Gamay was expelled from Burgundy in 1395, when Duke Philippe le Hardi called it a vile and disloyal plant and ordered it pulled from ducal soil. It moved south, into granite, and stayed. The region now runs roughly 55 kilometres between the Saône valley and the Monts du Beaujolais, and Beaujolais Wine Tasting Day Tour from Lyon tours reach the first vines inside forty minutes of the city. The geology splits the vineyard in two. North of Villefranche-sur-Saône, decomposed pink granite and schist frame the ten crus: Brouilly, Côte de Brouilly, Régnié, Morgon, Chiroubles, Fleurie, Moulin-à-Vent, Chénas, Juliénas, Saint-Amour. South, clay and limestone soften the wine and gild the walls. That gilding is literal. The pierres dorées belt south of Villefranche takes its colour from limestone shot through with iron oxide, quarried around Oingt, Ternand and Bagnols, and it warms to near-apricot in late afternoon light. Oingt is listed among the Plus Beaux Villages de France, its medieval watchtower still standing over the same slopes it was built to watch. Château de Corcelles-en-Beaujolais, fortified in the fifteenth century, keeps a vat room under the same roof as its keep. In 2018, UNESCO named the massif a Global Geopark, citing rock that records some 500 million years. Beaujolais Wine Tasting Day Tour from Lyon tour operators inherit a reputation the region has spent three decades rebuilding. Beaujolais Nouveau, released each third Thursday of November, carried the name to Tokyo and New York and then flattened it into a party trick. The correction began in Villié-Morgon. There, from the 1950s, the chemist Jules Chauvet argued for indigenous yeasts, low sulphur and cool, slow semi-carbonic maceration. The growers who followed him — Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, Guy Breton, Jean-Paul Thévenet — became the reference point for natural winemaking worldwide, and their cellars sit within a few kilometres of one another on the slopes below the Côte du Py. Roughly 2,000 growers work the appellation today, most of them on holdings under ten hectares, and the scale shows. Cellars are working buildings rather than showrooms; the person pouring is often the person who pruned. Entry to the region costs nothing — it is open country, crossed by the D43 and the Route des Vins — while each estate sets its own terms at the tasting bench. That structure explains the shape of Beaujolais Wine Tasting Day Tour from Lyon tickets: a sequence of appointments rather than a single monument, and an itinerary that usually commits either to the granite crus of the north or the golden villages of the south, rarely both.