Thivin

History of Château Thivin

The small cellar beneath the house dates back to the fourteenth century, while the château buildings date for the most part from the seventeenth century: the place has manifestly always lived from wine. The family adventure begins, however, with an auction. On 8 June 1877, Zaccharie Geoffray, a winegrower from the neighbouring village of Durette whose father, grandfather and great-grandfather had already cultivated the vine, purchased Château Thivin with his wife Marguerite Bernard. The property then comprised barely more than two hectares of vines, gathered within the Clos de Brouilly.

Each generation then extended the estate plot by plot, until it reached around thirty hectares in nearly one hundred and fifty years, without the property ever leaving the family: six generations of uninterrupted continuity, a rarity in a vineyard marked by sales and consolidations. In the 1930s, Claude Geoffray played a decisive role in the recognition of two distinct appellations, Brouilly and Côte de Brouilly, at a time when the initial project envisaged a single vast Brouilly appellation. This battle has durably shaped the hierarchy of the southern Beaujolais crus. Today, Claude-Édouard Geoffray is steering the property towards organic certification and continues a parcel-by-parcel work of remarkable finesse, acclaimed by the specialist press, which sees in Thivin the absolute reference of its appellation.

Terroirs and Vines of Château Thivin

The Côte de Brouilly is geologically unique in Beaujolais. The cru occupies the slopes of Mont Brouilly, an isolated dome that rises from the surrounding plain and gives its name to the appellation. The bedrock there is metamorphic, composed of blue diorite and schist, in sharp contrast to the pink granite that characterises the Brouilly appellation encircling the foot of the hill. The 8.3 hectares of the estate in Côte de Brouilly are spread across the eastern, southern and south-western flanks of the dome, at varying altitudes, which allows for a range of single-plot cuvées of unrivalled richness within the cru.

The summit plots rest on an arid blue diorite, exposed due south, with slopes reaching fifty per cent: this is the steepest planted gradient in the entire appellation, which rules out any mechanisation and imposes an entirely manual harvest. Lower down, the estate holds in the Brouilly appellation the Reverdon plot, five and a half hectares oriented to the east on crumbly pink granite comparable to that of Chiroubles or Fleurie, which yields more supple and fruity wines. The family also cultivates the Clos de Rochebonne, a fortified sixteenth-century vineyard located in the south of Beaujolais, on the famous golden limestone stones, planted with chardonnay. This dual geological signature — diorite at altitude and granite or limestone below — gives Thivin a rare structural diversity. Yields are controlled, at around forty-five hectolitres per hectare, and the vineyard is farmed organically.

Vinifications of Château Thivin

The cellar work remains resolutely classical, a world away from the excesses of minimalism as much as from technology. Vinifications take place primarily in concrete tanks, complemented in recent years by open wooden vats on which the family experiments with some pigeage. Depending on the cuvée, the harvest is vinified as whole bunches or partially destemmed, and fermentations are conducted exclusively with indigenous yeasts, without any addition of commercial yeasts or chaptalization.

Maceration lengths and ageing are then adjusted cuvée by cuvée. The Brouilly Reverdon receives a maceration of around ten days followed by seven months in concrete tank, in order to preserve the freshness of its fruit intact. The Côte de Brouilly wines, more structured, are aged in oak foudres, with longer durations that refine the tannins without ever marking the wine. Only the Cuvée Zaccharie spends time in two hundred and twenty-eight litre barrels, with a maximum of ten per cent new oak. This graduation of ageing methods, from concrete to foudre and then to barrique, allows each terroir to express itself without uniformity.

The cuvées of Château Thivin

The Beaujolais Blanc Clos de Rochebonne opens the range with one of the estate's rare forays into white wine. Produced from certified organically grown chardonnay, planted in a fortified sixteenth-century enclosure on the golden stones of southern Beaujolais, it wins over with its freshness, its notes of citrus and white flowers and its calcareous minerality. The Beaujolais-Villages rosé, vinified from gamay, plays the card of refreshing indulgence and demonstrates that Thivin's classical approach extends well beyond the red crus. The family also produces a sparkling cuvée, with fine and joyful bubbles sourced from the same vineyard.

The Brouilly Reverdon forms the fruity counterpoint of the range. Sourced from a single plot of five and a half hectares oriented to the east, facing the Brouilly hill, on crumbly pink granite, it displays a fairly light colour, an expressive nose of red fruits and a fresh, supple and zesty palate of fine balance. Its energetic style and lovely substance make it a wine of immediate pleasure, which the winegrower himself likes to describe as a picnic wine, while readily acknowledging its potential for a few years of cellaring.

The classic Côte de Brouilly is the estate's most widely distributed wine internationally and the finest entry point into the cru: fermentation with indigenous yeasts, frank minerality inherited from the blue diorite, precise fruit and a saline finish. The Côte de Brouilly Les Sept Vignes, as its name indicates, assembles seven plots spread across the different exposures and altitudes of the dome. The nose mingles floral notes and red fruits that darken on the palate towards black fruits, the substance is round and energetic, carried by a vibrant freshness. Normally more structured and more powerful than the classic cuvée, it is built for long cellaring and constitutes the textbook case for understanding the geology of the cru.

The Côte de Brouilly La Chapelle comes from the summit plots, on this arid blue diorite exposed due south with vertiginous slopes. Harvested entirely by hand due to the impossibility of using any machinery there, and aged in barrels until the following June, it is the most concentrated and structurally serious wine in the range, with a nose of red fruits, strawberry and cherry lifted by spices, supple and gliding tannins and a depth that reveals itself after five to ten years in the cellar. The Cuvée Zaccharie, created in 1998 in homage to the founder, is sourced from the oldest and most precious plots of the property. Aged in barriques, it offers a deep colour, a dark register of black fruits and bramble, a full palate of mouth-watering freshness and a finish of great scope, still marked by fine tannins and a hint of vanilla that requires two or three years to integrate. It is the estate's quintessential keeping bottle.

The Côte de Brouilly Godefroy is born from very old vines, among which a few chardonnay plants interplanted according to the old custom still survive. It is distinguished by greater power, a dense juice built on black fruits, a fine tannic structure and a remarkable length, always accompanied by that freshness which is the signature of the entire production. It calls for patience. Finally, the exceedingly rare cuvée Les Griottes de Brulhié, whose name preserves the old spelling of the place, is produced only in certain vintages from a specific small plot: concentrated on cherry and of chiselled elegance, it completes this unique cartography of Mont Brouilly, from the foot of the hillside to its summit.