It’s against this backdrop that Moulin-à-Vent recently celebrated its 100th birthday, festivities that initially left many of its invited guests scratching their heads as the cru was only awarded official recognition in 1936. It turns out that appellation status is only a part of the story. Moulin-à-Vent was, at the turn of the 20th century, a very desirable name to have on your wine label and so a producer in the neighbouring zone of Fleurie had been passing his wines off as Moulin-à-Vents. The local winemakers took him to court and the ruling handed down by the judge in 1924 included a recommendation that the boundaries of Moulin-à-Vent should be officially delineated. Soon after, France launched its official appellation system and the cru of Moulin-à-Vent was formally recognised.

So what was it about this cru that made it so attractive to both the fraudulent producers of the 1920s and the Burgundians who’ve invested in the zone in recent years? As ever, in France, it mainly comes down to terroir. Moulin-à-Vent – named after a 15th century windmill that still overlooks its gentle slopes – is the fourth largest of Beaujolais’ ten crus. Most of these vineyards are planted with old bush vines – the wider region is an astonishing repository of ancient vine material, some of which dates back to the era in which the cru’s boundaries were first defined.

But, contrary to common belief, not all of Beaujolais’ crus are based exclusively on pink granite soils and in Moulin-à-Vent’s case, most of the fine, sandy granite lies in the west of the zone, while the east is largely dominated by ancient alluvial soils. The wines made in these easterly soils tend to be rich and weighty, forming an interesting counterpoint to the rather more nervy cuvées made from grapes grown on the pink granite sands. The producers of Moulin-à-Vent are currently in the process of applying for recognition of 14 of the cru’s 71 lieu-dits to be acknowledged as 1er crus, a process that will take at least another five years to come to fruition.

Perhaps because of the strong links with Burgundy, winemaking here is quite diverse in style, with only some producers employing Beaujolais’ traditional semi-carbonic maceration to make wines that are generally light in body. There’s quite a lot of Burgundian winemaking around too, though, and in this case, instead of the bunches being piled into tanks (often made of cement rather than stainless steel) to begin an intracellular fermentation, the grapes are de-stemmed and crushed prior to the start of fermentation. This latter technique allows for a more rigorous extraction of the tannins but either style of winemaking could be complemented by maturation in tank or barrel (usually older barrels – Gamay and new oak is not usually a happy partnership).

The finished wines are often among the most elegant produced in Beaujolais, with typically fine tannins and, quite often, a telltale note of peppery spice. And if you thought Beaujolais doesn’t age, think again – some producers keep library stocks of wines going back at least three or four decades. If you’re lucky enough to taste any of these older bottlings, you might find yourself hard pressed to tell the difference between a Moulin-à-Vent and a wine from one of its far more expensive neighbours from further north in greater Burgundy. That €100,000 per hectare is starting to look like the bargain of the century.