Château Thivin, Côte de Brouilly

We try to wax poetic around here every now and again, but there’s nothing we’re going to come up with that’ll top importer Kermit Lynch’s description of Château Thivin’s wines. “A country squire who is not afraid to get his boots muddy,” Lynch writes. “Handsome, virile, earthy, and an aristocrat.”That’s ‘drop-the-mic’ talk right there, but we owe you a little more detail than that: Château Thivin is the reference-point producer in Côte de Brouilly, one of the southern-most ‘cru’-designated villages in Beaujolais. Mont Brouilly is a dormant volcano that lends a distinctive mineral character to its wines—some of the most age-worthy in the zone—and one glance at this wine’s label and you know you’ve picked a classic. This 2014 from Thivin is a category-defining wine in cru Beaujolais. From the first sip to the last, it’s a bright, energetic push-pull of red fruits and smoky minerality—an old-school benchmark which, if sipped with the right mix of discernment and insouciance, grants you ho