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Zucchini pasta

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.

Newsletter September 2023

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.

Elise Dechannes

Elise Dechannes runs 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 throughline of deep but elegant sappiness in the palate and ethereal, wildly complex aromas seem to truly come from this particular place. Her Rosé des Riceys is 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 complexity in Pinot Noir rosé like I’ve found in this wine, even outside of the greats we already represent Champagne Essentielle is made entirely from Pinot Noir from Les Riceys. The price is only a little higher than her starting Champagne, but it seems to perfectly capture 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 very limited. After tasting the range of limited cuvées of which we can only buy 36 bottles of each, the 2012 Champagne Chardonnay Brut Nature is a great view into her more distinguished wines. It has a lot to say but needs a little time to show its finer 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 become pointed and refined. A more in-depth writeup of Elise Dechannes and her wines will be available in the fall of 2021.

Cume do Avia Is The Source’s Most Revelatory Producer In The Last Years

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.

Newsletter March 2021

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. ■

Newsletter June 2021

Saint-Aubin vineyard facing Chassagne-Montrachet (maybe En Remilly?) Containers are finally landing As mentioned in last month’s newsletter, wines from Hubert Lamy, Simon Bize, Guiberteau, Brendan Stater-West, and Justin Dutraive are here. Due to the unpredictable delays at the port, Berthaut-Gerbet’s 2018s will unexpectedly arrive in June ahead of many others that were ordered a month earlier! The quality of Amelie Berthaut’s wines continue their ascent, and 2018 will be no exception. As usual, quantities are especially limited on all the wines except the first three Fixin in her range: the Fixin appellation wine, and the two lieux-dits, Les Clos and Les Crais.  Also on the docket are a few Italian goodies. Poderi Colla’s 2017 Barolo Bussia Dardi le Rose is still the Barolo to beat for classically-styled wines with higher tones and a trim but substantial palate feel and structure. While in very close proximity, there is often some separation between Barolo and Barbaresco in overall style and level of success in each vintage. For any of you who already experienced Colla’s 2017 Barbaresco and its beautiful Nebbiolo perfume and quick-to-evolve tannins that everyone is ready for with this vintage, the 2017 Barolo is right in the same line. It was a warmer year, especially toward the end, which these days just means delicious earlier on with producers like Colla, whose sharp winemaker, Pietro Colla, appropriately adapts the program by working around any specific “recipe winemaking” agendas when the grapes are received. It also helps that his father, Tino, carries the family’s three hundred years of passed-down knowledge about how to manage the vineyards to achieve great results no matter what Mother Nature throws at them. And once again, the critics acknowledged the consistency of the work these days at the cellar and have rewarded them with complimentary reviews that continue to demonstrate Colla’s knack for consistency and reliability.  Riecine’s 2016 single site wines (Riecine di Riecine and La Gioia) are here too. It’s a vintage not to miss from the team at Riecine. Once Alessandro Campatelli was given the reins to do as he felt he needed, starting with the very clever move to bring back Carlo Ferrini, the enologist who put Riecine on the map in the 1970s and 80s. He also completely removed any new wood from the Riecine di Riecine wine and went all-in on concrete eggs for three years of cellar aging to preserve and also showcase all that beautiful fruit supported with nuances of savory characteristics. La Gioia is the bombastic wine in the range with unapologetic big red fruit and a sappy palate. The team has a lot of fun with their work and it shows in the wines.  Another real highlight is Chevreux-Bournazel (La Parcelle) is also finally reaching the shores of California. We’ve decided that we will call this Champagne “La Parcelle” because the pronunciation of the last names of Julien and Stéphanie are pretty difficult for most Americans. Rachel Kerswell, our National Sales Manager and New York Lead Salesperson, has the most experience with La Parcelle, outside of the many bottles I’ve been able to drink over the last two years here in Europe. My first taste was while I lived in the Amalfi Coast, in 2019. I asked Stéphanie to send some samples over, and there are few wines in the history of our company that were such obvious no-brainers to add to our list. Rachel has written a teaser on the wines, the allotment of which is extremely limited: 48 to 120 bottles of each of the three wines imported for the US. Champagne La Parcelle by Rachel Kerswell “Biodynamic rules seem simple for us. Working without chemical products, without mineral fertilization, without products in the wine and with life, with our animals, with the wild plants of our land, with cosmological influences …” – Stéphanie ChevreuxAmong the multitude of producers who have been looking beyond Champagne’s initial grower-producer movement—a movement of growers that began to break free of the big houses and to produce their own wines, typically focused on single plots—are two young and enthusiastic winemakers, Stéphanie Chevreux and Julien Bournazel, of Champagne La Parcelle. Since their debut vintage in 2012, they have been laser-focused on a more homeopathic approach, not only in the vineyards, but in the cellar too. Upon the acquisition of their first vineyard, a 0.4 ha parcel on the Côteau du Barzy,  Stéphanie and Julien immediately began the conversion to biodynamic practices, and to the naked eye it’s evident their land is happy and thriving. The cover crop is verdant with an array of wild thyme, carrots, tomatoes, fruit trees and all things life. The grapes are manually harvested during the cool, early morning hours, when it’s eleven to twelve degrees Celsius, before the short trip to their tiny cellar where they undergo a gentle press, followed by spontaneous fermentation in old tonneaux. Following the lunar calendar, battonage is performed regularly throughout the winter months to give the wines more “gras,” a welcome layer to balance the naturally high acidity. The wines are never racked (outside of the necessary moment just before bottling), filtered or fined, and SO2 levels are kept extraordinarily low (between 12-37 mg/L) and added just before bottling. 2017 La Parcelle, La Capella La Capella is a 0.38 hectare parcel on a very steep 45-degree slope planted predominantly to Pinot Meunier (90%). The vines are dense, at 5000-6000 per hectare, with small amounts of Chardonnay and Pinot Gris interplanted throughout. Deep layers of clay cover chalky subsoils at the bottom portion of the slope, while silex (chert), marne and limestone dominate the upper slope, where you can find just 10cm of topsoil in some sections. The vineyard is situated in a small meander that gets some of the most intense and direct winds within the valley, likely contributing to the natural salinity, yellow citrus and wild herbs, supported by a substantially vivacious and linear palate. The dosage is 4g/L. 2017 La Parcelle, Connigis Connigis is Stéphanie and Julien’s second and, so far, latest acquisition. Luckily, it has never been touched by chemical treatments and has been thriving since they bought it in 2016. The subsoil of this southwest facing, 0.28-hectare parcel on a 30-degree slope consists of hard limestone, chalk and marne, and has deeper clay topsoil throughout compared to its counterpart, La Capella. It is protected by natural borders and therefore benefits from more temperate conditions, resulting in a wine that shows more opulence and roundness upfront. After about thirty minutes open, the palate begins to show a fine sea-spray salinity that balances out ripe orchard fruit aromas, keeping this wine straight and delicate. It is composed entirely of Pinot Meunier and finished without any dosage. 2018 La Parcelle, Côteaux Champenois We have anxiously anticipated this wine from Stéphanie & Julien since we began importing their wines two years ago. Their production hasn’t grown since they acquired their second parcel, so it’s been a give-and-take to bring it to life. The give is 850 bottles of 2018 Côteaux Champenois, while the take is from Cuvée Connigis, which will now be even less available than it has been previously. After the must from Cuvée Connigis is racked into bottle for the secondary fermentation, a portion is left in tonneaux for an extra ten months. This extra time in wood brings just enough finesse to balance the natural electrical charge of this purely Pinot Meunier Côteaux Champenois, while maintaining impeccable balance. Pre-phylloxera vines in the Carremolino vineyard of César Fernández July Arrivals We are expecting a slew of Spanish wines to make their way in. From Galicia’s Ribeira Sacra, Fazenda Prádio should be the first in line in July with a microquantity of his top red wine from 2018 called Pacio. Wines from Adega Saíñas, another Ribeira Sacra producer from one of the colder zones, will follow shortly after Prádio. We’ll have a very small reload on some wines from Manuel Moldes, which evaporated in the first rounds in the bag with our sales team in California and New York. César Fernandez will hit too. César is the guy I’ve talked about in the previous newsletters who spent the last five years working with Comando G, in Gredos. He’s definitely one to watch, but the quantities of his wines from Ribera del Duero are minuscule at twenty cases for the entire country. Fazenda Pradio vineyard in Chantada, a colder sub zone of Ribeira Sacra Arnaud Lambert’s wines will be resupplied in July. Arnaud is killing it with his entire range and it’s honestly hard to keep them in good supply. First in will be the new vintages of Saumur wines from Clos de Midi and Clos Mazurique, and the Saumur-Champigny Les Terres Rouges. He continues to set the bar for price/quality/emotion with all three of these, and we have some of the cru wines arriving in the following months. In the past it was an all-we-could-buy supply, but he’s become more famous now (I guess we shouldn’t have done so much promoting!), so while we still get a great allocation because we were the first to bring his Brézé wines into the US, the world has caught on and the demand is very high. Plan for these when they arrive, or you might be waiting another year for the next vintage to hit. Anne Morey, of Domaine Pierre Morey Pierre Morey’s 2018s will also arrive, and the white Burgundies that I’ve had so far from this vintage have been a great surprise. We often think about the relationship between red and white in the same year, but in 2018 the whites fared very well and not too far off the mark from the previous year. I recently spoke with Paul Wasserman about it and he shared that many vignerons have vacillated between different theories about why the wines are so fresh compared to the reds, like the influence of the high dry extract and a year that somehow favored tartaric acid much more than the usual proportion of malic, which made for very little acidity loss during malolactic fermentation. Also, the higher yield slowed ripening enough and may have created a better balance of phenolic maturity with fresher acidity, and, finally, as I’ve been mentioning for a few years now, the vines may be somewhat adapting to climate change. Lifelong Road Warrior I hit the road again for a long trip through Spain, France, Italy, Austria, and Germany the day after my birthday on May 25th and will return home to Portugal just before the third week of July. I’m going solo since my wife decided she doesn’t like these lengthy marathons anymore, which means lots of windshield time with my own thoughts, on my own timeline, things I’m rarely afforded. I think better when I’m walking or driving and often wish I could be writing at the same time! I’m surprised that I can even put together coherent stories (which is still debatable, anyway) having to sit still for hours at a time. I’ve always needed to keep moving, which made going to school six or seven hours a day and two hours of church every weekend hard for me. Which might be part of why I didn’t do any more of that stuff after I turned eighteen… As elementary school kids, my two older brothers and my sister, Victoria, the youngest (who’s worked with us at The Source since the beginning), and I would find ourselves in the back of mom’s early 80s maroon Chevy station wagon (a color choice of which I’ll never understand) driving from Troy, Montana, an extremely podunk, thousand-person mining town in the northwest of the state, down through South Dakota and on to Minneapolis where we’d sometimes stop to see our uncle, Tom. Our terminus was in Eagle Grove, Iowa, for weeks with our other, much older half-brothers, and the rest of mom’s side of the family. It was on one of these trips when we stopped once for the view at Mount Rushmore and the Badlands National Park that I discovered my interest in rocks.  I always saved my money, which I mostly earned by sweeping the floor of my dad’s carpenter shop, for $0.10 an hour; I was clearly cheap labor, and seemingly not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I spent every dime on little boxes with rocks glued to pieces of thick white paper, their names written below them, and every one of these were precious to me. They were my own personal little treasures that no one else seemed to care about. I especially loved fool’s gold, known in the science world as pyrite. It’s a beautiful mineral, worth nearly nothing, and more attractive to me than gold because I liked its angles and shine. Maybe I was a fool. Or maybe I just saw the value in things that others didn’t.  We passed through the Dakotas and what at the time seemed to be a strange desert landscape to kids who grew up in thickly forested, mountainous Montana countryside with wildlife literally at the front door, and then on into the endless cornfields of Iowa and what the folk musician Greg Brown referred to as “butterfly hills” in his live version of Canned Goods, where the car would go weightless for a second like a boat hitting a big wave while we all screamed and laughed and sometimes got nauseous. They seemed to go on forever and we eventually calmed down as they lost their appeal. I once played that Greg Brown song for my mom and by the end of it she had tears streaming down her face; his stories about Iowa in the days after the last Great War really hit her hard. These eidetic on-the-road memories are also fleshed out by a playlist that included Neil Diamond, Pavarotti, Hooked on Classics Part 1 (and 2 and 3 and…), Julio Iglesias, and Willie Nelson, especially Willie’s song, On The Road Again. Also, too many Hall and Oates songs to recount amid a blur of DTV—Disney’s 80s cartoon version of MTV for kids. My mom was a true romantic, and I’ve come to understand that more as I’ve gotten older. The music on those trips is a unique mix for me, and when I spend time with my wife’s mother, Nancy, down in Santiago Chile, we sometimes get a little sauced together late at night and drift back with Spotify to those deeply nostalgic musical moments. Sometimes I have to fight hard to keep the alcohol-induced tears from welling up, and I think she does too. They were such innocent times when we were kids, when our parents were the age I am now, and I’m sure they’re part of the reason why I’m always ready for the next trip. I like to relive those moments in the back of that ugly station wagon with the backseat always down so we could fall asleep whenever we got tired. We had to play games all day to keep busy so mom could stay focused on these long drives of death. At nighttime on the road, out in the pitch-black countryside with only the car’s headlights and the stars above to light the sky, we would rub our heads against pillows to create static electricity to watch the sparks fly in the dark. My brothers are pretty far along in balding, and I’m not terribly far behind them. Maybe we unknowingly created electrolysis with those pillows…  I don’t know how mom did it, but she’d sometimes drive 1,400 miles during endless summer days with these four unruly kids in the back, only stopping so we could go to the bathroom; other than Rushmore, there was hardly a stop along the route. Sometimes mom wouldn’t even make pit stops, she’d just pass back a cup for us to go in… Hungry? Drink a glass of water… She was pretty hardcore on trips, and some who’ve travelled with me on the wine route have accused me of being somewhere close to that—except that I have a lot more fun along the way and don’t hand over cups instead of a proper bathroom break. Sometime before mom passed away in 2017, while Andrea and I were on our honeymoon in Spain (there’s no good time for your mother to die), she made her final, long journey from California to Iowa in the middle of a winter storm, at age 78, alone. Afterward, she casually told us how she had been blown off the highway by a semi and into a ditch during a blizzard. It was freezing and a complete whiteout. She couldn’t see anything. Thankfully she was close to Iowa, so my oldest brother, Steve, went to get her out. Mom always excelled against unfavorable odds; I suppose having six kids in the world can be useful sometimes. Victoria was furious with her and made her promise not to do any more long trips alone. I don’t think she agreed to it, but it very soon lost its relevance, anyway.  About the time this newsletter is published I will have just arrived in Barbaresco to stay at Dave Fletcher’s rail station turned winery. I will have already passed from Portugal across Spain’s Ribera del Duero and Rioja, up into western France’s Madiran for a visit with a very interesting producer (more on that later if everything works out!), across to the Langedoc to visit Julien and Delphine from Domaine du Pas de l’Escalette (always a mouthful to say that name), and a long overdue visit to my friends, Pierre and Sonya, and their massive Provençal country home outside of Avignon, known to the locals as Mas la Fabrique. Surely, I will have eaten loads of white asparagus during my two-day respite there before heading north to say hello to the Roussets, in Crozes-Hermitage.  After La Fabrique and Rousset, I’ll have cut across the Alps, through the Mont Blanc tunnel, popping out into Italy’s Valle d’Aosta and over to Northern Piedmont to visit with our group of four producers there: Monti Perini, Zambolin, Ioppa, and the new one, Davide Carlone. My old friends Daryl and John, Willie, Luciano, and Greg will surely have made many appearances through my Spotify feed before reaching Alba. (I usually save Julio and Neil for those nights with Andrea and my mother-in-law.) You’ll get the rest of the trip’s scoop over the next two months when it starts to get even more interesting as I make my way through Lombardian foothills, Alto Adige, Austria, Germany and back through Champagne, Chablis, Cote d’Or, and finally Beaujolais to conclude my French leg. In the meantime, I’ll post a few things on our Source Instagram @thesourceimports, as well as my own, @mindfullofwine, about things I’m learning along my trip. Until then, drink well! You never know what your last glass will be until after you’ve had it. Better make them all good ones.■

Newsletter February 2023 – Part Two

(Download complete pdf here) New Arrivals Katharina Wechsler Rheinhessen, Germany We started our collaboration last year with Katharina Wechsler’s remarkable 2019 vintage of dry Rieslings from the Rheinhessen’s heartland, Westhofen. 2019 is considered one of the great vintages of recent years. Its high acidity, perfectly matured phenolics and low yields for concentration make for wines that will age very well, and that will also need time to open up once the cork is pulled or a much longer time in the cellar. Katharina began the harvest of her 2020 Rieslings on September 14th, though most of the top sites—the crus that have just arrived—were mainly collected at the end of the month. She explained that in the middle of September nighttime temperatures dropped, allowing the grapes more time on the vine to further develop their aromatic complexities. While the praise is greater for 2019, she believes that 2020 is more balanced overall because of the even crop load and slightly lower degree of acidity, though the acidity is still high. All in all, there may be a better fluidity to her 2020s than 2019—better for today’s market that probably drinks 95% of all of these wines within the first few years of their arrival. At the end of the month, Katharina will be making the rounds showcasing her top cru Rieslings. Katharina’s Big Three Benn sits to the left of the fallow field and goes from the road up the hill Benn, the family’s tiny monopole vineyard site, has perhaps the most diverse plantations of all her vineyard parcels. It’s her biggest section and has the greatest variation of bedrock and topsoil as well as grape varieties. The warmest of Katharina’s three important crus, it’s composed mostly of loess topsoil in the lower parts that sit as low as 120m, and limestone in the upper part, peaking around 160m. Quality Riesling vines are preferential to suffering, which is why it is in the lower sections where much of the non-Riesling are planted. The 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. Notably, the old vines produce an annual average of nearly 25hl/ha (1.33 tons/acre), and the young vines used for the estate trocken wine 65hl/ha (4.33 tons/acre)—almost a 1:3 ratio; you can imagine which vines are used for the top wine. The quality of Riesling generated from Benn is noteworthy, but there’s no doubt its current highs at the Grosses Gewächs level (while it isn’t classified as a GG wine, nor is Katharina in the VDP) are not yet the same level as Kirchspiel and Morstein. That said, Benn is still being discovered by Katharina. To this taster, Benn produces a substantial Riesling and it has very impressive moments, especially with more time in the glass. When the others shine so brightly in their own individual way, Benn has been upfront but somehow still a slower burn. The material for potential greatness is unquestionably in the wine’s interior, but it often needs a little more time open and perhaps more cellar aging too, to fully express itself on a level similar to Kirchspiel and Morstein. You can read a more exhaustive account of this vineyard and the others on Katharina’s profile on our website (here). Morstein vineyard Kirchspiel is a great vineyard and screams its grand cru status (Grosses Gewächs) upon opening. It’s always the readiest out of the gates—in the range of other growers as well—and for many reasons such as its amphitheater shape that faces the Rhine River (but still roughly five miles away by air to the closest point) with its southeastern exposure an average of around a thirty percent gradient, with bedrock and topsoil composed of clay marls, limestone and loess. It’s warmer 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 topographical feature that shelters it 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. The three different parcels were planted between the years 2000 and 2015 and the average yield between them ranges from 40hl-60hl/ha (2.67-4.0 tons/acre), with some of the fruit slotted for the Estate Riesling Trocken and the Feinherb Riesling Trocken, the top quality lots (which doesn’t always have to do with yield, but rather specific parcels that naturally excel beyond others) for the Kirschspiel Trocken, and the difference for the Westhofner Riesling Trocken. The youth of these vines is on display with the resulting wines and their vigorous, energy-filled, fruit-forward personalities that balance the mouth-watering, mineral-rich palate textures and aromas. Kirchspiel is a leader in the range of all who have Riesling vines in this gifted terroir, and it’s considered one of the country’s great dry Riesling sites. 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. It’s one of the vineyards that first made Klaus-Peter Keller famous (I believe the other was Hubacker), and from what KP told me some years ago, it’s also the principal location for his G-Max Riesling (the precise location of which he won’t openly disclose now because some years ago some overindulgent visitors were made privy to its location and later stole a bunch of the grape clusters!). 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, Morstein is formidable. And while it’s not as flashy out of the gates, it picks up serious power and expansive complexities that seem to know no end. There are many top wines in the range of the world’s great producers that behave similarly. Take the slow burn once the corks are pulled on Armand Rousseau’s Chambertin compared to the all-out charge of their crowd-pleasing Charmes-Chambertin; Cavallotto’s Riserva Barolos, with the long-game, Vigna San Giuseppe, that trounces after hours open, versus the upfront Vignolo that has a smaller window of greatness; Veyder-Malberg’s greatest pillar of Riesling purity and deep power, Brandstadtt, next to the ready-to-go Bruck; Emrich-Schönleber’s regal Halenberg on blue slate versus the friendlier Frühlingsplätzchen spurred into immediate action from its red slate. 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. Morstein faces south and rises to a high plateau of around 240m with a 20% gradient (a slope hard to understand from a distance but more evident when standing in the vineyard), all on limestone bedrock. The topsoil is referred to 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 limits its ability to store water than Katharina’s other main sites. Its root penetration into the subsoil is also a more difficult challenge, giving the Riesling vines the much-needed stress to regularly pull off peak performance. These young vineyards yield between 35hl/ha and 55hl/ha (2.3tons/acre to 3.7tons/acre), relatively low numbers for young vines that demonstrate Morstein’s spare vineyard soils. Cume do Avia 2021s Ribeiro, Spain The stress of each year at Cume do Avia pays dividends on the final wines. Every year, brothers Diego and Alvaro Collarte, and their cousin, Fito Collarte Pérez, enter the ring with Mother Nature to take her punches. They’re pummeled with frost, mildew, disease, and hail—everything! 2021 was no exception, but a complete opposite from the previous year, except that they had about the same 50% losses in overall yield. They may get beat up pretty badly but they still manage to win, and each year is another hard-earned uptick in the overall quality of their wines. Vintage 2020 & 2021 2020 was a dry winter followed by a rainy and cold spring, and fifty days straight summer sunshine before a wet fall. 2021 had a wet winter, late budbreak and dry spring, wet and rainy summer, and a dry autumn. 2020’s losses were mostly due to bad flowering, while 2021 was mostly due to mildew during the fruit season. Diego pointed out that even though the losses were 50% in each year, they were at about 25% of the production capacity of their vineyard when all the young vines will begin to produce to their potential. With this, you can imagine the amount of work they do each season for such meager yields. Especially notable in 2021 was the high level of humidity from the daily fog that only encouraged an explosion of mildew pressure and a severe selection through periods prior to the final harvest. Under organic culture, this is especially difficult. For varieties that need a longer growing season, like Sousón, Caíño Longo and Caíño Redondo, it was imperative to pull them earlier than they wanted. It’s for this reason that they were not made into single-varietal bottlings but instead were all blended into the Colleita 9 Tinto, just like their 2020 estate reds. Stylistically, the 2020s are more structured and 2021s are sharper and more angular. 2021 Wines Arriving are their two bottlings from the Arraiano estate, owned by another extended family member but farmed by the Cume do Avia team. These Arraiano wines are usually a little fruitier than the Colleitas. It’s another year where they skipped the single varietal bottlings because of the devastating low yields. 2022 will again have the full range of goodies in single-varietal form. In the meantime, we get to take advantage of having all their best materials from each vineyard area blended into a single wine. The Arraiano Branco is 59% Treixadura, 15% Albariño, 13% Godello, and 13% Loureira. Colleita 9 Branco is 53% Treixadura, 29% Albariño, 10% Loureira, 5% Lado, 2% Caíño Branco and 1% Godello. Treixadura has a medium to low acid profile with a more herbal, floral, and white, non-citrus fruit notes, the supporting cast of other grapes are all of much higher acidity, with stronger citrus characteristics and more taut stone fruit qualities to give these wines some punching power and a little more fruit. Both the wines are aged in stainless steel vats. Both reds are aged in large, restored chestnut barrels (some nearly 100 years old) and very old, medium-sized oak barrels. Every vintage the Arraiano Tinto comes from the same plot (as does the white) and is almost always the same blend of 60% Caíño Longo, 13% Sousón, 10% Mencía, 9% Brancellao, and the remaining 8% a mix of Mouratón (Juan García), Merenzao (Trousseau) and Garnacha Tintorera (Alicante Bouschet; not the same grape as Grenache/Garnacha). The dominance in Arraiano Tinto with Caíño Longo makes a wine with perhaps a touch more tension and red fruit compared to Colleita 9 Tinto. In top years, Colleita 9 Tinto is a blend of grapes that don’t make the single-varietal bottlings (Caíño Longo, Brancellao and sometimes Sousón). That’s what makes the 2020 and 2021 bottlings of this wine so special—they have all the best stuff from each harvest! It’s a blend of 28% Sousón, 27% Caíño Longo, 24% Brancellao, 9% Mencía, 6% Carabuñeira, 4% Merenzao and 2% Ferrón. The Caíño Longo brings some electric thunder, Sousón brings animal, spice, darker color and even more acidity and tannin, and Brancellao softens both of those strong personality grapes with its extremely fine nuance, beautifully balanced freshness and extremely pale color. The others, Mencía brings more fruit, Carabuñeira more tannin and color, Merenzao higher aromatic tones and Ferrón more beast, pepper and inky color. Birgit Braunstein Burgenland, Austria Our biodynamic guru, Birgit Braunstein is on the far eastern side of Austria in Leithaberg, on the north end of Burgenland. Many centuries ago, this region was inundated by Cistercians, the same monks responsible for advances and the preservation of knowledge in Burgundy and Galicia, among other European wine regions. Here the rock types are limestone and schist, no surprise for the monks who had a thing for limestone (Burgundy) and metamorphic rock (a good chunk of Galicia). Birgit is without a doubt one of the most actively thoughtful producers we work with. Nearly every month a personal email arrives wishing us well and with news and inquiries of how things are going for us. Not only does she farm her vineyards under biodynamic culture (Demeter certified), she lives that same culture in her daily life. A single mother that raised her two twin boys alone since birth and who are now running the winery with her, she’s a bit of an angel and she reveres everything around her, including you. She’s our Austrian Mother Goose. While she is most known for her Blaufrankish red wines, Birgit also has a zillion different cuvées of experimental wines mostly sold in Austria. They’re pleasurable, with solid terroir trimmings. We showed a set of them at an event just before the pandemic struck and they were a hit. It’s maybe understandable that we forgot about them while the world was falling apart, but they’re now back and even better, as she has a couple more years under her belt. We were able to secure a good quantity of these wines but we expect they won’t last long. After tasting her range of skin-fermented whites some years ago, I asked if she could make one that is easier on price, and she came through with her first bottling of the new wine, 2021 Pinot Blanc “Prinzen.” This delicious and fun wine meant for early drinking (and I don’t only mean before noon) comes from a very serious terroir buzzing with biodynamic life. It’s on the top of the Leithaberg hill, one of the most historical sites in the area, and abuts a forest that helps to regulate the temperature with cold northern winds that pass through the trees and into the vines in this relatively warm and humid area close to Lake Neusiedl, a shallow, landlocked saltwater sea (that’s also mosquito hell!). Pinot Blanc is known to have been in Burgenland since the Fourteenth Century and is grown here on limestone bedrock and clay topsoil. It’s almost too good for such an inexpensive biodynamically farmed and clean natural wine. It spends three days on the skins, pressed and then aged in steel tanks for six months. 120 cases imported to the US. Birgit’s 2020 Pinot Blanc “Brigid” is named after the Celtic goddess of light. This is a step up in complexity compared to the Prinzen Pinot Blanc, vis-a-vis its cellar aging and what Birgit considers to be ideal for a deeply mineral wine due to its schist soil. This wine made from 42-year-old vines was skin fermented for three weeks (so seven times more than Prinzen) before being aged in old, 500l barrels. Birgit describes it as having a strong presence of flint in the nose and subtle notes of marzipan, menthol, graphite, lemon verbena, white flowers, and ground hazelnut; fully ripe and vibrant with a taut mineral structure and long finish. 35 cases imported to the US. Birgit Braunstein's nature-filled vineyards Birgit’s 2019 Sauvignon Blanc “Nimue” is skin fermented for two weeks prior to pressing, then aged in old, 500l barrels without sulfur additions until bottling. Birgit describes this wine grown on limestone as delicate elderflower, fruity extract, pure minerality, and a robust structure derived from a prolonged maceration period. Birgit named the cuvée after Nimue, “Lady of the Lake,” a ruler in Celtic mythology who gave Excalibur to Arthur from within her waters, and she was the foster mother of Lancelot and Merlin’s lover. 35 cases imported to the US. Domaine Chardigny Beaujolais, France Victor Chardigny We also have some 2021 wines arriving from Domaine Chardigny. It was a soul crushing year for the Chardigny family with terrible losses on Beaujolais and even worse on Chardonnay. The battle for grape preservation began in April with a frost that killed a lot of early shoot growth, followed by a snowfall that added enough weight to the remaining tender shoots for them to break. Then there was heavy rain in July and August (more or less the same weather I experienced in Portugal during the summer) and then a dry enough final to the season to pull off healthy grapes with what was left. We spoke with Chardigny about getting behind their Chardonnay wines in a bigger way, but that will have to wait until the 2022s. After a series of hot years (2017-2020), we are finally able to relax and swirl copious amounts of low alcohol Beaujolais—the only problem being that the quantities are so miniscule! Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just take the average alcohol in a ten-year period instead of such swings? As mentioned in all past promotions of this young group of sons in charge of their family’s winery, they are on a constant upward trajectory. The first vintage we imported from them was 2016, a tough year in itself, and the rest were warm or hot years that they managed quite well. Now with 2021, we get to see what they would’ve done with a vintage that resembles what was more common in the past. Domaine Chardigny first bottled Beaujolais-Leynes with the 2020 vintage. Named after their hometown, it’s a Beaujolais-Village appellation wine sourced from vineyards at the geological convergence between Beaujolais and Mâconnais. It’s made entirely with carbonic fermentation with 100% whole clusters in concrete and stainless steel with almost no intervention over its two-week fermentation. This wine is a reaction to the need for a more price-friendly Beaujolais, and it delivers the spirit of these young and generous guys. Standing in Saint-Veran and looking at Beaujolais across the way Chardigny’s 2021 Saint-Amour Clos du Chapitre continues to dazzle with its trim figure and subtler notes than its counterpart, the 2021 Saint-Amour À la Folie. À la Folie has won over so many with its unabashed, bodacious curves, middleweight texture and big but trim flavor. It was always the greater potential production between these two Saint-Amour crus and was the one on which they ran most of their experiments, with different aging vessels of concrete, stainless steel, foudre, and small oak barrels (called fûts de chêne, or simply fût, in Burgundy).The 2020s I tasted out of barrel with Victor and Pierre-Maxime were stunning. I didn’t make it back to Beaujolais to taste the 2021s out of barrel this last year, so I don’t have the comparison to it, though I already know in the bottle it’s showing beautifully and it’s certainly less full bodied. Pique-Basse Roaix, Southern Rhône Valley Every order we receive of Pique-Basse evaporates almost overnight. Frankly, we’re pleasantly surprised that in this low-alcohol focused market that many buyers continue to recognize that one can make a good wine with low alcohol, but in some regions, like the Southern Rhône Valley, picking when the phenolics are properly ripe leads to wines of greater depth. The reality is that many wine drinkers who can actually afford to eat out in restaurants of high quality want more classically styled wines, not only natural wines, especially in the Southern Rhône, like the wines of Pique-Basse. Arriving are 2021 La Brusquembille, a blend of 70% Syrah and 30% Carignan, and 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 change your opinion, especially with the 2021, a cooler vintage with even fresher and brighter fruit than usual. 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 sugar levels comparable to grapes like Syrah or Pinot Noir, so he 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 it’s aged in cement vats, or 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.  

The Comical Chablis Master, Sébastien Christophe, Part Twenty-Three of An Outsider at The Source

After our visit to Thierry Richoux in Irancy, we returned to Préhy to drop Andrea off for some much needed rest. Ted and I paused beside a war memorial across from the Airbnb and stared at it with solemn fascination. In many towns and often on the side of the road, there are statues and monoliths to commemorate each of the great wars, when thousands of locals died fighting the Germans. It was more rich history that evokes so many disturbing images from film and fiction, more history that we just don’t have on the ground in the States, though certainly not the enviable kind. We jumped in the white wagon and drove through Chablis and to the other side, where we skirted Vaillons and Montmains, two hills that demarcate the left bank premier crus of the region. Chablis is a big AOC; just to give it some perspective, the one grand cru known as Le Clos is almost bigger than the five grand crus in Puligny-Montrachet combined. To our left were the grand crus on the right bank, where the producer we were going to visit, Sébastien Christophe, has all of his holdings. We were greeted at Sébastien’s compound by a nice lady who guided us into a tasting room in a low building adjacent to a small house. He was running late and she assured us that he would be along shortly. It turned out that she was his mother, and she lived in the little house with his father; Sébastien’s grandfather established the domaine and planted the family's first Petit Chablis vines in 1959. Sébastien finally arrived, a little frazzled, and peppered us with apologies. He had just come from some of his parcels where he had also lost quite a few vines to the frost. He’s wiry and of medium height, with a kind of fidgety energy, an expressive face and wide, wild eyes that he widens even more when punctuating a joke as he smiles his crooked, gape-toothed smile. He showed us into the next room, which expanded into a big facility with a vaulted ceiling, full of forty-five and ninety hectoliter steel tanks. He expressed disappointment that Andrea hadn’t come, because he had prepared a bunch of jokes for her. He speaks nearly perfect English, but still frequently apologizes for what he sees as his linguistic ineptitude. We passed a couple of his employees, both in white jumpsuits hosing down equipment and the floor, and Sébastien quipped that they should get back to work. They laughed good-naturedly, even though they looked exhausted. Everyone had been up all night tending to the precarious situation. Sébastien quickly said he was kidding and told them to go home. He told us that he usually cleans the cellar himself, but his staff couldn’t tie the vines down yet because it was going to be another cold night, so they were inside doing the cleaning to stay busy. He gestured at one of the tanks and said that for three years he'd been doing natural fermentation after the juice is pumped into the tanks, where it stays for twenty-four hours. In 2016 he'd done a lot less of this, he joked, producing only 70,000 bottles compared to the 140,000 of 2015. Then, half the crop in 2016 had been lost to frost and hail. Usually it wasn’t a problem, so fighting the frost for a second year in a row was discouraging. Christophe started in 1999 with half a hectare, had thirty at the time of this writing, and said he'll stop after he acquires five more. Ninety percent of his sales are in export and the bulk of it goes to Britain. The ten percent of his production that stays in France all goes to high-end restaurants, a fact that surprises and humbles him instead of going to his head. The entire time we were there, he never once stopped being endearingly self-effacing along with all of his playful sarcasm. He took us out to his vineyards in a beat up mini-van, every surface of its interior covered with a thick layer of limestone dust. We passed huge fields of tall green grasses, which he said was young wheat, barley and peas (much of which is grown for animal feed), along with linen. Unlike his grandfather, his father wasn’t interested in making wine. Instead, he farmed grains that were made into cereal, and his family still owns a hundred hectares of those fields. We got out to his parcels and he gestured around us as he explained that they’re divided into three sections. He pointed at the top of the hill, where the soil is predominantly Portlandian limestone, where true Petit Chablis is grown. Then he waved a hand across the middle section where we were standing and said it was a mixture of Portlandian and Kimmeridgian limestone, and the bottom of the hill below us was all Kimmeridgian. Ted excitedly picked up rocks and looked through his loop. Then he handed them to me and I saw what I’d heard him talk about at many of the other visits: the fossilized shells of countless tiny creatures from an ancient, long-gone sea. Every field was yellow-beige and white, covered completely with chunks of stone; there was hardly any greenery anywhere between the vines. As with other fields like it that we had visited, it seemed impossible that anything could grow from a ground so completely covered with rocks. He plows to limit grass, and the surface is too arid for microbial life and for the roots, which forces them downward in search of water. “I’m a tyrant with the vine,” he said, whipping an invisible lash in his hand. Keeping the vines deep also protects them from the rising temperatures during the warmer months, which are progressively getting warmer due to climate change; if they stayed too close to the surface, they would get baked. He works with highly sustainable methods, treating the vines with only one spray of organic weed treatment at the beginning of spring before they plow, and in 2015 they started trimming the vines and putting them into the soil for mulch. He often mends the soils with a little iron to prevent chlorosis, a sort of anemia in plants that can cause the leaves to go yellow when the vine can't absorb enough iron due to a surplus of calcium buildup around the roots. He could easily go for the organic classification, but as we had heard from many other vignerons, he hesitates to do so, reserving the right to resort to synthetic treatments in emergencies so as not to put himself out of business. We got back to the tasting room and started in on pouring the 2016 Petit Chablis, which is bottled in April, along with the Chablis AOC wine, unlike the old vine and premier cru Chablis, which are bottled in September. Sébastien watched Ted with tense anticipation and quickly dropped the caveat that we were sampling them a bit too early. Ted was uncharacteristically quiet with each sip. But he was just doing it to toy with Sébastien, and he finally broke into laughter when he noticed Sébastien’s tension growing. Ted said, “you worry too much,” a point that Sébastien instantly conceded. Ted is a huge fan of Sebastien’s wines and imports them all. But they both noted that 2016 was more concentrated due to the low harvest yield, and it had only been in the bottle for two weeks, so it was still quite closed. Ted waits a month before he lets any of his reps sample and sell the wines he imports; all of the travel can “shock” them, a temporary situation when the wine is constantly shaken during its trip and all of the aromatic and flavor components can go quiet for a while. For some vintages that arrive particularly “tight,” he’ll wait even longer. As Sébastien described his wines in a very animated fashion, the exchanges between him and Ted got more comical by the minute. Sébastien said he was stressed about how people would respond to tasting so soon after bottling, and Ted kept giving him grief for it and pretending each first sip was so-so. We moved on to some of the 2015s, which sell well, but don’t please wine geeks as much as the other because, as Ted said, they’re “lower in acid, less punishing.” It’s clear that many advanced-placement winos need a certain level of intensity to pique their interest. We were joined by Nico and his wife Leticia (whom we had visited in the Alps a few nights before), on their way to a couple of vacation days with their two girls. They got some glasses and jumped in on the tasting and discussion. They had just come from an area of Burgundy where some vineyards were attempting to ward off the frost in the most outlandish way yet: they were flying helicopters over the vines in order to blow the low-lying cold air away. Again I asked if this worked, and everyone gave shrugs and said, “who knows?” Nico remarked that all of his restaurant-owner clients and their customers were crazy about Sébastien’s Fourchaume premier cru for its “hardness.” He and Ted talked about how the grand crus are bigger because they are grown in more clay-rich soil, whereas the wines grown across the Serein River are much more mineral from being grown in mostly stony soils. Ted said he poured a magnum of one of Sébastien’s 2012 premiere crus at his wedding, a few months earlier, to which Sébastien joked, “did it give you a stomach ache?” Everyone laughed, and he added, “No, no. It’s a good wine. If I had the money, I would buy it and keep it all for myself.”

Holiday Bubbles

Winston Churchill said in 1946, “I could not live without Champagne. In victory I deserve it. In defeat I need it.” Whether you think you deserve it or need it, everyone in the US probably really could regularly use a good glass or bottle of bubbles. With what will inevitably be a difficult remainder of this unforgettable year that we’d all rather forget, maybe there’s a need to allocate at least a few cases for every drinking adult out there… Or maybe you’ll choose to keep your indulgences to a minimum until the holidays, when some of us might experience some added travel and risky-mingle stresses to our already interesting family gatherings. This selection of six wines can set you up with what you need for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, etc, as well as the finale, on December 31st, when we’ll tell a lot of what happened in 2020 to go to h**l, while we also toast the many things for which we’re grateful. The Tiers The first tier of sparklers is for the bigger family gatherings, where price and quality are imperative. These go quickly so you may want to double up on them. And we can’t forget to account for those sneaky family members who forgot they are not the only ones at the party. You know they’ve already scoped out and zeroed in on the wines you brought because they’re not dumb and they know your wines are the best anyone brought. Consider these wonderful wines to kick it all off. And maybe they’ll take the biggest hit in the collection of wines you offered to the party. Just make sure the family wine predator sees you pop one of these first, take a sip, smile like you’re proud, intentionally forget your manners and look a little greedy by taking a bit more before offering it to anyone else. Look the predator straight in the eye to signal that you know they want some and pour them a nice big glass to keep them busy while you head to the kitchen to get into the second tier wine in the fridge before they catch on to your game. That’s how it’s done. I’ve been doing it for more than two decades now, and it works. The second tier is a step-up and should partly be kept away from the family wine predator until you’ve had your share and are ready to move on from bubbles and that maybe you begin to feel guilty that you’ve been holding out on them; they’re still family after all, and I guess that counts for something. The second tier is indeed for you but even more so for the elders in the family who have endured your pain-in-the-butt family this long as well as this extraordinarily stressful year. Predator Tip: Make sure they don’t see what you’re up to and don’t ever set the bottle down until you’re ready to say goodbye to it. You can foil them by pouring it almost completely out for those most deserving (including you, of course), but offer them the last taste by pouring the remaining couple ounces, just enough to let them think about their sizable past offenses. In the last phases of the holiday, we start to dig into Champagne and we’re going to keep the prices in the non-ridiculous category. They’re wines that are exceptional in their own right, but young and exciting. The first set of Champagne’s are best served up with food. They are not the aperitifs or after dinner types that flaunt crystalline qualities and big fruit, or matured age with subtle nuance. These are savory, which makes them ideal with food. (The other showoff Champagnes that can be more overwhelmed by food than these will come in the next tier…) These wines need to be opened when people start snacking heavily and should be nearly polished off before everyone sits down and migrates into their preferred color. At last, it was a good day and you’ve maybe taken a post-lunch, booze-induced nap, or you’re wild-eyed and just beginning to defile yourself as you purge 2020. In any case, by the time you get to this last tier of wines, it’s been a long day and you’ve waded your way through a lengthy dinner and floated away on a lot of good bottles; well, at least if you’re able to enjoy the ones you brought before they’re topped up around the table, three glasses out of each bottle… The best part about saving these for last is that maybe you get to take some back home and have a toast with your intimate loved one, or the one you want to be intimate with… Or, maybe you just need a little perk up to finish the eventful day and the predator called it early because they thought you ran out, or they passed out (whichever comes first). In the wine industry we often start with Champagne and finish the night with it too. You will at least need these bottles opened some minutes on the night before 2020 turns into the past. The Wines The Sorgente Prosecco is the perfect start to any holiday gathering. The proximity of Sorgente’s vineyards to the Alps and the Adriatic Sea brings an ideal temperature characterized by large temperature swings from day to night. As you may know, this is crucial for a proper Prosecco to remain true to form (bright, fresh, minerally) and function (pleasure over intellect, although both are strong here.) Limestone and clay are that magical mix of soils that impart many of the world’s great wines with interesting x-factors. Yeah, it’s still Prosecco, but it’s a good one. And it’s been noticed by some of the best restaurants in New York, California and Illinois where it's being poured by the glass. The Château de Brézé Cremant de Loire is another wine in our collection that over-delivers for the price, especially when considering the exhaustive effort that went into crafting such an inexpensive sparkler from Brézé, one of the Loire Valley’s greatest terroirs. This now famous commune in Saumur is known for its laser-sharp Chenin Blanc wines, and fresh, bright and extremely age-worthy Cabernet Franc. The blend here is about 75% Chenin Blanc with the rest Chardonnay; the latter is used to soften up, add body and round out the edges of the extremely taut character of the Chenin grown in the coldest sites on this already frigid hill. Vincent Charlot is a master of organic and biodynamic viticulture, and within moments of meeting him, you know you’re in for it. Descending from a long line of family cooperatives, the passionate and eager Vincent took over the family business in 2001, when he began to bottle his own wines. One of the few vignerons in the biodynamic wine world to grow and make his own biodynamic preparations, he is a strong advocate of using homeopathy to manage any malady in the vineyard. To spend the afternoon with Vincent, means you will not only witness his remarkable knowledge of the complex microcosm thoroughly embodied by his thriving vineyards, and you’ll also see the rich biodiversity that populates them, including various species of wild strawberries and carrots, bees pollinating the lavender bushes and mushrooms that sprout between the vines as if to boast the health of the surrounding terroir. It is not only a visual experience; it’s also a spiritual one. Often quirky and full of surprises, Vincent’s wines are deeply complex and layered with savory characteristics that conjure up the feeling that you are drinking the entire terroir itself, with its immense biodiversity of plants, wild fruits, flowers and animal life. "La Fruit de ma Passion"comes from the Côteaux d’Épernay and is composed of 55% Pinot Meunier, 25% Pinot Noir, and 20% Chardonnay sourced from 2 parcels: La Genette (0.55 ha) and Les Chapottes (0.55 ha) are predominantly grown on chalk soil with clay and silex rocks. After fermentation it is aged in old French barrels for eight months without a Malolactic fermentation. It’s unfined, unfiltered, and the dosage is 4.5g/L “The secret is not what I do in the cellar, it’s my vineyards and how I work them.” Maxime Ponson and his younger brother, Camille, with his own label, Paul Gadiot, work their family’s vineyards together in La Petite Montagne, a subsection of Champagne’s Montagne de Reims, located west of Reims. The Ponson vineyards are scattered between seven different communes on premier cru sites spread over 13.5 hectares. The grapes are a mix of nearly 70% Pinot Meunier, and the rest is equal parts of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. The bedrock here is mostly chalk and Maxime says it’s softer than the chalk found further south on the Côte des Blancs because it’s more of a tuffeau, an extremely porous, soft, sand-rich, calcium carbonate rock. Maxime believes that if every vineyard is worked according to what it needs and not in a systematic way across the range of vineyards, the diversity obtained from the best characteristics of each brings to his blending palette something to fill the gaps where others may fall short. This makes for a more complete wine that hits on a broader range of complexities than others. All grapes are whole-cluster pressed in a traditional Coquard basket press. Alcoholic fermentation lasts between ten days and two months with maximum temperatures of around 16° to 18°C. Aside from temperature control, Malolactic fermentation rarely happens and is not encouraged. The Total SO2 of any Ponson wines rarely exceeds 30 mg/L. La Petite Montagne comes from premier cru sites scattered among seventy parcels in seven different villages and is composed of 40% Pinot Meunier, 35% Chardonnay and 25% Pinot Noir. The base year is 2014, and is blended with 25% réserve wine. The dosage is 4g/L. Camille Ponson’s Paul Gadiot Précurseur comes from some of the best premier cru sites, a few of which are seventy years old. The blend is 50% Chardonnay, 25% Pinot Meunier, and 25% Pinot Noir. 2012 is the first vintage and a joint effort between the brothers. The dosage is 4g/L. In 2008, Guillaume Sergent started his micro-domaine with a tiny parcel of his family’s vineyards. Along with his formal education in enology, he earned a degree in geology, making time spent with him a treat filled with in-depth details of the natural history of his vineyards and the surrounding area. Located on La Montagne des Reims, Guillaume’s minuscule 1.25 acres of vineyards are entirely committed to organic culture and plowed by horse. All the wines are all aged in old François Frères French oak barrels and finished with a small dosage—rarely more than 1g/L, minimal amounts of sulfur (45mg/L, or 45ppm) and no induced stabilization, fining or filtration. While he employs simple and straightforward, low-tech winemaking processes, Guillaume’s wines are subtly taut, ethereal and refined—a clear reflection of his mastery in the vineyards and soft touch in the cellar. Les Prés Dieu, a single harvest Blanc de Blancs premier cru composed of Chardonnay, originates from two vineyard plots on light sand and chalky soil. Both plots are within the advantageous middle of their respective hills, which brings balance to the body of wines; Les Prés faces northeast and Les Vignes Dieu, south. The May 2019 disgorgement comes entirely from the 2017 vintage, while the July 2020 disgorgement, entirely from 2018. Another Sergent wine labeled B.O. (Bouteilles Oubliées, which translates as “forgotten bottles”) signifies a lengthier bottle aging that lasts a minimum of six years.

Riecine – Rewinding the Clock and Moving Forward

If you have interest in Italian wines, particularly those from Tuscany, Riecine could be a worthwhile consideration for you. The style of the wines at Riecine wear many faces, from the elegant and lifted Chianti Classico, the more savory and deep Chianti Classico Riserva, the unapologetically top-heavy red fruited, full-throttle Sangiovese, La Gioia, and the most dainty and Burgundian of the pack, Riecine di Riecine—the latter is scheduled to arrive later in the year.During my first visit to the estate I was quite surprised by what I tasted. Fortunately we walked in the door at a change of guard, and while the wines before today’s vintages were also very good, it seems that things are taking an even bigger uptick in overall quality. Further below is a short story of what is happening these days at the cantina and some of my thoughts on the wines. If you have any questions about Riecine or any of our other producers, please send us an email and we can set up a time to talk about wine, a subject we never get tired of talking about. Riecine: Rewinding The Clock And Moving Forward Since the passing of Riecine’s founders, the Englishman, John Dunkley, and his Italian wife, Palmina Abbagnano, Riecine has now cycled through a few different owners. In 2015, a young and talented Italian enologist named Alessandro Campatelli (pictured) took charge with full support on his vision from the newest owners. His mission was to bring back the spirit of these historic Chianti Classico wines that began with the 1973 vintage made by Dunkley and his then enologist, Carlo Ferrini. Ferrini has since become one of the biggest names in Italian wine and Alessandro’s first order of business was to enlist him to achieve this goal. Dunkley passed away in 1996, and Ferrini decided to move on to more personal projects and consulting opportunities the following year. Surprised by the invitation to return, he hadn’t been back to Riecine since the day he resigned, and Alessandro said that upon arrival he had tears in his eyes, explaining, “John and Palmina were like Ferrini’s second parents. It was a great moment to have him back.” Riecine’s organically farmed vineyards (since the 1970s) are in the northern zone of Gaiole in Chianti, one of the highest quality communes of Chianti Classico. In the south of Gaiole, the vineyards are much lower in elevation, and the soil is less rocky than in the north. Almost entirely different from the lower area of Gaiole, the northern zone shares similar high altitudes—430 to 600 meters—to the vineyards of Radda in Chianti. This impacts the overall growing season, and results in higher-toned flavors, acidic snap and finely etched textures. Perhaps one of the most notable differences between these two fabulous Chianti Classico zones is that Radda has more galestro (a decomposed schistous clay soil with a very high pH that seems to impart more angular dimensions to its wines) while the upper areas of Gaiole, where the Riecine vineyards are located, is principally on limestone and clay, which imparts more roundness and fuller flavors to balance out the freshness of the wines. The Wines We know all too well that the constant comparison of wines outside of Burgundy to Burgundy is exhausting and overextended. However, a few of Riecine’s wines, particularly the Chianti Classico and the Riecine di Riecine, are far to this side of the spectrum for Chianti Classico. Not only do these two Riecine wines often feel close to Burgundy in the palate, they can smell and taste like Burgundies grown at high altitudes, particularly those premier crus above grand crus, or even some sections of rockier grand cru sites themselves. Believe it or not, some wines from Riecine have duped many skilled wine tasters into believing they were Burgundy before unveiling the wines; many of these occurrences happened during blind tastings that I conducted. By contrast, Riecine’s Riserva Chianti Classico is more of what one expects from the appellation, and even further out on its own is La Gioia, something of an impact wine that demonstrates how far the wines can be stretched. The first level Chianti Classico is well above the cut for the price and value. Fruit forward with a seamless and refined texture, it’s serious Sangiovese but with glou glou immediacy upon pulling the cork. Not solely a one-trick pleasure pony, the wine has extra gears and demonstrates its versatility and depth with more aeration (if it can be resisted long enough). More classically savory characteristics of Chianti Classico begin to unfold with time open in its youth and surely with more maturation in the cellar, and are supported with the acidic snap from its high altitude and endowed with a sappy red fruit core. This limestone and clay vineyard Chianti Classico is aged in large old oak barrels to further highlight its purity and high-toned frequency. (Reviews if you’re curious: 2018 received 99 points from perhaps an extremely overenthusiastic Italian wine critic, Luca Gardini; 92 points from both the Wine Enthusiast and James Suckling.) The Chianti Classico Riserva from Riecine is far more deep and savory than their lifted and elegant Chianti Classico. Between the ages of twenty-five and forty years old, the vines used for the Riserva are older and the wines are aged for twenty months in large, old oak barrels—the first wine, spends fourteen months in large, old French oak barrels and Grenier casks, and are from vines that are more than twenty years old. Grown also on limestone and clay, which, along with the older vines, imparts more roundness and an even fuller mouthfeel. At a tasting in Los Angeles with the most discerning palates from many of the city’s top Italian restaurant sommeliers and wine buyers, the merits of this wine were immediately evident and were a true highlight with the more traditionally-minded Italian wine buyers. Indeed it will age well in the cellar, but it can also be enjoyed early; just give it a little air before diving in, and know that it’s best drunk with a meal—just like every traditionally made Chianti Classico. (Luca Gardini 2017 Riserva: 98 points. I guess he more than just likes these guys…) La Gioia is one of Tuscany’s seminal IGT successes with its inaugural 1982 vintage, designated as a “Vino da Tavola di Toscana”. In 1982 the mix was 85% Sangiovese and 15% Merlot. As it has been since the 2006 vintage, it is now 100% Sangiovese. (The historic Riecine Merlot vines are used for the Tresette label, an extremely interesting wine with big-time chops for the long haul—if the market was still interested in Merlot!) Designed in the cellar for the long haul, La Gioia is aged for thirty months in a mixture of new, second and third year 500-liter French oak barrels. Clearly it’s not the same type of wine as Riecine’s Chianti Classico or Riserva since it’s notably more flamboyant and unapologetically full, decadent and loaded with flavor. It’s my experience that sometimes the wine leads with oakier nuances and needs a bit of time to get around it, which it will; then there are times the oak is hardly noticeable at all, save some textural components. Clearly this wine is alive and always on the move. For those looking for rarities/collectibles, this is one that should be considered; even we get very few bottles. It will live a long life and show quite well, as the mini-vertical of the 1982-1985 did only a month ago at a tasting in Riecine’s cellar of all the wines produced from 1971 to 1985; sadly I was not there for that tasting, but received some pictures of the event... (Accolades/Reviews for 2015: 95 points by both James Suckling and Germany’s Falstaff Wein) Riecine di Riecine transcends the appellation as a singular expression of Sangiovese unlike anything I’ve found elsewhere in the Chianti hills. It can test one’s notions of high-end, blue chip European wines—particularly those from Burgundy, and my first taste of the 2013 vintage, with the wine and food writer, Jordan Mackay, did exactly that. We were perplexed because in our Zalto glasses was a wine that evoked the feeling of high-altitude red Burgundy from a shallow and rocky limestone and clay topsoil on limestone bedrock. Poured from a Burgundy-shaped bottle, the wine was supple but finely delineated with high-tension fruit, earth, mineral impressions and a sappy interior. Its beguiling aromas were delicate but effusive, and very Rousseau-esque, in a higher-altitude-sort-of-way (think Rouchottes-Chambertin, without the bludgeon of new oak upon first pulling the cork from that wiry juggernaut of the Côte d’Or). Like a Burgundy, this wine is in fact grown on rocky limestone and clay topsoil with limestone bedrock, and at a high altitude of 450-500 meters, so about 200 to 250 meters higher than the majority of the Côte d’Or’s most prized sites. To preserve the wine’s purity, it’s raised in concrete egg tanks for three years, which serves this wine well—not all wines of pedigree can thrive so well raised solely in concrete. The vines planted in the early 1970s further its suppleness and complexity, and concentrate its fresh red fruit characteristics. This wine is special, and with a vintage like 2016, it's not one to pass on if your budget has room for at least a bottle to give it a try. (2016 Review: Suckling 94… Not bad, but if he gave 2015 La Gioia 95 points, this should be at least a 96. But to taste it next to La Gioia it can easily appear less substantial because it’s fine and more subtle. We find it substantial in a different way, a more Burgundian way.)

The Languedoc and Domaine du Pas de L’Escalette, Part Seventeen of An Outsider at The Source

I woke at seven thirty and had finished demolishing a fresh pile of baguettes by eight, when we hit the road. Our destination for the day was Domaine du Pas de L’Escalette, in the Languedoc, a major wine producing region in the south of France that stretches from Provence up to the Pyrenees Mountains, with Spain along one border. Many of the predominant varietals there, such as Grenache, can yield a lot of fruit elsewhere, but in the cool weather where Pas de L'Escalette is located the yields are low and the wines more fresh and high-toned. The Languedoc actually produces a huge proportion of French wine, but since a lot of them are high octane, it’s not a largely desirable source for some segments of the US market, where low alcohol is the current trend. Ted had met Julien Zernott and his wife, Delphine Rousseau, of Domaine du Pas de L'Escalette, a few weeks earlier, an event that left him wanting to give the wines another taste. Nicolas Rossignol made the introduction when they all happened to visit his cellar in Burgundy at the same time. Ted hesitated to further the conversation with Julien after an invitation to the domaine because they were already represented in the states and he didn’t want to step on the other importers’ toes. But when as they departed, Zernott gave Ted a couple bottles and they agreed to talk. Ted had been asking himself, “Am I doing the right thing?,” but after wrestling with the possibility of working with Zernott a little longer, he decided, “why not?” He would go into the meeting with no expectations and simply view it as an opportunity to learn more and meet up with an interesting vigneron who had given him a great first impression. We passed through the Camargue river delta, a marshy land where the Rhône River meets the Mediterranean Sea. Camargue Horses, one of the oldest breeds in the world, are indigenous to the area, and a lot of sea salt is harvested there as well. The vineyards around us were flat and thin and Ted remarked that they generally produce cheap and unremarkable table wine. There were many Roman ruins along the road, the remnants of walls and structures from that fallen empire. I was yet again struck by these remnants of ancient history scattered all over France and how the majority of it was vandalized with colorful graffiti. Little red and yellow flowers danced in the Mistral along the shoulder as we passed, and the sky was a shock of dark blue, the thin white clouds distant smudges on the horizon. Though it’s tucked away a little inland from the coast, the Languedoc has long been thought by many to be to underrated in its beauty, and it's free of the tourists that flock to better-known destinations. Further to the north and west we entered the Costières de Nîmes AOC, a huge area also known for inexpensive wines, usually blends led by Grenache and somewhat similar in style to other appellations in the Southern Rhône Valley. Ted works with a domaine from the appellation, Terre des Chardons, and thinks other wines in the AOC would be better if people would make just a few changes, such as adopting organic and biodynamic standards similar to what Terre des Chardons uses. Another producer he used to import from further north in the Languedoc uses natural techniques and sometimes their wines are really solid, while others (as with many natural producers who are more at the mercy of nature), not so much. We bent south around the sea toward Montpellier, where beige, orange and yellow stucco buildings with terra cotta tiled roofs spread out from each side of a highway lined with dense stands of trees. The city was heavily bombed in WWII so most of the structures are more modern than in many other places we had visited, and there was lush greenery and graffiti crawling across every wall on the underpasses. The road turned north and inland again through rolling hills with huge white limestone boulders scattered among the scrub, a landscape similar to that around the 118 between LA and Ventura. We passed the town of Mas Lavayre, situated in an area chock-full of uranium ore, and continued toward the ancient commune of Lodève, which dates back to the Gauls and where the hills are all red with iron rich soils. We were getting into a new territory for Ted, geographically and geologically, and he was clearly excited. “What's getting interesting here is that we're living in an era where the greatest producers in Burgundy, Champagne, the Loire, Germany, Austria, etc, are all in a window to make incredible wines in the increasing heat; they used to have a good season every few years and now five out of six are good or great, but that’s about to change. Right now, it’s much better for consistency in these colder areas, yet as the heat continues to rise, they’ll start to get inconsistent again because of heat instead of the old problem of the cold.” It was strange to think that there could be areas of the world that might actually be benefiting from climate change—the perfect ammunition for deniers. But most of us know that it’s a serious problem, and the beneficiaries won’t be such for long. The navigation system kept giving us poor directions, and after taking a few wrong turns on some narrow side roads, we finally found our way to the driveway of Domaine du Pas de L'Escalette. The winery building is a striking piece of modernism with a limestone tile façade, plain but for three four-by-fifteen-foot glass slots, the center one with a door at the bottom. The structure’s shape, with one rectangle and two symmetrical windowless wings on each side, gives it the appearance of a temple from another world. The delays had us running late, and Julien Zernott was already waiting in the parking lot with his father-in-law and a young couple who were also related in some way that I missed, and who didn’t speak English. Julien is at least six four, and built like a linebacker (another ex-rugby player like Jean-Claude Masson back in the Savoie), with broad shoulders and the belly of a man who likes the finer things. He has cherubic cheeks that pinch his small eyes almost closed when he smiles his gape-toothed smile, which he does constantly. He shook my hand and almost crushed it in his bear paw, introduced his family, then gestured for everyone to jump into his old and dusty SUV. We tore off down a narrow road through some of the most beautiful scenery we had seen yet. The vineyards rolled across wavy land in a long valley between steep hills of the deepest green, with jagged sandstone pinnacles stabbing upward from the ridges all around. The sky was spotless and rich blue, and a cool breeze kept the air under the bright sun mild and dreamy. The space between the vines was pure limestone scree, with thin grasses and weeds poking through on Julien’s parcels. Some of the sections belonging to other makers were bare of green—clear signs of the herbicide that he shuns. The limestone was scattered in every direction, from the tiniest pebble to the billiard ball rocks to the brick and cinderblock-sized pieces used to build the walls winding all over the land. Some were four feet tall, and some were eight, and every stone was stacked and locked together with puzzle-like precision, with no mortar in sight. Julien said that they were built partially to block the wind, but mainly they were just a way to clean up all the extra stones without just piling them into unsightly mounds. In the middle of some of the walls there were little stone huts called Bergers, also built without mortar; they look like igloos constructed with carefully stacked rocks instead of ice blocks. Inside, there were large stones to sit on around a fire pit in the center under a ventilation hole in a ceiling propped up by wooden beams. Apparently these were used by shepherds who worked the sheep in these hills in a distant past, before they were vineyards. And in the decades since, they’ve been used to warm the fieldworkers on the coldest days. In any case, there was no way I could look at a stone hut and not think, “Middle Ages,” and maybe even, “Bring out your dead!” When Ted inevitably brought up the extremely rocky soil under our feet, Julien said that it was remarkably easy for the vines to get down into it, to squeeze through the tiny spaces in the scree. Julien pointed at a few hectares of vines that he had planted in 2003 and said they were yellow because of a recent cold snap; he has planted twenty hectares of different varietals since 2013. He then nodded at more of his parcels nearby, some sixty-year-old Grenache and eighty-year-old Carignan. Andrea took photos of the landscape from every angle, and I would bet that they were almost all keepers. She and Ted got shots of Julien as he spoke, and he was camera friendly, smiling and allowing for countless candid action shots as he made gestures all around. Ted noted that all the biodiversity of grasses coming up between the rows made it clear that they were employing organic and biodynamic techniques, Ted's ideal conditions for healthy fruit. “But we live with the animals,” Julien added. “Small deer and boar eat the grapes. People hunt but don’t kill them all, so there will always be more. The grapes are always in danger.” As with every vigneron we had met so far, Zernott is always walking a fine line to preserve his crop, in one way or another. He took us over to a corner of his property that comes to a point at the top of a hill where two of the tallest stone walls meet. I turned around and was struck by a stunning view of the entire valley that opened out from where we stood in the tip of a giant, inverted V. There were countless patches of different greens of grass and vines, and the mix of deciduous and pine trees growing from the scattered pastures below the towering crenulated hillsides that cradled the valley around us. There were two square sitting blocks arranged around a cocktail table fashioned from one long stone. He showed us a small branch protruding from a nearby tree. It looked different from the others around it and was braced to a limb with some sort of tape; though it was grafted to a wild plum tree, in a few months it would produce cherries to snack on. He walked over to one of the walls and pushed on the edge of a big block, which was really just a thin stone façade, actually a small door that swung open on a hinge that revealed a hidden cubbyhole behind it. He reached inside and pulled out a bottle of rosé and a clutch of glasses. We all gathered around the stone table and tasted the crisp and refreshing wine, still cold from its chilly stone storage, despite the bright sun and warmth of the day. It was the perfect accompaniment to the herbal breeze. We returned to the winery and were greeted by Julien’s wife, Delphine. She smiled warmly and shook our hands from behind a sleek modern marble bar in a tasting room with cork-tiled walls. Julien told us that she runs the business side of things, raising his palms in a playful, “I have no idea what that entails,” manner. She also created all of the labels for the wines, which Ted immediately complimented for their simplicity. One series that I found particularly charming had tiny recreations of their children’s footprints walking up the side of the bottle. As she poured tastes, including a beautiful blend of mostly Grenache with some Carignan and Syrah, followed by their Syrah dominant blend, Julien said, “you need to learn enology so you can forget it. It’s important to just observe the wines. It’s fine to know how yeast works, but we don’t add commercial yeast to anything but the rosé, where it’s necessary. Everything else is naturally occurring yeast. You have to work with your heart and not with your head. We honor the terroir. We look for the holy grail.” Ted nodded vigorously with a big smile on his face. What Julien might not have known was that it could have been Ted himself who had spoken these words, verbatim, all the way down to the “holy grail” comment—one of his favorites. It was no wonder that they had hit it off back in Rossignol’s cellar; this guy was totally speaking Ted's language. Then Julien said, “I prefer elegant wines over power,” to which Ted responded with a wry grin, “I do, too. I prefer a woman in my glass, not a man.” It took a quick moment for the words to sink in, but once they did, Julien released a loud chuckle and nodded in kind. Julien led us through a tall sliding door to a big room lined with relatively new, wooden Stockinger barrels, then through another door where there were some older barrels and his steel tanks. We tasted a few of his aging wines from his pipette as he and Ted broached the subject of import. After this visit, Ted was all in, and Julien sounded interested as well. They agreed on pallet allotments for the coming vintages and that was that: they were in business. We were out of time and needed to get on the road again. When we asked Delphine where we might pick up a sandwich, she quickly said she’d make us one herself and invited us up to the house, a low slung annex to the winery that seemed certain to have been designed and built by the same people. The glass front was almost entirely open to the view of the valley, and eight or so friends and family sat around a long table on a covered patio, playing cards. They smiled and waved and beckoned us to join them and asked us where in the states we were from. It was a beautiful picture of the incredible life that Julien and Delphine have crafted for themselves. Inside, a teenage girl offered me some almond brittle from the oven, which I gladly took and instantly devoured, then silently wished for more the second it was gone. Delphine cut into a big loaf of rustic bread, spread gobs of fresh butter on the slices, grabbed from a thick stack of jambon de Bayon and pieces from a wheel of local cheese and piled it all together. She gave us each big hugs and sent us on our way. A quarter mile down the road, I tore into the sandwich, which was, of course, glorious (Hallelujah! Another ham and butter!) and I had finished mine before Ted even unwrapped his. He would remark—not for the first time, or the last—that I eat way too quickly. I don’t know why he kept harping on it; he knows I was raised by wolves.

The Meat of Mâcon, Part Seven of An Outsider at The Source

We headed south toward Mâcon, where we would sleep for the night before continuing on the next day to the Savoie department, up in the French Alps. It was a straight shot and about an hour to our destination, through mostly flat and featureless fields. A high point came when we reached a tollbooth and Ted achieved a small and comical victory when he said, “How much do you think this is? Eight bucks?” (as if bucks were now Euros); he was dead right, and quite pleased about it. It was a game that he would continue for the rest of our travels and he was almost always on the nose. Andrea’s keyboard keys clicked quickly as she filled orders, answered questions and put out fires with input from Ted, and by dusk we rolled into Mâcon, a little city on the Saône River, just north of the hills of Beaujolais. We zigzagged our way through narrow streets between simple, mostly gray, prewar four story walk-ups. We found our Airbnb in just one of these, across the street from a huge, ancient limestone edifice with two towering spires, like some citadel straight out of Lord of The Rings. The front door of our building had a big tarnished brass knob in the center that clicked loudly once the tricky lock was cajoled by the oversized key. Two turns up the switchback staircase brought us to another door with a center knob and a rope-pull doorbell. Inside, we found another space that, like in Puligny-Montrachet, was incongruously decorated with modern flourishes straight from the pages of Dwell magazine (some of which could be found on a rack in the bathroom). After a quick refresh in said water closet and the obligatory sign-in to the new wifi to feel a brief connection to the real world back home, we set off for dinner. Ma Table en Ville was a hot little restaurant a block away, with killer reviews on the web and a good wine list. But when we got there, we found a room with ten tables at most, all occupied. Three huge multi-colored fiberglass globe lights hung in a cluster over sleek wood tables and Hans Wegner Wishbone chairs (yet more modern). The Maître d’ summarily told us that they were full for the night; it was Château-Chalon all over again. It’s not that we weren’t prepared; it was just that most of these little places don’t take reservations, so if you don’t get in early you’re just out of luck. Only slightly perturbed, we set off through more narrow alleys between low stone buildings, paved down the center with polished limestone tiles—a promenade open to cars where rivers of people move out of the way as drivers plowed through. The walls of these small canyons were lined with slick modern cafes and clothing stores full of well-dressed mannequins, prices in big stickers on the windows. We could have been in one of the urbane little corridors of the Marais, in Paris. Our destination was another restaurant recommended by the Internet, located in a building covered with green webbing over repair scaffolding, which might have explained why the place was completely deserted on a Thursday. (As with lunch that day, I’m going to withhold the name). We took our seats at a cold steel table under severe floodlights beside half of the space that was closed off and dark. I was a little disappointed that the menu was all beef, except for a few side dishes and appetizers. I’m not a big meat eater, but I was willing to make a go of it, while Andrea put together a bunch of a la carte sides to keep it light and vegetarian. The serveuse (whom I’ll call Maude) was a beleaguered matron in an oxford and slacks. She seemed wary of us and more than a little impatient with my choppy French. Relief immediately washed over her features once Ted stepped in and took over communication. He ordered a bottle of 2013 Chiroubles Beaujolais, produced by Christine and Gilles Paris. It’s one of the few wines that use no SO2, no filtration and no fining, and maintains a cleanliness that many “natural” wine producers seem to leave in the vineyard before the grapes even ferment. The wine was delicious and understandably one of his favorites. Throughout the meal, Maude seemed to resent us for being the only table in the big space (sure, I could have been imagining this and she was just cranky); not a single other party came in while we were there. But the result was some surprisingly prompt service, especially for France and considering Maude’s age and physical condition; she brought and cleared all the dishes with hands severely bent and knobbed by arthritis that pulled on my heart. But she also had a quick command of the menu and accommodated some changes we requested with a proprietary air. I had a rich sampling of mini-appetizers including a lobster bisque, a tiny waffle with chorizo on it and a tomato tart, followed by a large flavorful marinated flank steak, and then some homemade vanilla ice cream for dessert. It was overall quite adequate. To be honest, I thought both meals that day were misses, after four possibly better places had shut us down. The food in France is mostly amazing, but you can’t win them all and I had just arrived—it would soon get much better. Though I heard murmurings from the kitchen, she was the only member of staff we saw the entire time, which fed a story I continued to tell myself that she was the owner, a thought that gave me comfort yet elicited even more pity. It was only as we were leaving that she finally exhibited an effusive gratitude that reinforced my suppositions. At least we had showed up that night. A walk east through the sleepy town brought us to the Saône river with its cobblestone quays on a tier below street level. Thin white clouds crisscrossed the moon over the smooth water like knife slashes on a dark painting. Ted and Andrea spoke low a few feet away, like the newlyweds they were. We got back to our street, went over to the towering citadel and read the placard. It informed us that we were staying across from the Old Cathedral of Saint-Vincent de Mâcon. Built in the eleventh century to replace an original structure from the sixth century, it shows the wear and tear of countless religious and revolutionary wars. The two octagonal Romanesque towers were extended to nearly twice their original height in a gothic style in the 14th century and still showed an outline of external staircases that spiraled upward. I thought of stoic monks with bowed and tonsured pates and hands tucked into the opposing sleeves of their brown robes, slowly tromping up the steps without a second glance down from the dizzying heights, as soldiers slaughtered each other at the gates. A huge arched entry in the front was sealed with a wall of glass like that of some modern museum. Around back, scratched up Plexiglas windows closed off the dark, crumbling, cavernous chambers inside, where the shadows seemed to shift. Apparently there was some sort of restoration underway, so the current state was one of shabby modernity shielding haunted places. The pillow back at the Airbnb fit my face perfectly and quickly pulled me on to morning, as again, jet lag-induced snoring choked my breathing into a grind all night long.

Rodolphe Demougeot

The path to Rodolphe Demougeot’s current level of quality took a while after he took over the family domaine in 1992. Since then, he’s amassed eight hectares of vines in the Côte de Beaune and year by year upped the ante on his attention to detail in the cellar and vineyard, raising his own personal bar and capturing the attention of the his illustrious neighbors with more enviable vineyard stables in Meursault and Pommard. Rodolphe says he “learned how to do perfect chemical farming from his family and had to deprogram his vineyards and himself, which has taken a lot of time to achieve,” something that takes courage and an evolved sense of self and humility to admit. Another telling quote of his candid and honest character is that he said he needed to learn to be a good farmer first, and then he had to learn to improve his performance in the cellar. If only everyone approached life with this kind of blatant and unflinching honesty about their own process! Since the mid 2000s, synthetic treatments of herbicides, pesticides or fertilizers were systematically abandoned one step at a time until they were all gone from his land before the turn of the decade. Then his interest in the inexplicable but observable energies of our mysterious universe and its influence on grapes and wine came to be central to his decision-making. The moon is his compass for the timing of processes during growing, farming, picking, racking and bottling. Today, Rodolphe’s vineyards are impressively farmed and have as much life as any organic or biodynamic vineyard we’ve set foot in. He’s renowned for the quality of his farming by the top growers in his area, and within all the talent of his hometown of Meursault, that’s saying something. He plows most of his vineyards by tractor, but with some he always uses a horse, such as in his top Pommard, 1er Cru Les Charmots. His cluster selection is made early in the season to concentrate the energy of the vines to fewer clusters in the pursuit of quality over quantity. Everything is done by hand and under severe scrutiny within his humble holdings—at least by Côte d’Or standards. Demougeot’s white wines are an obvious win and you don’t have to be a genius to sort that one out. However, I would contest that his reds are equal in quality and perhaps easy to overlook in the shadow of his extraordinary whites. Inevitably it’s difficult to separate most tasters with the concept that red wines need to bring something obviously substantial rather than subtle and refined as Rodolphe’s wines. For wine drinkers it can be an entirely different calibration when one knows the tendency of wines like his that, as the quote by Teddy Roosevelt goes that my mother loved to cite: “speak softly, but carry a big stick.” Compelling wines are not a one-act concerto; they build as they go and end with a standing ovation that begs for another glass, or two. Rodolphe’s Chardonnays are whole cluster pressed and undergo a natural fermentation without battonage (lees stirring), unless the vintage is so spare from challenging weather that they need a little help. Sulfites are added for the first and only time at bottling, which I believe to be a good approach when in pursuit of nuances that have a little required reading between the lines—the gift given to the astute and patient wine drinker. From the Bourgogne Blanc all the way to his top white, Meursault “Le Limozin,” all are aged equally in 90% old oak barrels with a modest 10% of them new. The Bourgogne Blanc is a knockout and entirely sourced from vines below substantial Meursault village appellation vines and has the unmistakable mark of Meursault. Les Meursaults, uninhibited by the excessive hands-on approach of insecure winemaking, are pure, and bridge the gap between the baroque and the fashionable. In cold years they are a shoo in, and in warm years can be unexpectedly stunning, fraught with tension typically found in a much cooler year. Here the hand in the wine is only felt in the quality of the fruit and the soft touch of the wines. Bravo Rodolphe. Like the whites, the reds are somewhere in the middle of the classic/trendy road, but are crafted with more elegance than power. The fermentations are made without stems and last two to three weeks depending on the vintage. They are lightly extracted using the infusion approach, which is to say very little is done to disturb the grapes during the process of morphing from exquisite raw produce to the magic that fills wine built by intention from the moment the vines were pruned to the day they were picked at their most brightly shining moment. Once pressed and put into barrel the wines aren’t moved until bottling. Like the whites, the first sulfite addition is made just prior to bottling to allow an unhindered development of the wine’s true voice before the intrusion of the sulfites. The wines are spared excess of new oak use, unless the vineyard has a habit of rendering wines with increased tannin levels than others, like his Beaune lieux-dits, Les Beaux Fougets and Les Epenotes, not too far from the great Pommard 1er Cru, Les Petits Epenots (sadly not in Rodolphe’s collection), just to the south. On his top Pommard wines, Les Vignots and 1er Cru Les Charmots, 70% older oak barrels are employed, while on the village appellation wines they typically land between 90-85% old oak barrels. When I was in Burgundy with an Austrian vigneron (who I’ll refer to as PVM), we visited many of the top producers in our portfolio, and to my surprise, Demougeot’s wines were his favorite. When I asked why, his response (in short) was that they are simply pure and unpretentious, and the terroir is on display without any obstacles of the ego. Not surprisingly, he ranked his reds over the whites—putting him in with me in the minority of less than five percent who feel the same way, and this agreement pleased me greatly. Rodolphe’s wines are honest and you really taste his effort in the vineyards and the respect he has for his fruit by treating it like a good sushi chef treats the perfect piece of fish; they do as little as possible.[cm_tooltip_parse] -TV [/cm_tooltip_parse]

Baby Artichokes

Both humble and exotic, the artichoke is a transporting food—to pick one up and turn it in our hands is to look back through time at one of the oldest cultivated foods with culinary roots back at least to the Greeks. Given the color and the ruggedness of the plant, it’s easy to imagine them growing in the scraggly soils of windblown islands beside the vast blue Mediterranean. A superfood and one of the healthiest things on earth to eat, artichokes are actually flower buds (as are capers), relatives of the thistle. Here is an excellent post on their distinguished history. For me fresh artichokes bear a sweet sentimentality. They were a delicacy in my family; we’d prepare them in the most basic way, steamed and served whole with a side of mayonnaise for dipping the leaves and heart. Later in life, when I had to good fortune of being in Rome in the right season, carciofi alla giudia, the great deep-fried delicacy of the Eternal City, made a huge impression. Closer to home, I’ve always been grateful to eat one of Frank Ostini’s signature grilled artichokes at his restaurant, the Hitching Post II, in Buellton on California’s central coast. (Frank’s also an excellent winemaker.) But of all the kinds of artichokes and their various preparations, the most irresistible for me is the baby artichoke. Unlike, say, “baby” carrots that are simply milled down from broken pieces of larger carrots, baby artichokes are harvested when tiny, only the length of a pinky finger. They’re mature, simply buds that didn’t grow larger. Their unique pleasure lies in the fact that they never formed that fibrous “choke” and thus are completely edible with a bit of trimming. You can just pop them whole into your mouth. Baby artichokes are highly nutritious, to boot, even showing higher levels of antioxidants than their bigger siblings. Trimming the baby artichoke is easy. Just slice off the spiky tip with a sharp knife. Then peel away a few of the tough, outer leaves. I’m pretty ruthless in this--while it does significantly diminish the size of the already small vegetable, trimming down to the green, thin, inner leaves results in a tender morsel that is easily chewed. If you’re not going to cook them right away, float the little guys in a bowl of water spiked with the juice of half a lemon; it keeps them from premature browning. Cooking is just as simple. A skillet is all you need. You can fry them in a half inch of oil with or without the garlic. I take an approach that uses less oil, cooking them flat side down in a skillet lightly coated with olive oil until they’ve browned. Then I add a bit of liquid—any sort of stock works well or vermouth or white wine and cover for a few minutes until the outer leaves are tender. Scoop them from the pan and into a bowl. When they’ve cooled, toss with maldon salt, a squeeze of lemon, and a chiffonade of fresh mint. They’re wonderful as an antipasto to munch on next to some olives, nuts, or salumi, to be washed down of course with an aperitif. But what kind of aperitif? The bitterness in artichokes makes them palatable with classic Italian-style bitters like Campari or Cynar, which is flavored in part with artichokes. Mix these liqueurs over ice with soda water, and you’re in business. Of course, I also like the challenge of putting artichokes against wine, as they are the food world’s most notorious wine killer. This murderous bent is thanks to the presence of the compound cynarin, which Harold McGee notes, “apparently inhibits the sweet receptors on our taste bus, so when it’s swept off the tongue by the next bite, the receptors start up again, and we notice the contrast. Because they therefore distort the flavor of other foods, artichokes are thought to be an inappropriate accompaniment to fine wines.” However, some people may not experience this. As Jane Adams Finn wrote in the Washington Post in a 2001 piece, “It seems that cynarin, unique to artichokes, can lend a sweet aftertaste to other foods and drinks. It also seems that the ability to taste this sweetness could be genetically based. Some notice the effect, others do not. Pass me the wine. I've never noticed a thing.” I certainly have noticed the artichoke’s ability to warp a wine, but it’s easily gotten around. First, in my preparation, the addition of the mint seems to moderate cynarin’s effect. Somehow, it just keeps flavors steady and in line. Second, the wine must simply be tart, bone dry, crisp, and unoaked. Any sweetness from residual sugar, a high degree of fruitiness, or oak treatment will be seized by the artichoke and twisted into a dissonant flavor. Look to dry, prickly whites, sparkling wines, light reds, and roses that finish with a clean and brisk. Here are a few excellent choices from the Source’s portfolio: 2013 Quinta do Ameal Loureiro Escohla 2015 Stift Goettweig Gruner Veltliner Messwein 2014 Mas de Cadenet Côtes de Provence Blanc

Newsletter April 2023 – Part Two

Brandini Langhe Nebbiolo vineyards The necessity for climate adaptation with European viticulture is most apparent in its continental climate landscape. Many historically successful fine wine regions—Burgundy, Rhône and Loire Valleys, central Spain, north and central Italy—are suffering from broiling summer temperatures following dry winters and springs. It’s especially noticeable within monovarietal wine zones whose varieties were once perfectly selected and adapted over hundreds of years to their terroirs are especially less reliable now. By contrast, multi-varietal blends from areas like Northwest Iberia from similarly hot and arid climates, like Portugal’s Douro and Trás-os-Montes, and many parts of Spain’s Galicia that share similar continental climate influences are faring better, especially if the winegrower’s palate is calibrated for fresher, brighter wines. Some, like Arribas Wine Company’s Saroto Tinto is made with forty different varieties and often shows the terroir with greater clarity than many other single varietal wines in these historical regions. Before working with Northwest Iberian wines, it seemed impossible to this taster weaned on monovarietal wines since the beginning that varietal blends could demonstrate a terroir just as well, if not better. Change of agriculture and cellar work is imminent in these historical, continental-climate wine regions. It’s good timing on only one front because today’s market continues to be opening wider for newer styles and different ways of doing things. One such area at the beginning of a shakeup is Piemonte, specifically the Langhe’s most famous appellations, like Barolo and Barbaresco, where most vintages have less and less in common with those crafted decades ago. Everything is almost too perfect for Nebbiolo wines, especially in Langhe—as the last two decades easily demonstrate—and if we could stop the advance of climate change, this could very well be the summit for this regional style. Sneak Peek Agricola Brandini Barolo, Piemonte Few Barolo producers exemplify the urgent adaptation to climate change more than Agricola Brandini, an organic cantina (certified in 2011) run today by two young and idealistic sisters who are in full directional control along with the support of their father, Piero Bagnasco. Giovanna (vintage 1994) and Serena (1992) are well researched and talk openly about climate change and how they can go with its flow as they do their part to ameliorate their impact as growers. During my first visit with Giovanna in December 2018, I understood their new direction, and after tasting her range again in 2021, the bottled 2016 and 2017 Barolos and the 18s and 19s out of vat, their vision was manifesting. Last summer on my third visit to the cantina, two of our top guns, JD Plotnik and Tyler Kavanaugh, both Nebbiolo junkies (like everyone in our company), tasted the upcoming vintages out of botte. Little was said but many enthusiastic raised-eyebrow glances were exchanged as Giovanna pulled Barolo tastes from the vats. Eventually our poker faces were undone and we let the compliments fly. Elegant, refined, pale in color, understated yet deep in terroir expression and structure, they were a joy and showed immense promise. This Wednesday (April 26th), we will present a full introduction to Brandini to coincide with Giovanna’s market visit to California during the first two weeks of May. Some of the wines are in stock now and available for sale, though they won’t be in our team’s wine bag until May. Giovanna will split her time between San Diego, Los Angeles, Central Coast, and San Francisco. We couldn’t be more excited to work with such progressive and inspiring youthful partners from this historical region. More to come in a week! New Producer Massimo Pastoris Caluso, Piemonte Maybe I’m only more maniacal than my father,” Eugenio says, “but I understood from him that nature is something that you can’t completely control. We must work well in every moment of the season, but the most important job is made from the soil, and we can only make mistakes against the harmony of nature.” Born in June 1996, Eugenio Pastoris is an even younger talent than Giovanna and Serena from Brandini, but with more humble vineyard holdings. After years of Latin and Mechanical Engineering studies and a short apprenticeship with a precise and attentive pizzaiolo in Toronto, Eugenio realized his scientific mind wasn’t meant to be working behind a desk or making pizza (or being a racing engineer for Formula 1, a sport he’s still obsessed with). It was to return home to his family’s organically farmed (since 2013, certified), untilled vineyards (an insistence of Massimo for decades) in Viverone, on the eastern end of the Erbaluce di Caluso appellation, close to Alto Piemonte. There, his dream is to revolutionize Erbaluce and Nebbiolo in the area and return to the lost local appellations, Collina Morenica Bianco, made in the hills of Viverone (their hometown) with Erbaluce, and Collina Morenica Rosso Rubino, made with either Nebbiolo, Freisa, Croatina and/or Barbera. Both classifications were abandoned when Italy joined the European Union, but they’ve claimed the appellation names Erbaluce di Caluso and Canavese Nebbiolo. It’s difficult to ask for more from the wines bottled at the beginning of the 2020s, after only a few years of Eugenio working with his father, Massimo, and the addition of enologist, Cristiano Garella, northern Piemonte’s global crusader. It’s also hard to say which wine Eugenio has a greater grip on, Erbaluce or Nebbiolo; they’re both stunning, tightly framed and varietally expressive and terroir strong with beautiful subtlety and purity. The Erbaluce vibrates in the same line of a great Burgundy from colder areas, Loire Chenin Blanc, and Campania’s Fiano di Avellino. The Nebbiolo is precise and expressive of classic notes but with “more aroma and drinkability.” They’re perfect for everyday drinking but are well equipped for special occasions and would be a fun disruption of the hierarchy often present when faced with the label. Both wines check the authenticity box and have distinguished personalities linked to their terroirs. It’s also hard to point them in quality to Caluso, unless one were to know very well all the regions of Piemonte and their wines, which few do. In discussions about appellation, Eugenio is quick to point out that he believes (as does Cristiano), that Viverone and the eastern end of the Erbaluce di Caluso DOCG is more Alto Piemonte than Caluso. (See map above for topographical view.) Their contention is that the similarly complex hillside vineyards are on acidic morainic soils (though with different minerals and rock depositions) like the Alto Piemonte regions Ghemme, Sizzano, Fara, and some of Coste della Sesia (a terribly underrated and somewhat undiscovered territory for quality wine production), while much of Caluso is sedimentary but from different geological materials. Caluso is mostly on flatter land while Viverone is on terraces. Most of Caluso is in pergola training while Viverone is guyot, similar to Alto Piemonte. It’s also a matter of the taste of the wines and their similarity to Alto Piemonte. Viverone is also within the department of Biella, as is most of the Serra Morenica d’Ivrea (the biggest glacial moraine in Europe), Lessona DOC and much, if not all of Bramaterra DOC and Coste della Sesia DOC. The land just to the west of Viverone belongs to the massive department of Turin. “Honestly, my style is under construction because I am young.” -Eugenio Pastoris Eugenio’s Erbaluce di Caluso delivers varietal nuances of white acacia flowers and honey, and flinty mineral notes (called pietra focaia in Italian). They are more round than sharp in acid profile (credited to guyout training versus pergola) and with greater sapidity, which they attribute to the higher quartz content in the soil. The fruit is more in the white spectrum than yellow in contrast to most grown further into the DOCG to the west. Vinified naturally with sulfites added after alcoholic fermentation to inhibit malolactic fermentation, which is maintained at 18°C for two months to find the balance between fruitiness (lower fermentation temperatures encourage more fruit) and earthiness (higher temperatures more earth). It’s then aged in steel and filtered before bottling—an obligation to inhibit malic acid bacteria from restarting in the bottle. The overall style is a steady controlled flow of electricity on the palate and a very minerally nose supported by but not dominated by intended reductive elements to keep the wine fresh and taut. It’s gorgeous and a great pleasure to drink. Pastoris Nebbiolo vineyards The Nebbiolo La Cucca leads with elegance over structure, by design, and when compared to Langhe and Alto Piemonte, it’s more aromatically delicate with finely delineated fruit and florals. The denomination is Canavese, even if it’s on the extreme east of the appellation and bears little resemblance to Canavese reds elsewhere in this extensive DOC. The 2020 hits high on the pleasure meter while remaining serious and laced with subtlety—a combination of high-quality vineyard materials, a clear direction, a soft touch, and a desire to put elegance above all. The elegance is accentuated with the use of a combination of medium-sized old wood and cement vats. Both Cristiano and Eugenio believe that morainic soils require this “third way” of making Nebbiolo. While Caluso isn’t ground zero for the world’s attention to Piemonte and Nebbiolo, these wines capture its purest essence, making them formidable in style and craft alone. 2021 Christophe et Fils Chablis, France We’ve waited a long time for a vintage like 2021. In the last decade fewer vintages hit close to the “classic” mark than in the past, but few have hit like it’s the 1980s, like 2021. I don’t remember tasting a young Chablis vintage like this (granted, my first bottle of Chablis was in 1995), so my experience tasting new Chablis releases is only about twenty-eight vintages long and my perceptions have also changed since my infatuation with wine began. The wines are racy, minerally, fluid, with a salivating texture. Many producers chaptalized (just like the old days!) to get above 12% alcohol but with perfect, classic Chablis notes. The only challenge is the limit on volume as it was a very low-yield vintage (down 30-40% for many) due to spring frost and snow, early summer rains and mildew issues. A cold summer and autumn led to harvest starting at the end of September and for many a finish by the end of the first week of October. Perfect. Sébastien Christophe’s Chablis are older-school by nature. They’ve never been in a 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. 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. 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 in which they sit, they’d surely be classified as premier cru sites. Similar to the Petit Chablis and Chablis, it’s hard to predict which premier cru 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 compared to its neighbors to the north 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 maintaining its grand cru strength and frame, Les Preuses is full of life, lifted and lives up to its pedigree and classification. It’s also extremely limited and tops the range for Christophe.

Organic and Biodymanic French Summer Reds

It’s summertime and while we tend to veer toward drinking bubbles, rosé and white, reds still have their occasion. The six red wines in our offer come from six different organic and biodynamic growers. What I’ve chosen is only one of the many wines each of these growers makes. So, don’t stop with these, dig into their other wines by clicking their link, because there is so much pleasure and fascination to be found in each wine we import directly from these producers. I’ve written a brief summary about the wines in The Skinny. If you want more, like I always do, you’ll find a more extended piece below that I enjoyed writing, titled, A Faux Seasonal Affair, which also includes a more in-depth overview of the wines. The Skinny 2017 A. Peraccia Ajaccio Rouge "Prestige Cuvée" There’s x-factor for days in this exotic and spicy red from Corsica. Thanks to its proximity to the sea, the granite soils and most of all, the lovely Sciacarello grape, this wine is a dandy. It looks and expresses like a wine from the Reynaud family of wines (I know the Rayas comparison is overused, but these wines really go that direction), but tastes Corsican. It’s one of the most compelling wines we import and we’re only able to get very small quantities. 2016 A.D.N. Patrimonio Rouge Patrimonio is often Corsica’s most rustic, manly, hairy-chested wine, but A.D.N.’s takes a leap into a more elegant world with this wine primarily composed of Niellucciu, the island’s adapted version of Sangiovese, the famous grape from Tuscany. This wine is suave, with gobs of crunchy bright red and black fruits and lots of texture, and the full range of the island’s smells and sunny demeanor. 2013 La Madura Saint-Chinian "Grand Vin" If one were to measure a wine’s merit by the length of its finish, layers of complexity and quality of craft, this wine would rank near the top. It’s a clean and full-throttle old-school style red mix of Mourvèdre and Syrah aged in concrete and old oak barrels. There’s not an ounce of slack here, just layer upon profound layer of texture and nuance; and it's savory to the bone—perfect for a night of long conversation in the cool summer night air. 2017 Jean David Seguret Rouge This is singing Provençal dialect in a bottle. Jean David concedes all to his nature-filled terroirs and the old-vine Grenache, Carignan and Counoise blend in his Seguret makes the wine deep and vibrant but a refreshing take from one of the Côtes-du-Rhône’s best kept secrets. If you miss more crunchy redness in your southern French wines, this is a good place to recapture it, as these wines are picked with ripeness that truly hits the mark. 2018 Pas de L'Escalette Coteaux du Languedoc "Les Petits Pas" It is only a matter of time before Languedoc reds shake the misconception that they are all bruisers. It is indeed the biggest region for French wine production—often of the mass variety, but this size also brings diversity in the terrain that can translate into some zones that make for crunchier style reds. Escalette’s organically farmed vineyards are in one of the coldest zones of the appellation, far from the Mediterranean. This is a sweet spot on rocky mountain terrain that preserves the tension and high-toned aromas in this Grenache, Syrah and Carignan blend. 2017 Roc des Anges Côtes-du-Roussillon "Segna de Cor" This biodynamic winegrower is going to almost single-handedly change France’s Roussillon. (Yup, big claim…) Their wines have snap and freshness, and stick out like a beacon of hope for this region known for its exhaustive reds and fortified wines. For any serious wine drinker or Francophile, these can’t be passed over if one wants to stay in the know. This wine is a mix of Grenache, Carignan and Syrah. A Faux Seasonal Affair (The Extended Skinny) I have many fond memories of Southern France, and I relive most of them at least twice a year with Pierre and Sonya, the extraordinarily talented cooks and two of the most loyal and generous friends I’ve ever had. Mas La Fabrique is their private country home in the Provençal village, Graveson, located between the ancient papal city of Avignon and the Roman city, Arles, to the south. Here the fire in their kitchen is never dormant for more than a couple of hours and the subject of food never ceases. Meals are planned days in advance and sometimes weeks. Even more than a month before I come, Sonya begins to press me for exactly what meals I will partake in and on what days. If only I were as good at business planning as they are with their meals. The contents of La Fabrique’s meals are sourced from local purveyors, including the fabulous outdoor market located in the former Roman outpost, Van Gogh hospital locale and current celebrity hotspot, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, and whatever you can’t find there you can get a little further south at the mile-long market in Arles, another Roman and Van Gogh hangout. The best nights in Provence are in the summer, when dinners are outside under the starry night sky and the occasional chaotic whistle of the forceful woosh of the cleansing mistral winds through the cypress trees and the constant, mesmerizing chirp of countless invisible cicadas. Once past the aperitif, which usually involves rosé on ice (yes, I do this sometimes too…) and the almost certain first course of cold fish, seafood or vegetables followed by fresh, taut and salty white wines, the main event begins. Of course a lighter red is the right start because its still hot out and the sun is still strong, but when the mountains and trees begin to shield the sun, and the cool, sometimes thick, soft air eases the parched earth and the trees and flowers, and the wind fans a welcome damp freshness to the skin, a chilled, sweating bottle of southern French red is the proper transition into the night. Many people carry the idea that it’s sort of a faux pas to drink full flavored, richer reds in the warmer evenings, but I don’t subscribe to this at all; we just have to wait for it to cool down a bit first and drink the red with a deeper chill than room temperature. Some think southern French reds, and other reds like them, only fit into occasions almost exclusively for cooler months. While it’s true that these heavier wines naturally compliment richer, stronger flavored dishes served with more regularity in cooler times, my summer night meals in France are often chock full of flavor and richness too, especially when the produce has regained its natural, non-greenhouse and hydroponic flavors, and the meat courses begin to make their way to an open flame. And anyone who has spent time in the south of France and dined with the French or lives close to the ocean where it can be hot in the day and sweater-worthy at night knows that the only thing faux is the idea that full-flavored red wine is a seasonal affair. Red wines somehow enrich the meal in ways that whites and rosés don’t, no matter what time of year it is. It seems to better pair up with the deeper conversations that arise later in the night, relaxing us while softening our concentration and rendering us fully present. It helps us shed the weight of the world that then somehow remains absent until after lunch the next day. Big southern French reds, like Bandol, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, or medium-sized Saint-Chinian or Côtes-du-Rhônes somehow fit into almost all occasions, and every season. Let’s remember to forget those false ideas ordained by those who forgot how to live! Do it the southern French way, where red wine is the occasion whether it is le dîner à l'automne, en hiver, au printemps ou en été. Wine Stories I adore A. Peraccia's Prestige Cuvée. We get too few bottles from this Corsican gem in Ajaccio, and the only thing that stopped this minuscule allocation from disappearing as quickly as it did last year was that they had only just arrived a few months before the world shut down, so this is a rare opportunity for everyone to pounce on. A bear of a man, Laurent Costa is the one-man-show who works his vineyards by hand, employing biodynamic and certified organic practices. Rich in beguiling x-factors channeled by Corsica’s queen red grape, Sciacarello, and the iron-rich sandy granite vineyards soils, Laurent’s Ajaccio red wines are unexpectedly captivating and complex for extremely modest prices. First timers may be taken off guard as the utterly compelling and peculiar characteristics far exceed the expectation of the price of this wine, and like any wine of true breed, you need to be patient with this one to see all of its dimensions. The color is lightly rusted garnet; the aromas are effusive, exotic and savory; and the palate is compact with a core of sappy, glycerol orange-tinted red fruits and refreshing mineral textures. It shares a similar temperament and x-factor with some uniquely individual wines, like those from France’s legendary Château Rayas and Corsica’s Abbatuci, a couple hours’ drive south, and Sicilian Frappatos by COS and Occipintini, and Langhe wines made by Guiseppe Mascarello and Fabio Alessandria, from Burlotto. The comparison to these luminaries may seem overindulgent (and it is only when comparing historic pedigree with some of the wines these producers make), but in delivery, Laurent’s wines speak the same heightened dialect and holds its own. Moving north and further toward the east in Corsica, we arrive at Patrimonio, one of the wine world’s most complex geological spots. Granite is the most dominant geological feature for wine production on the island, but here there is the full gamut of sedimentary, metamorphic and igneous rock, sometimes even within the same vineyard. This makes for an immense amount of palate texture and depth of complexity in the resulting wines. This wine, an exciting expression of Patrimonio, is crafted by Emmanuel Gagnepain, one of France’s most well known enologists, a man with a penchant for elegance over power—quite the contrary to most enologists charged with the job of point catcher. The A.D.N. Patrimonio is grown on limestone and schist from a few different parcels and is a blend of mostly Niellucciu (believed to be from the same parent material as Sangiovese), a grape with good acidity and structure, with smaller amounts of the more elegant and high-toned aromatic, Sciaccarellu. Limestone imparts more muscle and broad complexity while the schist seems to impart more deep mineral/metal characteristics and sharper angles. The 2016 is especially refined for a Patrimonio red wine. The vintage was perfect for those who like some freshness, and the palate texture is rich in mineral sensations. Overall this organically farmed wine is a solid balance of the rustic and the suave, with good upfront red fruits and already revealing great secondary and tertiary characteristics akin to a good Brunello, minus the power, pain and high alcohol. It's a lovely wine, great with food, and a clear demonstration of the genetic and cultural heritage shared between Italy and France on Corsica. This organically farmed wine is such a steal when considering the price and delivery. And with the extra years in bottle, La Madura's Saint-Chinian "Grand Vin" has opened up into its prime drinking window with many more years to continue its upward climb. Another blend of different bedrocks, topsoils, and grapes, the range on this wine is vast—truly… Mourvedre and Syrah take center stage and are collected from many different parcels grown on limestone, sandstone and schist bedrock, with topsoils heavy in rock derived from the bedrock and clay to cement it all in place. All of these elements contribute in different ways to the blend, giving broad impact on the palate with just the right amount of cut to keep it fresh and enticing. Once opened, the dense perfume of southern France opens up fields filled with the lavender and thyme that permeate the aromas. The palate has a balanced density with red earth, molten iron, meat and chaparral. As the wine unfolds, its softer sides take shape and offer up more red and purple fruits, Middle Eastern spices, coffee, garrigue and a deep, salty and mineral freshness. We’re all in on this one and if you like a little gentle oomph with your wines, this is a must. Being organic or biodynamic is a way of life, not just a philosophy reserved for the fields, or an effort to keep up with a current marketing trend. The age of extraction and chemical farming continues to lose ground, and Jean David, one of France’s humble and often overlooked heroes was ahead of the curve when he went full organic in 1979, a radical move at the time in a region overwrought by chemical farming within one of France’s main breadbaskets, Provence. His home is Seguret, a small wine-producing village set on the fringe of the better known wine appellations, Gigondas and Vacqueras, and further to the west, the most famous, Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Seguret should be more well-known, but I’m happy to say that it’s not. It remains quaint and not overrun by tourists (at least in the off-season) with the occasional painter in the street working away, or a man sitting alone on the back of his truck playing the guitar for his own pleasure—both of which my wife and I saw on the same day in Seguret with not another soul in sight. It’s an inspiring village of narrow rock passageways, thankfully not suitable for cars, with sometimes just enough room for one person at a time to pass. Seguret is an epicenter for geological studies and contains countless different rock formations from different epochs that date as far back as almost two hundred million years, with everything that’s happened up to now piled on top. Largely composed of limestone, clay and sand, the vineyards of Seguret begin low on the Ouvèze River terraces with soils derived from river deposits and work their way up toward the steep Dentelles de Montmirail, a jagged uplift of vertically positioned rocks, largely composed of limestones. It is geologically complex and so are its wines, especially for such modest prices. In these parts, there is always potential for high alcohol, power, extraction and prematurely aged, brown-tinted Grenache wines; but in Seguret the story can take a brighter more fresh turn, as it does with Jean’s wines. Protected by the Dentelles mountain range and the cool winds that flow through the Ouvèze down from Mont Ventoux, the great white limestone capped mountain of Provence, the wines can be more garnet red and dark pink on the rim of the glass, indicating less oxidation in the aging and earlier picking of the fruit. Jean’s fresh-tasting wines are balanced by the cold winds from Ventoux at night, the fifty-plus-year-old vines of Grenache (55%), Carignan (25%) and Counoise (20%), the concrete tanks the wines are vinified and aged in, the almost non-existent use of sulfur, and Jean’s pension from an organic, artistic way of life with the sole purpose to capture the true essence of his countryside in his finished product. They are true wines, with their tastes a result of concession to their land and its historical culture, truly worthy of attention from anyone looking for something honest and without pretension. From the moment the Pas de L'Escalette "Les Petits Pas" was created, Julien and Delphine’s intention was to create a charmer in their line of wines that didn’t take itself too seriously —hence the full color pinkish red label with neon green footprints, inspired by their children. 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 the 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 of organically farmed vines on limestone terroirs with a mix of 40% Grenache, 40% Syrah and 20% Carignan. Each of these grapes naturally carries ample freshness which is magnified by a little chill, making it anything but heavy under the sun. It is indeed a compelling wine for us wine geeks, but it’s more of a drink it, don’t think it kind of wine, high brow and low maintenance at the same time. It doesn’t constantly tug at your sleeve begging to show you how good it is, it’s just good. Roc des Anges is not the kind of domaine you expect to find in the Roussillon. Marjorie and Stéphane Gallet, both transplants from other parts of France (the Côte-Rotie area and Normandy, respectively), have constructed a biodynamic wine sanctuary in the Vallée de l’Agly, a nearly deserted vineyard land dominated by co-ops and famous for producing fortified wines. (The locals continue to abandon vines every year because the yields are tragically low and make it one of the most difficult places in France to make a living with vineyards.) Since she began the project in 2001 (at age twenty-three), Marjorie’s intuitive and peaceful contemplation has resulted in wines that carry a signature of purity, focus and elegance unlike anything made in the region. They are low alcohol, hands-off, mind-on wines bottled by varietal from single sites on specific and unique soil compositions. In smell and taste, their structure and style more closely resemble that of their earthy and salty cousins from the middle of France’s Loire Valley. The Segna de Cor is their starting block red, and it’s a knockout, as is their entire range, which I cannot recommend enough for their compelling interpretation of this part of the world. Senga de Cor is a blend of Grenache, Carignan and Syrah grown on schist. She picks the grapes weeks earlier than everyone else, and at first, her neighbors thought she was crazy. It’s impossible to think that now, and it was only a matter of time before someone came along and went against the grain to begin the reshaping of an entire region’s image. They’re doing it and the wines are fabulous.

Newsletter May 2022

Reznicek, a fabulous, new Viennese restaurant by sommelier Simon Schubert I’m writing this month’s newsletter in Vienna even though I thought about canceling this trip, as I have frequently done in the last few months due to Covid and the war next door, but I figure I can’t wait forever for the world to stabilize in every direction to feel completely comfortable traveling in this area. My wife and I decided to take a few days in Austria and the Czech Republic for her birthday before the arrival of some of my team from the States. This week is the beginning of forty consecutive days I’ll be on the road, starting in Riesling and Grüner Veltliner country, ten days in Northern Italy between Südtirol, Lombardia, and Piemonte, followed by what will surely be a stunning train ride from Milan through Switzerland and into Germany. From there, after a brief German excursion with Katharina Wechsler, the first team goes home, and I fly to Madrid to welcome three others for two weeks in Iberia. It’s going to be an intense one, but it will clear my schedule for a more relaxed summer. Last night we went to one of Vienna’s cool wine spots, Heunisch & Erben. It had been an overcast day, a little chilly but sunny, similar to when we left Portugal, though a bit drier. We settled into a tastefully remodeled modern flat with a light oak and shiny dark marble floor apartment with the classically high ceilings in a historic building in the Neubau district of Vienna. The original plan in Austria this year was to go to VieVinum, but despite how great the event is, I opted to avoid the crowds and see our Austrian growers in a more intimate setting. Ever since my first visit in 2004, I’ve searched Austria for the best wiener schnitzel and I may have finally found it. Two nights ago, at Heunisch & Erben, Katharina, our server, gave it a 9.5 out of ten, and I had to agree, only because she insisted a ten isn’t possible. It was near perfection: thin, soft veal somehow floating inside and seeming not touching its pillow of gold and brass-hued breaded crust with a superb and perfectly crafted delicate crunch. Their wine list is massive and requires a thirty-minute hunt to settle on the bottle for the night. We scoured the list of old Riesling with one of the sommeliers but he didn’t commit to pushing us in any particular direction, so we started with a series of Riesling tastes from their extensive wine-by-the-glass list and asked for a bottle of 2017 Domaine du Collier Saumur Rouge “La Ripaille” (because we knew we wanted a red for the night as well) to nurse over the next hours. During the last two years, I’ve had three different bottles of this Collier wine, two 2014s and one 2016. The La Ripaille Cabernet Franc wines I’ve had are, to me, complete in every way, and loaded with x-factor and perfect texture and palate weight. The 2017 clearly needs a few more years for the newish wood notes (not sure of the wood regimen) to meld a little further into the wine to make it a true 9.5. It was a solid 9, but I’m sure it will go up a notch with more bottle age. Everyone who will join me on this five-week journey will experience new places and meet new people that they admire through their wines. It’s a great pleasure to watch them visit places for the first time that I’ve had the fortune of visiting many times before, thanks to the great support of our customers and friends in the wine industry! Sometimes during the first visit to anywhere we are so worried about avoiding missteps that further complicate our travels that we miss the pleasure of watching others enjoy themselves too. My fondest memory guiding someone to somewhere I frequently visit was with my sister, Victoria (also our company’s Office Manager and Company MVP—yes, the second should be an official title), the first time she went to the Amalfi Coast. My wife, Andrea, and I lived on the eastern border of the area, in the port town of Salerno, a place people often just pass through without staying for more than a day or to just hop on the bus to Amalfi; Salerno is a true Southern Italian city populated mostly with Italians. Almost every sunny weekend we would catch the ferry to one of the Amalfi Coast villages, and our favorite was Cetara. Amalfi Coast fishing village, Cetara On the ferry ride we sat daydreaming while sea mist cast into the air by the boat bobbing up and down in the wake from other boats, the cool water freshening our faces under the hot sun. But anyone familiar with the area knows the better beaches, at least for relaxing, are to the east and south of Salerno in Cilento, not the pebbly and cobbly Amalfi Coast. The Cilento Coast is much flatter and has expansive and long, soft beaches made of fine sand, save the occasional razor-sharp volcanic outcroppings on the shore and scattered in the breaking waves. The water is cleaner and clearer than most of Amalfi (a place already known for its beautiful, clean water), and it’s where many Campanians go during the summer when excessive amounts of tourists make Amalfi unbearable, if it weren’t for its breathtaking beauty. One can only imagine the origins of the beauty of the Amalfi coastline adorned with limestone cliffs: surely it was the hot spot for torrid love affairs between gods. In Cilento, every beach shack restaurant surely has better food than you can find anywhere else on the beach in Europe; the Neapolitans have very high expectations when it comes to food and these places deliver, even if they’re served on paper or plastic. The place was Ravello, perhaps the most picturesque and well-kept village along the Amalfi Coast, a hilltop town about a thousand feet above the sea, celebrated in books, clean and well-groomed, and subtly posh. It’s a place that attracts the richest and the most artistic of our species for inspiration from the Mediterranean below, with its shimmering kaleidoscope of inimitable shades of blue and green, all backed by a treacherously steep, wild shrub-covered, limestone mountainside that seems to run right into the city center. It was only there that I ever witnessed someone so deeply awed by the beauty of a place that it brought them to tears. This person was Victoria, who was embarrassed by how it moved her, and this is, and will always be, one of my greatest travel memories. There won’t be anything quite as stunning as Ravello and the Amalfi Coast during my upcoming trip, but Galicia’s Ribeira Sacra and Portugal’s Douro will stimulate many other sensations: vertigo; disbelief that people would elect to work in such extreme conditions; deep contemplation about the history of conquest and religion in the region; the superiority of Roman engineering in their time and their lust for gold and how deeply they changed Europe. All this lies between our start in Austria’s Wachau and our terminus in Portugal and Spain’s Atlantic coasts. So much to see and experience, to learn and to ponder! It never gets old, only we do… Ancient gneiss from hundreds of millions of years ago, the famous bedrock (or “primary rock”) of Austria’s Wachau New Arrivals: Austria Tegernseerhof, Wachau An hour’s drive west from Vienna lies Austria’s ground zero for the country’s great Grüner Veltliner and Riesling. While I feel it’s not fair to say one region is better than another when comparing Kremstal, Kamptal, and Wachau, Austria’s elite spots for these grapes, Wachau certainly gets heaped with the most praise and is home to a tremendous number of great producers, including our friend Martin Mittelbach and his historic Weingut Tegernseerhof. The far eastern side of this appellation’s steeply terraced, ancient gneiss rock hillsides is where the recently organic certified Tegernseerhof has operated since 1176. While vines existed in the area for hundreds of years before the arrival of the monastic order of Tegernsee, Tegernseerhof is the oldest Wachau winery in the Loiben area. Owned and operated by the Mittelbach family for the last five generations, there are dozens of winegrowers in the area now, including two of Mittelbach’s neighbors and close family friends, the Knolls and Alzingers. Martin’s stylistic difference from his friends lies mainly in how he now organically farms and is certified (and I could see that would eventually head that direction when I first met him in 2009) and uses only stainless steel for fermentation and aging. He is also slightly stricter about excluding berries that are concentrated by good botrytis in his classic still wines from Grüner Veltliner and Riesling. Similar to the others, however, skin contact is used depending on the health of the berries: the better the health and the greener the berries, the longer the maceration before pressing. His vineyard and cellar choices leave Martin’s wines naked with a starkly clear view into the differences between the aspects, slopes, bedrock and topsoil, and genetic material from each particular vineyard site of his top wines. Always straight and intentionally slow to unfold upon opening, Martin wants his wines to evolve through time rather than erupt in the first moments. To better understand terroir with an extremely fair-priced wine, Tegernseerhof is second to none—make sure you do more than just taste them; better to drink them over some hours next to each other to let the differences truly reveal themselves. What a treat to have more 2019 vintage wines coming from Austria. Similar in overall caliber to other recent banner years, 2017, 2015 and 2013, 2019 may be considered a leader among them. Of course, each vintage has its standout characteristics, but 2019 fires on all fronts, leaving nothing ambiguous regarding its potential as well as its natural openness early on. The ripeness is full but balanced with zippy acidity and mineral nuances and loads of texture. It’s a great vintage on which to double down: one for today and another for the cellar. The Austrians are crazy about Grüner Veltliner. Why, one might ask? It’s extremely universal. It invites everyone with its mixed simplicity and convivial nature, and with the good ones, a deep but unintrusive complexity. At home, grandma, grandpa, mom and dad, and the entire extended family, and some of the country’s older kids enjoy their time together with this appealing white wine shared among everyone. Yes, Austrian teenagers drink wine (and probably more beer) with the family and in restaurants. The public drinking age in Austria is 16, and alcoholism is not a big societal problem thanks to the lack of taboo… Better to get them started on Grüner Veltliner than waste the Rieslings on them at such a young age! (Save the Riesling for the adults!) Interestingly, when asked which wine between Grüner Veltliner and Riesling may age better and even improve more, many of the winegrowers have a strong belief that Grüner Veltliner may slightly outdo Riesling in the long run. And if anybody knows, they would! Grüner Veltliner is a grape variety that doesn’t like to suffer too much stress in the vineyard, that is, benefit from the vine’s search for nutrients and water in the soil. It’s mostly planted on less extreme slopes and on deep soils, whereas Riesling takes to more precarious, spare soil, with picturesque positions that result in greater stress to the vine. Here in the Wachau and the surrounding regions, Veltliner loves to bathe in the water-retentive loess, a wind-traveled, fine-grained, and well-structured calcareous sand—well structured enough through its crystalline matrix that entire loess caves can be dug relatively deep into the earth with very little structural support and concern of collapse. Most of these loess vineyards in the Wachau are down by the river, on more east-facing terraces or in areas inside the river’s historical flood plains. The first Grüner Veltliner and Riesling in Tegernseerhof’s range are labeled Dürnstein (formerly labeled Frauenweingarten for the Veltliner, and Terrassen for the Riesling). The Dürnstein Grüner Veltliner Federspiel is grown on alluvial river sands and loess which brings bright notes of spice, honeysuckle, and white pepper to the forefront and a broader palate richness. (Federspiel is a ripeness category particular to Austria’s Wachau region, similar to a Riesling Kabinett in ripeness level but a dry wine rather than a sweet version one would typically expect with the reference to Kabinett on the label.) The mineral nose is further enhanced by notes of dried yellow and green grasses, and white radish, while the deep and glycerol back palate is characterized by Indian spices and a slight minty, lime finish. Between the Veltliners in Tegernseerhof’s range, this is the easiest and most universal for all palates. Grown in a parcel only a few dozen meters from the Danube and right at the doorsteps of the historic rock village, Dürnstein, Tegernseerhof’s Superin Grüner Veltliner Federspiel is quite different from the Dürnstein bottling. Here the Danube did some sculpting and stripping away of soil during flood periods while replacing it with new river sediments. Through this erosional process, it carved deep enough to expose the gneiss bedrock below. In other Grüner Veltliner vineyards used for Federspiel, they are often covered in a deep enough topsoil of loess and alluvial sediments with very little, if any root contact with gneiss bedrock far below. The dynamic of gneiss as a dominant feature of this vineyard creates a Federspiel Grüner Veltliner with a much more vertical, mineral, saltier, and deeply textured palate. Between the two Veltliners, this is the one for the mineral seeker while the other may be better suited for those in search of more obvious Veltliner deliciousness. The three newly released 2019 Tegernseerhof Grüner Veltliner Smaragd Crus are all located in the Loiben area. Leading with the most elegant of the three, we start with Loibenberg, a Smaragd (the Wachau’s regional name for the highest quality dry wines; think the equivalent of a dry Spätlese or Auslese-level trocken) grown on numerous parcels on perhaps the most recognizable hill in the Wachau. Unlike many other Grüner Veltliners from this hillside, similar to other Loibenberg Grüner Veltliners, Martin’s is a mix of around 2/3 loess-dominated soil in the middle and lower parts of the hill, but with the other third harvested from gneiss-dominated soils and bedrock further uphill, which may make (in theory!) his version a little more minerally than one may expect from a Smaragd Veltliner from this hill. The aromas and flavors express a beautiful collection of sweet purple fruits, Concord grape skin, violets, green melon, green candy, Meyer lemon, and kaffir lime. Tucked further in this tension-filled but open Veltliner sits a deeply rooted core of iodine, sea urchin, and marine salts. One of the most famous and exclusive vineyards in the Wachau is Ried Schütt. As far as I know, only Weingut Knoll and Tegernseerhof have labels that carry this name; both have Grüner Veltliner, but Knoll is the only one to bottle Riesling, which some say is the best Riesling in Knoll’s impressive range. This Veltliner from Mittelbach is slightly more textured and amare (in a very pleasant way!) than his Loibenberg Grüner Veltliner, with ethereal aromas of fresh sage, spice, exotic greens, and sweet lemon. On the palate, the aromatic sweetness of bay leaf stains deeply on all sides, while sweet green grasses, marine salt, and lightly purple and yellow citrus fruits round out the full but clean palate. Schütt is perhaps the most regal and firmly textured of the Veltliners from Martin, and it sits beneath Höhereck inside of a combe (known as the Mental Gorge, or Mentalgraben) where water eroded the eastern neighboring hillside of the Loibenberg vineyard just across the way. The combe floods with cold air from the Waldviertel forest behind and above the vineyards, contributing tension to balance out its deep power. An unusual look for a great cru site, it’s a relatively flat vineyard with only slight terracing below Höhereck. It’s composed primarily of hard orthogneiss bedrock and decomposed gneiss topsoil with a mixture of different sized, unsorted gneiss rocks and sand deposited by the former water flow. Replanted in 1951, Tegernseerhof’s Ried Höhereck is the Grüner Veltliner parentage of many vines in the area. A rare Grüner Veltliner planted almost exclusively on the acidic metamorphic rock, gneiss, rather than the sandy, nutrient-rich and water-retentive loess, typical for this variety with a beneficial southeast exposure inside and just popping out of a ravine with great access to mountain winds and an early summer and autumn sunset, Martin says that the most important element of Höhereck is its genetic heritage. This half-hectare (1.25 acre) vineyard has been a growing field for centuries for ancient Grüner Veltliner biotypes, thus contributing to the complexity of this wine and Martin’s entire range of Veltliners, with all new plantations made with genetic material from this hill. Höhereck produces dynamic wines that still manage to show great restraint, though this is perhaps due to its great abundance of layers that unfold once the bottle is open; it shouldn’t be drunk quickly because all the most important acts of the show take time. As charming as it is serious juice, with precise nuances of yellow and white peach, cherimoya, lemon curd, baking spice, bright green herbs eventually take center stage. It’s a lovely wine with immense depth. We have a rock star lineup (pun intended) of 2019 Tegernseerhof Rieslings grown on gneiss bedrock with slight variations of exposure and topsoil. First, we start with Martin’s rapier-like Dürnstein Riesling Federspiel (formerly labeled Terrassen). Every year this Riesling shows a gorgeous selection of green notes that dance somewhere between sweet mint, green fig, green apple skin, and sweet green melon, with razor-sharp steel and crystalline, salty mineral notes adding to its appeal. These grapes come exclusively from the first and second pickings of Riesling clusters from the gneiss terraces of some of the region’s greatest badass Riesling vineyards: Loibenberg, Steinertal and Kellerberg. The pedigree is all there, and Martin’s deft touch and desire to craft this wine into fine liquid art, making it one of the world’s greatest values for serious but delicious white wine. In the range of Martin’s Smaragd Rieslings, the Loibenberg Riesling Smaragd is the most delicate and refreshing while maintaining its Smaragd-level fullness. It comes from one of the warmest sites in the Wachau (which is still much cooler than most parts of Austria’s white wine regions) and is often the first to be picked within Tegernseerhof’s Smaragd Rieslings. The numerous parcels that are scattered over this large hill give the wine a great balance of characteristics from sweet Meyer lemon notes to the first pick of yellow stone fruits in early summer. It has a wonderfully refreshing spring-like feel, adorned with sweet flowers, acacia honey and early spring grasses. Indeed, spring and summer nuance is what this wine is all about, however, earthiness and forest floor notes are very present. As already noted, Martin prides himself on the savory and subtle nature of his wines, all framed with precise and regal mineral notes of river rock and freshly scratched metal, like a carbon steel knife after a good scrubbing. Refreshingly delicate for a Smaragd, it’s one of the most quaffable in the range and can be thoroughly enjoyed without the need for your full attention on each sip. If there is one wine in Martin’s range that he (and I!) might favor, the Steinertal Riesling Smaragd may be it. This tiny vineyard’s particularities give its wines tremendous range and also make it uniquely special. Steinertal is one of the great sites in all of Austria and its aromas beam from the glass with enticing and full-of-energy, high-toned mineral impressions; if it sounds exciting, that’s because it is! These elements of the wine are likely due to its growth in purely gneiss rock, spare topsoil and Martin’s preference for earlier picking and rigorous sorting to remove any concentrated botrytis grapes. The vineyard’s heat-trapping amphitheater shape and the steep ravines on both sides also create a teeter-totter of hot days and the cold nocturnal mountain air that breezes in and cools down the vineyards. My tasting notes from last summer express that the second glass emits discrete, late summer stone fruits, citrus, flowers, and French lavender. Exotic and sweet herbal notes follow, displaying fresh thyme, lemongrass and subtle wheatgrass and watermelon rind nuances. In the deepest parts of the wine, the acidity is fluid but intensely focused, supported by a gentle gust of palate-refreshing tannins. This full-scale orchestra of profound intellectual and hedonistic pleasure seems endless, so prepare yourself. If one were to cut their Wachau teeth on this Riesling, it may set the bar a little high. As Burgundy grower David Duband says when we dig into his grand crus at the cellar, “Be careful. It’s very good…” If one were to ask a knowledgeable wine professional about the greatest vineyards in Austria, the Wachau’s Kellerberg would likely be mentioned in their first breath. Keller-berg, or “Cellar-mountain,” is without a doubt one of the Wachau's greatest vineyards, and Tegernseerhof’s Kellerberg Riesling Smaragd is the fullest Riesling in their range, surely vying for the top spot with Steinertal. Imposing and profound in every dimension (very Chambertin-like in this way), from structural elements to the balance of power and subtlety, the only known weakness of this type of wine can be its maker; fortunately, Martin has a handle on it. To attempt to describe all the nuances of this wine would be a paragraph with no end. However, to better understand the wine’s nature it would be easier to demonstrate it with an explanation of its terroir. The hill faces mostly southeast, giving it good morning sun but also an earlier sunset than the neighboring Riesling vineyards with more southerly and sometimes western exposures, like Loibenberg and Steinertal. Similar to Steinertal, Höhereck and Schütt, and unlike the main face of the large Loibenberg slope, Kellerberg is exposed to a large, open ravine to the east that brings in a rush of cool air during the night. The aspect and exposure to this ravine, along with mostly unplanted hills just to the west, allows the fruit to mature to ripeness without imparting excessive fruitiness, while highlighting its pedigreed gneiss bedrock and spare topsoil. It has a deep range of topsoil from volcanic, loess and bedrock-derived gneiss, and Tegernseerhof has six parcels inside its boundary that cover these soil types. Loess brings richness and lift, gneiss the tension and focus. Even more important than the nuances is the way this wine makes you feel: the energy, the profound reservation, and at the same time its generosity. Kellerberg is formidable and does indeed comfortably sit among the world’s greatest vineyards. There are also reloads of Tegernseerhof’s popular 2019 Bergdistel Grüner Veltliner und Riesling Smaragds. These wines labeled with the name Bergdistel are a blend of many different small plots not big enough to be made into their own wines. Some of the grapes also come from further west of Dürnstein, closer to Weissenkirchen, home to many great vineyards, most notably (for me) Achleiten. Tegernseerhof’s renditions of these wines are his most generous in the Smaragd category. They are another great example of drink-it-don’t-think-it fabulous Smaragd Rieslings that don’t hold anything back immediately upon opening. New Arrivals: Italy Poderi Colla, Piemonte (Langhe) I think I write more about Poderi Colla in our newsletters than any other producer we work with outside of Arnaud Lambert. We always have new things coming from these guys and they’re fun to talk about. The Collas, like Lambert, are one of the most important cornerstones of our entire portfolio. I simply never tire of drinking their wines and would be happy to have them as my desert island red wine producer, although the island would have to be a little less tropical because warm Nebbiolo doesn’t sound so appealing… The reason for my infatuation—that could more aptly be described as absolute love—is simple, but also a little complicated to explain… Colla is among very few other producers throughout Europe who represent to me an unmovable historical wine culture. The Collas, like other quiet giants of the wine world, didn’t alter their course over the last fifty years regardless of the constantly changing wine styles the broader market wanted. Through the years of conformity in the global market in European staple regions like Tuscany, Piedmont, Rioja, Burgundy and Bordeaux, some producers stayed the course on more natural methods through the age of chemical farming (since WW II), the caricature-like muscular and overplayed wines of the Age of Extraction (1990s-2000s), until today, with the welcome movement away from those eras toward softer handling and elegance over power on one side, and on the other to the culture of unapologetic and, unfortunately sometimes, unaccountably flawed natural wines whose fans fashion them as a sort of punk rock-like movement; the difference is that the respectable punk rockers were good musicians that knew how to play their instruments in order to hit the notes they intended to hit. Intention has everything to do with any great wine too, “natural” or traditionally crafted. Tino Colla in Bussia Dardi le Rose The game-changers of old, the unflappable ones, refused to conform. Think of the many iconic and unmistakable historical styles found in the wines made by producers similar to Clape, Rayas, Rousseau, Leroy, DRC, Lafarge, Pierre Morey, López de Heredia, Vega Sicilia, Giuseppe Rinaldi, or Bartolo Mascarello; you get the point! (Perhaps the only shift in some of these producer’s philosophies in the last fifty years is in the direction of more natural farming.) For me, Poderi Colla is also on that list. It’s true that the Colla family’s wines weren’t popular for decades, but why? Because they made them like they were made in the 1950s and 60s, and they weren’t cutting edge anymore after the 1970s until about a decade ago. The Collas made their wines more or less the same seventy years ago as they do today. For example, Colla’s Barolo Bussia Dardi le Rose still goes through a two-week natural fermentation and is then aged two years in massive old barrels (50++ hectoliters) before bottling, as it was half a century ago. The difference is that now people get them because their graceful but traditionally sculpted and gently structured style is in again. Their wines are elegant and old-school, pale in color, subtle but fully expanding by the minute as they aerate, and, today, more pristinely crafted than in the past—perhaps the only thing I can think of that one might criticize about their style… Many of the great producers of wine know perfectly how to measure the risk in walking the line of volatile acidity in pursuit of x-factor perfection while remaining only a shade to the right of vulgarity. The Collas don’t walk that line, they keep it straighter from the start all the way to the finish, and that’s one of the many reasons why their wines are so incomparably reliable in this area. In fact, I cannot think of another producer with better consistency in their entire region—believe me, I’ve tried. The Collas are indeed pure on craft, thanks to the laser-sharp attention to detail of the family winemaker, Pietro Colla, with the help of his father, Tino, and their deeply ingrained three hundred years of knowledge passed down from the many Colla winegrowing generations. Another element I believe defines the Colla style is their unique position that lands between Piemontese and French style, more specifically, that of Burgundy and yesteryear’s Northern Rhône. I’ve often thought that the Colla’s wines would be less understood inside of a largely Italian portfolio, or a broad tasting of Italian wines because they are so straight. In many ways they fit perfectly into the expectation for the region, but in other ways they don’t. To better understand this, let’s rewind the clock a little. Back in the early 1960s, the late Beppe Colla (the family’s spiritual leader and a quiet revolutionary during his seventy years making wine and influencing his neighbors) went to Burgundy and it changed him. He returned home and decided to bottle, with the epic 1961 vintage, the first commercially marketed single-cru Barolo, Barbaresco, Nebbiolo d’Alba, Dolcetto and Barbera. It’s hard to believe, but Beppe is the true O.G. of the single-cru wine movement in the Langhe. Beppe was the first to commercially do this in the region’s history, all bottled under the Prunotto label, a winery they owned until the early 1990s before they sold to Antinori and then launched Poderi Colla. Colla’s wines today bear the mark of that pivotal moment in Beppe’s perspective, and that’s why I view them as wines that agree as much with a French palate as with an Italian one. I’m also inclined to mention (and not massively expand on, though I really want to) that Piemonte is historically linked to France by way of the rulership of the territory by the Savoy for almost five-hundred years. Many things in Piemonte are very close to France, but none more than the Piemontese dialect, which is clearly heavy on French-like vocabulary. For me, Colla’s wines somehow embody this (even if the Collas may not see it that way), and it’s interesting to be mindful of this when their wines are in your glass. They’re surely Italian, but there is a distinctive dash of French there from influence hundreds of years ago, but even more recently with Beppe’s pilgrimage to Burgundy a half century ago. The best news with Colla is that we have a great relationship with them, and despite their major surge of interest by the global market as of late, we are still able to import a good quantity of wine from them. Most of what we have arriving from Colla are restocks on wines that we simply can’t seem to keep around long. However, their 2020 Dolcetto d’Abla “Pian Balbo” is a new release. Dolcetto is a grape that deserves more respect than it gets. I am sure every visit I’ve had with Tino Colla he tells me that Dolcetto is the wine the local winegrowers drink the most. It seems like they would drink their top Barolos and Barbarescos with every meal, but their reality is that they focus on wine all day and at the end of the day they want something a little easier going, and less serious but also delicious and complex, and unmistakably Piemontese—and that’s Dolcetto! Pian Balbo, sourced from Cascina Drago, their magnificent vineyard on the border of Barbaresco at around 330m altitude, is macerated on the skins for a week, or slightly less, and aged in stainless steel to preserve its fresh and bright fruit profile. The acidity is cleansing and the tannins smooth and lightly chalky. It may seem strange, but I often open Dolcetto on the nights when I need a couple-hour vacation from too much seriousness in my wines, much like the vignaioli do. Sometimes I find its simplicity just as thrilling as the complexity of other greater wines. But no matter whether a wine takes itself too seriously or not, Colla’s Dolcetto, with its unmistakable Piemontese aromas and tastes, transports me back to Piemonte, and what can be better than that? And the price? At four or five bucks per glass at your home wine bar, it’s almost free. When Dolcetto is in the right setting, however, it can indeed be serious business. We squeezed the Collas for a last batch of their 85% Dolcetto, 15% Nebbiolo blend, 2016 Bricco Del Drago, a monumental wine with this historical blend long before the concept of IGT came around, with the quality and guts to outlast even the most prestigious of Barolo and Barbaresco wines. I know that’s a big statement, but I, a former skeptic too, have been convinced of this wine’s chops from the numerous examples with decades of age, especially the 1970 that Tino Colla regularly speaks about with seemingly greater reverence than even all the great Barolo and Barbaresco he’s had in his seventy-plus years. Piedmont wine junkies, like us at The Source, know that 2016 has all the accolades (well-deserved), and they are a treasure to keep but also show fabulously now. Don’t miss an opportunity for a serious cellar wine at a very fair price for the pedigree that will likely outlive you but give you a lot of pleasure along the way. Do all those six-year-olds in your family (and extended family) a favor and lay some down until it’s time to give them some as a special and thoughtful gift. The 2016, and all the other vintages of this wine, will likely stand the test of time without much effort—probably better than many of the Barolo and Barbaresco wines from the same year, but at a third or quarter of the price. There’s more 2019 Barbera d’Alba “Costa Bruna” arriving as well. There was a battle between our sales team for quantities of this wine for our top restaurants and I’m sure these will go fast again. Notes from November 2021 Newsletter: 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. The 2019 Vintage 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 that were mostly 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. More of the outstanding 2019 Nebbiolo d’Alba hit too. We went as long on quantities as the Collas would let us with this wine. It’s truly one of the greatest Nebbiolo years and this one will simply blow out your expectations with respect to category and price. It’s made with the same care as a Barbaresco (a year in large, old botte) and has the same basic calcareous marls and sand. The difference is that it sits between 330-370m and covers a multitude of aspects from east to west, and sits at the top of the hill, fully exposed to cold air which makes for a wine of great tension and never any hint of desiccated fruit, only fresh and bright notes, like those old-school Barbaresco and Barolo wines we all miss. As we said back in our Notes from November 2021 Newsletter: 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, 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. Colla’s Nebbiolo d’Alba is a preview of that oncoming quality, and it’s gorgeous. If Nebbiolo is one of your passions and you need a price break without sacrificing quality, go deep on 2019 entry-level Nebbiolos. For the very serious collectors and Nebb-heads, the 2017 Barolo Bussia Dardi le Rose MAGNUMS came in on this boat. The critics are circling back on this year and retracting a few of their initial concerns. Built to age for decades, and even longer in magnum, this could be a good one to take a look at. (We also have a few 2015 Barolo mags left in our inventory if mags of epic wine are your thing…) Crotin, Asti It seems that when we bring in wines from Colla we also take more wines from the Russo brothers at Crotin at the same time. The word Crotin is Piemontese dialect for “small cellars under the main wine cellar,” and is used for keeping the best wines for long-term aging. The Russo boys have been churning out some of the top values in Asti 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, where 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. We have the 2019 Barbera d’Asti “La Martina” finally arriving. It’s been more than two years since we ordered Barbera from these guys (and that’s what they specialize in!) because the last order of 2018 landed a month or two after the shutdowns of 2020 began. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you already know 2019 is a simply fabulous year for Piedmont. Wines like Barbera, known for their intense acidity, found their heights in this long and steady growing season (at least for my palate, whereas many growers here prefer the even hotter years for this grape) that helped the grape phenolics balance out this variety’s naturally high acid. Organically grown on calcareous sands and clay, the vineyard, La Martina, is in a very cold section of Asti and makes for a special profile mixture of crunchy but ripe, palate-staining dark red and purple fruit. It’s aged only in stainless steel, so you can expect notable purity here as well. Crotin’s 2020 Freisa “Aris” is made from this nearly forgotten grape variety that was ubiquitous in Piemonte only decades ago. Today, it’s been relegated mostly to the region’s backwaters in the wake of the mass propagation of Nebbiolo in Piedmont. There are still compelling examples to be found at cantinas like Brovia and Giuseppe Rinaldi, but 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 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’s Aris vineyard they’ve tamed it and it brings great pleasure with only a slight tilt toward its natural rusticity. Over the pandemic, the Russo brothers came up with a new wine bottled in liters: 2020 Vino Rosso Contadino “Beverin”. The label is totally different (more fun!) than the others in their range and it is certifiable Piemontese glou glou, by design—not a typical wine style for this very traditional region! It’s a blend of 80% Bonarda (the fiesta grape) mixed with 10% Freisa (the curfew police for the Bonarda party), and 10% Grignolino to bring more elegance and beauty to the scene. Beverin is Piemontese dialect that implies “a light and easy to drink wine.” I took my first sample bottle to a tasting in Portugal with some of our producers there and it was a favorite for all who tasted it. For the price and quality, it’s tough to beat for those looking for a glass of Piemontese deliciousness. New Arrivals: France Patrick Baudouin, Anjou I finally made it back to the Loire Valley three weeks ago after an almost three-year absence! Crazy! Last summer I hit the road for six weeks straight at the end of spring and into the early summer and missed only the northern part of Champagne and all of the Loire Valley before the fall Covid restrictions started to complicate things again. It was strange for me to miss this part of what has been my usual wine route because over the years I often stopped there twice in the same year. Now, one hour and twenty minutes on a plane from Porto drops me right into Nantes, making it one of the easiest trips from Portugal. It was a great tour and nice to finally see our friends there. I took some days in Saumur and then a few in Montlouis (some very cool things coming from there a few months from now!) and finally hit Patrick Baudouin on my last day before flying back home. Since I saw Patrick last, he seems to have swapped out his old crew for a group of younger workers in the vineyard and cellar. I’m sure this will influence some of the wines in the coming vintages. Months prior to the pandemic when those nasty tariffs were imposed, we had an order waiting to set sail from this natural-wine guru and somewhat controversial Loire Valley winegrower. The order was suspended and then the pandemic hit. We added a few more goodies but managed to maintain some quantity of great wines from 2015 and 2017. The first wine is Patrick’s 2019 Anjou Blanc “Effusion”, a Chenin Blanc grown on a mix of a few different parcels of vines on metamorphic and volcanic rocks, the latter formation was the inspiration for the name of this bottling from “effusive” igneous rocks, magmatic rock that cool on the surface of the earth instead of underground, which are known as “intrusive” igneous rocks. We historically import the highest volume from Patrick, so it may be the most recognizable. It’s made in a simple way, as are all the dry Chenin Blanc in Patrick’s range, with barrel aging mostly in older French oak with very little intervention. I find that all of Patrick’s wines go down very easily, but Effusion is the one that performs its best melodies in its younger years, and that’s why it’s always released earlier than the others, along with Les Fresnaye, a vineyard that has seen a lot of trouble in the years from frost. Volcanic ash rocks from one of Baudouin’s vineyards for his Anjou Blanc “Effusion” Produced from Chenin vines planted in 1947, the 2015 & 2017 Anjou Blanc “Les Gats” bottlings represent perhaps Patrick’s highest level in his range of dry Chenin in this neck of the woods, on the left bank of the Loire. The others may equal it, but Les Gats carries a few x-factor notes that in my opinion often separate it from the others. The other dry wines in the range are maybe a little more predictable in some ways, whereas Les Gats, even once you think you know it, somehow reveals a new secret with each vintage. That is the case with these two very good Chenin Blanc vintages, and to have them side by side in a tasting shows the merit of these two stellar years and the talent of this northeast-facing site grown on ancient schist that dates to Pangean times. Les Gats is raised mostly in older barrels (perhaps with a new one slipped in there occasionally) and is always released quite late. The 2017 is the new release and the 2015 was a wine that I requested before the pandemic that Patrick held onto for us. The quantities of both wines are minuscule, but at least we finally have some! We wanted to bring in some stickies from the Loire Valley because there is a small but growing interest again in the category. To work with Patrick on these wines is always a pleasure because they are typically quirky sweet wines, but under Patrick’s direction of natural methods in the vineyard they take on a few lesser-known layers in this part of the Côteaux du Layon, an area that is largely chemically farmed. The 2018 Côteaux du Layon “Les Bruandières” grows very close to the borders of Quarts de Chaumes, the most famous sweet wine appellation of the Loire Valley. Historically, Les Bruandières was on equal footing as Quarts de Chaumes but was not given its own appellation, perhaps due to its very small size? Les Bruandières is a fabulous sweet wine in the sense that it’s not overwhelming with too much sugar. I even sometimes find myself drinking it at a still-wine pace, like drinking a fabulous German Spätlese or aged Auslese, because the balance is gorgeous. It’s perfect for tasting menus when the dessert or cheese course needs something sweet, but it’s not overbearing after an extensive meal and at a time when palate fatigue (or disinterest in more wine) begins to set in. The 2015 Quarts de Chaume “Les Zersilles” is a very different story than Les Bruandières despite also being a sticky. It’s denser and darker in color, and serves a very different purpose at the end of the meal (I cannot imagine having it at any other point in a meal other than the end!) geared toward a more decadent finish. In contrast to some of the profound, sweet Auslese and TBA wines of Germany, this purely Chenin Blanc wine exists in a more deeply earthy, damp, and herbal sweetness—almost like a Sauternes (I haven’t written that word for almost two decades!) without the aristocratic gold trim and aim for perfection; like us, Patrick prefers the perfectly imperfect wines. Here, in Patrick’s Les Zersilles, it’s a berry selection; not a selection of berries that are totally free of funk, but rather full of the good funk! The quantity of this wine is even less than the others and is meant to be for the many restaurants with tasting programs looking for truly organic and naturally made, high quality sweet wines. Patrick Baudouin

Newsletter November 2022 – Part One

Ahh, Tuscan sunsets… (Download complete pdf here) Due to the lengthy content of our monthly newsletter and the desire to be more accurate on wine arrival timing, we are breaking it up into two segments each month, delivered on the first and third Fridays. Let’s dig in! Source Happenings We’re adding our trade and consumer events to the newsletter so you know what is going on! Austria’s Riesling and Grüner Veltliner wizard, Michael Malat, will be in California November 8-11. He will be at the following events/dinners: Thursday, November 10th, Austrian winegrower Michael Malat at Nari in San Francisco. Join Michael and Nari sommelier, Sam Zelver, and The Source’s Danny DeMartini at this fabulous contemporary Thai restaurant. Call to reserve at (415)-868-6274 Friday, November 11th, Austrian winegrower Michael Malat at Napa Valley’s Compline Wine Shop with sommelier/owners Matt Stamp and Ryan Stetins, and The Source’s Hadley Kemp from 6:30pm – 7:30pm. Tickets available for purchase at https://complinewine.com/collections/wine-education/products/fancy-flight-night-with-michael-malat Saturday, November 12th at Santa Barbara’s Bacara Resort, The Source’s Leigh Readey will be pouring donated wines at the Santa Barbara Vintners Foundation Gala Dinner and Live Auction benefiting Direct Relief and Community Health Centers. Tickets can be found at https://sbwineauction.org/ Wednesday, November 16th at The Anchovy Bar in San Francisco, The Source will be featured for their new dinner series with sommelier Adam Robins and The Source’s Danny DeMartini. Wines poured will include Galicia’s Manuel Moldes and Augalevada, and Piemonte’s Luigi Spertino and Monti Perini. Reservations at https://www.theanchovybar.com/ Navelli, Abruzzo New Arrivals Just in time for the holiday season, we have a load of great stuff to beef up wine programs. Our newest arrivals include Romain Guiberteau and Brendan Stater-West’s new Saumur releases, François Crochet’s cru Sancerres that show freshness is not lost on that entire appellation in the face of climate change, Pierre Morey’s statuesque Meursaults, and David Duband’s reliable and finely tuned terroir exposé. I’ve written exhaustively about these producers (available on our site), so they don’t need more plugging. Plus, their quantities are spare. Our main focus in the first half of this month is the arrival of wines from future Austrian legend, Michael Malat. Indeed, I’ve extolled his talents many times before, but his range is growing along with his experience! Weingüt Malat’s ancient cellar Special Feature Michael Malat – Kremstal, Austria Michael Malat has it all: affordable and spectacular, premium wines that exceed expectations, full of terroir and joy in every category: red, white, rosé, sparkling, and orange. Malat found his breakthrough with the 2013 vintage, six vintages after his father, Gerald, put him in the driver’s seat. Since then, notable years were 2015 and 2017, and now 2019. Michi, as he’s referred to in Austria (pronounced Mickey), who’s only a hair over forty, puts to bottle wines marked with a similar throughline: deliciousness, depth and terroir purity. Uniquely, he manages to get his Kamptal Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners to express fruit nuances of the same color as his deeply hued yellow capsules and labels. These exotic but discreet yellow fruit notes filled with Amalfi Coast-like sunshine makes their intellectual stimulation even that much more pleasurable. From the top of the range to the bottom there are few in the industry who deliver such serious wine with so much glee. The Vineyards Malat’s vineyards are mostly inside Kremstal (with some actually just inside of the Wachau), one of Austria’s most famous and equally geologically diverse appellations. All but his Pfaffenberg wine come from the Danube’s right bank (south side) where the hills slope more gently with multi-rowed terraces, while on the other side the hills are mostly treacherous, rocky sites facing south with more extreme exposure to the sun, similar in hillside structure to the neighboring Wachau. The flatter land on the south side has a greater level of loess (extremely fine-grained, calcareous, mineral-dense, wind-blown sand) in the topsoil. There are also sections on this side closer to the river on gravel and sand deposits where they grow some of the Pinot Noir grapes and others for the entry-level wines. Further upslope most of the vineyards in his top crus are usually covered to some degree with loess topsoil but are in closer contact with a solid bedrock of ancient acidic rock formations that date all the way back to Pangean times, hundreds of millions of years ago. Climatically, because of the tug-of-war between warm Pannonian winds and cold blasts from the Alps, it’s much colder than most of the rest of Austrian wine country, between the warmest and coolest areas of top Riesling and Grüner Veltliner production. Most of Malat’s vines were planted during his lifetime, despite the winery’s history dating back to the 1700s. This is largely due to his father’s ambition, which set the stage for Michael’s fabulous collection of vineyards in their middle age, perfect for wines of great balance. Bubbles We begin with bubbles. Michael’s father, Gerald, paved the way for Austria’s Sekt market in 1976. A straight shooter from the post-WWII Austria, post-Soviet occupation (until 1955) recovery generation, he pushed against the Austrian Republic’s law ordaining that only licensed producers could produce sparkling wines (Sekt in German). They also used local grape varieties, like Gelber Muskateller, Müller-Thurgau, Grüner Veltliner, and Riesling. After Gerald’s nationally followed fight and subsequent victory, it only took a few vintages for him to see that his wines were lacking in structure and finesse made from these local varieties when compared to those of Champagne. He already had Pinot Noir and Chardonnay planted but expanded his holdings during Michi’s childhood to provide his son with the superb material he uses to craft them today. Both the 2017 Brut Rosé Reserve, made entirely from Pinot Noir, and 2017 Brut Nature Reserve, purely Chardonnay, are aged in bottle on their lees for four years, while the law only requires nine months. Gerald used to add a small dosage but today Michael adds nothing because of the fuller flavor and fruitiness that climate change has imposed on the wines. The results are substantial, and many consider them to be the best of their kind out of Austria. Only a hair above the price of the least expensive organic Champagnes made from small-house producers, they’re a good blind taste for Champagne buffs. Orange Wines Curiosity, necessity, and keeping up with the times led Michael to develop orange wines starting in 2016, bottled now under the Malat label RAW. During the 2016 harvest the press broke when the Gewürtztraminer was perfectly ripe. Just as the “natural wine” movement was a topic of discussion and scorn in Austria, so was orange wine, but a decision had to be made to either leave the grapes on the vine until the press was fixed or give it a go with full skin maceration and put himself in the crosshairs of his colleagues. He explained that at the time in Austria there were only about ten producers making orange wines and only a few of them were good, at least to his Austrian winemaker’s palate. In classic Malat fashion, he was comfortable in the crosshairs. Grapes that seem to fare better for orange wines are often excessively aromatic whites with pungent floral and sweet spice notes, reminiscent of strong perfume scents that evoke generations of family gatherings. Toward the northeast of Italy and into neighboring countries, like Slovenia and further east to Georgia, orange wines have been a thing since antiquity, perhaps the way all white grapes were made into wine long ago. From a stability standpoint, orange wines would’ve outmatched a white wine due to tannins and polyphenols extracted from the skins in more low-tech generations. The yields are surely higher compared to white grapes pressed upon arrival at the winery that still retain some juice even with rarely employed high pressure at a quality producer. Being that orange wines are nothing new to the Old World’s older world, they deserve some attention, not solely as a trend but as a legitimate category. I, for one, love good orange wines, which are less rare than in the past. As with any category, many are lazily crafted and poured into the natural wine river, while on the other side, orange wines from big producers must be just as innocuous, soulless and uninteresting as others on their marketing team’s menu. When craftspeople with a level of mastery of fundamentals in wine chemistry and viticulture play with orange wine the results can be consistently compelling yet still framed in wine classicism: harmonious, reliable, and of utmost importance to this taster–intricacy. Michael has achieved a level of mastery with his craft, fundamentals all the way to a certain level of artistry, and though the orange wines are relatively new to him, it doesn’t appear so. Both of Malat’s orange wines are clean and elegant renditions with the 2021 Gelber Muscateller RAW more tense and bright by nature of the variety than the expectedly fuller and powerfully expressive 2021 Gewürtztraminer RAW. They spend between two and three weeks on the skins, age on their lees in large, old wood vats, naturally go through malolactic fermentation, and are bottled with low sulfur levels (given the greater natural stability extracted from the skins and seeds). The last batch we ordered evaporated, and though we tripled the order this time, it still won’t be enough. Classic Range – Entry Levels Malat’s starter kit on the classic range is second to none in Austria, especially when price is a consideration. Labeled Furth, after the main town in the area, they demonstrate what can be done on a medium scale in production with superb results. All come from the right bank with those close to the river on flat vineyards and the others with a slight northern tilt. The 2021 Riesling “Furth” is mostly grown at higher altitudes further upslope on terraces and in closer contact with rocky bedrock and topsoil, as opposed to an endless bedrock and topsoil of loess further below that much of the 2021 Grüner Veltliner “Furth” is grown on. An additional detail to highlight on these two entry-level wines is that they are aged entirely in ancient 5,000-10,000-liter wood casks. This type of aging vessel polishes them out into more of a friendly analog frequency than the digital-like renditions from stainless steel. I’ve asked Michael why his wines are so specific and unique from other wines in the area and have yet to receive a clear answer. My guess is that it has to do with these ancient barrels and the three-hundred-year-old cellar. I guess I could coin the term “The Rayas-effect,” where taste is so specifically linked to a winery, despite the origin of the grapes. When I visited Château Rayas it smelled like I was inside a glass of his wine the whole time. Malat’s old wooden vats The Riesling is as expected: sharper, fresher, more minerally, angularly nuanced, and with a subtle range of yellow fruits, spice and delicate flowers. Riesling can be so Germanically serious sometimes that it’s refreshing to slurp Michael’s down without thinking so much. The Grüner Veltliner has more body by comparison to his Riesling, though it’s not a full-bodied wine by any stretch. The variety is generally friendlier by nature than Riesling for most consumers, and under Michael’s hand it captures one of the most compelling profiles for this grape variety (re: my preferences) compared to much of the rest of Austria. Emitting Ischian Biancolella-like sunshine and smiles, this starter to the Veltliner range is generous and refreshing—a welcome departure from the densely spiced and almost overwhelmingly herbaceous, cloying nature of Grüner Veltliner taken far too seriously in the cellar. Many with less exposure to Austrian wine might be surprised to learn that Pinot Noir has been cultivated in Austria since the twelfth century. While it was initially grown in the warmer parts by the same order of monks that established Burgundy and Galicia, it crept into other regions as the climate warmed and made it possible to make solid Pinot Noir still wines instead being relegated to wiry rosés and sparkling wines. Grown further down the slopes closer to the Danube, the 2019 Pinot Noir “Furth,” comes from a fabulous year with sufficient ripeness for Pinot Noir to achieve its full robe of taut to fully mature red fruits while retaining its gorgeous and subtle florals. The soils here are largely composed of river alluvium with some in contact with loess. One cannot expect a Burgundian style wine here in the sense of texture and fruit notes. It’s simply impossible to completely replicate Burgundy outside of Burgundy, though there are many excellent Pinot Noir wines made in other parts of the world. Here, the textures are more pointed and slightly gravellier with aromatics that dance between the densely green north-facing hills covered in forest and bramble that borders all the vineyards to the south. Local herbs, flowers and berries, not the four-berry mix found in Côte d’Or Pinot Noir, but rather wild red and black currants, taut and bright wild cherries and blackberries, marked with a distinct Alpine quality. Classic Range – Cru Wines I admit that if given the opportunity to choose between a great Austrian Grüner Veltliner and Riesling, nine and a half times out of ten, it’s going to be Riesling. However, 2021 Grüner Veltliners might be the vintage that changes that, as it was an exceptional season due to the high ripeness of the grapes with an unusually high amount of acidity for this level of maturity. They are structured and deeply pleasurable. If you have a liking for Grüner Veltliner, don’t sit out 2021. Hohlgraben has been part of the Malat’s family vineyards since 1722 (think about that…), and for this reason, Michael describes it as the “classic Malat wine.” As with all years, the 2021 Grüner Veltliner “Hohlgraben” takes on its personality from a set of terraced vineyards at an altitude of 250-300m with loess topsoil on top of alternating layers of alluvium and loess—a consequence of cyclical erosion and deposition by way of Danube flooding and windblown loess depositions blown in from the Alps. Wines grown on loess tend to be more rounded and juicier than those from rocky bedrock, which, by contrast, usually imparts more angles and deeper mineral impressions. Grüner Veltliner doesn’t like to struggle in the vineyard, nor does it need to do so to find its happy place, unlike Riesling. Loess offers Veltliner optimal conditions due to its higher water retentive capacity and nutrient levels, which are also less favorable for high quality Riesling. The results are a spicy and easy-to-drink yet serious Veltliner with a medium body rather than the fuller ones often found across the river on the Wachau’s south-facing vineyards. Despite its immediate accessibility, it retains the interest of the taster with its palate-refreshing acidity and minerally qualities. A name from the Middle Ages that means “sharp ledges on the ridges,” Malat’s 2019 Grüner Veltliner 1ÖTW Gottschelle is their top site for this variety. This premier cru classified wine—abbreviated in Austria as 1ÖTW—sits atop a granulite bedrock with the vine roots mostly in contact with a deep topsoil composed of calcium-rich loess (fine wind-blown sand) and a layer cake of gravels further down, deposited there by the Danube during the most recent ice age, but the bedrock is so deep that most vine root systems may not make contact with it. Like all of Malat’s top Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners, Gottschelle is raised in 2000-2500-liter old foudres for six to eight months. This is the winery’s biggest Grüner Veltliner and expresses a forward spiciness and minerality with supporting notes of white and orange fruit, iodine, and dried grasses and grain. Malat’s Riesling Premier Cru trilogy is indeed special. First is the 2019 Riesling 1ÖTW Steinbühel, a name that dates all the way back to 1322 and means “stone hill.” Grown on a bedrock of granulite (a high-grade metamorphic rock similar to gneiss) with a loess-rich topsoil mixed with eroded bedrock, it’s perhaps the most elegant in Michael’s range of top-flight Rieslings, while the 2019 Riesling 1ÖTW Silberbichl has strength in its mineral impressions and broader power than Steinbuhl. Known as Silberbichl since the fourteenth century, which means “silver hill,” it’s named after the shimmering silvery reflection of the mica schist bedrock and topsoil best observed with the sun’s rays lower on the horizon. The newest member of the lineup is one of the rare wines made at Malat from someone else’s vineyard: The 2019 Riesling 1ÖTW Pfaffenberg is a glorious addition to the range and wonderfully demonstrates how structurally different and contrasting the mouthfeel of wines are from this side of Kremstal on the gneiss rock compared to those on bigger terraces with deeper topsoil on the south side of the Danube with dozens of vine rows on each terrace. Pfaffenberg’s terraces hold nearly a maximum of two or three vines per terrace because of the steepness of the hillside. A family friend with a small parcel offered her Riesling fruit to Michael for the first time prior to harvest. Of course, Michael had to accept on both the level of friendship and the curiosity to work with this celebrated vineyard perched on a massive hillside cliff that seems ready to fall right into the Danube below at any minute. The wine is simply spectacular and maintains Michael’s predilection for immediate pleasure with seriousness surely to be found, though further inside after some time open. Checkout Michael explaining his wines at https://thesourceimports.com/videos/ The Times They Are A-Changin’ It wasn’t just us. Everyone in Europe complained this year about the endless heat and massive mosquito invasion. It was a blistering summer, exhausting, a time when mosquitoes should’ve been hiding in cold basements waiting for cooler nights before pestering. Not this year. Shadows and corners in every hot room had one or two waiting, moving from one spot to another to keep you guessing. Mosquitoes all day. Mosquitoes all night. Hot days and hot nights. Humidity unlike any year before, according to locals. Can’t open the windows because few European rental homes have screens, and even fewer have AC. Open windows at night offered no relief. The Mediterranean wasn’t refreshing either. It was hot! One minute out and you want back in. REM sleep wasn’t possible until utter exhaustion. Blooming mosquitoes populations are only one of many consequences of climate change, like changing weather patterns, extreme flooding, which in some places, like Germany, some have increased mosquito populations tenfold (read more here). Here’s an obvious statement: Nature is out of balance. Some, often with a degree of condescension, say “We’ve had hurricanes and tsunamis forever. The planet has warmed like this before. It’s all a lie for x, y, z.” European wine producers are often conservatives too. They’re countryside folk. But they know the only lie is: it’s a lie. They’re seeing it firsthand. The moment of budbreak to harvest has completely changed. Everyone with a history in wine feels the new boozier norm, the richer and cleaner fruit, less earthiness and more solar power, a flatter, less fresh style. Yes, The Times They Are A-Changin’. Amended lyrics? Come gather ‘round people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have gone And accept it that soon You’ll be dry to the bone If time to your kids is worth savin’ And you better start conservin’ Or they’ll be dry as a stone For the times they are a-changin’ Over the years I’ve posed the question to growers about the difference in time between budbreak and picking in an attempt to understand the actual differences in terms of growing-season days compared to the past. In theory, when it comes to complexity, the length of the growing season is more important than how late in the year the grapes are harvested. In many recent years budbreak was early and the entirety of the growing season (the number of days in all from start to finish) wasn’t as short as it is now, compared to even ten years ago. There were many seasons shortened by a week or two in total, but budbreak happens even earlier and the full length of the growing season is also short, very short—by as much as a couple months in some places, no foolin’. The impacts of these elements have many implications, and not all of them are negative. For example, fruit picked in the earlier side after drier months are less impacted by botrytis, leading to fresher and cleaner nuances. I’ve told my friends many times that my generation is the last who might ride things out without completely devastating consequences. None of us, ni moi, take enough measures to make a dent in the right direction. Little adaptations are important and helpful on some level, but we’re not going to save this sinking ship by only pumping the water out when there’s a massive gash in the bottom. At forty-six I still feel young most of the time. I suppose I’m about halfway to the end, but I hope I’ll have a little longer. When I enter partnerships with producers under thirty years old now, I don’t feel so young anymore. We visited one of our new ones, a young, twenty-something winegrower in Barolo a few weeks ago (who will remain nameless for the moment) who took over the family’s cantina after finishing her university studies. As I sent a mosquito to the next life from my arm in the cellar, the conversation began; she too had had an unbearable mosquito season. She started reeling off statistics of insect reduction and the decreased population of birds which has further opened the door for a mosquito explosion. When she brought up the birds my mind trailed off back to a few days prior when I made an unwanted contribution to the bird statistic just outside of Basilicata’s historic and gorgeous rock city, Matera. A tiny member of a flock of about a dozen bounced off my front bumper and tumbled behind us as I watched in the rearview, grimacing and feeling horrible. Immediately distraught, I told myself that I somehow didn’t have a choice in that event. My wife didn’t notice our involuntary birdslaughter, or that I immediately went from smiles to momentary devastation and remorse. It was probably chasing a mosquito but I killed one of ours. Damn. A few days later in Bramaterra, October 19, Andrea Monti Perini opened his cellar door and a swarm of mosquitoes charged. It was warm and dry, and they were thirsty. “Zanzare in late October in Alto Piemonte… That’s new,” Andrea quietly lamented. Their numbers were too great in vineyards to keep my hands on the drone remote. Like in Madonna’s Vogue music video, my wife elegantly and rhythmically maneuvered her hands around my face and hands warding them off, doing the modelesque gestures for me as I filmed, especially during our visit between to two lakes in Northern Piemonte with a new and exciting young producer in Caluso, though on the far northeastern edge of the appellation. Eugenio Pastoris, from Azienda Agricola Massimo Pastoris, focusses on Erbaluce and Nebbiolo—both excellent and with great promise, though the quantities are small. At only twenty-six-years old, he has degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Latin—an extremely clever young man (see, I even sound like an old guy now) with generously spirited and supportive parents. People complain about the younger generations, but what generation didn’t complain about the new ones? Today’s tepid efforts on climate change have diminished my faith in humanity, but these younger generations will be better than ours. Their eyes are open. They know they have everything to lose. It’s us older, more established ones who are the problem. We see the change and the need to react, but perhaps in our psyche we know our time is nearer to the end, so we talk too much and act too little. As I write this in late October, it finally feels like fall again. We’re happy to be back in Portugal in the cooler weather and this season’s welcome torrential rainfall. The reservoirs across the country were getting pretty low, especially with the rivers that originate in Spain where many Spanish wanted to cut off the river supply to Portugal, forgoing their bilateral agreements. Thankfully that didn’t happen and I think things might become more stable again, for the moment. San Casciano dei Bagni, Tuscany

Newsletter February 2023 – Part One

Quinta da Carolina vineyards to the left of the orange and pink house (Download complete pdf here) Last month we introduced some new producers, including the young Tuscan winegrower specializing in single-site Sangioveses and compelling experimental white wines, Giacomo Baraldo, followed by Forteresse de Berrye, a Saumur producer who bought a historical domaine (former military base) with a decorated vinous history who converted it to organic and now biodynamic culture, and finally, one of Portugal’s most promising talents, Luis Candido da Silva, who crafts a set of unique and gorgeously refined wines in the Douro with his father’s family estate, Quinta da Carolina. Now we have three more newbies represented exclusively in the US by The Source slated to be introduced this month, including wine coming from a historical Alentejo winery undergoing a complete renaissance, Tapada do Chaves. Often described by Portuguese winegrowers as one of the country’s most “mythical” producers of old wines; if you’re lucky enough to taste one from before the mid-1990s, it may surpass all your expectations for aged Portuguese white and red wines. Two more new arrivals are coming in from good friends in the Loire Valley’s Montlouis-sur-Loire appellation whose organic wines offer a beautiful juxtaposition of this underrated appellation where only the right minds are able to crack its code. Vincent Bergeron crafts ethereal wines, both Chenin Blanc and Pinot Noir, while Hervé Grenier, from Vallée Moray, produces Chenin Blanc of deep, controlled power, and a very limited supply of red wines from Gamay, Pinot Noir and Côt. California Trade Events Next week we’ll put on more sit-down trade tasting events showcasing wines that are already allocated, some that have limited quantities, as well as those from new producers. Please ask your salesperson to book your seat as they will be limited. We plan to schedule quarterly tastings because there’s 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 Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners, 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). I’ll be in attendance for each of these events, so I hope to see you there. 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 February 13th: Moss Landing (Monterey) at The Power Plant from 1pm - 4pm Visiting Producer At the end of the month, Katharina Wechsler will be making the rounds in California showcasing her top Rieslings. The eastern end of the Wachau New Arrivals A few 2021s from Tegernseerhof have arrived. As mentioned last month in the short on Veyder-Malberg’s 2021 releases, this vintage is truly one of the greats where everything on all levels of Grüner Veltliner and Riesling are absolutely top tier: full-on in complexity and range, but light on their feet—a perfect balance. Arriving is the 2021 Grüner Veltliner Federspiel “Durnstein,” a collection of different vineyards around Loiben, principally from Frauenweingarten, the former name of this bottling. Also are the big hits, 2021 Bergdistel Smaragd Grüner Veltliner and 2021 Berdistel Smaragd Riesling. These two wines are a blend of the many different micro-parcels they own, mostly further west of Loiben and into the central part of the Wachau, Weissenkirchen. They’re both showoffs, youthful, and energetic, complex but juicy and delicious. 2021 is the year, so grab what you can and know they’ll age as beautifully as how well they’re drinking young. Fuentes del Silencio’s new releases of the 2019 Las Jaras and 2019 Las Quintas are two wines we’ve been waiting a long time to arrive. 2019 was a special year and showcases the depth of talent in these ancient vineyards revitalized by Miguel Ángel Alonso and his team of passionate winegrowers. Miguel and María, his wife, are doctors (with María still an active surgeon) who set out to bring back the history of Miguel’s birthplace at the east end of Iberia’s Galician Massif. The altitude is high, with the vineyards starting at 800m and Las Quintas reaching above 1000m. This is believed to be the original location for Mencía in its most natural setting, where there’s no need for the acidification that’s done in most other regions that grow this grape prone to lose its acidity in too warm a climate with little temperature extremes. Here, in Jamuz, the harvest is late, usually in mid-October, and the wines speak of this place with its slate-derived soils, the occasional slate outcropping, wild lavender and thyme bushes growing everywhere in this high desert setting, as well as the many pre-phylloxera vines dug deep into the soil that they’re nursing back to health. They started the project in 2014 and now with the 2019s, the sixth harvest under their belt, the wines are finding the extra gears that were clearly imminent with their organic approach in the vineyard and cellar. Arribas Wine Company vineyards in Portugal’s Trás-os-Montes along the Douro River Arribas Wine Company has a few new (but late) arrivals. From their stockpile of extraordinary old vines scattered throughout Portugal’s Trás-os-Montes wine region on the border of Spain to the northeast and Douro to the southwest, they have some of the greatest bargain wines in the entire world. Imagine these ancient terroirs along the Douro/Duero River grown on gnarly slopes and rocks identical to those of Côte-Rôtie and Cornas, though they go for only a fifth of the price for even the cheapest of these French appellations. That’s what you get, but with over forty different varietals blended into some wines, and 10.5-12% alcohol… It all seems like a dream, but it’s as real as it gets. Arriving are the 2021 Saroto Branco and 2021 Saroto Rosé. “The 2021 growing season was nearly perfect as we witnessed very moderate conditions during maturation. In fact, because summer was not hot and nights were unusually cold, maturation was slow and gradual, contributing to excellent acidity in the wines. The grapes for the Saroto White 2021 (which is really like an orange wine) were harvest by hand on September 8th and were foot-trodden in a traditional lagar, totaling three days of skin maceration.” They were then aged in old French oak barrels for seven months. The vine age for this blend of different white varieties comes from 51-year-old vines on granite and clay at 650-700m. The 2021 Saroto Rosé is unfortunately in very low quantities. It comes from a blend of 50% white and 50% red varieties, mostly from the same vineyards as the white and drinks more like an extremely light red, like a Spanish Clarete—a wine somewhere between rosé and red without stinging acidity while being refreshing and in the full red-fruit spectrum. New Producers Tapada do Chaves Alentejo, Portugal I’ve had my eye on Tapado do Chaves for a few years prior to signing with them. We were introduced to the wines by one of my great friends and winegrowers in Portugal, Constantino Ramos. When asked about what old wines in Portugal I should get to know his first suggestion was Tapada do Chaves. Constantino helped find some old wines from the 1980s and early 1990s that were being sold by a Portuguese retailer, and my first experience with them was shocking. Though more famous for their historic red wines, the whites were just as good. Everything aged well, even though the bottles looked like they’d been on top of some Portuguese guy’s countryside fireplace for a couple decades and had low fills and corks barely clinging to the insides of the bottles. I bought another mixed three cases of old wines and shared them with friends from Galicia. Soon, the source of the old bottles dried up but I was convinced that I should investigate, even though I was told the most recent wines were not the same. It was true that they weren’t, but a visit to the vineyards showed what was coming. One of the many gorgeous old wines tasted over the last four years Tapada do Chaves’s legacy in Portugal’s Alentejo is legendary, though there were many speed bumps along the way, such as the Portuguese dictatorship (1933-1974) and the sale of the estate in the late 1990s to a sparkling wine company that faltered on quality of the Tapada do Chaves wines for decades. In 2017, with the purchase by Fundação Eugénio de Almeida, led by one of Portugal’s most celebrated oenologists, Pedro Baptista (known for the highly coveted Pera Manca wines), it began to regain its footing. Biodynamic farming was immediately incorporated on this unique granite massif on the side of Serra de São Mamade, which towers over the flatter lands more typical of the Alentejo. The whites grown in vineyards planted in 1903 and massale selections replanted some forty years ago are a blend of Arinto, Assario, Fernão Pires, Tamarez and Roupeiro (among others), and fermented and aged in stainless steel and old French oak barrels. The reds, from vines planted by Senhor Chaves in 1901 are a blend of Trincadeira, Grand Noir, Aragonez and Alicante Bouschet. All are aged in older French oak barrels, then bottled and released around seven years after the vintage date. Today, Tapada do Chaves is selling their new releases of white wines from when they first took over, but the reds still have some years to go before the change of direction into biodynamic culture and a fresh new take from Pedro Baptista. During a meeting with Pedro, he told me of the history of the winery and about how, when he was a little boy, his father used to take him to Tapada do Chaves to collect their yearly allocation. Though he’s new to Tapada do Chaves, it’s not new to him. This famous estate weathered the dictatorship and continued to work independently while few in Alentejo (and all of Portugal) did. Portuguese white wines may be the most underrated white wines in the world. Since moving to Portugal in 2019, I’ve had many examples of aged white and red wines for such a low price that have truly been astonishing, though the most interesting for me have been the whites. Tapada do Chaves is no exception. The old whites that didn’t fail due to bad corks were incredibly good—fresh, slightly honeyed, minty and medicinally herbal, salty, deeply textured like a very old Loire Valley Sancerre without the varietal nuances of Sauvignon Blanc. My first interaction with the 2018 Tapada do Chaves Branco was extremely encouraging. In a blind tasting with some other trade professionals along with some other wine samples from Portugal, it stole the show. It stands as another strong example of the talent of Portuguese white wines made from a blend of many grapes. Despite the wide variety of fruit, the terroir elements are always there, along with the high quality of the replanted vines from massale selections taken from the unique biotypes grown inside of Tapada do Chaves’ walled and gently sloping vineyard on granite rock atop the massif. After the tasting, I put what was left in the refrigerator for more than a month, uncorked. I forgot about it after tasting it once the day after the first tasting. Then I started to taste it again over the coming weeks to check in, a little here and a little there; it was bulletproof. I remain shocked at the resilience of this wine and its inability to be fatigued. Based on this and my experiences with the old wines from this estate, I believe that it has the potential to age very well—not only to be sustained, but to improve tremendously over time as so many Portuguese white wines do. The 2018 Tapada do Chaves Branco Vinhas Velhas comes from the ungrafted 120-year-old vines first planted by Senhor Chaves in 1901. This wine is profound but will greatly benefit from time in the cellar—a long time. It carries many similarities to the first white in the range, except that it’s denser and more concentrated. One could simply retaste this wine for a month and add, brick by brick, a new tasting note with each soft turn of its evolution. To drink it quickly would be to miss witnessing its splendor. There are few cases imported because there are few made from these historic, nationally-treasured vines. It is indeed a little expensive, but in twenty or thirty years you’ll be happy to have captured a few bottles to share with your kids or grandkids. Vincent Bergeron Montlouis-sur-Loire, France Timid and cautious yet gently charismatic, middle-aged (born in ‘78) but youthful and spirited, with a heart of gold and a deft touch with his craft, the gracious Vincent Bergeron discovered his calling to the vigneron life while walking the streets for la poste, trading in antiquities, and periodically working construction. These were simple trades, though perfect for young ponderers like Vincent, at least for the moment. He received degrees in Art History, Literature, and Agriculture, had many different work experiences that were capped by the viticultural mentorship of Jean-Daniel Kloeckle, Hervé Villemade, and Frantz Saumon. The latter gifted him with a tractor, a small Pinot Noir vineyard and part-time cellar job, and Vincent commercialized his first wine in 2016 (though he’d tinkered with various bottlings since 2013)—500 bottles of bubbles that all went to a Japanese importer. When he talks about his project, he always starts with his great appreciation for Frantz’s generosity, the man who gave him such a jumpstart. He and I were introduced by Montlouis-sur-Loire local, Gauthier Mazet, also a new vigneron (practicing since 2020) and wine industry connector, who lives by the river in the epicenter of Montlouis’ bloom of amazing producers. They’re all making deeply inspiring wines from an underdog appellation in minuscule quantities, most of whom sell almost everything to Japan and very little in France. This includes Vincent Bergeron, as well as two others who’ve also trusted us to be their US importing partner: Hervé Grenier, owner of Domaine Vallée Moray, a craftsman of densely mineral and emotional wines that embody the focus of a scientist maker in his second career as a vigneron, and Nicolas Renard, a forcefully independent and elusive natural wine wizard, a virtual ghost whose wines are nearly impossible to acquire. He transcends style and mode with no-sulfur wines, both white and red, that are simply in their own stratosphere, easily holding court with the best examples of x-factor-filled, dense, moving whites in the world, and reds that captures the essence of the earth and human in a bottle. I first saw Vincent on a cool and sunny spring morning in one of his vineyard parcels close to downtown Montlouis. With his thick mane of lightly salted pepper flowing in every direction, he wore casual well-worn clothes stained by hard work, and he shied away from the camera as I stole a few shots before our official greeting. His hands are those of a true vigneron; they were strong from a life of labor, dirty from the vines and caked with earth, swollen, scratched, scraped, gouged and bloodied. He seemed a little self-conscious to be shaking my hand, and I instantly knew I’d like him: it was impossible not to. 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 of them seek celebrity and membership in idealist tribes rather than going for truth and an honest view into this métier, this art, and above all, this craft, a marriage of homosapiens 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.” He only tries in earnest to be himself—not for the world to see and celebrate, but for his family, his comrades, for himself and his humble yet idealistic relationship to wine and connection to nature. Though not an active provocateur, to simply be in his presence you might, like I do, contemplate life choices and motivations, what’s important to you and why it’s important, along with, “What the hell am I doing with my few short years on this planet?” Without effort or intent, he enriches others with his homage to his environment, a spirituality and open self-reflection in casual settings, drinking wine outside on a cold and sunny day in front of a tiny, wobbly table packed with cheeses, cured meats and oysters (also a favorite of his extremely young kids—only the French…), a perfect match for his bubbles and white wine. The talks are fresh and lively, more about life than wine, though in this context wine is life. His wines speak for themselves, and gently, as do his organic and biodynamic vineyards that are teeming with life. Sometimes he appears lost, even surrounded by his people, as he gazes into the world, into nothing, thinking, reflecting, wondering about his path. Perhaps he’s thinking less than it appears that he is, but it’s doubtful. Emotionally piercing, Vincent’s mineral-spring, salty-tear, petrichor-scented 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 wild flowers, 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. Vintage is important with Vincent’s wines. With his concession to nature and commitment to honor the season, sans maquillage, ni compromise, he sets his wines on a direct course, showcasing each season’s gifts and its challenges, allowing his wines to freely express the mark of their birth year. Warm vintages (2020) taste of a season’s richer fruits and a softer palate while still being delicate and complex. Cold years (such as 2021) are brighter, fresher, more tense and rapier sharp with a gentle and welcome stab. The Vineyards On the east side of the fabulous but small and modern Loire city, Tours, across the Loire River from the historic splendor of Vouvray on a series of undulating hills with some dramatic slopes mixed with mellower hilltops, sits Montlouis. It’s a long stretch of vineyards between the rivers Loire and Cher to the south, on floodplains shaped by torrential flows over the eons. Vincent explains that between Vouvray and Montlouis there have always been differences in soil structure, topography, and social hierarchy. While Vouvray maintains a more celebrated vinous history (as illustrated by the bougie houses across the river, so different from Montlouis’ more rural and less ornate neighborhoods), some of its historical relevance seems to stifle creativity and growth—as happens so frequently in many historically celebrated regions in the wine world. Why change what already works so well? Furthermore, historic families often prefer to preserve their position instead of rocking the boat of a viticultural system that, after many generations in place, continues to provide wealth for those next in line. In contrast to Vouvray, Montlouis-sur-Loire is filled with young and finely aged winegrowers with open minds and a strong desire and capacity for kinship and the sharing of ideas. Many had widely varied experiences prior to choosing the vigneron life and together they’ve created a tribal environment where they help each other to push that rock further up the hill. Organics have become a way of life for many in this circle and the influence of this free-thinking community is expanding. Montlouis is exciting and there are so many talents emerging from this extremely praise-worthy appellation that’s up to now been an underdog. Always the bridesmaid and never the bride? No longer. Some earlier trailblazers opened the path, the most famous, perhaps Jacky Blot and François Chidaine, and others more quietly developing their names and furthering the reputation of the appellation, like Frantz Saumon, Thomas Lagelle, Julien Prevel, Ludovic Chansson and Hervé Grenier, all of whom Vincent admires and calls friends. Montlouis is mentioned in every wine book as being sandier in general than Vouvray, which is true, though there’s often great depth of clay (lighter on average than Vouvray’s) further below the surface of the topsoil, before the roots intersect with the famous whitish/yellow limestone bedrock of much of the Loire Valley’s best Chenin Blanc areas, and a slew of other elemental contributors have a say in the wine’s subtleties. Vincent has various plots in a few different zones of Montlouis, close to the bluffs that overlook the Loire River and others further away and closer to the Cher, both on classic limestone bedrock, with variations of perruche (fossils, lithified clay, flint/silex), sandstone, clay, and limestone. These structures are not independent of others but rather form a conglomeration and vary from one to the next and within the plots as well. To see the diversity, go to eterroir-techniloire.com Though the land was already worked organically prior to Vincent’s last fifteen years of ownership, it was certified as such in 2018, and biodynamic principles are practiced during the season’s life cycle, though they’re not followed closely in the cellar. Plowing is done mostly by horse every third year, or by Egretier plow, a fitting pulled by tractor. The harvest begins with alcoholic and phenolic maturity in line with the chemistry of the grapes—pH, TA—and of course, the taste of the grapes. Pinot Noir is the first to be picked, followed by Chenin Blanc for sparkling, then the still Chenin. The Wines Vincent’s bubbles, Certains l’aiment Sec “Vin de France,” is gloriously ethereal and fun to drink. Like all his wines, the vintage has a big voice in the overall expression, though the spirit is the same: serious but playful and easy to gulp down. It’s made with a simple method using early pickings from the Chenin Blanc parcels. (Here, in this part of the Loire Valley’s Chenin Blanc region, many growers make numerous picks on their vineyards rather than just the one—a smart and utilitarian method to maximize quality with what yield nature provides, without being too forced.) Spontaneous fermentation takes place in fiberglass vats. Following malolactic fermentation, the wines are hit with their first sulfite addition of 20mg/L for its eighteen-month bottle aging. No fining, filtration, or dosage. “Morning, Noon and Night,” is a perfect name for this exquisite, fine, platinum-hued wine labeled Matin Midi et Soir – Chenin Blanc “Vin de France.” This is Vincent’s inspiring still white wine, (especially the 2021), where the vintage seems tailored for his style: helium-lifted, minerally charged, cold, wet rock and taut yet delicate white fruit. All the elements from each vineyard parcel in his 3.4-hectare stable of 40-plus year-old massale selections (and .60ha of clonal selections) give it breadth and complexity while maintaining Vincent’s head-in-the-clouds Chenin Blanc. It’s hard to pick a favorite in the lineup, but this low sulfite dose Chenin (30mg/L) raised twelve months in oak barrels (with some new to replace older barrels, which aren’t noticeable) is truly singular for this variety in the Loire Valley, so much so that it doesn’t even seem to be of this earth, but rather plucked from the heavens, pure, untainted, downright angelic. The first taste of Pinot Noir out of the barrel, Un Rouge Chez Les Blancs, was jaw-dropping, a burlesque walk from glass to nose and mouth. In recent years, I’ve greatly missed Pinot Noirs that carry this grape’s nobility and naturally bright, energetic, straight flush (hearts and diamonds) of red fruits and healthy forest with wet underbrush. I was tempted to be impolite and drink down my entire barrel sample from this mere one acre of vines (0.4ha) instead of returning it (2021 vintage) to whence it came; I could’ve nursed that first 500-liter barrel to completion. By the end of my first visit, I wanted everything in his cellar just so my friends back home could bear witness to it. Given to him—yes, given—by Frantz Saumon, the land was organically farmed long before Vincent took the reins of the plow horse. Optimal for this young vinous artist to explore his direction with epic, terroir-precise and living fruit, he nailed it. It’s true Pinot Noir perfection: egoless, a balance of nature and nurture, sensual, honest, captivating, pristine, delicious. There’s no sulfite added to this wine, so the future of each bottle will be in the hands of the handler, though with its naturally low pH, high acidity, and low alcohol, and, most importantly, its balance, it should manage well over time. One pump-over per day in the beginning, two later on in the fermentation, a year aged in 75% old oak barrel, 25% in fiberglass tank, and it’s not fined or filtered. The 2020, tasted blind by our staff in January, blew them away—an Allemand-like Pinot Noir. There’s not enough of the 2020 to go around, so we’ll have to wait for the taut, red-fruited 2021 to come! Domaine Vallée Moray Montlouis-sur-Loire, France Endless curiosity and self-reflection are characteristics of the most compelling vignerons. Some are born into the métier, many of whom are children of the greats, and a select few reach for new heights never before attained in the family line. Then there are the industry’s most enlightened freethinkers who come from the outside, drawn in by revelation, romance, and occasionally, a healthy mid-life crisis. At forty-six, Hervé Grenier abandoned the life of a scientist and began anew when, in 2014, he had an epiphany that brought him to an old ramshackle cellar with beautiful, healthy, organically farmed vineyards, in the quiet countryside of the Loire Valley appellation, Montlouis-sur-Loire. Hervé explained, “During a visit with a winemaker I used to frequent, I suddenly thought, ‘I’d like to do that!’” Inspired by the excitement of a significant life change, Hervé left a career in academic meteorology research and underwriting, focused on agricultural climate risk in the States, then moved back to France with his American wife, Emmy. They started their new adventure, only a couple of solid golf swings away from and to the south of the Loire River, on the first significant left-bank alluvial terrace that runs in parallel to them, but 30-35m above the river. Over time they bought more parcels further south and closer to the river, Cher, as they reshaped and converted the land to organic farming. As of 2023, they maintain roughly 4.5 hectares, 3.2 of which are Chenin Blanc with an average of 60-70 years of age, a single hectare of Pinot Noir, and 30 ares (.75 acres) of Gamay. Tasting with Hervé in his long, dark, damp, and cold underground concrete tunnel lined with mold and wine-stained old French oak barrels, is thrilling. Impressive from the first sample, Hervé shares his perception of each wine’s strength and weakness observed through its journey from budbreak, to grape, to wine. Organoleptic vibrational overload builds with each thieved sip, sips that gush with vinous lifeblood along with the gifts extracted from unique soils that have been bolstered by the microflora and microfauna and minerals mined from the rock and soil. His dry Chenin Blanc wines are vinous with the sweet green chlorophyll captured from the sun, the alchemy of slow fermentation—very slow, never forced—and the stamp of healthy lees from happy plants that render his wines digestible and revitalizing. The truth-seeking Hervé seems in deep reflection with each taste, contemplating the wine, his own nature, his choices. Vacillations between bursts of joyous laughter and doubt and self-reflection are interrupted when he hits the mark. Inspired and utterly serious, he slowly chants, “Ça c’est bon. Ça c’est bon. Ça c’est bon.” On Terroir Montlouis has a different quality of soils from those of Vouvray, across the Loire River. Vouvray vine roots typically have closer contact with tuffeau limestone bedrock and more clay in the topsoil than most of vineyards in Montlouis-sur-Loire. Hervé believes that the wines on this side of the Loire River are typically less marked by minerality than Vouvray, he says, “So there’s room for other stuff!” The composition of Montlouis-sur-Loire soils from a general point of view (though each site is different) is a mix of perruches (fossils, lithified clay, flint/silex), sand, and clay, atop bedrock of tuffeau limestone with varying levels of topsoil depth. ‘Montlouis is sandier than Vouvray,’ is the usual summary in textbooks, but this depends on each parcel, because it’s much more complicated than that. Domaine Vallée Moray With a manifesto (adopted by artists like him) that espouses ‘terroir expression over all things,’ Hervé says, “I would not like that my wines mainly express terroir, even if it’s a beautiful terroir.” But what is interesting and even slightly contradictory to Hervé’s notion of Vouvray and Montlouis and the terroir influence is that his wines are wrought with a sense of place; perhaps not only in the perception of mineral nuance, texture, structure, and ripeness imposed by the site’s soils, exposure and grape, but his full commitment to the preservation of his full-of-life, organically farmed old vines, the quality of the soils, and, of course, his skill in capturing their essence. His whites are strongly mineral in impression, thickly textured and weighted on the palate and the nose; his Aubépin Chenin Blanc is like a magnum squashed into a half bottle. Early on in his newfound life as a vigneron he demonstrated (through his 2017 and 2018 Aubépin, the fourth and fifth vintages of his life) a precocious and keen understanding, maybe even a certain level of mastery, in his sculpting of wines with clean and fine reductive elements—no doubt an intended consequence of protecting and preserving his sulfite-free, naked wines until bottling. The body is fuller though the wines remain finely balanced between the earth and the sky. The deep clay underneath the sandy topsoils, the quality of farming and his personal calibration of fruit maturity is marked through his entire line of wines. Terroir aside, Hervé’s wines reflect his intuition, curiosity, and measured hand. White Wines (and Orange) Hervé says he wants his wines to deliver, “The quality of the raw material produced from my vineyards; that they should feel good when you drink them. Satisfying. Pleasurable.” And he goes well beyond his aim. The Chenin Blanc are spectacular, singular, emotional, honest, and heavy on x-factor. For this taster, they stand tall among everything from the Loire Valley; sometimes they even tower over well-known and celebrated wines overwrought by cellar technique and experimentation. Hervé’s simple and confident approach is to let his wines find their own way, which they do. His objective for them to “be satisfying and pleasurable” is easily achieved, even for the everyday drinker. One doesn’t need to be an expert, or a wine lover with a penchant for the esoteric to fall for them, though a wine insider may be needed to help people find a bottle. They’re also profound, brainy, finely etched, and swoon-worthy for wine experts in search of a new frontrunner in the world of natural wine. Though they indeed fall into this genre, they are sterling examples of sulfite-free reds and whites, void of fault and without explanation or excuses. The whites don’t usually have any sulfur added at any point of the process, though if a wine is in peril he has no reservations when it comes to giving some assistance. This leaves his wines unclipped, robust and true in expression, free flowing yet harnessed and directed. Hervé describes his approach in the cellar as “The simplest and most natural way to make wine. The only intervention is the topping up of the barrels until I prepare them for bottling.” Like the superficial tillage of his vineyards (light scraping in Hervé’s case), his winemaking hand is gentle and patient. The fermentation of the classically styled whites, Cailloutis and Aubépine, takes place in old oak barrels with the total lees from the press—no débourbage (wherein the lees are settled before the wine is racked off them). There are no finings and filtrations, nor additions of sulfites—though, as already mentioned, necessary exceptions can be made. Fermentations can last months, or more than a year before dry. The two Chenin Blanc wines are made in the same way, with Cailloutis a blend of many different parcels and Aubépine a specific site of old vines closer to the Cher than the Loire. Hervé also makes an orange wine from Chenin Blanc (80%) and Sauvignon (20%), called, A Mi Chemin. This wine usually undergoes a two-month maceration on skins (fully destemmed) and is sparingly punched down, pressed, then aged in old oak barrels. Though the Chenin Blanc wines are glorious, Hervé claims with a smile, “A Mi Chemin is my wine.” It’s more gourmand than the other wines, with floating tea notes, dried citrus, stone fruit skin and dried flowers as opposed to fleshy fruit notes—which is to be expected with orange wines. It, like many other orange wines, is a wine for all occasions, with great versatility when it comes to chosen fare. Red Wines Hervé’s reds sing a bright and merry aromatic song. They’re fun, and they achieve Hervé’s objective of pleasure-led, feel-good, crunchy reds. Pinot Noirs grown in Montlouis and made by the right grower are a fabulous surprise, as are the Gamay. He doesn’t commit the reds solely to single-varietal bottlings but likes to make blends, too. There is the Pinot-led blend with Gamay, Arcadienne, and the solo Pinot Noir bottling is Les Figurines—neither are imported yet as they are produced in very small quantities. Côt Libri is made entirely of Malbec from very old vines on extremely calcareous soils in Montlouis-sur-Loire. It was fully destemmed and after fermentation ages in 400l-800l old barrels. As expected with this variety, it leads with more purple fruits than red, and after quite a few years of cellar aging in bottle it shows a broad range of earthy, savory qualities.

Newsletter July 2023

Loire River with Montlouis-sur-Loire on the right and Vouvray on the left, November 2022 After a string of scorching summers, we had a lucky break in 2021 in what now seems like a season we’ve all been waiting for half of our lives. Some European regions were hit by spring frost but almost everywhere else in Europe was cooler and rainier earlier on than usual which continued into the early summer. The year showed a reduction in volume but the results are often excellent for those looking for a more elegant version from their favorite regions. The vineyards were heavy on fungus, which required a lot of sorting by hand long before harvest, and once the warmer weather finally came it was still cool and pleasurable, unlike the blistering pain of the previous summers and the one that followed. During the latter, it was uncomfortable just to go anywhere outside until the sun was out of sight, or to try to take refuge at home (few in Europe are set up with air good conditioning, even though it’s been available since 1942), or even to find relief at the beach, where, after three minutes out of the water, it was time to go back in. I remember four big heat waves that summer between June and September, and the spring was uncomfortably warm, too. Insuportable!—the sweaty Catalan gasp of summer 2022. Though the term is overused to describe many vintages, a true “classic” is hard to come by these days in European wine regions. I’ve come to understand that, at least for me, some growing seasons impart characteristics that remind me of the glory years in the most historic wine regions of the last century when the vines eked out ripeness just in time for the change in weather that comes with the earth’s tilting back the other way. Though some years hit a few of the marks and stir excitement when the wines are young, the complete package often comes up short after more time in bottle. It’s important to taste wines out of barrel every year to get a clearer read on what’s really happening, though I admit I’m sometimes distracted by the romance that comes with this being what I do for a living, and I forget to pay attention at times. Young wines seem much fresher and more tense in their early moments in bottle than they really are, making it sometimes difficult to assess if a vintage should really be described as “classic.” Even no-added-sulfur wines at bottling freshen up for a period before they regain their true characteristics, just like when wines get a good oxygen hit during racking in the cellar, leading to a short window of one of the most honest and pure moments of a wine’s entire evolution from vat to bottle. For many northern European wine regions, 2021 hits all the “classic” markers: a cool growing season with a good balance of cloud cover, rain and refreshing winds to provide a longer window than normal for the growers to meticulously select the best fruit and to harvest within the fruit and structural profiles they prefer. Harmonious and with graceful fluidity, the 2021s tend to have greater freshness and higher natural acidity and lower to more moderate alcohol than from an average season, so you can drink more of them! What’s not to love about a “classic” year? I was in Portugal for most of the summer after a solo six-week road trip that started in Portugal and cut across northern Spain, southern France, through the Alps into northern Italy and back up through mountains to Austria, cutting back through Germany’s Rheinhessen, across to Champagne and Chablis, down into Burgundy and the Rhône and finally back to Portugal. I remember my surprise in response to the soggy, foggy and gray middle of June when, between showers, I went on runs from Michael Malat’s Kremstal winery, up the painfully steep and will-shattering rise of over a hundred meters in a span of just a kilometer, on the way to the Stift Göttweig, the historic abbey. There I was met with towering views of the valley below carved out by the Danube—the glorious, viticultural dreamland of the Wachau, Kremstal, Kamptal and Wagram. (Traisenthal is very close too, but mostly out of sight.) After that last rainy period in June, things took a steady course until harvest. The rest of the season remained cool for some regions to pick earlier than others without any severe heat waves (that I can remember), but a late summer and early fall drought began in other regions (such as Italy’s Langhe) prior to the fruit ripening. A day after the rains at Stift Göttweig, June 2021 Many regions made what appear to be historic wines in 2021, and for a lot of northern European white wine lovers, this year is tailored for the classicists—those who remember (and dearly miss) the days of the fresh and the tense, the mineral-laden wines that barely made it to a natural 12% alcohol without picking before the phenolics were in the grower’s ideal balance. 2021’s natural acidities are typically high, mineral nuances tight, sharp, and finely textured, and fruit profiles more citrusy than tropical. Austrian 2021 whites are as good as those from more than twenty years ago, like the historic 1997, 1999 and 2001. (Sadly, this predates Peter Veyder-Malberg’s Wachau project; wouldn’t we love to taste his wines if they were made back then?) 2021 marks perhaps a perfect vintage fitted to my taste in both Grüner Veltliner and Riesling. It also stands as the undisputed best young vintage I’ve tasted with regard to depth from either variety, though, for me, 2013 is right there with it. German Rieslings seem to be a dark horse that will pay dividends for the believers and those experienced enough to know the merit of youthful austerity evolved after much time in the cellar; oh, how I love balanced austerity! Northern French and Galician whites had stellar years, though the 2022 Albariños may edge out 2021 by a nose, which didn’t happen in other European areas that had much hotter conditions in 2022. The white and red wines from the Loire Valley are superb, and it’s surely our Saumur-based superstar Arnaud Lambert’s best vintage to date! Vincent Bergeron This month’s featured producer keeps us close to Lambert country, only slightly more than an hour-long drive on a hilly country road to the Loire River and straight east from there to the more verdant and humid Montlouis-sur-Loire. There we meet again one of our newest treasured vignerons, Vincent Bergeron, and his emotionally moving and finely etched 2021 Chenin Blancs (bubbles and still) and his full-of-life and delicately nuanced ethereal Pinot Noir. Vivid is my memory of these 2021 wines out of barrel on my first visit with Vincent, and casually slurping them down with oysters, cheeses, patés, and bread on a wobbly, makeshift table in his driveway in front of the tuffeau limestone wine caves during my second visit shortly after their bottling. Though the wines have changed over the last six months, since they’ve been bottled, I can confirm that the ones I nurtured in Spain over the last week while writing this newsletter validated my memory of their allure and proved that my subsequent infatuation is not based on embellishment or fantasy. Vincent Bergeron is a vigneron’s vigneron, a human’s human, an uncontrived example of how to live and simply let himself be, spiritually, without trying to become “someone.” He only tries in earnest to be himself—not for the world to see and celebrate, but for his family, his comrades, himself, and his humble yet idealistic relationship with wine and connection to nature. Vintage is important with Vincent’s wines. With his concession to nature and commitment to honor the season, sans maquillage, ni compromise, he sets his wines on a direct course, showcasing each season’s gifts and its challenges, allowing his wines to freely express the mark of their birth year. Warm vintages like 2020 taste of a season’s richer fruits and have a softer palate while still being delicate and complex. Cold years like 2021 are brighter, fresher, more tense and sharp. Vincent explains that between Vouvray and Montlouis there have always been differences in soil structure, topography, and social hierarchy. While Vouvray maintains a more celebrated vinous history (as illustrated by the bougie houses across the river, so different from Montlouis’ more rural and less ornate neighborhoods), some of its historical relevance seems to stifle creativity and growth—as happens so frequently in many historically celebrated regions in the wine world. In contrast to Vouvray, Montlouis-sur-Loire is filled with young and finely aged winegrowers with a strong desire and capacity for kinship, the sharing of ideas, and progress. Many had widely varied experiences prior to choosing the vigneron life and together they’ve created a tribal environment where they help each other to push that rock further up the hill. Organics have become a way of life for many in this circle and the influence of this free-thinking community is expanding. Montlouis is exciting and there are so many talents emerging from this extremely praise-worthy appellation that’s up to now been such an underdog. Though the land was already worked organically prior to Vincent’s last fifteen years of ownership, it was certified as such in 2018, and biodynamic principles are followed in the season’s life cycle, though Vincent clarifies that they’re not followed closely in the cellar. Plowing is done mostly by horse or tractor every third year. The harvest begins with alcoholic and phenolic maturity in line with the chemistry of the grapes—pH, TA—and of course, the taste of their taste. Pinot Noir is the first to be picked, followed by Chenin Blanc for sparkling, and finally, the still Chenin. There is much more about Vincent on his profile on our website. Click here to read more. Emotionally piercing, Vincent’s mineral-spring, salty-tear, petrichor-scented Chenin Blanc wines flutter and revitalize; a baptism of stardust in his bubbles and stills—a little Bowie, a lot of Bach. Vincent’s bubbles, the 2021 “Certains l’Aiment Sec” started out as Bach last fall and rebelled its way over the last seven months into more Bowie. At the domaine we made short work of a bottle of 2021 that was delicate and fine, maybe too pretty and too easy to slurp down? And perhaps because there is never a lot of this wine made! The bottle opened at the end of last month was more gastronomic and quirkier in a good Chenin-y way and shares quite a lot of similarities to Pinot Meunier-focused Champagne growers with deeply committed organic and biodynamic practices. Not so flowery and ethereal as it was last fall, it developed into a much more aromatically gourmand and abstract wine with notes of yellow apple, lemon pith, yeast, wheat and wheat beer, fresh oregano, first of the season freshly cleaned artichoke hearts, and the sweet and tender heart of a celery stalk. It’s savory and finishes with a welcome bitterness and plenty of refreshing acidity to cleanse for the next bite in the early courses of lunch and dinner. It’s made with a simple method using early pickings from the Chenin Blanc young-vine parcel. (Here, in this part of the Loire Valley’s Chenin Blanc regions, many growers make numerous picks on their vineyards rather than just the one—a smart and utilitarian method to maximize quality with what yield nature provides, without being too forced.) Spontaneous fermentation takes place in fiberglass vats. Following malolactic fermentation, the wines are given their first and only sulfite addition of 20mg/L for its eighteen-month bottle aging. No fining, no filtration, no dosage. Vincent’s inspiring 2021 Chenin Blanc “Maison Marchandelle” grown in Montlouis-sur-Loire is a vintage tailored to his preferred style: helium-lifted, minerally charged, cold, wet rock and taut yet delicate white fruit. It comes from Vincent’s favorite single plot of 50-year-old Chenin vines called Maison Marchandelle. The bedrock is tuffeau limestone and the topsoil, calcareous clay and sand. The clay brings breadth and depth while the sand and tuffeau keep this wine in the clouds. My first impression out of bottle in June 2023 was one of a cross between a Meursault of old, and a cru from Brézé raised in neutral oak barrels. It’s rich in woodsy aromas, hazelnut, sweet chanterelle, fallen wet oak leaves, Devonshire cream and creme fraiche, acacia honey, magnolia, cherimoya, and pear. If tasted blind in its first hours, I might mistake it for a cold vintage Meursault (though perhaps not within a lineup with other Meursaults) if it wasn’t so gentle and less muscled up—think a light version of old François Jobard (I believe all under the label of Antoine Jobard now) aromas with some age but without the cut of the harder limestone, dense core, and the fat of Côte d’Or’s rich clay. I had to leave the house to go out for dinner so as not to guzzle it to the end. On day two, it continued on the same path, and the palate strengthened a little more and deepened in complexity. The pear went a little more apple with a welcome smidge of strudel and spice. Fully intact and even improving on day three, it began to shed its Bourgogne-ness and moved much closer to Brézé in style and weight yet it was still quite different from many Chenin Blanc grown in Montlouis or Vouvray. It’s absolutely delicious and seemingly indefatigable in its first year in bottle. This low sulfite dosed Chenin (20mg/L in total) is raised eight months in oak barrels (with some new to replace older barrels—beautifully woven into the wine) followed by four months in fiberglass tanks before bottling. Vincent’s Chenin Blanc is truly singular for this variety in the Loire Valley, so much so that it doesn’t even seem to be of this earth, but rather plucked from the heavens, angelic, virgin, pure, untainted. In recent years, I’ve terribly missed Pinot Noir that showcases the grape’s nobility and naturally bright, energetic, straight flush (hearts or diamonds) of red fruits and healthy forest with wet underbrush. I didn’t expect to find such a shining example outside of Burgundy, let alone in France’s Chenin Blanc country. During my first visit with Vincent, I was tempted to be impolite and drink down my entire generously large barrel taste of the 2021 Pinot Noir “Un Rouge Chez Les Blancs” grown on an acre of vines (0.17ha planted in 2017 and 0.27ha in 1978) instead of returning the precious amount left after my first two sips to whence it came. It was jaw-dropping out of barrel, a burlesque walk from glass to nose and mouth, and I could’ve nursed that first 500-liter barrel to completion. It was sensual, honest, captivating, pristine, and delicious; egoless Pinot Noir, crafted into a sublime balance between nature and nurture. As I write this the day after tasting my sample bottle on the longest day of the year, more than six months after bottling, it’s more relaxed and lower key but with the same seductive spirit. Delicately crafted, sans soufre and sans concerned-enological-brow-raising, the first two hours open tested our restraint, especially my wife’s, but we very much wanted to give it more time to reveal its full breadth on day one before gulping it down. After the first sips, we decided to open our fifth bottle so far this warm season of the gorgeous 2021 Jean Foillard Morgon “Cuvée Corcelette” to slow our roll, but as delicious as that was, it didn’t stave us off for long. We were only disappointed with the bottle size (standard 750 ml), and the wine was down the hatch in two hours, leaving us with what felt like unfinished business; like the power went out in the theater just before the best part of the movie. In those two hours, the wine could be described as a combination of the finest understated Sancerre Pinot Noir from a cool year and an elegant Richoux Irancy and Lafarge Volnay of old, with a dash of Yvon Metras’ subtle yet often intoxicating Fleurie nose and slightly stern, gravelly mouthfeel, you can imagine this lovely Pinot Noir’s aromatic color palette and pointed-yet-fine structure. Grown on limestone bedrock and calcareous gravel and sand, the first glass emits dainty, sweet, red flowers (think Beaujolais florals), crunchy wild berry fruit (not to be confused with the store-bought greenhouse variety), verdant pastoral greens, fine wine lees, strawberry skin, orange, citrus, fresh mint, fresh oregano, gravel, and wet dirt. The palate is delicate but has fine, pointed tannins and very fresh acidity. There’s no sulfite added, so the future of each bottle will be in the hands of the handler, though with its naturally low pH, high acidity, and low alcohol, and, most importantly, its balance, it should manage well over time. One pump-over per day in the early stages of fermentation and two later on, a year aged in 75% old oak barrel, 25% fiberglass tank, and it’s not fine nor filtered.