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Romanèche-Thorins sits at the southern tip of Beaujolais, where the granite hills of Burgundy give way to the broader Saône plain and the vines run almost to the edge of the village. It is a small commune, the kind that most travellers pass through on the way between Lyon and Mâcon, yet it holds a claim to wine culture that far exceeds its modest size. The appellation Moulin-à-Vent, one of the ten Beaujolais crus and widely regarded as the most age-worthy among them, takes its name from a fifteenth-century windmill that still stands on the ridge above the village. That windmill has become something of an emblem for the whole southern Beaujolais, a reminder that this landscape has been shaped by viticulture for centuries.

The village itself is quiet in the way that working wine country tends to be: purposeful rather than sleepy, organised around the rhythms of harvest and the slow business of ageing. The surrounding appellation produces Gamay grown on decomposed granite, a combination that gives Moulin-à-Vent its characteristic structure and its capacity to develop in bottle over a decade or more, something unusual for a grape more often associated with early drinking. Visitors who arrive expecting the light, carbonic style of a Beaujolais Nouveau will find something considerably more serious here.