To be a wine critic, you really have to love your work. Take William Kelley, who recently reviewed no fewer than 465 different 2017 Beaujolais for The Wine Advocate.
 
As with any comprehensive look at a vintage, a few wines rise to the top. In this case, it was six:  the six wines out of 465 that earned ratings of 95 or above. Of these, three stood out because of the age of their vines (all 70-100 years old). And one stood out for its bargain price: Domaine du Vissoux’s Moulin-à-Vent “Les Trois Roches.”
 
Back Story
Of course, for Beaujolais insiders, the greatness of this wine is no surprise. Domaine du Vissoux’s Pierre-Marie Chermette is one of Beaujolais’ most respected winemakers, a staunch traditionalist who nearly 40 years ago joined Lapierre and Foillard in forging the region’s quality revolution.
 
But as great as the early Vissoux wines were, the wines he’s making today are at another level. This is especially true for his towering Moulin-à-Vent “Les Trois Roches.” Powerful, yet vibrant and elegant, the 2017 Les Trois Roches has it all … just as it should in this very great vintage.
 
The 2017 Beaujolais have been described by Decanter’s Andrew Jefford as “superb wines ... of structure, depth and penetration as well as beguiling fruit.” The vintage provided Chermette with a tiny crop of highly concentrated old-vine fruit from his three Moulin-à-Vent lieux-dits, and he nailed it.
 
The Union of Three Great Terroirs
Les Trois Roches’ brilliance is born of a trio of great terroirs, and Chermette’s peerless skill in marrying their contrasting characters. The steep, southeast facing La Rochelle, overlooking the cru’s famed moulin-à-vent (“windmill”) provides this cuvée’s bottomless depth and muscular structure.
 
To La Rochelle's power add the complementing finesse of Les Rochegrés  and the vibrant fruit of Roche Noire—courtesy of their more gently sloping, eastern exposures. The result is sheer magic.

Pierre-Marie uses the region’s time-honored methods and superlative blending expertise to fashion a Moulin-à-Vent perfectly balanced between these three sites' individual expressions of the village’s manganese-rich, pink granite soils.
 
Chermette draws on the accumulated wisdom of his family, who have been Beaujolais growers since the 17th century. Yet, he was the first generation to bottle his own production, bucking the trend at the time of chemically farmed, technologically made Beaujolais in favor of his ancestor’s classic approach.
 
He tends his old Gamay vines sustainably, and harvests for full, natural ripeness, making chaptalization unnecessary. Their fruit is fermented with the native yeasts by  the whole cluster, semi-carbonic method in closed vats for 10 to 12 days, with the minimum amount of sulfur, then pressed and aged in neutral foudres and pièces.
 
The result is a complete expression of Moulin-à-Vent: aromatically complex, beautifully textured and developing like fine Burgundian Pinot Noir with age. There is even a term for Moulin-à-Vent’s capacity for such transformation. It’s Pinoté, and the 2017 Les Trois Roches has it in spades.
 
Not to be missed.