La Dernière Goutte
Beaujolais, FR
Cyrille Vuillod of La Dernière Goutte came to wine sideways. An ex-ski bum who picked grapes in the Beaujolais to fund his lift pass, he eventually stayed on after one harvest in the late 2000s, working with Jean-Claude Lapalu and learning the rhythms of winemaking firsthand. By 2012, he’d started his own domaine in the small village of Vaux-en-Beaujolais.
Like many who came up through the natural Beaujolais tradition, Cyrille works with carbonic maceration across his reds, and his cellar is full of vessels—foudres, tanks, barrels, whatever he’s gathered along the way. In 2020, he took things further, importing qvevri from Georgia and burying them in his own cave to quietly push at the edges of his practice.
Gamay remains the core of what he does, but the experiments have expanded. He now makes a bit of white, working with Chardonnay from a nearby friend, and Riesling he sources from Alsace. The wines feel unforced, welcoming. They’re the kind of bottles that slip easily into a table or a conversation—but behind that ease, there’s an ongoing curiosity that keeps them quietly moving forward.