Before natural wine had a name, and a cult following, there was Jules Chauvet, a chemist, winemaker, and deep thinker from Beaujolais.
While he never set out to start a movement, his work from the 1940s to the 1980s laid the foundation for what we now call natural wine, popularising a return to the ancient heritage of wine that was still going strong in some of the lesser known wine areas of Europe, like Greece.
Born in 1907, Chauvet came from a winemaking family, but he was more curious than conventional. In the 1930s, he studied chemistry and microbiology, later bringing those skills back to his family domaine. His obsession? To fully understand the mechanisms of fermentation, and, once industrial yeasts and additives hit the market, to explore the characteristics of wild versus artificially induced fermentation.
By the 1940s, he was already studying spontaneous fermentations and observing malolactic fermentation under a microscope, decades before most western winemakers were even talking about it.
He also championed carbonic maceration, a fermentation technique that helps produce light, juicy reds (this is the method we use for Little Red) with very little intervention. That method became central to the Beaujolais style and later, a signature of easy drinking natural wines the world over.
But Chauvet wasn't just a pioneer in the cellar. He was also one of the most refined and perceptive tasters the wine world has ever seen.
His tasting notes are still admired for their clarity and depth. He helped introduce a more analytical, science-based methodology to wine tasting, combining empirical precision with poetic sensitivity. To him, low-intervention winemaking wasn't just a philosophical stance. It was a pathway to better-tasting wine.
In L'esthétique du Vin, one of several influential books he wrote, Chauvet argued that minimal manipulation allows wines to express their true terroir, with flavours shaped by nature rather than by the hand of the winemaker. His palate, sharpened by science and experience, found more beauty in purity than in polish.
Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Chauvet mentored a new generation of winemakers including Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, and Yvon Métras. These were the figures who would go on to define the natural wine aesthetic of Beaujolais and the wider world of wine.
Today, the Association Jules Chauvet works to preserve his legacy, keeping his research, philosophy, and tasting insights alive for future generations.
He didn't chase trends or markets. He just believed in making wine with patience, purity, and deep respect for the process.
And today, every bottle of low-intervention wine owes a quiet debt to the man who helped prove that less really can be more.