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"Beaujolais is not what it used to be…" I bet you’ve never heard that one before. Recently I had a conversation about how bright red, crunchy fruit renditions of Beaujolais contrast those with more ripe fruit components and deeper textures, with consequently higher alcohol. I found myself defending the latter, not because it’s what I prefer (quite the contrary), but 2005, 2009, 2011 and to a lesser degree, 2003, all fit this profile, as do some of the more recent, like 2015 and 2017, as well as (it seems) the incoming 2018. Some recent vintages more calibrated to my preference, like 2013, 2014 and 2016 would likely not have been considered top years in the recent past, except to people like me who prefer the general style of those years, but I’d like to stand by the other expressions of this appellation as being just as authentic. One of the points we debated was that while there is still elegant, cleanly made, bright red-fruited Beaujolais out there in the market, why are some of the recent vintages by some of the “greats” (who prior to the last string of vintages, starting in 2015 seems to be known for their more-restrained style) now regularly demonstrating higher alcohol, more power, and a stretch into overripe fruit. One of those producers criticized for bigger alcohol and riper fruit was one we import and is strongly associated with our company. What was most interesting about the observation and commentary from my friends, who are total wine nuts, was a complete contrast to another friend, a Master Sommelier who’s been around a while and didn’t care for this producer’s wines when we first began to import them. He found them too green and underripe—comments directed toward the producer’s ‘13s and ‘14s, banner vintages for my style of Beaujolais. I was as perplexed by the green and underripe comment back then as I am now about the overripe and high alcohol from the same producer within a span of four or five vintages. I find this degree of disparity of opinion about the same producer unusual, to say the least. Most of us inside the wine business have met those incredibly brilliant sommeliers and wine pros with outrageous talent and encyclopedic memories. They can rattle off facts and details about wines you may not know but feel like you should. Everything under the sun in the last four or five years seems to have been tasted and judged, but to drink an entire bottle alone without being accompanied by fewer than five other wines, or five other people around is becoming less common within the trade. While I enjoy the good fun of a taste off, this approach to wine analysis is a bit of a contrast to my usual practice as a wine importer. Importers have a unique view into a wine’s life and how they twist and turn, revealing surprises (not always good ones) over many hours, with numerous examples being observed from their earliest years in barrel, as well as in bottle throughout their development. We may not taste everything under the sun, but we’re able to observe the same wine as it changes from one moment to the next, for as many as ten hours in a day. Then, tasting different bottles of the same wine over the course of a few days shows that no bottle is exactly the same. What’s missing in the analysis of Beaujolais among the talented new wine pros is the same for all of us when new to something. Context. 2015, ‘17 and ‘18 in general show more concentration than the previous series of vintages that seemingly spearheaded the boost in Beaujolais’ popularity. Starting in the late 2000s and early 2010s, it reached a feverish pitch by the time the ‘14s hit—in no small part due to the second SOMM film, which gave Beaujolais a big shove in the direction of wine pop culture. Droves of new fans flocked to slurp down Beaujolais filled with unpretentious joy and freshness from those years. Back then the most celebrated Beaujolais wines from any domaine were largely from vineyards with old to ancient vines. In less hot years they show depth and complexity, along with the crunch in some of the exuberant, high-toned vintages. In the more recent ripe years they show equal complexity and depth, but are calibrated for a different palate than those who prefer the crunchy fruit and freshness from a cooler year, like I do. Within three of the last four vintages (again, excluding ‘16) things seem to have changed without any reversal in sight back toward the way it used to be—that is, for many, only five to eight years ago, when some of the vintages (like 2010, ‘12, ‘13 and ‘14) demonstrated characteristics more closely related to their Burgundian neighbors to the north. ‘15 and ‘17, and likely now the warm ‘18, could be in some cases equally associated to wine from the Northern Rhône Valley in taste and texture; and it stands to reason, when you consider the similarity of the soils (granite and schist) that make up a significant proportion of the Beaujolais Cru areas and Côte Rôtie, all the way down the right bank (west side) of the Rhône River to Cornas. Right now, those with far more than a couple of decades of experience with Beaujolais might want to poke me in the eye for defending riper-styled Beaujolais as part of its history, and as I wrote this piece I felt like I might deserve it, because part of me agrees with them. However, if you’ve read the fantastic account of Kermit Lynch’s time with Jules Chauvet in his book, Adventures on the Wine Trail. Chauvet commented about the “little vintages” of Beaujolais having 9 to 10% alcohol, but stated that even in 1945 and 1947 they were “unusually rich in natural alcohol” and after that they were “always 13 to 14 degrees.” There’s also talk about overcropping and full-tilt manipulation of the grape musts to bring the alcohol levels up as much as 4.5% from its natural level. Lynch’s account is awesome. I sure wish compelling and balanced Beaujolais that hit a natural 12% or less in alcohol was more common, but sadly, I believe this may be increasingly more rare in the future. For the vines in the cru areas of Beaujolais, there’s no going back with this climate change breaking heat records almost every year. And sure, you can pitch in the standard rebuttal that growers can “just pick earlier,” but grape vines don’t work like that if the balance of sugar, acidity and taste is a consideration. Yes, it does work if all that is important is the glou glou (glug glug, in French) made with carbonic fermentations and knocked back as a wine shot (vying for top prize of bad wine trends ever, in my opinion), but it isn’t for serious winegrowers with deeper aspirations for their wines. Don’t get me wrong, I love my glou glou, but glou can be serious too, baby! It has to start with serious grapes just like any other wine with big potential. Ever heard a winegrower say they pick based on taste? I assume you have, and you can be sure they aren’t referring to the grape sweetness alone (because a refractometer is much more accurate than a tongue), but rather the balance of the components—texture, tannin, acidity, phenolic ripeness, sweetness of the fruit, and most importantly how it tastes and feels tous ensemble. Contrary to today’s market trend, what were considered the most successful years in Beaujolais were its most ripe, which were also considered the most age-worthy. Today, there is some semblance of backlash from less-experienced buyers against two of the most recent vintages, ‘15 and ‘17, and I expect there will be more of the same with the warm ‘18s. Newer Beaujo fans likely expected the continuation of elegant vintages and heaps of the glou, but that’s only a part of Beaujolais’ story. Many long-standing growers and wine writers in Beaujolais claimed 2015 a great vintage. In fact, one of the region’s luminaries, Jean-Louis Dutraive (pictured above, in 2014, before he exploded onto the scene), told me that it could be the greatest vintage of his lifetime because of the body, power, vibrancy of the fruit and unusual balance of naturally high acidity. The wine critic, Josh Raynolds, from Vinous, described it as “superb if not atypically ripe,” and one of my favorite wine writers, Andrew Jefford, from Decanter, described the vintage as “great.” Indeed there was more praise from critics and growers, but not so much from those who recently walked in the door—an understandable reaction coming off of the previous couple of years. It may be an overlooked fact that Beaujolais is a warm to semi-hot wine region and is much more so than its surrounding neighbors, like Burgundy, the Jura, Northern Rhône and the Savoie. Don’t forget, Chauvet said that back in 1945 and 1947 they hit big alcohol levels for the time (again, 13-14%), and this was likely with hugely cropped vines and canopies that looked more Rastafarian dreadlocks than today’s “High Bald Fade + Thick Side Swept Hair + Shape Up + Undercut”—yes, that’s a real contemporary hairstyle that could stand in for the highly groomed modern vineyard… If they had been cropped less and manicured more in line with a metrosexual cut, the alcohols would’ve been even higher. To put it bluntly, to get the same kind of crunchy fruit characteristics year after year is not in Beaujolais’ cards, and probably hasn’t been in most of our lifetimes. Much of Beaujolais’ vineyards are quite exposed to an all day supply of sun during the latter part of the vegetative cycle and through the fruit cycle, all the way up to harvest. It doesn’t help that most of the suitable vineyard areas have been deforested and planted to vine, and the vast majority of them have been sprayed with herbicide. Trees and undergrowth help at least a little to mitigate some heat in the face of the sweltering sun. Another significant challenge for Beaujolais weathering the heat storm is its most prevalent soil types, granite, schist and alluvium, which are well drained but this further exacerbates the potential for intense hydric stress during heat spikes, unrelenting summer heat and droughts. As a consequence of the increased heat, the old vine parcels that most of the top producers have in their stable typically reserved for their best wines seem to be exacerbating the problem of too much power and concentration in hotter years, since old vines give these things a boost to begin with. Perhaps Beaujolais’ wealth of ancient vines may be somewhat of a liability when in pursuit of lower alcohol and less ripe tasting wines. Okay, now I’m ready for another sock in the eye from all comers… Old vines produce small crops with concentrated grapes, which means concentrated sugar, acid, flavor, extract and potentially increased aromatic and flavor intensity. They often ripen earlier than younger vines (which normally carry a larger crop often requiring more days on the vine) and in warmer years consequently render even greater density and less high-toned crunchy fruit than what vintages like ‘13 and ‘14 brought. In these two vintages the top growers knocked it out of the park with seemingly everything, especially their old vine parcels; the same bottlings that in ‘15 were monstrosities by comparison to the fresh, more upright versions in the previous two years. How long will it be before privileged sun exposure and effortless ability to reach ripeness each year become liabilities? When it’s hot, the vieilles vignes sites crank out big boys that the market has now begun to largely shun, while in a cooler year, they are unmatched in depth, balance and flavor and the market can’t get enough. In Beaujolais this unfortunate trend already appears to be well underway and sadly there seems to be a shortage of insight which has led to a lack of empathy by many buyers. Each grower in Beaujolais is facing climatic circumstances that have not been seen in recorded history. Even the greatest of the great producers of Beaujolais struggle to manage high alcohol, ripeness and the likely cellar problems that come with vintages like ‘15, ‘17 and perhaps ‘18—stuck or slow ferments, elevated volatile acidity and such. All these factors can leave wines exposed on many fronts, especially those that walk the razor’s edge with low to no SO2 to satisfy the natural wine purists. The elevated magic many of us love about less ripe years is likely less than half of what may be more common moving forward as the years get hotter. Then there’s the hail… and the frost… It takes at least a year for vineyards to get back to form after these increasingly more intense and frequent catastrophes. With back-to-back hail storms in ‘16 and ‘17 and frosts in places like Fleurie and Morgon (and other regions), it’s been a solid uphill battle over the last few years to find that crunch and elegance in some parts of Beaujolais. The after effects of hail and frost the following year may concentrate the fruit a bit more due to small yields during the vine’s recovery process. Then the rest of the dominoes fall. In 2017, while it was already a very warm vintage, the hail and frost of ‘16 imposed lower yields, and the spring frost and summer hailstorm in ‘17 doubled the recovery time needed for the vines where they were hit back to back. Where does that leave the ‘18s? I don’t know because I’m writing this article before I’ve had a chance to taste a finished example with a couple of months in bottle to see what’s really happened. It’s tough to know where it will go but what I tasted out of barrel and tank seems promising, without entirely falling into the elegant camp. So where does this leave Beaujolais and its followers, both new and historic? Is part of the answer to this conundrum that if you want more slurpable Beaujo glou glou, perhaps the stronger probabilities lie within wines made from young vines that naturally produce lower alcohol as a result of the higher yields? Or should the focus be on good producers who have no problem setting the course for higher yields which bring the desired lightness and immediacy that some of us enjoy? On the former side of the taste spectrum is the forty and over crowd, the ones who spend the most money in restaurants and on wine cellars and who likely don’t have the same calibration as those who walked into wine when the pendulum was in full swing against alcohols above 13.5%. I don’t think that specific demographic has a problem drinking wines loaded with the kinds of big flavors and matching alcohols that the more ripe vintages yield. While I admit it’s not always my cup of tea for wines with higher alcohol and richness, I believe I am in the minority demographic for my age bracket (over forty) who prefer elegance over power and has a healthy budget set aside for a good amount of drinking. The hard pill to swallow as an observer and wine merchant is that it seems like Beaujolais is already in a climate pickle, yet there’s a push for lower alcohol wines that are not going to be a regular part of its future. Perhaps the producers might begin to consider a retreat further back into the Massif Central where there is an abundance of similar soil types, but with less intense summer heat and exposure, and dense with forests for improved temperature balance between day and night—the key to balance in wine grown in warm climates. That said, I’ve never heard talk of that option and I don’t think the local vignerons are in agreement regarding the low alcohol stance on their wines taken by some in the market. Many love power in their wines as much as they love elegance. I also pondered the idea that the lower-classified zones of Beaujolais and Beaujolais Village, further south and largely perched on limestone and clay soils, are better equipped to weather the heat than the meager soils that dominate the Beaujolais Cru landscape. But while these areas may have the same sun exposure, their heavier soils may render a heavier style Beaujolais than those grown on finer soils that impart lift, freshness, texture and mineral feel to the abundantly fruity Gamay. An example of how powerful limestone and clay can be with Gamay, try a comparative tasting of Jean-Louis Dutraive’s Brouilly wine grown solely on limestone and clay soil with one of his Fleurie wines on granite. Those with a moderately experienced palate will see a profound difference in their shape and impact. To have the same wine delivered year after year in Beaujolais despite the growing season is unrealistic, now more than ever. It’s also contrary to the very ideal of a more natural wine with minimal intervention in the cellar. Indeed, a domaine can output wines with the same alcohol and acid level every year, but not without unnatural adjustments to the fruit in the cellar. Winegrowers are in pursuit of balance, and some years in Beaujolais it’s when the grapes are at a potential alcohol of 11%, with the right acid profile to match, and with others it can creep over 15% and still be wrought with acidity, as it was in 2015. Gamay grown in this part of the world consistently demonstrates dramatic swings of balanced ripeness from one vintage to the next, each with their own merit. Beaujolais seems to be especially feeling the impact of climate change as of late and has made a valiant effort of rolling with nature’s heaviest punches. We would all do well to view the unique versatility of Beaujolais as its winegrowers do, and embrace its ever-changing face.

(Download complete pdf here) Forteresse de Berrye, Saumur The French leg of my December trip with Remy would start with cassoulet, and it would end with cassoulet. At Sonya’s Provençal farmhouse, Mas la Fabrique, where I have for decades taken refuge during my European gallivants, I began writing this newsletter mid-February as she and I started our three-day cassoulet marathon. Sonya specializes in rustic French classics, sometimes with a Turkish twist—her family moved from Istanbul to Lyon when she was two, and her mother was dangerously good in the kitchen.  She and I struck a deal in December at the end of my two-week French tour with Remy as I pulled a well-seasoned traditional clay cassoulet pot from my car. Remy and I were about to boomerang through northwest Italy and I needed room to bring back wine. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Leave it. But come back soon and we’ll use it to make the real cassoulet.” I’d planned to return soon anyway, but this would quicken the process. I’ve dreamed of making cassoulet. That’s to say, I do make it regularly, and I’ve had actual dreams about making it—or something like it. I adore anything with white beans—stews, soups, ragouts, salads. Duck products? Addictive. Foie gras, rillette, dry salted and roasted whole duck, pan-fried breast with its epic fatty, salty crispy skin contrasting with the cool, sushi-like texture and gamey but clean flavor of the meat; the rich skin a fair trade-off for another five minutes of running. Confit? Soul food. I enter meditation mode with salted and seasoned duck legs and wings in front of me ready to undergo the confit process. The salty, fatty, collagen-infused air harmonized with thyme and garlic energizes me. Yet, I struggle with most French versions. Often salted to the marrow, like the chef expects to be six months under siege (as one story goes), they’re often dry and fibrous, like overcooked corned beef, or a rushed Portuguese bacalhão. I need to secure a large carafe d’eau in advance. Carcassonne, photo courtesy @ travellingcat11 Not a minute past eight and two weeks before our arrival to La Fabrique and Remy and I blistered out of Catalonia for our ambitious twelve-thirty rendezvous north to Cahors with Le Vent des Jours’ biodynamic winegrower, Laurent Maure. The low mountain pass of Le Perthus between Catalonia and France, with the 17th-century military fortification, Fort de Bellegarde, overlooking the goings-on below, seemed a perfectly suitable imaginary line from one nation to another. When I cross borders, I sometimes get a hollow, sinking feeling, like I’m guilty of something (indeed, always of something) and they will nab me somewhere down the road, and this was the first time in years since heavily armed guards were nowhere to be found at the first péage. But two months later, upon returning to the same gate in February on my way back to La Fabrique, I found that that new way of doing things had reverted. A full shakedown from machinegun-wielding but polite children in police uniforms, which included a rummage through my cooler of fresh Tuesday morning Costa Brava mackerel, castaña-fed Galego chuletones de cerdo, and a bottle of Stéphane Othéguy Côte-Rôtie. Sonya is crazy about Côte-Rôtie but prefers them rustic, minerally, sans barrique neuve—a journey to her Lyonnaise roots. At Narbonne Remy and I took a left on the endlessly long tease of the A61. It seems like the highway design engineers intentionally hid all the best parts along the road: the majestic snow-packed north face of the Alpine-era Pyrenees, the Haut-Languedoc National Park, and a clear view of Disney-like Carcassonne, with everyone nearly swerving off into oblivion as they try to steal a glance. But I’ll take this side over the Spanish side on the highway from Catalonia to Portugal any day, and the long drives on either side of the Pyrenees provide lots of time to talk. When you have a travel companion with a shared love of cooking and food culture and an equally weak resistance to the wine trail’s many once-in-a-lifetime dishes, time passes quickly and the conversations always build the appetite. Just east of Carcassonne, the historical argument starts. Remy and I were headed into the hallowed ground of cassoulet, where an ancient and hotly contested debate continues about which is the birthplace of the real version: Carcassonne, Castelnaudary, and Toulouse, each claim ownership of the medieval prototype, though I’ve seen Castelnaudary cited the most frequently. Two months later, before Sonya and I would begin our cassoulet, I would ask, “So which of the three makes the best cassoulet?” “Toulouse,” she quipped. To prompt more explanation, I asked, “What about Castelnaudary?” “Have you ever had a cassoulet in Castelnaudary?” “No.” “They’re awful …” The cassoulet controversy mirrors Spain’s paella dispute. Where does paella come from? Valencia? Catalonia? Andalusia? It seems universally known to have originated in Valencia. But like cassoulet, paella is more about what you want it to be. Though cassoulet needs the beans, and paella needs the rice, the basic ingredients and technique are the most crucial elements. In cassoulet, some use lamb, some don’t; some use breadcrumbs, while others are offended by the very concept. For paella, it depends on regional production—there are more from shells and fins by the sea and the once feathered and furry in the mountains. The texture of the rice? Another argument altogether … Cassoulet is one of the world’s great communal feasts. If I want my wife to join me for my cassoulet experience, it must be skimmed of fat (sacrilegious to the French). I wouldn’t dare sneak in pigs’ feet or skin, and leave to chance anything slightly firm and gelatinous; any ambiguous floating piece is met with subtle indignation on her part, skeptical inquisition as to my judgment, and an inevitable transfer of it from her plate onto mine. The result at Mas la Fabrique While standing in line for a sandwich at one of those French roadside feed lots, attractive single-portion-sized cassoulets in traditional clay pots caught our eyes. We were tired and hungry, and it was cold—around 2°C. We wondered if either of us would go for it. In the rainy and cold weather, cassoulet would be epic and would undoubtedly warm our spirits and prime us for our first visit. But a question on the other side of the Pyrenees would be if we saw a paella in a roadside stop that looked worthy of consideration would we have gone for it? We ordered sandwiches … Before the center of Cahors and the wildly meandering Lot, we took a left and began our gradual ascent toward Villesèque to Laurent (Lolo) Maure and his biodynamic domaine, Le Vent des Jours.  Winding through untamed forest and carved limestone passages with layered lithified sea creatures immortalized 150 million years ago, the sky was gray, the cold wind biting and the drizzle stinging, the limestone also ashen, wet, and uninviting, we arrived two minutes early after our four-and-a-half hour drive. Inside, their party hall was filled with duck products, countless hanging glasses, cigarette smoke (expected), wood smoke, the sound of Bowie on vinyl, and that salty, fatty, and familiar collagen-infused air, we were warmly greeted at the door by Pollux, a wiry-haired black and tan mutt with the same tight frame and graying beard as his manager, who followed with a smile. Cold and ready for our blood to circulate again, Lolo ushered us to the woodburning stove to unveil his days-long work: piping hot cassoulet (f… yeah!), bubbling in a porcelain-lined cast iron pot. Overjoyed for this perfect lunch, we were quickly led like bulls, pulled to the cellar by the nose as he lamented that he hadn’t prepared the cassoulet for us in a traditional clay pot. “How does it cook differently?” I asked. Without answering, he deflected with, “You don’t have one?” And I thought, I do mine in porcelain-lined cast iron pots too … (I learned later that aside from the cultural experience, clay pots better distribute the heat more consistently than cast iron.) Lolo walked me to an empty backroom hallway under renovation. He rummaged and pulled out a beautiful rustic clay pot, glazed inside, raw baked clay on the outside, and held it out. “For me?” I asked. “Yes!” Laurent (Lolo) Maure Few objects could mean as much to me as an authentic traditional cassoulet pot with scars of experience, especially a gift from a winemaker I admire. I can only imagine the magic produced in that pot, and I marched straight it to the car to make sure I wouldn’t forget it. This pot was about to leave its cozy comfort zone, travel all over France, and wait with Sonya for my imminent baptism in her version of real cassoulet. Too wet and cold to fool around in the vineyards, we stayed in the cellar to taste the promising 2024s. We started with C’Juste, a 90% Gros Manseng and 10% Ugni Blanc grown in amphora, destined to be without a milligram of added sulfites. It’s a testament to what can be achieved with no added sulfites in white wines; in fact, no sulfites are added to any wines at this domaine. Some in the natural wine world seem to have figured it out on whites, and they can be raw, charged, and clean. We ran through the various plots of Malbec for the fabulously balanced and charming Les Calades, and finally to Les Moutons, only made in the best years from the top of the hill on the rockiest parcel, groomed and fertilized by a group of miniature pudgy sheep with stringy black and white hair. Once again closer to the prize, we sat and tasted a series of Cahors vintages dating back to 2018, the first year after he bought the vineyards from celebrated naturalist and biodynamist, Fabien Jouves. Each year was distinct, and because of Laurent’s soft hand with the use of barrels ten years old or older, along with Tava amphoras, concrete and steel, each with varying degrees of micro-oxygenation (or none at all), the wines perfectly reflect each season’s particularities. Laurent Maure, photo credit Remy Giannico Laurent describes it as a “shit year.” I take this to mean, “Everything was hard.” On the horizon for the States is the 2021 Les Calades, a wine that shows its wet and cold season and the extensive care it took to preserve the good health of its few grapes. He’s quite proud of the result, and rightfully so; surrounded by fuller, riper wines, it’s an outlier. 2021 is for those who want less embellishment of this exuberant variety from the sunny years and more sting and verticality. It’s a direct extension of the high altitude, rocky terrain and spare topsoil without the concentrating and sweetening effect of the sun. 2020 and 2022 are fuller, juicier, and easier for anyone to love, and while they’re no-brainers, 2021 is a brainer. We know the difficult years separate the true talents from the fair-weathered geniuses. It’s the toil of the 2021 that made it a success. Laurent builds on each year’s strengths rather than overcompensating for its weaknesses. The only difficulty during the tasting was the distracting and inviting smell of the cassoulet behind us on the stove. When we finally dug in, it was so tasty and collagen-rich that my lips got chapped from so much licking off the rich and starchy glycerol broth between bites. Any of the world’s greatest wines could’ve been in front of me and it would’ve been just as hard to focus until my plate was clean and I was stuffed. I wanted to finish off the whole pot and Pollux it clean. Matthieu and Bénédicte, from Sadon-Huguet A solid food coma set in as we began our westward journey. Remy drifted in and out of consciousness, and I was charged with keeping us alive for the three-hour country drive in the dark. We finally arrived in Bordeaux and were stuck in traffic in the rain and the chaos of the city’s seemingly endless, non-stop road construction. We were an hour late for our dinner with Matthieu and Bénédicte, the makers of our no-added-sulfite, organic and biodynamic certified, non-AOC Bordeaux, Sadon-Huguet. This husband-and-wife team responsible for overseeing production at nearly twenty châteaux under organic and biodynamic practices started their own project in 2018, their red a blend of 60% Cabernet Franc from the limestone-heavy section of Saint-Émilion with the remainder Merlot. It’s an hour’s drive to the northwest in Blaye, on what they describe as an identical geological setting to their parcel in Saint-Émilion. Because they are both firsts in their family in the wine business, buying established vineyard land in Bordeaux isn’t a realistic option, so the parcels are rented from two of their biodynamic growers. “It wasn’t always about the quality of the terroir,” Bénédicte said when asked about why a good vineyard parcel such as the one they’ve isolated in Blaye has the same guts as Saint-Émilion but just across the river from Saint-Julien and Margaux is without a higher classification. It’s a familiar story commonly heard in Europe’s new generation of growers scouring the lost, forgotten, or perhaps never-explored areas. Blaye is massive compared to the appellations across the river. It wasn’t necessarily that Blaye (and even Pomerol, a historically a small-grower appellation without much of a tie to aristocracy, and Saint-Émilion, which was spurred into greater production by monastic orders to produce for local consumption rather than global commerce) was incapable of producing high-quality wine back then. It was the historical class division, the trade advantages and the focus of the aristocracy whose economic power developed the left bank. This shaped Bordeaux's reputation and ultimately a series of classifications that began a centuries-long self-reinforcing cycle of success, much like that of New York’s financial infrastructure, Silicon Valley tech, and Hollywood’s film industry. Mathieu and Bénédicte followed the vein of limestone and created one red wine from Bordeaux called “Expression Calcaire.” Like many of the world’s great reds, it walks a calculated line on volatility, bringing up the x-factor and highlighting the tucked-in fruit of this fully formed, broadly and deeply complex, no-sulfite-added Bordeaux. Their interpretation through biodynamics, organics and no additions is singular and exciting. It’s full of life and expression with a tightness they attribute to the limestone. With some fabulously unique and noble qualities, I can’t ever remember tasting before, Remy and I were treated to an impromptu cellar blending trial for their new white made from Semillon. It was recently bottled and will hopefully make it to our shores in 2025. This wine needs to go straight to the Michelin tasting menus. Yet another long haul ahead, we left our morning vineyard visit and cellar tasting with Mathieu and Bénédicte, for Muscadet. Our stop was in Mouzillon-Tillières with Alexandre Déramé, the nearly one-man show at Domaine de la Morandière. Morandière is a special site on the extremely hard igneous rock, gabbro, with varying depths of topsoil. Usually released six years after its vintage date, the old-vine bottling, Les Roches Gaudinières, grown on gabbro, is structured and expansive but tight and impenetrable when young. He also runs another domaine in Saint-Fiacre-sur-Maine on granite, called Domaine du Moulin. The wines from each domaine are made in the same way (usually in underground glass-lined concrete vats) and they support the argument for the influence bedrock has on wine. Those on granite are much gentler than those grown on gabbro, which are more robust and sturdy. Alexandre has been with us since we started our company and has been nudged into organic conversion with some of his top parcels. He began to test it out a few years ago, and you couldn’t pick a series of more difficult years than 2021 through 2024 to keep a new convert’s confidence in the organic process. Though still on board, 2024’s destructive mildew pressure tested his faith, as with almost every non-conventional grower in France. It was an extremely difficult year and many of our longtime organic growers lost nearly all their crops. 2025 needs to be fruitful (no pun intended), otherwise we may see the collapse of some of organic farming’s most faithful. When we extended our reach beyond the California border, it seemed that every tuffeau fragment of Loire Valley had already been overturned. It wasn’t only picked over by other importers, but sommeliers were also posting unknown growers on social media long before they found representation in the US. This prompted many importers to follow those with wide reach and sprint to nab the grower. After the growers in Brézé attracted more interest in Saumur’s dry Chenin game, a mad dash of importers to the area was in full swing. We were once at the front of the line, but by the time we branched out, we found ourselves holding up the rear. The beginning of Chenin’s most recent dry wine renaissance took shape a decade and a half ago in Brézé. In 2011, Arnaud Lambert’s Brézé wines were on our company’s first container. Buyers couldn’t reconcile the electrical charge of Arnaud’s entry-level Saumur white under the Château de Brézé label, which was composed entirely of the historic Clos du Midi fruit at the time but not noted on the label. We had a hard time selling them, but two years later, with Guiberteau’s wines on one of our boats to California, people took another look at Arnaud’s wines, and we were off to the races. Even if our relationship remains good, our collaboration with Romain ended a few years ago. But Arnaud, the quiet and largely uncredited spark that contributed to the explosion of Brézé, remains a cornerstone of our California identity. So, where to go after Brézé? If terroir is one’s guide, Puy-Notre-Dame could be one of the next hot spots. Further south of Brézé, there are a lot of different hills just like it: tuffeau limestone outcrops that survived flood erosion and are spread apart by vast lowlands used for other crops along with vineyards. The areas of Puy-Notre-Dame are visually unimpressive, but so is Brézé and Saumur-Champigny. Forteresse de Berrye, Berrie At the risk of sounding naïve, my original notion of being an importer was to seek out these nearly forgotten terroirs, and the quiet, hidden talents tucked away in corners. Success stories like Arnaud Lambert can also be found in what may seem like unlikely places; places that, in truth, may be the most capable and thrilling of all. That spark may be hidden within an imperfect, seemingly mundane wine that leads you in an unexpected direction. What first appears average may hold just a glimmer of brilliance, or the faint, familiar scent of a gifted terroir, of something remarkable, that’s somehow and miraculously been overlooked. There is no greater satisfaction for me as an importer than contributing to the success of humble and curious people. Sometimes their open minds only need a well-timed nudge. For better or worse, I’m a nudger. Most average bottles lead to a dead end, but occasionally I find some sparks too bright to ignore. Excellent cellar skills and how to farm well can be learned, but if humility and curiosity aren’t ingrained in one’s youth? A lifetime of therapy is in the cards … Four new growers around Saumur signed on with us in the last two years and each holds promise in their unique way. Our first visit during this trip to Saumur was the historic Puy-Notre-Dame domaine, Forteresse de Berrye. Purchased in 2019 by Gilles Collinet, a botanist who owned several organic nurseries, it was immediately converted to organic viticulture. After I saw the potential in the vineyards and Gilles’ seriousness in elevating his new property to a world-class level, I suggested he connect with Arnaud Lambert’s consulting enologist, Olivier Barbou. Olivier joined him immediately, and the following year Gilles also signed Loïc Yven as their new Chef du Culture (vineyards manager), who was at the time with the Nady Foucault consulted project, Domaine des Closier. Gilles lucked out with this historic property, whose ancient military base and vineyards are perched above the expansive territory and have a great view of the surroundings. While the lower areas are a mix of unsorted alluvium and capable of rendering good wines, their complexity has limits. The key to all the exceptional wines in the region is that magic sandy tuffeau limestone rock preserved above these ancient flood plains and in contact with the vine roots. Their new 2022s (with new labels) have just arrived, the first season under the gentle guidance of Olivier. After more than fifteen years of exploration with Arnaud, Olivier’s experience and touch is evident. He also understands Gilles’ predilection for wine, which is aligned with mine: pure, raw and focused without artifice and over-stylizing. With lesser terroirs this approach is perhaps less interesting, but like the highest quality fish in the hands of a sushi master, wines from fabulous terroirs need to be let alone and served unadorned to highlight their quality. Gilles cleverly explores his vineyard’s potential through this more naked state to better understand where the most promising plots are and how to bring out their best. The racy, chalky, citrusy 2022 Crémant, made entirely from Chenin Blanc with a dosage of 5g/L is the first in line for the newly arrived wines; the first batch of bubbles from the domaine blistered out of stock and into the market in a heartbeat. The 2022 Saumur Blanc “Les Bourgeres” is classic Chenin Blanc that echoes many celebrated white wine regions of northern Europe. It comes from vines planted in 1993 on tuffeau limestone bedrock with relatively thin topsoil of calcareous silt, sand and clay. It’s raised in only concrete and old barrels of 225-400 liters, and is deeply green, like exotic moss, chlorophyll, reposado tequila, lime and salt with a light honeyed finish. I’ve said since my first tastes of earlier wines even before Gilles took over, they reminded me much more of Vouvray than Saumur, or Riesling with the softness of Sonnenuhr, or Domprobst, with the limestone force of a Keller Von Der Fels. Their 2022 Saumur Rouge “Clos de Berrie” comes from vines planted in 2012. It’s vigorous, high-energy Cabernet Franc with a sturdy and wiry frame, perhaps credited to its tuffeau bedrock below a shallow loamy topsoil rich in calcareous sands. This year is also dark-fruited (perhaps because of the warm summer) and shows some nice curves, though it’s still tightly framed. Tannins are fine but sharp, with balanced green characteristics to compliment the cool and refreshing limestone tension. The red and white wines showed even better on the second day they were open than on the first. I was going to give them a few tastes and then open other samples on my list to taste, but I couldn’t quite break away. They ceaselessly continued to rise and fascinate even more, especially the white, which, even in this very simple and straightforward crafting, already shows the pedigree of this hill and these historic vineyards. He finally let me show the world his wonderful face: Fréderic Haus, Domaine Les Infiltrés, Puy-Notre-Dame Another smaller-scale head turner in Puy-Notre-Dame is Frédéric Haus and his Domaine Les Infiltrés. All his vineyards are in the village of Puy-Notre-Dame and are under organic culture. “I left a comfortable situation as a senior technician in the cinema in Lille, a city of heart, to take care of a piece of land with organic farming, and for 20 years I was a committed and enraged social and environmental activist. To speak from agriculture and out of phenomenological concern and to save the environment, I decided, like many, to occupy it …” 2022s 2023s Fred’s initial wines were unusually successful initial endeavors. It was 2021, also his first year involved in any viticultural activity. It was also the first year of Chenin Blanc and Cabernet Franc I tried from him before we signed on, eventually importing his 2022s. Fred’s background in craftsmanship and art is felt in his wines. But more than the aesthetic of craft, he’s looking for emotion, and his wines find it. On our day with him, his new wines had just been bottled and were hard to read. But with the bottles shipped to me in Spain in January and tasted in February, I’m even more convinced of this guy’s talent. The 2022s have just made their way to New York for their first showing. Heads will turn, even in markets that have heard every pitch under the sun: some things are still uniquely beautiful enough to grab our attention. Hiding in Brézé under everyone’s nose was Fabrice Esnault’s Domaine la Giraudiere. Most of Fabrice’s viticultural life was spent building business for the negociants by selling from his production of twenty hectares and only a little in-house production to sell at his tasting room. All that was needed was a label change and a little nudging from us (and our mutual friend, Arnaud Lambert), and he would walk through the door with us. Fabrice Esnault, Domaine la Giraudière, Brézé Our visit with Fabrice was another moment of confidence for us and this investment on both sides. The new 2023 wines out of vat were promising in the spring, and when I tasted them with Remy in December they had found solid footing. What I like most about his wines is their directness and simplicity in the way they’re styled. The whites taste as much Brézé as any from the hill because the grower hasn’t overthought or overwrought them in the cellar. During our cellar tasting, Remy asked about a mostly spent unlabeled green bottle with a white wax top. It was a Chenin from Brézé made by his father in the 1990s. Remy asked if we could try it, and Fabrice grabbed another one. It had a perfect platinum hue like it hadn’t aged more than a few years and still had a full tank of gas, simply spectacular. The taste in that bottle was what everyone should be pursuing: unadulterated purity! My spring nudging (the second or third attempt, I’ve forgotten) about conversion to organic farming with Fabrice took root. He already has a parcel under organic generically bottled as “Brézé,” but there will now be many more to come in time with Ardillon the headliner. His stable of reds comes from Saumur-Champigny in the communes of Montsoreau and Turquant. Like the whites, they are also crafted to express their distinct terroirs rather than bamboozle with the sleight of hand in the cellar. For a classic style approach, Fabrice is one to watch. Those gorgeous old Brézé wines crafted long ago by Fabrice’s father The scene was set early on in Portugal. It would be my second visit to Carole Kohler, and Remy’s first. I pulled her 2022s out for dinner before we flew from Porto to Barcelona. It was as convincing as I’d hoped, and Remy was excited to see this place and this person I’d already mythologized before a single drop of her wine had ever been poured in the US. Sometimes you know instantly when you’ve gotten lucky, again. Like my first Lambert Chenin from Brézé in 2010. Thierry Richoux’s 2006 Irancy with the Collet family over dinner in Chablis. Veyder-Malberg’s first Wachau wines at his house in 2010. My first Dutraive Fleurie in New York, in 2013, poured blind by my friend–a true sommelier, Eduardo Porto Carreiro. Cume do Avia’s 2017 Ribeiro reds over lunch in Sanxenxo. My drop-in visit with the unknown Daniele Marengo was at his family’s cantina in Barolo. My first two wines from Carole are part of this list. When I first tasted her enchanted forest, biodynamic, baby-vine 2022 “Source” Chenin Blanc and 2022 “Jardin” Cabernet Franc, I thought, “These are too good.” I yelled to my wife from the kitchen while preparing dinner, “It’s impossible that no one works with her in the US … You won’t believe them. They’re crazy!” My tasting notes were filled with exhausted references to the great producers in every other sentence. I’ll spare you what would seem like hyperbole and all-to-often exaggerated comparisons to the world’s elite everyone uses as context to sell their new wines these days, but let’s just say that Carole’s are aligned with the world’s best raw wines—no direct references needed. After drinking her wine for the first time, I tried to maintain a poker face for our call. I distracted her with inquiries of how she made them, about the vineyards (“schist, silex and limestone all in three different plots only hundreds of meters away from one another? Really?), and finished with, “How much sulfur did you add?” “None,” she responded without explanation. Then she asked what I thought. I let her have it. “They’re just incredible … How are importers not swooning by the dozen? Have you never sent your wines to a US importer before? No sulfites, at all?” (In 2023 with a few of her wines, she added a mere 10 mg/L to mitigate some risks for what she describes as a challenging vintage. None of the 2022s have added sulfites.) So why hasn’t anyone snatched the place? First, it’s new—well, kinda. Fleury does have history, though it might’ve been forgotten for a while. Carole’s viticultural renaissance of Fleury, an estate documented back to 1458, and then again in 1753 as a fiefdom (land grant from a lord) of the Dukes of Trémouille, began in 2016 with its first vines rooted since at least the 1960s. Registers kept in the Municipal Archives of Thouars demonstrate that vines were cultivated in Fleury long ago, with the oldest registered in 1930. But many European registers for various things were only started sometime in the 1900s, to make sure people planted with American rootstock, and to fall in line with incoming appellation laws, among other things, but most importantly the desire to have a greater tax regulation on wine. We’ve seen this a time or two with old vines in certain areas, like Spain’s Jimenez de Jamuz, whose register says that all the old vines there were planted in 1930, but the locals know they’re much older—some pre-phylloxera. Secondly, it’s located in the greater Anjou AOC and almost nobody is poking around on the edges away from the most celebrated areas of Anjou, like Coteaux du Layon, or Savennières. This generations-long family home of her husband, Brice Kohler, is a dull 35 minutes south of Saumur center, 30 from Brézé, and 22 minutes from Puy-Notre-Dame. It seems to be the last area to discover on the frontier of the appellation for quality wine. The vineyards are in the former Vins de Pays Thouarsais, an appellation discarded decades ago during the EU’s consolidation of appellation regulations, along with most of the interest in this once-important wine region before phylloxera. Today, it’s lumped into the generic “Anjou” appellation, and the Kohlers forgo the appellation altogether in favor of an even more generic Val de Loire appellation, to be even a little more self-exiled. Many vineyards in Thouars were destroyed in 1964-65. The government paid owners to uproot because they were at the gates of an expanding city, with many pre-empted to build the city’s bypass and large commercial and residential areas. This all seems like such a blasphemous offense to Dionysus, and they were surely punished for it as the wine trade basically disappeared. The financial incentives of the time were too low, the same as in most of Saumur’s generic appellation until the last ten years. If you hadn’t recovered twenty years after WWII ended, maybe it’s time to move on. History shouldn’t be forgotten, and at Fleury, it wasn’t; it was recorded quite well. It only needed the right people to dig up the records. Fleury was established in the 15th Century around its constantly flowing spring between the front gate and the house. Joined at its western hip to the ancient city of Thouars, the 16th Century house is quaint, well-kept, remodeled timelessly and full of artifacts, and beautiful art that hardly leaves an open space on the walls of this idyllic storybook countryside manor in France’s north. There’s a maze of cellar underneath, a small, freestanding winery installed in one of their old storerooms and animal shelters, a beautiful, long greenhouse dating back to 1870-1900, 19th Century gardens and a sizeable amount of ancient indigenous forest (suggested by Carole as perfect for Shinrin Yoku—Japanese “forest bathing” to clean the mind). Some exotic trees were planted through Brice’s family of five resident generations (including a sequoia in 1877), an untamed and undeveloped riverfront property, and an extensive horse pasture where Finley and Léon spend their days grazing. It’s almost too perfect with its separation from all other agricultural fields by trees, and without another vineyard even close. Its four separate vineyards gain a unique and lively biodiversity without neighborly intrusions from possible conventional farming activities disrupting her organic and biodynamic practices. It’s hard to imagine that when people figure out how good her wines are some of them won’t also consider planting around Thouars. Perhaps a third reason she was overlooked was that 2018 was Carole’s first year, ever. The 2020 and 2021 wines they opened to taste along with the 2022s and 2023s were well beyond just that “glimmer of misdirected brilliance and the faint, familiar scent of a gifted terroir somehow overlooked” that was mentioned above. But I didn’t find the same level of clarity as the 2022 Jardin and 2022 Source. Something else clicked in 2022, perhaps they just needed five years to find that line. And then there is Carole Kohler, the subject of a Klimt painting who slipped her frame. In constant reflection of light in motion, seemingly unaware of the energy with which she fills every room and every vineyard she enters, she leans in, listens like it matters, and smiles easily. There’s no distance with her, no pretense, no guarded elegance. She cooks with inspiration. There’s so much art and sculpture in their house that everything seems to be alive and moving. She’s an avid reader, skier, runner, swimmer, and yogi. “I also like meditation, sewing, decorating my house, and taking care of my flowers and my family.” After her university studies where she attained a Master’s degree in Chemistry followed by fifteen years in the agri-food industry, Carole felt it was time to “Reconnect with the living and give meaning to life ... to live with the rhythm of the seasons, immerse myself in nature, produce a local and shared wine and work to guarantee the sustainability of the Domaine de Fleury, owned by my husband’s family for five generations.” She added, “I can’t really explain why it was like a little voice telling me that I will be happy doing that…” Committed to her newfound idea (and giving in to the voices in her head), she went back to school, attaining a diploma in Viticulture at Montreuil Bellay, just twenty minutes north on the way to Saumur. During this time, they also had their selected plots analyzed through pits and generated detailed geological maps and bedrock and topsoil compositions of what they stood on before they began to plant. A working architect by trade, Brice met Carole through his sister when they were teenagers and is the other half of the dream to revitalize cet endroit extraordinaire. His desk overflows with a collection of ancient, illustrated maps and today’s geological research of the area that supports its rich heritage as a transitional center of the Massif Armorican and the Paris Basin, copies of vineyard registers, documents of Fleury’s history as a fiefdom and declarations of harvest from the 1930s. Together, they shared the same curiosity and belief that this was indeed a place! Wall at Carole Kohler’s Jardins de Fleury demonstrating their vineyard’s geological convergence of the Massif Armorican and Paris Basin A walk inside Fleury’s vineyards is a walk in what seems like virgin green land flowing uninhibited with yellow, purple, pink, and red indigenous flowers and a multitude of competing grasses that make it hard to walk through the fields before their annual plowing. These flowers are usually only around during the months one would expect, but as mentioned in last month’s newsletter where we covered the portion of our trip in Spain, there were also spring flowers in bloom in the Loire Valley mid-December! Carole notes that when the vines are young, they need more plowing to ensure the root systems head downward instead of sideways. Tree groves abut each plot, bringing an orchestra of fresh wind and foresty smells with the constant rustling of leaves and the buzz of bees and bugs.   After Jardin was planted in 2016, Source was planted in 2017 entirely to Chenin Blanc on a single 0.7-hectare parcel at 70 meters altitude. It sits across the little one-car road, Rue de la Mare aux Canards (Duck Pond Street), which marks a clear separation of the acidic rock of the ancient, Pangean-era Massif Armorican from the alkaline limestone rocks of the Paris Basin. On the south side is the 570-million-year-old Precambrian quartz-rich schist and micaschist outcrop above the Thouet River, and on the other side, the white limestone. This is evident on the road’s walls, cleverly distinguished by its builders, who built the southwest wall with the dark gray and green schist from that side and white limestone (an occasional dark blue schist for accenting) on the northeast wall. Named after the spring that led generations to inhabit the space around it now known as Fleury, Source is dynamic and quite distinguished from the other Chenin Blanc on the property, Séquoia. Its topsoil is rich in quartz and grey schist with clay on a green and black schist bedrock. This is an explosive white with more muscular, mineral-heavy lines. The 2022 was fully matured to 13% potential alcohol before picking and is a must-try from this domaine as it represents what is possible with this extremely talented site. By contrast, the 2023 was picked very early because of vineyard challenges from botrytis in September. Carole explained that with its proximity to the river, only 50 meters away, and the thick forest in between, she couldn’t wait another day for fear of losing too much crop to rot. It was picked, not chaptalized (as so many would do without a second thought), and bottled with 10.5% alcohol. Even with this low degree of alcohol, it offers extremely fine lines but without the same explosive solar-powered energy of the 2022 version. Just a hundred meters east of Source are the two parcels planted in 2019 that constitute the 1.5-hectare plot of Chenin Blanc for Séquoia. Once again, we are in the Pangean remnants of the Massif Armorican with a topsoil of clay and decomposed schist and quartz on very hard green mica schist bedrock. With only a few vintages to draw from, Séquoia appears to be more linear and finer than Source, in general. It’s not as explosive but offers a distinct contrast, indeed worthy of bottling separately. The 2022 Source was whole-cluster pressed and naturally fermented in 30-hectoliter steel tanks for four days at a maximum of 23°C and completed malolactic fermentation. It was bottled with no added sulfites and was not fined nor filtered. The 2023 Source and 2023 Séquoia went through the same processes as the 2022 Source, except that they were aged in 12-hectoliter clay Vin et Terre amphora and old 225 L French oak for eight months before bottling with 10 mg/L of total added sulfites. Neither were fined or filtered.   As good as Carole’s Chenin Blanc wines are, her Cabernet Franc hooks you immediately. Incredibly alive and full of energy, its red and black fruit profile has a lean fleshiness snugged up and narrowed by a garrigue-like floral bouquet of lavender and flowering wild thyme and a core of deep earth and virility. It’s complex and hard to square that it comes from a half-hectare of baby vines planted in 2016. This is the fruit for Jardin, whose vines sit on a mild slope facing west on the Paris Basin side of this geological convergence. While there are both Jurassic and Cretaceous limestones in the greater Anjou area, the bedrock here is what geologists call, Toarcian (named after Thouars!), from the Early Jurassic dating to around 180-million-years ago. This hard clayey limestone doesn’t share much in common beyond its dense calcareous materials with the Loire Valley’s much softer sandy tuffeau limestone, though it does have some sandstone interbedding. It’s less pure in calcium carbonate, and more relatable to the limestones of the Côte d’Or, though it predates the Côte d’Or’s predominant limestones by around ten million years. It’s like Bathonian, Bajocian, and Oxfordian, among others, though Toarcian limestone may be found in some appellations—and Chablis’ Kimmeridgian marls are about thirty million years younger, while Portlandian limestones predate it by about forty million years. The upper section of Jardin sits at 90 meters with shallower rocky topsoil of silex, limestone, clay and sand before striking a hard and fairly siliceous limestone bedrock (in this case, with black flint/chert) at 30 cm below. The topsoil deepens lower on the slope reaching down to below 80 cm where some influence of the river is apparent with deeper alluvial topsoil, making it a longer but easier journey in search of limestone bedrock. All this is to say that Jardin is complex, and some of that complexity could be attributed to its geological diversity inside this small parcel. Jardin is destemmed and naturally fermented in 50hl stainless steel tanks for 15 days with no extraction movements (infusion method) at 25°C maximum. It’s then aged eight months in old 225 L French oak and concrete eggs and bottled with no added sulfites and without fining or filtration.     “You don’t want to taste my rosé?” Carole asked. My first thought was: The world needs Cabernet Franc rosé like a vigneron needs late spring frost. When the 2023s were finally in bottle, I asked her to send me samples of the 2023 Source, Séquoia and Jardin. The bottles of Source were missing from the box. In its place were two clear glass bottles filled with a hazy, faintly rusty, warm, amber-colored wine inside, with labels of a cartoon Carole, red-headed and her face pastel shades of golden yellow, soft coral pink, deep orange and red, with one big eye peering through a marigold wine glass. “Carole, you sent me the rosé.” “Well, lucky for you. I’ll send Source next week.” I didn’t want to spoil my impression of Carole’s great range of wines with a Cabernet Franc rosé, so the bottles sat unattended for three months before Remy arrived. “What’s this?” He asked, emerging from the parking garage after rummaging through my wine storage there. “Cabernet Franc rosé.” “Oh …” We pulled the cork anyway. Before I took my first sniff and sip, I saw a light go on in Remy after he’d tasted his and I knew I’d made yet another incorrect assumption. Carole’s rosé is bottled summer sun. I never thought a Cabernet Franc could render such a dainty, attractive beauty. It’s soft and pretty, lifted with pink rose petal and taut stone fruit skin, just the right touch of amare from the light extraction and thrust from Cabernet and Chenin picked just a touch earlier than grapes for her other wines—an equal mix of both varieties. Whole-cluster pressed, naturally fermented at a maximum of 18°C for a good balanced fruit and savory notes, and aged for six months in 12-hectoliter fiberglass. It undergoes full malolactic and has no added sulfites, finings or filtration. The Cabernet Franc portion comes from a single 0.3-hectare parcel planted in 2020 at 75-80 meters altitude, just across the Rue de la Mare aux Canards and slightly uphill from Source (where it takes the Chenin Blanc of the blend) it’s on a mild slope facing southwest. Across this one-car street, from the first Chenin vine to the first Cabernet vine, the mica schist soil of Source changes to Toarcian limestone bedrock and clay topsoil—Precambrian Massif Armorican to Jurassic Paris Basin, a 360-million-year geological swing in less than ten meters.

The first time I stood on the hill, I didn’t think much of it.  It’s a quiet place just outside of the famous French wine town, Saumur.  To tell you the truth, there wasn’t much to admire besides a quaint, but lifeless, chateau sitting on top of it. This insipid wonder attracts droves of tourists every year to snap photos and walk away with a lousy souvenir wine from the chateau.  Indeed, the recent history of this chateau is one of making downright terrible wines. This hill, however, has a glorious history that has been almost completely forgotten –until now… My addiction to this hill began about four years ago. During my debut as a wine importer, I spent six months chatting it up with various people in the business about producers that could be interesting for me before I pulled the trigger on my maiden voyage in search of the holy grail.  Amongst my group of “sources”, was a friend back in Virginia who also runs an import company.  Although he was only 26 when I met him, this guy had developed a remarkable and enviable palate for wine.  He told me that he drank many great wines throughout his life because his father was a serious wine collector.  It must have been nice…  My first taste of wine was not one of privilege.  I grew up in a small town in Montana, called Kalispell.  Most people thought I said “cow’s bell”, or “cattle smell”, when they asked what the name of the town was.  I suppose both names could make sense after meeting a hick like me.  Because Montana wasn't exactly a mecca for wine lovers, my first contact with wine was an unforgettable bottle of Manaschewitz.  It was one of the worst things I can remember putting in my mouth as a kid, and believe me, I put a lot of disgusting things in my mouth back then.  After I snuck a taste, I couldn’t understand why my parents would drink this thing that seems like it should have been poured over our salad.  Given my first encounter with “wine”, it’s a miracle that I ever drank another glass of the stuff.  I must admit, however, that I’ve never had another sip of Manaschewitz.  Maybe I should give it another go, just to be fair; after all, it was probably open for at least two months, and I think I was about eight years old at the time.  Anyway, my buddy back east told me about a few producers; one in particular caught my attention.  He said that they were somewhat of a newcomer to Saumur, which is an area that specializes in two grapes: Chenin Blanc and Cabernet Franc.  He seemed pretty surprised that no major importer had picked them up yet in the States.  It was a good lead, so I put an email together and sent it off to Domaine de St. Just, fingers crossed. You’d be surprised at how fast people sometimes respond to this sort of inquiry; most of the time, if you ask to buy their wines on the spot, they put it together and send it to you without much ado.  Of course, you have to pay in advance, but that’s about it.  At any rate, the owner of the domaine, Arnaud Lambert, wrote back immediately and invited me to visit the estate.  I asked if it was fine with him to send samples to my friend’s house, in Provence, as I wasn’t planning on going to the Loire on this trip (even if the wines from this place were top notch).  This was the only producer in this region that I had the beat on, and it was pretty far out of my way.  Believe me, a thousand kilometers out of the way is a long distance to go only to find disappointment. By the end of 2010, I set off for France with proper financing to start importing wines to California.  My first stop, whenever I travel to France, is at Pierre and Sonya’s house in Provence, called La Fabrique.   Before I arrived, I made sure that it wasn’t a problem for them to receive samples sent for me –little did they know how much was on the way. Before my arrival, they sent me a message saying that, over the last couple of weeks, they had amassed about 11 boxes of wine.  Admittedly, I also was a little surprised by how much wine showed up.  I was going to be there for only two nights, so I proposed that La Fabrique throw a party.  They thought I was insane when I told them that I was going to open all the bottles at the party because they only had gathered 15 people for it.  It was a lot of wine, but in the end, only about a dozen bottles were worth drinking and most of them had been made by the hand of the same vigneron.  The truth is, most of what we importers taste is pure junk; the good wines ones are only good, and the great ones are rare. A couple of hours before the party started, I began pulling corks to taste them all before everyone arrived.  There were many that weren’t even fit for an outfit like Cost Plus.  Then, I put my nose in the first white wine from St. Just, and I knew, straight away, that if the rest followed suit, I would have to reconsider making the journey to Saumur.  I slowly worked through the entire range of his wines, looking for reasons not to go, but from top to bottom, they were all seamless.  My friend was dead on and I was sure that I had found my first producer.  I’ve been a fan of this area of France forever and these were some of the best wines I’ve tasted from there, period.  The Chenins were clean, expressive and straightforward –and they weren’t too Chenin-y, if you know what I mean.  Their Cabernet Franc wines from Saumur-Champigny were perfectly on par with what I wanted out of this grape: pure, clean, terroir-driven with charming bright red fruits.  Honestly, I was more excited about the reds than the whites because I feel that, not only is Cabernet Franc from the Loire Valley one of the most authentic terroir wines in all of France, but it is also, in commercial terms, a little easier to sell than Chenin Blanc. The problem I have with this area, however, is that a lot of the highly revered producers make wines that can be a little funky, and that’s not the type of horse that I want to get behind. Arnaud sent another box of samples from a different estate, which was also from Saumur.  He put a note in the box telling me that he just started to work with this estate and that he’d like me to consider them as well, but because I was already sold on Arnaud’s wine, they sat in the box until the end of the tasting. In addtion, some of their labels were lousy and only served to further my lack of interest.  Without expecting much, I arranged these other wines for a quick tasting.  I didn’t expect to care much about them after I tasted the little gems from Domaine de St. Just –boy, was I in for a real shocker. I pulled the cork on the first white, and took a sniff that was loaded with minerals and high-strung citrus fruits.  I had no idea of what was about to hit my mouth.  When my brother Jon and I were kids, we dismantled a power cord and decided that it could be fun to stick the metal prongs into a wall outlet, with our bare hands.  We weren’t the smartest kids, and perhaps that moment in my life explains a few glitches in my system.  Anyway, this wine brought me back to that moment as it unleashed some serious liquid wattage into my mouth.  This little wine was more than an attack on the palate –it was an assault.  I was all puckered up and my head went sideways.  It felt like I just brushed my teeth and rinsed my mouth out with a glass of Chablis.  After a few more tastes, however, it became clear that there was something magic inside this angry little wine.  I’ve always been a sucker for abuse, so this was right up my alley. I opened the second Saumur white, Clos David –it was like Meursault on crack.  The first wine was all tension; this second wine was also intense, but it was endowed with more body and finesse. It was a more tamed beast, but a beast, nonetheless.  Like the first wine, it tweaked my mouth in every direction, but that didn’t stop me from coming back for more.  Every sip felt like I was getting smacked in the face by a furious, but sublime, French girl –I loved it!  As I continued to taste, I kept thinking: “Are these wines just freaky good, or picked way too early?”  I didn’t know because I’d never tasted anything like them before.  They were somehow regal and barbaric at the same time; yet, it seemed like they came from a noble terroir.  The rest of the wines followed suit with overwhelming tension.  The reds had bright red fruit and flowers in aroma with an acidic backbone enviable even for a fine red Burgundy from a classic year.  Every one of them was intensely acidic and penetrating, but once you made it through the pain, they were deep and pure. Although it is hard to believe, it’s still possible to find nearly abandoned or chemically destroyed vineyards all over Europe that were once owned by the elite classes of the past. Many of these precious grounds have been passed down generation after generation, only to fall from grace at the hands of a few misguided, or opportunistic, bean counters who put profit at the top of their agenda.  They are the ones who manufacture cheap and industrialized imposters that are sold to tourists who think that they are walking away with a wine that, based on historical merit, was once suitable for a king.  These wines, in reality, are only paupers dressed in a king’s clothes.  There is a quiet hill and chateau with this story of abuse that has now lasted for over a half-century.  It could be the greatest forgotten hill of our time; the hill is know as, Brézé. I saw the name “Brézé” for the first time on a bottle of white wine made from a well-respected, but underground, producer best-known for their red wines from Saumur-Champigny, the wine is called Clos Rougeard.  I never paid their white wine much attention because it’s a rare bird and it's not usually hanging out at your local wine shop.  I remember having it once before, but it didn’t catch my attention, so I never took the time to taste it again.  The truth is, I visited Arnaud, not for the Brézé wines he had sent me, but for his Saumur-Champigny reds and his entry-level whites, which were much less physically taxing than the Brézé wines. The first time I visited Arnaud was January of 2011.  He first took me to his vineyards in Saint-Cyr-en-Bourg.  Nothing makes me happier than visiting vineyards.  He was proud to show me that, unlike his neighbors, his land was full of natural grasses and herbs that grew freely between his vines. Moreover, his soils were thriving because he treated them respectfully and spared them synthetic chemical treatments that kill most of the bad (and good) micro-organisms.  As we stood on this limestone hill, called Saint-Cyr, I remembered the energy I felt it in his wines the first time I tasted them.  We spoke at length about the appellation and he pointed out that, historically, these vineyards have soils that are more suitable for white wines but had been planted to Cabernet Franc before he and his dad bought them back in 1996.  Before their time, red wines were more profitable, so it became an economical choice to make the switch.  As we finished our tour of Saint-Cyr, he mentioned this “Brézé” wine again as he pointed south and insisted that we go there to look at the vines before we head back to the cellar to taste. We drove to this unsuspecting hill about three kilometers across the way from Saint-Cyr.  There was only a gently sloping alluvial valley that separated the hills of Saint-Cyr and Brézé, but I can assure you that the taste of their wines gives the impression that they are miles apart.  Our first stop was at the Clos David –the Meursault on crack.  Arnaud walked me into what appeared to be a clos; it had old broken down walls that I could easily jump over from a stand still.  It wasn’t an impressive vineyard to look at.  The vines were tired and seemingly unattended.  The vineyard seemed to be held together by a thread and it looked like a cemetery of old vines. Arnaud plunged his hands in Clos David's soil and pulled a pile of chalky white and brown soil full of small limestone fragments.  He put his hands full of soil close to my face for inspection.  He gave me a faint smile, and, quite embarrassed, he said: “I brought you here to show you what damage has been done to these vineyard over the last century.  Look at this topsoil… it’s dead, completely dead…”  He told me that it was going to take years for any noticeable changes to take place in the topsoil.  The underlying limestone, which holds the magic of these terroirs, had been penetrated long ago by these abused vines, and that’s what keeps them in the game. He pointed out, however, that through the years of abuse with chemical treatments, most of the development of the root systems had stayed close to the surface and didn’t have the power to dig much further than what they had done half a century ago.  We went to another special parcel called Clos de la Rue, where he told me stories about the trading of bottles between Chateau de Brézé and other estates like Chateau d’Yquem, bottle for bottle.  Each of these special parcels were, in the past, owned by France’s elite society and they were sent throughout the royal courts of Europe.  At the time, they were known as “Chenin de Brézé”, and they were considered to be of the best white wines in all of France. While on the hill, Arnaud emphasized the importance of a concept that I seemed to have overlooked; the uniqueness of old walled vineyards, called "clos."  Over centuries, vineyards change through erosion that result in a loss of soil.  With the case of a vineyard surrounded by a wall, however, the historic soil structure remains while the rest of the vineyards around them, through centuries of erosion, can lose a significant amount of their ancient topsoil.  That simple concept hit me like a ton of bricks.  These enclosed vineyards are a geological and historical time capsule.  They preserve the impression the wines had when they were regarded centuries ago as an important site. I was dumbfounded and saddened by Arnaud's story of Brézé.  I could sense his animosity towards the more recent owners of this once great land.  After the Second World War, they destroyed the life of their once magnificent terroirs.  As we stood in the vineyard, my mind went back to the wines I had tasted in Provence and it started to make sense.  The wines were taking only what they could find with the root systems developed as young vines over 60 years ago.  They mostly expressed the structure of their deepest, stark-white chalky limestone soils, and not much more.  The soil on top – mostly sand and clay – which usually feeds the wine with body, breadth and generosity had little to give.  They were on a fast-food diet, yet, somehow, the terroir still fought through.  As I walked between rows, looking at the damage, I began to recollect the staggering power my mouth felt a week before in Provence. I realized that what I had tasted were skeletons of what the wines used to be.  The vineyards seemed like they were on their way out as many vines were missing and the remaining survivors were fighting a tough fight.  I had only tasted their skin and bones –but what powerful skin and bones they were.  I looked at Arnaud with disbelief and disappointment.  A smile began to grow on his face.  He looked at me and declared with a contemptuous tone: “Now, with the children out of the way, we’ll see how great this hill is back in the hands of men.” That moment will stay with me forever and writing down Arnaud’s exact words sends a chill through my body. Hearing stories about the former glory of Brézé was exciting.  Arnaud explained that he had signed a 20-year lease on the vineyards.  He let a few more kittens out of the bag when he told me that this historic wine hill was once considered one of the greatest wine producing communes in the entire north of France, and one of the two best of the Loire Valley –the other being Savennieres.  He added that there were only three other producers bottling estate wines from the hill: Clos Rougeard, Domaine du Collier and France’s newest darling, Romain Guiberteau.  Arnaud is originally from Normandy, so these guys had to fill him in on the legend of Brézé.  He told me that there are records at the Chateau de Brézé of the historical affairs of the hill which likely give insights on the production of its wines throughout the centuries.  Arnaud and others have asked to see them, but the owner of the Chateau dismissed their request, likely out of spite for Arnaud’s growing success with the vineyards that their incompetence let go to pasture.  The history is there, but he won’t let anyone have a look at it. To add to this incredible story, Arnaud told me that the rest of the farmers who own quality parcels on the hill sell their grapes to the local co-op because they have no reason, let alone means, to produce commercial wines.  What goes on with this hill is unbelievable and Arnaud, at times, he had to stop his account to laugh with me about how absurd it all was.  Brézé had been neglected for so long that even the locals, who own a piece of this unique place, throw their grapes into a collective wine that is probably sold down the street at Super U for three euros.  What is this madness?!  Don’t they know what they have?  Clearly, they don’t.  The good news, however, that the story of this once glorious hill now rests in the capable hands of a man determined to resurrect this hill of historical vineyards.  Once the Chateau de Brézé rises again, so will the rest of the hill. After we finished our tour of some of the clos, we went back for a taste.  At this point, I was chomping at the bit to get some of these wines back in my mouth.  As soon as we got there, we tasted the St. Just wines, which I was already set on importing.  Then we started the Brézé bottlings.  On my first smell and taste, I better understood the electrical current that flowed through my mouth.  All that these unstoppable terroirs had to give once again began screaming in my face, calling attention their glorious past.  After 65 years of punishment and neglect, the wines made in these suppressed vineyards still shined.  I was all in. Not surprisingly, on my last year on my visit to Brézé, Arnaud had more things up his sleeve.  He told me that the fruit for both of the “entry-level” cuvées, that were simply labeled "Saumur," come from individual historical clos, the Clos du Midi for the white, and the Clos Mazurique for the red.  You’ve got to be kidding me!  He finally decided to reveal this to me on my third year of selling the wines?!  I almost flipped out at him.  I was beside myself that he didn’t put the name of the clos on the label!  Here, we are talking about this hill and it’s glorious collection of clos, and he’s got this cheap entry-level wine made from a historical site with historical pedigree that he puts into a generic bottling?!  I was flabbergasted.  “Arnaud, what else are you not telling me?” I demanded.  I felt like a death row lawyer dealing with a man who was keeping secrets that could exonerate him.  He explained that he had just acquired over 20 hectares of land that he did not have a market for.  He had to choose which vineyards to put in the most energy and money.  He simply chose to use the two largest crus as the entry-level wines.  Crazy…  Don’t get used to the cheap prices, they won’t last.  I promise you.   In 2009, Arnaud and his father Yves signed a deal with the Comte de Colbert for the rights to the vineyards of the Chateau de Brézé.  They knew what was needed to nurse the vines back to health.  The first trip to the vineyards with Arnaud felt like the sad beginning of an epic movie in which our hero would inevitably triumph as he humbly stood upon the hill after reinstating her glory.   Since the day they gained control, they started the process of converting to organic farming with the idea to eventually move into a biodynamic practice.  When I asked why he didn’t go straight to biodynamics, he explained that moving the vines into a real biodynamic culture within three years was simply impossible.  He pointed out that because the topsoils of all the vineyards were desolate and void of almost all microbial life, making such a bold move at an early stage wasn’t the right way.  He further explained that he didn’t want to fabricate the soils by introducing a bunch of foreign microbes to supercharge the healing process.  He believes in the terroir and feels that nature needs to find her way again into the vineyards.  He estimated that, in ten years, he would be able to assert with confidence that his vineyards were performing at the level of a healthy biodynamic environment.  Last year, six years after they started farming organically, he expected to finally see some natural grass growing again.  Each time Arnaud tells me something disturbing like that, he looks at me out of the side of his eyes, with a smirk, and his head pointed down as though he felt responsible for what took place before him.  Indeed, what happened here is embarrassing; sadly, it’s not uncommon. What makes it especially disheartening, in this case, is the negligence with vineyards that possesses such a rich history. Last year, I had dinner with Romain Guiberteau and Arnaud Lambert, both of whom I import to California.  We went down to Arnaud’s cave, below his house, to taste his 2012 single-vineyard wines from both hills.  After four years of organic farming, the whites were simply off the charts.  After we tasted, Romain needed a smoke, so he and I went outside and started to chat while Arnaud stayed in the cave to organize a few more wines to taste.  Romain took a long draw of his cigarette and leaned into me as though he was going to tell me a secret.  He quietly said in French: “Yes, I have ONE (Clos des Carmes) of the greatest vineyards on the hill…  He has the other EIGHT…”  He stared at me as he pointed his finger towards the cellar where Arnaud was and continued: “He’s a great winemaker and he’s just getting started.  My vineyards have been in organic culture already for over ten years and he’s just converting them now.  Just wait, he’s the one to watch.  He has them all…”  Hearing this confession from one of the hottest young vignerons in France was unreal.  It was a wonderful insight into the character of Romain Guiberteau.  He’s a selfless, passionate man interested in the success of his friend Arnaud, as are the other vignerons on the hill, Antoine Foucoult and his father and uncle from the Clos Rougeard.  I haven’t met anyone from the Foucoult family, but Arnaud told me that he feels like they are all in it together with him; like a band of brothers.  It’s impressive. Two weeks ago, I was in Saumur to pay another visit to Arnaud and Romain.  We further discussed the nature of the wines produced on this hill and my purchase of the 2010 basic Saumur white and red from Chateau de Brézé a few years ago.  I revealed to them that I only started to find success with the Brézé wines at the start of 2013 and that I hardly sold a single case the first 18 months as they sat in my warehouse.  I was a little afraid to show the wines at first because they were taut for so long, but when we unleashed Guiberteau into the California market last year, it helped prime the market’s palate for the wines of Chateau de Brézé.  The wines from Romain shocked (literally) everyone and, by that time, the Brézé wines finally relaxed and started to put their cards on the table.  They were a perfect follow after Guiberteau floored the market and were welcomed with the same enthusiasm.  That night, we all agreed that the wines from Brézé need much more time in the bottle before being sold.  That’s why Romain already sells his high-end cuvées three or four years after the vintage date.  The next morning, I could see anguish on Arnaud’s face.  He told me that, because of our conversation last night, he decided that he was going to ask the bank for more money in order to make the wines age longer before releasing them.  It’s this kind of stuff that makes Arnaud special.  He never ceases to impress me as his commitment to the success of this hill is inspiring. Two weeks ago – almost four years after my first visit – Arnaud and I walked the vineyards again.  I wanted to spend more time in the vineyards to get a better understanding of each clos.  As we walked through, the vineyards were showing signs of new life.  We reminisced what has happened over the last years that led up to this point.  As we bent over to admire new life emerging after a lifetime of abuse, we smiled and grabbed piles of dirt and rock from each sight to inspect its renewing quality. The natural grasses were popping and the life of the soil was being nursed back to health.  The vineyards are changing, so is Arnaud.  He is a different man than when I met him four years ago.  Since then, he’s had a rough patch with the tragic early passing of his wife and his father just a year after my first visit with him.  It's a hard story to hear from such a wonderful guy.  As we carried on, I realized that the dark cloud, cast over Brézé and Arnaud, is lifting more and more with the passing of each year. Four years ago, I stood with Arnaud at the Clos du Chateau vineyard on the very top of the hill without realizing that this place would become one of my most unexpected love affairs with wine.  It's heartwarming to see that the other great producers from the hill, rather than competing with Arnaud, act as his strongest supporting cast.  They all know of this almost forgotten history that has been silenced for decades inside this mysterious hill.  They are all anxiously waiting to see what Arnaud unearths as he nurses her back to health.  There is something stirring on this little hill, and soon, the wine world will remember her name; she is Brézé, the greatest forgotten hill.

(Download complete pdf here) Etna, east Sicily’s great mother, Mother’s Day 2024. After a ten-day trip with our LA tastemaker, JD Plotnick, we were joined in Sicily by the Canary Islands superstar from Bien de Altura, Carmelo Peña Santana. Aside from our growers on Etna, we also squeezed in a moment with the volcano’s renaissance man, Salvo Foti. We don’t work with Salvo, but he opened his door to give us more perspective on Etna. We also attended the annual Contrada tasting with many big names present where many growers showed solid progress. Even the most dogmatic of naturalists have come around in recent years, particularly on sulfites. The quality of 2021s and 2022s is high, with the 2021 winning on elegance and ’22 on juicy pleasure. But the weather in 2023 was a disaster for many, with our two new growers losing almost 90%. Volcanic minds: Canary Islands luminary, Carmelo Peña Santana (Bien de Altura), meet Etna’s modern-day OG, Salvo Foti We visited again with the gents at Barrus, a dream project started on southeast Etna decades ago by Salvo and Toti that had been put on hold for a while after a deal with an overpromising Italian distributor went south. The experience scared them away from the commercial wine trail until they partnered up with their younger friend, Giuseppe, in 2017. Though they produce a mere five hundred cases of wine each season (with aspirations to grow more with two new hectares added this year), they are perhaps Etna’s most unbeatable Etna Rossos in quality and price. Grown on Monte Gorna’s ancient lava flows now eroded into sand up at 550-600m, their organically farmed wines are full of life, vibrant, raw, and pristinely crafted by Salvo, with help from the well-respected Sicilian enologist, Andrea Marletta. We renewed our vows with them during a flood of interest from other US importers and look forward to the newly arriving wines this fall. Monte Gorna with Etna’s peak looming, site of Etna Barrus’ vineyards Our first morning was spent with the high-energy Carmelo Sofia, at Azienda Agricola Sofia. After more than a decade in the cellar of Vini Franchetti’s Passopisciaro, Carmelo and his sister, Valentina, began to bottle wine from the organic-certified vineyards owned by their father, Giocchino (on the left). Sofia’s entry-level red, “Giocchino,” is a light-colored (like Gio’s sun-kissed checks!), fresh, and fun Nerello Mascalese grown mostly on volcanic soil with 10-15% on the siliceous clay soils. The other imported Etna Rosso, “Piano dei Daini,” is more substantial and has deep volcanic textures and lifted aromas. We’ll dig in more in next month’s newsletter. (Usually laughing and keeping it light at all times, the picture of Carmelo below on the right is as serious as you’ll ever see him look. Giocchino is the opposite: quiet and calm, though he smiles a lot, too.) A name you will see much more of among the highest level of Etna producers (and Italy in general) in the foreseeable future is Federico Graziani. This is where we started our Etna tour in May and found that he is a hard act to follow. Voted Italy’s “Best Sommelier” in 1998 at age 23, author of numerous Italian wine books, and protege of Etna’s oracle and renaissance man, Salvo Foti, Fede’s wines hit marks high enough to match some of the world’s greats. Because it was the night before the Contrada tasting, we shared time (at least before our dinner together) with journalists filming him and droning his vineyards (which I’ve also done!). Half a dozen Italian sommeliers, some recent recipients of Italy’s “Best Sommelier,” crowded around his massive, round, and beautiful violet-tinted, ash-grey basalt table centered in the shade of three immense, ancient olive trees, the youngest of which are 600 years old and the oldest, 850. Quiet and with a gentle demeanor, he seemed amused by the attention but also exhausted after a long day of entertaining. Eventually, the groups went to their dinner spots, and we lit a fire in his home away from home (most of the time he’s with his family in Marche). Fede prepared a delicious impromptu broccolini pasta (and we were stunned by how delicious it was despite being so made on the fly), along with some slow-roasted clay-pot chicken and numerous great bottles of vino. Federico is one of the most talented growers we’ve picked up recently. With more new additions like the well-known Bien de Altura and Martin Muthenthaler along with others that will be mentioned later in this newsletter, it’s been an extraordinary year already with more to come. Let’s start with Fede’s unique blend of international and local white grapes harvested from vines grown at a frosty 1200 meters. Mareneve is sublime and seems destined to perform at its peak potential in slightly formal, relaxed, and quiet environments, perhaps even best suited for Michelin star-style restaurants—an environment familiar to Fede, the former lead sommelier in a Michelin three-star, among others. Mareneve is an unusual blend of 15-20-year-old Carricante (30%), Gewürztraminer (25%), Riesling (25%), Chenin Blanc (15%), and Grecanico (5%). To borrow from his website, Fede calls it “crystalline alchemy.” He says, “Mareneve is the result of an idea as simple as it is bold, that of planting a vineyard at extreme altitude [on the northwest side of Etna!] to ascertain how the vines react to cold climates and volcanic soil at high altitude. Mareneve is a wine that defies time, overcoming the contradictions of an extreme terrain. It is sinew, skin and bone, with a biting acidity, a persistent salinity and a strong-but-measured personality.” It’s fascinating, and from grapes most of us would never imagine on Etna. Fede explained that he thought the Gewürztraminer would bring the wine down, and it may initially cause hesitation for some with an aversion to the grape. “I don’t like this variety very much,” he said but then explained that it’s sort of the unifier of these different worlds (Germanic, French, Sicilian) and may be the most crucial grape in the mix. It’s noble in aroma and taste, versatile, and unexpectedly harmonious. It’s a must-try and another example of how blended grapes can express a terroir’s personality just as well as a single-varietal wine. I’ve had about four bottles of the 2021 Mareneve so far, and it’s consistently slow to start, especially if it’s too cold, but quickly stacks one layer on top of the other in time. It’s naturally fermented in steel at a maximum of 23°C (a good temperature to curb fruit and focus more on other typically secondary and tertiary characteristics), then aged 20 months in steel on the lees with a light filtration before bottling. It’s usually decked out with soft white fruits of pear, skinless green apple, leechee, gentle spice, slight petrol, vinyl, delicate fresh chive and lime leaf. It tastes like all the fine points of these varieties forged into one flowing current. Other notes that develop are acacia honey aroma (rather than taste, which is often aggressive), dried fennel flower and fresh orange blossom. Gewürztraminer adds more flesh after some time but remains tightened by the Riesling aromas. The local varieties have their voice but seem more dominant in the texture and ashy reductive elements. Fede’s three Etna Rosso wines are fabulous, a stylistic marriage of Salvo Foti’s Vinupetra and the best of Vini Franchetti’s Rampante and Guardiola. But Fede’s also speak the language of the most soulful, classically-styled reds: harmoniously spherical, full yet light, direct, complete, and seamless—in the palate line of those like Collier la Ripaille, Bize Aux Guettes, B. Mascarello & G. Rinaldi, Castell’in Villa. But each rosso has a singular expression relatable to other greats you may know. Fede’s starter Etna Rosso is gorgeously polished. Raised for twenty months primarily in steel with a small portion in 500L old oak and is racked three to four times. Each of his reds are fermented with up to the low 30s Celsius, which tends to alchemize tense and lifted fresh fruit to richer, deeper, slightly steeped and perhaps less precise fruits alloyed with savory, earthy notes. It comes from 15-year-old Nerello Mascalese (90%) and Nerello Cappuccio (10%) in one parcel of Montelaguardia and two in Passopisciaro on north-facing gentle volcanic slopes between 600-800m with shallow sandy and rocky topsoil. It starts with a bit of reduction (the attractive Fourrier-style) but quickly blossoms to lifted red and dark red fruit, strong mineral textures and greater length to its elegant finish. Young Etna Rosso vineyard at 800m altitude inside Contrada Montelaguardia Rosso di mezzo, the second Etna Rosso up is harvested from 35-year-old Nerello Mascalese (80%) and Nerello Cappuccio (20%) vines in the Contrada Feudo di Mezzo in Passopisciaro. Facing north on a gentle slope at 600m, the volcanic bedrock is covered with medium-deep sand and rock topsoil. It’s vinified in steel with the majority continuing for 20 months, also in steel, and a smaller portion in 500L French oak. When I first tasted the 2021s in November, I preferred the entry-level Etna Rosso (if you can call it that) over the Rosso di Mezzo, but after a few more months in the bottle, the Rosso di Mezzo surpasses it and stuns with purity. The Etna Rosso is beautiful, but last month the bottle of Rosso di Mezzo I had was fully unlocked from the get-go and pulled away through time when tasted next to the Etna Rosso. It was hard to move on from Rosso di Mezzo, even if Profumo di Vulcano was next in line. Rosso di Mezzo is the first wine in the range that takes one to the stratosphere with echoes of the most compelling examples from growers like Rougeard (clean versions), Fourrier, and Rousseau (more of a 1er Cru Les Cazetiers than Grand Cru, but after two hours open when free of their commonly oaky start). Overused winegrower clichés are certainly not in the spirit of these wines and their emotional currency. Take your time with this one. Profumo di Vulcano’s 800m altitude ancient vineyard in Passopisciaro “Garden wine” is what Federico calls his Profumo di Vulcano, his top wine. Mostly because it’s a mix of many different varieties in a garden-like arrangement (see the picture). But the world’s best wine grapes do indeed come from a garden-like treatment, hand-tended and respected one vine at a time rather than mass-farmed rows managed by people with no connection to the final wine. (Even here in Portugal’s Lima Valley, the local co-op makes honest and unusually inexpensive wines for the price made from local farmers’ grapes grown surrounding their gardens. The Lima Valley’s mouth-staining beastly red, Vinhão, is rough for first-timers but beautifully rustic. The local co-op’s version from Adega de Ponte de Lima is basically free compared to other authentic wines, worldwide. Isabelle, the woman who sometimes cleans our apartment, grows Vinhão and makes wine, too—she collects all of our used bottles to bottle her wines. She once brought me Loureiro Tinto and Vinhão clusters and a bottle of the previous year’s wine. I asked if she uses any synthetic treatments. Her face flushed and tilted, perhaps in disgust, and then with a chiding tone she said she would never use such “stupid things” in her garden. Maybe it escaped her that I have to continually remind her to stop cleaning the oven or any part of the kitchen with chemical cleaners other than soap and water. A reasonable ask, no?) What vineyard not hand-worked like a garden could produce a wine of extraordinary quality? Very few. A dense population of non-human living residents is required to arrive at the highest potential. There are those like Vinhão that are inspiring for nearly the cost of the glass bottle alone—at least for some people. And those with big price tags for which we find more excuses than justifications for time and money spent. But Profumo di Vulcano is a no-foolin’, well-worth-the-price wine. It’s a moving experience. I recommend sharing it with fewer people to experience its extensive offering over some hours. It’s never static, and one short moment isn’t enough. My latest bottle was in June on a balmy, wet, electrically stormy, romantic night and the wine surprised us when it immediately bolted from the glass. The bottle had sat upright and unmoved for two months at cellar temperature—the right pre-game stillness and degrees for this kind of wine to be served. Other bottles were calmer out of the gates or rather less resolved in the first moments of resurrection after bottling, but this blossomed in time-lapse speed with fiery and effusive perfumes of fresh-picked, sun-warmed strawberries, sun-wilted but still living red and orange flowers; the crescendo, a pure and divinely pungent Grenache-like monologue of the Châteauneuf-du-Pape of old: tempered on alcohol, refined yet forceful; the type of wine that may have raised the eyebrows from the likes of the late Jacques Reynaud. Further in, the structure builds. The first act of fruit and flowers recedes, and the deep, savory notes of wild, high desert-blooming thyme, austere mint, cistus, saffron, and darker-tinted fruits take center stage. For the third act, ferrous volcanic palate-staining petrichor that sharply refreshes and tightens the ever-expanding nose evolved to dry allspice berry, Kashmiri chili, green and dry smoking tinder with gamey wild meats along with lightly burned vegetables to sweeten the ensemble. Act four, regret: 750s are too small for wines this good. Act five, winesearcher.com, or hit us up for more. On the second day, it’s equally attractive but with a juicier palate. Impressive all the way around, it gets even closer to the greatest of the greats. Think a volcanic wine touched with the spirit (and quality) of the Rousseaus, Abattuccis, and Salvo Fotis of the world, and you’ll already mostly know this wine without yet having your first taste. Profumo di Vulcano comes from 70-130-year-old vines with an average of 100 years (some pre-phylloxera) grown in shallow sandy and rocky volcanic topsoil. The blend, Nerello Mascalese (75%), Nerello Cappuccio (15%), and 10% of Alicante, Francisi, and about forty plants of Carricante, Grecanico, and Minnella, rests on a north-facing gentle slope at 600-650m. When picked, it’s completely destemmed and naturally fermented without temperature control (which may play a part in the red-orange fruit and flower profile as opposed to fresher berry fruits, the latter often a result of lower temperatures) for two weeks. There aren’t deliberate extractions that may be sensed in its absence of a single bit of slack. It’s then aged twenty months in old, 500L French oak. Finally, the title card tech notes typical of the most full-of-life red wines: no fining, no filtration. 100 points. I jest … 20/20, probably. Like many others, Austria’s wine regions are going through regular climate dilemmas. It’s well beyond just hot weather these days as they were also hammered with frost in 2023, and again this year, 2024, some growers lost nearly everything. This year’s big frost happened in mid-April while the shoots were very short, so there’s hope for some recovery. Weszeli and Malat were hit hard while for the Wachau team, it was less severe but still noteworthy. 2022 Riesling and Grüner Veltliner are solid, a little fuller and more broad-shouldered than 2021 and 2023. The 2022s seem more universally appealing. 2021 and 2023 Austrian Riesling and Grüner Veltliner may be more appealing for some of us in the trade because of the tension, while 2022 is likely more what the general wine consumer wants because they’re more robust, perhaps with the feeling that there’s more wine in the glass. 2022s next to 2023s are a difficult juxtaposition for high-toned aroma and mineral hounds. However, many 2023s tasted at this time were just bottled which always brings lift and increases intensity while also hollowing them out a bit for the first few months. I don’t think 2023 is at the same high level as 2021, but it’s still clearly successful and with perhaps greater immediate appeal. That said, 2022s inside the Spitzer Graben, off the main path of the Danube wear their acidic freshness like a cooler vintage. Davis Weszeli set in motion some brilliant moves, starting with hiring Thomas Ganser in 2015, followed by organic certification achieved by 2019, and Demeter in 2023. You can taste these practices in wines expanding and overflowing with hundreds of subtle nuances trickling out over time. All the cru wines are aged a remarkable three years in large oak barrels, making the winery unique, with a big investment in piquing our curiosity and pleasure as much as theirs. Martin Mittelbach from Tegernseerhof shows no signs of slowing down on his ascent in the ranks of the Wachau. We tasted the ‘22s and ‘23s side by side with the always-energetic Martin and everything was exquisite. We are nearing our fifteenth season working together and there are few growers I know with greater consistency, whether in so-called great or average years. And now that he’s working organically, the wines have improved overall complexity and breadth. We are in talks to have him return to the California market early next year to show the 2023s. Fingers crossed! Michael Malat moves so quickly in the cellar that he also looks blurry to the naked eye Michael Malat has produced yet another beautiful set of wines in 2022 and 2023, in line with earlier comments about the deep and shouldery ‘22s and lifted, flirty ‘23s. It’s difficult for me to find other growers’ wines as complex as his and that I also want to gulp down like they’re water from the fountain of youth. They’re different from other Kremstal wines, with their charming exotic and tropical yellow fruits (that uniquely match the yellow of the label and foil), spice, and refreshing minerally palate dosed with plenty of acidity, and I theorize that it has to do with their ancient cellar, which is over three hundred years old and tightly packed with heavily patinaed 40-60-hectoliter fuders with more than half a century of wines having passed through them, all seasoned from its ancient yeasts and good bacteria. I love the line and continue to feel that few in Austria make such charming wines as these. So much can be said about Peter Veyder-Malberg and his wines, as it was in last month’s newsletter (and many times before)! During our visit, we tasted a few 2022s from bottle (though I had already experienced the entire range some months before) and 2023s out of vat over a welcome light dinner, post Sicily, on his perch overlooking the terraces of Schön and Bruck. His 2022s are more open and lifted than the 2021s. The 2023s were hard to assess in their unfinished state fully but are sure to be in line with the success across Austrian Riesling and Grüner Veltliner territory. Peter’s 2023s seem to be a stylistic cross between the ethereal and minerally 2021s and the fuller but open and complex 2017s. I didn’t know Peter’s now making beer and apricot jam, too. You have to go for a visit for those. They’re both wonderful, which isn’t surprising coming from the hands of this wizard. Epic beer and jam now, too? How much can we get? Sorry, not for sale … (Peter on the left, JD on the right. Our new grower and a protegee of Peter Veyder-Malberg, Martin Muthenthaler, will soon finally have a solid presence in California. (His wines have mostly sold in New York over the last decade.) We’ve landed him for the country as our only national-exclusive Austrian grower, and what a grower to have! His 2022s were truly second to none, and they taste more like other top grower’s 2021s. All his wines come from Spitzer Graben vineyards, the coldest area of the Wachau. The range is extraordinary and his commitment to quality and full-time hand work in his vines and cellar is unlike any other top grower I know in the Wachau. Nearly a one-man team, he was only recently joined by his new Bavarian wife, Melanie, who now works in the vines and helps on the commercial side. Muthenthaler’s range is serious and undoubtedly in the company of Austria’s elite. The Loire remains a center for not only low alcohol, fresh wines with great value, but it’s also an epicenter for the natural wine movement and home to some of the most compelling wines in France. However, I remain perplexed by the continued attention on so many Instagram-anointed, minuscule production natural wines from these parts, and elsewhere, that all too often fall shorter on expectations than supply. Many globally overhyped and overpriced new winegrowers have done a stage, or two, or a two-week harvest at some famous winery (often in Burgundy) and are then touted to be the next “big thing” in their region, regardless of experience with their own vineyards. There are many less well-known natural winegrowers outside of the Insta-wine world as natural as those guaranteed to triple the like count on a post but are made with more astute technical precision (and guaranteed to get you half your normal likes, or fewer). I know, shiny new things everyone else is excited about are exciting. Quirk is cool, too. Especially the noble quirk of Jura. (Did I just coin that?) But there were already many competent Quirk Lords outside of Comté country before the natural wine movement hit the mainstream. When they deliver, unicorns are even cooler, especially when they’re not marked up twenty times the ex-works price in the secondary market. Even if these famous cult natural wines stink (figuratively, and literally), people may still at least want their money’s worth when they post them for the status of having had them, often without an honest take, thus continuing the cycle of undeserving overhyped wines. Are we brave enough to start to tell it like it is when a cult-famous wine is no bueno, and give more soundly crafted but less famous diamonds credit for being diamonds, regardless of their likes count? But what’s even way cooler is schtick-free, skillfully crafted wines made naturally and with intention but without the dogma doodoo. I appreciate abstraction and quirk in wine, but serious winemaking and other artistic endeavors should have a coherent delivery. Don’t get me wrong. I believe natural wine is the most important movement since wine began to redefine my life twenty-nine years ago. The natural wine movement didn’t start as a rebel-without-a-cause insurrection but a logical pursuit to rediscover more natural ways of releasing a terroir’s entire voice while consciously respecting the land’s health and life in all forms. The natural wine movement is different from organic and biodynamic movements in that it was able to shuck the tight seal of the historical hierarchy in the style of the wines, many of which were a break from classical structures. However, when natural wine arrived in the mainstream, craftsmanship was neglected by some snake-oil natural-wine evangelists and less skilled dogmatic winegrowers throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck and standing by their misfires no matter how awful the result with: “This is the way it’s supposed to be. It’s natural wine.” A resonant line in Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing is, “The biggest difference between a writer and a would-be writer is their attitude toward rewriting. (…) Many a would-be writer thinks whatever he puts down on paper is by that act somehow indelible,” which is categorically false. The same could be said for a would-be winegrower, natural or not. Admit when you’ve made mistakes, learn to do better and then apply it. The concept of natural wine done by hand (and even more, with regenerative farming) is the most logically sustainable ecological approach to making wine (except that there’s nothing about selling that natural wine that’s sustainably ecological, especially if it’s shipped across the globe). For our health, as natural as possible seems an obvious non-argument, too; except perhaps the unfair mob villainization of added sulfites in wine. How did added sulfites become the main evil, natural or not, with organic and biodynamic growers often spraying two to four times as much copper and sulfur in their vineyards, often administered by fossil fuel-powered tractors? But I would ask why anyone wouldn’t want wine to be as free from unnatural (and natural) inputs as possible. (Natural inputs can unnaturally distort wine, too.) Like any terroir idealist, and naturalist, I want the influence of nearby forests with its indigenous wild herbs, brush, undergrowth, and trees and their inhabitants, the bug-transported wild yeasts, soil bacteria, mushrooms, etc., along with a wine’s architecture imparted by the topsoil, bedrock, weather, and healthy vines well adapted to the specific conditions of the place and cultivated responsibly. Just the good ones, please. The end of May closed off a very rainy start to the year in the Loire Valley. The growers continued to struggle through the last week of May and early June as the rain slowed but it remained cold. Only a few days were above 23°C, at least in the central Loire. But this could shape-up to be a great season if the weather stays cool and less damp. This four-day Chenin Blanc and Cabernet Franc adventure was one of the top short legs I’ve been on in this part of France. It gave me the emotional uplift I needed in the face of these less certain times. I hope it gave JD, my travel partner, the same. The birth of 2024 in Vincent Bergeron’s Montlouis-sur-Loire Chenin Blanc site, “Maison Marchandelle.” Since the beginning of our importing life, we’ve had a decent foothold in the Loire Valley, which started with our remaining Loire flagbearer, Arnaud Lambert. We started with Arnaud and then visited a series of growers in their second year with us, like our natural wine Montlouis team of Hervé Grenier (Vallée Moray), Vincent Bergeron, and Nicolas Renard. We also nabbed a new one over there by Montlouis, working organically since 2019, just over thirty years old and making inexpensive, solid by-the-glass wines on silex, limestone and clay, Thomas Frissant. More on him in the fall! We also stopped by Domaine de la Lande to confirm our suspicion that François and his organic Bourgueil (certified since 2013) are the real deal. As mentioned in last month’s newsletter I bought four mixed cases of old wines and have since tried every vintage he sent. I tasted most with winegrowers, who all asked me to fetch as many old bottles from François as possible—names like Constantino Ramos, Manuel Moldes, and two other high-caliber growers in Rías Baixas, Eulogio Pomares (Zarate), and one of Forjas del Salnés’ cellar masters, Angel Camiña Seren. Our tasting in the cellar was a masterclass of wines made from different terroirs that all get blended into the single appellation bottling in the by-the-glass price range. Bourgueil is undervalued, and François’ wines are far too impressive for the prices. The old ones must be tasted to believe. Forteresse de Berrye continues its rise. Gilles Colinet, the new owner since 2019, is committed and the new wines are a solid uptick from our first imported wines. On his team now is Arnaud Lambert’s long-time enologist, Olivier Barbou, and in the vineyard, Loïc Yven, the former chef de culture for the new Nady Foucault-consulted project, Domaine les Closiers. The vineyards are gorgeous and the potential is as big as it gets in Saumur, if terroir is a guide. And, after all the ranting above, we have three “natural-ish” Loire winegrowers—all are new to the US market and mega-doozies, though two of them will arrive much later. Arriving this month is Domaine Les Infiltrés, created and run by the timid but wonderfully enthusiastic and charming Frédéric Hauss, a former cinematographer who worked extensively behind the camera for the big screen and TV. Fréd is near my age (30, take 16; I’m on 30, take 18), but wanted a change of life into something equally artistic but more connected to nature. (Relatable?) Given that 2021 is his first vintage growing grapes and making wine, what he’s put to bottle is flabbergasting. He may have little experience in winegrowing so far, but it doesn’t show. I wouldn’t call his first vintage beginner’s luck either. The 2022s are even better, and you would surely know it wasn’t luck if you’ve tasted his unfinished wines in the cellar. Some people are quick to understand fundamentals, perhaps those who already mastered them in another craft are advantaged. But it’s clear that Fréd already understands artistic composition and how to craft a wine to capture emotion, discreetly. Fréderic is based out of Saumur Puy-Notre-Dame, which will be a new focal point for Chenin Blanc and Cabernet Franc in the face of climate change; it’s colder down there. It’s also prime vineyard real estate whose grapes are mostly sent off to the cooperative—à la Brézé before we shouted from the rooftops of this hill’s potential with the simply made but potent wines of a young Arnaud Lambert, in 2010, followed by Guiberteau in 2012. What’s important in this emerging Saumur area is to find those sites on the top of hills or in the upper-middle areas where vine roots are in close contact with the tuffeau limestone bedrock, like the wines Les Infiltrés, and Forteresse de Berrye. I enjoyed what Fréd wrote about his project, about himself. It’s in French, so I asked a friend for help translating it, then tidied it up. We also checked with Fréd to see that he approves of the translation. He’s very particular, and thankfully he did. A picture of Fréd’s face is notably absent from our website and this newsletter. You will better understand when you finish his text. “Believe what we feel. Act accordingly.” - “Maintenant,” by comité invisible. My name is Frédéric HAUSS Since 2021, I have been guiding three hectares of vines whose fruits I transform into wines, between Doué in Anjou and Le-Puy-Notre-Dame in Maine et Loire (49), in the extreme south-west of the Saumur and Saumur-Puy-Notre-Dame. I grow Chenin, Chardonnay, Cabernet (Franc and Sauvignon) and Grolleau. But in reality, I had branched off… I left a comfortable situation as a senior technician in the cinema in Lille, a city of heart, to take care of a piece of land with organic farming, and for 20 years I was a committed and enraged social and environmental activist. By evolving in these environments, I learned to identify models of the past that seriously compromise our future. These include agro-industry and the pressure it imposes on agricultural income, the race for equipment, expansion and debt, land pressure, the monopolization of resources, the disappearance of the peasant world, synthetic pesticides, and the death of the soil. To speak from agriculture and out of phenomenological concern and to save the environment, I decided, like many, to occupy it… I spent my childhood and adolescence between Orléans and Angers. A true child of the Loire, joining its banks seemed obvious to me; memories of hide-and-seek with my brother in the small Gamay plot owned by my grandfather, an amateur winegrower in Chalonnes-sur-Loire. Later, sweet emotions during tastings in Burgundy near Auxerre (Chloé Maltoff in Coulanges la Vineuse, Domaine Richoux in Irancy, Domaine de la Cadette in Vezelay, the Chablis geniuses De Moor and Patte-loup, especially the meeting with what is known as a bifurqueur (young graduates from major schools who radically change paths) before the time: Pierre Hervé, a former schoolteacher who converted to winegrowing in the hills of Tannay directed me towards vines and wine. A duo of former colleagues who went to make wine in Ardèche (Domaine les Bois Perdus), also greatly inspired me. Wine and cinema have many points in common: the clever balance between technique and emotion, two artisanal rather than industrial professions, two areas in which our country excels and where two fundamentally opposed forms of economy coexist but are not exclusive. They are also two arts of circumstances: Just as a film can be a reflection of the mood and logistics of its filming, a wine is marked by our harvest environments, the flashes of ingenuity with the breakdowns of the press, instincts sharp as the unavailability of a racking rod, the radical decisions as much as the compromises. To paraphrase Baptiste Morizot in his book “Manières d'être Vivant,” grapes transformed into wine seem to me the perfect playground for forging alliances with the plant kingdom, for practicing diplomacy with non-humans. Finally, as Antonin Iommi-Amunategui (creator and host of the blog “No Wine Is Innocent”) underlines in his ‘manifesto for natural wine,’ those who, courageously, at the margins, develop wines without artifice and provide “the clear key to other battles.” So I wanted to be … Besides, Jean-Luc Godard claimed that “it’s the margins that hold the pages together.” So much for the mind. Concretely: Harvests at the Grange Aux Belles in 2019, a professional baccalaureate in 2020, an internship at Mélaric, the flagship of organic wine in the south of Saumur and great meetings at the right time made me settle in 2021 in the middle of unique personalities (and always ready to be of service) who revolve around the Saumur-Puy-Notre-Dame appellation (Mélaric, L'Austral, Manu Haget, Thibaut Stephan, Thibault Masse, La Folle Berthe, Jonathan Maunoury, …). It was a smooth transition and installation, step by step; as the rapper Oxmo Puccino says, “From prestige to burlesque, I manage, with what life suggests to me.” I rent the vines and benefit from a library of C.U.M.A. material (Coopérative d’Utilisation des Matériel Agricole). But above all, I share a tractor, van, pump and press, grape harvesters, doubts and certainties, joys and setbacks with a winegrower who settled at the same time as I did in the same area: Charlotte Savary Fulda (Vins les Coquilles). Compared to what I call “my sister vineyard,” our farms are distinct and our wines are very different. But you'll often see us stuffed together. Our relationships link common logistics, mutual aid, Adelphia, care and philosophy. Finally, between two green jobs, I perpetuate my activism against agro-industry within the Confédération Paysanne or Les Soulèvements de la Terre. The neighboring Deux-Sèvres department has been the scene of struggles over water usage, which I consider historically significant for the world. This commitment along with many others is a salutary collective counterpoint to the solitude of our professions. It also requires me to exercise a form of discretion. I shun social networks and avoid photos. I aim to make wine like Daft Punk made music: without ever investing in my image. As one of my colleagues says, “Everything must be in the bottle.” The estate is called “Les Infiltrés” [The Departed] like the film by Martin Scorsese, a work at once nervous, tense and elegant: a horizon for the wines that I try to develop, literally without filters, without artifice–it is also a nod to my previous job and to an environment that I infiltrated three years ago [2021] when I knew nothing about it at all. I wish the word “Infiltrés” was feminized, to pay tribute to all the women who help me daily. From my lover to the seasonal people who help to select young shoots from the vine, from my participatory financiers to the harvesters, from the winegrowers allied to the wine merchants who trust me. In the vineyard, I’m certified in organic farming and work as carefully as possible on yield management (pruning, de-budding and shoot selection in two passes, sometimes three, as in 2023 … difficult!!!) and I plow only according to the vigor and other signals sent by the plant. No systematism. Climate change forces us to be on permanent alert. I already combine copper with herbal tea sprays (nettle and horsetail). Yarrow and valerian for periods of stress (frost, drought). Manual harvest, obviously. And perennial. Every September I like to be the accountant of the life brackets we arrange with our buckets and secateurs. In the cellar, I work with native yeasts, my nose and mouth as compasses, the microscope as a crutch. If, in the cinema, a few tutelary figures have always intimidated me, in the world of wine, my ingenuity and my relative ignorance of the codes to master or the “100 vintages that you must have tasted” afford me great freedom. “Act like so-and-so…” isn’t really part of my vocabulary. Nevertheless, I seek to make fine, delicate, digestible wines. With bubbles and whites, I look for purity, clarity and radicality, even if it means getting close to the vegetal (should we really forget that wine comes from a vine?!). On the reds, delicious fruit, freshness: short macerations, sometimes whole bunches. I shy away from sophistication a little but recognize in the wood of old barrels its quiet and centuries-old way of magnifying certain choices. Sometimes I sulfur in homeopathic quantities to correct a deviation or an air intake during bottling. That said, my wines do not display more than 25mg/l of total SO2 when the regulations allow 100 to 150. This sulfur story is complicated: I admire those who make no compromise but I have decided to put my radicalism elsewhere. On the pins, each label has a distinct illustration to mark the uniqueness of the vintages. The quotes that accompany them guide me every day, as horizons of revolutionary lives that I modestly try to transmit to my drinkers. They adapt well to work in the vineyard and the cellar, evoking serious, determined paths, always questioning … Raging Bulles comes from a 0.3ha Chenin Blanc plot planted in 1962 at 70m facing north-south on a gentle hill of limestone bedrock with shallow silty clay topsoil. Its natural fermentation is in fiberglass for 15 days then bottled on lees with a bit of residual sugar to create natural CO2 and aged for five months. It doesn’t go through malolactic and is neither filtered nor fined. Sulfites are added (15mg/L) at disgorgement. No dosage. According to Frédéric, this wine should be seen as functional and refreshing, to be consumed with or without moderation, with friends after a long day of working in the heat. For both white and sparkling wines, he likes his to bring a side punch, an uppercut, with balance around the tension. The 2022 vintage offers a full mouthfeel linked to the few grams of residual sugar but the tasting ends with a liveliness partly brought back by the absence of malolactic fermentation. Its aromatic palate focuses on citrus fruits as well as notes of pear. An ideal drink as an aperitif or a transition between two wines or dishes.” In a region now better known for cuttingly intense dry wines, the 2022 Saumur Blanc “Une Histoire Vraie” is the most delicate and intricate of all Chenin Blanc wines we import from Saumur. 2022 was a warm year (well, it was hot …) and all the wines are a bit softer. Fréd picked early and worked gently to capture the essence and tension of this small organically farmed 20-are Chenin Blanc plot planted in 1990 on a slight east tilt of Turonian green chalk bedrock, and deep silt and sand topsoil. After its 60-day natural fermentation in fiberglass at 20°C maximum (similar to his Chardonnay vinification, a temperature that imparts nearly equal voice to fruit and savory characteristics), it’s aged on lees for six months in old 228L French oak and then six months in bottle. It passes through malolactic fermentation and is neither filtered nor fined. The 20mg/L of total sulfites added only at bottling renders this wine even more fine. Over a few hours, a bottle in June started on the wider side and slowly became more vertical, lifting its freshness even higher. It’s wonderful alone but would be dangerously good with sea fare like cuttlefish and calamari on a plancha, and fatty fish, like turbot or sea bass, left with the skin on—sweet and crunchy brown, finished with a touch of sizzled almond brown butter, a squeeze of lemon juice and dusted with the zest. Rarely would I think about dry wines with dessert, but with its yeasty, pastry, soft spice notes, it may also go well with a mildly sweet one such as apfelstrudel. After about four hours open, it keeps getting better, tightening more, and releasing floral notes and high-toned spice. Stylistically, think of a marriage between the wines of Anjou’s Patrick Baudouin and Montlouis-sur-Loire’s Vincent Bergeron. The next day, it was tighter and almost completely vertical. It’s a journey but hard to leave alone long enough to see those wonderfully tight-knit floral aromas. Chardonnay “Itinéraire Bis” comes from a flat plot planted in 1992 on a Cretaceous limestone bedrock with a deep silty clay topsoil. It passes through a 20-day natural fermentation in fiberglass at 20°C maximum, the medium temperature making for a Chardonnay with a balance of fruitiness and savory qualities. It’s then aged on lees for six months in 60% sandstone amphora and 40% old 228L French oak and passes through malolactic fermentation. It’s filtered but not fined. The total sulfites are 20mg/L and all are added at bottling. My first tastes of it just after bottling were full of iodine (one of my favorite white wine aromas) and ripe lemon with a little wildness. It needs only a few minutes open to find its footing. What is going on with Saumur Cabernet Franc? If it continues at its current upward trajectory, in ten, twenty years they will even further combine the noblest traits of Côte d’Or reds and left-bank Bordeaux, and will be the most balanced and beautiful red wines of France. Fréd’s whites are very good, but the red … Damn! This 2022 Saumur Rouge Puy-Notre-Dame, one of the most compelling and stunning wines I’ve had in 2024, is no accident, as that would be impossible. It’s only his second vintage, ever, but if I hit this level of mark on my second try, I’d be scared for the rest of my life that I’d never get close to it again. The constant heat spikes of the 2022 season made for some serious bullet-sized vigneron night sweats, but for Saumur reds in this moment of climate change, if one listens to nature and rides its wave the results can be this! Pick the right spot (hilltop tuffeau limestone and sandy loam), pick early and fresh with some sting still in ‘em and ripe enough to let the stems play their part, let only the right ones in the vat, guide don’t push, think more, react less, and when the time is right, lure it into the bottle at the peak of its powers. That’s what happened here. This slightly turbid deep red rose-colored Saumur foreshadows the absurd pleasure of what’s to come. We’ve imported some gorgeous Saumur Cabernet Franc, but this kind of wine seems only possible from an outsider looking in; someone led by emotion and intuition that realizes (rather, doesn’t care to know) that at all times they are in the middle of a frozen lake during spring on the thinnest of ice. Fréd explained that even though he’s new to winemaking he doesn’t want the influence of more experienced winegrowers. Well, ok … it’s working. But what will you do next, Fréd? On this day in June, this wine has already led me to the tuffeau hilltop of my Cabernet Franc dreams, and there’s only one direction to go: further up. This wine won’t apex on a mountaintop; it will do so in the clouds above. Planted in 1990 on an east-facing gentle hill of Turonian green chalk bedrock with a deep silt and sand topsoil, the grapes were 50% whole cluster and fermented/macerated with a single pumpover during its nine-day fermentation. It was then aged ten months in five to ten-year-old 228L French oak. It passes through malolactic fermentation and is neither filtered nor fined. 10mg/L total SO2 added only at bottling. You will believe me when you try it. And then there was Carole. Sometimes you know instantly when you get lucky, again. Like my first Lambert wines from Brézé. Thierry Richoux’s 2006 Irancy with the Collets over dinner in Chablis. Veyder-Malberg’s first Wachau releases at his house in 2010. My first Dutraive in New York poured blind by my friend–a true sommelier, Eduardo Porto Carreiro. Cume do Avia’s 2017 red wines over lunch in Sanxenxo. Les Infiltrés’ 2021 Saumur Puy-Notre-Dame wines, a stunning first vintage from a complete rookie. My first two wines from Carole Kohler are part of this list. When I first tasted Carole’s enchanted forest, biodynamic “Source” Chenin Blanc and “Jardin” Cabernet Franc, I thought, “These are too good.” I yelled to my wife from the kitchen, “It’s impossible that no one works with her in the US! … You won’t believe them. They’re crazy!” We’re talking about the hottest category in France right now, especially for value, and they were complete insanity for an unknown—another Fréd! My tasting notes were filled with exhausted references to the great producers in every other sentence. I’ll spare you what would seem like hyperbole, but let’s just say that Carole’s wines are aligned with the world’s best raw wines. Name them. These are on par. Carole was our last visit before flying from Nantes back to Barcelona and it was as inspiring as I hoped. On our call after drinking the wines for the first time, I tried to maintain a poker face—she always calls with video. I distracted her with inquiries of how she made them, about the vineyards (“slate, schist, silex and limestone all in three different plots only hundreds of meters away from one another? Really, all that in that small area?”), and finished with, “How much sulfur did you use?” “None,” she responded without explanation. Then she asked what I thought. I let her have it. “They’re just incredible … How are importers not swooning by the dozen? You never sent your wines to a US importer before me? Really? No sulfites, at all?” Her 2022 Source and 2022 Jardin are spectacular. After my first set of two sample bottles, I bought three more of each from her, and my wife and I finished them in short order, then had another set in the company of Constantino Ramos, our talented grower and great friend in Vinho Verde. Each bottle was perfect, and the mystique of the unassuming and extremely humble Carole Kohler began to grow. The walls tell the truth about the rocks in the ground: limestone, slate/schist, sandstone, silex—in one spot … Three days before our first rendezvous with Carole, Arnaud Lambert asked who else we were planning to see, as he always does. I went through the list, but with Carole Kohler’s name, his eyes lit up, and he instantly corroborated all the fantastical stories about her wines. Arnaud is not one to charge into vouching for new growers, but there was no hesitation. He knows she’s special, but why didn’t he ever tell me about her? I have no doubts about Carole Kohler and her magical forests and vineyards just outside of Thouars. Inside of the greater Anjou AOC, this long-time family home of her husband, Brice, is just 30 kilometers directly south of Brézé, the first place we struck the motherload. It’s also in the former Vins de Pays Thouarsais, an appellation discarded decades ago during the consolidation of EU regulations, along with most of the interest in this once-important wine region before phylloxera. There will be so much more on Carole to come, but I’m still digesting our visit and our opportunity to work with such a kind soul churning out extraordinary wines from an unexpected place. There was another superstar we visited on our trip—one that will have to remain a secret, for now … I had my first bottle of his wine about two years ago and was told he had nothing to sell. It was true. This time he opened the door for us, but because his production is so small (though he is not) and won’t have wine for us until 2026 we will tuck this one away until the time is right. Bubbles. Incredible bubbles. JD and I began our trip with a meeting in Barcelona before our flight to Catania, and it closed in the same city after a short one back from Nantes. I’ve dined at many of the recommended Barcelona spots, but too often they’ve fallen short. Gresca has been the most consistently good spot for me, even if this time it wasn’t the same level as the last half dozen times. While Gresca is a pretty sure bet, there’s now a new place that delivers perhaps the most personalized but casual service experience with a tapas family-style menu: Suru Bar is often described as a sort of “speakeasy,” but it’s right on the street with a sign in clear view. The list is well curated and the food is tight, clean, flavorful, and easier on the pocketbook than expected. The owners, not surprisingly offshoots of Gresca, are true hospitalitarians. It feels you’re in their direct care, and you are. It’s a must.

Südtirol, Italy Our first terroir map is up! I’ve been teasing the official release of our terroir maps for a while. Finally, our Ribeira Sacra terroir map is up on our website. It’s the first of seven from Northwest Iberia that we have coming over the next few months. There’s also an essay on Ribeira Sacra on the same page that I wrote last summer that offers a greater in-depth view of this complex wine region. Both the map and the essay are downloadable in pdf format. Each of the vineyard maps have three supplemental pages that help users orient themselves, the first classifies the rock types that are numerically coded on the map page, and the second presents some geological basics on different rock types. We know that rock is only part of the story of a terroir, so on the last page are listed other factors to consider while theorizing about the wine in your glass with what else beyond the cellar and vineyard choices may be at play. The work is surely incomplete on many levels, but it’s a good starting point for what I hope will be an ongoing project. You can find the first one here: https://thesourceimports.com/terroir-maps/ New Arrivals Spain We have two new batches coming in from Ribeiro, the most historical center of Galician wine for more than a thousand years. There are good reasons for that too, what with its fantastic balance of medium-to-steeply-angled vineyards, a kaleidoscope of exposure, stunning river valleys, a broad range of metamorphic and igneous rock types, as well as a combination of cold Atlantic winds and the Mediterranean climate coming from the east and south. Bodegas Paraguas’s new vintage of their Treixadura-based wine (more than 85%) is the 2019 El Paraguas Atlantico. It’s grown in three different parcels with different altitudes inside the Miño River Valley and is a mixture of mostly granite soils and a smaller amount of schist. It’s truly the most Côte d’Or-ian white we have from the region in the sense that it has a broader and fuller mouthfeel and the strong presence of mineral impressions, but without many nuances of Chardonnay. With Treixadura it’s all about the timing of the pick; if it’s not done well the acidity plummets. Paraguas does it extremely well and their sole focus is on wines from this grape variety blended with microquantities of Albariño and Godello, both very high-acid grapes that impart more lift in the palate and enrich this already deeply complex and layered wine. There are only thirty cases docking this month, but another thirty are on the way. With so many new producers joining our portfolio, Ribeiro’s Fazenda Augalevada is one of the most highly anticipated. A former professional Spanish futboller turned winegrower, Iago Garrido has begun to turn heads in Spain and there is already a strong buzz in some corners of the US in anticipation of the arrival of his wines. Both his and Paraguas’s wines are ubiquitous on the wine lists of almost every top restaurant in northern Spain, especially those with Michelin stars. Iago’s wines are different from any other in Ribeiro because he works with flor yeast in all of them—a great accidental discovery for him. After six years under the veil of flor, his high-strung white and red wines have started to find their voice with great clarity. Iago Garrido of Fazenda Augalevada These days, there are few wines that find their place on my dinner table more than Augalevada’s (along with those from the guys at Cume do Avia, his friends who introduced us), and it feels like we’ve been already working with them in the US for years, despite this being our first batch to reach the shores. For many, this will be a first introduction to his wines, while anyone who knows them already will see how far he has progressed in such a short time. They are all in very limited supply and we simply won’t have enough to fulfill the demand. Please be patient with us on this one. We hope to get more in the coming years. Augalevada’s range of whites are Mercenario Blanco, a blend of five different white grapes; Crianza Bioloxica, a blend of Albariño and Treixadura; Ollos de Roque, made of Treixadura, Lado and Agudelo (Chenin Blanc); and a 100% Albariño wine from grapes in Salnés, the most famous subzone of Rías Baixas. The two reds are blends, with the first, Mercenario Tinto, composed of 40% Caíño Longo, 20% Brancellao, 20% Espadeiro, 15% Sousón, and 5% Caíño da Terra, all from many parcels throughout Ribeira in the Arnoia, Avia and Miño Valleys. The last red, Mercenario Tinto Selección de Añada, is a blend of 60% Caíño Longo, 30% Brancellao, and 10% Caíño da Terra. All the wines I find are particularly special in their own way, and a few are some of the most compelling wines I’ve had from Galicia, even among the most revered wines from well-known producers. There are more details on Augalevada on our website at https://thesourceimports.com/product-category/spain/galicia/fazenda-augalevada/ France Another new and highly anticipated arrival (at least for me!) for the first time in the US are the wines of Elise Dechannes, a petite domaine under biodynamic culture in Les Riceys, two hamlets (Ricey-Bas and Ricey-Haut) that share a small appellation in the south of Champagne known for its rosé, Rosé des Riceys, just an hour drive northeast of Chablis. The character of the Pinot Noir in this region is exceptional and unique. Through her range (almost entirely composed of Pinot Noir-based Champagnes and one still wine rosé) the through line of deep but elegant sappiness in the palate and ethereal, wildly complex aromas seem to truly come from this particular place. Elise Dechannes Three of Elise’s wines are arriving. The first is her 2017 Rosé des Riceys, a well-worth-it, juicy and tremendously complex and delicious rosé with real stuffing. It alone brings greater meaning to rosé for me than a festive warm weather drink and sits atop a very short list of truly extraordinary rosés I’ve had in my life. Once open, it often shows darker fruits and needs time to show its full range of complexity while it works its way into the higher fruit tones and sweet rose aromas. We have a lot of great Pinot Noir rosés in our portfolio (Bruno Clair, Thierry Richoux, François Crochet), but I’ve not found the same level of complexity in Pinot Noir rosé like I’ve found in this wine, even including the greats we already represent. Unfortunately, there are only twenty cases allotted to us for the entire US each season (I’m working on trying to improve that number), so please reach out to us as soon as possible to try to reserve some bottles. The next is her second tier Champagne Essentielle, bubbles made entirely from Pinot Noir from Les Riceys. The price is only a little higher than her starting Champagne, but for me it better captures the essence of the winery. It’s gorgeous and delivers as much pleasure for a young Champagne as seems possible. The bright Pinot Noir fruit is not subtle and makes for an unapologetically delicious, serious Champagne (2016 vintage, zero dosage) that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s also limited. Lastly, the most limited wine is the Champagne Chardonnay. After tasting the range of limited cuvées of which I can only buy 36 bottles of each, the 2012 Chardonnay Brut Nature is a great view into her more distinguished wines. It has a lot to say but needs a little time open to show its finest points. It comes out straight away with a lot of flavor and Chardonnay power and becomes more finely tuned with more time open. Chardonnay can be surprisingly beastly in the south of Champagne on limestone marl and clay, but with the right amount of patience, its characteristics narrow and refined. These days, it seems like Sancerre is viewed as a real commodity on any wine list. Sancerre just sells, and often a great one is not needed for customers to order it. That’s why it’s so great to work on the flipside of that with people as talented as François Crochet, a winegrower in constant pursuit of improvement who every vintage seems to produce some of the most exciting wines in the entire appellation. Even in the warmest years François manages to surprise us all with the tension of his wines and solid natural acidity. Usually, we space out the arrival of François’ wines, so we don’t overwhelm everyone with too many choices, but we are playing catch-up after all of the time that things have been shut down. Three are from 2018, and from most elegant to most powerful, we start with Le Petit Chemarin. This wine has quickly moved to the top of the range for me based solely on its bright mineral characteristics and elevated aromas—a profile that I’ve yet to be exhausted by within my general view of wine. It’s substantial but flies high and always maintains a dainty, but ornate frame. Next is Le Chêne Marchands, the flagship of the winery and the grandest cru in Bué, Crochet’s hometown. My challenge with this wine is that it’s always at the top of the range and sometimes I want his other wines to finally pull ahead of it, the way it’s fun to see an underdog beat the champion; as loved as they are, it’s sometimes nice to see someone else with the gold. Le Chêne Marchands is perhaps the most well-rounded in the range. It has big mineral characteristics, medium to full structure and an endless well of fine nuances and broad complexities. Lastly, Le Grand Chemarin is perhaps the most explosive of the three 2018s. It’s often marked with more stone fruits along with sweeter citrus notes than others in the range. It has a more expansive body and bigger shoulders. It perhaps shares the title of most powerful in the range with Les Amoureuses, but in a denser and stonier way. A few 2019s are also arriving and there will be more to follow. The first is Les Amoureuses, the most consensual and powerfully expressive wine in the range. It has the biggest shoulders of all, and this is most likely due to its numerous clay-rich topsoil and limestone bedrock parcels. Each of its dimensions are strong and seem to tuck any subtleties further into the wine. It’s a perfect Sancerre for four or more people who want to break the ice at lunch or dinner with a nice refreshing glass that doesn’t stutter once the cork is pulled. Les Exils is the outsider in François’ range of Sancerre single-site wines. It’s grown on silex (flint, chert) on a more northerly facing slope, while the others are all on variations of limestone with more sun exposure. Les Exils is perhaps the most mineral dense of all, with mineral impressions that are heavy and dominant in the overall profile; perhaps flintier (a natural expectation from wines grown on silex) than the others and with less presence of fruits and with a grittier mineral texture than what the limestone vineyards impart to their wines. Les Exils is always one of the favorites because it’s a bit of a marvel of minerality in itself, especially when tasted in François’ exciting range. A New Team Member The Source continues to improve, and our level of advancement has always been subject to the quality of the people in our company and the producers we represent. Sometimes we lose ones we don’t want to lose, but we’ve always been fortunate to fill those shoes with other great people. Over the last two months we’ve added two fantastic new additions with Kevin O’Connor and Tyler Kavanaugh, both mature, smart and very well-experienced wine professionals, and most importantly for all of us, a joy to be around. When we first started our company, we went through quite a few people because we couldn’t offer much more than a bag full of good wines to sell and a commission rate. But these days, we are in a more fortunate position to attract top people in our industry and (hopefully) keep them. Early this Spring we were in search of someone to align with our company culture in San Francisco. During a five-month vetting process there were many fabulous applicants that were hard to pass on, but we found one who seems to be the right fit for us: someone who inspires us to be better... Hadley Kemp will join us in the middle of August. Her last post was as the General Manager of Spruce, one of San Francisco’s most notable restaurants inside the Bacchus Group’s top tier collection of Michelin-starred establishments. She worked with the group for around a decade, with some of that time spent as the General Manager and Sommelier/Wine Buyer for an award-winning wine program at, The Village Bakery, prior to taking the helm at Spruce. I’ve never liked the idea of phone interviews and I generally try to avoid them, but two minutes into my conversation with Hadley I had a smile from ear to ear. I knew she would be someone who would offer our company (and any company for that matter) yet another opportunity to up our game through the quality of our team members. More importantly, Donny (the other owner of The Source) and I realized, at this stage of our lives, that she is the type of person in whom we want to invest our energy. We want to work with people who we truly enjoy spending time with. Some say, “work is work,” or “business is business,” but for me, my work and business are my life; they’re very personal as well. I want to enjoy the people I work with and we also want our customers to have a good time with the people who represent us. Many San Francisco restaurants and retail stores will now benefit from Hadley’s great outlook on life, her deep knowledge of wine, and her humble, soft and extremely hospitable and professional approach. She’s a great compliment to Danny DeMartini, the consummate pro we’ve worked with in San Francisco for almost five years now. Wine Feature Poderi Colla Bricco del Drago Written by Donny Sullivan, Cofounder of The Source A tall tale is what it sounded like in 2013 when I first heard of this wine and its aging potential, and with a name like Bricco Del Drago, or, Hill of the Dragon, a little bit of hyperbole seemed pretty likely. But Tino Colla of Poderi Colla has been cited as saying this very prized and historic wine has a hard-to-believe aging potential of 50 years. Of course in my experience of Dolcetto, even if it has a splash of Nebbiolo (15%), longevity of this kind seemed inconceivable, but I didn’t want to question the claim. So began my pursuit of understanding the wine and maybe proving it wrong. Then one night, eight years after I heard the claim in question, I was sitting in Tino Colla’s most-welcoming dining room awaiting a home-cooked meal by his wife Bruna, when we did a blind taste with many great wines, and as it turned out, it was a 1970 Bricco del Drago that was the wine of the night. It was precisely 50 years old and it not only blew my mind, but also those of a handful of my colleagues and fellow wine trade professionals. It was alive, fragrant, regal and as seductive a wine as I’ve ever had: honestly, shocking! I’ve only tasted the one from this vintage, but I’ve tried others from this wine and I can confirm Tino’s statement that this is arguably the greatest and most age-worthy Dolcetto-driven wine in all of Italy...ever! The history and lore of this vineyard and wine speaks for itself. It’s grown on a very steep hill that climbs from around a thousand feet to over 1200 feet above sea level, faces west and has vines of 20, 30 and 50 years of age. The plot has undergone hundreds of years of genetic adaptation, having been planted to Dolcetto for many centuries. This wine has an immense power and structure upon release, while still exuding the aromas of Piemonte and the freshness of the cool fog that often covers its vineyards. This is a very serious wine, contrary to the often oversimplified reputation of Dolcetto. Don’t be intimidated; just be patient and you will find one of the true hidden gems of Piemonte. This time we do know where the diamonds are buried: on the hill of the dragon—Bricco del Drago! Rocca di Montelino, Oltrepò Pavese Travel Journal 2021, Part 2 by Ted Vance Beaune, 26 June I just finished a plate of perfectly in-season heirloom tomatoes I picked up from Grand Frais, a local grocery store with a knack for quality products on a larger distribution scale. The farmer’s market in Beaune was today, but I didn’t feel like tangling with a crowd and waiting in line, even if it was for some of the best ingredients to be found in all of France. Yeah, maybe I was a little lazy… I went for a run this morning for the first time in more than six weeks. This allergy season has been hard on my profession, which relies so much on my nose. Symptoms have been intense and incessant due to the excesses of rain throughout spring and well into June. The last time I went out for a run was in southern Portugal’s Alentejo when I was there with my wife and Constantino Ramos, a winemaker we work with, and his wife, Margarida, on our first getaway in Portugal after things opened up. The run was a terrible mistake. The grass was chest high and the typical Portuguese square cobblestone country road had it bending into the lanes, so every car that passed brushed against it. A few hours later, I could hardly breathe. My nose was firmly blocked for the rest of the day and most of the trip. There was no wind today and it rained pretty good yesterday, so particles were wetted down and I took the run (sans Zyrtec) from downtown Beaune mostly on Chemin des Tuvilains nearly to Pommard and back (I’m too out of shape for more), as the wine writer, Vicki Denig, recommended I do during a tasting with her and Paul Wasserman in David Croix’s cellar the day before. My lungs were working like the clogged air intake on my old 1984 Toyota Landcruiser as it struggled to ventilate the engine while it tried to keep up with the flow of seventy-mile-per-hour California freeway traffic. The first run after a long break is always the hardest. Attack of the Drone A few weeks ago, I headed west from Piemonte and into Lombardia’s Otrepò Pavese (OP) to see Andrea Picchioni. My primary agenda was to do some drone filming of his vineyards. Andrea doesn’t speak English and my Italian has been completely written over by Spanish, so I struggle now to find the words. On this trip, I just spoke Spanish and English with some Italian words peppered in, hoping he’d understand, which he mostly did. I got great footage of the original Buttafuoco vineyards that he works with only one other grower, Franco Pellegrini. OP is overwhelmingly a marvelous place to see, and its potential to reside in the upper echelons of quality wine is grossly underestimated. It’s a shock that there aren’t more outstanding producers in the region. After hitting all his vineyards in the Solinga Valley, Andrea took me up to Rocca di Montelino, a castle that sits at the northernmost point of the Apennine Mountains. I wanted optimal reception for the drone and to photograph Lino Maga’s vineyards as well, for context. Andrea had a hard time helping me locate Lino’s parcels from above because they aren’t as obviously discernable as others, but after my drone battery was two-thirds dead from looking around, we found them. Basically nobody is familiar with how things look from an aerial perspective, including local producers, so it takes us a while to find our bearings. I got a few shots and my low-battery warning started beeping and wouldn’t let up, making me nervous and feeling rushed. I had to hustle it back. It was pretty windy and the drone made its way up through a clearing toward a stone pad just about big enough to land a helicopter—so no problem for a tiny drone, right? I zipped it through some trees without any worry about hitting them (which I did in Portugal a month before the trip and had to replace the drone) and then over the pad to about six or seven feet from me and Andrea. Andrea moved in closer to the drone to get a better look while I was trying to land and a collision sensor triggered, freezing my controls, jerking it backward and along with a gust of wind it quickly pushed back toward Andrea. Everything seemed to suddenly be moving in slow motion as the propellers wrapped against his legs (thankfully he wasn’t in shorts) and as he tried to dance out of the way I stood there helplessly, but amazed at his agility as it stayed on him like an angry bee looking for its target. With the sensors fully restricted, the drone was completely out of my control for a very slow but exciting five seconds. Andrea finally evaded the machine and its propellers slowly met the rock wall, busting up almost all of them and leaving me in a state of complete shock and embarrassment, but I couldn’t stop laughing and was in tears in seconds—a total Johnny Knocksville, Jackass moment. I was speechless. Nothing but English words were coming to mind as I apologized while nearly hysterical with laughter as I analyzed Andrea’s pants to see if the propellers caused damage. Thankfully they’re flexible plastic and he had on a durable pair of old school Levi’s 501s, as he always does when I see him. Andrea smiled in disbelief at the drone all mangled on the ground. I’m sure it was one of the most exciting moments over the last couple years, and he repeatedly assured me that he was okay and took greater interest in whether the drone was badly damaged. It was an easy fix, but I wasn’t at all cool with what happened; I was shaken up and realized the drone had simply gotten too close to him for a landing. We got back in the car and headed down the bumpy road and the whole trip back to the cantina I had to keep turning away from him because I couldn’t stifle the giggles and the tears—indeed, I’m still a mere child at heart… Before I left, he insisted that I sit for some pancetta and focaccia that his mother prepared. Andrea told her about the drone (but not the attack) and then asked when they could see the video. I told them in about a month or so after I edited it, but after a few minutes I realized how cool it would be to watch his mother’s face as she surely had never seen this area where she’d probably spent the last eighty years from a drone’s-eye view. I got the computer out, plugged in the SanDisk card and watched her repeatedly shake her head in disbelief, repeating bello… bello… bello… We live in a different time and some of the things we can do today are almost unfathomable for older generations. Andrea Picchioni’s Buttafuoco vineyards As I watched Andrea’s mother melt, something was also melting in my mouth; the pancetta was extraordinary (not all of them are) and accompanied by a little perfectly baked focaccia with just the right amount of soft crunch in the flaky salt and the crust below, a calculated measure of the stretch of the bread and olive oil dusting. It was dreamy. It reminded me of a discussion I had with one of my Iberophile friends about Spanish versus Italian ham a few years ago, while in Costa Brava. In Matt Goulding’s fabulous book on Spanish culture through the lens of food, Grape, Olive, Pig, he compared the best Spanish hams to Italian, saying, “Yes, Italy produces fine cured hams, but next to a slice of three-year, acorn-fed, black-footed jamon, prosciutto tastes like lunch meat.” I adore Matt’s writing and in a perfect world, we’d be friends who regularly shared food and wine together. However, it’s hard for me to agree with that comment; in my opinion, there’s a time and place for everything. In my experience, Italian cured hams come in many more forms than the Spanish and are less monotonous. The Spanish seem to have found an extraordinary combination with the race of the pig, its diet and habitat, and stuck with it; why change something that’s already perfect? It may be true that jamón de bellota will provide one of the single greatest tastes of cured pig you could put in your mouth, but I don’t find it as pairable or combinable with other foods as some of the very versatile Italian cured hams. The best Spanish jamón is exhilarating but can be somewhat exhausting for me after a solid plate of it, and I need to take a break for a few days before the next ración. It’s kind of like a mushroom trip—you don’t want it all the time, but when you do, it can be life altering. And pancetta and the elegance of Italian cured meats with a higher quantity of fat compared to those of Spain may offer some daylight for me. The fat of this pancetta was extremely fine and elegant, creamy, and salty like a gentle ocean spray breeze, a nice contrast to the profound umami and oftentimes excessively thick greasiness I find in many of the most intense cured Spanish hams. This particular pancetta at the Picchioni cantina was one of the best I can remember. Andrea insisted I have a few sips of his Bonarda Ipazia (twist my arm), a semi-sparkling, dark red wine served chilled, and it was an absolutely perfect match. Val Camonica, Lombardia Back on the road, I set the course for Enrico Togni, a Lombardian winegrower whose wines stunned me the first time I tasted them last February. Enrico invited me for lunch and in typical Italian fashion, I had to nearly run away from the Picchionis because my final destination that night was Bolzano, and I had to get to Togni on time, otherwise I could be staring at a dark hotel and an unwelcoming innkeeper, if there was any innkeeper at all. Enrico lives up in the Val Camonica, a place in the Italian Alps I never imagined existed. Arriving from the south, outside of the ancient city, Brescia, a right turn on the highway leads you into a valley surrounded by mountains to an almost immediate, unexpected and magnificent view of Lago d’Iseo, which has the largest lake island in Italy and Southern Europe, called Monte Isola. It’s truly a stunning image with this island that quickly rises to more than four hundred meters above the surface of the water below, and you’re only able to see its magnificence in bits and pieces as you slowly go downhill from one tunnel on the east side of the lake to the next. Driving through the ancient glacial valley and into the tiny centro storico of Boaria Terme, the streets began to narrow sharply and it became more than an ordinary nerve-wracking ascent, toward Enrico’s house and winery, tucked just below a series of limestone cliffs on the north side of the valley. Had I driven a Fiat Panda like Enrico’s, it wouldn’t have been intimidating, but I was in a Renauld Megane station wagon and I barely made it through a few strips squeezed together by towering stone buildings on either side by an inch or two. My wife would’ve gone completely nuts if she were with me as I carefully and slowly negotiated some hairpin turns while the car’s sensors beeped obnoxiously no matter what I did because there was zero room for error in every direction and no possibility of backing up without destroying the side mirrors of the car, and likely the doors. It reminded me of rock climbing: no direction to go but all the way to the top before calming the nerves. First, it was the drone attack on Andrea and now this. Things seem to go in waves of three, so I wondered if there would be a third on this day. Enrico quit his university studies in Law to get out into nature. Over lunch, Cinzia, his partner and the mother of their daughter, lovingly told many stories about Enrico and his unique obsession with farming, and about some of his vineyard workers that happens to be a flock of sheep he hangs out with first thing in the morning and again later in the night before bed, every day. She also told a story that seemed only partially embarrassing to Enrico about how much he loves animals, and that on his sixth birthday he asked for and got a sheep, on his seventh birthday he got a donkey, at his eighth, a pony—and none of them were the stuffed versions. Enrico Togni Enrico’s vineyards sit on limestone terraces only a half kilometer from volcanic hills across the glacial valley. The grapes of his focus are Barbera, which he makes mostly into sparkling wines, a Nebbiolo still wine, and a few different wines from Erbanno, a member of the “Lambrusco” family that requires almost no treatments in the vineyards because it has a strong immunity to mildew and disease. There are two still versions of Erbanno: one that has almost no extraction and is pressed quite early that he labels as a Rosato (though I asked that “Rosato” be removed from the label because I find that it is more of an extremely light red in almost every way, like a Premetta, a very light Schiava, Poulsard, or even the Galician variety, Brancellao, and it deserves a better fate than to be lumped into the Italian Rosato category) and the other, a darker, more typically extracted red wine version. The lighter red is absolutely wonderful, and I’ve come to adore it after just four bottles and a few tastes in the cellar. The darker version is more gamey and perhaps even better with food. His Nebbiolo wine, labeled as Vino Rosso 1703, is special. It comes in around 12% alcohol, is very light in color and layered with extremely delicate classic Nebbiolo nuances, especially that sun-roasted red and orange rose smell. He said that his great challenge with Nebbiolo is that there are no references for it in his area. He’s the only one who grows it. Before I left, we spent a few minutes tasting his 2020 wines out of barrel and tank. Their purity was mind-blowing, and I wanted to just sit there and drink them for the rest of the day and dream about the reaction of our buyers back in the US. I’m fired up about what I tasted and can’t wait for them to be in bottle. It was a great sendoff before I worked my way through the Alps toward Bolzano for a visit with Falkenstein, a winery that I’ve known about for many years and whose wines I love, and another, Fliederhof, a producer I’ve kept an eye on over the last few years. A slow, four-hour drive through the Alps was perhaps the part of the trip I looked forward to the most since I began to plan it. I’m originally from Montana and I often have a great craving for backcountry mountain terrain; I spent one summer in my early high-school years working in Glacier National Park where the Rockies are gorgeous and treacherous, and totally wild. The Alps are even more beautiful and somehow very inviting, plus they don’t have grizzly bears like Montana, which makes it easier to hang out alone snapping shots with my guard down, to fully take in the clouds that covered part of the bright blue sky and the enchantment of mountains. The air was so fresh, clean and invigorating it was hard to believe I was still in Italy. In fact, I was headed for a countryside civilization that was annexed by Italy after World War I, but culturally is more obviously Austrian than Italian. Some of the locals don’t even really speak Italian because their native tongue is German. The Italian Alps at Vermiglio On the other side of this corner of the Alps I had my much anticipated and first in-person meeting with Martin Ramoser, a young man I was introduced to by Florian Gojer, of Glögglehof, a winery I feel produces the strongest killer combo of red and white wines in the Südtirol; many wineries there are very good at either red or white, but few make extraordinary wines in both colors. I asked Florian, with whom I worked with some years ago, for some insider tips on who was up-and-coming in the red wine arena and he pointed me straight toward Martin. But first, it was a long overdue visit with Falkenstein, whose unforgettable Riesling I had for the first time almost ten years ago, just on the edge of Lago de Garda. Gevrey-Chambertin, 29 June I’m parked on a dirt road facing north with Lavaux Saint-Jacques directly to my left and Le Clos Saint-Jacques straight ahead. I just finished eating a jamon emmental sandwich and a vanilla éclair I got from Pàtisserie La P’tite Chambertine, in Gevrey. I’ve got about two and half more hours before my visit with Amélie Berthaut, in Fixin. The weather is volatile, fighting between intense gusts of wind and solid downpours that last just a few minutes, followed by a bright blue opening above that’s framed by ominous and angry, saturated gray clouds. The juxtaposition of colors between the shade and illumination of the earth and sky is intense and seems unnaturally exaggerated—like it’s all photoshopped. It’s typical of the weather back home in Ponte de Lima, Portugal, which for us is a regular daily light show from our perch behind a big glass wall facing directly west. About fifteen minutes ago, while I worked my way through the sandwich, I thought that I should break out the drone to capture some images of the Côte Saint-Jacques while everyone is eating lunch, so I’d be more likely to go unnoticed. I honestly don’t know all the legalities of flying a drone in France because the information online is vague, and I can only imagine how much paperwork would be required if I were to try to seek out official permissions from each location (if there’s even an easily accessible office that actually does such things for private fliers, which I doubt). I follow the rules I find on the internet the best I can, and I steal as many shots as possible without attracting any attention. I went for it and made a quick loop above Gevrey, landed the drone and quickly packed it up and opened my computer to write. La Côte Saint-Jacques I love eating sandwiches outside on park benches in France—although I ate this one in my car because there was no bench to be found. I still had a fabulous view of one of my favorite vineyards, Le Clos Saint-Jacques, with its slight tilt in my direction toward the south so I could see all the rows behind its famous, beautiful limestone rock wall on the south side. Sometimes a sandwich is all I want while on the road in France, after a few big sit-down meals with a lot of great wine for lunch. As long as the sandwich has good bread, at the very least. This is usually my first choice if the weather is good because for some reason I don’t love dining in French restaurants where there is often too much emphasis on the process, when I just want to eat something with quality ingredients without as much ado. (This rarely happens when I’m travelling with others because not everyone comes to France with enough frequency to forego a great wine list with absolute bargains on rarities that, depending on the wine, would cost more than four times the price on a wine list in a big US city.) France has the best baguettes for sandwiches; while other countries have amazing bread, the baguette medal is firmly in France’s corner, and they cost almost nothing when compared to a good baguette in the US from an artisanal baker. When I first started to develop our import wine portfolio, sandwiches were about all I ever ate for lunch if I didn’t have an invitation. While eating in a park, the French usually give me an extra-long stare, looking at me like I’m some strange creature they’ve never seen before, or like they’re scared of me. But after a smile in their direction, occasionally followed by a non-committal smile in return, there is sometimes a surprising utterance of “Bon appétit!” The truth is, our company’s start was fueled by sandwiches. A little less than three weeks ago, I drove to meet Magdelena Pratzner and her father, Franz, the family who started Falkenstein, a winery located in Italy’s Südtirol/Alto Adige that produces many fantastic different wines (Weissburgunder, Sauvignon, Pinot Noir—all grapes that have been cultivated here for centuries) and many consider the Pratzners to be the most compelling Riesling producer in Italy. The vineyard and winery are located in one of the many glacial valleys in the north of the country, with a typical relief of a flat valley floor surrounded by gorgeous, steep mountains, which creates starkly contrasting shades and colors throughout. All the vineyards in these parts must have the correct exposure on northern positions that provide some angle of a south face, otherwise there is no chance to achieve palatable ripeness. The vineyards here are some of the wine world’s most stunning, and it’s surprising how many are tucked into the valleys of Trentino (the bordering region to the south) and the Südtirol. But what’s even more attractive to me (because I see vineyards all day long) are the north facing hills, with their spring and summertime bright green pastures on equally steep mountainsides, surrounded by forest and a great view of all the terraced vineyards across the way. Falkenstein Walking in Falkenstein’s vineyards in the heat wave that just took hold a few days before, after a very wet and unusually cold spring, it was easy to see how their slab of the mountain is perfect to ripen the late-ripening Riesling grape. Magdelena led the hike up in the stony, sandy terrain of their vineyards, a walk that demonstrated just how steep and slippery they are. The rock types here are mostly medium to high-grade metamorphic, like schist and gneiss, with the latter quite similar to Austria’s Wachau wine region, a place that inspired Franz to focus his energy on Riesling instead of their apple orchards. The sandy topsoil is derived entirely from the bedrock, and unlike many of Austria’s famous Riesling terroirs, there is no loess to be found here in their vineyards, making for Rieslings with a more dense mineral core, a deep, mouthwatering saltiness and acidity, and concentrated but still tight yellow and orange stone fruit characteristics imparted by the generous summer and fall sun, and the massive diurnal shift at nightfall. The first time I tasted one of their Rieslings about ten years ago, it brought vivid images of the Wachau and its gneiss-dominated vineyards—loess, which is commonly found in the Wachau, adds a sort of fluffy, extra mouthfeel to wines, which can be good with Grüner Veltliner, but I prefer Rieslings from purely stony soils derived from the bedrock below, like Falkenstein’s. After our tasting, and a few quickly snapped photos with her very humble, shy but very photogenic father, Franz, Magdelena and I went to Kuppelrain, a Michelin-starred restaurant that serves a more casual lunch, just a short drive west from Falkenstein. It sits above the Castelbello train station, named after the castle that sits on the north side of the valley, right across the small Adige River, no more than three hundred meters away, in full view of the restaurant’s outside terrace that overflows with plants and flowers. I love the food in Austria and I think it’s completely underrated on the European scale. People are always surprised when I praise Austrian food in the same breath as French and Italian and often insist that the average there is higher. And what foodie doesn’t love Italian food? Imagine a marriage of the two at Kuppelrain: a capture of the sun’s generosity in an Italian summer fare and intensely fresh alpine spring greens and pastoral fruits with deep, concentrated flavors. Anytime beef carpaccio is on the menu it’s hard for me to not order it, and Kuppelrain’s is one of the best I can remember. Other than perhaps the shaved parmigiano-like cheese (which is still from only a few hours south), everything was local including the beef, which came from a cut with almost no sinewy parts—just clean, perfect slices that stayed together with each bite wrapped around the supporting ingredients. It was served with chicory, edible purple and yellow flowers, perfectly caramelized miniature golden mushrooms that exploded with salty, buttery, sweet woodsy flavor, and rose-infused salt. I asked to buy a little bit of this salt tinted slightly purple with little pieces of dark dried rose floating around, one of the most simple but special ingredients and I supposed that it has to be done with a specific kind of rose, or flower, but I was rejected. No problem. I’ll go back every time I’m in Südtirol, which should become another annual visit with our two producers there. The St. Magdalena hill, Südtirol, Italy Chez Dutraive, 30 June While I lived in Campania a few years ago, Martin Ramoser sent me samples of their wines labeled Fliederhof. They were mostly crafted by his father, Stefan, and were obviously well made and in a charming but rustic style better suited to their local market than to most of my customers in the US. I find it funny that in the US, a country so culturally diverse, the wine trade professionals have specific expectations about the style of wines we drink from other regions, so the wines they buy need to be a sort of hybrid of what the region has historically done and what we like, when it seems more authentic for us to embrace their tastes if we’re drinking wine from their area. I suppose my comment is really a criticism of me more than others because I also do this all the time. Perhaps it’s really a function of the diversity of our culture and exposure to so many different types of cuisine. Martin and I cultivated a telephone friendship in hopes that we would someday work together, talking a lot about his family’s winery and where they were in their development. Though he’s a few years younger than thirty, Martin’s parents, Stefan and Astrid, gave him philosophical control of the vineyards and he began to inch toward organic farming. During our conversations, I gave him a strong push toward full regenerative farming and encouraged him to make the jump because the market would support it, and his wines at the time were just a shade away from something really special. A year later, they not only fully committed to organic farming, but also to biodynamics. The wines? I was shocked at the progress in just two years. It was a big left turn from more weighted wines toward a more invigorating and ethereal style with wiry tension and brighter fruit tones. Before dinner, Martin told me that their Schiava, labeled under the St. Magdalener appellation, had just been voted the best of the year by the local wine community. Their Lagrein is also wonderful, but I am a sucker for Schiava. I had dinner with the family that night on their terrace overlooking their Santa Magdelena vineyards under a faintly starry sky, just next to the Chiesa di Santa Maria Maddalena, its spire backlit by Bolzano’s city lights toward the south and just over the small hill the church is perched on. It’s during these moments that I wish I spoke the local language perfectly (which here in Südtirol is more German than Italian) or that they spoke fluent English. As I feasted on a simple-looking but gloriously-addictive fresh ravioli stuffed with spinach, ricotta, onion, parmigiano, and a little nutmeg, I wanted to tell Stefan and Astrid so much about what I think about Martin and how they’ve obviously done an outstanding job raising him and how proud I was of his drive and achievement that clearly has taken flight because of their support. Martin speaks perfect English, but it would’ve been strange to ask him to translate those thoughts. With a thankfully negative result on the Covid antigenic test in my hand (that Martin assisted me in getting the day before), I was off to Austria. I would do a straight shot north, pass over the Austrian border in the far west of the country, up into southern Germany, take a hard right to reenter Austria and pass through one of my favorite small European cities, Salzburg. After about seven hours on the road, I would set up shop at the Malat family’s hotel, on the south side of the Kremstal region, just across the Danube from the local wine hub, Krems. Throughout the trip I was always a little nervous crossing borders with these kinds of restrictions and requirements that are vaguely understood by anyone on either side, except perhaps the guards whose authority could turn me right around if they were simply having a bad day and wanted to give me a hard time. But this was Austria, and they’ve always been nice people in my experience, aside from the often startling abruptness of the German language, especially when spoken by law enforcement. The border guards were professional and courteous, quite the opposite of my unexpected run-in with a set of four more police the next day at Stift Göttweig, a famous and impossible to miss, massive and almost ostentatious rock monastery overlooking the Danube River valley, with the eastern end of the Wachau, and most of Kremstal, Kamptal, and Wagram within view. Not surprisingly, my covid test was finally checked at the Austrian/Italian border and it was no problem crossing for me, but the traffic jam filled with container-carrying trucks destined for Italian seaports coming from the other direction was about fifteen kilometers long—maybe even longer. One of the reasons for the extensive freight delays we are experiencing in the US as a European wine importer became obvious as I passed by hundreds of semi-trucks that stood completely still for the entire length of the jam. I felt terrible for those guys. Austria and Germany will be on the docket for next month. It was a great leg of the trip, as always. The Austrians are an awesome and welcoming group. Every time I’m there, I feel more comfortable than in any other country I visit.■

Climate change is relentless. June was a scorcher in Europe while at the same time just a month ago France was hit by yet more major hailstorms in many areas. European countries are playing a high-stakes game of dodgeball, with the climate playing an unrelenting offense. If it’s not hail, it’s mildew pressure and/or rain at the wrong time, hot winters followed by Jack Frost in the Spring and summertime sharknadoes. Nowhere seems immune, except maybe places producing sun-drenched boozy wines along the Mediterranean coast. Who in the fine wine world wants those, anyway? A lot of people, actually. But like me, perhaps you might be living on the fringe of the wine world, where you don’t want to be punched in the face by the alcohol in a glass of wine, but rather by a nice, fresh, acidic and minerally love tap, or maybe the occasional electrocution by these latter elements. Well, 2022 is off to a good start for many, but so much can happen between now and harvest. Gino Della Porta, from the new Monferrato project in Nizza, Sette, says that the churches in Piemonte fill up with praying vignaioli before harvest and return to emptiness once the grapes are picked. We wish the best of luck to all winegrowers out there, not only those who make our preferred elixirs. Gino Della Porto from the new Monferrato cantina, Sette, and his partner Gian Luca Colombo (on the right). Website Feature Update We have two new website features that should (hopefully) add to the joy of perusal. Mobile devices will always fall short of laptops or desktops when it comes to more fluid navigation, so they’re where you will see the biggest improvements. The first redesign is our Producers menu. We’ve customized new country maps with more precise region selections and an easier view of each producer from next to their map without the need for excessive scrolling. The second improvement is a producer profile sidebar on our producer profile pages that displays more related content. The wines are also easier to get to with a quick dropdown (I know the profiles can be long, which required a lot of scrolling to finally reach the wines), as are related materials like terroir maps, videos, newsletters that update information that may not be found on profile pages or wine descriptions, and lastly, the ability to download the profile content into a printable format. Please don’t hesitate to send suggestions directly to me at ted@thesourceimports.com. We’re always looking for ways to improve your experience and much of the time we can’t see obvious things right in front of our faces. 2022 Spring Trip Top 15 Wines Following the New Arrivals, I’ve posted some highlights to drop you a little tease to get your wheels turning for the future. There are so many spectacular wines to talk about, but I trimmed it down to a select few during my forty-day Europe trip this Spring. New Arrivals The logjam at ports continues and while some countries are getting better, France remains solidly in last place with improving their turnaround time from the moment we submit orders for a container to the time it arrives at our warehouse. Why France more than anyone else? No idea. We don’t know what will hit for sure in July, but we think this new batch of French wines just might do so. Chevreux-Bournazel, Champagne The last release from Chevreaux-Bournazel stirred up a frenzy the moment we published last year’s June Newsletter. The small amount of wines allocated to us were out of stock by the end of the day—an unexpected result for this quite unknown but likely-to-turn-cult Champagne producer. We have a little more wine with the 2018 vintage than last year, but not much more. Decanter magazine describes the 2018 vintage as “truly exceptional,” and “destined to be remembered for producing both quality and quantity.” According to Bollinger’s Cellar Master (via drinkmaster.com), Gilles Descôtes, described it as the “best of his life,” and that there is a resemblance to both 2002 and 2004. 2018 is indeed a year with a good yield and also very good quality despite the warmer year. One key was that the bountiful crop helped maintain balance for the wines than a smaller crop would, leaving a greater amount of acidity for the level of ripeness. Three Pinot Meunier-based wines will arrive from this micro-producer, surely the smallest from any producer in our portfolio other than our Txakoli revolutionary, Alfredo Egia, and a new organic and biodynamic-certified Bordeaux producer, Sadon-Huguet, that will hopefully arrive before the end of the year. Two cuvées imported before are Connigis, grown on a very steep slope (think Mosel-steep) with hard limestone bedrock, and clay and chalk topsoil, and La Capella, grown on an even steeper vineyard (like the steepest, terraceless vineyards in the Mosel) with a thinner layer of clay topsoil, chalk bedrock on the lower portion, and silex (chert), chalk, and marne (calcium carbonate-rich clay topsoil) in the upper section. The new cuvée, Le Bouc, is their first blend of different vintages and the two plots for La Capella and Connigis. Chevreux-Bournazel’s Champagnes are all biodynamically farmed, unchaptalized, naturally fermented with indigenous yeast, unfiltered, zero dosage, and with all cellar movements made in sync with the rhythm of the lunar calendar. Their range is led by dried herbs and grasses, tea, honey, dried flowers of all sorts from yellow, orange, violet and red, and a multitude of savory nuances. More than anything, I find that Stéphanie and Julien’s wines separate themselves from much of the typical Champagne style due to their strong polycultural setting, different from other more famous Champagne areas. Here, there are large expanses of separation between vineyards in the backcountry of the Vallée de la Marne, and the wines are a notable departure from fruit-led, bony Champagne with fewer layers of greater complexity. Massive forest-capped slopes covered in an endless sea of vines with no other crops in sight than the swathes of grain fields in the flatter areas below don’t lend themselves to such a broad array of nuances. Chevreux-Bournazel’s wines are alive and their forcefully savory nature is almost overwhelming, which makes them gastronomically suitable for a greater mix of cuisines. Christophe et Fils, Chablis The 2020 season was not as hot as 2018 and 2019. While 2019 may have jumped a little further away from being described as “classic” Chablis due to its riper fruit notes (but with a surprisingly high level of acidity for this warm year), some hail 2020 as “classic,” “early but classic,” and “a great vintage.” I don’t even know what “classic” means anymore with Chablis or anywhere else, do you? I know what “great” means to me, personally (with emotional value topping the list), but my “great” may not be yours. Our current frame of reference and experience sculpts all of our preferences, and formative years are always present too. People who’ve been in the wine business for decades have a different reference for wine than those recently seduced by Dionysus. Classic Chablis? I haven’t had a young Chablis that vibrates with tense citrus and flint, a green hue in color, shimmering acidity, and coarse mineral texture all in the same sip for a long time—so long that I don’t even remember the last vintage I had those sensations with newly bottled Chablis. (Of course, a recently bottled wine still high strung with sulfites can give that appearance but the wine will bear its truer nature a few years after its bottling date.) Chablis is different now. Burgundy is different. Everywhere is different than a decade ago and even more so than two decades ago. With the composition of today’s wine lists and their one or two pages of quickly-changing inventory compared to extensive cellars of restaurant antiquity, most of us developed different expectations—if not a completely different perspective—for wine now than what “classic” used to imply. (The idea of “classic” from more than twenty-five years ago when I first became obsessed with wine now conjures images of chemically farmed vineyards and their spare wines.) 2020 may be fresher and brighter than the last two years in some ways but maybe with less stuffing than the similarly calibrated 2017s, a vintage I loved the second I tasted the first example out of barrel at Domaine Jean Collet. Maybe we can call 2020 “classic,” but if picking started at the end of August would that be “classic” graded on a curve? Sébastien Christophe’s wines are classic in their own way. Like older-school Chablis, they’re usually in no hurry to reveal their cards upon arrival, especially the top crus and his Chablis Vieilles Vignes. Sometimes they perplexingly arrive with a blank stare, but after a proper rest they liven up; some take a month, some three, others a year or more. The usual exception is one or the other of his two entry-level wines, the Petit Chablis and Chablis. Some years the Chablis comes out slinging miniature oyster shells at your face while the Petit Chablis plays tortoise. Other years, the Petit Chablis springs off the boat with a big smile and sticks you with rapier mineral nuances, blowing away expectations for the appellation with its wider frame and rounder palate than most wines from this appellation. One of them is almost always notably stronger than the other when they arrive, but a year later the script can flip with the same vintage of wines. Let’s see what 2020 bolts from the starting block first. Between the premier crus and the Christophe starter range is the lonely Chablis Vieilles Vignes—too big to play with other Chablis appellation wines and not part of the premier cru club. Sourced from two parcels in Fontenay-près-Chablis, one above the premier cru lieu-dit, Côte de Fontenay, and the other southeast of the village, they were planted in 1959 by Sébastien’s grandfather. These vines render a richer wine out of the gates that tightens up with more aeration (the opposite of many wines), shedding superficial weight and concentrating power. Minerally and deep, it often rivals one or another of Sébastien’s premier crus from each year. Were these west and north-facing parcels in a more southerly exposition and outside of the small valley they sit, they surely would be classified as premier cru sites. Similar to the Petit Chablis and Chablis, it’s hard to predict which Premier Crus will show the best out of the gates; it’s anyone’s game upon arrival, no matter the pedigree of the cru. What remains somewhat consistent, at least in my experience, is the way they behave in a general sense. Fourchaume is the most muscular, offering a stiff mineral jab and a stone-cold smile with a set of nice pearly shells. Opposite of Fourchaume, Mont de Milieu is sleek, fluid and versatile, resting more on subtlety than force. It often shows as much left bank nuances with its ethereal minerality and more vertical frame. Montée de Tonnerre borrows from the best of each of the other two premier crus and turns the dial down a touch in pursuit of sublime balance. Usually the most regal, sometimes it takes a while to show its fine trim and breed, while on another day it shows up straight away. While Montée de Tonnerre takes pole position in Chablis’ super-second premier crus for many Chablis followers, it doesn’t always finish in first place chez Christophe et fils. The title of best premier cru here is up for grabs each vintage and all have the potential to top the podium. Each individual taster’s preference and calibration on balance, and the moment the wine is tasted—influenced by the mood of the taster, the environment, what they ate or are eating, anything they tasted beforehand, the order in which the wines are tasted, the cork, the moon, the barometric pressure, etc—will decide their frontrunner. It’s true that most compelling wines aren’t static, and neither are we. The wine we prefer today may not be what we prefer tomorrow. This makes wine fun but sometimes maddeningly elusive, especially in moments when in pursuit to relive an extraordinary bottle and the follow up is inexplicably off and deflating. With too many variables, firm conclusions based on a single taste or bottle, or moment in time, is shaky ground. The most solid advice in wine is to consistently buy from a producer you love. It’s the most reliable way to keep the average quality of your wines high. Christophe’s first vintage of Blanchots was 2015. This grand cru faces directly south on a sharply angled, wedge-shaped hillside. Those familiar enough with this grand cru know it typically generates expansive wines, often with more blunt force than sting; nevertheless, still entirely grand cru material. In Blanchots’ defense, needlepoint texture and electricity are commonly stronger attributes for the left bank. Christophe’s Blanchots comes from conventionally farmed vines of more than forty years on white topsoil on the famous Kimmerigdian marl bedrock of the area. The wine is aged in 60% inox and 40% oak (with roughly one-third of the oak new) for eighteen months. Sébastien doesn’t employ cellar tricks, so one tastes the cru and quality of the farming. He purchases his Blanchots fruit, as he does his newest grand cru, Les Preuses. The Les Preuses grapes are organically farmed, and it shows in the wine. While maintaining its grand cru strength, it’s full of life, and more lifted and subtle, the latter element harder to achieve with sustainably farmed vineyards. Since I tasted all the new young vintages from Sébastien from 2012 up to now, the 2020 Les Preuses is unquestionably the greatest young Christophe wine I’ve experienced shortly after bottling—an important distinction. (Tasting newly bottled wines can be a fool’s game. Most of the time for months after bottling they’re off-balance and stretched uncomfortably thin and tight, and generally unresponsive to any attempted coaxing. During my wine production years, the first couple of weeks after bottling may show well, but then wines tend to tighten and shut down for some months. Often it seemed to take about as much time in bottle as their élevage after the bottling for many wines to recalibrate to their previous form. However, I suppose that wines aged extremely long in the cellar, like three or more years, may not behave the same way.) I hope this incredible effort lives up to its promise during my first interaction with it. The 2020 Les Preuses seemed to be a pivotal wine for Sébastien to go from a toe in the water to a full jump into organic culture, a point I’ve pressed him on since our first meeting in 2013. The difference between organic and non-organic wines in a region so particular as Chablis can be obviously clear (with few exceptions, and one extremely notable one…) for wines that are made to highlight their terroirs, not the cleverness and over-intellectualization in the cellar work. Stéphane Rousset, Northern Rhône Stéphane Rousset’s Crozes-Hermitage and Saint-Joseph range represents one of the greatest terroir-focused values in all the Northern Rhône. Virtues of the sublime marriage between Syrah and Northern Rhône granite and schist are commonly extolled, and there are few as fair-priced and thrilling as Rousset’s. Stéphane Crozes-Hermitage vineyards, unlike most of the low altitude, flat and gently sloping Crozes-Hermitage areas, are on steep rock terraces difficult to work by tractor, or on terraces with many vine rows, like the eastern end of Hermitage. Sharing the likes of Saint-Joseph, Hermitage, Cornas, and Côte-Rôtie, most of his wines sell for a fraction of those from more illustrious appellations, but with work that puts the same heavy toll on his body. I usually meet Stéphane in the afternoon when he’s just out of the vineyards, bushed but with a big smile, his bright cheeks rosy from the sun, ready to give me the tour—which always includes a visit to say hello to the precariously steep and rocky Les Picaudières, one of my favorite vineyards in Europe and one of the truest, quietly great terroir treasures in the Rhône Valley. Each time I drink his wines I am reminded of his daily toil with his father, Robert, who still works by Stéphane’s side, as they race to stay ahead of today’s runaway sunny seasons, followed by a full sprint at harvest time to beat the birds, the bees and the relentless sun when the grapes are in the zone. Located behind Hermitage and across the Rhône River from some of Saint-Joseph’s best steep granite vineyards in Saint-Jean-de-Muzols and Vion, Stéphane’s Crozes-Hermitage vineyards are in Gervans, Érôme, and Crozes-Hermitage (the appellation’s namesake), the original communes before the appellation’s extensive eastern and southern expansion. Stéphane’s vineyards are unlike any of your standard Crozes-Hermitage. Much of the appellation wraps around Hermitage from its eastern flank to the south on an expansive flood plain. These areas have a multitude of sedimentary rock and topsoil from mostly river deposits with some areas richer in calcareous-rich depositions but most are a mix of silt, sand, gravel and cobbles. Behind Hermitage it’s mostly a continuation of the acidic granite bedrock of Hermitage’s far western flank, with vineyards lower down on the granite terraces sometimes frosted with slightly yellowish white loess, a fine-grained wind-blown sediment rich in calcium-carbonate. All Stéphane’s Syrah vines are on granite bedrock with sections heavier in loess topsoil reserved for the Crozes-Hermitage appellation red and the vineyards with the deepest loess topsoil are reserved for his small production of whites. 2019 may be the most promising vintage in Stéphane’s neck of the Crozes-Hermitage appellation since 2015 or 2016. He is a fan of both 2019 & 2020 but says that 2019 maintained a higher level of acidity compared to the surrounding vintages because of dehydration from the heat. There is a high variability reported between regions, but Stéphane finds his to be more structured than his 2020s. 2020 was the earliest-picked vintage since 2003 (while maintaining more fresh fruits than this deeply hydric-stressed vintage) with wines said to be easy early drinkers. Sourced from a mix of mostly granitic vineyard sites scattered around the hillsides behind Hermitage and some terraces closer to the river on granite bedrock with a mix of loess and granite sand topsoil is Stéphane’s first red in the lineup, the 2020 Crozes-Hermitage Rouge. Aged in a mix of primarily concrete and inox vats with a little in oak, this wine is the most accessible out of the gates. The loess contribution softens the edges, lifts the aromatics and curbs the deep saltiness often imparted by the granitic soil. A crowd pleaser, this pure Syrah is also very serious juice led by the pedigree of its geological genetics that bring its terroirs into focus more than the variety—similarly to terroirs like Cornas, Saint-Joseph and Côte-Rôtie. Crozes-Hermitage is an appellation where a relative shoestring wine budget won’t hinder studying the influence of how many different soil types can create very different wines made from a single red grape variety. One only needs to know the location of each producer’s vineyards. This will take a bit of research, made easy by the wealth of accessible information nowadays, particularly in the fabulous Rhône books put out by authors Remington Norman and John Livingstone-Learmonth. (There’s a new book out, by Decanter contributing editor Matt Walls, that I haven’t dug into yet, but I’ve heard it’s also a good place to start.) During my first visit with Stéphane in the spring of 2017, a particular Syrah stood out among the different parcels he vinified separately before blending them into the basic appellation wine. Equally good and already on qualitative par with his Saint-Joseph and Les Picaudières, I asked why he didn’t also bottle it on its own. He shrugged, grinned, contemplated, and we moved on—my first insight into the deep humility of this quiet and jovial man that by the end of the day is clearly spent. I pushed him to bottle it alone via email and during all of my subsequent visits. The 2019 Crozes-Hermitage “Les Méjeans” is the new addition to the range, and a worthwhile exploration for anyone interested in Stéphane’s wines and high altitude, granite-based Northern Rhône Syrah. Les Méjeans comes from three different parcels only a golf shot from each other and rising to as high as 350m (maybe as high as it gets in the appellation), all within a small area known as Les Méjeans. This is the only purely granite-based Crozes-Hermitage Stéphane bottles, and it tastes like it: salt, earth, animal and pepper before fruit and flower, rustic but elegant and deep graphite-like mineral textures that keep it fresh. The steeply terraced vineyard of the three has the most fine-grained sand (an unexpectedly small grain, like beach sand), and the other two are more gradually sloped, lending support for their vines against the hydric stress of these fully exposed sites on top of the hill. We imported 600 bottles for the entire US market (he didn’t make much more than that and we both wanted to be conservative out of the gates), so let us know your interest level so we can make sure you get a shot at it. The decision is often split between Rousset’s Saint-Joseph and Crozes-Hermitage “Les Picaudières” in preference depending on the taster and the amount of time the wines are open. Les Picaudières is often less immediately approachable in the context of the two, but it’s still very accessible straight away. Les Picaudières takes time to reveal its full depth and expansion while the Saint-Joseph usually hits its mark in about fifteen minutes and remains in a heightened state and on a straight line for hours. In my opinion, Les Picaudières is the greater terroir between the two, but it will take time once opened for it to take control of the standoff, eventually evolving so much that one begins to understand that it is well beyond its appellation in hierarchy. Likely a geological transition area, the vineyard’s bedrock, on an extremely steep south face surrounded by forest on all sides except where it tops out on a ridgeline, ranges somewhere between granite and schist—perhaps slightly more of the latter rock type. The topsoil on these precarious terraces is entirely derived from its bedrock, landing this wine with some elements found in the great schist vineyards of Côte-Rôtie and the granite sites of nearby Hermitage (where only on its west flank it’s mostly granite) and the granitic southern end of Saint-Joseph across the way. Les Picaudières is no ordinary Crozes-Hermitage (as you can see by the photos), and texturally it is almost unrecognizable as a Crozes-Hermitage—except its price! Textured with fresh metal-iodine-graphite palate aromas and mouthfeel, it’s led by stronger savory, earthy and rustic notes more than fruit. If you walk down the path with this wine, give it the proper time to reveal all of its hand or you will miss the main event. Rousset’s Saint-Joseph is now labeled Saint-Joseph “Côte des Rivoires.”  During my discussion with the Roussets about revamping their range with the addition of Les Méjeans, I also suggested they add to the label the site name they use exclusively for their Saint-Joseph. (Rousset has a ton of great sites that may warrant future individual bottlings, and they may have a third new in the mix—possibly a grape selection from all of their Crozes-Hermitage vineyards in honor of previous generations.) Rousset has two adjacent east-facing plots inside one of Saint-Joseph’s top communes, Tournon. It’s a nail-bitingly steep drive up the hill with a complete open view into the massive valley to the east. At times it would seem like floating up the hill if it weren’t for the bumpy road and granite terraces and rock wall just a few feet from one window. Aged similarly to Les Picaudières and Les Méjeans in a mix of old and new barrels (roughly 10-20% new) for about a year before bottling, it is the most forward and perhaps most elegant wine in Rousset’s lieu-dit range, at least immediately upon pulling the cork. Apparent in pedigree, this classic southern Saint-Joseph springs into action upon opening, releasing esters of water-stressed wild shrubs and garrigue (with much less violet and lavender compared to many others in the area), and more earth and sun-rich cherry, and fresh but ripe fig. Perhaps the saltiest and softest texture between Rousset’s lieux-dits, it’s usually the frontrunner in the first hour and the most charming. Other Arrivals (in short form) Nothing new to report with Clos Fornelli, possibly Corsica’s most friendly-priced, organically grown, fresh and simply delicious wines from the island. Arriving are the 2021 La Robe d’Ange Blanc, a pure Vermentinu, 2021 La Robe d’Ange Rosé made entirely from Sciacarello, and 2020 La Robe d’Ange Rouge, also composed entirely of this wonderful queen of the island, my favorite Corsican grape, Sciacarello. All were born on soils derived from the erosion of the geological formation referred to as Alpine Corsica on the northeast of the island on a series of terraces that Josée Vanucci and her husband, Fabrice Couloumère, tend their vines. (Alpine Corsica is named as such because it was developed during the Alpine orogeny, while the granite parts, the dominant geological formation on the island, known as Crystalline Corsica, date further back to Pangaean time.) This eastern side of the island with mostly eastern and southern exposures butted up the island’s mountains (yes, surprisingly a lot of mountain area in Corsica) protect them from the scorching early evening summer and autumnal sun, leaving them fresher than most of the wines from the island’s west side where many of Corsica’s famous wines come from. Clos Fornelli’s wines are raised mostly in concrete vats with some old 500-liter barrels. We can’t keep these in stock once they’re here, so don’t wait. Josée and Fabrice have everything sold just months after their release, making each year a one-shot opportunity. As you likely know, the big game for Domaine Jean Collet is Chablis, but Romain Collet was always interested in Saint-Bris, a neighboring appellation with the same bedrock, but on shallower rocky soils—soils mostly too spare for Chardonnay to thrive. Only a twenty minute drive from Chablis, this is Sauvignon Blanc territory and the 2020 Saint-Bris is the third vintage for Romain. With the prices of Sancerre making steady but notable increases each year, this Saint-Bris should be a consideration for by-the-glass programs in restaurants and a great starter to a summertime meal. Domaine Chardigny has a couple new vintages for us to feast on. These last few seasons were hit hard by Mother Nature, leaving much less compared to prior years. As regularly touted over the years since our first imported vintage (2016) from the Chardigny brothers, I believe both 2020 and 2021 are exceptional years for them and jump a few notches up from the years before, with 2019 a solid pregame for the breakthrough. The 2021 Beaujolais-Leynes is their newest Beaujolais label and made from a blend of many different parcels—some from the Beaujolais appellation classification with a mix of grapes from their two crus, Clos du Chapitre and À la Folie, all entirely EU organic certified wines. Leynes leads with red-fruited charm, while its complexity is tucked further inside. The 2020 Saint-Amour “Clos du Chapitre” is likely the best wine they’ve put to bottle—at least in comparison to any that predate the 2021s. (I don’t yet know how the 2021 crus panned out since they were bottled.) This vineyard is flat and visually uninspiring compared to much of Beaujolais’ scenic hillside vineyards, but regardless it performs exceptionally. Regal, with the greater polish between all Chardigny Beaujolais wines, the 2020 is a knockout. This was the vintage out of barrel that stunned me with its Côte d’Or likeness, despite differences in grapes. The Chardignys are making serious strides in the natural wine world all the while keeping their record clean from the rodent smell so commonly found in high-brow organic and natural Beaujolais these days. Don’t miss this wine from these young stars. As expressed previously in our September 2021 Newsletter, if Pique-Basse owner/vigneron, Olivier Tropet, had vineyards in appellations like Côte Rôtie, Cornas or Châteauneuf-du-Pape, he’d be more likely to garner wide acclaim, but he lives in Roaix, the Southern Rhône Valley’s tiniest Côtes-du-Rhône Village appellation. It’s hard to believe what he achieves within this relatively unknown village with his range of wines that have been organically certified since 2009 and are as soulful as they are exquisitely crafted. Arriving is the new release, 2020 La Brusquembille, a blend of 70% Syrah and 30% Carignan, and a reload of 2019 Le Chasse-Coeur, a blend of 80% Grenache, 10% Syrah and 10% Carignan. Syrah from the Southern Rhône Valley is often not that compelling because it can be a little weedy and lacking in the cool spice and exotic notes that come with Syrah further up into the Northern Rhône Valley. However, La Brusquembille may throw you for a loop if you share this opinion, especially with the 2020 clocking in at a modest (for the Southern Rhône) 13.5% alcohol. Without the Carignan to add more southern charm, it might easily be mistaken for a Crozes-Hermitage from a great year above the Chassis plain up by Mercurol, where this appellation’s terraced limestone vineyards lie and are quite similar to the limestone bedrock and topsoil at the vineyards of Pique-Basse, without the loess sediments common in Mercurol. It’s not as sleek in profile because it’s still from the south, but its savory qualities and red and black fruit nuances can be a close match. Despite the alcohol degree in the 2019 hitting 14.5% (while the target is always between 13%-14%), Olivier tries to pick the grapes for Le Chasse-Coeur on the earlier side for Grenache, a grape that has a hard time reaching phenolic maturity at comparative sugar levels as grapes like Syrah or Pinot Noir, and farms accordingly for earlier ripeness with the intention to maintain more freshness. It’s more dominated by red fruit notes than black—perhaps that’s what the bright red label is hinting at—and aged in cement vats, and sometimes stainless steel if the vintage is plentiful, to preserve the tension and to avoid Grenache’s predisposition for unwanted oxidation. Both Le Chasse-Coeur and La Brusquembille offer immense value for such serious wines. Some of our California sales and administration team with Douro luminary Mateus Nicolau de Almeida (Left to right: Leigh Ready, Mateus, Hadley Kemp & Victoria Diggs) 2022 Spring Trip Top 15 Wines No longer successfully on the run from Covid, I tested positive on my birthday on my forty-day European tour. You probably had it already and know what to expect, but I was caught off guard. I experienced unusually intense allergies prompted by a wet spring that ended with a two-day rise of more than twenty-five degrees (F) and lasted for three weeks and pushed every plant in the Czech Republic, Austria and Italy into full-throttle growth, ending my successful spring running streak (literally). Then Covid hit—surely contracted on the three different trains between Milan to Frankfurt. Milano’s Stazione Centrale is a perfectly orchestrated Covid super-spreader daily event, swarming and—at least what seemed to be—not a single person masked up until forced to by the train conductors inside the train. It seemed that every unmasked passenger walked through our train car on the way to theirs; I guess it’s not so clear for some which car is theirs from the outside indicators on the train. Still mandatory on public transport in Italy, the passengers and the crew promptly unmasked once into Switzerland then masked up again crossing into Germany. Silly. It felt like a light spring cold at first (and frankly, initially no different than the allergies I was experiencing) and I thought it couldn’t be Covid. The horrors of this coronavirus shared by everyone seemed intense and my initial symptoms weren’t aggressive enough. The lower body aches set in while touring Arturo Miguel’s (Bodega Artuke) Rioja Alavesa vineyards. The wind was bitterly cold, strong enough to rip shoots off vines that weren’t yet tipped (a quick manual breaking of the shoot tips to stop their vertical growth, a necessity in most of Rioja Alavesa and Rioja Alta vineyards at higher altitudes that take the full force of the north winds shrieking down the Sierra Cantabrian mountains), and I was cold enough and in my favorite element to not realize that I was already mid-fever. By the time we got out of the cold, I began to thaw in his cellar. Still oblivious to my condition, my head began to heat up and slowly made its way to full Ghost Rider. I’ve never been so hot! Covid is indeed a bizarre experience. I was lucky to get Covid-light with mild symptoms over the first few days, irritating but not debilitating aches, and a fever that lasted all of about sixteen hours—maybe because my head rushed into a ready-to-erupt volcano state and peaked early. A few days after the major symptoms passed, as many also said might happen, my lungs tightened (a somewhat normal experience for me with my minor asthma), feelings of depression and a lack of motivation (neither normal for me), and physically, mentally, and emotionally disconnected—zombie-like; lightly and uncomfortably, eternally stoned. No matter what I did or where I went for necessities like tests, masks, food, and water, I felt guilty for being close to anyone. My travel companions, Victoria, Leigh, and Hadley were empathetic to its untimeliness, as I was supposed to guide them through their trip in Iberia. They all had it in January and some were also recently boosted, so they were pretty chill with my new condition. Eventually I rented a different car in Logroño, the central hub of Rioja, and drove their same scenic route through my favorite section of Spain, the verdant and mystical coastal landscape from País Vasco, Cantabria, and Asturias, finally dropping the car in Galicia. My predicament was exacerbated by my wife’s mother’s visit from Chile, a normal occurence when I go on lengthy benders my wife doesn’t want to do with me anymore. Neither of them previously had Covid, so I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t visit producers. I was adrift on a strangely lonely planet for days—a culpable castaway surrounded by people I wasn’t supposed to even see. Friends and family kept their distance and, unintentionally, harbored a look of mistrust, like I’m going to lash out at them, or maybe they saw me as a potential dead man walking and didn’t want to break the news to me if they saw it worsen. In Santiago de Compostela with nowhere to go and nothing to do, I holed up outside of town for a night in a small hotel—cheap, but better than expected. The sun’s angelic evening beams illuminated the Santiago green countryside, and the temperature was warm but breezy and friendly. Still positive but a week past the heavier symptoms, I convinced Andrea to pick me up. Benched in the backseat, no hugs or kisses after a month apart, fully masked up, windows down for the two-hour drive with a feeling like we were on the rocks (although we weren’t) I hid out at home until those pesky coronavirus proteins completely expelled from my nose. Thankfully, I didn’t lose my taste or smell, so my job remains somewhat secure. (If I did lose them, I probably wouldn’t tell anyone anyway…) Regardless of my personal woes, the trip was very successful for me prior to the Covid battle and there was an immense amount of joyful and revelatory wines experienced, even if I missed sixteen Iberian visits. Making this list was hard. There are certainly many more than fifteen wines that deserve to be on it, but it’s trimmed down to the goosebump-inducing highlights and breakthroughs. Missing here is most of Iberia and our visit with a potential new producer in Piemonte that may have stolen the spotlight of the whole trip, but next month’s newsletter will have top picks from our expert staff. My top 15 in no particular order: Veyder-Malberg 2021 Riesling Bruck. All 2021s from Peter are wonderful and the Austrian Grüner Veltliners in general must be my favorite vintage ever for this variety. In fact, any one of Peter’s Grüner Veltliner crus could’ve made this list. Malat 2019 Riesling Pfaffenberg. 2019 is very successful from Michael Malat and I think they are his best wines to date, but the 2021s will be a strong follow and will surely be in the running for his “best ever,” next to the 2019s. Martin Mittelbach from Tegernseerhof. I wasn’t surprised he made the list… Tegernseerhof 2021 Steinertal Riesling Smaragd. 2021 was another extremely successful vintage across Martin Mittelbach’s entire range. As some of you know, his 2019s were a smashing success and finally the wine press gave him appropriately high marks. La Casaccia 2019 Freisa di Monferrato “Monfiorenza” is a modestly priced, joy-filled wine with massive heart, made by maybe the happiest Italian man I’ve ever met, Giovanni Rava, and his lovely family. I never thought Freisa could be so seductive and delicious! 2021 seems to be its equal as well! (Sadly, they forwent on bottling any 2020 because of market concerns due to extensive shutdown periods in Italy during Covid.) Fletcher 2019 Barbaresco Roncaglie is a new bottling for Dave, and all of his 2019 Barbaresco wines are extremely impressive. Faset and Starderi were stunners on their own, but Roncaglie ran away with it—not surprisingly, given that the fruit all came from Poderi Colla! Poderi Colla 2019 Barbaresco Roncaglie is unquestionably in the top 3 wines of the trip, possibly the top wine for me. It’s far too good for the price and will surely be one of the greatest wines we will have imported since our start in 2010. Fliederhof 2020 Santa Magdalener “Gaia” is a mega-breakthrough Schiava made with 100% whole clusters and almost no extraction. It scored extremely high on both my pleasure and seriousness meters. The young Martin Ramoser is nailing it and he’s got a few more years to go before he even crosses thirty. Problem is that we will only get 48 bottles… Andrea Picchioni in one of his Buttafuoco vineyards Picchioni 2018 Buttafuoco dell'Oltrepò Pavese “Riva Bianca” has more X-factor than the entire Marvel Universe. Our San Diego representative, Tyler Kavanaugh had cartoon eyes popping out of his head through this entire visit. Andrea Picchioni drove it home with exquisite bottles of 1999 & 2010 Riva Bianca. One day, people will realize that Picchioni is the Mega to the late Maga. RIP Lino. We were lucky to meet Lino a year before his passing. He was much sweeter than any of us expected based on the stories told. Monti Perini 2019 Bramaterra wasn’t bottled yet and possibly will not be labeled with the Bramaterra appellation because it’s in too perfect of a moment and hasn’t yet had its mandatory time in wood required by the appellation. The 2017 and 2018 may be just as good as the 2019. This trio of wines was enlightening. Sadly, Andrea lost everything to Mother Nature in both 2020 and 2021. Almost throwing in the towel, I convinced him that our industry would support him through these times. We do our best for the little guy! Davide Carlone 2019 Boca “Adele” wasn’t bottled yet, but the tastings out of botte were riveting. Some of the best wines of the trip were in this cellar. Carlone is crazy in the best way, and with Cristiano Garella advising in the cellar, he will be one of Piemonte’s best, rivaling the biggest names further south in the Langhe. Enrico Togni’s 2021 Martina Erbanno Rosato out of concrete vat. Enrico’s cellar is rustic and he flies by the seat of his pants, but what comes out of those vats seem like miracles. Special guy, special wines. This pink wine is as serious as it gets for rosé with unique character and less enological polish. Sadly, its quantities are severely limited. Wechsler 2021 Kirchspiel Riesling Kabinett, is a savagely delicious and sharp new Riesling from this multifaceted talent! Unfortunately, there are only 20 cases coming in for the entire US. Our visit with Katharina revealed so many simply delicious and very complex wines within her natural wine range, “Cloudy by Nature,” and her classical dry Riesling range. Now, we have to add her wholloping knock-out-of-the-park Kirchspiel Kabinett (and Morstein Spätlese!) as another major success. Five wines from her could’ve made this list. (I’ll let you know more about them when they are closer to our shores.) Xesteiriña 2020 Albariño, a crackling laser beam shooting from a plank of igneous and metamorphic rock, is a fabulous new project in Rías Baixas that’s going to shake it up! Again, too few bottles to be had by all. Quinta da Carolina 2021 Xis Amarelo tasted out of barrel may also be top 3 of the trip. Somehow Luis (whose day job is the winemaker for Dirk Niepoort’s still wine range since about five or six years—post Luis Seabra) is channeling some major red Burgundian juju: think Mugnier and Fourrier birthing a schist Amarelo baby from the Douro. Everything tasted out of barrel from Luis was superstar material and there could be more wines from him on the list too. Also too limited! Mateus Nicolau de Almeida’s Porto Branco. Never did I imagine a Port wine would make my top 15! Theresa and Mateus’s (pictured further above) wines channel their openness to let terroir and vintage fully speak, and this is one of the things that makes them so special. Authenticity at its peak is found inside this quirky, fun-loving duo and their deeply minerally, savory Douro wines. Being in their company made me think a little more deeply about my place in the world, and I truly believe it would do the same for anyone.

After four solid days of wine tasting, great hospitality and excesses (mostly with the Collets) in Chablis, we are off to the Loire Valley tomorrow to visit François Crochet and a new producer in Pouilly-Fumé. Chablis was as great as usual and the group we visited is optimistic about 2018. Why optimistic so early? Because it’s still cold! The last two years the vegetative cycle began too early with too much heat at this time, which left the tiny new baby shoots open for that sneaky little Jack Frost. This year the buds haven’t broken out yet because a cold front came in (just before we arrived to France, of course) after a couple weeks of hot weather in early spring. Everything is still tucked inside the vine and safe from this early spring frost. Fingers crossed for a classic vintage with some quantity! My takeaway from our visit is that our guys here are getting better at managing the heat, like most in France. I can’t speak for all in Chablis but our two producers, Romain Collet and Sebastien Christophe, have found ways to not get caught with their pants down. They’ve accepted the inevitable and are now planning for it with adjustments in the vineyard. Even in warmer vintages (2015, 2016) their wines maintain a strong sense of place with freshness that’s not burnt out by the sun. 2015 is good drinking—not especially for those of us who like a little punishment with our Chablis—and 2016 is a cusp vintage with a lot more fresh energy than we expected. 2017 seems promising as well, although we only tasted a few examples that were being bottled at Sebastien’s place when we visited. All of our producers are up to good things, but none more thrilling than what’s happening chez Thierry Richoux. He already makes fantastic wines but apparently he’s not satisfied yet. Now at age 57, he’s knee deep in experiments with his sons, Gabin Richoux and Félix Richoux. A few years ago, he planted a high density Pinot Noir parcel with 23,000 vines by hectare, as shown above. He only has a tiny quantity planted, but it was enough to make a single barrel in 2015. None in 2016 or 2017 survived Jack Frost and the erratic hailstorms. We had the privilege of tasting the 3rd bottle he’s opened since it was bottled. It is one of the single most fascinating young wines I can remember tasting, and J.D agreed. It’s both abstract and noble, and smells and tastes like everything grown in its soil: fresh mushrooms for days, wild grasses, aromatic herbs, tiny little purple flowers, dirt, minerals, crushed rocks, bramble and wafts of cherry from the trees that grow just across the way. I know I won’t be able to buy it (so don’t even ask me for any ;) but my request was that every year when I visit I want to drink a bottle with them. He agreed to it and I'll never let him forget that! Right, Thierry?? His 2014s are classic Richoux: structured, taut, aromatic and pure Irancy Pinot Noir. His village Irancy just hit the water now along with 2013 Veaupessiot (which I’ve been waiting impatiently for!). His 2015s are, well…, stupidly good. One could easily pound them by the pitcher but it’s a vintage for the ages—monumental and epic written all over this one. Wait, there’s one more! In 2012, Thierry made a special wine for his grandmother. It’s from Irancy, but it ain’t like any Irancy I’ve tasted. It’s a shocker and will put top—and I am not blowing this out of proportion—Côte d’Or wines from the same vintage to the test. It’s vinified and raised more like a wine from the Côte d’Or and won’t be released for another couple of years (cause that’s how our boy rolls sometimes) but when it is, you MUST find as much as you can get. What a pitch, eh!? Thierry Richoux has gone mad in the best sort of way and there is not a more exciting producer within our portfolio.

Years ago, one freezing February in Friuli I pulled into the town of Gorizia, near the Slovenian border. I was bundled up tightly, as the temperature hovered around forty degrees, which made me all the more surprised to find the town square packed with people, eating, drinking, and making merry. I approached, curious to find out what could be causing this improbable, wintry revelry, only to discover just as unbelievable a source: Radicchio. I had happened on the festival for Rosa di Gorizia, a highly prized version of radicchio, which, when its leaves are pulled back, resembles a rose. Hundreds of people, wrapped in coats, scarves and hats drank wine as vendors tending outdoor kitchens couldn’t grill and fry these lovely magenta vegetables fast enough. Italians revere what we fail to appreciate in America, where radicchio languishes primarily as a streak of color in green salads. They revel in its versatility. They roast it, grill it, deep fry it in batter, caramelize it, cut it into ribbons and toss it with pasta, they stir it sweetly into risotto. Radicchio perfectly articulates Italians’ famous predilection for bitterness, which we simply don’t share. Cookbook writer Barbara Kafka explained more about it than I ever could back in this 1988 Times piece. So, I won’t belabor its culinary genius. Rather, I’ll mention something that never gets brought up: Radicchio is brilliant with wine. Simultaneously sweet and bitter, tender and crunchy, Radicchio is remarkably able to be two things at once. This ability to resolve contrasting elements not only provides a native complexity, it makes radicchio an ideal intermediary between plate and glass. Many wines, red and white, have a tinge of bitterness. Often we fail to note this or comment on it, because it usually expresses itself fleetingly in the finish, and we tasters tend to focus more on sweetness, fruit, spice, acid, and tannins. Unsurprisingly, Italian wines, more than any category, consistently express a bitter note. Look for it in most wines, but to give a few examples: Verdicchio and Vermentino, Sangiovese and Nebbiolo, Fiano, Aglianico, Nerello. The list could go on for pages. French wines are no strangers to bitterness; see Loire wines, red Burgundy, Beaujolais, Alsace, Rhone reds and whites. In pairing food and wine, we love to connect to a wine’s fruit. But having something on the plate which reaches out to a wine’s slight bitterness completes the relationship. Radicchio is that liaison. Cooking it also brings out its sweetness, making the match doubly appealing. While strong in flavor, radicchio is lighter in texture, making it, in my opinion, ideal for wines at the lighter end of the spectrum: red Burgundy, Nebbiolo, and Cabernet Franc from the Loire. I prefer the Old World versions of these wines with radicchio, simply because New World ones, in their joyful emphasis on fruit, lack that bitter note. Below find a simple recipe for pork chop and radicchio, both grilled. This is a dynamite meal to have with a red Burgundy or any Nebbiolo from Piedmont. Look for thick-cut pork, with meat as purplish and dark as possible, which indicates more flavor. While the pork marinade calls for a habanero, have no fear; it doesn’t really introduce heat, more just a hint of chile flavor. But as delicious as is pork, the magenta-hued chicory is the real star here. Two thick-cut Pork Chops, the darker the meat and fattier, the better 1 Large Head of Radicchio (or two smaller ones) Pork Chop Marinade: 1 Habanero Pepper 1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves 1 clove of garlic, minced Juice of 1/2 lemon—about an ounce Radicchio marinade: 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar 2 tablespoons olive oil Salt and Pepper Finely mince the habanero and mix it with the thyme leaves and garlic then stir in the lemon juice. Toss the pork chops in this mixture and let sit for 1-2 hours. Whisk a tablespoon of white wine vinegar with two tablespoons of olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Set aside. Cut the radicchio into thick wedges, leaving the core intact so the leaves stay together. To prepare the grill, create a coal bed large enough in area to match the area of the pork chops. The coals should be hot, but not too hot—aim for no-hotter than a four-count with the hand above the coals. Salt the chops before placing them on the grill. Grill on both sides before standing them on their edges to brown the outer ring of fat if there is one. Finish by standing on the bones and grilling for another 3-4 minutes. Internal temperature should be about 130° F when you remove from the grill (for medium rare). Allow the meat to rest by standing the chops together on their bones. While they rest, toss the Radicchio in the vinaigrette and spread them out over the coals, which should be slowly cooling down. Don’t move the radicchio sections until you turn them (to keep them from falling apart). They are finished when a bit of char begins to appear, but don’t let them get thoroughly burned. Arrange the two on a plate and serve with a Burgundy or a Nebbiolo from Piemonte. Wines to pair this dish with: 2014 Alain Michaud Brouilly - Beautifully combining serious Beaujolais' ability to merge cheerful fruit with a more structured, mineral character, Alain Michaud's Brouilly sets the standard for that cru. Here, it brilliantly picks up the hints of char and smoke, nestling them in its earthy/fruity embrace. 2013 Demougeot Bourgogne Rouge - One of the rising new talents of the Côte de Beaune, Rodolphe Demougeot makes both white and red wines of impressive quality. This Bourgogne Rouge delivers exactly what such a wine should—buoyant red fruit on a smooth palate that goes down with delightful ease. A hint of leafy earthiness in the finish is what will bond with the radicchio's mild bitterness. 2012 Poderi Colla Nebbiolo d'Alba - Tart cherry, orange zest, floral high tones—this basic Nebbiolo from the Colla family has all the seductive flavors and aromas we expect of the grape. Pleasantly round and mid-bodied, it brings some gentle tannins into play, perfectly complementing the pork and radicchio.  

Süditrol’s St. Magdelena vines shot from Fliederhof winery, May 2022 May, Europe’s new summer month… As we descend upon Germany via train from Milan through the Alps, our group of four are all wounded and bloated from a massive intake of beef tartar, vitello tonnato, agnolotti, ravioli, gnocchi, and a near overdose of Nebbiolo (if that’s possible… well, maybe it is with the tannins of young ones…). We are in Germany for a day and then I’m off to Iberia for two more weeks of visits with another group of our staff who are joining me there as the others head home. I packed light for this forty-day bender, as sparingly as I ever have for a journey of over a month: four pairs of pants, two sweaters and a long jacket have taken up precious space in my bags since I left Prague at the end of April. It’s strangely hot this year and especially dry too. Climate change is really starting to weigh heavily over here and everyone’s concerns are more heightened than ever, despite 2021’s colder year in many locations, with great losses in some areas due to mildew pressure. In the past, climate change was a talking point in the midst of each vintage’s woes, but today, perhaps elevated by the post-pandemic shutdown period (hopefully post!), Ukrainian invasion and inflation ridiculousness, the mood is heavier than ever, especially after so many years of wackiness with the twisting of seasons. In many parts of Northern Italy it has only rained three times since November and what has arrived didn’t deliver enough. We just left Barolo and Barbaresco and many of the Nebbiolo vines were already flowering in those areas and their surroundings, around May 20th, which means a harvest will likely be in early September. There isn’t anything to do except hope for some relief, but it’s already quite late to slow things down enough to extend the season. I started the trip with ten days in Austria and the Czech Republic accompanied by my wife, Andrea, where we found the best Napolitana pizza I’ve had outside of Campania, at Pizza Nuova (which has a fabulous Italian wine list too), and a great wine bar, Bokovka, both owned by the same clever company. When Andrea left, JD, our Los Angeles sales rep, arrived. After a great visit with our Austrian team—all highlights, honestly, between Tegernseerhof’s 2019s, Veyder-Malberg’s 2021s, Malat’s 2019s and 2021s, Weszeli’s 2017s, and Birgit Braunstein and her cool range of progressive and well-made, biodynamic natural wines—he and I jumped down to Milan to grab Victoria, my sister and Office Manager, and Tyler, an Aussie expatriate who represents us in San Diego and Orange County. We all have serious farmer tans now just in time for the real summer months and big setbacks on our beach bellies. There is far too much to say about my trip here, and I wish I had time to share it all. What I can say is that I am very proud of the producers we represent in Austria and Northern Italy. Perhaps the biggest surprise for our team was the quality of wines coming from our four producers in Monferrato: Crotin keeps nailing it with inexpensive but serious wines and some new bottlings, too; Spertino is becoming a problem because the international demand for this true vinous artist is putting a pinch on our allocations; La Casaccia, a new producer for us, was probably the most unexpected knockout visit for our group with their masterfully crafted range of Barbera, Grignolino and Freisa (the latter is simply inconceivably delicious, perfumed, and subtle but generous as any Freisa I’ve ever had); and Sette, a new winery working biodynamically that lived up to my hype for my staff with their head-turning wines from Nizza. Alto Piemonte and Langhe also had a spectacular showing with the most notable highlights being Monti Perini’s yet-to-be-bottled 2017, 2018 and 2019 Bramaterra wines, Davide Carlone’s upcoming 2020 entry-level wines all grown in Boca, Dave Fletcher’s 2019 four Barbaresco bottlings that were simply a stunning breakthrough for him (an already very good, young winegrower) and Poderi Colla’s 2019 Barbaresco Roncaglie, a true masterpiece and unquestionably the top Barbaresco I’ve had from them. There’s so much more to add, but we’ll get there another day because now we’re off to Spain and Portugal. In next month’s Newsletter, I’ll give the play-by-play and note the highlights from my final two-week leg of the journey. New Producers In June we have a real boatload of wine coming in (unapologetic pun intended). It’s hard to know where to start because there are so many good things arriving. All the new wines this month are from France, except a lone Spanish wine made from one of our new French producers who plays by his own rules, Imanol Garay. Also arriving in the warehouse are new wines from Arnaud Lambert, Thierry Richoux, David Moreau’s 2019s, finally the 2020 Dutraive wines, Francois Crochet’s 2021 Rosé of Pinot Noir, Domaine du Pas de L’Escalette, Pascal Ponson “Prestige Cuvée” Champagne, and finally a reload from our lone Bordeaux producer (for the moment), Cantelaudette. Because there is so much, I’ll only highlight a few, starting with our newest additions. Aside from the two new producers we will explore today, there are over a dozen more we signed on with over the last six months or so whose wines will finally be arriving by the last quarter of the year. We have new wines coming from Chile (Itata), Saumur, Montlouis, Champagne, Bordeaux, Piemonte, Abruzzo, Douro, Setubal, Alentejo, Azores, Rías Baixas, Ribeira Sacra, and Sicily—finally, after five years of poking around the island. We are in the middle of exciting times at The Source and we greatly appreciate the support from you who continue to work with our talented team and consider the wines from our constantly evolving portfolio. It’s because of you that we can continue to do the work we love to do. Imanol Garay, Southwest France/Northern Spain Spanish/French former engineer and barrel broker, Imanol Garay, un vigneron libre, follows no wine rules (other than some labeling requirements for his French/Spanish wine blends) and believes in terroir not only as the concept of specific site or even region but as a contiguous philosophical thread practiced in different places that may be forged into one wine. A resident of southwest France, his cellar is in Orthez, only a short drive from Spain’s Basque country. Before starting his project, he worked with French natural wine gurus Richard Leroy and Vincente Careme, among others. Some vineyards are his own, some he rents and farms, and some fruit comes from friends with the same deep respect for nature aligned with their life philosophy. He has another project in Spain’s Txakoli region with friends, Alfredo Egia (also in our portfolio) and Gile Iturri, labeled Hegan Egin; some years he makes Rioja, others Navarra, and always a lot of French wine. Cautiously walking the natural-wine line, his pursuit is of the clean yet uninhibited, void of unwanted animally smells (the mouse, the horse), and instead with wonderful character-filled and potently nuanced, high-energy wines filled with joy and authenticity, like the man himself. Imanol Garay We start with Imanol’s 2020 Clandestinus, a Pyrenean red wine from Spain’s Navarra grown on limestone bedrock with brown topsoil. CLANdeSTINUS is a play on words regarding Imanol’s family history, the Stinus clan, from (de) Alsace in former times, and a “tribute to all those who have crossed mountains, seeking a better life.” The mix is equal parts Grenache and Graciano, the latter a less well known and very promising red variety with an incredible structure led with, at times, jarring acidity when not fully ripe, but gorgeously savory with tight dark red fruit. As all of Imanol’s wines, it’s made without any additions throughout vinification, with some added after malolactic fermentation where it receives a sparse amount of sulfur prior to bottling. Élevage takes place over a ten-month period in a mix of 228-, 600- and 700-liter French oak barrels with mostly old wood and a small portion of new. Clandestinus dances on its toes around the danger of a natural wine disaster while delivering a non-stop barrage of juicy, slightly baked fruits and roasted nuts, and sweet, northern Spanish countryside rusticity—think leather, chestnuts, and cured meat. I observed this young and surprisingly voluptuous wine for days after opening it, waiting for it to succumb to exhaustion after its vigorous dance, but my wife fell under its spell and finally finished it off before I could stop her—a surprising act from someone who usually has little interest in red wines that hit 14% alcohol. Diving into Imanol’s highly sought after whites with unfortunately extremely tight limitations on quantity are his Ixilune (pronounced “itchie-loo-nay”), French whites grown in and around the Madiran and Béarn appellations, without the appellations on the labels. These are very special whites indeed, and we took whatever Imanol would allow from the two vintages available. Both are deep in reductive, minerally elements (à la Richard Leroy) and need a moment to open and express their rolling hill, limestone and alluvial terroirs. The 2018 Ixilune is composed of 70% Petit Courbu from d’Aydie, and 30% Petit Manseng from Soublecause. The élevage takes place in 225- and 500-liter barrels of young but no new French oak. Free of sulfites through its time in wood, a first and final addition was made at bottling. The 2020 Ixilune is a blend of 25% Petit Courbu and 25% Petit Manseng (both from Pacherenc du Vic-Bilh), with the difference, a rare white grape with a long tradition, Raffiat de Moncade, cultivated in and around the village of Orthez. The potentially high-yielding Raffiat de Moncade produces relatively neutral white wines, often expressing soft, white flesh fruit notes and flowers. It offers this blend with the other two higher-toned and more tense fresh grapes a gentler mouthfeel and softer aromas. The 2020 Ixilune is similarly aged in 225- and 500-liter barrels of young French oak and 10% in a small amphora. Always searching to work around sulfur, Imanol was confident enough to bottle this white without adding any. Given his successes with his no-sulfur Txakoli project, Hegan Egin, the 2020 Ixilune appears to follow in those very successful footsteps. Both wines are 14% in alcohol, but fresh, tight, minerally (alongside its beautiful reductive elements) and as mentioned, surprisingly unbreakable for days after opening. New Producer: Nicolas Pointeau (Domaine de la Sablière), Chinon Due to the severe shortage of Saumur red wines from Arnaud Lambert, Romain Guiberteau and Brendan Stater-West, I began to search for some young blood in the Loire Valley’s Cabernet Franc world, especially outside of Saumur, to add a little variety to our Cabernet Franc range. I love the wines of Saumur, but I’m also interested in finding other things throughout the rest of the Loire Valley, a region we adore. Marielle et Nicolas Pointeau I received a tip from one of our top winegrowers about the wines of Nicolas Pointeau, a young vigneron working his family’s Chinon winery organically with his wife, Marielle, in Domaine de la Sablière. Any tip from great producers is worth exploring, and a few years ago they met Nicolas at an event and pointed me in their direction—this is how “discovery” in importing works most of the time (nearly all the time), rather than knocking randomly on doors and cold-calling in other ways. A lot has happened between my introductory tastes of his wines in the summer of 2019, with the 2017 and 2018 vintages, and what is in the bottle now, with the 2020 vintage. The conversion to organic farming and a few more years of experience in the cellar, Nicolas made wines convincing enough to jump on his wagon. Pointeau’s organic Chinon vineyards on alluvial soils used for the entry-level Chinon wines Nicolas’ wines will not yet revolutionize the Cabernet Franc wine scene because they are made in a very straightforward way without much “hand in the wine.” His entire range is solid, unpretentious, and not over-thought or overplayed; they deliver tremendous value and exist squarely in the realm of lightly structured, delicious, gravelly, black earth, lovely red and dark-fruited, perfectly ripe and deliciously savory Cabernet Franc. Their vineyards in Chinon are largely on alluvial soils with some on shallow topsoils above tuffeau limestone bedrock. The alluvial soils make for wines with a little more gentleness on acidity and palate roundness without being too rich from the soil and much less solar powered than Cabernet Franc wines from further south in western France. If you are familiar with Arnaud Lambert’s range (as are most restaurant and retail buyers who work with our portfolio), think Les Terres Rouges, or Montée des Roches, both grown on Arnaud’s richer soils of the Saumur-Champigny commune, Saint-Cyr en Bourg, but maybe a little less dense given the loamier soils than the clay-rich soils of Saumur-Champigny. Even more, Nicolas’ reds represent his conviviality and hard-working nature; when I drink them, I am always reminded of him in his well-worn vigneron’s clothes, with a smile from ear to ear. The Pointeau cellar Within the range of the three Chinon reds that will land, the 2020 Chinon “Tradition” is the first in line and raised in only stainless steel tanks and comes from gravelly soil on large terraces. The wine does indeed have gravelly textures (classic for the variety), a good mix of dark and red fruits, graphite palate and nose, on a light frame. The 2020 Chinon “Tonneliers” is raised in old French oak barrels (called fûts de chêne in these parts, rather than barrique) and similarly grown on gravel soils as the “Tradition” bottling. The difference here is maybe just a slightly fuller body and rounded edges though with a similar fruit profile. The time in wood also imparts more savory notes and a slight softening of the fruit notes. The 2020 Chinon “Vieille Vignes” comes from parcels with a greater tuffeau limestone presence, further uphill from the vineyards used for the other bottlings we imported. Finer lines and a deeper core with additional mineral notes alongside the variety’s ubiquitous graphite notes, this stainless-steel-aged Cabernet Franc has great purity and depth for Nicolas’ gentle and easy style. The average age of vines for all the cuvées is around forty-five years, with the Vieille Vignes closer to eighty. All the Chinon red wines we imported from Pointeau are bottled between March and June after their vintage year. New Arrivals Richoux, Irancy We have a fabulous group of wines coming in from Thierry Richoux and his fils, Gavin and Félix. The baton is in the process of being passed from Thierry to them, which explains why some labels display their names, and others have Thierry’s. Since 2017 a few things have changed at this organically-run domaine. The boys have incorporated some new techniques, most noticeably a gentler extraction and the use of smaller barrels, where in the past they were aged exclusively for a year in stainless steel, followed by another year in large foudre between 55hl-85hl capacity. They are also experimenting with notable success with smaller total sulfur additions and holding out on the first addition until the wines are ready to be bottled. Much of these changes will be felt in the years to come more than those that arrive today. We adore the old-school style of Thierry and hope they will stay close to it, but it’s obvious that Gavin and Félix are making a few advancements instead of experimental setbacks. Félix, the youngest of Thierry and Corine Richoux’s sons We have a reload of 2017 Irancy and our first batch of 2017 Irancy “Veaupessiot”. This vintage expresses the beautiful fruit nuances of this warm vintage that ripened when the fruit was still dominated by red tones. In the 2005 vintage, Veaupessiot became Richoux’s first single-cru bottling of Irancy, and for good reason. While a good portion of Irancy sits inside the amphitheater shape that surrounds the ancient village, there are many prized sites just outside of it, or on the south-side of the south hill of the appellation. Veaupessiot is on the outside, at the southwestern end of the horseshoe-shaped appellation as it opens toward the west. The slope is moderately steep and ends near a ravine that cuts in below it, and an incline far too steep for vineyards. Other vineyards look like they could be as good, but that’s the fun and mystery of great vineyards; it’s not what’s above that determines the great sites, it’s what’s below. Richoux recognized this early on and it remains the most well-balanced single-cru wine in his range. This wine will have good moments early on but certainly has the chops to age as effortlessly as Richoux’s many wines have time and time again. The Richoux family’s wines are bulletproof and remain one of the greatest deals still to be had in all of Burgundy among top domaines. Richoux Veaupessiot parcel to the left of the road Les Cailles is Richoux’s second single-cru bottling and is more powerful and structured than Veaupessiot. It’s spicier, more mineral and with more formidable tannins, requiring extra time in bottle as well as aeration once opened to find its peak moment. When it gets there, it arrives in a big way, but we must be more patient than with Veaupessiot. 2015 Irancy “Les Cailles” will surely be the best yet put to bottle (that is released), and this year is a perfect vintage with its boosted ripeness and softer tannins; this means that it will require of you less patience to find its moment upon opening compared to the previous three releases. (The first year of Les Cailles was bottled in 2012.) The 2015 Veaupessiot is an extraordinary wine (that sold out in a flash), which means that Les Cailles will be nothing short of impressive for decades to come. It will be interesting to see Veaupessiot and Les Cailles duke it out over the years, and it would be best not miss a vintage from either of them to experience this intriguing comparison. Les Cailles is situated on the north hill of the amphitheater facing south. The vines are over seventy years old and contribute added depth. South-facing old vines of Les Cailles Arnaud Lambert, Saumur Yet another group of wines from Arnaud Lambert is arriving. We have a lot of coverage of his wines in our newsletters and on the website, so I won’t take a deep dive here. On the boat are reloads of the Crémant de Loire Blanc & Rosé and some new releases of single-cru wines. It seems we have some of our barrels marked in Arnaud’s cellar! In the Saumur Blanc department, we have the 2020 “Les Perrieres”, 2018 “Bonne Nouvelle”, 2018 “Coulee de St. Cyr”, 2018 Clos de la Rue, and the 2018 Saint-Just “Brézé”. Quantities are minuscule on some of these, so please go easy on us if we can’t fill your requests. In the red department, the new release of 2019 Saumur “Montée des Roches” and 2018 Saumur-Champigny “Clos Moleton” will arrive. Quantities on these two wines are very limited, so get ahead on those and reach out soon if you are interested. Brézé’s tuffeau limestone diversity from stark white to light orange due to a higher iron content Jean-Louis Dutraive, 2017 Dutraive, Beaujolais Finally, the 2020s from Dutraive will arrive. We opted to wait until all the wines were ready in this vintage (some fermentations ran a little later than expected) before we brought them in, which resulted in some unexpectedly lengthy delays. The 2020 vintage was relatively uneventful and without demoralizing natural elements such as frost or high mildew pressure. However, it was a warm year all around. The difference between some of the other warmer seasons of late is that the vines had a good natural yield that was only curbed by the summer heat, concentrating grapes and making for riper wines. The most positive element of the year was that the growers were able to choose when they wanted to pick, resulting in balanced fruit. Dutraive’s wines in 2020 are fresher than many of the recent years thanks to the naturally balanced crop load. The recent warm years that had early season losses to nature’s elements affected the final balance of the wines due to too much of the vine’s focus on the little quantity of fruit they produced. As usual, quantities are very limited. Dutraive’s Clos de la Grand’Cour vineyard in Fleurie Pas de L’Escalette, Languedoc Julien Zernott and Delphine Rousseau have become one of the Languedoc’s leading producers for substantive wines with higher tones and greater freshness than the typical wines from this massive area of France. During the pandemic many producers were understandably forced to seek out new markets for their wines while their traditional markets, including France, waited out the pandemic. That, in conjunction with the rest of the world taking notice, is why our allocations are more limited these days. I apologize in advance for an unusually small quantity of wines from this young (still!) and progressive duo. Escalette vineyard with walls constructed from “clapas” 2021 should be a great year for French rosé. It’s probably the coldest year since 2013 and offers a lot of freshness to the wines, especially after the long string of warm years, particularly between 2017 and 2020. Escalette’s 2021 Ze Rozé is a slightly top-heavy wine sourced from some of the better red grape parcels—no specific parcels are isolated for the rosé. Here, compared to most Provencal rosés similarly composed of Grenache, you can expect more body but on a rather tight frame due to the higher altitude, rockier limestone bedrock and topsoil, and the constant fresh winds that blow through this narrow valley. The blend this year is 65% Grenache, 20% Carignan for greater flesh and deeper fruit, 10% Cinsault for more lifted and floral aromas and 5% Syrah. The 2021 Les Petits Pas also benefited greatly from the cooler year, yielding a very fresh red. From the moment the Les Petits Pas was created, Julien and Delphine’s intention was to add a charmer in their line of wines that didn’t take itself too seriously—hence the full color pinkish red label with neon green, baby footprints. Pas de L’Escalette is nestled up into an ancient roadway that connects the Languedoc to the north by way of France’s central mountain range, the Massif Central. This is cooler wine country, far from the Mediterranean, so it’s plenty cold at night, even in summer, and this is what imparts their wines with more zippy freshness and crunchy red and dark fruits, which make it a perfect wine for warm weather. Les Petits Pas is a multi-parcel blend from organically farmed vineyards on limestone terroirs, typically a mix of 40% Grenache, 40% Syrah and 20% Carignan. Each of these grapes naturally carries ample freshness, magnified by a little chill, making it anything but heavy on a sunny day. It is indeed compelling for us wine geeks, but it’s more of a drink-it-don’t-think-it wine. Les Petits Pas doesn’t constantly tug at your sleeve begging to show you how good it is, it’s just good. Les Clapas Rouge, named after the limestone rock piles (clapas) found in the vineyards, is led by Syrah, which makes up 50% of the blend. The Syrah is entirely vinified in whole bunches, and Delphine says they never destem Syrah because the stems add so much complexity; they’re mixed in for the fermentation and contribute what one might expect: heightened freshness, texture, and exotic green, animal nuances. The remainder is a mix of 30% Carignan and 20% Grenache, both co-fermented with 50% whole clusters. The latter two grapes contribute more of the suppleness, but the combination of the three—all extremely noble grapes—make for a wine broad in dimension and full in flavor. After its three to four week “infusion” fermentation (which simply means no big movements for extraction) the wine is polished up over fourteen months in 50-hectoliter upright wooden tanks and a single 20-hectoliter foudre. It’s racked once in the spring and the only sulfite addition (no more than 30mg/l, or 30 parts per million of total SO2) is made just prior to the bottling, without any filtration.

(Download complete pdf here) Colares, Portugal, March 2024 It seemed possible that winter wasn’t going to arrive. Dave Fletcher called from Barbaresco to confirm they weren’t alone in facing a sunny, dry, and unusually warm January. In Spain’s Costa Brava it was like fall had returned and even sometimes felt like a cool late-summer day; a hot, sunny spot protected from the wind on our terrace pushed this particular vitamin D-soaking lizard back inside after only ten minutes. People were at the beach, swimming. It rained less than usual in Portugal and one of my best friends and favorite winegrowers, Constantino Ramos, was enjoying the balmy temperatures but had the same concerns as every grower: the vines might fail to get enough of their much-needed winter hibernation, and could start pushing far too early. It cooled off and things slowed again in February but March temperatures picked back up. Growers in southern Portugal said bud break is even two weeks earlier than 2023, and that year was early too. The fourth weekend of March in Portugal’s Ponte de Lima (where we live) hit an unusually high 83°F. A few days later it plummeted to highs in the mid-fourties. 2024 holds the record for the warmest January in history. February got a little chillier, and winter arrived again for me on the bone-chilling London Stansted tarmac in near-freezing temperatures during a slow march to the terminal in face-stinging drizzle and hair-twisting winds of well over twenty miles per hour. Passengers on some planes were in for a white-knuckle, stomach-churning, face-blanching landing. I heard that the next day planes had to attempt numerous landings before they were successful. Photo borrowed from tripadvisor.com We came to London for a Spanish winegrower-tasting event called Viñateros. But our first stop was 10 Cases. Highly recommended for a casual but effective culinary experience, this bistro à vin was commandeered by the lovely Parisian-born, Émilie, and Matt, a youngish, lanky, long-haired, elegantly scruffy British wine-tender who floated in and out of the bar, sometimes drifted across the street, then outside on the bench for a smoke, maintaining at all times his devilishly inviting Bowie-like charm and smile. With an endless supply of temptations on the list, we followed the food. For my wife, a one-bottle date for dinner and a single-glass date for lunch who always prefers the lowest alcohol options, the 2019 Prager Riesling Federspiel “Steinriegel” couldn’t have been a better choice to cover our diverse food choices. Minerally icy and wiry, the extra years in bottle from this top vintage provided the right richness and flesh for its naturally sinewy frame. The start was Cantabrian anchovies with bread and addictive salted Beillevaire Normandy butter, followed by duck rillette, beetroot salad, bacalao-cheek fish and chips (a clever play on a local favorite?), and caramelized sunchokes (delicious, though not worth the ensuing internal pressure for this eater, some hours later). Then we finished with a trout reminiscent of the Danube (though born of the Chalk River) with fried skin, which was perfect for a Wachau wine. Then we may or may not have had two back-to-back orders of eye-crossing chocolate delice to tie everything off. Our first imported Portuguese wines from Quinta do Ameal arrived in California in 2012. Our maiden voyage to the verdant hills of Portugal’s granite-dominated Lima Valley and its fast-moving Atlantic weather—a daily Ridley Scott-like scene from dark and frightening deluge to enlightening solar explosion and warmth—enchanted us enough to move here in 2019 after a year in the beautiful and unforgettably chaotic Salerno and the Amalfi Coast. It took seven more years to land a second Portuguese grower, and before that we already had a good collection going in Galicia. Today we import more than twenty-five growers from Iberia, and we’re just getting started. It’s only April and we recently made a lucky strike in the tiny, historic Colares, Portugal’s rare pie franco beachfront refuge. While there used to be 1,500 hectares of vines, there are now fewer than fifty, credited to Lisbon’s ever-expanding urban sprawl. (Beachfront property outside of Lisbon is far more valuable as real estate than vines!) Like Provence’s Palette, Colares produces mysteriously immortal and charming wines in what’s now considered a tiny appellation buttressed by a beautiful limestone city and limestone ridge, though it’s not as dramatic as Palette and Aix-en-Provence’s iconic Mont Sainte-Victoire. Two hours south of Colares and ten minutes east of the Atlantic there’s another genius we hope to work with. At the Simplesmente Vinho on the Douro in Porto, one would be hard-pressed to find wines more delicious. And maybe another grower in Dão! We’ll see. Exciting times in Portugal, nonetheless. And then there’s Spain. Photo borrowed from sbnation.com Our first Spanish wine arrived in 2017, but this short-lived Albariño affair led us to the humble luminary, Manuel (Chicho) Moldes. Chicho’s generosity and immediate friendship brought us deep into Spanish wine culture and an entirely new family of growers close to what would eventually be our new hometown on the border of Galicia. Spain is on a different trajectory than its neighbor with which it shares one of the oldest national borders in the world—around 900 years now. Indeed, Portugal is moving, but only fast by Portuguese pacing. Thirty years ago, Spanish reds and Austria whites exploded on the scene. Twenty years ago, indigenous Italian wine started to capture a lot of real estate on fine wine restaurant lists and store shelves. However, it seems to be losing ground now, slowing to a Bolognese-bubbling simmer. At the same time, Germany’s dry Riesling revolution grabbed headlines. And a newer taste began to develop in Spain, spurred by the natural wine movement and fresher, lower-alcohol wines. Spain may be progressing faster than the rest of the wine-producing countries in Europe. Indeed, France continues to evolve, but the French are not rediscovering old viticultural heritage at the pace of the Spanish. Rather, France continues more in its evolution with techniques, but mostly with already well-established viticulture land. Spain is nearly equal in scale, but they’re rebuilding a forgotten wine culture and nearly entire regions throughout the country. Their tumble into the dark times started like the rest of Europe with the 1800s nasty-boy mildew-twins, and led by phylloxera. Then it was time for a couple of World Wars, between which the Spanish had a Civil War that landed them with a thud under the dusty boot heel of a Francoist dictatorship that lasted forty years until his death in November 1975. Spain is only fifty years past this brutal moment (of many brutal and cruel moments in their history), and over thirty percent of today’s population there lived part of their lives under Franco. While other European countries were in full recovery mode after World War II, the dreams of the average Spaniard under Franco were kicked down the pitch. The answer in Spain during those times was not to work in vineyards but to go to the cities, breaking many of Spain’s historical wine links. Today it’s on an impressive rebound, and with extraordinary terroirs yet to be fully realized. Imagine if Côte-Rôtie and the rest of the Northern Rhône Valley were reignited only a decade or two ago. That’s what’s happening all over Iberia, from Douro to Dão, Galicia to Gredos, and one of the first nearly forgotten lands in Spain to strike it big, Catalonia’s Priorat. Montserrat photos (above and below) borrowed from worldsbesthikes.com (One of my Spanish teachers, Montserrat—a tough name to pronounce on first go for any Anglo-Saxon—explained that it was given to many Catalan women during the Franco dictatorship as a passive rebellion against Franco’s ban of català, Catalonia’s native tongue. The Santa Maria de Montserrat Abbey, just northwest of Barcelona on one of Europe’s most entrancing and singular conglomerate formations, Montserrat—directly translated as jagged mountain—resisted and continued to speak català throughout the dictatorship. They also gave shelter to political dissenters against Franco, for which many priests paid the ultimate price. When she was in school, there could be seven out of twenty girls named Montserrat. She jokes that the only Francos in all of Catalonia are the dogs no one likes.) And while Portugal moved peacefully into democratic society more than a year before Spain, it is the Spanish that bolted out of their boxed-in apartments and stone houses with tiny windows to enjoy fellowship with friends in restaurants and threw their bikini tops on the sand—some also occasionally discarding their bottoms—and began to live like their freedom wasn’t going to last. Almost every restaurant, no matter how poor the food may be (though they always have a decent beer, if anything), is full of Spaniards, cañas on every table, paellas, pulpos, tortillas, and jamon, elements as necessary to them as the air they breathe. I attribute part of Spain’s recent rise—and now Portugal’s—to how international wine has become a regular part of progressive restaurant and wine-store culture. Passionate local Spanish wine importers and influential winemakers travel, learn, and bring back the intellectual spoils to everyone at home. It’s astounding how fast some find new and interesting growers outside of their home country as fast as the rest of the world. And it’s equally impressive that they all know each other throughout the country, like a massive version of the enviable comradery of the tightly-knit Austrian wine community. Spain’s interest in the outside world means open minds and exponential progress. Every progressive Spanish grower I know, and likely 95% of those at the Viñateros tasting in London, are not only acquainted with the boutique wines of Champagne, Burgundy, Jura, Rhône and Loire Valleys, Italy’s Barolo, Barbaresco and Etna, Portugal’s Dão and Douro, the Wachau and Mosel, they also know the great producers in those regions by name and frequent their wines as much as Spanish wine. Do you think many growers in the famous French and Italian wine regions know today’s greats of Spain, or Austria, or Portugal? But to be fair, there’s a lot to learn in their own respective country for the growers in France and Italy, and for every great Spanish grower, there are five French and three well-fed Italians.   Spain is in full explosion mode. Not only because of the growers themselves but also thanks to a series of importers (and critics) that preceded the arrival of The Source, by generations. Much is to be credited to those who forged a path into Iberia and encouraged growers to rediscover and rebuild. We can’t forget that Spain was under a dictatorship until 1975, and people were, and some remain, in a period of healing and recovery while others simply won’t make it out from under the weight of that past. And while we may pick sides with the style of wines we prefer, those Spanish importers during the ‘90s and aughts gave confidence to a country by reigniting their dreams of rebuilding their viticultural heritage. The Spaniards did it. The world noticed. And they were and are being rewarded. That brave generation set the stage for today’s generation to thrive. One such importer of more than thirty years and part of this Spanish renaissance is Eric Solomon. Initially cutting his teeth in France, Eric’s first imported Spanish wine was made from a globally unknown region at the time. That first wine that brought Eric to Spain was crafted by a Swiss-German born in Paris, Daphne Glorian, a dreamer who forged her first wine from seventeen terraces in one of the world’s most aesthetic and extreme environments. She called it Clos Erasmus, and she went on to become one of the most celebrated growers of Priorat and all of Spain. She and Eric married in 1997. Though Eric’s first love was music, then French wine, he’s more known today in the US market for his influence with Spanish wine. Names Eric championed include growers from Priorat (Clos Erasmus, Terroir al Límit, among others), Sierra de Gredos (à la Commando G), Ribeira Sacra (Fedellos), Jerez (Luís Perez), among many others. We know the strength of our Spanish range here at The Source is Galicia. Eric’s is the entire country. His wines bring a matured Spanish wine culture that has come about after the modernist age of extraction and without any natural wine boobytraps, rather a group of the country’s most progressive and talented growers. Our producers at The Source tend to play in the more tense and aromatically piercing, austere realm (except those from Castilla y Léon and Rioja). They’re sharp and lean toward brighter acidity for structural framing, and crunchy fruit and rocky terroirs for aromatic and textural strength. In my January snapshot at the London Viñateros tasting, I found that the dozen Indigo Wine Spanish growers are equally elegant but fuller. Perhaps they could be described as more classic, and on the stage of the world’s universally appealing superstars. They’re less austere yet strongly distinguished in palate texture with intendedly middle-amplitude acidity and they’re salty, the way we love them. If I were to use a hillslope to chart the general feel and shape of wine with the sparer soils on the top and richest soils on the bottom, The Source profile tends to play in the upper section where some richness is exchanged for tension. Eric’s are in the center, the sweet spot for balanced fullness. Philosophically, Indigo Wine’s Spanish lot occupies that center space between modern movements of the last fifty years, where the hand in the cellar is measured, nothing of value is left to the pomace pile, and craft is never forsaken for dogma. Most practice organic and/or biodynamic farming. (Once I have more in-depth experiences with Indigo’s French wines, I’ll write about them.) Indigo Wine’s Spanish collection represents today’s voice that evolved over the last fifty years of cultural rebirth and renaissance in one of the world’s most exciting wine-producing countries. This April, The Source will start to bring to California Eric’s small winegrower portfolio from France, Spain, and Switzerland. I am thrilled by the opportunity to learn from and work with Eric, who shares a common bond with us at The Source in that he also built his company from scratch. I am also excited for our team and our California wine community to benefit from his crew of deeply experienced former sommeliers and now longtime importing colleagues. “People and places are the essence of what I do. Had I focused solely on monetary success, I would have retired years ago. When I add a new producer to my portfolio, the wines must say something unique about variety and place and something profound about the winemaker. Interesting people make interesting wines. They tend to work at the margins, rebel against convention, and doggedly follow their own path. They are thoughtful and hospitable, demanding and loyal, surprising and dependable. If I have to work harder to get attention for their efforts, I do this gladly because they're not just business partners but friends. “Late last year, I met Ted Vance. The instant and easy rapport that developed might have been from shared experience. Ted was born and raised in Montana, and I grew up in small-town North Carolina, but we feel genuinely at home in Europe. While I have Daphne to ground me, Ted has Andrea. Fundamentally, we share a deep connection to the winemakers we represent and the relentless curiosity that led to their discovery. With Ted, I feel the same excitement and possibility as some of my most talented winemakers, and through our shared commitment to people and places, I couldn’t be more confident in my new partnership with Ted Vance and The Source in bringing my Indigo Wine portfolio to California.” In London I was greeted by Eric and some of his team. I then surprised six of our Spanish growers, since they had no idea I was coming. I hadn’t seen them outside of the cellar and vineyard in events before (I avoid them like the plague), and they were bursting with enthusiasm. Our real purpose in going to London was to meet with Eric and taste the dozen or so of his growers that we would represent in California. Our small team of producers at the event made a strong showing among a carefully sorted high level of Spain’s top progressive producers in one small space. Eric’s range of Spanish wines was equally impressive and covered much more ground than our seven years of importing from the region. No surprise. Ahead of time, I calibrated my palate with growers from our portfolio before tasting Eric’s—a practice I regularly do before and during tasting new prospects to gauge them better. Setting the bar, Manuel Moldes (aka Chicho) and Iago Garrido’s Augalevada wines both showed spectacularly. And while Iago never seems convinced by his reds over his whites, they blew my mind, again: indeed of the most compelling reds of the tasting for their uniqueness, beauty, and delineation of fine nuances; the new labels are great, too. Similarly, Chicho’s were just as good as we expected. Manuel Moldes and Iago Garrido (Augalevada) In Rías Baixas, there is some unspoken internal hierarchy in the wine community. I know part of it is out of respect for the region’s trailblazers (same as other Galician regions), and each other. But we outsiders have more freedom to express opinions: Chicho is at the top of the heap. I adore and drink the top Rías Baixas growers’ wines every year, and in fluidity, detail, and spherical harmony few match his complete body of work; certain wines in another range do, but few demonstrate the same across the board. Each wine he puts to bottle seems as though he’s bet his life on it. Part of his progress is that he’s one of the most well-tasted growers I know in all of Europe, and has a clear vision and the tools to achieve his objectives. Our first imported wines, 2018s, were already in the upper division. Today, however, even his entry-level, Afelio, is tough for any Albariño to beat on balance. His reds now also find the mid-palate flesh they were short on when we first started. At the tasting was also Artuke, the most developed of the Rioja growers we represent. Arturo Miguel Blanco is well past the initial discovery phase and deep into the refinement of details. He’s middle-aged but has already achieved a certain level of mastery, similar to Chicho. But it’s the wines of the relative winegrowing newcomers from our portfolio at Viñateros that pleased me the most. The Rioja wines of José Gil and Javier Arizcuren, and Aseginolaza & Leunda’s Navarra range reached a new level. Javier’s reds were some of the most exhilarating in the whole tasting on full-flavored deliciousness, nuance and craft. An architect by trade (and famous for his designs in Rioja), in the last ten years he’s become an obsessive vineyard worker and cellar tinkerer, and his wines, many from recovered ancient vines at high altitudes, have found their voice. They went from a little loose but serious in the first wines with a bit much newer wood for my taste (sometimes necessary when increasing production with the desire to guarantee the hygiene of the wood in the cellar), to wine more sculpted by now more mature wood barrels, with intense joy and better-contained fullness. I tasted them after a few hours open, and the top of his range (wines we haven’t yet imported) delivered two of the best reds I tasted all day. Now to wines that are actually arriving. Wines arriving in California from Indigo Wine will be covered in greater detail in the marketplace with our sales team and support from Eric’s team, and sometimes Eric himself. The amount of knowledge Eric’s team has about their wines (and their similar fascination with geology’s relation to wine) and the most important wines of Europe is at the highest level of any importer. Many of the growers, as in the Jon-David Headrick Selections French roster, were sourced and are also managed directly by them. More on those producers to come. At the tasting next to Javier Arizcuren was José Gil, who, interestingly enough, already works with Eric Solomon in the rest of the US market. José is on a seriously fast track, as if he was born to do this the way Messi was to play fútbol. While Javier’s Riojas hit the mark of contemporary classic, José’s are equally delicious but flash more x-factor, a wildness of that northern Rhône garrigue with its lavender and purple flowers, thyme and other parched high-desert herbs framing the fruit. This year we’re getting a little more from José than usual, but only with his starter red. And with José awarded Tim Atkins’ 2021 “Young Winemaker of the Year,” and a big belief with big numbers to match from the Wine Advocate’s Luis Gutiérrez, it makes it even harder to parcel out his top wines. This leaves the range’s starter, 2021 Viñedos de San Vicente de la Sonsierra, the wine to focus on. It’s vinified and aged as the entire range with just short of a two-week fermentation (here about half stems included, all others destemmed), pumped over a couple times per day followed by a year in older 300-500L French oak barrels with sulfites only added at bottling. It’s 80% Tempranillo co-planted on large terraces between 1932-2017 with Garnacha Tinto and Blanco, and Viura, exposed in many directions on shallow calcareous sandstone bedrock and calcareous silt and sand topsoil at 510-620m. If you don’t try his top wines next to this one, you might think it’s one of them. The other 2021s are so small in quantity, it’s too much of a tease for a big presentation. Arriving are the elegant Viñedos En Labastida, a blend of 85% Tempranillo, 10% Garnacha, and 5% Viura from Labastida, a neighboring commune to Sonsierra; the potent and equally fine Parcela La Conoca from a 0.5-hectárea Tempranillo (and a little Viura) on the easternmost area of San Vicente de la Sonsierra Valley planted in 1967 on a northwest-exposed terrace of deep calcareous silt and clay topsoil on calcareous sandstone bedrock at 560m;  Parcela El Bardallo, a big-flavored Tempranillo co-planted with a little Viura, exposed northwest on sandstone and limestone with calcareous silt and sand topsoil at 540m. What some consider the most complete wine in the range, Parcela La Cancova “Camino de Ribas” comes from the Concova vineyard with Tempranillo (~60%), Garnacha Tinto (~40%) and a minuscule amount of Garnacha Blanca and Viura planted between 1892-2017 on northeast-facing calcareous bedrock with shallow sandy topsoil at 610 m. José’s parcela wines are extremely limited but a lucky few might be able to grab some. Don’t hesitate to ask. We will do our best to accommodate. While Javier and José are hitting big on the Rioja scene, Basque natives and environmental biologists by education and trade, Jon Aseginolaza and Pedro Leunda, are no longer quietly grabbing attention for their appellation-revitalizations in Navarra. Their wines in London sent a message as they pursue elegance over power and have made directional choices to either play on the lighter side with each specific cuvée or sometimes with a grander tune. What I like most about their choices is that they highlight Navarra as an undervalued and underutilized multi-talent with the possibility to create refined beasts and ethereal beauties from the same ancient and nearly forgotten Garnacha vines. From one vineyard on the south side to another could be more than an hour’s drive, they play in Navarra with Garnacha like Sonoma winemakers source Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from many corners of county. There are countless changes in terrain and climate as one moves across the appellation, especially in the north, passing through the desert and closer to the Bay of Biscay. Jon and Pedro Before we jump into the reds, I want to acknowledge that I made a mistake by not importing the new vintage of their white, Txuria. This old-vine Viura was absolutely one of the most compelling whites tasted in London. They found a great path and I hope they continue to follow it so we can get some next year—a perfect balance of reduction, finely etched framing and gorgeous, sharpening stone texture. Beautiful! What’s landing now are the reds that play more in the ethereal, high-toned domain than the darker, earthy, beast realm. All are in the 13.5% range, which is no easy task in today’s Navarra with its long, hot summer days, especially with ancient Garnacha vines whose grapes mature faster than the younger ones. The most ethereal and freshest of the bunch is from the sole young-vine wine in the range, Kauten. 50% whole clusters from 15-year-old Garnacha vines, soft-touch extraction, and five months in old French wood forged a gorgeously lifted, bright red-fruited aromatic wine with elegant graphite-like textures and sappy back palate finish. If there ever was a poundable Navarra red with serious quality trimming, this is it. The 100% whole-bunch, x-factor-heavy Matsanko is bright for a Tempranillo-dominated wine. More purple than red, it emits fragrant lavender with wild purple thyme blossoms and dark green leaves. The remaining blend of 10% Garnacha and 5% Viura adds to the already lightness of this wine from old, resurrected, dry-farmed bush vines grown on rocky calcareous clay soils at 410-490 meters. Taken from the same vineyard sources, is Cuvée, one of their principal blended wines loosely composed of 75% Garnacha, 20% Mazuelo (Cariñena), and 5% Tempranillo. It’s assertive, with the Mazuelo shouldering its way to the forefront with sweet sugarplum, black raspberry and exotic Persian mulberry. I don’t know how he does it, but give Pablo Soldavini a box of vitis vinifera grapes from anywhere and prepare yourself for a miracle. He started making wine in 2010, but it seems like he was born into it. Ollo de Sapo (Eye of the Toad), one of the famous gneiss rocks of Ribeira Sacra Pablo grew up in Argentina, a seven-hour drive south of Buenos Aires. He attended university for graphic design but it wasn’t for him. Instead, he hit the road. First France, then England, and into Castro Caldelas, a medieval town with a castle in the heart of Galicia’s Ribeira Sacra. It’s the birthplace of his grandfather who emigrated to Argentina in the 1930s—a fortunate move considering what was in store for Spain shortly thereafter. What was originally just a return to Pablo’s ancestral background spurred a romantic interest in wine that turned into his calling. Fully committed to his objectives, putting all his money into only smoke, drink, food, and his vineyards and cellar, today he lives humbly, like a forty-something-year-old overactive hermit, high up in the Ribeira Sacra in a desolate and largely empty town full of rundown houses and a church and cemetery in almost complete disrepair. His only full-time companion in his tiny ramshackle wood house atop a tiny rock-walled cellar is his cat. Bank funding in hand, last year Pablo began to build a new winery across the street in preparation for production from some old vineyards he’s worked back to health—very few of them Mencía vines, rather more historical indigenous varieties if one could even say such a thing; centuries-adapted-cultivars? And after being dragged around the last decade starting with the 2013 co-founding to his ultimate departure in 2018 from the now famous Ribeira Sacra producer, Fedellos do Couto, followed by a consultation gig for a misguided heavy metal rocker in Ribeira Sacra’s Amandi who bet his wine economics on a tree swing, and then Adega Saíñas in Riberas do Sil, Pablo has found his footing. The results are as good as expected, and the once-underutilized talent of Pablo Soldavini is no more. Fidgety, often overly anxious, he has irresistible cravings for smoke and drink and carne (he loves four-legged and winged animals but isn’t a fan of seafood—both Argentine cultural heritages, at least from his generation). With his perpetually vigneron-stained hands and whole-bunch-rarely-destemmed grooming, he’s mostly Dr. Jekyll and rarely Mr. Hyde. The man is generous and friendly and can’t sit still in the company of others—maybe not even when alone. But who can say? Two of the four wines this season from Pablo arrived in March and should be rested enough to give them a swirl in the marketplace in April. The two that come later are new: A Besta, the beast, a blend of mostly whole-cluster Sousón and Brancellao, and Lurpia, which means harpy (an inside joke that belies this beautiful wine), a pure, whole-cluster Brancellao with intoxicating qualities. They arrive this summer. I’ve already polished off numerous bottles of each but need to slow down or I’ll run out too soon. (2022) O Branco isn’t technically vintage-dated but rather is coded on the back label. It’s harvested from 80-year-old Albariño vines in the Rías Baixas subzone, Salnés, from a flat plot of granite bedrock and deep granite topsoil. It’s naturally fermented and aged for eight months in old 300 and 500-liter French oak. Unfiltered and unfined, it’s a sharp but full-bodied wine made in an atypical fashion compared to most Rías Baixas Albariños. The minuscule amount of sulfites is added only before bottling, lending a view into a more sulfur-free élevage from the heartland of Albariño. Critic and strong advocate of all the wines Pablo has touched over the years, Luis Gutiérrez describes the 2021 perfectly as having a “reductive and leesy nose,” and says it’s “austerity in a bottle.” There is fruit tucked in there, but it’s tertiary. The 2022 vintage carries the same feel but there’s more stuffing and flesh—a good step up. Not labeled for its appellation nor vintage, the (2022) Simple is a field blend of 30-80-year-old vines of Mencía, Garnacha Tintorera, Mouratón, Godello (white) and many other varieties grown in the subzone Ribeiras do Sil with many expositions on steep slopes of gneiss bedrock and sandy and loam topsoil at 400-500m. Naturally fermented with 50% whole clusters and infusion extraction for a week and then aged in steel, it’s also unfiltered and unfined. It may seem simple at the start, but layer after layer emerges when given time to properly open. 2021 was difficult due to the cold year and problems with mildew. Like O Branco, the 2022 is much fuller and giving on fruit. Spain’s Michelin-starred restaurant count is just short of two hundred and fifty, with thirteen holding three stars. And while its total is only a little more than a third of France’s and more than half of Japan’s, it still has more than the US, despite having only 15% of the population of The States. Germany and Italy are the only other countries to have more than Spain, and both have many millions more people. Michelin-starred restaurants haven’t always been a big deal for Spain (after all, it’s a French concept), but one Catalan trailblazing restaurant that’s now a museum, elBulli, led by the Ferran and Albert Adrià, changed the face of Spain’s global restaurant position and was the first one fully committed dive into molecular gastronomy, worldwide. While Michelin-starred restaurants don’t have much pull in the US over the market’s fine wine interests, they remain the primary measuring stick for Spain’s growers and their achievements. Real estate on lists for these limited-seat restaurants is hard to get (except for wines with built-in investment value), especially with Spain’s embrace of international wines more than most other major European wine-producing countries. To make the cut, you must already have the world’s attention, or you must be doing something unique and at a high level. Pedro Méndez doesn’t yet have the world’s attention, but he’s well represented in Spain’s top culinary destinations, including dozens of Michelin-starred spots throughout the country, including País Vasco’s three-star Arzak, an institution that landed its first star in 1974. Pedro’s breakthrough into Spain’s top spots started with his reds—50-70-year-old Mencía and Caíño Tinto vines, with the former a peculiar variety for the appellation, especially with its enviable vine age. With just over 1000 bottles produced of each of the two reds, more than half of them are sold to Spanish Michelin-starred restaurants, and most of the rest to top local restaurants. This says something, no? We’re lucky to import a quarter of Pedro’s production of reds along with a quarter of his micro-production, ancient-vine Albariños. It’s not much wine, but we’ll take them. I understand Pedro’s wines’ place in Michelin restaurants. Both red and white perform extraordinarily well with more time open (one micro-dose of oxygen every ten or fifteen minutes makes them sing after an hour), but the reds glide with light textures with unique finesse and balance of mineral, metal, tea notes, soft fruits, and salivating salty oceanic freshness. After a few hours, they’re gorgeously refined and attractive. On the second day, they feel like they’re still on their first hour. They’re also an adventure for most of us into the unknown. The aromatically powerful and classic Galician Atlantic red, Viruxe is entirely Mencía from a single vintage, while the more refined but edgy Xuntanza, is a blend of Mencía and Caíño Tinto, from two vintages… I never thought a still wine blend of two different vintages would interest me, let alone result in such a compelling wine. But it did, and I’m more than ok with it. It’s the wine’s magic. Both come from a granite sand vineyard in Meaño four kilometers from the ocean. Both are whole-bunch fermented for 20 days in steel and aged nine months in old barrels. Neither are fined or filtered. On first taste, the 2021 Viruxe delivers classic Rías Baixas red wine aromas of chestnut, austere red fruits, pomegranate, sour cherry, bay leaf, and pungent mineral and metal notes. Because of its strong natural snap, I wouldn’t guess it to be 100% Mencía in a blind tasting. (I admit I struggle with Mencía, though Pedro’s is like a ray of light for me. I find a lot of the top examples overrated. In places like Ribeira Sacra, for example, most other indigenous/historic varieties, or combinations of them, would make a more compelling wine on the same dirt. However, there are a lot of great old-vine Mencía around that should live out their days of production before replanting.) Viruxe, which means “fresh wind,” is aromatically intense but deceptive, as the palate delivers the variety’s naturally gentle touch. Equally gulpable as it is intellectually stimulating, Viruxe alone presents a compelling argument for Mencía as a reasonable Rías Baixas red grape alternative to some of the more aggressive reds of the commune. It lacks naturally high acidity and is usually acidified or blended with other grapes endowed with massive acidity, like Caíño. But here it doesn’t need the unnatural boost or the blend, especially when harvested from such old vines grown on granite and a finishing alcohol of 11%. In Rías Baixas, this is perhaps the least ornery and easiest, pleasure-filled, aromatic and serious red I’ve had from Salnés. Indeed, others deliver a worthwhile experience and are extremely well made, like those of Manuel Moldes, but few are so inviting and gentle as Pedro’s. In a side-by-side two-day comparison next to Xuntanza, it doesn’t evolve as much with time open but after more than a half hour of micro-pours, it finds its footing and lifts off. Probably like you, I haven’t put much serious contemplation into mixed-vintage still wines, nor have I wanted to. But Pedro’s choice was clever because the result is a beautiful Salnés Valley red. I’m starting to notice mixed-vintage blends more now, but perhaps they’ve been around more than I thought. Xuntanza, meaning “union,” is a blend of equal parts 2020 Caíño Tinto and 2021 Mencía. Initially, it shares the same aromatic profile as Viruxe, except that it’s mellower and less effusive, more analog if Viruxe is a little more digital. The palate is more stern and tense (Caíño effect) but finishes with salivating mineral strength in the front palate and a suave back palate despite its Caíño-charged acidity. Like many wines with upfront acidity, the first glass seems like a different wine than the second. Its aromatic austerity softens quickly and makes way for more spice, orange peel, pomegranate, and rhubarb. With each swirl flows more delicate aromas while the palate continues with sharp textures and a slight sting but finishes gently. Half an hour in, it softens and begins to ripple like a crystal-clear lake disturbed by the first drops of rain. Pedro’s Albariño collection is from the Salnés Valley hamlet, Meaño. If I were to draw a comparison to Pedro’s wines and our other growers in Rías Baixas, I’d say they’re more powerful than those of Manuel Moldes and, perhaps of equal power to Xesteiriña, but are more contained and classically styled than the latter. Pedro’s Albariños have broad shoulders, a compact core and megathrust. This may be partly due to the older average vine age of his many parcels, and, in some cases, deeper topsoil. Moldes’ cru Albariños are on schist, with his Afelio on the mostly granite. Xesteiriña harvests from a single plot of extremely hard metamorphic rock with almost no topsoil. The bedrock is somewhere between medium- to high-grade metamorphic rock: some looks like gneiss while others look like schist. Xesteiriña’s rock type is probably the rarest of all in Salnés with vineyards planted. Each of Pedro's cuvées are staggered releases based on their more optimal drinking window. The eponymous label, “Pedro Mendez,” is the earliest, along with the previous season’s As Abeleiras, and the year before that one, Tresvellas. All three vintages arriving, 2020, 2021, and 2022, are stellar Albariño years, which makes this trio particularly exciting. None of Pedro’s wines conform to the appellation Rías Baixas, therefore none bear the vintage date or grape name (though coded at the bottom as a Lot). These two non-conforming label elements are common in Galicia. Formerly labeled as Sen Etiqueta, the (2022) Pedro Mendez “Viño Branco do Val” (Albariño) lays down the gauntlet as the first wine to taste in the three together. It’s so delicious on the first take, that it’s hard to want to move on. It reminds me of Arnaud Lambert’s Saumur “Midi” with its power over your ability to restrain and drink slowly. It captures the elegance of sandy granite soils, salty ocean breeze rim, sweet Meyer lemon, sweetened juicy lime, honeysuckle, and agave—like a wine margherita (my Achilles’ heel of cocktails, which I rarely partake in nowadays). Forget the oysters and jump straight into salty clams, sweet Santa Barbara ridgeback prawns, and spiny lobster. Though dry, the sweet elements and effusive aromas bring great lift to this fluid and undeniably delicious wine. It’s a firecracker of a starter. The (2021) As Abeleiras “Viño branco de parcela” (Albariño) is released a year after the entry-level Albariño and comes from a single parcela planted in 1993 by a very young Pedro and his father. It sits at 100 meters altitude, also on granite soil. While the 2019 version was raised in steel, this year spent time in old French oak barrels. (2020 wasn’t up to Pedro’s standard, so it wasn’t bottled alone.) While the other two Albariños have a broad band of expressions and roundness due to the diversity of the many vineyard parcels in each wine, this single vineyard’s uniqueness offers a more vertical than horizontal experience. While the other two would be great for a bigger party of people because they jump into the mosh pit and start knocking people out on the first swing, As Abeleiras is initially more snug and better suited for a two-person tango. While the others are wonderful in their way, this is the thinker, the wine to observe and admire for its singularity, focused austerity, and tight, chalky and grippy texture. It’s a minerally beam of light. The others are mineral bombs. I first tasted (2020) Tresvellas “Viño Branco de Viñedos Históricos” (Albariño) in Pedro’s arctic-cold cellar on a rainy and freezing November day. It was almost impossible to warm up and to break the ice shell on the wine. Cold Albariño, no matter how good, doesn’t pair well with a runny nose, numb face, and icy fingers and toes. But in the comfort of my apartment overlooking the Lima Valley on a sunny winterish day in March, it’s different; I’m different. This wine is a gorgeous beast! And when you see the vines it springs from, you know the description is apt. They’re small trees! Their average age is well over a hundred years, and you feel it in the wine. With concentration, depth, and restraint, the warm and well-worked Tresvellas (Three Old Ladies) fills the glass. All the varietal’s classic high-toned lemony notes went to full preserves: sweet, salty, acidic, zest oil and the right amount of bitter pith. The color is between straw and gold leaf, and it tastes expensive. The three tree groves sit at 10, 50 and 130 meters altitude in Meaño on granite bedrock and granite sand and gravel on wide, relatively flat terraces. (In these parts, extreme slopes are less important than other viticultural areas with clay or limestone because water passes through granite soils quickly.) And, Meaño has a lot of the earliest part of the day out of the summer sun because it’s tucked down in a little valley with the highest parts on the south and southeast of the vines. It’s also protected in the north from the wind, which gives that extra body pump in an already naturally pumped wine. In the cellar, it’s naturally fermented and aged in old French oak until the next season’s wine is ready to go into the same barrel.

Newsletter April 2025 Diego Collarte, Cume do Avia, Ribeiro Is there anything but strange happenings lately? The last decade produced some memorable moments for all of us as the wine import business, restaurants and retailers have constantly teetered between epic meltdowns and nearly irreparable disasters. Nothing has been easy and current events keep throwing more wrenches into the works. So then, what do you get when you cross a warm winter, a warm spring, and a hot summer with numerous heat waves recording the hottest year in Europe on record? Indeed, not only the sweaty Catalan gasp of Insuportable!, but also great white wines. Yeah, that happened–some good news. I posed the question everywhere on my warp-speed winter wine tour with Remy, our New York captain, across six countries where makers were selling their 2022s. As I suspected, most of them credited the 2021 season for providing the vines with greater resistance to 2022’s solar beatdown. And after a series of hot summers, Mother Nature struck back in 2021, shut out the sun, and replenished the well. It was also a month-long never-ending feast for mildew, to the point where growers actually began to miss the relentless summer sun. But the pump was primed, and 2022 delivered—not only on quantity but also with quality. I love exfoliating, tenderizing, vibrating and borderline abusive acidity and I expected many 2022 European white wines to be a little flat, which is typical in hot years. Instead, there’s thrust and energy alongside a sun-kissed fruit profile and many aren’t just good, they’re excellent. For a lot of growers, the crop was bigger, which helped reduce the high concentration most common in balmy vintages and also made up for the losses of 2021. As I write this segment, I’m sipping on Vincent Bergeron’s 2022 ‘Matin, Midi, et Soir’ Chenin Blanc from Montlouis-sur-Loire, which will hopefully arrive at the end of April without a 200% tax. Each new pour picks up momentum and tension, increments of cooler and cooler freshness. While tasting his 2022s out of barrel, I couldn’t read them well—maybe I was too in my head about what I expected from the hot season. But across our Northern European white wine territory, from Austria to Galicia, makers were met with success—with few exceptions. Because of their deeply embedded location inside Europe’s continental climate influence, our Austrian and German growers were the true test. Of all grapes, dry Riesling is most prone to fall flat when the vines are overheated. They remain complex, at least by definition, but their libido goes … well, a little limp. The 2022 Rieslings of Wechsler, Malat, Tegernseerhof, Veyder-Malberg, and Muthenthaler? Energy-filled, with surprising torque. So are the Austrians’ Grüner Veltliners. Our two Chablis growers, Christophe and Collet pulled it off. Few anywhere are salty shredders like the Val do Salnés 2022 Albariños, which many growers there consider their best vintage in years. So far, I’m enjoying these longboarding 2022s, soul surfing in the diffused rays of a low winter sun. There are some great reds, too. In continental areas, the balance is still intact, but the fruit is juicier and the wines stouter. But growers who’ve recently moved from power toward a gentler approach played well in 2022. It’s a vintage with the potential to create bruisers, but so far with our growers, it’s loads of purity and the unmistakable echo of their terroirs. Dave Fletcher, our Barbaresco grower (available in select markets), described the 2022 fruit as the most immaculate of his career. It’s not that they’re necessarily perfect in profile (perhaps missing some floral and brighter red tones), but the clusters in hand were without imperfection. And, like the top-quality 2022 Val do Salnés Albariños, the reds of Galicia hit their highest notes. They are ideal examples to represent this region’s potential for reds. The fruit and charm are more on display than the typically pronounced angles, squares, and jolts of metal and mineral from their rock-and-roll terroirs. Unofficial port authority, Salerno 2018 I hope you’re not like me—weaned on Côte d’Or, which carved my preferences in stone and sometimes led to my donning a pair of blinders. Enmeshed nostalgia for our past influences is a strong default, especially when challenged by the enormity of the constant and rapidly accelerating variations in the wine world’s evolution. It captured my primitive wine mind early, narrowed my focus, and became the benchmark to which I compare every other wine on the planet. It hit the bullseye, and everything else landed in the outer rings. And I remain as guilty at times of regressing as anyone, though I tell myself that at least Côte d’Or wasn’t a bad place to backslide into. “Burgundy has the advantage of a clear, direct appeal, immediately pleasing and easy to comprehend on a primary level.” -A.J. Liebling, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, 1959. My Côte d’Or-influenced bias leaned more toward red than white. New oak notes in the forefront have never been my inclination, but the older more structured Côte d’Or reds seemed to digest it well. Now, gargantuanly fruity reds in hot years still have the same levels of new oak and taste like either a slightly sloppy smash-burgundy or a material display of wealth rather than of cultural and intellectual value—a surface allure of riches, to be paraded to a table of those who often lack appreciation for a wine’s relevance–the art of the thing. Malat cellar, Kremstal Few whites in the world, if any, wear woody bling better than Chardonnay from the Côte d’Or, but my preference for neutral aging vessels (mostly older wood barrels or concrete rather than steel) was yet another product of my wine youth. In the late 90s Austrian wines (for me, more Riesling than Grüner Veltliner) became the next thing and influenced me greatly. More neutral aging vessels on whites illuminates their directness and highlights their terroir. Between the two early influencers of red and white, that of the more neutral vessel with white wines remains closest. Below in the section, “France Part Two: North Central,” you will find more information about two of our most important new arrivals this month from two organically certified farmers and growers. First are Jean Collet’s 2022 Chablis Premier Crus and Grand Crus. In my experience, Collet is one of the most reliable domaines in Chablis for warmer seasons. The wines migrate from cooler years that are unmistakably classic, and in the warmer years, they’re like a marriage of Chablis’ nuances with Côte d’Or’ and Mâconnais’ sunnier fruit qualities. While in warm years Chardonnay can be a bore, Collet’s ‘22s still express their origins and will be quite crowd-pleasing for a typical restaurant guest, more than those who love a Chablis with a sharper edge.  The most successful regions of 2022 inside our collection of whites are those of Galicia, specifically Rías Baixas and Ribeiro. The 2022 Val do Salnés Albariños of Manuel Moldes and Pedro Méndez are undoubtedly the best we’ve experienced from them. Manuel (Chicho) describes it as his best year ever, and those who enjoyed his 2022 Albariño ‘Afelio’ and Pedro’s 2022 starter Albariño already know what’s coming with the imminent arrival of their parcela selections. Manuel Moldes and an ancient Albariño vine in “Peai” The 2022 Albariños arriving from Manuel Moldes are A Capela de Aios, a wine made from 70-80-year-old vines on severely decomposed ancient, Pangean-era schist with a rich topsoil, Peai, another Albariño on schist but harder bedrock than A Capela de Aios and similar topsoil, and As Dunas from schist-derived beach sand. Each is raised in old 500-600 L French oak and they’re quite different. As Dunas finds a unique set of aromatic characteristics unlike any other Albariños in the region (except those of Rodrigo Méndez and Raul Pérez, who bottle two different wines, one under Forjas del Salnés and Rodrigo Mendez’s eponymous label) and remarkably powerful for a wine from beach-like sand. Peai, pronounced P.I., like Magnum P.I., might be the most structured of the bunch, a powerhouse puncher with a dense nucleus and an intensely salty mineral orbit. A Capela de Aios is the foundational wine of the bodega—the first of his Albariños from schist, and one of the first in the region to acknowledge its geological difference—a true anomaly in this granite-dominated region. In the years past, it was heavier and richer; a gilded but deeply complex and slightly baroque wine. But in 2021, there was a change, a finer line drawn in its sandy-loam schist soil. The 2021 lit the way, but the 2022 walked the path up to this vineyard’s zenith, like a star at the peak of its nuclear fusion—harmony is now in perfect equilibrium. While As Dunas and Peai have opposing qualities, Chicho’s ‘22 A Capela de Aios combines their best qualities and finds its newest level. It may be the most compelling young wine I’ve had from him, which also makes it perhaps the most compelling and complete young Albariño I’ve ever had. Also arriving from Moldes is his 2023 Albariño ‘Afelio.’ 2023 was another successful year with a slower growing season. Each year after the new wines are buttoned up for aging, my wife and I meet up with Chicho and his wife, Silvia, and he says the same thing no matter the season: “A really difficult vintage but I am very happy with the results.” Afelio is Chicho’s wine grown almost entirely on granite soils. It’s highly mineral but more fluid compared to his three parcela wines on schist that often pack a tighter punch. Most of this wine comes from further north of the schist outcrop just north of Sanxenxo. In 2018, he and I discussed raising more wine in older barrels, and he’s now incorporating new large foudres. 2022 was a great year for Galician reds, too. There’s nothing more that Rías Baixas needs than a consistent season with some sun, warm daytime temperatures and the ocean-cold nights to ripen their reds to beyond a bearable pitch. A 50-50 blend of Caíño Tinto and Espadeiro from old vines (some pre-phylloxera), the 2022 Acios Mouro’s summer and fall red fruit profile is as bright as usual but softer and more generously juicy to balance its light balsamic notes and high acidity—a natural characteristic not only spurred by the cooler climate but the extremely high acid of these two varieties. Acios Mouros has become a cult favorite for those who know it, but it might be better served by leaving it for professionals and adventurers who like an intense experience. If you’re looking for a simply relaxing moment with a glass of red, this probably won’t be your copa de vino. Chicho’s wines move out of our warehouse like we’re having a fire sale, so if you are interested, please let us know soon. Pedro Méndez and an ancient Albariño vine for ‘Tresvellas’ Dancing around the 2022s are two new arrivals from Pedro Méndez. Both are unofficial non-D.O. wines made entirely from Albariño in the Rías Baixas Val do Salnés area of Meaño, the historical viticultural center of Val do Salnés. The 2023 Pedro Méndez ‘Viño Branco do Val’ eponymous label is a fabulous follow-up to the double-take inducing ‘22 that took everyone by force and charm. 2023 is tighter in some respects and narrows more quickly to a more minerally point. (But don’t forget that if you’ve recently had the 2022, this 2023 with a year less in bottle will be more piercing until it settles in a bit further.) It’s harvested from a broad collection of small parcels in Meaño, from young to ancient vines, giving it a wide range of complexities. It sneaks in just under the limit for by-the-glass programs but will deliver on expectations for that upper-tier price. Liquid gold and platinum Albariño is bottled up in the 2021 Tresvellas ‘Viño Branco de Viñedos Historicos.’ Continuing its winning streak after the ‘19 and ‘20 versions from these ancient vines that look more like trees, each of these 100-year-old-plus vines (with a few estimated to be around 200 years old) were able to maintain their root systems free of the aphid due to their silty and finely sandy soil grain. Many for this wine are next to a small creek at the bottom of the hill on super fine silt, and are used as budwood for all new plantings in that area—they are not only the Tresvellas (Three Old Ladies), they’re the mothers of almost every young Albariño vine around them. Another borrow from a previous newsletter, as this wine doesn’t miss a beat from the earlier versions: “With concentration, depth, and restraint, the warm and well-worked Tresvellas fills the glass. All the varietal’s classic high-toned lemony notes went to full preserves: sweet, salty, acidic, zest oil and the right amount of bitter pith. The color is between straw and gold leaf and it tastes expensive.” This is one of Rías Baixas’ most triumphant bottlings, and one not to be missed. Though stout to the core, it’s also generous and filled with the joy of its ancient mothers surrounded by their thriving babies. Iago Garrido, Augalevada From serious to the most serious of our Galician growers, former professional Spanish futboller turned virtual modern-day Cistercian cellar monk, Augalevada’s Iago Garrido recentered his athletic discipline from the highest level of sport to natural viticulture and precision cellar work. Established by Benedictine monks in 889 A.D., the Monasterio de San Claudio de Ribeiro is perhaps Galicia’s most historic viticultural center from the Middle Ages. Iago’s proprietary vines are a few kilometers to the east on a sliver of granitic land carved out into an amphitheater facing the sun where vines were first probably planted more than a thousand years ago. Today, those vines “replanted” again between 2008 and 2010, and grafted over a few times to varieties that he gravitated toward as his ideas for the kind of wines he wanted to make, crystallized. Fully committed to biodynamic farming since the first plantation, he wed himself to Treixadura, a variety that produces soft and agreeable white-fruited and herbaceous wines, but eventually left her for a much racier pair, Lado and Agudelo—the latter also known as Chenin Blanc (first identified by a Spanish ampelographer exactly a hundred years ago this year, though it’s believed to have been brought in centuries earlier). This duo comprises the new 50-50 blend of his 2022 ‘Ollos de Roque,’ (Eyes of Roque, Iago’s son). But first, we have to introduce you to the 2021 ‘Ollos de Roque,’ a blend of the gently structured Treixadura balanced with the extremely high acid, minerally-dense varieties, Lado and Agudelo. This flor-influenced, old oak and amphora wine is Iago’s flagship. His other white from Ribeiro, 2022 ‘Ollos Branco,’ is a blend of 15-50-year-old Treixadura, Albariño and Godello from organically farmed vineyard of Manolo de Traveso and other parcels in the three unofficial Ribeiro subzones Arnoia, Avia, and Miño. This is the right introduction to Iago’s Neil Gaiman-like wine universe where everything is fascinating and far from typical. All his wines up to this release are under the influence of flor, which was naturally discovered on his property when he buried an amphora with wine out in his granite terraces. It’s a striking wine filled with moments of almost unbearable tension, liberation and euphoria. One needs a meditative journey to uncover all its secrets that evolve from one sip to the next. It’s a brilliant wine, though perhaps too Lynch and Kandinsky for the common drinker. Out of Ribeiro and into Monterrei, one of Galicia’s D.O.s furthest to the southeast and perhaps its warmest, is Iago’s 2022 ‘Areas de Rei.’ A play on words, it means “king’s areas,” but also “areas” in Gallego means sand (in this case, sand from granite), and Rei, as in Monter-Rei. It’s sourced from 80-year-old vines on granite at altitudes exceeding 450m. A strange name for a grape, Dona Branca can almost always produce innocuous, perfumy white wine with low acidity. But put her in the hands of a wild man with a brain that works overtime outside the box, and something altogether different arrives. It’s hard to describe such wines, but let’s say it’s mildly floral, spare in fruit but white fruited, salty for days, earthy, spicy and utterly savory. It’s a wine that mystifies me—not for the first time with Iago’s wines—and there is certainly a place for it on the right menus. The most electrically charged in his high-voltage range is yet another Albariño in our collection of five growers who make the stuff.  2022 Val do Salnés Albariño “Parcela Eiravedra” comes from 60-year-old Albariño vines just three kilometers from the ocean in the Val do Salnés. This is Luke’s Return of the Jedi green lightsaber in liquid form, a bottle of aurora borealis; it’s mean to some and absolute glory to others–and I’m one of those others. Older vintages are denser and almost offensive to some who don’t appreciate the high voltage. In recent years, he found a way to calm the current and make it play nice. It’s a beauty, and one of the great representations of salty, minerally and high-strung Albariños, though it’s made in a cellar far far away from its roots. I love Iago’s whites, but I am a bigger sucker for his reds. He’s never as proud of them as he is for his whites, and I don’t understand this. I’m not sure what he’s searching for, but I keep finding what I want. They’re so fresh and vibrant, clean yet character-filled, more analog than the usual digital waveform Galician reds, with thin frames but a solid smack of affection. The 2022 ‘Ollos’ Tinto and 2022 ‘Ollos de Maia’ (named after his daughter, Maia) have found a new level. The differences aren’t so great, but Ollos Tinto is a blend of young and old vines of Caiño Longo, Brancellao, Espadeiro and Sousón from organic and sustainably farmed vineyards on granite and gneiss, and Ollos de Maia is a blend of 15-year-old, biodynamically farmed vines of 45% Caiño Longo, 45% Brancellao, and 10% Caíño da Terra, from the unofficial Miño subzone on granite. The whole-cluster management may have been the biggest factor, at least outside of learning how to do things better each year—this guy’s a fast learner. It went from fully destemmed in 2018 (which I also adored, as I drank at least three cases, maybe four over a few months—no exaggeration), to 2019 partial whole cluster, then to 100% whole cluster in 2020, and now to about one-third in 2022. During those 100% whole-cluster years, the wines needed more time once open to find their footing. We spoke about this subject at length in 2021 on our first visit after the borders reopened as we tasted the 2020s. I explained that I was worried about clipping the fruit with too much whole bunch; in this part of the world, fruit is a needed asset that doesn’t always come easily with these indigenous red varieties (not including Mencía) that tend to overload on metal, mineral, earth and flower. They are naturally intense channelers of the region’s hardcore acid bedrock and topsoil that often seem to overdose their wines with minerally and metallic angles. But this year he nailed it. Everything is in place: fruit, freshness, authenticity, and the coming together of the seventeen years of the Camino de Iago. For someone who rarely seems satisfied with his work, even when it’s extraordinary, the question is, where will he go next? We arrive at the last of this month’s 2022 white wine act. And what a way to finish the story of the white wines with the arrival of Katharina Wechsler’s 2022 Westhofen Riesling Grand Crus, Kirchspiel, and Morstein, as well as Katharina’s monopole cru in between, Benn, among others. I hoped Europe’s hottest year on record would be as gentle to the vines here in the Rheinhessen as it was elsewhere. Same story: 2021 filled the well and helped the vines maintain their resilience through a scorcher, yielding a collection of superb dry Rieslings with unexpectedly strong punching power. Even Katharina’s 2022 Riesling Trocken, the starter in her range, is an especially powerful wine. Of course, many of the areas with limestone, a rock with good water retention, and clay, were well advantaged over those regions with sandier soils that had a harder time fending off the heat and protecting the grapes. Benn, the family’s tiny monopole vineyard site, has perhaps the most diverse plantations of all her vineyard parcels. The warmest of Katharina’s three important crus, it’s composed mostly of loess topsoil in the lower sections that sit as low as 120m, and limestone in the upper part, peaking around 160m. Quality Riesling thrives with suffering vines, which is why much of the non-Riesling vines are planted in the lower sections. Its 50-year-old Riesling vines, particularly those used for Wechsler’s top-flight trocken bottling, are planted in limestone bedrock and limestone and loess topsoil toward the top, not too far away from the bottom of Morstein. Benn produces a substantial Riesling that expresses impressive moments, especially with more time in the glass. When the others shine so brightly in their specific ways, Benn has been upfront but is somehow still a slower burn. Katharina Wechsler, photo credit to her husband, Manu Kirchspiel is a great vineyard and screams its grand cru status as soon as it’s opened, especially the 2022. It’s always readier out of the gates—often in the range of other growers—and for many reasons. Shaped like an amphitheater facing the Rhine River (though still roughly five miles away) with its southeastern exposure an average of around a thirty percent gradient, its bedrock and topsoil is composed of clay marls, limestone and loess. It’s a warmer site than Morstein because of its lower altitude (between 140m-180m) along with the curvature of the hillside that allows it to maintain greater warmth inside this small but sheltering topographical feature from cold westerly winds. Katharina has three different parcels in this large vineyard with reasonably good separation, giving the resulting wines a broader range of complexity and greater balance. Morstein, Rheinhessen’s juggernaut limestone-based dry Riesling vineyard is—even with vines only replanted in 2012—the undisputed big boy in Katharina’s dry Riesling range. Katharina’s Morstein vines are massale selections from the Mosel and have smaller, looser clusters with naturally low yields, even from the young vines. A mere pup by the standard of vine age, Katharina’s Morstein is formidable. And while it’s not usually as flashy out of the gates as Kirchspiel, it picks up serious power and expansive complexities that know no end. Like many of the world’s great wines, Morstein is no rapid takeoff F-15 fighter jet with instant supersonic speeds, it’s a rocket ship with a slow initial takeoff and a steady climb that reaches 17,000 mph before entering orbit. The topsoil is known as terra fusca (black earth), a soil matrix of heavy brown clay. Its low to medium topsoil depth (by vinous standards), combined with limestone fragments from the underlying bedrock makes its ability for water storage more limited than Katharina’s other main sites. Other 2022 wines arriving from Katharina start with her mid-tier dry Riesling, Kalk (formerly labeled Westhofen Trocken), a wine entirely composed of the younger vines of Kirchspiel, making it a fabulous deal! And the greatest deal in the bunch, the Riesling Trocken is about to arrive, which also benefits from a large percentage of Kirchspiel fruit. And finally, in the range of dry white wines, her Scheurebe Trocken, made in a classic way, and the Scheurebe Fehlfarbe, an orange wine. Lastly, but often first in my summer wine line, the Kirchspiel Kabinett, one I begged her to make and with which I’m now completely obsessed. It’s a wealth of riches from Wechsler at unbelievably fair prices for such talented terroirs. Remy Giannico and Jean Delunay, an old master of Bourgueil, Domaine de la Lande Only thirty kilometers east of Saumur, Bourgueil feels so much farther away. Maybe going into flat lands after Saumur’s limestone perches over the river with troglodyte dwellings and limestone mansions, ornate pasty white tuffeau châteaux surrounded by residences built with the same white stone, and the absurdly beautiful, overindulgent churches (like the hemispherical-domed Notre Dame des Ardilliers, scrunched between the bluffs and river) with their glistening gray slate roofs hued green-gold with the same lichen found on the region’s vines. The majesty of Saumur’s inspired buildings seems to descend into Bourgueil’s more serviceable and industrial buildings on the north side of the Loire. But once inside its vineyards, Bourgueil’s are just as exciting as Saumur. That is to say, they don’t look like they would render wines that would send a shiver of excitement down your spine or make your hair stand on end. But if the wines couldn’t, those 12th-century Cistercian monks would’ve split faster than it took them to plant and wait a few years to taste their first few harvests. But like many of the world’s unassuming vineyard sites that generate life-changing wines, you gotta go to where the root meets the rock. Those clever monks knew the magic of Bourgueil started mid-slope and continued farther up into the clay-rich rocky topsoil and limestone bedrock not too far underneath. Bourgueil has long been overshadowed by its neighbor, Chinon (at least in the US market). Maybe because it’s easier to pronounce? The word is more guttural than Chinon, which somehow sounds more noble, even if its name originates from the word, Canetum, which means swampy area. Maybe Bourgueil would be more accessible if they left it to its Latin origin, Burgus, or even when that evolved to Burgolium before Bourgueil. They got the Bourg part right, that’s easy. But the last syllable with all those vowels is tough for the back of the throat of English speakers. Maybe it’s Chinon’s dark yet romantic connection to Jeanne d’Arc? The Saumur-esque reemergence of magnificent ancient buildings overlooking a river, like the Château de Chinon, with even more charming residences than in Saumur? Maybe it’s the wine? Perhaps Bourgueil is viewed as more rustic than the typical Chinon, but this doesn’t seem plausible to me … On a mostly contiguous slope on the north side of the Loire River, the landscape of Bourgueil and Saint-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil (SNdB) is shaped much like parts of the Côte d’Or, or high quality Champagne spots. Chinon is more topographically diverse and mostly former marshland sandwiched between the Loire and Vienne like Montlouis-sur-Loire’s vineyards are between the Loire and Cher. Perhaps it’s a matter of more gravelly and sandy sites in Chinon? I don’t know, but Bourgueil’s wines have great potential and deliver on the authenticity of terroir as strongly as anywhere in France. And perhaps more growers here are committed to a more classical style, which seems to be coming around again. After an evening tasting and dinner that included his spectacular new release of Arnaud Lambert’s 2023 Saumur “Midi” (formerly known as Clos du Midi) arriving in California this April, Remy and I left Arnaud’s, we headed east toward Touraine and into Bourgueil to Domaine de la Lande. There we met with François Delaunay and his kids, Pauline and Thomas, and his father, Jean, a charming well-aged vigneron responsible for crafting some of the greatest old Cabernet Franc I’ve ever had the pleasure to drink. François Delunay, a young master of Bourgueil Because we were so tight on time, and I didn’t expect that Remy could sell the wines in New York, we had a quick tasting of their precisely crafted and wonderfully expressive new releases. We then went straight to their organically farmed vineyards (certified since 2013 under François’ direction) and, despite running late, were enticed into their limestone lair for my third round of extraordinary old bottles that dated back to the 60s. In a past newsletter, I wrote about my experience with their old wines and how I managed to procure four cases back to the earliest part of the 1980s, when Jean made all the wines. There wasn’t even close to a single dud in the entire bunch and it was by far the greatest batch of old wines I’ve ever purchased from any domaine, the prices ranging between that of a good sandwich and a three-course lunch menu at a decent bistro while they all delivered a long-drawn-out Michelin experience of constantly evolving vinous courses. 2 pm is already too late for lunch in France. But we had skipped breakfast, and I couldn’t drag Remy to the next appointment hangry. We had no choice but to grab a grocery store sandwich, even though I knew being late for lunch in France was a bad idea. Those stale and tuffeu-white sandwiches with a paper-thin, salty, reddish cross-section of animal lacked nourishment. They only served to bloat and balance us out a little after our undeserved and illuminating rarities cellar tasting with the Delaunay family. The Delaunay’s unexpectedly offered us the opportunity to represent their work in the entirety of the United States, and I knew everyone needed to be introduced to these wines. Their wines are as honest and pure as any found in all “wines of place” inside France. And most of the time, in the middle of your wine discoveries, don’t you want at the very least an honest wine? Brutally honest, or even just brutal? So long as it’s true? It’s easy to feel cheated with wines that lost their identity through too much tinkering. Like they’ve cheated you, cheated themselves, cheated their terroir. You won’t find that in anything coming from the Delaunay family. Was ‘sur-Loire’ really necessary? Montlouis alone sounds noteworthy; regal, even Royal: Mountain of Louis! Now that carries weight! But Mount Louis on the Loire? No. Would Volnay-sur-Saône sound like a glorious terroir? A name says it’s only as good as a secondary appellation … Paulliac-sur-Gironde? Unclassified swill … Cornas-sur-Rhône? Cheap! Montlouis’ hyphens and dead-weight words hold it back! Vouvray? Two syllables. Clean—like a sword unsheathing from a metal scabbard. Or, a challenge to a duel, “Tu as insulté mon honneur! Je demande un Vouvray !!” Well, it turns out that this was actually said in a celebrated French restaurant by a nobleman after they had sold out of Vouvray, and Montlouis-sur-Loire was offered in its place … With or without Sur-Loire, Montlouis is indeed old but these days it’s a newish frontier with a second generational wave of boutique growers rising in the ranks of quality for Chenin Blanc. The natural wine movement sparked it, and what better appellation to spawn a group of rebels to challenge the establishment across the river in Vouvray. It may be Touraine’s mirror of Saumur as an overlooked appellation creating unexpected waves. Interestingly, I recently received a message from Arnaud Lambert asking for me to write a letter—which I did—in support of the Saumur growers application for a new Dénominations Géographiques Communales (DGCs) that includes the six names: La Côte (some areas inside of Saumur-Champigny), Brézé, Berrie, Brossay, Puy-Notre-Dame, and Courchamps. However, Saumur has nearly ten times the surface area of vineyards than Montlouis’ 400 hectares. This warrants some delineation. The first of our three Source underground Montlouis luminaries (one of whom is still withholding our US allocation because Trump got elected) is Vincent Bergeron, a man whose humility and generosity continues to inspire me to better myself. He’s a gem of a human being. It was easy for Remy, our Los Angeles tastemaker JD, and me (the first time I met him in 2022), to want to do everything possible to support such a person and bring him the recognition he deserves. Borrowing from the website profile I wrote a few years ago, “Vincent is rare in today’s world of self-aggrandizing young vigneron talents—sometimes appointed by the wine community and often by the self, as “rock stars.” Many seek celebrity and membership in idealist tribes rather than going for truth and an honest view into this métier, this artistic pursuit, this craft–a marriage between homo-sapiens and nature. Vincent is a vigneron’s vigneron, a human’s human, an uncontrived example of how to live and simply let be, spiritually, without trying to be someone.” Soul-filled? Angelic? These are two impressions that come to mind with Vincent’s wines. He crafts some quite serious but inviting organic, and, most of the time, no-added-sulfites Montlouis wines. Again, as I put it years ago: “Emotionally piercing, Vincent’s mineral-spring, salty-tear, petrichor Chenin wines flutter and revitalize; a baptism of stardust in his bubbles and stills—a little Bowie, a lot of Bach. His Pinot Noir is earthen en bouche, and aromatically atmospheric, bursting with a fire of bright, forest-foraged berries and wildflowers, and cool, savory herbs rarely found in today’s often overworked, oak-soaked, and now sun-punished Pinot Noirs, the wines that were the heroes of the past millennium, but today are a flower wilting under the relentless sun. Advances in the spiritual heartland of Pinot Noir have been made, though I sure miss the flavors of the Côte d’Or from my earlier years among wine.” Vincent’s Pinot Noir takes me back to the beginning of my love affair with this grape’s propensity to produce the world’s most beguiling and slightly austere red wines. Vincent’s range of 2022 Chenin Blanc is arriving in May (we hope without 200% tariffs!) with the vineyard blended, ‘Matin, Midi et Soir’ and the lieu-dit, “Maison Marchandelle,” two of the most convincing 2022s I’ve had, and his Pet-nat, “Certains l’Aiment Sec” is about to land as well. Vincent’s 2022 still whites are some of the initial ones that helped me begin to recognize the quality of white wine from this vintage across Northern Europe. As mentioned in the introduction to this month’s newsletter, they’ve got legs and unexpected thrust for a year with such hot weather. And once I tasted 2022s from other makers, as mentioned early in this text, I was sure that the vintage has merit, a wine worthy of those who want and need a white wine with snap. Vincent Bergeron in Maison Marchandelle, December 2024 Vincent’s Maison Marchandelle plots outlined in black—the green sections! While standing in Maison Marchandelle, a 0.87-ha plot planted in 1970, Vincent lamented that this was the only vineyard he harvested grapes from this year. Outside of this small parcel, the rest of his 2.6 hectares of crop were destroyed by the constant mildew pressure of the season. He’s made it clear that if 2025 isn’t fruitful, he might have to hang up his vineyard boots, a personal tragedy. And if you know the wines and even more the man, it becomes a tragedy for us all. Fingers crossed. In the meantime, enjoy the masterful wines that we have on hand! In 2024, Vincent managed to buy some fruit from one of last year’s new Source growers, Thomas Frissant. The morning after we visited Vincent we would stick our nose into the cellar of this young, well-trained, and technical cellar swashbuckler. His organic vineyards are located near Amboise, the final resting place of Leonardo da Vinci. We braved a walk through his vines (and he braved a drive with his truck through some pretty wet, slippery clay roads) for probably the coldest vineyard exploration of our trip. We thought it would be quick, but Thomas took us on the long route! I mean, how much silex does one need to see when it’s all over the place? It was bitingly wet and windy but glimmers of sun shone through that would’ve surely inspired Leo to paint, had he lived to 572 years old. Against my better judgment, I flew the drone. I could’ve easily lost it as I did its twin in Wachau’s Spitzer Graben seven months earlier. But this flat terrain presented no obstacles other than the fierce wind, so it returned and touched down with no problem. Thomas’ wines are fabulous and mostly come from older vines and all are under organic certification. He has higher-end wines too, but the starter range is restaurant-program gold for the price, quality and vineyard culture. Their silex soils seem to endow them with that similar Pouilly-Fumé and east Sancerre hard-punching mineral quality. Sometimes it’s hard to break the market of such addictions when they deliver at these prices, but it’s perfectly fine with Thomas that we’re addicted and even particular regarding the selection we import from him. We blistered through the first batch we received in October, and the second one just landed a month ago and is on the move again with the two main features, 2023 Sauvignon Blanc, “Le Chapeau Comte” and 2023 Chardonnay, ‘Tout En Canon.’ Thomas Frissant Nicolas Renard’s cellar We won’t spend too much time on Nicolas Renard given the minuscule quantity of wines we’re allocated every other year, but we would finish our day tasting with him in his pharaoh-like tomb of a cellar. While we receive so little from Nico (pictured above), his wines are of the most substantive whites in our entire portfolio from seven countries. Nico is a magician with Chenin, Sauvignon, and Chardonnay. They’re epically singular (like the guy) and flirt with x-factor perfection. I can’t get enough of them, and once they’re open they’re unbreakable, and they have not a molecule of added sulfites. I asked Nico during my first visit in 2022 if some of the wines had had any sulfite additions at some point. It was the only time I ever felt like I had crossed a line with him. After his brow unfurled, his usually ever-present sheepish smile returned. His wines ferment for years (the last two whites we received, the 2017 Sauvignon and 2018 Chardonnay, finished fermenting in 2023) and I’ve not tasted many more intriguing wines out of barrel in the Loire Valley, though I could say the same for all the cellars I’ve visited in France. If there’s any Loire Valley grower whose wines should fetch massive second-market prices, it’s Nico’s. But good luck finding them, though I have faith they’ll come around again. The three restaurants in France that get a few bottles don’t even put them on the list, saving them for a rainy day, I guess. The rest that we don’t get are in Japan. Le Berlot has become the communal restaurant of the growers most preoccupied with nature, in the area. It’s a tradition for me to meet up with everyone I know when I’m in town (again, now minus the guy who withdrew our allocation because of Trump), and I was most happy that our young Thomas joined us for dinner there with Nico and Vincent. Thomas already has the skills but a little of the magic dust that falls off Nico and Vincent wouldn’t be lost on him. Le Berlot has a good kitchen with only slight tweaks to more French classics, and a good selection of natural wines. There are so many names on it I don’t know that I need a virtual wine shaman to guide me through it. And if you’ve had too much to drink to get behind the wheel (so less than two glasses with France’s tolerance of 5g/L of blood alcohol level), they have dorm-style private rooms upstairs, but with shared bathrooms. The legend of after-hours here is quickly gaining a reputation, though I’ve been lucky enough to avoid any unwelcome long nights and space shared with strangers. Domaine Jean Collet and Christophe et Fils amplified my perception of northern Europe’s unexpectedly successful 2022 white wines. (Perhaps southern Europe was also successful, but that’s not where we have a strong position with white wine.) And I mean unexpected only because I thought they would be shorter on energy. But they’re not. They have plenty but are even maybe less corpulent and rich than I expected. They go down easy, but they don’t have the premature notes I associate with struggling vines and sun-tested clusters in other warm seasons in Chablis. We tasted Christophe’s 2022s for context with his recently bottled 2023s. The 2023s were sparer in body at the time because of their recent sulfite addition at bottling just some weeks before. 2023 was yet another sunny year, and we’ll see how it will compare to the 22s. In any case, the 22s showed very well. Maybe this vintage won’t live forever in the context of age-worthy Chablis seasons, but who cares? I suppose that in the three years after their release, 95% of every bottle of 2022 will already be down the hatch, and that seems like a good time for them. Curious to see what others thought of the year, I checked out a critic’s website and how they tasted and scored the Chablis growers of 2022. A lot was tasted blind at BIVB, the Bureau Interprofessionnel des Vins de Bourgogne gathering. Of course, no critic would dare blind taste and score certain domaines for fear of giving accidental poor marks, which they might be tempted to alter once revealed for fear of dismissal from their readers, or a cold welcome from the celebrated winegrower on the next visit to the domaine. While so many well-made wines are analyzed in minutes, or seconds, in a snapshot with no personalized fluffing and far too early in the wine’s development, others have them isolated for the pitch—pharmaceutical sales 101. I’m fortunate to still drink the two elites from Chablis here and there because of my regular visits to the appellation, where restaurants are forced to sell them at fair markups from the cellar pricing or risk losing allocations; no grower wants to see their 15€ ex-cellar premier cru sold for 200€ on a wine list in their hometown. There are also a few hidden restaurants in France, or close to it, with relatively fair prices on the Big Two. In the past, wine pros would say, “I love Chablis!” But when you’d peruse their list, they only had the Big Two on the bottle list and something else on their glass-pour program. Is that a true love for Chablis? Or, at the time, just a love for the cheapest ticket to extraordinary white Burgundy? Sometimes blind tasting is useful. Sometimes it’s not. Five minutes of excessive swirling, exhausting the wine and your palate as you try to discover its clues … The best outcome? When we are wrong …  especially after we were so certain, it’s humbling. It’s always a test of what we think we know—a harmless learning experience, though maybe not so great for the ego. Sometimes we look like a boss. Other times, a World Market wine department specialist—no offense: ya gotta start somewhere! And sometimes we’re not humble enough in spirit and develop an immediate negative bias that, sadly, can stick around when we’re wrong. “No, not me,” you say. Never … “Oh! I should’ve said that … I was going to say that!” Or, “I can’t believe that’s that. It doesn’t have X, Y, and Z (otherwise I’d have nailed it). The post-mortem play-by-plays are often best left unsaid. Blind tasting doesn’t work well with Chablis. Especially within only five minutes of opening it … Chablis is a journey, and the best may seem spare at first, sometimes even awkward. If it outshines others in a blind tasting within the first ten minutes, maybe there’s something more off than on. Most compelling Chablis start and remain snug, withholding, and can even be Willy Wonka quirky. And in an instant after waiting, almost pressuring it to perform, they strike deep into its Kimmeridgian limestone marl, the salty brine now rising to ocean’s spray, the phenolic blob now cutting minerally textures and acidic flare. No worthy Chablis is as quick a read as an Instagram post. By the very nature of this region’s wines, its best traits can be slow to get out of first gear. Like with any serious wine, depth takes time to discover. Analysis in a minute, six months after bottling for a few minutes of swirling it to death? Folly. So many Chablis just won’t give their all so quickly—whether just uncorked, or within the first two years after bottling. It ain’t Côte d’Or nowadays, where an immediate blast fizzles quickly or grows into a sixth-gear, high-rpm hum but rarely goes to the salty clouds of the taut Chablis. If there’s any blind-tasting category with the greatest probability of missing the wine entirely, it’s Chablis. So, congrats to Sébastien and Romain for scoring some solid 80s with their AOC Village wines when tasted blind at a BIVB events by critics. Sébastien Christophe Romain Collet We tasted with Romain Collet out of the various vats they employ to highlight each cru’s qualities: Montmains in steel to memorialize the edges of its rocky terroir; Vaillons, with its brown but light textured clay and rocky topsoil, aged equally in 20-year-old 85-hl and 228-liter French oak, a great balance of vat choices to gently “sculpt the clay” and preserve the strong minerally compaction of Vaillons, the wine of their range that helps me best understand each vintage; the exotic Fôrets nestled up in its furthest western part inside a small heat-trap amphitheater raised in an egg-shaped concrete; the remaining 1er Crus—Butteaux, MdM, MdT, and grand crus, Valmur and Clos, all in more marne-rich (calcareous clay) topsoil—in variations of two-to-seven-year-old 228-liter French oak barrels (none new) to sculpt the clay once again. No matter what Romain employs in the cellar, each wine speaks its truth. There’s some new excitement from Collet labeled ‘Vallée de Valvan,’ but it hasn’t arrived yet. If you look at a map of Chablis, there is a “village” section of the backside of Montmains facing northeast, mirroring Vaillons and most of Vaillons is inside Valvan. I asked Romain since my first visit with them in 2010 about this long stretch of vines they have that makes up a good chunk of their AOC Chablis. It seemed obvious and still does, that it has the same geology as its neighbors. When they classified the area the southerly exposure needed for premier cru classification was missing eighty years ago, but the soil was premier cru. But things have changed, and these “less favorable” expositions can now chalk that up as an asset, and that’s clear in this minerally fresh new bottling. Collet’s Vallée de Valvan represents Chablis’ future. We finished our day at the Richoux’s cellar in Irancy. We work with the Richoux family only in California and a few other states, but Remy needed to meet them and their wines as they’re one of the central pillars of our company’s French portfolio. Our first imported vintage from them was the 2005 Veaupessiot and 2007 Irancy. Since Gabin and Félix were given more input into the production, things have changed a bit from a more rustic, classic, striking and clean style raised in 55-85-hl old French oak foudres to something more in line with a Côte d’Or style, smaller barrels with some a little newer than the past. The first moment for their cellar filled with 500-600 L barrels was with Thierry’s “Ode à Odette,” a unique wine made in honor of his grandmother who used to work a certain parcel of ancient vines. Seemingly on a whim, they bought a massive batch of new barrels and aged it for three years in them. Well, then they had to do something with all these leftover barrels! The Richoux boys also experimented with softer extractions and withheld sulfite additions until the bottling. These changes resulted in much more fruity wines but it was harder to understand all the changes at the time because the seasons were going haywire and particularly impacted Irancy. Fast forward to 2019 and 2021, two of their finest vintages demonstrating the balance of those changes. 2019 is richer, as the season was warmer, but balanced with denser fruit and well-managed alcohol levels still around 13.5%. While the 2019s may be the crowd-pleaser between these two vintages, the extremely low-yielding 2021s are nearly perfect wines for my preference: elegant, lifted, red-fruited, finely structured, fresh, floral, and without any impression that the sun abused a single berry. After the cellar tasting and the open bottles of 2019 and 2021, we tasted and tasted and tasted, Remy became a deep believer in the mythology of Richoux. Our first shipment of the 2021 Richoux Irancy wines will arrive in California this month.

Forteresse de Berrye and its historic vineyards (Download complete pdf here) The Dam Broke? There is a lot about to happen in the first quarter of this new year as we unexpectedly had ten containers arrive in November; normally, we receive two or three in a single month. Things had been running so late over the last year and a half that we ordered very early to try to get ahead of any delays, but now the dam seems to have broken (we hope). Imports sometimes stretched to as much as seven months coming from France right after the pandemic (less in other countries), and maybe now we’re getting back to something more manageable. November isn’t the best time to launch new producers into the market so with these nine new ones (three from the Loire Valley, two from Douro, and one each from Alentejo, Rioja, Etna, and Tuscany), we’ll be staggering them out over the coming months. This newsletter will introduce three of our new producers imported exclusively in the US by The Source. Because there’s so much material, it’s helpful to download the attached pdfs in order to read up completely on each of them; otherwise, this document would be a book. First is Forteresse de Berrye, the epicenter of a wonderful new renaissance within a historic commune of Saumur, ten kilometers south of Brézé, a place with similar potential for Chenin Blanc and Cabernet Franc as that now-glorified hill. The new owner (since 2019), Gilles Colinet, a former botanist, converted to organic culture straight away, and his first efforts are promising. You’ll then meet Giacomo Baraldo, a fabulous young producer from Tuscany with years of experience all over the world (including Burgundy) who’s crafting refined and distinctive Sangiovese single-site wines at high altitudes, and a diverse, exquisitely crafted and compelling range of white wines, most notably from Chardonnay vines planted on limestone and clay at high altitude with massale selections gathered from Corton-Charlemagne, Saint-Aubin, and Puligny-Montrachet. Finally, we’re proud to offer the wines of Quinta da Carolina. This quinta is run by one of Portugal’s young superstars, Luis Candido da Silva. He’s currently the head winemaker of the non-Port wines at Dirk Niepoort’s empire in the Douro. Under his own label, he crafts stunning white and red still wines from north facing, high altitude hills in the Douro. These three are a great trio to start the new year. Quantities from each are limited, so if something strikes your interest, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Quinta da Carolina vineyards in the foreground overlooking the Douro Download Forteresse de Berrye Profile Download Giacomo Baraldo Profile Download Quinta da Carolina Profile California Trade Events In February we’ll put on more sit-down trade tasting events showcasing some allocated, limited, and new producers. Please ask your salesperson to book your seat as they will be limited. We plan to schedule quarterly tastings because there is so much to show and because we’ve had a great response to them. On the billing: Wechsler’s 2020 Riesling crus, Veyder-Malberg’s 2021 Riesling and Grüner Veltliner, 2020 Artuke Rioja single-site wines, 2020 Collet Chablis grand crus, and some of our new producers, Vallée Moray (Montlouis), Vincent Bergeron (Montlouis), Tapada do Chaves (Alentejo), and José Gil (Rioja). February 7th: San Francisco at DecantSF from 11am -3pm February 8th: West Hollywood at Terroni from 11am-3pm February 9th: San Diego at Vino Carta from 11am - 2pm   New Terroir Map It seems that I’ve waited forever to finally release this terroir map of Portugal’s Douro. Now that we have two new producers from there, both truly special people (also very different, and making quite different styles of wine), we can finally put this one out there. The grape key was put together with the help of Luis Candida da Silva from Quinta da Carolina because I am simply not qualified to organize such things with so many complex and relatively unknown varieties as these! This map, as with all of our terroir maps, was also done in collaboration with Ivan Rodriguez, a PhD student and MSc of Geology from the University of Vigo, along with my wife, Andrea Arredondo, our graphic designer. Ivan has become a close and very special friend and also a part of our team. He is an incredible resource and helps with our many educational projects where science needs to be better understood. You can download the map by clicking on it which will take you to our website to download it with the three additional pages of support material. New Arrivals Ried Schön in the right front, Bruck on the next hill to the left, and Brandstatt in the upper left Veyder-Malberg 2021 Rieslings and Grüner Veltliner Crus Veyder Malberg’s 2021 vintage will also be trickling out over the next few weeks, starting with the entry-level wines and then the top wines shown at our tasting events in the first week of February. Austria continues to have slam-dunk vintages every other year with their Grüner Veltliner and Riesling. First it was 2013, then 2015, 2017, 2019, now 2021. A big fan of all, but more 2013 and 2019 than the others, it’s likely 2021 will be the best of the bunch. They are so fluid and tense, aromatically fine yet with the right pressure. Never did I think (with very strong lean toward Riesling) Grüner Veltliner would rival a great producer’s Rieslings in a top vintage, but 2021 is without question for me the best vintage for this variety I can remember—at least from the likes of our great growers there, Peter Veyder-Malberg, Tegernseerhof and Michael Malat. The top Veltliners seemed to have somehow swapped out the extra fluff and broad palate weight for finer, lacier, minerally profile, like a young prodigious progeny of Riesling and Veltliner. The Rieslings are as good as it gets. It’s simply a banner year, a throwback to the old days in overall structure and profile with a bright but tensile, sunny smile. Peter gave us the opportunity to go long on this vintage because he accidentally shorted us on the 2020. We were happy to make up the balance of what we would’ve normally gotten, and from this incredibly fantastic year. One could write a book of tasting descriptions for a year like this, but they’re already going to be in such high demand that I don’t want to promote too much. My advice is to get everything you can! Not only from Veyder, but all of your favorite producers. They will surely age beautifully and they do indeed sing gorgeously now. Jean Collet 2020 Chablis Premier and Grand Cru What follows is a commentary on the 2020 vintage from our July 2022 Newsletter, which was a preface to the offer of Christophe et Fils 2020s. I haven’t changed my thoughts on this vintage (though it includes a few editorial changes), only that I’m even more convinced of their quality. The 2020 season was not as hot as 2018 and 2019. While 2019 may have jumped a little further from being described as “classic” Chablis due to its riper fruit notes (but with a surprisingly high level of acidity for this warm year), some hail 2020 as “classic,” “early but classic,” and “a great vintage.” I don’t even know what “classic” means anymore with regard to Chablis, or anywhere else. Do you? I know what “great” means to me, personally (with emotional value topping the list), but my “great” may not be yours. Our current frame of reference and experience sculpts all of our preferences, and our formative years will always be present as well. People who’ve been in the wine business for decades have different associations with wine than those more recently seduced by Dionysus. Classic Chablis? I haven’t had a young Chablis that vibrates with tense citrus and flint, a visible green hue, shimmering acidity, and coarse mineral texture all in the same sip for a long time—so long that I can’t even remember the last vintage where I had those sensations with newly bottled Chablis. (Of course, a recently bottled wine still high-strung with sulfites can give that appearance but the wine will display its truer nature a few years after its bottling date.) Chablis is different now. Burgundy is different. Everywhere is different from a decade ago and obviously even more so than from two decades ago. With the composition of today’s wine lists and their one or two pages of quickly-changing inventory compared to extensive cellars of restaurant antiquity, most of us have developed different expectations—if not completely different perspectives—for wine now than what “classic” used to imply. (The idea of “classic” from more than twenty-five years ago when I first became obsessed with wine now conjures images of chemically farmed vineyards and their spare wines.) 2020 may be fresher and brighter than the last two years in some ways but maybe with less stuffing than the similarly calibrated 2017s, a vintage I loved the second I tasted the first example out of barrel at Domaine Jean Collet. Maybe we can call 2020 “classic,” but if picking started at the end of August, would that “classic” be graded on a curve? The artistic Romain Collet Snapshot of 2019-2021 Romain Collet says that both 2019 and 2020 were very warm vintages that experienced about the same losses of 10-15% from spring frost. The 2019s were picked in the first week of September, while 2020 began one week later—though the budbreak of 2020 was earlier than 2019, perhaps lending some credence to the use of “classic” when categorizing this year because the season was longer than it would otherwise appear if one only considers the harvest dates. 2021 was a cold year and this one will surely ring true as a classic Chablis vintage. They started picking at the end of September and finished on October 6th. Considering how late they picked with the loss of 30-40% of their 2021 crop to frost, this should make it quite a strong vintage for those in search of what’s considered a truly classic vintage style. We’ll see, but if the Collet’s 2021s are any indicator of what’s to come, the classicists will be very happy, even though there was chaptalization on many wines across the appellation to get them up past 12% alcohol. Chaptalization was always a known element with classic Burgundy wines but in the last warm decades we don’t talk about it much anymore; alcohol levels are naturally high because it’s gettin’ hot! Romain’s intuition for managing each year’s challenges continues to surprise—and pleasantly, of course. In cold years, the wines are classic, and with Raveneau-esque fluid sappiness and the element of attractive green notes—green apple skin, wheatgrass, green grapes, lime, sweet mint—though they’re also perhaps a little bonier and more square. (Raveneau is Romain’s inspiration in overall style and each year he creeps a little closer to it.) In warm years the wines maintain structure, though with rounder and more tropical fruit notes, while being more taut than one would expect. 2020 is indeed another successful year for Collet. The quantities produced are less than the years before, but the good news is that they’ve kept our allocation relatively the same. Arriving are the 2020 and 2021 Saint-Bris made from purchased fruit from one of Romain’s longtime friends. These are a good (and needed) counter for the low quantities of Sauvignon Blanc from Sancerre, Pouilly-Fumé, and their neighboring, less famous appellations. Saint-Bris neighbors Chablis but was planted to Sauvignon Blanc instead of Chardonnay because it’s extremely rocky, with less topsoil, better for Sauvignon and not so good for Chardonnay, which needs more topsoil. Despite the spare soils, the wines are full compared to others from the appellation, and they represent a great value from this talented producer. Butteaux at the bottom of the picture, Forêts where the road turns right, Montmains (though it includes the previous two lieux-dits) is further toward the village on this hill slope, grand crus all the way in the back and Vaillons on the hill just to the left along the forested top. Left Bank Premier Crus As usual, we have the star-studded lineup of premier crus, starting with Montmains, a selection of fruit from the original Montmains lieu-dit that sits closest to the village, on the rockiest soils the Collet’s have for this designation. As one would expect from this topsoil-spare site, this is one of the most minerally wines in their range and Romain exemplifies its character with a steel élevage. Part of the Montmains hill is subdivided into two more well-known lieux-dits (that can be labeled as Montmains as well but seem to rarely be these days) are Les Forêts and Butteaux. Here we find more topsoil in both sites compared to the rows closer to the village. Les Forêts’ young vines usually prove to be the most exotic of their range while Butteaux with its old vines and heavier topsoil with massive rocks in it is one of the stoutest, and in a blind tasting it could easily be confused for a grand cru wine on weight and power alone. Vaillons shot in Vaillons The long hill of Vaillons parallels Montmains just to the north, separated by Chablis village vineyards on the same Kimmeridgian marls as the premier crus but face more toward the north—the sole reason for their classification instead being appointed premier cru status. Vaillons is often my “go-to” Chablis in Collet’s range of premier crus when I want a balance of everything. It’s minerally due to the very rocky soil, and has good body because of its 40% clay in the topsoil. Tension is always there no matter the vintage because of the richer, more water retentive soil that makes for a longer and less hydric stressed season compared to other sites with sparer soils. The majority of the vineyard faces southeast with some parcels due east, bringing an advantage from the morning sun and less so the baking evening summer and autumn sun. Though not as hot as the right bank with the grand crus facing more toward the west, it shows its breed with a constant evolution rising in the glass due to the many different lieux-dits parcels blended into it. I believe that Collet is the owner of the largest portion of vines on this big cru hillside, making for that sort of MVP character without anything missing due to the large stable of parcels to choose from. Given its size, it is also the largest quantity of wine from any single Collet premier cru we receive. Montée de Tonnerre in the center and Mont de Milieu to the right Right Bank Crus The Collets are advantaged with a fabulous collection of vineyards from both sides of the river, though most of their premier cru land is on the left bank. While the left bank wines could be characterized as more mineral dominant than the right bank, there are indeed exceptions. I’ve often said that Mont de Milieu is one of those wines that, though it is on the right bank, is very left bank in style compared to the grand crus and many of the other right bank premier crus. There are also few who bottle Mont de Milieu. Over the years this wine was always good but less impressive than many in Collet’s range, at least for me. These days, I lament the small quantities we are allocated (based on past purchases) because the most recent versions are starting to fight for top billing in the premier cru range. There is no doubt that the 2021 version of this wine is one of the top of the vintage, if not the top premier cru (at least very early on during a tasting this last November at the domaine), and the 2020 is a great prelude to what will arrive next year. We only have ten cases to share, so they will be judiciously allocated. There is no greater call in the Chablis premier cru world than Montée de Tonnerre. Yes, it’s like a grand cru in some ways, mostly in how regal it is, but it is its own terroir as well. Positioned between Mont de Milieu and the grand cru slope, just a ravine away from Blanchots and Les Clos, it finds the balance with a gentler slope in many parts than the grand cru hillside which has many different aspects and greater variability between the crus. Collet also has (in very small quantities) the grand crus, Valmur and Les Clos. Their Valmur is situated at the top of the cru on its south side, facing northwest, which was less ideal for a grand cru decades ago but perfect for today’s shifting climate. Stout and minerally, I believe it to consistently be one of the greatest overall wines in our entire portfolio. Les Clos is its equal but perhaps more extroverted and even slightly more balanced, gilded with Chablis’ royal trim and the sun’s gold. The topsoil toward the bottom of the hill is deeper and richer, bringing an added advantage against the hydric stress of warmer years, though disadvantaged in fending off frost. Don’t forget to download the pdfs of Forteresse de Berrye, Giacomo Baraldo and Quinta da Carolina! We go deep!

Welcome to the June club, which features three wines from three producers. The wines have many differences, but, more crucially, they have a few things in common. This month’s exploration is perhaps a bit less technical than in past clubs, but it’s no less interesting. Best of all, the wines are delightful. Actually, “delightful” may be too limiting, perhaps depriving these wines of some depth and gravitas. While no one would characterize them as “monumental” or “colossal,” their intricacies perhaps exceed “delightful.” This is all indicative of the contortions we often find ourselves in when contemplating this month’s theme, Pinot Noir. A grape that defies easy categorization, can produce a dizzying multitude of styles, and boasts a genome more complex than our own, Pinot Noir eludes characterization when it produces even simple wines. The beauty of its greater wines, rather, lies in their ability to integrate seemingly opposite forces: structure and suppleness, depth and buoyancy, gravity and delight. This month’s wines straddle that divide. More specifically, we’re drinking three Pinot Noirs from cool-climates. Technically all great Pinot regions are cool, but the ones featured today are outside the epicenter of the Pinot world, the Côte d'Or. They’re satellite areas or neighboring regions lacking the Côte d'Or’s perfect Pinot conditions. Today, attention is warranted for these lesser known Pinot zones, which have for centuries been afterthoughts, because, in the era of climate change, they may soon have more to say. So, on to the wines (in no particular order). First up, Sancerre. Sancerre? you ask, incredulously. Yes, indeed. The world rightfully looks at Sancerre as the home of Sauvignon Blanc, but there is red wine here too, made from Pinot Noir. Wine labels declare it Sancerre Rouge, showing subordinate status (no one bothers to label the whites Sancerre Blanc). For the most part, Sancerre Rouge these days is regarded as a simple, insignificant, often underripe or light red, with little character—classic lunch wine. It wasn’t always this way. Before the phylloxera plague of the late 19th century destroyed Europe’s vines, Sancerre was primarily planted to Pinot Noir, its wines enjoyed at the finest tables on both sides of the Channel. In the post-devastation aftermath, during replanting, landowners discovered it challenging to graft Pinot Noir to the phylloxera-resistant American rootstock, so they converted almost entirely to Sauvignon Blanc, which took the grafts much more rapidly. To shift a region’s entire identity overnight is almost unthinkable today, but such were the exigencies of the time. As a Pinot place, we can’t help but regard Sancerre in relation to Burgundy. Many producers here do too. They’re the first to point out that, located on the Loire Valley’s eastern edge, Sancerre is closer to Beaune than to Angers. The climate here is different than Burgundy. It’s cooler…and warmer. That is, the diurnal shift in Sancerre is greater than temperate Burgundy, resulting in a more jangly wine that ripens under greater highs, but respirates in chillier nighttime lows. More stark are the soil differences. Burgundy has many soil types, but all based on variations of the perfect mixture of clay and limestone. Sancerre’s soils are more extreme and specific. Kimmeridgian limestone marl dominates the landscape, but there’s also chalky caillottes (little stones), and silex (flint). In addition, there are good amounts of clay in some parts and iron-rich red soils, as well. The bottle you have before you is François Crochet’s Sancerre Rouge 2014. Most of François’ Pinot lies on caillottes with some on the reddish clay soils. It’s a good mix, because Pinot Noir on pure limestone will lack body and become too strident. Too much iron-rich clay, on the other hand, will produce a wine that lacks lift and finesse. As you may know from the precision of his Sancerre (blanc), François is an incredibly meticulous winemaker, and this Pinot Noir evinces the same dedication. It boasts the ripeness of 2014 and density from low yields with tightly executed extraction. Clearly, François cares about his Pinot Noir because he’s raised it in a non-oxidative style that suggests he’d like to see it grow old. It drinks well now with dark cherry flavors, a brace of earthy, soil flavors, and a fine-knit floral array. That hint of toast or char probably comes from a touch of reduction, which may well blow off if you open it or even decant it for a little while before drinking, though to us, it’s great straight out of the bottle. Our next bottle, the 2013 Dominique Gruhier, comes from the unheralded/unknown appellation of Epineuil. The name is harder to pronounce than the village is to find, as it sits just about 20 minutes northeast of Chablis, outside the town of Tonnerre. It’s a cold place with classic Kimmeridgian soils. Epineuil’s greatest vineyard area lies on a massive and steep slope, the Côte de Grisey, where Dominique has most of his vines. The Côte is richest in its center where a bulge of clay graciously delivers to these wines their perfect mid-palates. While in times past, a celebrated site for Chardonnay, the Côte de Grisey is able to ripen Pinot Noir because its chilly, windblown climate is protected from the fiercest of winds by the Langres Plateau. As to why Pinot resides on Kimmeridgian soil in the vicinity of Chablis (why not cash in on Chardonnay here?), the mystery bears more investigation. We know that the 20th century was hard on the region in general. Terrible weather in the decade following post-phylloxera replanting resulted in massive loss of crop and economic devastation. The arrival of WWI and the loss of a great deal of the male population made the preceding years look like salad days. While mounting the slow recovery from WWII, the entire region endured the ruinous frost of 1956. By 1970, wine growing had largely been abandoned, and only five hectares of vines remained in Epineuil. Slowly, viticulture has been coaxed back (to the tune of just over 100 hectares), but Epineuil lives in the eternal shadow of Chablis, which suffered equally but recovered more robustly. In parallel, Dominique Gruhier has endured his own Job-like series of afflictions while on his path to becoming a vigneron. The misfortune he and his family experienced is almost comical in its totality, and we suggest you visit Becky Wasserman’s long Gruhier webpage for details. You’ll enjoy this bottle even more after reading the whole story. Simply put, this is remarkable wine. Its deliciousness is self-evident in its deep cherry fruit and powerful mineral notes. Yes, there’s a notable herbal tinge when you first approach the wine, indicative of Pinot’s struggle to attain ripeness here. But keep sniffing and drinking. In moments, you’ll acclimate to the wine as your palate discovers that the hint of greenness actually accentuates the fruit’s purity. The evocation of cherries is not like any jam or pie, but rather crisp, fresh, firm cherries as they come off the tree, snappy to the tooth, the hint of summery leaves and stems. Without a doubt, this is one of the greatest deals for Burgundian Pinot Noir in our book and in the market in general. Dominique is redefining Epineuil and the possibility of red wine from Burgundy’s extremities. If you love this, we suggest you order more. It likely won’t be a secret for much longer. Speaking of dwindling secrets, the extraordinary quality of our final wine, the 2013 Thierry Richoux Irancy, is quickly becoming known in the sommelier world. The only thing holding back Richoux is the name of his village. Hard to say who has it worse, Dominique Gruhier, who makes wine in an appellation no one has ever heard of, or Thierry Richoux, whose village’s reputation is tainted by the association of wan, weedy Pinot Noir blended with César. Just 15 km southwest of Chablis (Epineuil is northeast), Irancy has always been a Pinot Noir village. Once, long ago, celebrated (though what region can’t claim that?), Irancy Pinot Noir was only allowed the Bourgogne Rouge appellation until 1999, when it was given its own name. Since then, its growers have been working hard to restore the quality of its wines. Richoux is probably first to have truly crested that wave. If you detect cherries in the wine—and we certainly do—it fits the area, as Irancy is still studded with cherry orchards, which share the slopes of the protected horseshoe of a valley with Pinot Noir vineyards. The partial enclosure of the valley shelters it from the lashes of harsh weather, while trapping a modicum of warmth to ripen the fruit. Fruit can get ripe here, but it’s a lower level of ripe expression than we’re used to in the Côte d'Or. The genius of Thierry Richoux, as we see it, is that, rather than trying to make Pinot by Côte d'Or standards, he’s embraced the nature of Irancy and figured out how to turn it into utterly beguiling wine. His wine presumes nothing. It’s light colored, a hazy ruby red. To some that might connote rusticity, but to us it communicates confidence. When grapes aren’t richly ripe or deeply colored, he leaves no part of their material behind, as they provide silky texture and complexity. He preserves delicate flavors by letting them alone—the wine’s first year is in steel tank, it’s second in big oak foudre. That combination, which has nothing to do with how classic red Burgundy is made, produces a wine that has both the internal resources to age and the tender exterior to reward earlier drinking. The flavors, like Gruhier, are a spectrum of cherry, mineral, leaves, flowers, and earth, though Richoux’s are even more broad, playing to extremes while they dance about the middle. The cool-climate nature of these Pinots provides a lot of their charm. They are, foremost, wines of texture. Their lacy fabric is a cool-climate hallmark, hard to come by in warmer places. As you settle into drinking these wines, you will find momentum because of the addictive beauty of the texture. So, like Thierry Richoux, banish expectations for Pinot and embrace these flavors and textures. Furthermore, know that, thanks to a changing climate, we are perhaps coming into the greatest era for winemaking these places have ever known. And not too many people know it yet! Happy drinking! The Source

(Download complete pdf here) As this hits your inbox I’ve hopefully caught a bus from Barcelona to meet my wife in the Catalan seaside town, Sant Feliu de Guixols. This historic fishing village doesn’t make it easy to curb excessive consumption, with its daily outside market of dozens of local farmers who have all the seasonal fruits and vegetables you could want, three fish markets brightened by the glass-clear eyes of the freshest fish and the famous local Palamós red prawns and the cheese purveyors inside the historic Mercat Municipal building and half a dozen butchers with an immense selection of beef cuts from all over Spain (including the famous Galician beef chuleton), Iberico pork (cured and every fresh cut you’d ever want), all only 150 meters from our door. With only a few days to run off the well-earned weight I’ve gained while in Piedmont and Southwest France, I won’t make a dent before I’m off to Sicily for producer visits and the Catanian restaurants responsible for some of my most memorable meals. My last trip to Catania was five years ago. It was short and I missed my shot at attending the frenzied fish market down by the port. It’s been more than a decade since I savored the perfect and simply prepared fresh seafood in a cozy spot in the middle of the chaos—I think the place was called “mm! Tratoria.” It’s a touristy area, but if there’s one place to have extraordinary seafood in a touristy spot, it’s there. I’ve had a lot of noteworthy food experiences in my life, but Catania and its market have become part of my personal food and culture mythology. We have a new producer from Etna that I’ve yet to meet in person. My usual modus operandi involves a visit to the cellar and vineyards before working together, but the Nerello Mascalese wines of micro-producer, Etna Barrus, were emotionally striking every time I drank them over a few months, so we skipped protocol. When I get to Sicily I’ll dig into the sands of Vittoria and turn over some more Etna tuff to see if there’s another Sicilian grower waiting for us. This last wine-country sprint started in Milan and ended in Bordeaux two weeks later and put me on that bus to Sant Feliu de Guixols. Our close friend and longtime supporter Max Stefanelli joined me. Our first stop was with future legend (mark my words) Andrea Picchioni and his historical but esoteric, unapologetically juicy, and deeply complex Buttafuoco dell'Oltrepò Pavese wines. Fabio Zambolin and Davide Carlone were the next stops up in Alto Piemonte, and just to the south in Caluso we visited Eugenio Pastoris, an extremely intelligent and skillful young producer featured in our next newsletter this month. Monferrato was a quick stop to visit our four-pack of growers Spertino, Sette, La Casaccia, and Crotin, and finally the Langhe to visit Dave Fletcher and two new inspiring Barolo producers: Agricola Brandini, run by the young and ambitious sisters, Giovanna and Serena Bagnasco, whose wines we officially launch next month, as well as Mauro Marengo, run by an even younger talented wine wizard, Daniele Marengo. Andrea Picchioni A snow-capped, eye-candy alpine train ride from Turin to Chambéry kicked off my first French visits of 2023. The ride was beautiful but on the French side of the Alps the Savoie’s Arc River was concerningly low with little spring runoff. I had a stop with one of Savoie’s cutting-edge growers, then dashed across France through the Languedoc to another new addition, Le Vents des Jours, a former Parisian sommelier crafting wonderfully pure and expressive Cahors wines without any added sulfur. Jurançon had two stops, Imanol Garay, and another exciting new prospect who will remain a secret until our first wines are on the water. Finally in Bordeaux, I visited Mathieu Huguet and his Demeter and AB certified micro-Bordeaux project, Sadon-Huguet, with its full-of-life, pages-of-tasting-notes Merlot (60%) and Cabernet Franc (40%), Expression Calcaire—à la Saint-Emilion! I admit that I’ve always had a soft spot for the old right bank Bordeaux, particularly Pomerol, but, of course, when someone else is buying! Those I loved are well out of my range and older than I am. California kicks off in May for my second 2023 trans-Atlantic jump. I’ll get two weeks with our team, my family, Giovanna Bagnasco, the newest Barolo revolutionary at the helm of Agricole Brandini, and attend the wedding of one of my lifer-friends (who’s also my literary editor). Upon my return to Costa Brava, I’ll crack a bottle or two of Champagne with my wife before bed, then jet lag will kick off the usual cycle: Death. Rebirth. Repeat. New Arrivals This month we have something from about almost every country we work in Europe, with our newest addition from Champagne’s Les Riceys area, Taisne Riocour, Beaujolais wines from Anthony Thevenet, Portugal’s preeminent Vinho Verde garagiste, Constantino Ramos, Spain’s Navarra renaissance men, Aseginolaza & Leunda, and Italy’s premier Riesling producer, Falkenstein. New Producer Taisne Riocour Les Riceys, Champagne I have this obsession now, this little addiction to Les Riceys, its bubbles and still, and Élise Dechannes is to blame. These Pinot Noir wines grown an hour east of Chablis are hallucinogenic, hypnotic, more fun and fantasy than reality, cherubs with love-poisoned arrows, irresistible enchantments of high-toned red fruit and fields of dainty but potent spring strawberries, hints of cranberry, and dry as a bone but with that inexplicable, irresistible limestoney, fairy dusty, powdered-sugary, stardust twinkle. After being open for days they run out of gas but never go entirely flat, often remaining charged, pure with pink and red fruit and fully expressive post pop they can be even better than their former bubbly selves. If there’s a Champagne as good, sans bulles, it might be from Les Riceys. This makes sense of the fame of its most historical wine, a rosé made entirely from Pinot Noir with its own appellation, Rosé des Riceys. Rosé des Riceys is a bit of a unicorn, hard to get your hands on more than a bottle at a time, and it’s expensive. After all, it’s part of Champagne’s Aube and right on the border of Burgundy’s Côte d’Or department—no chance for a bargain! Our interest in Élise Dechannes was timely. With gorgeous new labels inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry illustrations (Le Petit Prince), people were drawn in and discovered Élise’s soft touch and talent, and interest in her seemed to explode overnight. This forced us to search for more sources in Les Riceys, and one just happened to knock on our door when I was in Austrian wine country last summer. Taisne Riocour is a new venture by the historic Les Riceys grape growing family, de Taisne. In 2014, the five boomer-aged de Taisne siblings decided to bottle their own wines for the first time since the maison was established in 1837, “not out of necessity, but more of a project to go deeper in the previous work of our parents in the vineyards,” Pierre de Taisne explained. “We also had the will to reveal one of the greatest terroirs of Champagne. Instead of selling all our grapes to be blended away into big house cuvées, we want to show the character of our vineyards.” A visit to the de Taisne family and their vineyards is ecologically encouraging and rich in familial comfort. While all are parents, and some now grandparents, the three brothers and two sisters de Taisne are addressing the agricultural challenges and ethical necessities of our time. Since taking on this new project, they embraced biodynamic treatments (three of their 21 hectares were converted to biodynamics in 2020 as a trial with the advice of Jean-Pierre Fleury) and a plan for full organic conversion began in 2021. Open to other progressive ideas, they like wind-powered ocean freight liners and want to adapt payment agreements to facilitate this slower but more ecological transit. It's a small contribution, but everything counts! The de Taisnes speak of greater biodiversity objectives by incorporating more non-vinous plants into their land and between rows, though Les Riceys is more heavily forested than many French viticultural areas. Here, it’s not like other famous Champagne territories with vines on every hillside and a vast expanse of other single crop fields that begin where the vines end. Les Riceys and the surrounding vineyards bear some resemblance in topography and town positioning to the neighboring Auxerrois regions. Similar to Chablis and Irancy, the three hamlets of Les Riceys were individually fortified centers with their own churches less than a kilometer apart. Ricey-Haut, Ricey-Bas and Ricey Haute Rive sit in the center of the appellation with numerous hillsides on all sides of the villages, carved out by erosion. But unlike Chablis, where vines grow on all sides around the village with even more Chardonnay vines for Petit Chablis on the plateaus above, all surrounded by endless crops, Les Riceys has many more vineyards scrunched together between wild forests. Les Riceys has little in relation to the heartland of Champagne, and the Google Earth images below demonstrate the dark green forested areas (which are the greatest sources of biodiversity and soil life) in two Champagne areas, Chablis and Les Riceys. All are roughly the same scale on the Google Earth. Les Riceys and the elusive Rosé des Riceys When asked why Pinot Noir is preferential instead of Chardonnay, Pierre de Taisne says that though it’s geologically linked to Chablis with similar Kimméridgien marls, more Pinot Noir has been planted in Les Riceys since the 11th century. Les Riceys is Champagne’s southernmost area, known as the Barséquanais, and borders the Côte d’Or with vines just next to the official lines. Les Riceys changed hands between Champagne and Côte d’Or many times, which helps explain its history of still wine production and Champagne, and the possibility for three different appellations of wine: Coteaux Champenois, Champagne and Rosé des Riceys. Initially the Aube, where Les Riceys is located, was not included in the greater Champagne appellation. Pinot Noir was most suitable in Les Riceys (the monks knew!), and this predates the adoption of bubbles in wine by more than five hundred years. Biodynamic culture dynamiser Les Riceys Pinot Noir first captured the attention of France’s royalty which led to greater European celebrity—particularly notable are the courts of Louis XIV and Louis XVI. The rosés of Riceys also gained widespread fame thanks to strong wine merchants, with the notable example of Jules Guyot, who published a study in the 1850s about French vineyards and noted the high quality of Les Riceys terroirs—pre-local Champagne production. But in 1927, after a strong revolt from growers who were able to sell their Les Riceys grapes to other Champagne regions for Champagne production but were not allowed to make their own Champagne until after 1911 (wineterroirs.com; 2009) and classified as Champagne Deuxième (second), the Aube was finally included in the Champagne appellation (albeit with second-class citizenship), and were now permitted to make their own bubbles. Since there was (and still is) more profit in Champagne than a dark-colored, full but taut, slightly tannic, sharp rosé (the opposite of Provence rosé in almost every way), Champagne production became the focus. The Team Because of their centuries of building relationships, the de Taisne family was able to move from grape growing cautiously and carefully to bottling their own with the help of friends. Cellar Master at Taittinger, Alexandre Ponnavoy, helped launch their new project with confidence by helping them define their core principles based on historic terriors that have richer soils than most of Champagne, a warmer climate, and strongly fruity Pinot Noir. The de Taisnes describe their wines as having “regional character with the richness of Pinot Noir aromas, freshness, and an elegant finish.” Pierre and Charles de Taisne are the family members in charge of the vineyard work, and they’re supported by Enologists Jean-Philippe Trumet and Laurent Max in the vineyards and the daily cellar work. Taisne Riocour also has oversight and other advice from Enologist, Cécile Kraemer, and well-known French Sommelier and Champagne specialist, Philippe Jamesse. What a team! Limestone in Les Riceys The Vineyards The geological bedrock classification of Les Riceys is Kimmeridgian, the same as Chablis, though not exactly the same dominance of the famous miniature oyster-like fossil limestone marls of Chablis. Les Riceys is more similar to Chablis and Côte d’Or than the north of Champagne where bedrock was formed during the Cretaceous and Tertiary and is most famous for chalk. Les Riceys is limestone marl and calcareous mudstones from the Jurassic age, with a more geometric rock appearance than the flaky, friable, fossil-rich Chablis Kimmeridgian limestone marls. Les Riceys’s topsoil is rocky with calcareous clay and silt and very little sand. Taisne Riocour’s twenty-one hectares of mostly Pinot Noir have an average age of 35 years (the oldest around 65), are on different exposures throughout the appellation on slope gradients from Côte d’Or-gentle to Mosel-steep, range between 250-340m in altitude, and are on both sides of the northbound Laignes River. Tillage is done lightly to a maximum depth of 5-10cm, only to undercut grass roots and is done a few times each season—the same as most limestone-and-clay Burgundy areas. As mentioned, they work some parcels organically and biodynamically, with organic certification processes that began in 2021. The Wines Cellar practices are simple and direct, especially in the earlier years to better discover their terroirs and to adapt the direction for each parcel. Fermentation in steel lasts 10-15 days, with neutral Champagne yeasts, and all go through malolactic fermentation. Sulfites are added during the pressing, again at the end of malolactic fermentation, and at disgorgement, with a total that ranges between 40-60ppm (mg/L)—low for Champagne. Everything is aged for approximately five months in steel (25k-200k hectoliter vats) with the exception of about 1% in old oak barrels for the Grand Reserve. The wines are filtered and aged in bottle for three years, with riddling done one month prior to disgorgement. Taisne Riocour’s Grand Reserve (NV), is composed of 15% vin de reserve, 85% vintage wine with 65% Pinot Noir and 35% Chardonnay—dosage 6.5g/L. These grapes originate mostly from a site known as Val Germain on the right bank of La Laignes (a tributary of the Seine, the same one that passes through Paris), southeast of the appellation, at the highest altitudes in the appellation of around 340m with a multitude of exposures on a medium slope. The topsoil is deeper (50-80cm) due to the flatter slope and the composition of more than half clay and one-third silt. The average age of the vines is fifty years and is usually the last of the appellation to be harvested. Other vineyards include La Fôrets (1ha), La Velue (0.4ha), and a little bit of the famous Tronchois (1.4ha). Made entirely of Pinot Noir and with a dosage of 3.5g/L, the Blanc de Noirs comes predominantly from Tronchois, one of the most celebrated vineyards in the appellation known since the 11th century when under the direction of the Abbey of Molesme. Here is one of Les Riceys’ most exposed sites with a direct south face, capped by wild forest around 275m and met by forest at the bottom at 215m—perfect grand cru and premier cru altitude if one considers similarities to Côte d’Or. The slope is extremely steep and the topsoil is thin, with 40cm on average. It’s also one of the warmest sites in the appellation. The vines were mostly planted in 1970 (with 50 ares replanted in 2019), and the rest in 1973, 1982 and 2007. Anthony Thevenet Beaujolais, France I’ve said it for years: Thevenet is one to watch. His first vintage, 2013, was wonderful but in very short supply. The following was fabulous for Beaujolais: great overall balance of yield and quality. While Anthony’s 2013s were very good, the 2014s were even better. 2015 was hot and he still delivered—they have punch, but are contained and fine. 2016 was hit or miss for everybody, but his hits were solid. Then it was back to the heat in 2017 and continued on through 2018, 2019, and 2020. 2021 was different with a cold season that led to big mildew pressure after a loss of half the production to frost. 2021 is hit or miss too, but Thevenet did not miss. We’ve been waiting for this. The difference today between vintages teeters on a knife’s edge between too much or too little. With extreme changes in short periods, wines easily overshoot their mark in a day or two. 2021 is short in supply, but the results from Thevenet are absolutely wonderful. Thevenet Cellar Notes All the wines are vinified with a carbonic maceration without any sulfur added until just before bottling, and they ferment at temperatures no lower than 16°C. There are no added yeasts, and the fermentations are done in a gentle, infusion style, and can last between eight to thirty days, with the latter more rare and only employed for the top wines. There is no fining or filtration, and the total sulfite levels are under 15mg/L (15ppm). The purity and clarity of each wine’s terroir expression under Anthony’s supervision due to very spare sulfite inclusion are a testament to his laser-sharp attention to detail and instinct. We were able to nab a few more boxes of the 2019 Chénas Village and 2019 Morgon Vieilles Vignes, so don’t sit on your hands here. This season created full and delicious wines and these are two highlights of the vintage (the reasons we asked for more!). Like 2020, the 2021 Beaujolais-Villages presents an opportunity to see the merit of Thevenet’s lovely Beaujolais range and what a perfect year for a wine with streaky red fruit and tension. Thevenet’s 2021 Morgon appellation wine comes mostly from Douby, a zone on the north side of Morgon between the famous Côte du Py hill and Fleurie, and the lieu-dit, Courcelette, which is completely composed of soft, coarse beach-like granite sands. Many of these vineyards are on gently sloping aspects ranging from southeast to southwest. There are also rocky sections, but generally the vineyards are sandy, leading to wines of elegance and subtlety, also endowed with great length and complexity from their very old vines. The average vine age here is around 60 years, not too shabby for an appellation wine! Thevenet’s Morgon Vieille Vignes Centenaire vineyard in Douby Once it’s in your glass it becomes obvious why Anthony bottled his newest cuvée, 2021 Morgon “Le Clos,” instead of blending it into other Morgon wines. Discrete and fine with a north-Chambolle-esque structure, body, color, and lifted perfume, its red fruits, citrus and a touch of stemy green lead the way for this young wine born from twenty-year-old vines on granitic bedrock, clay and sand. After ten days of carbonic fermentation, it spent six months in older (with just a hint of fresh-cut wood), fût de chêne (228l barrels). This effort by Anthony is his ninth vintage since he first started bottling his own wines in 2013, and his fifteenth or so vintage in all (including work with Georges Descombes and Jean-Marc Foillard over five or six years) demonstrates his mastery of craft and maturity as a winegrower. Anthony makes the 2021 Morgon Vieilles Vignes Centenaire exclusively from the ancient vines in his Douby property just above the D68 on the north side of the hill across from the fields surrounding his family’s home and old cellar. This latest release is the continuation of wines from extraordinary survivors that date back to the American Civil War! What an opportunity to taste wines with such history, and what a vintage to do it. Like the Morgon Vieille Vignes, it’s aged in 600-liter demi-muids, but for around ten months. It’s spectacular and offers a different view into how vine age can truly influence a wine’s overall character. If wine critic Neal Martin says the 2017 version “would give many a Burgundy Grand Cru a run for its money,” then imagine the 2021… It’s off the charts. Elegant and profound. Bright to garnet red, great texture. With clear potential to last forever and improve with cellar aging. Once open it’s fresh for days and builds on its strengths. If Thevenet’s Le Clos is Chambolle-like, this is Ruchottes-Chambertin fruit, tension, and caliber. As one would expect, supply is very limited. Constantino Ramos Vinho Verde, Portugal Shortly after our first contact with Constantino Ramos, his wines exploded in Portugal; we clearly got in at the right time. At the beginning of last year, he left his post as Head Winemaker at Vinho Verde’s most famous and progressive producer, Anselmo Mendes, and these days he’s touring the country consulting for half a dozen growers in Dão, Bairrada, and Azores. He can also be found on television cooking shows, doing wine events, wining and dining with inspiring wine writers, winning new fans all over, including us and our customers in the States. Only twenty-five minutes away by car from our apartment, there is no person in Europe, other than my wife, that I spend more time with than Constantino. Cooking and wine tasting and drinking is an every other week event for us, at least when I’m home. There are two new wines we’re importing from Constantino. Guided by the region, his former mentor and boss, and his passion for Spanish Albariños, particularly from Salnés, it was natural for him to start his winemaking project with Alvarinho (aka Albariño). His is called Afluente, which is in reference to a stream passing by, not because it’s made solely for affluent people, or because it’s expensive—it’s not. I’d tasted many vintages of this wine before and all were good, but the 2020 Alfuente Alvarinho turned a corner and we had to bring some to the States to further share his talent, despite the miniscule quantities available. Constantino describes this season as balanced, with good sunlight and the right amount of much-needed rain at the very end of July, which helped a lot after a dry June and July. It’s harvested from a single vineyard situated 200m altitude in Melgaço’s Riba de Mouro hamlet, all part of the greater Monção y Melgaço subzone of Vinho Verde, and generally much higher in altitude than Monção. Constantino believes this to be his best effort to date, and while the others were also very good, I’m as convinced as he is. Once pressed, the juice is settled for a day then barreled down in 500l old French oak barrels with no added yeast. In the barrels the temperatures peak around 20-21°C, which develops wines focused more on mineral and savory characteristics than fruitiness. Because this is further inland than Albariño areas like Salnés in Rías Baixas, which is almost entirely within view of the Atlantic, the wines are more influenced by a continental climate, resulting in a full-bodied white with broader shoulders. In 2020, Constantino sculpted and trimmed these shoulders into a much more delicate wine for this famous Portuguese Alvarinho region. Sadly, we were only able to squeeze him for about nine cases this year because we were very late to the game on this wine. Despite the amount of time we spend together, we don’t talk a lot about his wines or my import business, as there are so many other interesting things and other wines to talk about. When my staff visited with him this last spring (and became the newest members of the Constantino Ramos Fan Club), they pleaded with me to buy his new wine, 2021 Juca. Juca? Great name. Great label. Never heard of it… I thought, “Seriously, Constantino? Not even a mention over the last six months of dinners together?” (Obviously not acknowledging what I just mentioned about our usually not talking shop.) Once I tasted it, I understood the plea from my reps: it’s delicious. It also comes from a surprisingly special source, and for the money, that makes it an even more ridiculous deal. In August 2021, one month before harvest kicked off on the white grapes, Constantino’s cousin told him about a vineyard high up around 400m (about as high as it goes in these parts to get ripeness, especially with red grapes) with what they believe has 100-year-old vines. Surrounded by forest and well away from any highway and accessible only by foot or small tractor, he bought the fruit; he simply had to. Instead of putting this intriguing new vineyard’s bounty into Zafirah, Juca, named after Constantino’s wife’s grandfather, was born. It’s a field blend of Caiño Longo (Borraçal in Portuguese), Brancellao (Brancelho/Alvarelhão), Espadeiro, and Sousón (Vinhão), and has one week of soft punchdowns by bare hand one time per day during one week before being pressed and followed by 7-8 months in 30% old barrels and 70% steel. While Juca was harvested on October 8th, the grapes were collected for 2021 Zafirah from its five different parcels between 200m-250m also in Riba de Mouro, on October 5th. It spends a single day of skin maceration before being pressed, followed by seven to eight months in 30% old barrels and 70% steel. 2021 was a very cold and wet summer with a lot of cloud cover. Constantino describes the reds as more vertical in style, more savory and with balsamic notes—both typical of the red wines here. Zafirah is also roughly the same blend as Juca but expresses its terroir in a more discreet way than the nearly flamboyant and stronger flavored  Juca. I guess in the vineyard parcels they had a formula long ago that worked well with these four varieties that are co-fermented with bits of other grapes. Aseginolaza & Leunda Navarra, Spain Environmental biologists and former winemaking hobbyists, Jon Aseginolaza and Pedro Leunda, have taken on the colossal task of trying to better the image of Navarra and bring back its former notoriety, when it was once considered the equal of Rioja, centuries ago. They are indeed making strides, but the Tempranillo tide that washed away most of the Garnacha in this part of Spain, and the ubiquity of Garnacha in Spain and France, makes it a tough fight. Grenache seems to perform best in the market as either cheap and cheerful on one end, or serious wine in need of cellar time. In between seems like no man’s land, even if the wines are very good. Those made in a simple way with higher yields are fruity and sometimes have less alcohol. And those in search of cellar immortality from places like Gigondas and Châteauneuf-du-Pape can be simply mesmerizing with lengthy cellar aging, especially when alcohol levels are modest when compared to today’s alcohol monsters. It’s much easier to understand the true greatness of this noble grape after decades of cellaring when its youthful vigor and solar strength gives way to nuance and refined elegance; it’s no accident that Châteauneuf-du-Pape was France’s first official AOC. Most young Grenache wines between value and vin de garde seem lost in a sea of full-bodied, strong reds that lack compelling distinction. Not an exception to these conditions, Jon and Pedro’s wines tend more toward the vin de garde category, though they’re approachable compared to many of today’s sun-soaked top wines of the Southern Rhône Valley. The fruit quality of their wines between 13.5%-14.5% alcohol is fresher and more savory than sweet, and still full in flavor—ideal for full-flavored fare. Jon and Pedro approach their wines as a project of rediscovery more than one of brand-building to sell more and more boxes. Even though they hadn’t made wine prior to their project, their wines have been impressive from the start, and they continue to build on their early success. Jon describes 2020 as a warmer vintage than the average year, but a wet spring gave much needed water reserves to the start of the season. June was cool and rainy, July was dry, and August returned to gentle rains and higher humidity, defining the 2020s as full yet fresh, with tense, energetic fruit. The 2020 alcohols range between 13.5%-14.5%, the same average found in Italy’s top Nebbiolo appellations, and even lower than many 2018-2020 Côte d’Or Pinot Noirs. When I visit Navarra, Rioja, and Provence, I pick and fill my car with bags full of wild thyme to dry and separate later. Thyme here is more powerful and gamey compared to the wild thyme I’ve picked in Provence—like the full flavor of jamón Iberico compared to French saucisson—and it often smells as much of lavender as thyme. I love lavender but it’s hard to incorporate it into recipes because of the bitterness and texture of the buds. (That said, I suggest putting the stem, buds, flowers and all inside of a whole duck set to be roasted; it works for chicken too. The duck fat is infused with clean and intoxicating lavender scents, and lavender duck fat on roasted potatoes is the next level.) This thyme is so strongly scented with lavender that it’s a perfect, though subtler, stand-in. All of Jon and Pedro’s wines are marked with this gorgeously pungent and aromatic thyme/lavender and other wild aromatic bushes—French garrigue on steroids! The first of the four is the 2020 Cuvée, made from 85% Garnacha and 15% Tempranillo from several vineyards at 445m-535m altitude, grown on clay, sandstone and limestone conglomerates. It’s fully destemmed for fermentation and afterward pressed and aged ten months in old French oak barrels. Jon notes that this wine’s general disposition is a mix of black and red fruits, garrigue, and good mineral drive. The 2020 Cuvée Las Santas is made from 100% old-vine Garnacha from several plots (445m-655m) on calcareous clays. 50% whole bunches are included for fermentation, followed by nine months in old French oak. It has lower alcohol than the others, at around 14% (the other three are 14.5%), and is dominated by red fruits (love that red-fruited Garnacha!), spices, aromatic herbs (you know the ones!), and it has a distinctly minerally character. Aseginolaza & Leunda ancient vine surrounded by life—wild grasses, thyme, lavender, y mas The two top wines come from very old single parcels. There are others too, but to have them side by side is interesting and perhaps more distinguished because they are led by different grape varieties in their blends. Camino de la Torraza (2020) is made of 70% Mazuelo (Carignan) and 30% Garnacha grown at 380m with vines planted in 1960. The soils are very poor (perfect for complex wines) and composed of clay, silt, gypsum, and conglomerates—similar to some top terroirs of Italy’s Nizza Monferrato. Whole clusters (25%) are incorporated and after pressing it’s aged for ten months in stainless steel. Jon notes that it always has Mazuelo’s classic purple flower aromas and slightly higher impression of saltiness, perfect for food matching. Because La Torraza is mostly Mazuelo, it’s quite different from all the other wines in this Garnacha-led bodega. Last in the lineup but always first for me in the range is Camino de Santa Zita (2020). It’s 100% Garnacha grown at 545m from vines planted in 1926 on two calcareous clay terraces. It’s x-factor heavy and has the greatest depth with elegance in the lead role. It’s also the vineyard that started their project, and I can see why they would want to make wine if this vineyard was that genesis. If vortex energies tied to locations are real, Santa Zita surely would be one of those places. Its wine is aromatically lifted a touch with the 20% whole bunches in the fermentation followed by eight months in old French oak. Jon notes that it is usually filled with scents of aromatic herbs, balsamic hints, and is round, fruity and minerally. That’s a serious oversimplification, but a good start. This wine is deep. Falkenstein Südtirol, Italy An Italian cantina with Austrian heritage, Falkenstein is in Italy’s Südtirol/Alto Adige and produces many fantastic different wines (Weissburgunder, Sauvignon, Pinot Noir—all grapes that have been cultivated here for centuries) and many consider the Pratzner family the most compelling Riesling producer in Italy. The vineyard and winery are in one of the many glacial valleys in the north of Italy’s alpine country, with a typical relief of a flat valley floor surrounded by picturesque steep mountains, which creates starkly contrasting shades and colors throughout. Vineyards in these parts need full exposure on northern positions with southern exposure to achieve palatable ripeness. The vineyards here are some of the world’s most stunning, and it’s surprising how many are tucked into the valleys of Trentino (the bordering region to the south) and the Südtirol. We’re taking in two vintages at once of Riesling because of the small quantities allocated to us with both years. The 2019 & 2020 Rieslings show the skill of the Pratzners and how they manage in difficult and warmer years. Sauvignon from these parts can be intense with a strong and compact core encouraged by the strong diurnal swing from day to night during the fruit ripening periods of summer and fall, making for a 2020 Sauvignon with clean fruit lacking any off-putting pyrazine varietal notes and more focus on shades of lemon preserves and zest with aromatic and sweet white mountain flowers.

Piemonte and the Alps I’ve finally returned for a couple-month stay in California and was greeted yesterday by a torrential downpour that the state has desperately needed. Meanwhile, the wine industry freight woes continue with the constant touch-and-go challenge of extensive delays. I waited until the last moment to write this newsletter until I got the go ahead from my sister Victoria, our company office manager, to let you know that a container from Italy is finally landing after more than two months of holdups. It’s filled with some exciting new releases from some of our favorites in Piemonte. There isn’t a lot arriving for a typical November, however some Burgundies may also arrive from David Duband (Côte de Nuits), Rodolphe Demougeot (Côte de Beaune), and Domaine Chardigny (Beaujolais and Mâconnais), as well as some from Germany’s latest cult wine producer, Wasenhaus, and Katarina Wechsler, a young producer out of Germany’s Rheinhessen who has fabulous Riesling vineyard holdings, including Kirchspiel and Morstein. New Italian Wines Poderi Colla - Langhe, Piemonte I doubt there’s another importer worldwide that beats the drum of Poderi Colla louder than we do. We just can’t seem to get enough of them. And it’s partly due to the fact that during the many changes in trend over the last few decades, the Colla family has stayed the course on the traditional approach since the late 1950s, when Beppe Colla owned Prunotto until the early 1990s. Once Prunotto was sold to Antinori, the Collas put all their money into only a few specific estates that Beppe and his brother Tino thought were as good as it gets in the area: Barolo’s Dardi le Rose, Barbaresco’s Tenuta Roncaglie, and Cascina Drago, a high altitude estate just across the road from Barbaresco-classified vineyards where they produce their Nebbiolo d’Alba and Bricco del Drago Dolcetto-based wine, along with other atypical higher-acid varieties that thrive best in cooler climates, like their sparkling wine made from Pinot Noir, a Pinot Noir still wine, and a dry Riesling. We’re fans of everything they make, but as one may expect, our focus is on their traditional local varieties. Aside from a restock on the fabulous and underrated 2017 Barolo and Barbaresco (which are now being reassessed by some critics in a more positive light), the single most exciting new Colla wine on this container is Colla’s 2019 Nebbiolo d’Alba. The reviews of the finished bottlings of 2016 Barolos and Barbarescos started coming out about the time that the producers were harvesting a vintage that appeared to be one of the most important in recent decades: 2019. While discussing the 2016 vintage in Piemonte at the start of the pandemic in Italy during a visit to the Collas (among about a dozen other top estates visits in Barolo and Barbaresco) in February of 2019, Tino Colla (pictured here), who has seen more than fifty harvests as an adult, basically skipped over 2016 and jumped right into the merits of 2019, a vintage he felt would be one of the most important of his lifetime. Their Nebbiolo d’Alba is a preview of that oncoming quality, and it’s gorgeous. Colla nails it every year with this wine, but 2019 is a little different. As always, it’s made just as a Barbaresco would be with one year in old botte to soften the edges while preserving its delicate aromas, but the 2019 Nebbiolo d’Alba is notably more suave and with profound depth for this classification of wine. Aside from the balance of the vintage itself, the high altitude of this vineyard—370m on average—imparts vibrating tension and snappy-to-the-tooth fresh fruit. During the last three years that I’ve lived in Europe, I’ve had the opportunity to taste many wines from different producers before they reached the states. (Of course, I’ve tasted a lot of others we don’t import, as well.) The quality demonstrated in this broad sampling of 2019 Nebbiolo wines from great producers is convincing enough to suggest that you should buy as much as you can, not only from us but from everyone who’s selling them. All of the best examples will improve in bottle for a long time, despite this classification’s less reliable reputation for doing so, compared to Barolo and Barbaresco. Look out for the great Nebbiolo vineyard sites outside of the limits of Barolo and Barbaresco that can only be labeled as Nebbiolo d’Alba, instead of the declassified young-vine Barolo and Barbaresco fruit bottled as Langhe Nebbiolo. In Nebbiolo d’Alba vineyards there are characteristics imparted by old vines, which, in Barolo and Barbaresco appellation vineyards are all reserved for their top bottlings. If Nebbiolo is one of your passions and you need a price break without sacrificing quality, go deep on 2019 entry-level Nebbiolos. Barbera always needs more heat than Nebbiolo to reach its peak. This may not be music to the ears for those in search of lower-alcohol wines but with the top producers exceptions can be made. While visiting Giacomo Conterno in 2019, perhaps the most unexpected and mind-bending wine in the bunch was the 2017 Cascina Francia Barbera, out of large oak cask. The layers of depth were simply extraordinary, and our entire group walked away from that visit with a newfound respect for big-hitter Barbera, even with its high alcohol well over 15%! (The reality is that many Barolo and Barbaresco are labeled 14%, but are well over 15% nowadays with the continued increase in solar power each year.) Almost every vintage in the last twenty-five years (save a few, like 2002 and 2014) has brought greater credibility to Barbera as a world class variety, and 2019 has kicked it up a couple notches. It was a long growing season with steady weather all the way through, and despite the lack of extremely high temperatures in the previous two vintages, it ripened perfectly, and its naturally high acidity relaxed just enough to bring its stockpile of complexities into balance in this slow growing season. What’s more is that Colla’s Barbera d’Alba “Costa Bruna” is sourced entirely from the Barbaresco cru, Roncaglie, on what would typically be a Nebbiolo exposition facing south, and with very old vines with most of them planted in the 1930s. It offers a diverse combination of fruits, from bright red to dark, with sweet red and purple flowers and spice. It’s absolutely another Colla wine to pepper into your annual wine schedule. Crotin's new high altitude Nebbiolo vineyard - first vintage 2021! Crotin - Asti, Piemonte Just north of the Collas is the Russo family, who are also extremely big fans of the Colla’s wines. Their wines are labeled under Crotin, the Piemontese dialect name for small cellars under the main cellar, used for keeping the best wines for long-term aging. The Russos have been churning out some of the top values in all Piemonte now for nearly a decade, under the assistance of the well-known prodigy enologist, Cristiano Garella. Their organically farmed vineyards are in some of the coldest growing sections of southern Piemonte. Here, the frigid temperatures offer grapes a long growing season, ideal for the high-toned aromatic Piemontese varieties. In these parts it’s all about punching power inside of this lightweight division. Crotin is most known for their Barbera d’Asti wine but these days a major uptick is Grignolino, a variety with bigtime aromatic pleasure and a fruity and round but tight mouthfeel laced with scents of Aperol and sun-dried red and orange flowers. Crotin’s Grignolino has become a big call item for our restaurants, and we buy all that we can from this cantina. Everything Crotin makes is priced exceptionally well, and their Grignolino offers profound value for those with a hankering for wines from this part of Italy. Freisa, a nearly forgotten grape variety ubiquitous in Piemonte only three decades ago, is found today mostly in the region’s backwater areas. It lost its footing to the rise in popularity of Nebbiolo-based wines and hasn’t yet found enough Langhe cantinas to be its modern-day champion on a larger scale. However, there are still compelling examples to be found at cantinas like Brovia and Giuseppe Rinaldi. Perhaps with the ever-increasing demand for Barolo and Barbaresco, it won’t regain footing in the Langhe anytime soon. Nevertheless, it should be on anyone’s radar looking for more of the identifiable but difficult to describe Piemontese characteristics imprinted on all of its red wines. From year to year, Freisa can vary in its tannin levels and if not managed well it can be a beast, but at Crotin they’ve tamed it and it brings great pleasure with only a slight tilt toward more rusticity than their Grignolino. There’s a new and perhaps polarizing wine in the Russo brothers’ range called Ruché, a grape variety I was unaware of until two years ago when I had my first one at their cellar. They made one for a well-known producer of this variety and after it permeated my nose with Piemontese potpourri aromas, I was sure there would be takers in today’s market filled with highly aromatic wines; in this style, Ruché seems like a shoo-in. The problem—one I realized after Federico Russo sent me a mixed box of some other producers from the area along with one they produced for another label prior to bottling their own—is that most of them are above 15% alcohol and hard to enjoy because they overindulge in strong, perfumy, caricature-like aromas that can be wonderful for some, but downright cloying for others. Their 2018 was delicious enough for us to give the 2020 vintage a whirl, their first vintage bottled under Crotin. At 13.5% alcohol, their 2020 is lovely and not at all overwrought, but rather subtle for a wine that can sometimes be suffocating. If you are in search of pleasure and fun in your Piemontese wine experience, Crotin’s Ruché should be on your list. The first drone video I did (which was more of a practice effort) is a regional teaser for our new producers in Spain’s Rioja and Txakoli areas, a short piece of eye-candy that covers some interesting ground from earlier this year. It’s fascinating how different the landscape in Rioja is compared to Txakoli, which is barely a half hour drive away from the northern parts of the region. The shots were filmed within a day or two of each other, but the drastically different environments make them seem like they are hundreds of miles apart. One of Fabio Zambolin's vineyards Fabio Zambolin - Alto Piemonte Going north into Alto Piemonte, the alpine foothills are home to Nebbiolo’s most historic roots. We’ve established a good foothold there with four winegrowers: Davide Carlone, Monti Perini, and two who have new arrivals in this container, Ioppa and Zambolin. Fabio Zambolin has a garage-sized operation and only a few very small plots of land in and around the most historically celebrated region in Alto Piemonte, Lessona, and an appellation that covers a lot of peripheral territory near the most famous DOC appellations known as Costa della Sesia. He also has a bureaucratic challenge in that his winery is in the Costa della Sesia appellation but his vineyards are inside of Lessona’s borders; this makes his wine labeled as Costa della Sesia Nebbiolo “Vallelonga” ineligible for the Lessona DOC, despite its fruit being grown entirely within Lessona. (This is the cue for savvy buyers to look a little closer at this bargain-priced wine that drinks as well as many wines bottled under this appellation.) Fabio’s wines are a favorite among our wholesale staff so it’s often hard to keep them in stock, especially given that we are allocated fewer than a hundred cases of all of his wines for the entire US. The overall style is one of finesse over power, a combination of the sandy volcanic soils of Lessona and Fabio’s stylistic preferences. Vallelonga is made entirely from Nebbiolo with extremely serious trim and represents one of the top values in the region. Zambolin’s Costa della Sesia “Feldo” is a field blend of old-vine Nebbiolo, Vespolina and Croatina, and it flies out of stock upon arrival. I never imagined that a blended Piemontese wine without a dominant grape variety would be one of our top sellers, but Feldo has proven me wrong with every delivery, and I don’t expect anything different this time. It has gobs of festive aromas and flavors (at least compared to other wines in an area known for often producing more solemn, strict wines in their youth), with not a single dash of pretension—it’s well-made Northern Italian glou glou. Rustic and playful flavors evoke those of an ancient Italian festive culture and are perfect for full-flavored food, like cured ham, braised meat, pasta, and pizza. There’s a lot of seriousness tucked in there too—no surprise considering the perfectionism with which Fabio organically farms his vineyards and his meticulous work in the cellar.  When I am able to finally unplug myself from the unusually high quantity of new producer profiles I need to write for our website, I will get to the left bank of Chablis, along with dozens of other videos I plan to create from the drone footage I shot on my two-month trek through Europe, which only really missed the Loire Valley and Central and Southern Italy. Ioppa's Santa Fé Ghemme vineyard with the Alps in the background Ioppa - Ghemme, Alto Piemonte Since the first day we started to import Ioppa, the 2016 vintage of single-vineyard Ghemmes were greatly anticipated. 2016 marked the first year of their collaboration with Cristiano Garella, a Piemontese enologist with a knack for slight alterations in philosophy, cellar work and final blend decisions that can significantly improve a wine. Interestingly, I used to sell Ioppa’s wines back at the beginning of my import/distribution career in 2008 and 2009 when the wines were imported by a progressive Italian importer of the time, Matthew Fioretti, through his company, Summa Vitis. I visited the cantina in 2009 and I would’ve never guessed that almost a decade later I would be importing the wines myself. The first vintages we brought in from their crus, Balsina and Santa Fé, were 2012s, wines that were built to show their best at least a decade after their vintage date. Cristiano had a hand in finishing them and they and the 2013s are just now beginning to open up. Ioppa turned a corner starting with the 2015s, moving away from a bigger, more tannic style that, when young, required food, to wines with more immediate accessibility that at the same time are still very ageable. The cantina also began conversion to organic farming around that time, which also seems to have softened the overall impression of their entire range. Ioppa’s 2015 Ghemme is simply wonderful, and six years after the vintage date the tannins are softening and this alpine Nebbiolo beauty is expressive immediately upon opening. The 2016 Ghemme DOC is the same overall quality as the 2015 that just arrived, but will come in next year. This Ghemme is composed of 85% Nebbiolo and 15% Vespolina and is aged for 48 months in 25-30hl Slavonian oak botte. The single-cru 2016 Ghemmes, Santa Fé and Balsina, are stunning. I tasted them this summer at the cantina with Andrea Ioppa, the eldest of the family’s progressive generation of thirtysomethings, and Cristiano. The results between the two were simply stunning. With the proper time given after pulling the corks, they will greatly reward the patient drinker. And with even more patience for cellaring, there is no doubt that they will last decades, improving along the way.  The majority of the most important Alto Piemonte wine regions are set upon igneous rocks in geological origin (Bramaterra, Boca and Gattinara on the volcanic porphyry, and Lessona on volcanic sand), while Ghemme is mostly alluvium. However, not all alluvium is the same. Ghemme’s unusual bedrock mostly consists of incredibly friable granite cobbles brought in from the Alps by way of both glacier and river. These rocks, or what appear to be rock, can be crushed into sand with a gentle squeeze of your hand. This granite sand and completely decomposed bedrock is one of the keys that elevates Ioppa’s wines to higher tones. It’s more present in the topsoil of the Balsina vineyard which makes the more elegant of the two cru wines. Mostly composed of iron-rich clay topsoil, Santa Fé is more muscular and has deeper balsamic notes. But in the case of the Ioppa’s vineyards, no matter what lies on top, they all rest on granitic alluvium bedrock. If Santa Fé is brutish power and earth, Balsina is elegant power and plays slightly more in the ethereal realm. For the collectors and cellar builders, you might not want to take Balsina without Santa Fé. They are a match that shows greater strength together. Both of these Ghemme wines are composed of 85% Nebbiolo and 15% Vespolina, and are aged for 48 months in 25-30hl Slavonian oak botte. Lastly, an unexpected thriller is Ioppa’s Vespolina “Mauletta”, which I tasted this summer along with the 2016 cru wines. It was the wine of the day for me among Ioppa’s power quartet of 2015 and 2016 Ghemme DOC wines, and 2016 Balsina and Santa Fé. However, it didn’t take the day because it was the best, it was simply the most stunning because I’ve never had a pure Vespolina wine of this caliber. Vespolina is a fabulous grape credited as contributing genetic parent material to the Nebbiolo. In recent years there’s been new focus on this ancient variety; much has been discovered about how to manage it in the cellar, and few have more experience vinifying it than their enologist, Cristiano Garella. Cristiano, Andrea and the other Ioppa boys, Luca and Marco, truly unlocked the key to this noble variety with their 2016 Mauletta. The answer for working around Vespolina’s often green tannins when the rest of the grape is phenolically ripe is simply to vinify it for a shorter time in the cellar separate from Nebbiolo instead of co-fermenting them together, followed by 48 months in botte to further sculpt it through a slow maturation. When Vespolina hits its balanced ripeness, its tannins are still green, so shorter fermentations may be preferred while extremely long ones often significantly reduce the impact of the wine’s primary fruit. Ioppa plays it in the middle with eighteen to twenty days on the skins and the 2016 Mauletta is a breakthrough performance and should not be missed by anyone interested in Piemontese wines. Monte Vulture, Basilicata's extinct volcano Madonna delle Grazie - Basilicata, Italy Madonna delle Grazie’s entry-level Basilicata Aglianico wines, Messer Oto and Liscone, are some of the most sought after in our portfolio for restaurant by-the-glass programs. Since the first wines were imported five years ago, they were immediately scooped up by the half-pallet by many of our top restaurants. The Latoracca family, with their extremely astute and well-educated sons, Paolo and Michele, in the cellar and in the vineyard with their father, Giuseppe, were relatively new wine producers that started bottling their own wines only fifteen years ago but have been growing grapes for generations. Initially, they simply couldn’t keep up with our demand—mostly because Immacolata (Irma), aka mamma, couldn’t hand label every bottle herself fast enough. These days, they’ve given Irma a break with a new labeling machine, and our ability to get stock on a larger scale is easier, despite the massive port delays. (Though these wines were supposed to arrive three months ago!) I snuck down into the cellar for a shot while Irma was hand labeling bottles. So cute! The two-hectare parcel of Aglianico that makes up the 2017 Messer Oto comes from the family’s youngest vineyards in Venosa’s Fiano di Camera district, inside the Aglianico del Vulture DOC in southeastern Italy. A location 420 meters above sea level on volcanic soils full of limestones bears this highly expressive and bright wine. The grapes are a massale selection of small berries with more polyphenols in the skin, which brings more color to this wine. These grapes are usually picked in the middle of October and are the first in for red wine production. Climatically it is the same as the other vineyards in their range, but the soils are better drained which results in earlier ripening than the Liscone, Bauccio and Drogone, all with richer volcanic clay soils. Raised in stainless steel, Messer Oto is a charmer and perhaps their most versatile wine, able to appeal to a broad range of wine lovers. The aging in steel preserves the wine's aromas and freshness, revealing impressive levels of bright acidity, earthiness, and an ethereal nose filled with red and purple fruit.  Paolo Latoracca paid us many visits during our year in Salerno While Madonna delle Grazie's Agliancio del Vulture 2016 Liscone is the second Agliancio in the cantina's range of reds, it can easily rival many cantinas’ top wines. It’s very serious wine with equal charm and punches so far above its weight class it seems silly for the price. (I’ve told as much to the Latoracca family, followed by tongue-in-cheek threats to dissuade them from increasing it!) Liscone is made from thirty-plus-year-old vines that sit at 430 meters. Three kilometers away from Messer Oto, it’s harvested a week later at the end of October because its soil is richer in volcanic rock-derived clay, not because the temperature is dramatically different. The plants are ancient biotypes different from Messer Oto and have larger berries and clusters because of the great water retention of its clay soil. The average yield here is 50-55hl/ha (70-80 quintale; ~2.8tons/acre). Grown in a sub-parcel of the Liscone vineyard, the grapes for 2015 Bauccio are grown entirely on black volcanic clay with a soft volcanic tuff layer about 60-70cm below the surface. Tuff is a combination of sand compacted with pyroclastic material, and each volcanic region and subzone has its own combination of minerals and bedrock structure. In contrast to sections used for their Liscone bottling, the topsoil here has little to no tuff in its black volcanic clay topsoil. Despite growing beside all the vines for Liscone, it takes a week or so longer to ripen due to the topsoil depth and the temperature influence of the nearby creek. A perfect marriage of volcanic and Aglianico flavors, Bauccio will age effortlessly for decades while maintaining very good accessibility in its youth. The grapes are picked at the end of October and if the ripeness is not there, its grapes are blended into Liscone, which has a shorter fermentation that doesn’t extract hard tannins. Bauccio is a noble wine with a fine balance of Aglianico power and elegance with both dark and bright fruit and savory characteristics. Every wine in every price level from Madonna della Grazie presents as good a value as can be found the world over, and Bauccio in a mid-range price is no exception. From a classically styled wine standpoint, Madonna delle Grazie’s 2013 Drogone d'Altavilla takes its place at the top with the best of all we have to offer in our portfolio. The 2013 checks the boxes of a great wine: impeccable balance, powerful yet refined, both gritty and suave, a deep well with elevated lift, and enjoyable young but destined to grow old with grace and polished nuance. It's made only in the best years when the Liscone vineyard's oldest vines find optimal ripeness. Usually it’s blended into Bauccio or Liscone on other years, and the only vintages bottled thus far have been 2003, ‘04, ’07, ’09, ’13, and ’15. What makes Drogone special is a combination of vine age (planted around 1960) and its genetic makeup. It’s a unique massal selection of Aglianico with a more compact cluster and more red than black tinted grapes. The deciding factor each year if Drogone is bottled is whether this extremely late-ripening ancient cultivar achieves the extra phenolic maturity to properly ripen the seeds to withstand its 40-45 days of fermentation without the tannins overwhelming the wine. For this length of time, the Latoracca’s need the seeds to be perfectly ripe, or the tannins may be slightly too coarse for what they expect out of a wine that will take the top spot in their range over Bauccio. Paolo, the winemaker of the family, explained that it has little to do with the concept of whether it is a “great” vintage or not, but only if the seeds can reach maturity in that last week on the vine, which is usually harvested the first week of November. Drogone is made the same in the cellar as Bauccio, except for the additional time of the post-fermentation maceration on the skins. Drogone remains one of the great wines in our portfolio. It’s a big win for me on authenticity and emotional value and transports me straight back to the Basilicata into the view of Monte Vulture, the extinct volcano that gave dramatic birth to this rich land with its black and beige volcanic soils, and the Latoracca’s bountiful vineyards. Drogone tastes, smells, and feels like this ancient land whose vinous history is as old as any in Europe, all with the added touch of the heart-warming spirit and generosity of the Latoracca family. During this unique moment in history, we greatly expanded into Iberia and picked up a few other producers in Italy, France and Germany along the way. Many of our new producers are not even close to arriving and I wanted to play them close to my chest until they got to the States because I’ve had bad experiences where people changed their minds and pulled out after we had already started to promote them. But given that this month all our new arrivals were already covered over the last two monthly newsletters, it’s a good opportunity to talk about some great new things in the market, and what’s more exciting than that? Many of Venosa's streets in this ancient village's centro storico are paved with massive slabs of black volcanic and white limestone rock found throughout the area.

Ancient Roman/Medieval bridge (ponte) of Ponte de Lima, Portugal (March 2022). April-May Arrivals We all share the belt-tightening sensation of tax season, or at least most of us do, and I’ve made it a habit to be on the wine trail during this time to avoid the stress as much as possible. Without my team back home, spearheaded by my sister, Victoria, my escapades around European wine country would be impossible, and taxes usually make April our slowest sales month. We don’t expect that to change, so we ordered somewhat less a few months ago in hopes that we would time things just right (an almost impossible task with these months-long delays) in order to have only a few gems to show around while budgets are reduced. Somehow, the timing worked out, so we don’t have much arriving, though I’m very excited about the wines that are coming into port. France Anthony Thevenet, Beaujolais While I was tasting through Anthony’s range in his cellar last summer, I was caught off guard by how little bottled wine there was inside his new stockage, next to his new house in Villié-Morgon. Despite the pandemic, global interest in Anthony’s wines increased immensely in recent years and his cellar was nearly cleared out. There wasn’t a line out the door waiting to put in their reservation, or the phone ringing with others that would squeeze me out, but I couldn’t get through our tasting fast enough to jump into securing a sizable allocation on the spot. Some wines, like the 2020 Côte du Py, weren’t even released yet, but I pushed to get on the boat before it sailed. This resulted in us acquiring four different vintages at once, a good opportunity to explore some insight on his development, from four warm seasons in a row that experienced different circumstances. I’m not surprised by the increased demand for his wines. From our first meeting and tasting, his imminent rise to Beaujolais stardom seemed obvious. Anthony Thevenet started out on the right track; prior to his first vintage, he worked a few years in the cellar of the natural wine luminaries, George Descombes, followed by a half-decade in the cellar with Jean Foillard. While still working with Foillard, he made his first domaine wines from the 2013 vintage, a lovely year for those of us who adore fresh, taut and bright Beaujolais wines. Anthony’s gorgeously subtle 2013 Morgon Vieilles Vignes and the 2014 that followed were a fabulous omen for the future of this kid crazy about motorbike sports and wine. The 2014s seemed to be a shoo-in for everyone in Beaujolais due to its beautiful balance and clean and pure perfumes. Anthony Thevenet Thevenet’s third year, 2015 was filled with behemoth wines and this harvest tested the efficacy of picking teams to get the fruit off the vines as fast as possible. The fundamental challenge of logistics remains the difference in some years from good to very good, to great, even with top growers. Often, nuances that stick out from a wine today, like desiccation of fruit, discreet green notes, austere tannins, or a lack of acidity are the result of challenging logistics during grape harvesting by hand and the need to collect as much as possible before the problems are really exacerbated. When the grapes are ready to go, you better be ready with a committed team that knows what to do! 2015 was a big year for everybody, but for some, it was a banner year. With a higher-than-expected alcohol and ripeness level, the grapes inexplicably maintained balanced acidity with a good mixture of red and black fruits. While roaming the streets of Los Angeles, before the release of his 2015s, I pressed Jean-Louis Dutraive about his honest opinion on the vintage, and, to my surprise, he said that 2015 may be the greatest year of his lifetime. (If you’ve not spent time in Beaujolais with the growers, at least in Morgon and Fleurie, you should know that these guys like to drink, and many, even the top growers, often don’t seem to concern themselves about alcohol content as much as they do about balance in their wines with whatever the season dicatates.) Overall, in Beaujolais, it’s all about what you, the consumer, wants from the wine. Some vintages can produce monsters, while others are dainty and flutter. I have not yet tasted better 2015s than Anthony Thevenet’s, but I stopped tasting many of them once the 2016s came around. 2016 was hit or miss, and the hits were solid ones, at least for me. Then it was back to the heat with 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, with varying differences between these hotter years. The Northern Rhône, being just across Lyon and toward the south, shares great similarity to these years, as do the lands of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir further north. With climate change, the hot years, especially in continental Europe, are predictably similar to each other, as are some of the cold years, like 2021, where mildew pressure across the west of the continent was insanely high and had a severe effect on yields and quality potential. Today, the difference between vintages teeters on a knife’s edge between too much and too little of what’s desired. With extreme changes in very short periods, wines can easily overshoot their mark in just a matter of a day or two. Quick Thevenet cellar notes: All the wines are vinified with a carbonic maceration without any sulfur added until just before bottling, and they ferment at temperatures no lower than 16°C. There are no added yeasts, and the fermentations are done in a gentle, infusion style, and can last between eight to thirty days, with the latter more rare and only employed for the top wines. There is no fining or filtration, and the total sulfite levels are under 15mg/L (15ppm). The purity and clarity of each wine’s terroir expression under Anthony’s supervision due to very spare sulfite inclusion are a testament to his laser-sharp attention to detail and instinct in the cellar. The 2020 Beaujolais-Villages presents an opportunity to see the merit of Thevenet’s lovely Beaujolais range from a year that is often (at least with our producers there) more expressive of red than black fruits. 2020 is a great followup to 2019 in that it was similarly warm, but the wines are more delicate and less decadent and full than the 2019s. There’s everything to love about the 2019s too. They are full-figured and strong in concentrated red fruits compared to the previous years, 2018 and 2017, which both show greater sweet licorice and slight balsamic notes accompanying the mix of red and dark fruits. This Beaujolais is a small parcel grown just outside of Morgon with vines of an average age of fifty years, grown on granite sands and raised in concrete tanks, leading to lifted aromas, a gentle palate, and bright fruit. In the next tier are the Morgon and Chénas appellation wines. Both wines are made the same in the cellar with 5-8 months (depending on the vintage) in 60hl concrete vats without sulfur until bottling. They also sit lower in the slope areas, which makes for a fun side-by-side comparison of these terroirs. Anthony and his father rent the Chénas vines and do all the work themselves. The slope is soft and slightly tilted toward the north, but still relatively flat. The soils are a combination of completely decomposed granite with different soil grains that either decomposed in place or are alluvial depositions. There are few rocks in this vineyard planted in 1970, except for some large, rounded ones. An interesting consideration between his Chénas and Morgon is that the Chénas granite is much pinker than the grayer granites of his Morgon vineyards. Thevenet’s Morgon appellation wine comes mostly from Douby, a zone on the north side of Morgon between the famous Côte du Py hill and Fleurie, and the lieu-dit, Courcelette, which is completely composed of soft, coarse beach-like granite sands. Much of these vineyards are on gently sloping aspects ranging from southeast to southwest. There are also rocky sections, but generally the vineyards are sandy, leading to wines of elegance and subtlety, also endowed with great length and complexity from their very old vines. The average vine age here is around sixty years, not too shabby for an appellation wine! Jumping into the upper tier are the domaine’s two flagship wines, the 2020 Morgon Vieilles Vignes and 2020 Morgon Côte du Py “Cuvée Julia”. The general vinification method for these two is the same as the others but often for a longer maceration time, and the cellar aging is also different. Both are aged for seven months in old, 600-liter barrels, but sometimes 225-liter when the crop is too low to fill a full 600-liter barrel. The differences between these two wines are a result of their terroirs. Both have very old vines, with the Morgon Vieille Vignes being from 90–100+ years old, grown on granite bedrock with gravel and sand topsoil derived from the bedrock, while the Morgon Côte du Py “Cuvée Julia” (named after his daughter) is from 90-year-old vines grown on extremely hard metamorphic rock with a spare topsoil also derived from its underlying bedrock. 2020 is a special year for these wines where they return to a brighter style with a little more tension than the 2019s. Of special note is that the 2020 Côte du Py is the last vintage before these old vines were pulled out in preparation for a new plantation. It’s unfortunate, but the vineyard was difficult to farm and needed to be replanted because it was not tended to very well prior to Anthony taking over and converting it to organic farming. Côte du Py rock collection atop hard bedrock In 2015, I asked Anthony if he would consider making a wine exclusively from the ancient vines in his Douby property just above the D68 on the north side of the hill across from the fields surrounding his family’s home and old cellar. With wide eyes he said, “why not?” And then he did it! The vines that make up the 2017 & 2018 Morgon Vieilles Vignes Centenaire date back to the American Civil War! What an opportunity to taste vines with such history! Like the Morgon VV and the Côte du Py, it’s also aged in 600-liter demi-muids, but for around ten months. It’s spectacular wine and offers a different view into how vine age can truly influence a wine’s overall character. Vinous wine critic, Neal Martin, says about the 2017 version that it “would give many a Burgundy Grand Cru a run for its money.” And there’s only one way for you to find out if this is true, and while the 2018 was not reviewed, it is just as good as the 2017. As one would expect, supply on these two legends-in-the making is very limited. Ancient Gamay vine planted in Morgon at the time of the American Civil War Domaine la Roubine, Southern Rhône There are few southern French wines that have come in and then blown out of our inventory as quickly as those of Domaine la Roubine. Located in the famous wine village, Gigondas, Eric Ughetto and his wife, Sophie, moved back to their family’s region in 1990, where they took over the family domaine and converted it to organic farming. Roubine’s style of wine represents the best of the rustic-but-clean vein of European wines. Each are fermented with their whole clusters (already quite different from most growers working with these varieties) for at least a month on the Séguret and Sablet, and for a month and a half for the Vacqueras and Gigondas, an even greater step into the rustic realm! One of the many interesting elements of their wines is that they’re exquisitely crafted, despite all opportunities for them to get too loose in their framework, with higher volatility among other possibilities with this kind of extended fermentation. The pH-increasing whole cluster inclusion with Grenache, a grape with an affinity for oxidation and higher alcohol levels, can often result in brettanomyces, a wine fault (at least in my book) that seems to be almost forgotten in the face of the new rodent in the cellar, mousiness, which is most often found in wines left to their own devices following the natural wine movement dogma. Starting with the entry-level reds are the 2020 Sablet and 2020 Séguret, two very serious wines at not-so-serious prices raised only in concrete tanks. Sablet, named for its vineyard’s dominant soil type, sand, is a beautiful and quiet satellite village of Gigondas. Perched up on a small hill, its sands were principally brought in by the Ouvèze River coming from further east, through the hillsides at the base of Mont Ventoux. Roubine’s parcel is up off the river valley floor, tucked into a forested hillside on terraces, giving it its own unique personality, and, I would add, its own deeper complexity with its likely deeper connection to bedrock below instead of an endlessly deep sand bed. The grape blend is 70% Grenache, 25% Syrah and 5% Cinsault. The main difference between the neighboring vineyards, Sablet and Séguret, is that the latter has a greater mix of calcareous clays with the same sands of Sablet, resulting in a topsoil that has a yellowish hue and is notably chunkier and whiter with than Sablet’s canvas-brown sands. Both wines are a true bargain for those looking for a middleweight that punches a few classes up, and one would be hard-pressed to find wines from these appellations of such note as these. The Séguret appellation as a whole seems to have a greater possibility for more significant wines, but will likely always be overshadowed by Gigondas and Vacqueras, two powerhouses of the Southern Rhône Valley that can often match the complexity of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, without overpowering it. Roubine’s Séguret is composed of 70% Grenache and 30% Mourvedre, an alliance that imparts a slightly more exotic expression compared to Séguret’s more classically-nuanced savory characteristics. Indeed, both wines are rooted in the savory world, which makes them and Roubine’s upper division wines great for nights of grilling salty meats. Eric Ughetto et moi The 2020 Vacqueyras and 2020 Gigondas are, as mentioned, vinified in the same way in the cellar and aged in a mix of mostly neutral medium-sized oak barrels, which leaves their terroirs to do all the talking. Vacqueyras has a little diversity in topography with some vineyards perched on higher terraces on the western side of the Dentelles de Montmirail, with a gradual slope downward in a series of undulating alluvial terraces of reduced steepness. The Vacqueyras, like the Gigondas, is a mixture of terraced vineyards upslope and some in the middle terraces, and is usually the more rounded of the two wines. Often it can steal the show between the two because of its more upfront appeal, while the Gigondas showcases a more serious profile; it really depends on what you want from the moment! The Gigondas comes from two different areas, one up into the mountains on white and gray terraces of limestone, quartzite, clay and sand, and the other on a flatter terrace of iron-rich red clay mixed with galets roulés, the rounded quartzite river rocks most famously associated with Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and which is otherwise ubiquitous in the Southern Rhône Valley. Roubine's terraced Gigondas vineyards The result of this combination is a Gigondas of immense depth with all the things we hope for out of this historic appellation filled with many good vinous addresses. It has the freshness of the vineyard high up into the dentelles surrounded by all the herbs of Provence, wild lavender, thyme, rosemary, and many more wild, aromatic shrubs and trees, along with the ferrous-rich palate seemingly imparted by its red soils from the parcel further down above the river plains. If Southern Rhône wines are a part of your annual interests, don’t miss these. They’re truly a bargain for their pedigree and craft, and have their own unique expression from Eric’s choices in the cellar. Germany Weingut Wechsler, Rheinhessen More Riesling Trocken from Wechsler is hitting our shores, as well as the Scheurebe trocken wine (a big hit despite a historic lack of interest in this unique grape variety, though we’re not surprised at all), and more of the Scheurebe Fehlfarbe, one of Katharina’s orange wine experiments that has gone very right! The new wines for the market start with Wechsler’s 2020 Westhofener Riesling Trocken, a wine made entirely from her many parcels in Kirchspiel and mostly from the younger vines. This wine bridges the gap between the Estate Trocken and the Kirchspiel Trocken. It’s friendlier straight out of the gates than the Kirchspiel Trocken and a bit less intense than the Estate Trocken. Like others in this region who have a “Village Trocken” wine, it’s worthy of attention and may be the better for larger parties of people rather than Katharina’s bigger hitters, like the next wine, which simply need more time after opening to show everything they have. There’s more to be discovered about the setting of Kirchspiel in the next paragraph! We have waited quite a while for the Katharina’s 2019 Kirchspiel Riesling Trocken to arrive. It’s a non-Grosses Gewächs (GG) classified though Grosses Gewächs-level wine from one of Germany’s most talented dry Riesling sites. For those familiar with the range of Klaus-Peter Keller’s GG wines, his Kirchspiel is often the most upfront and immediate compared to the rest of his big hitters. The same is true here with Katharina’s two top trocken wines, Kirchspiel and Morstein. Kirchspiel is a great vineyard and screams its grand cru quality (Grosses Gewächs) upon opening. Shaped like an amphitheater facing toward the Rhine River, which is roughly five miles away by air, its southeastern exposure has an average of around a thirty percent gradient, with bedrock and topsoil composed of clay marls, limestone, and loess. It’s a warmer site than Morstein because of its lower altitude (between 140m-180m), and the small topographical feature of the curved hillside helps shelter the vines from the cold westerly winds. Katharina has three different parcels in this large vineyard with reasonably good separation, giving the resulting wines a broader range of complexity and greater balance. After opening, the wine lasts for days with a constant evolution that develops more and more layers over a three-day period (if you can let it last that long). It seems relentless, the way a great Riesling should be! We will never have enough of this wine to satisfy everyone, but we will do our best. There are also micro quantities of the single-crus, Benn and Morstein, but both are in extremely limited quantities. However, next year we will have more of those two wines to satisfy the need! Ribeira Sacra subregions: Amandi in the foreground and Ribeiras do Sil across the river (once covered in vines!) Travel Journal Mindful Meandering in Northwest Iberia Most growers in the northern hemisphere have finished pruning by now. There are exceptions, of course, with those who test the limits of late pruning before bud break in hopes of a later start to the vegetative cycle. This increases the chance of avoiding frost while potentially extending the vine’s growing season to pass the peak of summer heat and into a gradual cooling of autumnal weather—sometimes just two or three extra days can make a difference of a degree or two of alcohol, and slightly more balanced phenolics. Late pruning is mostly a theoretical practice and doesn’t always yield the desired result at the end of the year, but it seems to delay the start of the season. Here, in Northern Portugal and Galicia, just up the freeway from us, bud break began weeks ago with some varieties. So far, it’s a strange year (what’s new?) with a big scare early on due to extremely dry weather in Europe. At the beginning of last month, I spoke with Tino Colla over in Piedmont’s Langhe wine regions (Barolo, Barbaresco, etc). He said that it was still bone dry over there and the topsoil in their vineyards was simply mounds of fine dust, which will lead to a lot of erosion when the rains finally arrive. In northern Portugal and Galicia, some reservoirs have nearly dried up, an unusual and almost unimaginable occurrence in a place that usually has a lot of annual rainfall. Just as the panic set in across Green Spain and Northern Portugal, a deluge arrived and reset the course of the season, ameliorating the stress levels of the local growers, farmers and ranchers. They still need more water, but it appears to be on the way. It’s strange to think that where we are in the north of Portugal will probably closely resemble the climate of Lisbon in thirty years, or sooner. In February, my wife and I followed the Lima River from Spain (Río Limia, in Galego) back home to Ponte de Lima, passing through the elevated countryside just before the start of the Peneda-Gerês National Park. Things began to take on an eerie apocalyptic feel. The sky was hazy and gray with the platinum shine of an indistinguishable sun straining to break through the thick web-like covering of clouds. We stopped for a little roadside break above a drying reservoir and in the distance saw that Aceredo, a Galician ghost village that had been submerged under a reservoir that was dammed up in 1992, had reappeared. (Two days later, there was a big story about it on the news.) Thanks to the recent drought, the entirety of the ruins emerged from the depths of the then shallow body of water, with recently dried crusts of concentric rings encircling it. Along the steep edges of the reservoir and on terraces were what looked like gnarled tombstones on hillsides but were actually vine stubs whose last harvest was three decades ago. Of course, being the sentimental wine lover that I am, my first thoughts were how tragic it was that I would never know the taste of the wines those vines produced, that the history and the future of the terroir is gone forever. Aceredo; Photo credit to Miguel Vidal/Reuters It’s around mid March as I write this in a hotel room in the center of Ourense, a small, former Roman settlement, famous for its thermal hot springs, which separate the Galician wine regions, Ribeira Sacra and Ribeiro. I was taking a moment after having just passed through Ribeira Sacra’s Sil River gorge with one of our producers, Pablo Soldavini, the winemaker at Saíñas, a bodega in Ribeira Sacra’s Riberas do Miño subregion. The forecast for the day of our journey was purely clear blue skies with a ten-degree (F) spike from the day before, but what we all woke up to was an air thick and dirty brown with an orange tint. It was a dust storm brought in all the way from the Sahara Desert that blew fiercely into southern Iberia and other parts of Europe, dropping orange/brown rain filled with clay particles in some parts of Spain. I was skeptical as Pablo explained the reason for the truly eerie and strange sky, until I checked a few news sources and they confirmed the tale. After a slightly harrowing start, the road became bumpy but wide enough and far enough from the edge for me to loosen what had up until that point been a Kung Fu grip on the handle above my window. We were on the south hill, opposite the picturesque cliff-side vineyards in Amandi, Ribeira Sacra’s most famous subregion, with the Sil River (really a reservoir now because of the dam further downstream) sitting still below us. On the principal aspects of the south side are north, west and east faces, all officially part of Ribeira Sacra’s Riberas do Sil subregion and curiously, vineyards no longer exist on most of its slopes. We suspected that it may have to do with the easier access of the other side to the northern towns of Galicia, but that surely they will be good spots for future investment, considering the imminent scorching of the other side of the river due to climate change. The hillsides are completely covered in beautiful, dark forest, with a thick covering of oaks and naked, leafless, gray trees poking out from the thick bramble, waiting for their new foliage to emerge in the coming weeks. The hillsides would seem untouched by humans if it weren’t for the many nearly hidden rock terraces tucked inside the forest, abandoned generations ago during the vineyard pandemics, dictatorships, wars (and their aftermath), etc, of the first half of the twentieth century. As we drove along the recently reawakened road that meanders along a hillside made of a variety of metamorphic rocks, we were surrounded by at least a dozen kilometers of hillside running east to west, with a range of about four hundred meters of altitude (1300 feet) from hilltop to the Sil far below, with countless more hills in the distance. The scale of it all is hard to convey in words, another wonder of the world, especially when you’re in it. Pablo Soldavini The vinous history of Galicia and Northern Portugal is a dreamland for terroirists with a knack for Indiana Jones-style fantasy, but instead of golden statues and legendary things that possess supernatural power, it’s the wines from these sacred places we seek. I drift off in thought on how it used to be there and who brought to life what are today ruins, lost vineyards, remnants of ancient granite buildings and completely abandoned and clearly once thriving countryside homesteads. Even the churches are falling apart, and some are actually for sale. It’s overwhelming to imagine the scope of how much they used to produce there, even more, what the wines tasted like so long ago. The thing about Ribeira Sacra and the Sil River gorge that separates Amandi and Ribeiras do Sil is the overall emotional impact when inside of the region. Not just from the wines themselves, but also from the clear signs of a lost time, a lost people with a strong and what seems to have been a fanatical culture to even attempt to continue to work hillsides like those, let alone build them from nothing in such a treacherous landscape. Over lunch in the middle of nowhere in Ribeira Sacra with Pablo, we crossed paths with a guy named Pepe. He’s either in his late 60s or 70s (hard to tell with winegrowers sometimes because they often look older than they are from their toils in the sun and vines), and he owns some land in the steep areas of Ribeira Sacra. After lunch, on our sometimes white-knuckle drive on the edge of cliffs in the Sil gorge, Pablo recounted to me some of Pepe’s stories about when he was a teenager, packing grapes out of the river gorge on a donkey. Pepe said he could make only one trip each day with as much as the beast could handle. But how much weight could they actually carry? Apparently a lot, and it occurred to me that that’s probably where the phrase, “an ass-load” comes from. His story seemed like something from ancient times, but he’s still getting around just fine and making time to regularly shoot the breeze and drink beer and wine at lunch time with his buddies. The people of Ribeira Sacra were not born into the same posh culture as those of Bordeaux or Burgundy. The people there were dirt poor for many generations and are only now making a few bucks with wines, a similar story to Piedmont’s Langhe, sixty or seventy years ago. It surely was a hard life that paid little to nothing, with commensurately impoverished living conditions. It’s these kinds of stories that energize my motivation and give greater meaning to my work as an importer. I want to not only bet on our industry’s most recognized champions, but also to fight for history’s underdogs. Ribeiras do Sil abandoned vineyard terraces taken back by nature Extraordinary terraces are hidden under nature’s impressive return everywhere in these parts, even along the Lima River where my wife and I walk on the river path on weekends and come upon countless abandoned terraces (presumably former vineyards) peeking through the greenery. I think the local Galician winegrowers (more so than the northern Portuguese, who always seem to be just a few years behind Galicia) have visions of rebuilding on their region’s past glories, similar to what’s happening in Piedmont’s Alto Piemonte wine areas (Ghemme, Lessona, Gattinara, Boca, Bramaterra, etc.). None of the Galicians I know have ever been to Alto Piemonte, but they have so much in common with their recent histories and even many aspects of their terroirs. The task is incredibly immense, and today, almost impossible because of the labor shortage: if you don’t own it and it’s not your dream, why would you want to work on these treacherous hills where one wrong move could lead to calamitous injury or even death? The massive financial investment needed and the quickly changing climate seem to make it a fool’s errand. Perhaps… But with a world distressed in so many ways at this moment, we continue to move forward.

The two prevailing names for zucchini suggest a split personality. The Italian name, which we obviously employ in the U.S. too, Zucchini, is a sort of silly word that sounds a bit like a clown who performs at kids’ birthday parties. (Oh, yes, there it is: http://www.zucchinibrothers.com/ ) On the other hand, the name favored by the French and English, Courgette, sounds gallant, like a courageous corvette or cougar with jets. Given this pointed discrepancy, I see two prevailing attitudes toward this summer squash: those who esteem and admire it (the courgettes) and those who are uninspired and go out of their way to avoid it (the zooks). Well, I’ve been a fairly vocal member of the latter group for most of my life. Outside of ratatouille and a dish I was once saw a recipe for but failed in my attempt to produce it (sun-dried zucchini), I just don’t see the point. At best its flavor is extremely mild, poised somewhere between faintly bitter and sweet. At worst, it’s insipid, with no flavor at all and a slimy, mushy texture. So what gives? So the other night I learned a much more compelling approach from an Italian chef, who was inspired to become a chef in part because of this dish. Zucchini, stand up and be proud. The zucchini hero was Antonio Giordano. During his eight years as chef of Terroni in Los Angeles, he earned raves for his perfect pizzas and meticulously handmade pastas. He recently quit to prepare to open his own restaurant, which will also be in Los Angeles. The dish is sometimes called Spaghetti alla Nerano for the town that inspired it on the Sorrentine Peninsula of Italy’s Amalfi Coast, where Antonio grew up. The story is that the dish was invented by Maria Grazia in 1952 in her eponymous restaurant in Nerano. With its azure waters, resplendent beaches, and towering cliffs to the sea, the Amalfi Coast is one of the most spectacular areas of Italy. But before its towns like Positano became popular with jet-setting Hollywood celebrities (Bogie, Sinatra) in the fifties and sixties, it was poor region. For summertime tourist traffic, the area is remote—its snaking roads cling to incredibly narrow, vertiginous cliffs that make for punishingly long journeys into the population centers. Instead of a steady stream of commerce, these spectacular cliff side villages had to rely on the fishing trade and carving narrow terraces out of the cliffs to establish flat spaces on which to grow produce and grapes. This Zucchini Spaghetti, an incredibly simple, but soulful dish is from the simple, powerful cuisine of necessity. “For me, this pasta says Amalfi,” Antonio said as he quickly sliced four medium zucchinis into thin rounds. “I grew up eating it, because it was a dish of the summertime. Zucchini grows like crazy in the bright sun on the coast, and every house grows a ton of basil.” Indeed, basil is the primary addition to the zucchini, as its incisive, minty edge provides a piercing counterpoint to the squash’s soft, mellow base tones. Besides the pasta, the only other additions are some grated cheese (Antonio used Parmesan), a dash of butter, and some olive oil. “This is the simplest, easiest version,” Antonio noted, “but it works pretty well.” While the pasta water is coming to a boil, Antonio begins cooking the onions in a large pot with the olive oil before adding the zucchini rounds. At first they sizzle, but he continues to stir them every few seconds as they start to release their liquid. “I’m cooking them down,” he says, “so the zucchini becomes the sauce.” He’s embracing the mushiness, turning weakness into strength, continuing to stir until about half the zucchini is broken down. He keeps the pot on low, letting some of the liquid boil off. When the pasta’s just before al dente, he pulls it out and adds it to the zucchini, along with the butter. A little bit of the pasta water goes in and the cheese, and he stirs it all until combined. The heat goes off and he stirs in the fresh basil, just before serving. With an Amalfi white, say a Falanghina, the dish is comfort food. This quick and easy dish is no place for a courgette—it’s all about the zucchini. Recipe for Zucchini Pasta Serves 4-6 1 Onion, diced 1/4 cup olive oil 4 medium zucchini, sliced into very thin rounds (equal to about 1 quart, when chopped) Salt and pepper 12 ounces (1 package) spaghetti 1/2 cup grated Parmesan 2 tablespoons cold butter 1 cup chopped Basil Leaves 1. Boil a large pot of salted water. 2. In another wide-bottomed pot, add half the olive oil and warm over medium-high heat and begin cooking the onion, until it has softened a become translucent. 3. Add the zucchini and stir until it’s all covered in oil. 4. When water is boiling, add the spaghetti and give a stir. 5. Keep sautéing the zucchini until it starts to break down, letting some of its water boil away. There will still be some chunks, but some of it will turn to purée. 6. Just before the spaghetti is al dente (when it’s still a bit tough against your tooth), use tongs to pull it out of the pasta water and place it into the zucchini. Alternately, drain the pasta into a strainer, while reserving about a half cup of the pasta water. 7. Turn off the heat under the zucchini, add the butter and cheese, and toss the spaghetti until well integrated. You’re looking for a nice silky coating with the cheese-zucchini-butter emulsion. If it needs a little water, dash in the reserved pasta water until the desired consistency is reached. 8. Finally, toss in the garlic, mix it up and serve with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of cheese. Wines that work Here are some options that will heighten your cooking and eating experience.  All of which Château Cremade - 2008 Palette Blanc: This top-notch pick for this dish comes from the tiny Provençal appellation, Palette, just within the city limits of Aix-en-Provence.  While this French wine is more often paired with courgette over zucchini, it will be a masterful pairing for this dish.  If you've ever been to the south of France, you know you will find just as much zucchini as you would in Italy.  $36 Domaine de La Vieille Julienne - 2013 Côtes du Rhône Blanc, ‘Clavin’: Following the theme from the south of France, this biodynamically-made white wine, principally made of Grenache Blanc and Clairette, is one of the greatest overachievers in southern French white wine.  We get only 20 cases for the entire west coast and they are a treasure to have around.  $26 Jean David - 2013 Côtes du Rhône Rouge: For a red, at only $17 retail, this complex and thoroughly delightful wine with a simple wine's price will be impossible to beat.  Like many great wines, this organically farmed (since 1979!) offering needs a ten minute warmup to begin its entourage of sweet red flowers kisses, cranberries, red currants, pastry spices and fresh mission figs. The palate takes on the seriousness of this wine showing that it is not a mere Côtes du Rhône, but a wine finely-tuned with fresh acidity and polished, but refreshing tannins.

(Download complete pdf here) Domaine Les Infiltrés old-vine Chenin Blanc, Saumur Puy-Notre-Dame, May 2024 Gen Z already at the helm of a Barolo cantina? Impossible, you say? Nope! Born in 1997, the first year of Z, the inspirational Daniele Marengo from Mauro Marengo, and Gino Della Porto, the soul-surfing, super-chill Gen X visionary from the establishment-rocking Nizza Monferrato, Sette, are about to invade California over the next two weeks. These two long-time chums will be a two-person road show, with Daniele flaunting his triumphant 2019 Barolos (crafted at a jaw-dropping 22-24 years old!), and Gino, Sette’s revelatory range after the biodynamic conversion six years ago of their lucky-strike purchase of old vines on a perfectly situated hill in Nizza Monferrato. The Barolo and Monferrato reboot is here, and these two are quietly at the front of the charge. One producer I’m excited about this month comes from the humble and nearly forgotten Loire Valley appellation, Bourgueil. Operated for the last few decades by François Delaunay after his father handed him the reigns, the now organic (certified in 2013) Domaine de la Lande maintains spectacularly priced wines that simply overdeliver with an extremely classic sensibility. Full of flavor, François’ wines rewind the clock to my first encounters with Cabernet Franc, which, almost thirty years ago, was an esoteric variety in the States thought best blended rather than as a monologue performer. Cabernet Franc from Chinon, Bourgeuil, Saint-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil, Saumur and Saumur-Champigny remain some of the world’s best deals for legitimately great wines. Even the average ones are higher than the average from most famous appellations. The most common Loire Valley Cabernet Franc can age well, if not more consistently than most Burgundies two or three times the price. And while the wine world continues to flirt with new styles in each area and decade-long trends, some, like François, have wedded themselves to traditionally and simply made wines. With the first sample bottles I received, I knew by the aromas alone—rustic but clean, deep, balanced between darkness and light—that they were for me. I admit, I’m an aroma hound first, texture second. My first visit with François this last December brought my enthusiasm to new heights, and my second only three weeks ago was reassurance that it wasn’t a fluke. My first cellar tasting last December was on point, followed by a quick vineyard tour of the well-tended and thriving grounds, still green even in December. But it was in the ancient tuffeau cave with old bottles that I understood the true quality of this domaine and was reminded of the breed of Bourgueil. François (but he’s usually much more smiley than this picture) At the top of the slope near the forest, we pushed through thick bushes, ducking under an overgrown tree and into their hidden cave. Entombed in the milky white tuffeau cavern were vintages as old as François, with bats quietly sleeping before slowly unraveling like old wines as they stretched before flight. As with many of us, one of my greatest pleasures is old wine that’s still sound. Well-aged wine is the final frontier of wine appreciation, a test of pedigree and clairvoyance (and sometimes vindication) of its maker. Most “taste” old and celebrated wines with too many people for a single bottle, which works as an academic snapshot, or often to fluff their experiential inventory to be later embellished in recounting, as though a taste is enough to know a wine. “Tasting” a great bottle is wasting a great bottle. Great wines reveal their merit when drunk over enough time—at least until the conversation starts to go downhill. The worst tastes of a great wine are the first, or the mud in the bottom. It’s everything in between over a time where one really gets to know a wine’s true character and breed. I’ve long collected wine to age. In the late 1990s, I worked at Restaurant Oceana in Arizona, with its chef, Ercolino Crugnale. He moved there from California with an extensive collection of mostly California wines he intended to put on his wine list, only to find out that he’d have to sell them to a distributor first and have them sell them back to keep things legal. He decided to drink them all instead. He was, without a doubt, the most generous restaurant owner I’d ever worked for. He had all the California greats from the 1970s-1990s, the highlights for me being Ridge and especially Williams Selyem. His pleasure was sharing as much as drinking the wines themselves. And we definitely didn’t taste. We drank. And that’s when I fell in love with old wine. Williams Selyem was the first great influence after flirting with the world of cheaper wines—the price point I could afford to drink. I was fortunate to spend a lot of dinners in Santa Barbara and Sonoma with Burt Williams, from Williams Selyem, during his last five years when he brought out mostly magnums because he’d run out of 750s. Darn. In the mid-nineties, young and ambitiously curious wine freaks like me weren’t easily allowed into the exclusive “wine club.” I was dismissed regularly by older wine professionals who guarded wine knowledge like gatekeepers, bestowing to the worthy (but moreso those who kissed the ass the most), or to the guests they schmoosed. Never one to kiss the ring (and not so humble about it either) I walked my own path until I met Ercolino. The other most generous boss I ever had was The Ojai Vineyard’s, Adam Tolmach, with whom I worked in the cellar for five seasons and remain good friends. There are few wine experiences like old wines crafted by generations past that then go unmoved in silence and darkness for decades deep inside the cold, damp earth. It’s incredible to think that some of the wines that had been guarded perfectly for decades before François opened them were destined for my glass that first day I visited Domaine de la Lande. It’s humbling, and a special privilege that I can’t say I felt I deserved. Yet, I could cite countless examples of having experienced that sort of kindness and hospitality in the wine world. François started with the younger wines, 2010 first, then we blind-tasted another half dozen that went back to the early 1980s. As he ripped corks from the bottles between his knees, gave his glass a sniff, smiled with the joy of sharing, and poured, everything was top-notch. The “great vintages” were as expected and the overlooked ones were even better; there are so many special wines in that cellar, and the vintage was inconsequential for the quality. Like all great reds of Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Rhône, they are aging gracefully with similar results and fewer differences beyond color and structure, despite big differences in terroir and variety. Though undoubtedly Loire Valley Cabernet Franc, many of François’ wines would stand their ground next to other aged greats from more celebrated regions. No wine showed a hint (at least in the first ten minutes) that they were on the other side of their peak. The “great” years were fuller and showed the ripeness of their seasons, and the fineness of the lightest years was magnified and bright. It was freezing. I was hungry. But I didn’t want to leave. Back in Portugal, I messaged François about possibly buying some old wines—a mixed case or two, I begged … I could see François’ lean, rosy high cheeks pressed up as he smiled and typed a mile-long list of options with every vintage back to 1982 that he sent me a few days later. The list was thorough, the prices jaw-dropping—a mere $0.50-$0.65 for every year aged in the cellar; top years, $1.10 for every year. I scoured the web for vintage charts but came up short on information for Bourgueil. I asked for guidance, which François gave. I proposed four mixed cases off his list: some very old that I would try immediately and other young ones (2005-2015) that I’d cellar longer. So far, I’ve pulled the cork on about ten bottles (1985, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1993, 1996, 1997, 2001, 2002, 2005–and there may be a couple I’ve forgotten), and each has been glorious. Most I shared with our Portuguese grower and great friend, Constantino Ramos, who is also now obsessed with them. The only confusing moment is just after the cork is pulled. No bottles had been capsuled until François’ family readied them for me; they’d all been left exposed to that ancient cellar, some for as many as four decades. The top of each cork was moldy and smelled like the deepest corner of the cellar and even a little TCA, quite rotten. But none of the wines were corked! The bottles only needed their lips and inside the neck cleaned, where the cork was in contact. Bourgueil has long been overshadowed by Chinon, at least in the US market–maybe because it’s easier to pronounce? With all those vowels, Bourgeuil is tough to get right! Bourgueil and Saint-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil (SNdB) are on a contiguous slope on the north side of the Loire River. Chinon is more topographically diverse and mostly sandwiched between two rivers (the other being the Vienne), like Montlouis-sur-Loire’s vineyards are between the Loire and Cher. Perhaps Bourgueil is viewed as more rustic than the typical Chinon. Perhaps a matter of more gravelly and sandy sites in Chinon? Without a classification system in place, location is an important variable. The pedigree of each vineyard bearing this appellation name can be quite different from the next. There are wines for easy drinking and others far more serious. Looking closely at a Google Earth image, or an appellation map, the land near the Loire River has fewer vineyards than other crops. Bourgueil is split in two by the small creek, Le Changeon, and from a 20,000-foot view, along with the SNdB, the contiguous slope is like the Côte d’Or and many Champagne areas, only facing south and southwest. Many of Burgundy and Champagne’s top spots favor more eastern expositions. Given its abundance of pyrazines, Cabernet Franc historically required more late afternoon sun, so more south/southwest positions. These days, it ripens quite easily regardless. The lower slopes of Bourgeuil and SNdB are generally sandier, and those on the riverbank have more unsorted alluvial sand, silt, clay, and gravel. About 4km north of the Loire River toward the forest, a gentle uptick begins from 40m, peaking around 90m. The top sites for wines of pedigree sit higher on the slope, close to the forests, where roots make contact with more of the tuffeau limestone bedrock and calcareous clay. François’ family vines begin just north of the village on the western end of Bourgueil at about 50m with more clay than sand and move upslope with the oldest vines destined for the “Prestige” bottling. Bourgueil Burgundy’s Côte d’Or and Champagne’s Côte des Blancs In short, the Bourgueil comes from six hectares planted between 1965 and 2010 at 50-60m facing south on a gentle hill of tuffeau limestone bedrock with a shallow siliceous clay topsoil. This is the easier-going wine, fresh, beautiful, and lifted with a substantial follow-through. It’s a great wine that will improve your day when you need a fair-priced, terroir-laced organic wine that doesn’t make you work too hard to find its cultural and regional stamp. Lucky for you, we were able to buy both the 2015 and 2017 Bourgueil “Prestige.” This is their superstar wine from two excellent and balanced vintages (from the same vineyards those old wines that I bought from François grew and then aged so long in the cellar). They are also their current releases—it’s nice to have some age built into a wine program! Prestige is more profound and substantial than the appellation wine. It’s equally classic in style, and just as fun to drink, but in a heavier weight class (though more a tight-lipped-but-fluttering Ali than a bruising Tyson) flowing with waves of complexity. Also facing south on a gentle hill of tuffeau limestone bedrock with deep calcareous clay topsoil at around 70m, this two-hectare plot was planted between 1930 and 1964. These old vines give it its torque and the organic culture for more than two decades now, its vivacity. The 2015 is for those who want more meat on the bone, while the 2017 is only a little more lifted and still quite substantial. Next time someone says they’re the winemaker, ask to see their hands! All François’ Bourgeuil wines are made in a very straightforward manner. They’re fully destemmed and fermented/macerated for around two to three weeks with one punch-down and one daily pump-over. Then they’re aged 18 months in old 5000 L French oak foudre and steel, with light filtration but no fining. Speaking of nice guys making wine in a similarly straightforward way as François Delunay, Rodolphe Demougeot takes his humble (by Côte d’Or standards) scatterings around Beaune, Pommard, and Meursault to peak performance for their classification—a subjective hierarchy in the face of climate change since we don’t all see eye to eye in our preferences. Unless someone else is paying the tab I’ll often take a young, higher altitude premier cru above a grand cru. Demougeot’s vineyards are either high or low, with hardly anything mid-slope: two premier crus, Pommard Charmots and Savigny-les-Beaune Les Peuillets, among eighteen different bottlings, no grand crus. It’s not Mercurey-level humble among the hierarchy of Burgundy areas, but it is modest considering his surroundings overlooking Pommard’s top Epenots premier crus on the north hill, paces below and above Meursault’s top premier crus and in the vast expanse of Beaune, with its swarm of négociants and tainted reputation. He does the best with what he’s got, and his best are charming and finely tuned. I’m a fan because, like I always say, I love honesty and less hand in the wines. As mentioned in a previous newsletter, when traveling in Burgundy with the Austrian luminary, Peter Veyder-Malberg, Rudy’s wines topped his list. Purity and sophisticated simplicity won him over, and we visited a lot of excellent makers. Yes, it was hot. But … How about some perspective without the spin? It wasn’t exactly hot like other hot years. There were so many heat waves in the spring, summer and fall of 2022 but there was also at least some healthy rain at crucial times in Burgundy. 2021 was a cold and wet year, and hot seasons following cold ones always benefit from less hydric stress because reserves are topped up, especially in limestone and clay-rich lands. This was felt all over Europe, which makes 2022 compelling enough to bet on. This didn’t happen so well for the string of hotter years that started in 2017 and was bookended by 2020, though 2017 also benefitted from some seasonal particularities (cold and wet until the summer went nuclear) and a colder year prior. This filled 2017 with some playfully serious wines with classical trim and their terroir clarity fully intact. 2017 remains my go-to red Côte d’Or drinking vintage since 2013, though the 2014s with their often hollow interior are filling in, and the furrowed brow of 2015 has begun to loosen. Let’s see what happens in the years to come with the 2018-2020 vintages. At the risk of being dismissed as having a house palate, I admit to being very happy with our two main Côte d’Or growers in these hot years. They delivered fresh wines of low alcohol and a well-managed structure. I have a fortunate history of steadily following most of the same producers as a Burgundy lover since the release of the 1999 vintage, until the wine industry lost its mind on certain domaines. Coche and Roumier used to be about the only small domaine Côte d’Or unicorns with hefty second-market prices, but now there’s an uncountable amount. Before the zombie buyer searching for unicorns who had more dollars than sense showed up, guys like Demougeot took over his family’s domaine and nobody cared because he didn’t have top premier crus or grand crus. And Duband was under severe scrutiny for big ripeness and extraction and lots of new oak, which he then drastically recalibrated and has since evolved into one of the finest top values on the entire Côte. France’s top wine publication, La Revue du vin de France, went so far as to put him in the same sentence as Leroy. Let’s face it, while many regions benefit from newfound positive ripeness where it was once impossible, Burgundy is facing a climate change dilemma more quickly harrowing than most—it’s particularly existential for those in the prime historical spots. Aside from the new challenge of frost and hail almost every year, the solar beatdown on what makes it to harvest is off balance compared to what it once was. The phenolic balance of Burgundian Pinot Noir and Chardonnay has always teetered on a knife’s edge. Other French red varieties in more continental climate environments such as the Cab family and the Rhônes, get away with more acceptable variation in some sense (except when the alcohol is too high), and the varieties are sturdier. But when Pinot Noir loses its flowery palate freshness or the growing season is too fast, forcing shorter and/or softer extractions during fermentation, they may maintain acidity by being picked early, but they’ll lose their magnitude. Chenin Blanc, unlike Chardonnay, has a history of tensile-dry wines and sticky sweets successfully grown at world-class-quality levels on just about every soil type. Its chameleonic quality is more resistant to the immediate weather challenges at hand. But when Chardonnay is picked prematurely in a warm year it gets bitter, and when picked late its flat and feels prematurely aged in bottle. The truest statement about navigating Burgundy still stands (for now): Buy the producer, not the vintage. The amendment to that rule should be to follow producers working on a more human scale with less surface area that are personally in daily contact with their vineyards. Slight adaptations during the growing season make the difference on that knife’s edge. And that brings us to Rodolphe Demougeot, who works in his vines all day and leaves his wines in tranquility until bottling. These will go as fast as they have been lately, since our fan base in California began to see the light of Rodolphe’s wines a long time ago, and his 2022s are about to land. First in the hierarchy … We have the Bourgogne Côte d’Or Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. (Which I think they could’ve shortened by leaving out Bourgogne…) These two wines are a case in point for Rodolphe’s talent with lower classification wines built like a Champagne flute rather than the slightly audacious Zalto Burgundy stem. The Chardonnay is a blend of different parcels from high up on the slope above and below Meursault. This combination delivers a wine with a somewhat mid-slope weight and richness (lower site) and minerally lift (higher site). It’s a great starter white and tastes as much like a Meursault as, well, a Meursault. This isn’t too surprising since it’s located in Meursault! The Pinot Noir comes from old vines near Chassagne-Montrachet, an appellation formerly more famous for red than white. It’s a serious ferrous red Burgundy, without the lipstick. Rodolphe has done all of us terroir junkies a favor by presenting almost all of his appellation wines with their respective lieux-dits. This way, we can still contemplate and play with terroir without selling Mom’s jewelry to get familiar with Burgundy’s terroir mapping. Let’s start in the north with Savigny-les-Beaune and work our way south. Savigny-les-Beaune is a diverse appellation and probably less famous than it could be. The diversity of its parcels divided between two main hills spread far and wide with so many expositions (southwest to north-northeast) and deliver unexpectedly high-quality wines. Outside of the local luminaries, like Simon Bize and Chandon de Briailles, many great to very good growers from other appellations (like Leroy, Bruno Clair, and Mongeard-Mugneret) have planted flags in the appellation and on the south hill with sites facing as much northeast as east on the same slope of Rodolphe’s two wines, Les Bourgeots and the 1er Cru Les Peuillets. These are adjacent, with the former a more gravelly alluvial wash from the now creek-sized waterway, and the latter, farther from the creek, built with more sand than gravel. Les Bourgeots is often grittier in texture and darker, while Les Peuillets is brighter and more lifted. Rodolphe in his Pommard 1er Cru Charmots Jumping over the freeway and to the south side of Beaune, Rodolphe has the Clos-Saint-Désiré, a Chardonnay harvested from a soft slope with deeper topsoil than expected so high up. It’s crafted in the cellar the same way as his Meursaults but it doesn’t taste like Meursault, beyond the variety and the more general region. It has bigger shoulders and is more frontloaded, while the Meursaults have that ingrained finesse and specific Meursault minerally magic. Rolling downhill just to the main road shooting out from the south side of Beaune’s town center, is Les Beaux Fougets, a red Burgundy. I’ve always loved the texture of this wine; it’s a rich Pinot Noir with a lot of earth and density yet remains lifted and lightly exotic by Rodolphe’s touch. Like many of his other reds, they often open with some reductive elements but quickly move into a more open expression. In photos, Rodolphe looks rough and tough, and though he might be tough he’s not at all rough. He’s gentle and generous, thoughtful and accommodating, an unstuffy Burgundian with a soul surfer’s demeanor unless he’s talking about organic certification, which furls his brow and thickens the air. He works organically but doesn’t certify because he, like many in France, doesn’t believe in the paper shuffling certifications. Auditors don’t go to the vineyards. They focus on receipts to see what makers have bought. Not sure that’s the best metric … Ever heard of cash purchases? The next commune to the south is Pommard. Like Savigny-les-Beaune, it can be a difficult village to navigate because of its many faces. Rodolphe’s appellation Pommard is one of the few non-lieu-dit wines as it’s a blend of two parcels in very different areas, like his Bourgogne Blanc and Meursault. A blend of unusual names, La Rue au Porc and En Boeuf—in English, they could be loosely translated as The Pork Street and In Beef. (There is also a Pommard climat outside of Rodolphe’s collection called La Vache—the cow. When they were classified in 1936, Pommard clearly had a few jokers on their marketing team; perhaps these names were chosen to stimulate digestion, and I guess we know why Rodolphe didn’t bottle them separately as lieu-dit wines … ) La Rue au Porc was planted in 1948 and composed of deep clay and limestone rock topsoil—the sources of the muscle and weight of the wine. En Boeuf is located in the Grande Combe, a somewhat narrow valley far to the west of the appellation on the north hill facing south on a steep slope of shallow rocky topsoil, close to forests, and in the direct path of colder winds from the countryside to the west, which presents an almost complete contrast to La Rue au Porc. Planted in 1979, the position of these vines brings the balance of mineral, tension, cut and lift, to compliment the richer fruit and fuller body from En Boeuf. Compared to the other Pommards of his range, this is more savory and meaty, while the others are more lifted and ethereal. Vignots, mid-slope above the fork in the road and up to the top Moving away from vineyard names with animals and on to more sexy, Pommard “Vignots” is not part of the upper cru club, but of cru club quality, thanks to climate change. Perhaps it was left out mostly because of its altitude which more or less begins at 300m on Pommard’s north hill. Vignots is a phonetic portmanteau of vigne and haut, which means, high vines. In communes with grand cru wines, above 300m usually defaults to a premier cru or appellation wine. But in Pommard, where there are no grand crus, the default goes to either village or Bourgogne. Regardless, Vignots is a serious wine, especially today. (Lalou Bize Leroy knows it, Vignots being one of her domaine’s bottlings.) It leans toward those of us who often appreciate as much angle in our Burgs as curves. Rodolphe’s 0.21ha parcel was replanted in 1983. Its defining characteristics of being south-facing, higher altitude, windy and steep, with thin topsoil and limestone bedrock are on full display after his soft approach in the cellar and rigorous organic vineyard work. Though its full name is a bit long, we’ve finally arrived at an A-level marketing decision on the name of Rodolphe’s top red: Pommard 1er Cru Les Charmots “Le Coeur des Dames.” I.e. High Charm, “The Heart of the Ladies.” Now that’s more like it, Pommard marketing team! Here, we flip Vignots upside down by leading with more curves than angles. Nature abounds in this small clos enclosed by limestone walls that keep out the diesel and brake dust from the surrounding roads. The vines here are plowed by horse as much as possible to respect the microbial life in the soil while also maintaining control of the natural grasses and weeds. Purity, elegance, and nobility are consistently defining factors rendered from this hillside planted in 2001 on limestone and clay. It’s made the same way as Les Vignots, which makes for a clear two-bottle demonstration of terroir at play with two of the most elegant faces within Pommard’s diverse range of terroirs and wine styles. Both are softly extracted through the infusion method, which is to say very little is done in the way of punch-downs or pump-overs during fermentation. I love this style because I subscribe to the idea that if the terroir is strong it doesn’t need to be forced to deliver its message. Last but not least of the reds and the furthest southern Pinot Noir vineyard in Rodolphe’s range, aside from the Bourgogne Rouge, we finish the red set with the Auxey-Duresses Rouge, “Les Clous.” Harvested from a single acre of Pinot Noir planted on a direct south exposition, it’s perfect for this appellation which is sometimes cooler than the rest of the Côte. Tucked into a small valley back to the west of Meursault and scrunched between Monthélie and Saint-Romain, this is a smart buy in warm and healthy years, like 2022. The soils are limestone and clay, but are very well drained due to the ample mix of stone sizes deposited by the small creek that once flowed through this valley long ago. Earthy and foresty freshness with a long finish are its lead characteristics thanks to the depth of the vines planted in 1949. Though more fruit-driven in 2022, it remains restrained and savory, a lovely match for food. As it is traditional tasting in barrel rooms in the Côte d’Or, we finish with Chardonnay. Demougeot’s Meursault is composed from two different lieu-dit village sites, Les Pellans and Les Chaumes. Located low on the slope, Les Pellans sits just next to the Puligny-Montrachet border below the famous Meursault 1er Cru Charmes known for its full-bodied and burly shoulders. Planted in 1957, these old vines set on a deep clay topsoil bring weight, earthy power and thrust to this seemingly lithe, middleweight Meursault. Les Chaumes, planted in 1999 and just above a deep limestone quarry above the village’s most famous 1er Cru Les Perrières, is the pointed spear in the charge of this ensemble. The stony and shallow soils—just next to one of Coche-Dury’s principal sections that make up his Meursault—brings lift, high energy, tension and vibration. The combination of these two sites that sit above and below some of the most talented terroirs for white wine in all of Burgundy make this a noteworthy Meursault. As usual, everyone wants it but there’s so little to go around. Planted in 1969 on just a tenth of a hectare (eight vine rows!), Rodolphe’s minuscule parcel of Meursault “Le Limozin” is surrounded by premier cru greatness on three sides. Indeed, not all village wines are created equal, and it’s good to note the location of this one: downslope from Genevrières, south of Les Porusots-Dessous, and north of Les Charmes-Dessous—not bad neighbors! Like his appellation Meursault, it’s another rare example—at least these days—of strikingly pure Meursault, devoid of overindulgent and trendy reductive winemaking notes. Its privileged placement among giants renders a deep body, dense interior and aromatic spring. The soils are deep with limestone-rich clay, and while this wine has striking tension, its depth is credited to its deep soils with a clear balance to bring weight, texture and finesse. The production is tiny with only five cases for the US. 2021 is the vintage to understand just how good Falkenstein’s wines are. I tasted them out of vat with our Southern California team, JD Plotnick and Tyler Kavanaugh. Their eyebrows shot up like mine did a decade ago during my first encounter with their wines at a restaurant near Lago de Garda, with Le Fraghe’s Matilde Poggi. Our first vintages imported, 2019 and 2020, were warmer years. The wines were still exquisitely crafted by Franz Pratzner, the founder, owner and chief winegrower. Though more now under the welcome influence of his daughter, Magdalena, Franz was already doing great work before she returned from school and with experience from working in other wine regions. She’s gentle, but also a force of nature that will help elevate the level even more. We tasted Falkenstein’s 2021s in their state-of-the-art, frigid cellar dug into the mountainside tricked-out with gorgeous medium-sized, mostly 10hl-18hl acacia botte in the middle of May 2022 with already sweltering heat that didn’t let up the rest of the year. If I ever had a cellar (and a lot of cash), it would look like theirs: immaculate and with big, beautiful, botte! When they released these vintages, we received our 2020s in California and needed time to work through them. They asked if we wanted to skip the 2021s and buy again with the release of the 2022s. Not a chance! The 2021s are too good and you need to know how special they are in the cooler years. Grown on a mix of metamorphic and igneous bedrock, it shares similar geology to the region for Franz’s inspiration with Riesling, Austria’s Wachau, though from a different geological age. Franz’s wines speak the same language but with a different dialectic twist. The Südtirol’s Vinschau DOC is similarly continental/mountain climate with hot and dry summer days and frigid nights, though the Wachau has been much spottier as of late during fruit season with more frost and hail. While the Wachau is a narrow river gorge, the Vinschgau, or Val Venosta, is an expansive and steep-walled glacial valley. The topsoil of their vineyards are a mix of glacial moraine and sand derived from the bedrock. The vines are also at much higher altitudes than the Wachau, at 600-900m—about 400m maximum in the Wachau. First up, the 2021 Weissburgunder. In Südtirol, Weissburgunder (more commonly known as Pinot Bianco or Pinot Blanc) is often considered the top white variety and when tasting those from the best local cellars, it’s easy to see why. On Jancis Robinson’s website, she describes the grape as it usually presents itself in most regions: “Useful rather than exciting.” She’s right. The majority are like that. But things are changing, and this grape offers pretty dull wines most of the time (especially further east in Friuli), but in Alpine country it thrives. Take Wasenhaus’ German Weissburgunders from Baden as another excellent example. In Südtirol, Weissburgunder is truly their top white, on average, and a lot more exciting than those produced elsewhere. Many whites grown in Südtirol grow well on the Dolomite limestone formations further east, and, just like the Sauvignon grown there, can be intensely racy, fully aromatic, and sharply textured. In the center of the broad region, on porphyry rock and glacial moraines, usually the hottest zones, they tend to be richer and more glycerol, salty, expressive of spices, honey, and more mature stone fruit. In the areas with the coldest nights and on more acidic soils, like those of Falkenstein, the combination of bedrock, sandy soil, bright sunny and warm days and frigid nights keep it fresh, lifted and complex. Weissburgunder is never a pushover inside special terroirs like Falkenstein’s. And 2021 is the season to give them a spin if you’re looking for more zing in your Pinot Blanc. The six hectares that make up the headlining 2021 Riesling vary in vine age and are planted with a multitude of different biotypes, with the oldest established in the mid-1980s, and others up until the late 2000s. The selection for this first Riesling in the range (the one bottled with only Südtirol Vinschau DOC printed on the label; the other is labeled Alte Reben—“old vine”) comes mostly from the younger vines and the upper row of clusters of the older vines. And while the Alte Reben is a grand wine, the appellation wine is the one I want to drink most, like the Federspiels of the great Wachau growers—though this one lands between Federspiel and Smaragd with a tilt toward the latter. The altitude ranges from 600 to 900 meters and offers a broader span of characteristics. The Pratzners describe theirs as typically dominated by citrus, stone fruit and salty minerality. But in 2021, it’s even more minerally and with greater citrus dominance over the stone fruit and the textures have finer lines. The vintage brings us back a decade or two in climate influence. It also validates the claim of their Italian peers and many Austrian and German Riesling growers that Pratzner’s Rieslings are indeed Italy’s flagbearers. While Germany’s most famous dry Riesling is concentrated in the Rheinhessen’s limestone sites, these match the more historic Austrian deeply salty dry Rieslings grown on metamorphic rock inside the Kamptal, Kremstal and Wachau. This year is the best demonstration of what the Pratzners can do with the noblest of grapes. My wife thought Marrakech would be similar to Napoli, one of her favorite cities. But on Napoli’s most chaotic roads (which are everywhere), at least you have the body armor of a car. The center streets of Marrakech are narrow and dirtier, but not with the scattered and ubiquitous trash like Naples. Marrakech has a lot of dirt, brake dust, smoke, exhaust, buildings in ruins, quieter and gentler people, and cats … lots of cats. After quickly rinsing off the air-travel grime and donning a fresh set of clothes, outside of the riad (a small privately owned hotel), wood and meat smoke, tajines, herbs, spices, and motorbike exhaust are instantly cured into your skin, hair, and clothes that were fresh a minute ago. Everyone is on their toes, even the locals, and tourists’ heads bob up and down as they check their spotty phone navigation apps trying to decide which street to take as men and boys honk and blister by them through the souk market on bikes. Among the disgusting and divine scents, I was happy that one was notably absent: that of dogs; their scent couldn’t be found anywhere. I don’t mean the smell of puppy fur only a couple days after a bath (which I and most people like), but rather the stink of Europe’s urban centers where dog owners all too often shirk responsibility for their animal’s messes (necesidades, as the Spanish say) and the noise pollution of territorial barking. I saw only one old black-and-tan canine trotting through the chaotic traffic at dinner time, tongue out, confident. Though it’s a mere hour and forty minutes by plane from Porto, it’s a very different world. Despite warnings about dark streets at night and misdirection from locals with dubious intent, the only things I felt were unsafe were the bikes and cars. But for as much shock and terror as there was in realizing that there were only millimeters separating us from severe injury or death every thirty seconds, my wife was anxious and somehow relaxed at the same time. A change of activity and mindset was needed: no home and office habits, no computers, poor cell phone coverage (and I was disappointed my phone worked at all)—every reminder of our privileged life back home was gone. And on the street of Marrakech, your inner yogi has no choice: you must be present, or you’ll get run over. The highlight of our trip was the day we spent in the Atlas Mountains with a Berber family. Our first stop was Asni, a town in the lower mountains and foothills, damaged by last year’s earthquake, the most severe in over a hundred years, responsible for the death of a few thousand people—a tremendous amount in proportion to these sparsely populated areas. Some who slept in their clay houses were crushed by truck-sized boulders crashing from above, and many survivors now live in tents outside of their ruins while they rebuild. We stopped at the Saturday market for the vegetables we needed for our cooking class with a Berber woman, Latifa, who taught us how to make the real-deal tajin, fresh bread and the unforgettable and easy-to-make eggplant dish, zaalouk. Without a doubt, I was the only blond, fair-skinned dude, and my wife was the only woman I saw among the mess of tents and rough-but-kind Berber men. And I’m sure there were positively no California health code violations in that market … We barely made it back to the airport after three days. Not because we didn’t have enough time, but because our young driver was a stone-silent, horn-honking swerving, needle-threading, 4-Runner-driving madman with a death wish. Our lives were out of our hands for thirty minutes, but we got to where we were going. Pointers after four days in Marrakech: be patient; remember why you’re there; concede to the chaos and smile, knowing that they’re gentle people and they will smile back even if they’re not trying to sell you something; arrive at least three hours before your flight departure—the lines are slow and long, especially inbound passport check so don’t underestimate how much time you’ll need; go to L’Mitad restaurant (our lunch pictured), the best modern(ish) restaurant we went to—other highly recommended places fell very short by comparison; explore the street as much as possible during your first days before you commit to any street food so you can find the right ones. If you’re going to risk Montezuma’s revenge, Moroccan style, better to get it the day you return home instead of at the beginning of the trip.

If your wine world revolves around natural wines, wines of true terroir identity that are as unaltered as possible by the hand of the grower so as to remain pure, with high-tones, and vigorous, deep textures, then read on and get ready to buy. You won’t want to miss these. Cume do Avia’s wines are rare. Most of them are limited to just over a hundred bottles of each wine for the entire US market, and it wasn’t anticipated that we’d still have them in our inventory at this point. But Covid-19 has opened the door for you, and I am thrilled to introduce you to these wines if you don’t know them already. This lot that just arrived in California was transferred to us from our New York warehouse, where they barely missed their opportunity to put on a show in the Big Apple for some of the world’s most talented sommeliers running wine programs in the city’s best restaurants. Our California team’s 2018 allocation evaporated in days upon arrival and these wines certainly would’ve been long gone out east, too. The Wines at a Glance (A more in-depth write-up is further below) The Colleita Tinto is simply too good for the price. Its delivery is astounding and profound for those who like high-toned, low octane wines that drink as much like a white as they do a red. Brancellao is a grape that can render a wine as brightly hued as a glass of Campari and is the most seductive and elegant in the range. Caiño Longo, a bright red in its youth that can quickly take on a darker hue with only a little age, has an electrical charge and vigorous energy. The Viño Tinto Sin Sulfuroso is a marriage of red and black grapes and bottled without any added sulfur. It continues to surprise as it matures, and keeps getting better, despite its naked life free of sulfur. Their other red varietal bottlings available on our website, Sousón and Ferrón, are ink-black beasts, tight and trim, gritty and earthy and almost savage when young. Be forewarned, these last two wines must be experienced but they will not be for all takers, only those who don’t discriminate against unbridled energy, because they are that. All of the Cume do Avia wines are aromatically intense and have a mouthfeel full of tremendous freshness and intensity. Their range of red wines is a unique and exciting addition to the resurgence of the Iberian Peninsula’s many awakening wine giants. A short story and a deeper dive into the wines Constant Evolution On the narrative arc of our lives inside the wine world, some producers come along that redirect our compass. For me, the first was the legendary California Pinot Noir producer, Williams Selyem, whose wines I was able to drink with surprising regularity at a restaurant where I worked in Scottsdale Arizona back in the late 1990s. The chef and owner, Ercolino Crugnale, came out from California and brought his personal wine collection out to the middle of the desert, where he opened his own seafood restaurant. He planned to put his collection on his wine list, but once he got there, he was told that in order to legally do so, he would have to sell it to a distributor first so they could sell it back to him. Lucky for me, Ercolino decided we would drink it all together after dinner services instead. At Restaurant Oceana I was generously treated to so many of California’s best 80s and 90s wines from Ridge and all the names in California Cab, but it was the Williams Selyem Pinot Noirs that really made an impression on me. What came next was Jean-Marie Fourrier, with his 1999 vintage. I was spoiled by Fourrier's wines early on thanks to the late Christopher Robles. Chris carved out a massive allocation of Fourrier’s wines for the Wine Cask Restaurant, in Santa Barbara, where I ended up working as a sommelier, back when it had a list of more than two thousand carefully selected wines. There were many life-altering wines on that list during the year and a half I worked there, and we were drinking wines like Fourrier’s famous Gevrey-Chambertin 1er Cru Clos Saint-Jacques for a mere $57 a bottle after our employee discount, and it seemed we had an endless supply of the stuff. Now his Clos Saint-Jacques runs from three hundred to a thousand dollars a bottle, depending on the vintage. We had about a full mixed pallet of his entire range of wines from that truly great vintage that we soaked up daily, along with tons of the other best wines in the world generously allocated to Wine Cask. Once I became a wine importer, things changed drastically. I got to know my heroes personally, which upped my game considerably from those years as a wine-country dreamer to the full, daily immersion of someone in the thick of it. There were soon countless producers that few knew about yet that eventually became synonymous with The Source. Austria’s Veyder-Malberg showed up on my radar in 2010 (thanks to Circo Vino, an Austrian wine importer), along with France’s Loire Valley rising star, Arnaud Lambert, and the discovery of his laser beam Chenin Blancs of Brézé, followed by Thierry Richoux and his singular, giant-slaying Pinot Noirs from the unassuming and minuscule ancient village, Irancy, in the far northwestern corner of Burgundy. Poderi Colla, one of the greatest and all too often overlooked families in all of Piedmont, suddenly caught my attention at a Barolo party overflowing with great wines, when I’d never heard of, had or seen their wines among the vast sea of Barolos, a region I thought I knew a fair bit about at the time. And at the same moment I fell head over heels (like so many others worldwide) for Jean-Luis Dutraive’s wines, which he kicked off with his spectacular run from 2012 to 2014, before Beaujolais blew into the mainstream. Then there was Green Spain… In northwestern Iberia, just above Portugal is Galicia—a part of Green Spain. Galicia is one of the most obvious places in all of Europe clearly with the ability to achieve so much, but with enormous unmet potential. It has a rich history, a deep well of indigenous noble grape varieties and terroir systems, perfectly suited to produce a broad diversity of deeply complex wines. I only began learning about it in depth about four years ago, shortly after my wife and I took our month-long honeymoon in Spain in an attempt to actually get away from wine for a moment. On our journey in the heat of late September and early October, we found ourselves off the wine path and in the world of the tourist, and it took only a couple nights of the famous bruiser red wines from Spain before we began our retreat to beer and Albariño in an attempt to stay fresh and clear-headed so we could enjoy each oncoming day. Once we got home, my friends, Rajat Parr and Brian McClintic, who both resided at my house in Santa Barbara at different times (the latter for years), kept pushing me in the direction of Galicia with so many good wines from Envínate, the now famous producer from the Ribeira Sacra with a ubiquitous presence on all serious wine lists, worldwide. Then JD Plotnick joined our Source team and stoked my Galician embers into a full raging fire. He’s freaky about Galician wines (and wine in general, which makes him a particularly effective and respected salesperson) and it has been a major focus for him for many years, long before Envínate nearly single-handedly put Galicia into mainstream wine pop culture. Enter Cume do Avia The most beguiling wines give the impression that you’ve never truly fallen in love like you have with the one currently in your glass. My first taste of Cume do Avia was at a restaurant in Sanxenxo, at Bar Berbereco, with Manuel Moldes (known to his friends and family as Chicho) and the owner of the restaurant, José (Salvo) Esperon and all of our better halves. Salvo brought out a bottle of Cume do Avia’s Colleita 5 Tinto. I asked if I could taste another wine from this producer because I loved one I was drinking, but was trying to temper my excitement since one-offs happen a lot. But if they could back it up with another wine, it was on. Brancellao was that second wine, luckily for all of us it was incredible, and the rest is history. The wines I first tasted out of barrel with Diego Collarte, one of the family partners of Cume do Avia, seemed to carry the full weight of his family’s collective dream—I’ve never been so moved by the energy of a moment as I was the day I met him and heard his unfiltered, brutally honest view of the challenges they needed to overcome to arrive at that moment, and I knew that I had found as true a diamond as I’ve ever found in the rough. The grit and heart-filled determination of this tribe has led to a range of red wines in 2017 that are raw, honest and inspiring. The nature of the spare and intensely focused wines from the 2018 vintage turned what little noise was left in already impressive wines into wines of greater precision and stark clarity. Diego assures me that this is just the beginning. I believe it. Cume Do Avia Wines In-Depth Raw and enticingly naked, the Colleita 6 Tinto is the charming starting block for Cume do Avia’s range of honest and sparsely touched wines, made from a blend of indigenous red Galician varietals. Caiño Longo (40%) and Brancellao (26%) bring elegance and taut red fruits, and the balance from Sousón (34%), the dark, agile beast side with a deep, vigorous acidity. It’s angular but still soft and restrained, and drinks as much like a white when its young as it does a red, save its glorious, dainty and fluttery red wine characteristics, and the influence of its three-week fermentation with more than a third from whole bunches. A shade over 11% alcohol, it’s aged in an ancient, restored chestnut foudre, and is replete with mineral and metallic impressions derived from its soil mixture of granite, schist and slate. (No matter the scientific debate on how these characters come to a wine, these soils vividly mark their vinous offspring.) Its freshness is a waterlogged forest with tree bark spices, exotic sweet green pastoral herbs and wild red and black berries never touched by a direct ray of sunshine. It’s refreshingly cool, like fog rising from a slow moving river; like rain; like wet, brisk wind. It’s a wine from the Ribeiro and it tastes like that land looks and feels. Cume do Avia’s Brancellao is dainty, thin framed, soft spoken, and subtly powerful. It’s equally as compelling as the other wines in their range of reds, but its charm flows ceaselessly from the first sniff and sip. It’s more suave and with far less than one hundred cases produced annually, Brancellao is still the largest production of their single-varietal wines. It’s extremely fresh, bright and beautifully transparent, and reveals many facets in time, all filling out together as it unfolds. One moment it speaks of Italy’s alpine influenced wines such as Premetta and Schiava; or France’s Massif Central red, Saint Pourçain, a Mugnier-like Pinot Noir from Burgundy; Poulsard from the Jura; lightly extracted old school California Russian River Pinot Noirs from the 80s and 90s like Williams Selyem’s coastal vineyard sites after decades of cellar time. In the glass it smells and tastes of the first red berries of the season, sweet green citrus and bay spice. The palate ceaselessly expands in depth and weight, with the start as light as a darker rosé and that evolves like a fresh, cool vintage red Burgundy from a high elevation site on stony soils. That said, I have no illusion about this wine’s pedigree when comparing it to Burgundy because it is not constructed like one in the cellar. It was crafted for a shorter life, but over hours of tasting it finds unexpected heights that show what its potential could be if modifications were made with the intention of aging it longer. It’s hard to imagine a more compelling prospect in the resurgence of the Spain’s Ribeiro (and perhaps within Galicia) than Caiño Longo. If there were ever an extroverted bright light within all of the noble red grapes of the world, this could be a contender for the top prize. Cume do Avia’s interpretation is almost outrageous and appears to be some kind of mythical legend from a fantasy land. It’s grown on a mix of granite, schist and slate soils, and is a lightning bolt of freshness with an atomic level of expansive energy. In its youth, it bursts with a broad, mouthwatering spectrum of piercing lines, sharp angles, seductive curves and concentrated energy. (My descriptions may seem indulgent, but this wine is like a high-grade stimulant for the nose and mouth.) When I first tasted Cume do Avia’s 2017 Caiño Longo from a restored chestnut barrel of over a hundred years old, it was a hair-raising and somehow illusory experience, and one of the most vivid moments of my entire wine career. Instantly smitten by its flamboyantly profound beauty and depth, I asked if it was made from old vines and was surprised when I was told that they were planted in 2008 and 2009. Its sappy palate and lengthy finish is deceptive and easy to associate with a wine rendered from ancient vines whose energy focuses on fewer but more concentrated grapes. When compared to the entire range of Cume do Avia’s red wines, the mood of the Viño Tinto Sin Sulfuroso lands squarely between the opposing bright red and ink-black single varietal wines. Nearly half the blend is Sousón (known in Portugal as Souzão, Sousão or Vinhão), which brings darkness to the color and a strong virile sense of spice, animal, iodine and belly to the wine—though not as much of a belly as many other solar-powered red wines grown on heavier soils. The difference, a blend of one-third Caiño Longo, both the backbone and horizontal core of the wine, along with the radiant Brancellao (25%), bestow together ethereal wild red berry nuances, unremitting acidity and pure joy. It’s spare on fat, but rich in character and personality. Once past its coy first fifteen minutes, this elegant but firm wine begins to aromatically blossom with pointed thrust and beautifully long lines.

(Download complete pdf here) Anchovies from Cetara, Italy We’re still in renovation purgatory with our countryside rock house (lifelong dream number one), a Notre Dame de Paris-level timeline that started only months before the pandemic hit. Even with such a long way to go, we’re still happy living in Europe, though a process like this will test even the most patient and optimistic saint. I’m mostly the first two of these, but certainly not the last. Perhaps the top European perk for us Epicureans is the availability of the best ingredients. My wife and I miss a lot of things about the US, and some farmers’ markets can equal some of ours, but Europe is generally tough to beat. As I write this in late August, the spectacular taste and color of the figs in Spain are dizzying and they cost the equivalent of only $2-$3 per pound. Chanterelles are $7 a pound (dried to the point where a full produce bag weighs that much), fresh sardines are $5, mackerel $4, and on and on. Some European countries simply dominate certain food categories. The Usain Bolt of cheese and poultry is France: no one else is even close. The battle between seafood and fish is without a clear winner, but many believe the raw product frontrunner in Western Europe is Spain. The most compelling argument that tips the scale in Spain’s favor outside of the three Atlantic fronts and a thousand miles of Mediterranean coastline is what comes from Galicia’s Rías Baixas (though the endless variety of Sicilian and Sardinian fare would be two of Italy’s many parries); the uniqueness of the four Galician estuaries (rías) offer marine life a plankton overdose, leading to monstrously sized and extremely flavorful goods all the way up the food chain. Costa Brava Sardines: more lean than the fatty Portuguese ones, but just as good. The salt-cured food category echoes the Federer, Djokovic, and Nadal debate: sausage is anyone’s game, and all the contenders are as different as tennis’s Big Three. Spain wins on land with cecina and jamon like France does with cheese. Italian anchovies can match the Spanish in taste, though Spain has many more high-end producers in Cantabria that market themselves well. Like all anchovy-producing countries, the disparity may be attributed to their cultural approach. Spain takes anchovies more seriously than any country as a stand-alone food, a sort of luxury good meant as the center of the plate it adorns. Italians see anchovies as more of a potent support in their orchestra of ingredients for a million different dishes, and it’s rare to see them as the dish alone. Iberico pork (pictured below), Galician beef, lamb, goat and cochinillo (suckling pig) are legendary in Spain. Spain is so far ahead of the European pack on four-legged fare there is almost no chance for a successful coup. Indeed, there are always outliers in Europe—individuals or small zones that do it perfectly—and arguments for other non-European countries, but Spain as a whole on meat is what Babe Ruth was to baseball. Even though this looks like beef, it’s “presa” from Iberian pigs. The next top perk for epicureans interested in vinous exploits is the European restaurant wine list. Prices in most restaurants lacking Michelin stars are still appropriately marked up because growers know where their wines are shipped directly in Europe and they visit their clients all over the continent. For example, French growers understand that in places like Paris, Bordeaux and Lyon the cost of living, rent and labor is much higher and have far more affluent customers passing through. They also expect to see higher markups because restaurants want to keep exceptional wines in stock long enough to maintain their reputation for having a great list. Beef from El Capricho and Bodegas Gordón on the border of Galician in Castille y Leon. The countryside is the best place to drink. Prices are much lower because the owners know their top growers on the list may drop in for a visit, especially if they’re local. And if they are in fact gouging with big city margins, they may get a reduction of or lose their entire future allocations. I imagine that few growers are happy to see their 15€ wine on a countryside list at 200€ per bottle. While Europe wins on restaurant wine lists, it doesn’t always win in the retail market. A good fine wine store in the US is often a one-stop shop for wines from all over the world and the others are very local, though that’s changing with the addition of the online marketplace. The access to the many now unaffordable growers, like Chablis global megastars Dauvissat and Raveneau, are the same jaw-dropping prices online in Europe as they are anywhere in the world. Twenty years ago, the wines from Dauvissat and Raveneau were easier to attain at a decent price. Even if they were gray marketed by US retailers at the time, they were marked up only a touch more than what the official importer charged. This duo of Chablis royalty was once slightly obscure and mostly known to insiders. Kept relatively quiet among the wine trade, they offered enlightening grand cru and premier cru experiences for low-paid wine professionals and wine lovers without Montrachet prices. But if you want them stateside, that markup is now more of a shakedown. The last bottle of Raveneau I ever bought upon release in the US from their official importer was a 2010 Montée de Tonnerre at LA’s Silverlake Wine, where it sat on their shelf for anyone to buy for around $100—today, the 2019 and 2020s are online starting around $500-$600. These days it’s only window shopping in the States on the Raveneau and Dauvissat front for most of us. And I marvel at the prices on lists and wonder why people think wine—a bottle of fermented grape juice—should command so much, especially if they started from the cellar door for far less. Romain Collet, who’s close to the Raveneau family, always shoots me a smirk when we speak of Raveneau and the absurdity of second-market prices because he knows his ex-cellar prices are the same as theirs. I think we in the business can only blame ourselves for letting our insider wines go to only the highest bidders now. We aggrandized these special wines on social media to sell them (and ourselves) more effectively and to make a few more bucks on tiny allocations. And in these pursuits, we priced ourselves out of the game. I remember how disheartened I was when one budding wine retailer boasted to me that they were converting all their Bordeaux drinkers to Burgundy—like they were doing all of us a favor. The famous Bordeaux enologist Emile Peynaud said something like, “People drink what they deserve.” Maybe in his time, that was truer, but this catchy snark hasn’t aged well with big money willing to pay any price for certain wines. Before the pandemic, there were still a lot of deals to be found with hard-to-get wines from European retailers, but those days are over now too, at least for the elusive ones from France and Italy. The most recent batch of goodies I snapped up before the prices went bonkers on every inevitable name destined for that list were those of Lamy and Lafarge. I had a few good European sources for Lamy and one for Lafarge, but those have dried up too. I’m not sure what happened to Lamy’s second market pricing earlier this year, but his Saint-Aubin wines online jumped about 300% in a matter of months, and the grand cru somewhere around 600%. I was waiting for the 2017 Lafarge premier crus to be released so I could make one last grab I could almost afford. I knew Lafarge was soon to be on my never-able-to-afford-that-again list for many reasons. The first was the passing of Michel Lafarge and the anticipation of something similar to what happened to the Barolo prices with the passing of Beppe from Giuseppe Rinaldi. Then there were the oncoming challenges with the hot 2018 through 2020 vintages (which Lafarge did much better than I expected with the 2018s compared to other top growers—some of my favorites of the vintage; 2019s are already out of my range). Ultimately, the rise of Lafarge was inevitable and long overdue. I’m surprised it took much longer than many other Burgundy producers did, though as of late the style is more upfront than in the past. I secured a decent supply of the 2017 Lafarge Volnays, and a few months later the same French retailer had a restock of the same 2017 premier crus for exactly double the prices I paid. So I’m out now for good. With all this madness surrounding wine pricing and exclusivity, and while people with more dollars than sense want to cellar and stroke their preciousss, and claim them as part of their wine museum or brag about their entitlements on their Instagram feed (can we stop that one already?), there are growers making extraordinary wines right under their noses in the same appellations that give those juggernauts a run, not only for the money but the quality too. In Chablis, that’s where our main feature of this month comes in: Domaine Jean Collet. Before our dive into Collet, there are a few more arrivals you need to know about before what’s left of them vanish: 2022 François Crochet Sancerre (Blanc) 2022 Arribas Wine Company Saroto Branco 2022 Arribas Wine Company Saroto Rosé 2020 Château Cantelaudette, Graves de Vayres Rouge “Sans Soufre Ajouté” 2016 Château Cantelaudette, Graves de Vayres Rouge “Cuvée Prestige” We also have the new 2021 starters in the classic range of Katharina Wechsler. Katharina got married last month and I was able to attend the wedding at the couple’s home and winery. I tasted her new releases and verified that she’s continuing her ascendency with her already spectacular wines. The 2021 Rieslings are silly good. What a year for European white wines! There will be more about everything new in next month’s newsletter, including more off-dry wines, the grand crus, and the Cloudy By Nature range. In the meantime, the following wines are back! 2021 Wechsler Riesling Trocken 2021 Wechsler Scheurebe Trocken 2021 Wechsler Riesling Trocken “Kalk” (formerly Westhofen Riesling–all from Kirchspiel) Because Alexandre Déramé works both of his domaines alone in the cellar and with limited help in the vines, I encouraged him to use his name on the labels of his two domaines, Domaine de la Morandière and Domaine du Moulin. Extremely humble by nature, he resisted. Then he asked for advice from his family and friends and when they pushed him to do it, he caved. Progress! I was skeptical at first when presented with the 2022 Pinot Noir Rosé but quickly realized it’s far too good for the price to ignore. I’m only sorry I didn’t know about it until this last year. Its label is not yet converted to his new design, but what counts is what’s in the bottle. All things in good time, right? The wine is simple in a perfect sort of rosé way: drink it, don’t think it. It ain’t gonna change your life, but you may hold it up to a light and say, “Damn. That’s one mighty fine Pinot Noir rosé for the price.” The 2022 Domaine du Moulin is the first year of this wine we’ve imported. This is Alexandre’s familial domaine in Saint-Fiacre-sur-Maine, west of Mouzillon-Tillières and closer to Nantes. Its shallow topsoil is sand and silt derived from the underlying bedrock of granite and schist. It’s a lighter, fresher, and easier wine than those from Mouzillon-Tillières, home to the following two Muscadet Sèvre et Maine wines. All of Déramé’s wines are made in a combination of steel and impressive underground glass-lined concrete vats. Also arriving is the 2022 “Le Morandiére,” from vineyards inside Mouzillon-Tillières on the eastern side of Muscadet Sèvre et Maine, across the street from Les Roche Gaudinières (L.R.G.). Similar to L.R.G, it’s on gabbro bedrock (pictured), a pale green and black intrusive igneous rock developed through the slow cooling of basaltic magma under the earth’s surface. However, the topsoil is different and composed of sand and silt with fewer loose rocks. The vineyard renders extremely solid wines, and for the price, it represents an extraordinary value with big-time chops in the context of other Muscadets. Because of the lighter topsoil, it’s ready for enjoyment much earlier than L.R.G and is aged for a shorter period and released just prior to the oncoming harvest of the next vintage. Gabbro The 2017 Les Roches Gaudinières “Vieille Vignes” comes from Déramé’s three hectares in Les Roches Gaudinières. The bedrock is gabbro but the deep topsoil is rich in clay with a lot of bedrock fragments. The vines are a mix of massale selections and old biotypes with three-quarters from 80-year-old vines and the rest fifty years old. This magnesium and iron-rich rock, the clay-rich and rocky topsoil, and the old vines with their extremely low natural yields of 25-30hl/ha at most in any year impart a dense power to its wines, obliging extensive cellar aging to reach the beginning of its decades-long drinking window. Once it’s there, it’s an extraordinarily powerful Muscadet. Alexandre ages it in glass-lined concrete tanks for three to five years followed by at least two years in bottle before release. It has tremendous aging potential, as demonstrated by the many old vintages we’ve imported (starting with the 2002 release ten years past its vintage date) and the surprising freshness it maintains after many years. Who knows what can be credited for its longevity, but there’s something special about this vineyard. Before this summer’s sweltering heat, Romain Collet shipped me some boxes of his 2021 premier crus along with some 2019s I wanted to check in on. My first tastings of the 2021s out of vat and again just days before bottling convinced me that we finally had a true classic on our hands. Though the yield was down 30-40% on average because of spring frost, and the work especially difficult in the vineyard due to mildew during this cold season, the vigilance and remembered experience of how to manage cold years despite the last two decades of hot ones paid off. After nursing two bottles of each 2021 premier cru over a few days with each one, there is no doubt in my mind that this is my favorite young Chablis vintage in more than a decade, if not much further back. Jean Collet’s premier crus have always been priced fairly with unexpectedly high quality, even in tough years. The only problem has been that they used average corks in the 80s, 90s and 00s, so those are a mixed bag—oxidized or epic with a few in between. Last year I had some premier crus from the 1980s over lunch with the family (and some 2010 magnums in another lunch) and they were stunning. In the last few years, their wines have crept up in price, partly due to so many losses by frost, hail, and mildew. 2017 and 2018 had decent volume but 2019, 2020, and 2021 were very short. Another reason for the slightly increased prices is that I convinced Romain that if he finished the full conversion of the domaine to organic certification to include the Chablis V.V. (nearly 100 years old) and the premier crus Montmains, Montée de Tonnerre and Mont de Milieu, no one would complain about paying a little more for the wines. (The Chablis AOC, the premier crus Vaillons, Forêts, Butteaux, and the grand crus, Valmur and Clos, have already been certified for nearly a decade.) Regardless of the increase, the wines present even more value because Romain continues to quietly raise his own quality bar above most of those in Chablis. Collet is one of Chablis’ most consistent growers. I’m not saying that just because we import them. This is coming from a Chablis lover and drinker of nearly thirty years, and I want you, likely another fan of this appellation, to know. Throughout Collet’s forty years of working with one of the US’s most historically important French wine importers, Robert Chadderdon, they were considered one of the appellation’s top domaines. Today, the wines are even better under Romain’s direction—along with the improvement in corks! In cold years they’re classically tight and fine with more thrust than expected. In warm ones, they continue to impress and often taste like a Chablis-Côte d’Or hybrid without losing the classic Chablis mineral nuances, tension, and tighter framing. This consistency in warmer years shouldn’t surprise us given that their average vine age is well over fifty years and they’re tended to by a family with a decorated history of growing grapes since 1792. After taking the helm at twenty-one years old and still only in his thirties, Romain Collet often mentions his luck. His grandfather, Jean Collet, replanted most of the family’s vines before he retired, and their collection of 40 hectares of vineyards is enviable, especially their massive premier cru holdings in Montmains and Vaillons. When Romain is a grandpa himself, his premier cru and grand cru stable will likely average 80-90 years old. Lucky for him indeed, and for us. Collet’s style is not that of razor-sharp Chablis, and one only needs to spend time drinking with the family to know why their wines express weight and balance somewhere between Chablis and the Côte d’Or. They drink a ton of Côte d’Or whites and reds and even more Chablis and Champagne. They’re not only Chablis-minded, they’re also Burgundy-minded on a global level. I had the pleasure of dining with one of the wine world’s most well-educated and respected writers a few years ago. At one point, I said that I appreciate that Collet isn’t uniformly formulaic in their approach in the cellar with each vineyard. They do things differently with each site based on the location’s assets. The writer thought the contrary, that the lack of consistent cellar styling in the range—as in everything in steel, or everything in wood, or everything in whatever—is what holds them back from full recognition. I went quiet. Not because I didn’t have a follow-up argument, but because I like and admire this person and wanted to continue to enjoy our conversation. I would ask, why should a grand cru with 80cm of clay before bedrock be treated the same in the cellar as the premier cru Montmains with only rock and organic matter and no clay at all? Does it make sense that a pure rock vineyard should get the same vessel treatment as a heavy clay vineyard? I think not. The genius and versatility after two hundred years of passed down knowledge from working in the vines, three generations of winemaking from Jean to Gilles to Romain, and their constant tasting and drinking wines from outside of Chablis, make Domaine Jean Collet stand out. They also spend a tremendous amount of time in Japan and other markets selling and eating and drinking well, which is not something every grower does. Romain continues to make wines that build on the traits and qualities of each site, rather than an inflexibility (and what some may consider a lazy approach) for the benefit of the terroirists who expect Burgundy domaines to have particular earmarks from a universal cellar style, which Collet does have but with their own unique flourishes. They break the modern Burgundian mold by vinifying some wines in steel, some in large old foudre (80hl), amphora, concrete vats and eggs, and mostly used wood. In fact, the only wine with any first-use oak is their Sécher (also spelled Séchet and Séchets). Due to all that woodiness, we haven’t imported a single bottling of Sécher since the first vintage of their wines we imported, in 2007. Sécher has become an ongoing joke between us: Will Romain eventually break me down until I import this 100% new oak wine? Sometimes it’s compelling, but there’s almost no chance. (Though at least in 2021 they put half of it in amphora.) I’m glad they put all the new oak barrels on that single cuvée instead of tainting numerous wines in the range with it—kind of a genius move if you ask me. I’ve learned so much while tasting Collet’s wines that they’ve made me a better taster, a better importer, and a more open-minded wine lover. Diversity is one of their truest assets; it keeps things interesting, not only for us but also for them. Each of their wines has a mood, and if you know what to expect because you’ve done your research on each terroir, you can almost anticipate how Collet will work with it in the cellar and how the final wine will taste: rockier sites get big, neutral aging vessels while those with more clay age in smaller format barrels in order to “sculpt the clay,” and as mentioned, none of the wood is new with any wine except Sécher. The constant cellar tweaking guided by Romain’s supertaster talent (he won an under-25 national blind tasting competition in France at age 19) leads to the baby steps we’ve witnessed over the years as they better their range each season, come hail, frost and extreme heat. Coming off the more opulent profiles and less acidic snap of the previous six vintages, 2021 has a more classic balance. Led with savory herbs, sweet grass, delicate pastureland floral notes, taut but sweetly aromatic yellow-green citrus, high-toned stone fruit, iodine and flint mineral nuances, this has been my favorite vintage in overall style since those of more than a decade ago. It was a tough year, but as mentioned, the growers in Chablis didn’t forget how to manage a cold, wet, and long season. Collet started picking at the end of September and finished on the sixth of October—late compared to recent vintages. Considering how late they picked after the loss of 30-40% of their 2021 crop to frost, which would theoretically speed up the maturation of the remaining fruit once the vines come out of their shock from the hail, this should still make it a strong vintage for those in search of what’s considered a truly classic style. If Collet’s 2021s are any indicator of what’s to come, the classicists will be very happy, even though there was chaptalization on many wines across the appellation to get them up past 12% alcohol with many picked so late, conditions that lead to potential alcohol of only 10.5-11.5%. Chaptalization was always a known element with classic Burgundy wines (pretty much every year that wasn’t a scorcher) but in the last warm decades we don’t talk about it much anymore; alcohol levels are naturally high because it’s gettin’ hot. I can’t be any more convinced about how this vintage is tailored to my personal taste. Consistent with my first cellar tastes and pre-bottling run, the first day open the 2021s exhibit a more delicate frame and are highly nuances with fine delineation, even if sometimes a little quiet—an undervalued quality these days of a freshly opened bottle that leads to an exciting journey of evolution if the proper time is granted. The acidity is present but not jarring, and the aromas are delightfully nostalgic for those who remember young Chablis from before 2000. (I can only go back to 1995 when I first discovered wine, and Chablis didn’t cross my path for about a year after that when I first went into a Scottsdale Arizona wine shop called Drinkwaters, where the owner, whom was either an Aussie or a Brit, kindly walked me over to his dusty wood bins filled with old Dauvissat, thereby sending me on my Chablis journey.) After only five minutes Collet’s 2021s begin to ascend, and they don’t stop. The problem is to try to save some for the next day to see how they extend their depth. On day two, they flesh out and become even more harmonious. Few made it to day three, but at this stage in their evolution, they seem invincible. It’s a pity that wines like these are finished so quickly when their best moments, as with any good wine, are far more than two hours after they’re opened. As a side note, I had many bottles of Collet’s 2019s this summer. Butteaux and Valmur started out with pronounced wood notes upon first taste and prompted me to recork them and put them back in the fridge where they remained in the penalty box for a day or two. But after that, they were simply awesome, and if blinded at that time, many experienced tasters might easily place Butteaux as a grand cru and Valmur’s classification was unmissable for any taster that made it as far as Chablis. On day one, Montmains, Vaillons and Montée de Tonnerre showed very well. And on day three, all the 2019s were equally stunning. This leads me to believe that this vintage has the guts to cellar well and wade its way out of the rich weight of such a solar-powered year and rest solidly on its unusually high acidity for such a warm year. Before the brief overview of each wine and their respective terroir elements that influence the distinction inside this group of wines, there are a few universal commonalities. They all go through natural fermentation and complete malolactic fermentation. All are lightly filtered and fined, and most, if not all, are below 13% alcohol this year. None of the wines we import are aged with first-use oak barrels in the mix, though some, like the grand crus, show nuances of newer wood notes in their first moments open because they receive mostly second and third-year wood. Those wines with rockier soils generally are aged in more neutral vessels and those with a greater clay percentage and deeper soils are aged in futs de chêne—228L French oak barrels. We have our usual lineup of premier crus, starting with Montmains, a selection of fruit from the original Montmains lieu-dit that sits closest to the village, on the rockiest soils the Collet’s have for this designation. As one would expect from this topsoil-spare site, this is one of the most minerally wines in their range and Romain exemplifies its character with a steel élevage. 2021 is a season that pushes Montmains into even higher-toned territory and it’s more mineral than usual. Given the track record of Collet’s cellar-worthy wines, Montmains is one of their most successful. I’ve had bottles from the 1980s that have been stunning and are still at their peak. I believe this wine will age gorgeously for decades. Part of the Montmains hill is subdivided into two more well-known lieux-dits (that can be labeled as Montmains as well, though that seems rare these days), Forêts and Butteaux. Here we find more topsoil in both sites compared to the rows closer to the village. Les Forêts’ young vines usually prove to be the most exotic of their range while Butteaux with its old vines and heavier topsoil with massive rocks in the mix is one of the stoutest, and in a blind tasting, it could easily be mistaken for a grand cru on weight and power alone. The 2021 Les Forêts was fermented and aged in cement eggs. Just before bottling was the only time it was aromatically slightly closed, but still explosive and juicy sleek on the palate. After more than a year in bottle, it’s wide open now and shows well for days—always better on day two. The 2021 Butteaux was fermented in steel, then aged in old barrels (5-10 years old). It also had a closed nose right before bottling but a big mouthfeel of plush fruit, chalky tannins, and frontloaded texture. Today, it’s full, beautiful, and ready. Like all the 2021s, I expect these two to age very well in the cellar, and I cannot recommend enough that the classicists buy as much 2021 Chablis as possible. We’ll never know when another one like this will come around again. The long hill of Vaillons parallels Montmains just to the north, separated by Chablis village vineyards on the same Kimmeridgian marls as the premier crus but they face more toward the north—the sole reason for their village classification instead of being appointed premier cru status. Vaillons is often my “go-to” Chablis in Collet’s range of premier crus when I want a balance of everything, and 2021 is no exception. Just prior to bottling it was the most mineral-heavy in the entire range and a little tighter on the palate than the others. This is still the case with the two bottles I had over the summer. They are classically wound up and ready for a longer haul and a more patient drinker compared to Les Forêts and Butteaux. Its minerally asset is likely due to the rocky soil, and it has good body because of its 40% clay in the topsoil, which always keeps tension there no matter the vintage. The majority of the vineyard faces southeast with some parcels facing directly east, taking advantage of the morning sun with less of the baking evening summer and autumn sun. Though not as hot as the right bank with the grand crus facing more toward the west, it shows its breed with a constant evolution rising in the glass due to the many different lieux-dits parcels blended into it. I believe that Collet is the owner of the largest portion of vines on this expansive premier cru hillside, making for a sort of MVP character without anything missing due to the large stable of parcels to choose from. The Collets have the advantage with their fabulous collection of vineyards from both sides of the river, though most of their premier cru land is on the left bank. While the left bank wines close to the center of town could often be characterized as more mineral-dominant than those next to the village on the right bank, there are indeed exceptions. I’ve often said that Mont de Milieu is one of those wines that, though it’s on the right bank, it’s a little south of town and very left-bank in style compared to the grand crus and many of the other right-bank premier crus around the grand cru slope. There are also few who bottle Mont de Milieu. Over the years this wine has always been good but less impressive than many in Collet’s range, at least to me. These days, I lament the small quantities we are allocated (which, along with the small size of their parcels, has been locked in by our past purchases) because the most recent versions are starting to fight for top billing in the premier cru range. There is no doubt that the 2021 version of this wine is one of the best of the vintage in its youth, if not the top premier cru after bottling and more than a year afterward. We were severely shorted in 2021 on this wine and will cellar it for some years before releasing it with a batch of other aged 2021s. There is no greater call in the Chablis premier cru world than Montée de Tonnerre. Yes, it’s like a grand cru in some ways, mostly in how regal it is, but it is its own terroir as well. Positioned between Mont de Milieu and the grand cru slope, just a ravine away from Blanchots and Les Clos, it finds the balance with a gentler slope in many parts than the grand cru hillsides which have many different aspects and greater variability between the crus. For us mineral junkies, Montée de Tonnerre thrives best in the coldest years. In hot ones, the soil saves freshness but the mineral punch gets tucked further into the wine. While it’s celebrated so highly among Chablis, and people always talk about how much they love the “minerality” of Chablis, this cru is one I find to often be least dominated by strong mineral impressions compared to many of the other premier cru sites; it’s there, but it doesn’t particularly stick out by comparison. This is likely because of its greater soil depth before bedrock contact—especially the further one goes down the hill. One can see on a vineyard map that the bottom quarter of this hill, under the lieu-dit “Chapelot,” is not a premier cru classification, which is likely due to heavier soils at the bottom rather than its exposition. The same can be said about many of the grand crus with deeper topsoils: less mineral impression dominance and more horizontal, while those with shallower topsoils are more mineral heavy and vertical. 2021 highlights this super-second’s shortcoming on mineral qualities (of course, only within the context of other Chablis premier crus), and this year it’s off the charts. My recent tasting notes from a couple of bottles I drank this summer were the same as when I tasted them in the cellar just days before bottling. The short version: perfect balance with a bigger mineral nose and palate than usual, sweet greens, passion fruit, DELICIOUS!!! Like the grand crus, Montee de Tonnerre and Mont de Milieu are principally fermented and aged in two to three-year-old futs de chêne, with fewer older barrels in the mix. Collet also has (in very small quantities) the grand crus, Valmur and Les Clos. Their Valmur is situated at the top of the cru on its south side, facing northwest, which was less ideal for a grand cru decades ago but perfect for today’s shifting climate. Stout and minerally, I believe it to be one of the most consistently outstanding overall wines in our entire portfolio. The 2021 remains tropical but with bright and tense fruit. Valmur is a grand cru all the way, and 2021 should be the best year since the gorgeous 2012, which we tasted four months ago and found earth-shattering! Les Clos is its equal but gilded with Chablis’ royal trim and the sun’s gold, even in the cold 2021. The topsoil toward the bottom of the hill is deeper and richer, bringing an added advantage against the hydric stress of warmer years, but disadvantaged in fending off frost–though it’s the first to be protected when Jack comes to town. The 2021 is a little backward thus far (a good thing for such a young grand cru) and has a denser core than the Valmur. Les Clos also stands out of the range in style, leaning more toward the Corton-Charlemagne power and ripeness of fruit, golden color, and richness in body.

The Source’s Most Important Recent Arrivals Welcome to the first official Source monthly newsletter. Yeah, it’s been a long time coming! After a tough economic year for all of us in this métier reliant on hospitality, food and wine, we are gearing up for what we hope will be a strong return before 2021 comes to an end. Hopefully you’ve made the best of a pretty dismal situation to expand in positive directions, and not too much in the waistline, like some of us have. During this quiet time, two of our star cohorts at The Source, Rachel Kerswell and Danny DeMartini, separately brought two new arrivals into the world, offspring that will undoubtedly continue their parents’ positive impact on all of those around them, and judging by our Zoom calls, little Simona and Vienna are happy and healthy kids. I’ve often pondered these pandemic-era newborns and young kids stuck at home, showered with so much love and attention from both parents during their most formative years. I think they’re going to be special kids worldwide, and probably like no other generation in history, who alone may make the troubles we’ve globally endured worth it. By comparison, I suppose we can recall the progeny that sprung from the US during the Spanish Flu, World War I and The Great Depression, those who became known as the “The Greatest Generation.” This new one might be the generational catalyst that provides a strong pivot for mankind and its relation to the earth, led by a deeper well of care, love and gentleness—another thought in the utopian dreams of my optimistic side. As luck would have it, it’s actually been one of the most personally fulfilling years I can remember, on top of so many others that preceded it, ever since I started snooping abroad for wines to send back home to our friends and customers, so they can pass them on to others as well. We’re happy you’ve managed to hang in there and I hope to see some of you back in the States in a couple of months. New Arrivals This month we have the 2017 Poderi Colla Barbaresco Roncaglie and our first red wine from the new and exciting Portuguese producer, Arribas Wine Company. The 2019 Arribas Wine Company Saroto Tinto, a blend of a multitude of Portuguese grapes that most people have never heard of, carries a modest price tag for this low alcohol, high energy, ancient-vine glou glou with some serious trimmings. Quantities are limited, with only 50 cases imported to the US. Next year we will get a bit more. 2017 Poderi Colla Barbaresco Roncaglie The Collas have the potential to produce a lot of wine from their 6.5 hectares of Roncaglie and 8 hectares of Barolo Bussia Dardi le Rose, alone, without even counting the other two historic estates they own. But to keep the quality as high as possible, they sell quite a bit of wine made from what they deem to be lower-tier parcels from each specific vintage. This keeps the Barolo and Barbaresco sourced from the best interior plots. Sometimes all the plots render gorgeous wines but some will still be sold off to negociants because the Collas haven’t built a market to support the sale of the potential maximum quantity from their Barolo and Barbaresco vineyards. While I know what I am about to say goes against every sales pitch containing an illusion of scarcity for a particular wine or producer to build demand, I will pivot with Colla when I say that it is my personal goal to make sure that not a drop of this most-deserving of family’s gorgeous wines is ever dumped into the river of innocuous bulk wine from the negociant industry.  The Collas are the quiet family who makes the least noise at industry gatherings, who humbly waits for someone to step away from the growers behind the loudspeaker and into a different scene where the wine does all the talking, after which they thank you for stopping by to take a taste. These wines are available to us and it is our unapologetic intention to get them in as a regular fixture within many restaurant wine programs where we want to ensure that they have reliable opportunities to reorder as much as they need, instead of sticking them with only a single case. We want these wines to be solid workhorses in as many places as possible, to spread the joy, and so that those that are in fact relatively rare aren't depleted too quickly. Poderi Colla has been such an important part of our identity, not only within our Italian selection, but our entire company culture and wine preferences. While 2016 is a hard follow (as are the Barbarescos from ’15, ’14 and ’13, on their own merits) this softly sun-touched 2017 Barbaresco Roncaglie will keep up the Colla’s winning streak and surprise most who haven’t yet realized that they are an institution of consistency. My last personal bottle of this wine that I opened just a week ago was simply stunning. A bright and upfront Verduno-esque nose jumped out of its extremely inviting, high-toned, pale reddish/orange color. It was so captivating that it took some time to simply unhinge my nose from the glass to even take my first sip. But, take my advice when I say open it up thirty minutes ahead of time and draw out a touch of wine to get a little microoxygenation working before serving (without necessarily decanting the entire bottle) to let it find its footing on its high profile Barbaresco cru tannins, which seem very stern initially but somehow quickly resolve into refinement with a newly found supple mouthfeel that is hardly even recognizable from the first sips. This is simply a wine not to miss if Nebbiolo with more pleasure than pain is on your horizon—if you can leave it alone for that first half an hour! The aromas of the 2017 Barbaresco are reminiscent of the best of the lifted nuances of the 2011 and 2012 vintages but with even more taut and generous fruit. Within only a short time after opening (while being served with the right food, as it should be with any wine like this crafted for a place at the long lunch or dinner table) the palate and nose begin to become one. Pietro Colla is an impressive young craftsman and his grape-growing team, spearheaded by his father, Tino, continue to deliver on the promise of their historic family’s success. I’m simply impressed by this wine and like so many other Colla wines before, it surpasses my already high expectations for this spectacularly talented Barbaresco cru. Every year the Collas do superb work. Their wines are clean and aromatic, appealing in their youth, but without sacrificing their cellar worthiness to mature, to stretch, to broaden in complexity and narrow each nuance into a harmonious ensemble of finely struck chords. The critics also took notice in 2017, and they seem to have come to understand that Colla’s wines always show up no matter the hardships and complaints of any given year. There’s three hundred years of passed-down knowledge at play with the Collas, and it’s obvious year in and year out. 2019 Arribas Wine Company Saroto Tinto The new and youthful Portuguese winegrowers, Ricardo Alves and Frederico Machado, are at the beginning of their lifelong path to play their part in the rediscovery and redefinition of the unique Portuguese wine region, Trás-os-Montes. In two short years they’ve already made waves with the local administration by creating wines dramatically different from the rest of the region, with very low alcohol, low extraction, high-altitude field blends with sometimes as many as thirty different indigenous grape varieties, as it is with the red wine we started with, Saroto Tinto. Interestingly, just last month they were awarded with “Revelation Producer of the Year” by Wine Magazine. They have other very interesting wines in the range, but Saroto sets the pace for pleasure, intellect and authenticity, at an extremely fair price. The demand for their wines in Japan and Scandinavia is already gobbling up their stock faster than we can get around to buying it. Look for Saroto’s release toward the end of March. The quantities are limited, at 50 cases for the entire US market, and the new vintage won’t come in until much later in the year, which will include their white (orange wine) and a few other higher-end very compelling wines—tastes you may not have experienced before with this enormous mix of grapes and talented terroirs. We’re extremely excited to be a part of their story now. Further On The Horizon Iberian Dreams What a time to turn over rocks in Iberia! You’re going to see a lot of new things continue to roll out of this area in our upcoming offers and sample bags, and our selection of wines from its colder parts in the north has particularly blossomed. Personally, I feel extremely lucky to have the opportunity to represent such wonderful people making such compelling wines so new to me in a multitude of ways. The benchmarks are all spoken for, so naturally we’re hitting the next generation of winegrowers. The youth in these parts seem infected with a generational ailment whose cure seems to be to get out of the city grind and into the countryside that many of their parents and grandparents vacated in that last century, to get away from the relentless economic woes Spain hasn’t seemed to be able to shake since the sixteenth century. And they’ve come to restore ancient abandoned or neglected vineyards, or in other places reset with new plantations of ancient masale selections of hundreds of grape varieties most of us have never heard of. Over the last four years, we went from one producer in this area to four, to eight, to now fifteen and counting; my sample room is constantly full of new things to explore and most of them are suggestions from the growers we already work with! The camino we walk along in Iberia was paved by the hard work and belief of so many importers before we set foot here, and to them we give great respect and thanks for their groundbreaking expeditions. In all the years of doing this work I am pleased to report that I have never been happier with where we are (despite some of the pandemic’s ramifications) and where we’re going. I’m genuinely excited and ready to return with the spoils given to us by our supporters, those who believe in our efforts and “finds,” and to do our part to contribute to the narrative of Northern Iberian wine. We are learning so many new things that we want to share, just as we’ve always done. Some new names to add to our exclusive national portfolio: Augalevada (Ribeiro, ES), Fazenda Prádio (Ribeira Sacra, ES), Bodegas Gordon (Jimenez de Jamuz, ES), Menina d’uva (Trás-os-Montes, PT), and César Fernández Díaz (Ribera del Duero, ES; previous job was at Comando G). There’s too much to say about each of these new producers in one newsletter, but when they start to arrive you will certainly hear more. Iberia has some of the most exciting depth of discovery in the wine world, and most of the heavy lifting is being done by the most recent half of the Iberian Gen Xers, followed closely by some Millennials. Italia We’ve also picked up some new and thrilling growers in Italy for California and some other states. In Alto Piemonte, we’ve scored with Davide Carlone, from Boca. There is a new horizon for this already talented and continuously evolving winegrower, and that is that Cristiano Garella, our longtime friend and cornerstone of this entire region’s mega growth spurt over the last fifteen years, is now advising Carlone. Carlone brings our tally in Alto Piemonte to four, with Ioppa (Ghemme), Zambolin (Lessona, but labeled as Costa della Sesia), and Monti Perini (Bramaterra). Carlone’s wines will arrive in the late summer/early fall. Up in the alpine foothills of Lombardia, Enrico Togni, a former law school student who left man’s academia for nature’s bounty, is crafting some very interesting naturally grown wines on steep, acidic rock terraces. The first two wines I tasted, a 12% alcohol, dainty but deeply substantial and aromatic Nebbiolo, and a lightly extracted rare red grape, Erbanno, were an exploration into another dimension of alpine red wines. Enrico’s earlier years were marked by a more untamed naturalness and have now matured into something quite nuanced and cleanly crafted. The high CO2 content at the start, left in place during the aging and bottling so as to use as little SO2 as possible, takes some management by decanting, or with a vigorous aeration and some patience to follow. Once through the gas, the wines are striking, emotional and original. The Erbanno is an almost entirely new idea, with its pale colored rendition of a dark grape; think somewhere in the same vein of Grosjean Premetta, Emidio Pepe Cerasuolo, or a light, but non-flor-heavy Jura Poulsard—a pale red, almost more of a rosé. I tasted the wines over two days and the second day was even as good with both, although it was hard to stop drinking them on the first day to save a little for the next for curiosity’s sake. He also makes two different sparkling wines, one from Barbera and the other from Erbanno; both are interesting and, not surprisingly, very good. All of his wines are bottled under a combination of both of his parents’ familial names, Togni and Rebaioli, and will arrive in the third quarter of the year. The quantities will be very limited. An Austrian Reunion We’re happy to announce that the nicest guy in a country of some of the nicest people on earth, Michael Malat, will be rejoining us (in the California market only) after a year and a half away. We’re going to reboot the program with his 2019 vintage, a stellar year for Austrian white wines and clearly Michael’s new gold standard. In this year he added Pfaffenberg to the roster from across the river, on the north side. I had a bottle and Andrea (my wife) and I almost snuffed it inside of an hour before we realized that we were well outpacing our dinner. Everyone on staff is excited to have this special guy back on our team. The first set of wines should arrive at the start of summer. Staff’s favorite wines from February It’s long been an aspiration of ours to bring the voice of our talented wine team to a broader audience. With a strong passion for wine, food and European culture, they are all well traveled in wine country and speak from their own personal experiences on wines that were love at first sight, and many others that slowly grew on them over time and then developed into some of their favorites. All of us wine people are on a constant path of evolution and the things that interest us today may not be as interesting tomorrow. Our team has been invited to write each month for our newsletters about any wine that was a true highlight for them over the last month. 2018 Quinta do Ameal Loureiro by Rachel Kerswell National Sales Manager & New York Lead Salesperson It’s been some time since I cracked a bottle of Loureiro from Quinta do Ameal. While impatiently enduring this New York winter, I often find myself reflecting on this special yet unpretentious Portuguese white wine. One could say it’s simple in some ways, but its versatility around food and profound sense of place can set this wine up to be as deeply meaningful and emotional as any other. In 2018, during a sunnier-than-usual Iberian Peninsula autumn, I was visiting Ameal’s restored, ancient quinta in the Vinho Verde’s Lima Valley. Over lunch—a perfectly premeditated assortment of deeply-flavored fare, clean and full-of-life local vegetables and an abundance of fresh Atlantic seafood —we shared several bottles of Loureiro dating back fifteen years. I’ve been fortunate to experience vintages of this wine as far back as the early 1990’s with the now former winemaker, Pedro Araujo, and though they are all captivating in their own unique way, it is typically the younger vintages that steal the show for me. In its youth, Quinta do Ameal’s Loureiro is etched and incisive but its natural tones of sweet fruit keep it from being abrasive. Pedro raises the wine entirely in stainless steel vats, which keeps its purity and maritime salinity intact. 2017 Fuentes del Silencio “Las Quintas” by Danny DeMartini Northern California Lead Salesperson Fuentes del Silencio’s Las Quintas hails from villages on the high plains surrounding Herreros de Jamuz, an area with ancient abandoned vineyards with many that predate phylloxera. It’s made predominantly from Mencía, with a little Alicante Bouschet (Garnacha Tintorera) & Palomino. Mencía from Jamuz enjoys a very long growing season, high altitudes (the highest average elevation where Mencía is planted in Spain), cold air currents, and poor soils composed of fine grained silty sand. The combination renders balanced wines with stunning elegance and complexity. Light tannins and expressive fruit are perfectly juxtaposed with raw, earth-driven spice and aromatic lift. Las Quintas stands apart for its immediate appeal and elegance as well as underlying depth and brooding complexity. This wine perfectly illustrates the felicity of Mencía within this region. 2017 Poderi Colla Nebbiolo d’Alba by JD Plotnick Southern California Lead Salesperson I recently had the pleasure of taking out samples of Poderi Colla’s current releases, and while I expected to be enamored with their excellent Barolo and Barbaresco crus, I was reminded just how fantastic their “basic” Nebbiolo d’Alba is. Several years ago when I was tasting and buying wines with Lou Amdur at his eponymous wine shop in Los Feliz, we were constantly searching for affordable nebbiolos that were expressive, floral and aromatically compelling. Things that, to us, tasted like “real nebbiolo.” Most affordable nebbiolos, it turns out, are rather boring. Not necessarily bad, just not exciting. An annual favorite of ours was always Brovia’s Nebbiolo d'Alba, but the problem with that wine (and every other nebbiolo we seemed to fall in love with) was that we could only get one to two cases per year; clearly not enough to work with year-round. When I started working with The Source and tasted Colla’s Nebbiolo d’Alba for the first time, I immediately thought that this was the wine I had been looking for: an organically farmed, beautifully expressive nebbiolo that is actually affordable and in decent supply, it’s uniquely approachable when young, and bursting with all of the savory, umami nuances I look for in great nebbiolo. Quiet European Adventures In A Pandemic Year by Ted Vance Andrea (my wife) and I moved to Portugal two Decembers ago after a chaotic and eternally memorable year in Italy’s Campanian coast. We got out of Italy just in time for the pandemic to drown the world in despair, starting with where we’d just left. Our Italian friends said their parents regularly commented that Italy's draconian confinement was like the confinement during wartime years, and there’s still a big group of old Italians who know all about that, firsthand. We miss the ferry rides from Salerno to all of the Amalfi Coast fishing villages and the warm, salty Mediterranean, the endless supply of anchovies and spectacular seafood, bufala mozzarella and fresh ricotta from Vanulo; and then there’s the epic summer infused pastas and the real deal Napoletana Margherita pizzas for 3.50€ to 4.50€—so basically, free. Food and wine writer, and dear friend, Jordan Mackay, regularly says, “It’s hard to get a bad meal in Campania.” There were too many good ones to count and there’s hardly evidence of a bad one within the neurological scramble of my brain. We couldn’t have picked a more civilized modern country to hide out during what has been for so many a difficult and cruel time. The Portuguese took it in stride and without panic; the middle-aged and senior population of the country just got free from a terrible dictator fewer than fifty years ago, so they’ve seen much worse, in different forms. The Portuguese are special people (as are their ancient, gentle kin across the border up in Galicia) and they’ve done nothing but welcome us to their country and help, help and help some more. We’ve already made great friends—true lifers, these ones—in the wine industry and outside, too. This year was my most academically focused year to date. Italy was a solid gearing up to my output, but I feel I’ve found a stride on some new level. So much study and research, and boundless time to work uninterrupted on my writing and English and local language skills, which have been as enriching as anything I’ve done before it. (I never went to University, but I very much crave education.) I know I’ve progressed from where I started six years ago when I penned my first short essay about a thirty-hour awakening through a bottle of 2009 Pierre Overnoy Poulsard I nursed alone that finally ended in disaster—that is, the bottle was eventually empty… But with the turning of each page in books by literary luminaries, a lifetime of strong headwinds has been revealed to me, an endless—and welcome—intake of humble pie all the way to the end. Language has always been of interest to me. After flailing with Portuguese for the first six months, I knew I needed a stronger base. One day, after envying Andrea’s easy assimilation (she’s from Chile), I asked her how much of Portuguese is only slightly different from Spanish. “Maybe 80%?” She said. So I was doing it wrong… That prompted me to immediately dive into Spanish, a language I knew would be the easiest for me after many years of studying French, followed by some dabbling in Italian. It was the right move. Portuguese will likely be a painful slog, but the Spanish is already breaking through the Portuguese cloud in my head. Reading Portuguese is easy if you have a decent grip on another Latin language, but as I try to make sense of the spoken word, it could just as well be Ukranian. People—non-Portuguese people—say that Portuguese is like a drunk Russian trying to speak Spanish, with which I would heartily agree. Andrea and I got out a few times when Europe completely opened up to countries inside the EU. We know that restrictions have been different everywhere, and during this last year in Portugal we’ve been on lockdown for nine out of the last twelve months with everything proposed to continue until the end of this April. Once California’s restaurants shut down, our company’s cash flow did the same, and we all hunkered down and began the hibernation. Thankfully our growers have been patient and supportive because they are all in the same boat; plus, we all need each other as the gates begin to open. Trying to pay bills during this time was like trying to propel a dingy without a paddle, and because they weren’t small, I didn’t think it wise to post our meanderings on social media; otherwise my new strategic location could have been a terrible oversight: it’s a lot easier to reach me during a pandemic from France when I live in Portugal than when I’m in California! All of us needed some refuge from the pandemic, and when we were given permission we took advantage of it. The highlights of our brief opportunities to get out while the restrictions were lifted across Europe started with a twelve-day drive across Spain’s north coast in July. We started in Galicia, and then made our way through Asturias, Cantabria, País Vasco, and the Costa Brava for a week in Sant-Feliu de Guíxols. Between Sant-Feliu de Guíxols and S’Agaró, on the Platja de Sant Pol beach, there’s a restaurant with a decent wine list and fabulous food with the little bay in front, a perfect Spanish stand-in if Fitzgerald had chosen to set Tender Is The Night in Spain instead of the Côte d’Azur. The restaurant tour along the north coast was altogether wonderful, and felt like one generous gift after another in both food and wine. The dream candy goes to the Asturian coast, a place that is unique and almost surreal; some places felt like you were the first and only person to ever set foot on that section of the beach, crag or cliff. If there were ever a countryside that could give me courage to extract a novel within my lifetime, that coastline might be the place. One could be brought to tears, just as my sister, Victoria, was the first time she walked into the piazza of Italy’s famous Amalfi Coast mountain town, Ravello, with the limestone cliffs and the view of the turquoise sea far below; the sheer natural majesty of some places in the world can sometimes be overwhelming. While the EU lockdowns were lifted and the borders still open until early October, we went to visit our good friends, Max Stefanelli and Francesca Sarti, from the Terroni Restaurants in Los Angeles, who unexpectedly committed to a yearlong sabbatical in Bologna with their three kids in tow—so young they are, all five of them! Sadly, they decided to close their downtown location permanently and were in need of a moment away to reset. The tickets were already booked before we got off the phone with Max when he broke the news. It was the first time for both of us in Bologna (what a terribly overlooked city!), Modena and Venice, and we didn’t want to leave as Max drove us back to the airport some days later. We stayed at the famous Hotel Principe, close to the train port, in Venice. The clerk’s light blue eyes nearly fell out of his head when we passed our two American passports underneath the newly installed protective glass. Aghast and giggling like a schoolboy meeting the couple on a poster in his childhood bedroom for the first time, he explained that these were the first American passports he’d seen since March. He got emotional; we couldn’t see anything else on his mask-covered face but his slightly welling eyes—they somehow expressed relief, and even more, hope. It was the end of September, and this was probably the first six-month stretch in any Venice hotel since before the spring of 1945 without a single American occupying a room even for just a night. We saw the world’s most famously overrun tourist city—the world’s living museum—with only the company of European tourists; no boatloads or droves of busses with foreigners on a speed tour with all their memories being captured in their phones instead of their minds. On the streets it was calm and surreal at night, and quite busy during the daytime. It seemed like a different pandemic already wiped out a lot of Venice before we arrived, and that I was the only American (Andrea is Chilean) in the entire centro storico. I felt a little like I wasn’t supposed to be there, like I’d entered a new Forbidden City. Even the gondoliers, suited up just like the postcards promised, were begging us to take a ride. On one of the three nights there, only two people and a couple bands of pigeons shared the entirety of Piazza San Marco with us under the moonlight and the platinum and gold reflections of the piazza lights on the wet rock floor with the fresh, muggy, and salty Adriatic breeze. Venice is almost an unbelievable place, like something out of fiction, like it can’t possibly be real. Like many cities at night during this pandemic, at some moments Venice was all for us, and that was even more unbelievable. ■