Red Rolling Castle 20/21

Chateau Roulant Red 20/21

Benoit Camus

Château Roulant is a Beaujolais red wine, organic and natural (Ecocert certified), made from Gamay. Classified as a Vin de France, it is produced by Benoît Camus at his Pierre Dorées estate, in the south of the appellation. Its name evokes the itinerant life once led by the winemaker, a former seasonal agricultural worker.

Vinification

The Gamay vines of Beaujolais grow on clay-limestone soils. The very steep plots prohibit any mechanized work. The harvest, carried out by hand, undergoes a three-week semi-carbonic maceration. The wine is aged in concrete vats for fifteen months.

Tasting

The Beaujolais wines from Pierre Dorées are structured, long-lasting, and beautifully fruity. Here, after admiring a bright garnet color, we find strawberry, raspberry, red cherry, and cranberry, with a beautiful acidity in the mid-palate giving way to a rich and voluptuous finish. Freshness and acidity, leather, earth, and some animal notes. Wonderful richness in the mouth that we will enjoy accompanying with cold meats and cured meats, poultry such as pigeon or duck. Or even Red Meats .

Learn more about Benoît Camus

You might think he's itinerant, with his vintages called "Château roulant" or "Vagabond", but for Benoît Camus, it's a memory of his previous life, when he was a seasonal farmer in the Rhône Valley and as far as Roussillon. Since 2003, he has settled in Southern Beaujolais, in the Pierres Dorées terroir, to make organic (Ecocert) and natural wines.

Nature before, nature always

Before purchasing his seven-hectare estate from an old winemaker, the vines had not yet seen pesticides or chemical additives. Many in Beaujolais worked this way. He made his first vintage in 2006, "natural without knowing it," he says. A brief attempt at chemical spraying to treat grape worm definitively dissuaded him from adding anything to the vineyard or the cellar. He acquired Ecocert organic certification and continues to make natural wines.

The Pierre Dorées terroir

The southern Beaujolais, with its clay-limestone soils, produces wines that are more structured and powerful than those from the granite soils of the North. This is the profile presented by the reds of Benoît Camus, natural wines that are straight, dense and long-aging, with good acidity and well-integrated tannins, not forgetting abundant, rich and seductive fruit.