2017 Château Thivin Côte de Brouilly

• By Josh Raynolds
  Beaujolais: If You Want Value - You’ve Got It (Oct 2019), 10/1/2019, (See more on Vinous...)

  (Château Thivin Côte-de-brouilly Red) Login and sign up and see review text.

Full Pull

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull Desert Island Wine, 11/5/2018

  (Chateau Thivin Cote de Brouilly) Hello friends. During a recent book event at Book Larder, a certain someone in the audience asked a question: what is your desert island wine. I reflexively answered Ameztoi Txakolina, but in the days since, I’ve been thinking that my answer should’ve been Thivin.I’ve probably consumed more bottles of Thivin Cote de Brouilly than any other wine on earth. For me, Thivin represents an unparalleled translation of earth into wine, an ethereal mix of volcanic minerals and the brightest, crunchiest red fruits. Kermit Lynch, who has been importing Thivin since 1979, describes the wine as “…a country squire who is not afraid to get his boots muddy. Handsome, virile, earthy, and an aristocrat.” While this wine didn’t fit into our recent Thanksgiving offer (we put a hard ceiling of 19.99 TPU on those wines), you can bet a bottle of this will be opened on my turkey table this year. Since we first began offering Thivin (the 2011 vintage, in Feb 2013), the wine has grown more expensive and more scarce. Let’s tackle “more expensive” first. That 2011 vintage was 24.99/21.99 TPU, and here’s what I said then: If we were a few miles north into Burgundy proper, a wine from a site like this would command, what, four times the price? Fortunately, we’re in Beaujolais, which has become marketing poison in the United States, a victim of the roaring success of Beaujolais Nouveau, which has now cemented in many American brains that Beaujolais costs $10 or less. It’s a fortunate turn of events for those of us who love Cru Beaujolais, because it has had a clear dampening effect on prices. As I’ve said many times, if we’re willing to swim against the ebb tides of wine fashion, we can find exceptional values. Thivin is just that. I wouldn’t usually highlight that a wine has gone up in price. That’s not often a formula for juicing sales. But here it helps underscore the point that Cru Beaujo in general (and Thivin specifically) were crazy values, are still excellent values, and that folks are catching on. In another five years I suspect this will be a $40 wine. It seems inevitable. As for this wine’s increasing scarcity, that comes in large part from several reviewers who have been banging the drum for Thivin in recent vintages; namely Josh Raynolds at Vinous, and Neal Martin and William Kelley at Advocate. Yes, our new Washington reviewer for Advocate is also responsible for singing the praises of Cru Beaujolais. Wine Advocate: Copyrighted material withheld. Those kinds of reviews drive sales all over the country (hell, all over the world), and nowadays we generally get one Thivin shipment per year into Seattle. It just landed in mid-October, and we were allocated a full half of western Washington’s overall parcel. Which is excellent, but which is still borderline for an offer. I’m going to set order limits at 6 bottles and allocate this wine Wednesday morning, but my guess is that actual allocations will be more like 1-3 bottles. Okay, those of you who already know and love Thivin have permission to stop reading and click the order link. For noobs, here’s the deal. Cote de Brouilly is one of ten “Cru” sub-regions in Beaujolais. The Crus generally follow the foothills of the surrounding mountains, whereas wines labeled Beaujolais-Villages or Beaujolais come from the flatlands. Here is a map of the Crus to get us oriented. To make it clear: we’re not in Brouilly (the largest of the Crus); we’re in Cote de Brouilly, a tiny Cru encompassing the slopes of Mont Brouilly. More specifically, here is where Thivin is located, on the southwestern slope of the mountain. It’s prime real estate, but it’s not so easy to farm. The slope has a grade of 48%, and if your imagination is working in overdrive trying to think about what a 48% slope on an extinct French volcano with 50 year old Gamay Noir vines looks like, here’s a picture to test the accuracy of those imaginings. Thivin has sat on the slopes of the extinct volcano Mont Brouilly since 1383, and they’re a winery that takes their history and traditions seriously. Here is what a bottle of the 1949 looked like. Here is what today’s label looks like. There is nothing too fussy going on here. Grapes are harvested and then whole-cluster fermented. After they’re pressed off, they move into big old oak foudres (here’s a picture) for six months, and then it’s into bottle, onto container-ship, off to our warehouse, and then (hopefully) onto your table.