The Angel on the Label: How Van der Weyden's The Last Judgment Inspired a Remarkable Chénas

My first trip to Beaune wasn’t actually about wine.

Which sounds a bit ridiculous when you consider where Beaune is.

I wasn’t there hunting down Grand Crus or going from cellar to cellar. I certainly wasn’t trying to prove that I could tell a Pommard from a Puligny-Montrachet. I can’t. Not reliably, anyway.

I’d gone for the art.

There was one painting I really wanted to see. I’d known it for years, long before I knew much about Burgundy or its wines.

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It was Rogier van der Weyden’s The Last Judgment (Le Jugement Dernier), in the Hôtel-Dieu, or the Hospices de Beaune as most people know it.

I actually knew the painting from university. It was part of my art-history degree. I wish I had a better story than that, but I don’t.

It was on the syllabus.

Yes, that art-history degree. The one that seemed like a slightly impractical choice at the time and then, somehow, kept popping up in my life.

Interior view: The Last Judgement, polyptych c. 1443–1451 by Rogier van der Weyden, Hôtel-Dieu, Beaune, France

I remember walking into the Salle des Pôvres and seeing the polyptych for the first time.

The colours were incredible. Reds, blues, gold. They still looked so strong after all those centuries. There’s a reason for that, of course. The altarpiece had a major restoration between 1875 and 1878, and there have been other conservation treatments since.

Still, standing there, that wasn’t really what I was thinking about.

I was thinking about how clever the whole thing was.

There are nine oak panels, and six are painted on both sides. The wings could be opened and closed depending on the occasion. On Sundays and feast days, they opened to show the full Last Judgment.

It’s basically a medieval dramatic reveal.

No Instagram. No TikTok. Just nine huge bits of oak and a very serious amount of preparation.

The view with the wings folded of six panels with the donors kneeling in the far wings.

The altarpiece was commissioned by Nicolas Rolin, Chancellor of Burgundy, for the Hôtel-Dieu, the hospital he founded for the poor. It was completed around 1445–1450.

And this is the bit I find hardest to get my head around.

This huge, spectacular painting wasn’t made for some grand palace. It was made for a hospital.

People who were sick would have seen it. People who knew they were dying would have seen it. It was there to give them some comfort, but also, presumably, to make them think about what came next.

Imagine being in a fifteenth-century hospital and having Rogier van der Weyden’s Last Judgment at the end of the room.

I’d probably have found it slightly terrifying.

At the centre is Christ, surrounded by saints and angels. Below him, the Archangel Michael weighs the souls of the dead. The blessed go one way, the damned another.

There’s so much going on that you can keep looking and still miss things.

And that brings me, rather unexpectedly, to wine.

From Masterpiece to Wine Label

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A few years later, I was looking through wines from Beaujolais when I saw a bottle and stopped.

I knew the picture on the label.

It was the Archangel Michael.

The same Michael I remembered from Beaune, with his scales, calmly weighing souls.

The wine was Domaine Jules Desjourneys Chénas Le Jugement Dernier.

And there it was: two things I’d never really thought of putting together—medieval art and wine—on the same bottle.

Where Wine Meets Art

The story behind the label is pretty simple.

Fabien Duperray founded Domaine Jules Desjourneys in 2007. He was a Burgundy négociant before starting the domaine, and he’s also a serious art collector. He has more than 1,000 original works, and some of that collection has ended up on his wine labels.

The bottles themselves get a lot of attention too. The labels, paper, wax seals, corks—it’s all part of the look.

Which I quite like.

There’s no sense of the label being something slapped on at the end.

The wines cover Beaujolais and the Mâconnais, with Gamay from some of the better-known Beaujolais Crus and Chardonnay from places such as Pouilly-Fuissé, Pouilly-Vinzelles and Saint-Véran.

Duperray also works with a lot of old vines, some 70 years old, some more than 100. The vineyards are farmed organically and biodynamically, with plenty of hand work and horse ploughing.

All of that is interesting, but for me it still comes back to the wine.

Why Chénas?

Why this painting?

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Chénas: The Smallest Beaujolais Cru

Chénas sits between Juliénas and Moulin-à-Vent. It’s the smallest of the ten Crus du Beaujolais, and it has always seemed a little overlooked to me.

The name comes from chêne, meaning oak. These hills were once covered in oak forests. There’s also a story that King Philippe V ordered the trees to be cleared in 1316 so vines could be planted.

I do like a forest. But apparently Philippe had other ideas.

Chénas is Gamay, and it can be surprisingly serious.

There’s plenty of perfume—peony, rose, iris—but also darker fruit, spice and something earthy underneath it all. The texture can be beautifully silky, but there’s structure there too.

A lot of that comes from the soils. The higher slopes have pink granite, which helps give the wines their perfume and lift. Lower down, the stonier sedimentary soils bring a little more weight.

And Chénas can age.

That’s probably the part that makes the pairing work for me.

You don’t really take in The Last Judgment in one go. You look at it, think you’ve got the picture, then notice something else.

A face.

A hand.

Some tiny detail you somehow missed five minutes earlier.

The wine is a bit like that.

Give it some time and it starts to change. Things come forward, then something else appears. You notice more once you stop trying to take it all in at once.

Maybe that’s all the connection really is.

The painting and the wine both make you slow down a little.

And I like that.

Especially considering I only noticed the bottle in the first place because I recognized an angel.