Nathalie Banes
Beaujolais, Oingt, France
 

Nathalie Banes spent years working in the jewellery trade in Lyon before she gave it up entirely to make wine.
 

In 2015 she bought a hectare and a half of vines in Oingt, in the Pierres Dorées area of southern Beaujolais, about 40 kilometres northwest of Lyon. The domaine has since grown to 3.8 hectares, still worked mostly by hand, with the help of her Comtois horse, Hulot, who does the ploughing and soil work alongside her.
 

She doesn't call herself a winemaker so much as a "transporteuse d'émotions", a carrier of emotions, and named her domaine Transport Emotionnel because of it. The sign outside her cellar reads: a bare, honest and free wine.
 

The soils are mostly clay and limestone, and Nathalie steps away from the region's usual playbook by skipping carbonic maceration altogether, a technique most Beaujolais producers lean on heavily. In the cellar there are no additions of any kind, not even sulphur, her wines are what's known locally as "zéro zéro".
 

The result is Gamay with none of the candied, jammy character people expect from Beaujolais, wines that are fresher, more serious and, true to the domaine's name, genuinely moving to drink.