There are winery visits where you spend most of the day around a tasting table. At Chardigny, you are far more likely to find yourself in the back of a car, bouncing between vineyards, family homes and small cellars scattered across the southern edge of Mâconnais and Beaujolais
“This road is a little bit my route every morning,” our guide Pierre‑Maxime explained as we drove through Saint-Amour. A little later, passing the local school: “This is my village. My daughter goes to school here.”
This is home turf for the Chardigny family. The vineyards sit almost in their back garden, the white wines are made beneath their parents’ house, and brother Jean-Baptiste is never far away on a tractor. Their roots in the area run deep, but there is nothing static about the wines. Across Saint-Amour and Saint-Véran, they work with two varieties and two strikingly different landscapes.
Two sides of Saint-Amour
“We are very lucky because we have big plots of vineyard” they told us as we drove between their parcels.
That matters. Larger, contiguous vineyards are easier to farm thoughtfully, without the constant stopping and travelling that comes with a patchwork of tiny holdings.
In Saint-Amour, low-trained Gamay grows in remarkably stony soils formed from ancient deposits at the foot of the hills. In places, fragments of pink granite are clearly visible across the vineyard floor, giving the ground a distinctly Beaujolais character.
The two parcels produce very different expressions of Saint-Amour.
À la Folie comes from a warmer site with a gentle southerly slope. It is the more immediate and fruit-driven of the pair, full of bright, generous Gamay fruit.
Clos du Chapitre comes from a flatter two-hectare parcel. It has more structure, mineral detail and the ability to develop in bottle. “Clos du Chapitre is the best for ageing. À la Folie is a little more fruity.”
It is a simple comparison, but an accurate one. À la Folie leads with charm and openness; Clos du Chapitre asks for a little more attention and rewards it with depth.
From pink granite to limestone
Further north, the granite gives way to the clay-limestone and hard limestone soils of Saint-Véran. In some of Chardigny’s parcels, the earth is strikingly red: “like a clay tennis court,” as they described it during our visit.
The contrast with Saint-Amour is immediate. The soils become increasingly rocky and poor, and Chardonnay replaces Gamay. The vines are trained differently too, with the fruit carried further along the cane rather than close to the base of the plant.
Here, the wines gain greater breadth and texture while retaining plenty of freshness and limestone definition. The individual parcels vary considerably, but there is a clear change in shape from the generally open, fruit-driven reds to the more layered and structured whites.
“The white wine cellar is in my parents’ house,” they explained as we returned to the village.
That cellar is compact, practical and very much part of family life. Bottling, labelling and storage all happen within a small network of buildings that has grown around the family over generations.
Old barrels, not oak flavour
The winemaking is deliberately unobtrusive. Depending on the wine, the family works with stainless steel, older barrels and larger demi-muids, choosing vessels for texture and development rather than obvious flavour.
“We use only old barrels because we don’t want too much wood.”
In stronger vintages, they might buy one or two additional barrels, but never enough for oak to become the story. The aim is to preserve the distinction between the parcels rather than impose a house style over them.
That same directness runs through the whole visit. There is no elaborate mythology around the wines, just a close understanding of the vineyards, the soils and how each parcel behaves.
Even the local weather forecast comes from the landscape. “It is good news that we cannot see Mont Blanc. If we see Mont Blanc, it means rain in two days, and we don’t need more rain.”
By the end of the visit, standing above the vineyards with the villages spread out beneath us, the appeal of Chardigny was obvious.
“We are very, very lucky. There is a lot of good wine here, and good people.”
The wines reflect that sense of place: generous without being simple, carefully made without feeling polished into anonymity, and rooted firmly in the changing landscape between Beaujolais and the Mâconnais.
