As the road into the Jura Mountains got steeper, a cliff loomed to our left like a slanting wall of neatly stacked flagstones, done by some midcentury architect with a sense of humor. Each layer of limestone had been laid down as sediment over countless years and then striated vertically every foot or so as the mountain pushed skyward. We...[ read more ]

Come morning in Puligny-Montrachet, Ted threw together a great breakfast of farm fresh eggs with the most golden of yolks and sautéed potatoes with the requisite baguette from the gods. I inhaled it all in a couple minutes and washed it down with four strong pod coffees kindly provided by the Airbnb host. Then we packed up and left for...[ read more ]

After our visit at de Montille’s garden, Ted’s friends decided on a restaurant for dinner in Beaune, the nearby, perfectly preserved and walled-in medieval city at the center of Burgundy’s Côte de Beaune. We rolled down its one-lane cobblestone streets between ancient buildings with storybook gables and spires until we came to a modernized town center. It was full of...[ read more ]

Everyone in the wine business got their start with a few memorable bottles, and believe it or not, mine were from California, back when I was nineteen and had just moved to Arizona from Nowhereville (Kalispell), Montana. It doesn’t matter where you start, you’ll always have a soft spot for the wines you got to know in those early years....[ read more ]

At the legendary domaine of the de Montille family, we were greeted inside the gate of an old stone villa from the 1700s by Alexander Götze, the vineyard manager and assistant to the winemaker. He led us up a narrow stairwell to a lofty space with updated sleek blonde floors and huge, roughly-hewn, exposed dark wood beams that jutted out...[ read more ]

The movement against chemical farming has slowly begun to thaw my feelings about regions like Champagne, a region that without a canopy of leaves to hide its sins looks post-apocalyptic—much like the majority of the vineyards in Beaujolais and many other viticultural areas. (Though at least in Beaujolais the weather is nicer and the cuisine more rich in plant-based foods...[ read more ]

I landed in Lyon on a bright sunny day in April; I expected rain, but my weather apps had lied to me. I was there to tag along with my friend Ted Vance, the founder of The Source Imports, as he visited his countless friends, wine producers he already works with and others he wanted to bring on board. I...[ read more ]

At precisely 4:15 Manu insisted that we leave the tasting. Traffic could be a bear going north on a Friday and we had a three-hour drive from Porto Vecchio to Bastia to catch our boat. Last year our trip was a more fluid route with less back and forth across the island. We started in Bastia and made one loop...[ read more ]

The drive between Sartène and Porto Vecchio is beautiful and the day’s sunny, cool, windy weather was perfect for this cinematic dreamscape. We drove by the famous natural sculpture, Lion de Rocapinne, a granite outcrop atop a hill shaped like a perched lion that faced south, like it was guarding the island. The lion’s mythological story is of an impossible...[ read more ]

After two exhausting days on the Corsican wine trail I passed on our first two visits of the third day to try to catch up with some work while I had good access to wifi. It was a tough decision because the first one was a tasting with Sebastien Poly, a young biodynamic vigneron, followed by another meeting with Abbatucci...[ read more ]