With the help of one horse, Nathalie tends 3.8 hectares in southern Beaujolais, embracing organic viticulture and natural winemaking. 

Nathalie Banes, vigneronne in southern Beaujolais, crafts some of the most honest, fresh, and soulful wines of Beaujolais. From start to finish, Natalie's methods are intimate, deliberate, and singular. 

Nathalie founded her estate in 2015 after a career in the world of jewelry and immediately embraced organic viticulture and natural winemaking methods. Her wines are often "zero, zero" meaning there are no additions in the cellar whatsoever, even sulphur. Wines made without sulphur are rather fragile, and when done well like Nathalie's, they offer an immense amount of pleasure — a portal into wines of a pre-industrial era. 

Get this. Aside from assistance during the harvest, Nathalie is alone with her horse, Hulot — they tend 3.8 hectares as a team. You can't make this up! While this sounds charming and romantic, vineyard work is not for the faint of heart. Few of us have the toughness to handle the daily grind of being in the vines. Trust me, I’ve worked a harvest.

The Pierres Dorées region of Southern Beaujolais, where Nathalie is based, is located about 40 kilometres northwest of Lyon. The "little Tuscany,” as people call this region, takes its name from the golden stones used to build most of the buildings. The hints of ochre and gold in the limestone here come from the iron oxide.

This region offers a great diversity of landscapes, where vineyards stand alongside fields, orchards and woods.

The Pierres Dorées' clay and limestone soils are very similar to those found in Burgundy and very different from the northern area of "Crus du Beaujolais" where the soils are dominated by granite. 

For us, thanks to the unique terroir of Southern Beaujolais, Nathalie's wines are decidedly set apart from the majority of most Beaujolais which are crafted in the northern sector of the region. Hers are more mineral, tangy and firmly textured. Nathalie doesn't employ carbonic maceration in her cellar, a method most often used in Beaujolais. As a result, to our palates, her wines don't offer that candied, strawberry infused iteration of Gamay but something altogether very different and maybe even, more serious, transportative and delicious.