Gamay was condemned by ducal decree in 1395. Philip the Bold called the grape a very bad and disloyal plant and ordered it uprooted from the Côte d'Or. Pushed south, it found granite. Between Mâcon and Lyon the hills turn to decomposed pink granite and schist, poor soil that suits Gamay and little else. Today, Beaujolais wine tasting from Lyon tours cross that same geological seam within fifty minutes of Place Bellecour, following the Saône north into a vineyard belt roughly 55 kilometres long. The region carries twelve appellations. Ten are crus, each a single commune or cluster: Saint-Amour, Juliénas, Chénas, Moulin-à-Vent, Fleurie, Chiroubles, Morgon, Régnié, Brouilly and Côte de Brouilly. Moulin-à-Vent takes its name from a fifteenth-century windmill standing without sails above Romanèche-Thorins; its manganese-rich soils yield wines that age for a decade or more. Morgon's Côte du Py is a hill of decomposed schist locals call roche pourrie, rotten rock. Fleurie sits beneath a chapel to the Madonna, raised in 1875 after the phylloxera years. Vineyard area totals close to 14,000 hectares, worked by roughly 2,000 growers, most of them families holding under ten hectares. South of the crus the stone changes. The Pierres Dorées country takes its colour from limestone shot through with iron oxide, quarried since Roman times and used for the walls of Oingt, Ternand and Charnay. Oingt keeps its medieval gate and a twelfth-century keep. Château de Corcelles, begun in the fifteenth century, still shelters a vat room under oak beams. A Beaujolais vineyard tour strings these villages together with cellar doors that ask nothing at the threshold. Local signage still calls the practice dégustation à la propriété, tasting at the property. Relevance here is not nostalgic. Since the 2010s a generation of growers around Villié-Morgon has pushed low-sulphur, whole-cluster winemaking, and the region now sits near the centre of the natural wine argument. Organic conversion covers a rising share of plantings. Cellars keep long summer hours, Monday to Saturday from 09:00 to 18:00, Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00. Beaujolais wine tasting from Lyon tickets, where they exist, cover transport and guiding rather than admission, since entry to the cellars costs 0 EUR. The Beaujolais Nouveau release each third Thursday of November remains the region's loudest export, shipped from Romanèche-Thorins to Tokyo within hours of midnight.