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Varietal ProfileGamay Noir
The vine is a hasty one, budding, flowering, and ripening early, which makes it prone to spring frosts buy means that it can flourish in regions as cool as much of the Loire. It can easily produce too generously and the traditional gobelet method of training (without wires or stakes) is designed to match this aptitude to the granitic soils of the better Beaujolais vineyards. Gamay juice also tends to be vinified in a hurray, not least because of market pressure for Beaujolais Nouveau, and if Gamay-based wines are cellared for more than two or three years it is usually by mistake. As a wine Gamay tends to be paler and bluer than most other reds, with relatively high acidity and a simple but vivacious aroma of freshly picked red fruits, often overlaid by the less subtle smells associated with rapid, oxygen-free fermentation such as bananas, boiled sweets, and acetate. In France and Switzerland it is often blended with Pinot Noir, endowing the nobler grape with some precocity, but often blurring the very distinct attributes of each. Gamay and Beaujolais are entirely interdependent. No wine region is so determinedly single-minded as Beaujolais, which has just a few Chardonnay vines for Beaujolais Blanc to prove the rule, while 33,600 ha/ 83,000 acres in 1988, well over half of the world's total Gamay plantings, are in this single region. Similar, often lighter and arguably truer, wines are made from the Gamay grown in the small wine regions of central France, particularly those around Lyons and in the upper reaches of the Loire such as Châteaumeillant, Coteaux du Lyonnais, Coteaux du Giennois, Côtes d'Auvergne, Côtes du Forez, Côtes Roannaises, and St Pourçain. Outside Beaujolais, and perhaps because its wines have been seen as too different from the intense, tannic, fashionable norm, the Gamay vine has been losing ground. In the Côte Chalonnaise and the Mâconnais between Beaujolais and the Côte d'Or Gamay was displaced as principal grape variety by Chardonnay during the 1980s, and the unexciting muddy quality of Gamays made here is expected to continue this trend. Gamay still took up 400 ha/ 1,000 acres of the Côte d' Or's valuable vineyard in 1988 but is fast being supplanted by more rewarding varieties. It is also grown in minute quantities in Canada and is confused on a grand scale with BLAUFRÄNKISCH throughout eastern Europe. It is grown to a certain extent in Italy, and plays a relatively important role in the vineyards of what was Yugoslavia, notably in Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, and to least effect, in Macedonia. It is chiefly valued, however, outside Beaujolais, by the Swiss who grow it widely, most enthusiastically around Geneva. It thrives well at high altitudes and is commonly blended with Pinot Noir to become Dôle in Valais and Salvagnin in Vaud. Too often, however the Swiss are apt to chaptalize the life out of it. Outside France there is even less incentive to develop this under appreciated variety although a few California growers have bothered to import and vinify true Gamay as opposed to the less distinguished vine know there as Napa Gamay or the variety called Gamay Beaujolais, which is in fact a lesser clone of Pinot Noir. Excerpted from:
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