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After a quick visit to try the new vintages at a winery in Épineuil (where the vigneron was out of town), we headed back toward Chablis and passed through Fleys, a village maze of tight canyons between crumbling stone and limestone brick buildings. There was no evidence of stores or commerce of any kind, and though there were some signs of life, on that day the place seemed completely deserted; I didn’t see a single soul. It felt like the French version of a western ghost town. As an outsider, it seemed romantic to me, the idea of getting a flat or little house in that empty place, settling in and working without interruption. But in truth, like with so many little French hamlets, it seemed sort of like a beautiful slum, a place where migrant farmers go to sleep during harvest. Many of my favorite buildings in France continued to be the ones that looked like they were about to fall down. To the southwest of Chablis is the town of Irancy, home to one of Ted’s favorites, Thierry Richoux, and we were meeting him for lunch at a bistro called Le Soufflot. We got there and were immediately greeted by a friendly, energetic guy who sat us and took orders from other tables; he was running the whole show. The restaurant space is bright and airy, with white tile floors, blonde wood tables and chairs, rough sandstone finished walls covered with colorful wine region maps, and a glass ceiling webbed over with thick green grape vines, just out of reach. Ted studied the list while we waited for Thierry to break away from work to join us. He was excited; the place is known for its amazing selection, and he ordered a bottle of the 2014 Saint-Aubin 1er Cru from Hubert Lamy, and this was our second bottle in two days (we had one the night before at Les Trois Bourgeons). Ted imports and sells many of Lamy’s wines, but he’s only allotted a dozen or so of this one for all of California. Thierry came in, full of apologies for being late. He’s wiry and deeply tanned, with windblown, longish brown hair, a sculptural aquiline nose and smiling eyes like horizontal commas. His handshake is firm and leathery, his fingers as strong and callused as a mechanic’s. The server/maître d’, greeted him like an old friend and poured him a glass of the Lamy. He settled in and caught up with Ted for a while before I was able to ask him some questions myself. He told me that he had just come from a small parcel with buds that had succumbed to the frost of the night before; it did turn out that Collet and others had to light the fires again. Thierry was grateful for how few he had lost, but he knew they weren’t in the clear just yet. Some of the other producers were employing another technique to stave off the frost, the polar opposite of fire: though irrigating grape crops in France is illegal, it is permitted to spray the vines with water on nights when the temperature plummets, so that a thin layer of ice forms on the buds or shoots. Counterintuitive as the practice might sound, this shell can actually provide protections from freezing. But Thierry remarked that the jury is still out as to whether any of the methods people try actually work. He has two sons who’ve worked with him since they were twelve and thirteen years old. Now they’re twenty-two and twenty-five, and they assist him along with only one other employee most of the year, pruning and pegging his twenty-three hectares of Pinot Noir. From May to July they bring on six more people, and of course many more for harvest. He’s been making wine since 1979 and says, “it’s always different. There isn’t a recipe.” Whatever he’s doing, it’s working; his wines are some of Ted’s favorites. Ted said, “He sells seventy percent of his output straight to customers who come for tastings from as far away as Paris every weekend. At retail prices!,” with an enthusiasm that deepened the color on Thierry’s face. Yet, as humble as he is, he also smiled with pride. Talk turned to the growing popularity and demand for biodynamic farming, for which Thierry is known. He noted that “a lot of producers use it as a selling point while the priority of quality comes second.” Despite his success, it’s clearly very difficult to cede control of the process to nature and still achieve consistency. “Many of these guys talk a lot more about bio than they practice,” he added. Ted said, “that’s exactly why I visit all of the producers I work with, to see they’re practicing what they preach." So far, everyone who’s told him up front that they work this way appear to be telling the truth. For a starter I ordered their “œuf parfaits” with red wine and mushrooms—a variation on the Bourgogne specialty, œuf en meurette, that I had passed on the night before at Les Trois Bourgeons. What came was a beautiful bowl of eggs poached in red wine and layered with chopped mushrooms and frisée, and it was an incredible mélange of flavors and textures, earthy and decadent. My plat principal was a breast of goose with caper and celery purée topped with crisp cheese disks. The meat and accompaniments were asymmetrically placed like little modernist park sculptures, among dabs and lines of colorful sauces from an abstract painting, all sprinkled with yellow flower petals. It was so fun to look at that it seemed a pity to ruin it. But as with a lot of the meals I ate on the trip, I was less caught up in knowing the minutia of composition, and more concerned with being well fed (I was hungry), and Le Soufflot did not disappoint. After lunch, Thierry took us to the wounded field he had come from earlier. As we walked up and down the rows, everyone was respectfully quiet; the air carried the mournful feeling that something unfortunate had just happened. He reached down and gently cupped a cluster of buds, but his careful movements were unnecessary; they were all dead. Healthy buds are green and fuzzy, with a purplish hue, whereas these had gone white-gray and brought to mind cigarette ash. We nodded solemnly as he gestured to the other places that had been hit, which seemed completely random in their spotty placement. Frost is mercurial like that, striking at random and infuriatingly difficult to ward off, despite all the wild techniques people try. Luckily—or rather, more from experience, Thierry had not yet tied the vines down to the wires, which allows them to remain upright and further from the ground where it gets the coldest. Vignerons who did this prematurely were making a big mistake, a bet they were likely to lose in seasons like this; many of the vineyards in the surrounding areas had already suffered huge losses on recent nights. Again, Thierry expressed gratitude that he had been relatively spared so far. Knowing that we would see him again soon, we said à bientôt, and left for our second business appointment of the day.

The Source is the first importing company (we know of) and perhaps the only one to have a staff geologist, Brenna Quigley. And now she’s off to Burgundy to put in a month of scratching and digging and surveying (or whatever geologists do) with the Wasserman family, who are bringing her over to get a worm’s eye view of some of the great vineyards of the Côte d'Or. On the eve of her departure for what will hopefully be a great month and a big step in her own career evolution, I conducted a little interview with Brenna to check in. With a newly minted masters in geology from UCSB, Brenna joined the team last year mainly because founder Ted Vance has an insatiable interest in geology and believes at least some of the answers to wine’s mysteries are contained in the rocks and soils in which vineyards and regions are rooted. Brenna had a budding interest in wine herself, so at the beginning she and Ted traded lessons in wine and geology. There’s a small but perhaps growing tradition of geologists working in wine. Some notable books have come out of this dynamic: Land and Wine by Charles Frankel; The Winemaker's Dance: Exploring Terroir in the Napa Valley by Jonathan Swinchatt; Terroir by James Wilson; and Great Wine Terroirs by Jacques Fanet. Likewise, I remember the estimable “Dr. Dirt” Daniel Roberts, whom I met years ago with the late Jess Jackson, and Françoise Vannier, who is currently working for many vintners in Burgundy, helping them understand their vineyards. While the ability of geology to explain anything about wine is still in its infancy, the attraction of people like Brenna to the field can only help. Lots more of the wonderful work she and Ted have been doing on geology and French wine will be posted on the Source website in coming weeks and months, so stay tuned!  — Jordan Mackay JM: So you’re going back to Burgundy! For someone who’d never been before last year, it’s now like your second home. What’s the agenda for this trip? BQ: We’re going to do what we’ve done in the past on my trips with Ted, where we go on vineyard walks, explore the land, and talk to winemakers, but this time the goal will be to get a more in-depth geological impression of each individual vineyard. We will combine all of the information we can get from geological, soil, and vineyard maps with my observations, and with the observations of the vigneron. The final product will be a short paragraph on each vineyard summarizing all of the components that we feel contribute to its unique terroir. JM: You come from a geological family, right? Your dad is a geologist with a company that carries out geological explorations for various industries and your brothers and sisters are geologists too, right? BQ: Yes, but my oldest brother is an artist. JM: So how does your family feel about your going off into the barely existent field of geology and wine? BQ: They’re all very jealous. [Laughs.] JM: They’re not dubious about it? They don’t think this is geology light? BQ: They’re definitely not dubious. I guess when I talk with other geologists, I’m always careful not to overstate what the field of geology can offer wine. But for the most part they seem just as excited about there being a connection between place and wine as the wine experts I deal with. I actually even got that in grad school: On weekends a group of us would go wine tasting, and you’d have field geologists, geochemists, and geomorphologists all tasting wine together, and we would hypothesize about what geologic components might exist. JM: At that time, I’m sure you had no idea you would be able to dip your foot into this professionally. BQ: No, it was something we all talked about, like “wouldn’t that be great? There has to be a way to understand these things more.” And that’s before I even knew what the word terroir was. I didn’t even know that side of things existed. JM: It’s interesting, though, because you had the intuition. As you so eloquently described at The Source geology seminars you and Ted put on, geology impacts everything in one way or another. So why wouldn’t it impact wine? You could see that instinctively as a student. BQ: Yes. I just gave a little talk to a geology class at UCSB the last time I was in Santa Barbara, and the way I presented it to them was to say that it’s natural to be a bit skeptical the first time you mention terroir or say a wine is reflecting a specific place. I like to introduce the idea by starting with the biggest, broadest concepts and then keep zooming in. For instance, you wouldn’t grow bananas in Minnesota. If you tried, you might find it rather difficult, and if you were able to produce some bananas, they probably wouldn't taste very good. So even if this sounds obvious, it’s a starting point to then look at all of the factors that make it obvious. JM: And as soon as you project that forward, you can say, well, if you can contrast Ecuador with Minnesota, why not look at this hillside versus that one for grapes? So, sure the logic follows. On the one hand, we know there’s a great and important connection between geology and wine. On the other hand, we also know the current limits of geology’s ability to explain what’s in the glass. Will this project further that or are you still basically working to describe vineyards geologically? BQ: I think the latter. For me, observing and beginning to understand the vineyards is still the most valuable thing I can do, for now. I believe it’s a great step because the vignerons have been working in these vineyards and making the wines for years, or even decades. They understand the place and the wines more intimately than I ever could in just a couple of days. Gathering observations from these people is an excellent source of raw data. It’s getting a very diverse set of opinions and experiences that have been collected and honed over years and years. So before I’d want to do anything more directly scientific, I’d first want to do exactly this—understand the current state of thinking and what ideas stick out as the most successful. The next step will be to start testing these ideas. JM: If you could push forward the relationships between natural sciences and wine growing, making, and drinking, what breakthroughs would you like to see? And how could you imagine your job in the future? BQ: One thing I would like to see is a push towards being a little more systematic in the way we think and test these potential processes. This includes systematically testing the physical and chemical components of terroir—like, soil structure and chemistry, topography and hillslope aspect, to see how they are working together, and how small changes may influence the wine. But I would also like to extend this thought process to the tasting side of things as well. I think that talented tasters could provide a whole new dataset on the impressions that different terroirs can impart to a wine, but for this to be significant we would have to make it a little more structured, and a little more anonymous. JM: You mean rather than just sitting in a room and nodding their heads in agreement at each tasting note before calling it a day and finishing the bottle? Yes, I get that. So things like oil industry geologists or mineral geologists have existed for generations. But until just a few years ago the idea of a wine geologist was a fairly new concept and there are only a handful of people in the world that do this. But all of a sudden it’s starting to sound like a viable profession. You’re only 26 years old. Do you feel you’re starting down the path of a real profession and one that’s desirable to you? BQ: Absolutely. I can't imagine being more passionate or excited about a subject than I have in the past few years with The Source, and I'm excited to see how the work itself will mature. I would love to one day contribute to the way we think about terroir, and maybe one day make some progress in understanding the mechanisms that control it. JM: So you leave in a couple of days for, what is it, a month in Burgundy with the Wasserman family? BQ: That’s right. It will be great to have more time to focus on one specific region. Other trips have allotted only a few days in a number of different places. I’ve seen a lot and gotten to understand the big geologic picture of several wine regions. But my thought when I first visited Burgundy was, this is going to take way longer than a week! It’s very complicated. There’s a bigger story to tell, and we were just scratching the surface. This will be a deeper dive. JM - Well, Burgundy is still a massive mystery to those of us who’ve been there many times. I can’t wait to see what comes out of your work and I look forward to reading more of it at the Source and the Wasserman sites. The more knowledge, the better for everyone. We’re all excited to see what sort of things you may be able to add to the field, whether this year or over what we hope will be a long and fruitful career. Bon Voyage!

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

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

After more than six months, Andrea and I finally had an opportunity to get out of Portugal and into Spain. It’s been strange to be only twenty minutes away by car but unable to go for so long! Over the last three weeks we found our way through Galicia, Ribera del Duero, Rioja, Navarra, and finally, Txakoli—what a bunch of beautiful places! Of course we had to stop in San Sebastían for a weekend and got out just as the city was beginning to close its entry ports. We originally intended to go to France for two or three weeks in the middle of what was supposed to be a much longer trip to visit our friends and finally share some good news in person about the US market’s rebound, despite the unexpectedly long delays at the US ports. However, that good news would’ve been offset by another hard-hitting reality delivered by Jack Frost. Many crops were devastated throughout much of France and other parts of Europe, a couple of weeks ago, and the outlook for recovery this year is grim. Can we catch a break, please? It’s been pretty tough for everyone over the last eighteen months. Of course, we’re happy about the recent progress in the US, but over here in Europe the stress level continues to rise, despite the improvements happening abroad where it seems like things are in fact rebounding, but because of the excruciatingly slow vaccine rollout, the light at the end of Europe’s tunnel still seems quite distant and immobile. Spanish Trip It’s an exciting time to be in Iberia and I am personally humbled by the open welcome we’ve received by the Spanish and Portuguese wine communities. Most of the producers we’ve met have no historical laurels to rest on, something that many of us can relate to. As I’ve said in previous writings on our experiences on the Spanish wine camino, we here at The Source are grateful for the inroads carved by other importers who waved the Spanish flag long before we did, back when few were interested in more backwater regions, and we hope that our effort to spread the word will help their businesses as well. At the beginning of our trip we made stops to visit our guys in Galicia, and there’s so much to say about the Galicians and their inspiring wines. Things are constantly moving there, with a ceaseless rise of new, conscientious producers sprouting up nearly every month. The last leg of our trip was in Txakoli, yet another wine region that I know next to nothing about. I regularly step back to look at what is happening and come to the conclusion that this is such an exciting time for all of us in the wine world. There are so many lost, forgotten, and abused vineyard areas being nurtured back to health, one vine at a time, through a steady rebirth of old ideas and wisdom lost to the distant past, before global industrialization. There is an abundance of new tastes and smells, not just by way of tinkering in the cellar, but also terroirs that have been overlooked for generations in regions with less opportunity over the last century stifled by post-war economics, or the dictatorships that severely oppressed Portugal and Spain for decades after the last great war. Grapes and regions unknown to most of us from the States are suddenly coming into focus, and many local winegrowers even admit it’s hard to dig up historical information about their own region and its indigenous grapes. Blended and co-fermented white and red varieties are making a dent in the mono-varietal wine world, even for me! Many growers in Spain and Portugal regularly discuss the large, often multi-generation gap between them and the growers in the past and they continue to move forward by looking at their broken vinous history. The biggest whale in this area that seems on the path to breaching has to be Rioja. A Rioja Revolution?? Looks like it’s happening… Rioja was a central focus of our trip. We had a few visits set up there prior to going and we unexpectedly stumbled into a few more. One thing seems certain: Rioja is likely to no longer be a wine region that, beyond López de Heredia, only old-school wine people know anything about. Now there is a group of young, idealistic and revolutionary-minded growers there who, like in other uprisings in the wine world, are striving to do their best to bring their own historic wine region out of its dark age. The children of grape growers are ready for change and they’re taking it into their own hands by braving new enterprises, with the full support of their families and the strong work ethic inherent in grape farmers everywhere. All sparks start small, and while in other regions one could light a bonfire, a spark in Rioja might just detonate a bomb. So, what is my motivation for digging into Rioja and its confusing story, while very few, if anyone, in the restaurant market seems to care about putting anything on their list besides López de Heredia? It’s simple: Rioja is Spain’s most historic red wine region. It has been known for centuries to be the flag-bearer of Spanish wines, and eventually these things have a way of coming back around. We don’t do this kind of importing just for the money and a good time. The intense effort we put into our work gives us all a sense of purpose, working to help the little guy make his way into the fold, because we’re little guys too. And while López de Heredia is responsible for producing some of the world’s most compelling and historic wines—with well-aged bottles that only ten years ago sold for a fraction of what they go for today while still seeming underpriced—there is far more to this region than some of these bigger bodegas that make their living on ratings. While I am a virtual Rioja rookie (the last time I visited a vineyard here was on a bicycle trip in 2004), and new to much of the rest of Spain as well, I have clearly become accustomed to visiting Europe’s most talented and historic vineyards. Rioja is not even close to being a second-rate wine region, if one considers its historical reputation along with the obvious quality and diversity of its terroirs. It’s one of the top regions in all of Europe! Spain’s equivalent to France’s Burgundy and Bordeaux, Italy’s Piedmont and Tuscany, and Germany’s Mosel and Rheingau. It’s clear that Rioja is the real deal, a wine region with an unlimited potential to achieve the highest of the highs in wine quality. I’m writing this today after having lunch at Rekondo, a Basque institution of fabulous food and without a doubt one of the world’s greatest restaurant collections of old Spanish wines at unbelievably low prices, where we had a bottle of 1970 Viña Albina Gran Riserva. Recommended by the sommelier, it was a total winner. The wine list price was 99€, so only 2€ per year—what a deal! This winery is now known for inexpensive wines, and back then, as demonstrated by this bottle, they could produce enormously emotional wine that was also inexpensive at the time. It was gorgeous and memorable, with the umami aromatics of Spanish food culture and an enviable finesse that most Burgundies with this much age would have a hard time equaling let alone outshining them, on their best days. Rioja, promising? Sí, claro, tio! While visiting a vineyard in Rioja Alta, just north of the historic medieval hillside village, San Vicente de la Sonsierra, the young and pleasantly idealistic pair, José Gil and Victoria (Vicky) Fernandez, explained their terroirs and the overarching climatic conditions with the cold winds from the Sierra Cantabria Mountains on the north side of the appellation. I was caught off guard when these winegrowers (whom I started to think of as young Jedi) explained that a major influence from the regional characteristics they hope to capture in their wines, aside from the obvious talent of their sandy, calcareous soils and ancient vines, are the matices (nuances) of the aromatic herbs running wild on the mountainsides and just on the edge of many vineyards; herbs like lavender, thyme, rosemary, and a slew of other high-desert plants whose aromatic resins and oils seem to stick to grape skins in micro doses and possibly infuse the wines with subtle notes of their scents. These micro doses—which may be aroma and flavor enhancers in wines—are likely absent in monoculture vineyard environments, particularly those in vast, flat areas where mechanization is easiest and far away from forested or untamed land. This duo’s vineyards are all above 500m, high for the region, which test the limits to achieve full phenolic maturity in most years. There is less Grenache planted in these colder parts due to its significantly longer growing season than Tempranillo—the early, little one. This altitude and proximity to the Sierra Cantabria Mountains just to the north also puts them in the direct path of these aroma-filled winds that rip up and down the mountains with the rising and setting of the sun. Whether or not they come from the plants directly, these aromas are evident in their wines, and many other Rioja wines, too. Their fabulous wines are bottled under the label José Gil, and we have the good fortune to represent them in the US. On the subject of herbs, in our first in-person visit with the Jon and Pedro from their exciting new project in Navarra, Aseginolaza y Leunda (their last names, respectively), I was able to procure some wild thyme from a few of their vineyard areas—yes, I’m telling a story about thyme; it’s my favorite herb… The most aromatic of the plants seemed to be a cross between lemon-thyme and lavender and was undoubtedly the most intoxicatingly exotic and ridiculously aromatic fresh thyme I’ve ever put under my nose. Perhaps it was because they were flowering and the flowers took it to a completely different level. These particular plants were growing in an ancient vineyard named Otsaka, not too far from Pamplona, which also had rosemary and lavender that were left to grow freely everywhere, even right next to the ancient vines—real biodiversity! The other thyme, a wild one growing on the opposite side of Navarra in the west, more than an hour away by car, was marked by a deep, frosty green and somehow emitted—believe it or not—the umami of many Spanish foods; it was like the thyme absorbed the smell of Jamon Ibérico and grilled Galician beef without having met them yet! I snipped a full bag’s worth as the guys laughed at my enthusiasm for this ubiquitous herb (or weed, as they see it) and promptly dried and picked them when I got home last week. We visited a few other up-and-coming producers in Rioja working to redefine and restore the region to something similar to what it was like before phylloxera. It is possible that vines will grow in many parts of Rioja without American rootstocks, but sadly, it is now forbidden to plant without them. Maybe things will change. Today, it’s a region that suffers overwhelmingly industrial wine production, like many places on the Iberian Peninsula. A drive through much of Rioja reveals flat alluvial terraces littered with vines in some places with hardly any space left for a road to access the vineyards. But up on the hillsides there are greater separations between parcels due to the erratic erosional patterns of the sandy hills. Higher up, there are typically small plateau-like sections planted while the steeper sides of the hills surrounding them are uncultivated and wild; many are filled with aromatic brush, quite similar to what the French refer to as garrigue. Still, because of the enormity of Rioja, there are many secluded spots with a lot of natural biodiversity, as well as forests that were vineyards in the mid-1900s, including some that we visited with producer Javier Arizcuren, a very well-known Spanish architect with an obsession for wine and the recovery of nearly lost vineyards. He has a project where only his father helps in the vineyards, in the far eastern end of the region, Rioja Oriental, formerly known as Rioja Baja. On very high altitude sites, some above 800m, they grow a lot of Mazuelo (Carignan), Garnacha and some prephylloxera Garnacha vines. He has aerial photos of vineyards taken in the 1950s by the US Army that showed an entire ridge at very high altitudes (near 1000m) that were once cultivated and are now completely overtaken by thick forests. We will soon have the good fortune to also represent Javier. The rebellion seems to manifest itself in their working mostly among these higher-altitude zones that have more complex soil structures and an easier time to achieve the phenolic results they want without big alcohol levels and riper fruit qualities. Alcohol aside, perhaps the shared agenda of these rebels, who seem to have rightly renamed their movement from Rioja’n’Roll to the Rioja Revolution, is to make single-site wines. Arturo Miguel, from Artuke, a bodega that seems to be front and center for the Rioja Revolution and for whom everyone in Spain with knowledge of the uprising holds in the highest regard, explained that prior to the 1960s almost all of Rioja red wines were vinified by carbonic fermentation because efficient destemming machines weren’t around yet. This style of wine was simply a consequence of not having enough time, too small a labor force (partially due to the restriction of immigrants under the dictatorship of Franco) and too little money: the family picked it and pitched it into a vat and hardly touched the grapes until they were pressed. They couldn’t sell it for much with this method of winemaking, so they made some changes to the system—and not good ones. This kind of thinking that prioritized economics led to the removal of ancient vines and replacing them with more productive biotypes (not at all an unfamiliar story!), and of course, young vines themselves are far more productive than old ones. The growers didn’t have to care if the grapes were good, they just needed to reach high-alcohol levels to fetch the highest prices from the big producers in control of the grape market. This resulted in the loss of what would’ve surely been some of Europe’s most prized vineyards, and no doubt Spanish national treasures. There are still some ancient vines to be found from this era, but they are not so common. José, Victoria and another just-turned-forty revolutionary, Miguel Merino, ventured a guess that vines over a hundred years old probably make up less than one percent of the vineyard surface area of Rioja. What a terrible loss for this generation! I’ve seen some of these ancient vines in both Javier Arizcuren’s and José Gil’s vineyards. They are gorgeous, and most continue to look surprisingly healthy. Many other European wine regions have emerged from virtual obscurity over the last couple of decades, places like Alto Piemonte, Etna, Beaujolais and Jura, as well as many parts of France’s Loire Valley. Rioja’s terroir diversity, with its expansive coverage of over a hundred kilometers east to west, as well as a broad range in altitudes may have given it the ability to withstand climate change, possibly more than many other wine regions, since the vines have already adapted to such extreme conditions. It’s obvious that Rioja is a sleeping giant, and it appears to be en route to an awakening—perhaps not tomorrow, nor too far down the road, either. Maybe to some it seems like a long shot with the region’s current obsession with sun-soaked, American oak-scarred wines, but to state something that seems obvious, if you believe in terroir—as many of us wine junkies claim to—you cannot ignore the inevitable reemergence of this region in the global marketplace. Rioja is no less historically important in the wine world than other sleeping giants, such as Chianti Classico, which also suffers from confusion about its identity and what it’s supposed to taste like. If you couldn’t already tell, I think Rioja is an incredible place and it’s going to be fun to continue to learn more about this historic region. Discovery and learning are the best parts of our business because they yield constant humility along with a never-ending excitement for new things. And for those of you who are a bit in the weeds on this region, as I am now, we can slowly walk down this path together. I’ve got a lot of work to do before I really discuss this place with any great confidence. There is just too much information to reduce Rioja to a bite-size piece. But we plan to be a part of this rising tide by helping these new arrivals bring power back to the families who need to break loose of the grip of the big companies that cornered the market some decades ago. As is happening across the globe, it is plainly obvious inside many wine regions that the disparity between financial classes continues to widen. One of the answers for the wine business that winegrowers need to know is that there is a market out there waiting for them. They don’t need big and costly marketing teams, they just need to focus on quality and authenticity, and the market will reward them. New Producer: A German On The Horizon While we have very few German wines these days compared to when we used to work with the importer Dee Vine Wines, it’s never strayed far from our minds. Through some unlikely “sources” (my old German volleyball buddies who are nuts about Klaus Peter Keller’s wines) we were introduced to an exciting young producer, Katharina Wechsler, who has vineyards in the famous Kirchspiel and Morstein vineyards… She’s also a biodynamic practitioner… got your attention?? I thought so. Obviously the combination of this caliber of vineyards and the philosophy of biodynamics indicates that something special must be happening at Weingut Wechsler. Katharina is crafting exceptional dry Rieslings from these two famous GG sites—although she is not part of the VDP, so you won’t see any reference to “GG” on the bottle—along with some entry-level Rieslings from the same parcels that are total knockouts with very familiar profiles to those who know the wines of Keller, if only in that they are neighbors and their terroirs speak the same language. And then there is her less traditional line of wines, including an orange Scheurebe and other interesting goodies that contrast her classically styled dry Rieslings. I’m really excited to get these wines into the US to show what she is up to. Hopefully they will arrive around July or August. May New Arrivals The biodynamic Champagnes of Chevreaux-Bournazel “La Parcelle” will finally arrive in California. We received only a minuscule allocation in our first year of working together before the pandemic hit, but they didn’t make it past Rachel Kerswell, our company’s New York goalkeeper (who’s also an extremely talented striker!). Stéphanie and Julien have an interesting story and approach to their wines since both have seen more harvest time in more places throughout Champagne than probably any other vigneron working in the region over the last decade. Their first enterprise (which is still going today) is a company that organizes harvest help throughout all of Champagne’s regions. It’s given them a lot of perspective on their own biodynamic project out in the middle of nowhereville, in the Vallée de la Marne, which prompted an interview that we’ll post soon about how they view the wine world through their experiences and how they’ve incorporated the best of what practices they’ve seen throughout the various Champagne areas and its top producers, who are now their friends. They have around a single hectare of Pinot Meunier vines grown in a couple of different places on extremely steep, beautiful limestone and silex (chert) bedrock hillsides. The wines are stunning. It’s just too bad they don’t make very much. A good chunk of Viñateros Bravos is arriving soon from Chile and our staff is beyond excited about them, which indicates that some of our customers must be too. We were finally able to place a much larger order than anytime in the past, improving the prices for everyone. Leonardo Erazo, the owner and winemaker, has really cranked it up over recent years due to his newfound time and focus solely on his own project instead of those in Argentina and France. These wines are “natural” in the best way in that they are straightforward terroir wines from a sunny but windy and cold climate on either ancient granite bedrock or volcanic soils. Wines from Hubert Lamy, Simon Bize and Guiberteau will be here soon as well. Nuff said… I did an interview last month with Brendan Stater-West that will be posted online right about the time the wines arrive later this month. It’s a good time to get to know what Brendan is up to now that he has a few more vintages under his belt. He’s stayed the course from the beginning but now things have come into greater focus for him, as in, what he wants to offer in his range in comparison to the wines of his mentor, Romain Guiberteau. Stay tuned for the interview and get ready for the wines. Riecine is finally hitting the States. It’s been a long wait for these charming but serious wines grown in vineyards in the high altitude areas of Gaiole in Chianti’s Chianti Classico region. Their top 2016 bottlings, Riecine di Riecine and La Gioia, are arriving along with the 2018 Chianti Classico. I was curious how these wines would do when we first signed on with them, and I’m not surprised that they are one of the producers whose wines sell fastest upon arrival. As usual, Poderi Colla continues to crank out the goods. The 2017 Barolo Bussia Dardi le Rose is landing and will be on the docket toward the end of the month. Like just about every vintage since 2002, 2017 is another Colla success story. The wines are notable for their upfront tannins due to their quicker ripening during the summer months, but given the deliciousness of the Colla’s 2011 Barolo from a similarly warm year, this should shape up quickly over the next months and drink quite well with twenty or thirty minutes open—just like every good Barolo! Justin Dutraive’s 2019s are finally coming. They’re the lightest vintage yet in color and extraction with some closer to resembling a richer rosé hue than a red wine. This is a welcome approach for Justin’s many Beaujolais Village appellation wines that seem to carry greater mineral and metal textural profiles than his dad’s. The wines were clearly less settled in the tank before bottling in the past, so when you get them, sit them upright for some days (if not at least a few weeks) before popping and go gentle on the pouring to keep those sediments in the bottom of the bottle instead of the glass. Staff write-ups Cume do Avia Colleita 7 Tinto Leigh Ready, The Source Santa Barbara One of the things I love about these up-and-coming, reviving regions, such as the Ribeiro and Trás-os-Montes, is the discovery of grapes that are new to me. When I’m out in the market showing the Colleita 7 Tinto from Cume do Avia, I explain that it’s a blend of Caiño Longo, Sousón and Brancellao, and this is our third Colleita imported, derived from the Portuguese word, colheita, meaning harvest, aka vintage, which can’t technically be referred to as such, but that’s another story. Unless someone is versed in Galician indigenous varieties or already familiar with Cume do Avia, I’m usually met with raised eyebrows and bulging eyes. “So, what’s it like?” they ask, to which I usually reply, “You just have to taste it.” Please do read The Story about Cume do Avia on our website; it tells a leap-of-faith tale of epic proportions. The wine though... Upon first swirl, this wine emits a sense of liveliness that instantly intrigues, and at around 12%, one can enjoy a couple of glasses sans fog. Crunchy red fruit gives way to tart cranberry compote with a vein of minerality searing through the mid palate to finish. I find myself going back sip after sip to further investigate. It’s deliciously light bodied yet persistent and finding what seems to be imprints from their granite, schist and slate slate soils is a dreamy addition. By trade, I know I’m not supposed to be partial to label design, but theirs is just darling. Serve slightly chilled if you prefer. Salud!  

As we drove Manu’s truck off the ferry we began our ascent from the base of the mountains to the west of Bastia. A crooked road led us up and out of the town with high walls of deformed schist to our right, black from the previous night’s rain, bent in every direction. The fog was dense and flowed like a river in the strong and unusually cold wind. We hit the top of the pass with nothing to see but a dark, wet road and softly brightened fog. It was a stark contrast to last year’s welcoming first sight of the ancient village of Patrimonio and the dramatic limestone ridges of Monte Sant-Angelo, framed by a bright blue sky and the sea in the background. As we descended the western side of the ridge, we passed a graffiti tag on a schist guardrail that read, “tourists go home,” in thin red spray paint. I remembered it from last year—apparently, the locals are okay with keeping it there, and ironically, I kinda was too. The unmistakable limestone ridge that sits between the beach town Saint Florent and Patrimonio finally popped through the fog. As we entered Patrimonio, we saw the old church tower and passed a red trim white village sign that read, Patrimonio, which had been blacked out with spray paint. Patrimoniu, the Corsican name for the village, was spelled out below, tag free—a common mark of the village signs on the island. Patrimonio may be the most geologically complex wine region on Corsica. The vineyards are a mix of limestone, schist and granite—three of the greatest bedrocks and soil types for wine growing—with a range of soil grains from clays, silts, sands and gravels. Vines are planted on soft sloping hills, down in former riverbeds and up on extremely steep hillsides. This massive variation makes for a broad patchwork of smells and tastes that usually combine under one name, Patrimonio, the first AOC (1968) established on the island. Patrimonio white is made exclusively from Vermintinu, the island’s top white wine. It’s a salty, minerally, spicy textured wine that smells like the sea. The lovely and complex rosés are a blend of Niellucciu (75% minimum to call it Patrimonio) with other red grapes as well as Vermintinu. Red Patrimonio is always led by the powerful and rustic Niellucciu, often blended with small quantities of Sciacarellu, a red grape that makes the most complex elegant reds on the island, and/or Grenache to bring more charm. Our first visit was with a domaine that still had problems with “stuck fermentations” on some 2017 reds. This can happen when there is too much sugar in the grapes, which results in high alcohol levels, and the yeast begins to die before all the sugar is converted to alcohol and CO2; there are many studies and opinions as to what the threshold of a wild/natural yeast is, but it seems that over potential alcohol levels of 14% the risk is high. With too much leftover sugar and no active yeast, other microbes start to eat the sugar, and one of the more famous “bugs” is the spoilage yeast, Brettanomyces, which smells like an old barnyard with all its less than desirable nuances. Volatile acidity, unintended premature oxidation and many more challenges can arise, potentially making the wine more unstable, less attractive and scarred by these early problems. The winemaker didn’t have much time so we went through only the most difficult wines, and none of the good ones. Some were ticking along, while others were dead in their tracks, exchanging freshness for early fatigue. This is one of the big challenges of 2017, and Manu was there to advise his vignerons on how to navigate these kinds of problems. Our second visit at Muriel Gaudicelli’s tiny biodynamic domaine was more convincing because their 2017s seemed to be going just fine. We tasted with her husband, Stéphane, who works with her every step of the way. The wines of the past were already very good, but it seems the newer vintages have taken a leap forward with Manu on board. The new results show a great balance of power and elegance, enough for them to be picked up by Kermit Lynch, a US importer who seems to nearly have a national monopoly on Corsica’s best. It was an enlightening tasting compared to the last year, which I partially attribute to my lack of experience with the wines of Corsica up to that point rather than simply the jump in quality. We stopped for a quick lunch in Saint-Florent, a charming village that sits on the Golfe de Saint Florent. I was again desperate for veggies and fish but the only thing that seemed worthwhile on the menu (at a reasonable price!) was the cannelloni stuffed with Brocciu, a local fresh cheese similar to ricotta. Turns out, it was the perfect kind of warm comfort food for this relentlessly cold and windy day. Our stop after lunch was with Lisandru Leccia. He took over his family’s estate, Domaine Leccia, in 2014 and has already made large strides in the right direction. We had an appointment at two o’clock and arrived early. Out in the vineyards we saw some guys operating a tractor, with one driving and two directing the plow blades behind it. Manu said that even though he’d never met Lisandru, he knows his father and that the bald guy out behind the tractor was likely him. As we started out to the vineyard, we were met by Lisandru’s aunt, Annette Leccia, a woman with an unforgettable smile and warm energy. Lisandru is a near carbon copy of his father, Yves. Both have sharp features, a shiny bald head and dark, thick eyebrows, a quiet demeanor and in Levi’s blue jeans. I met Yves Leccia in Paris two years ago while on tour with my friend, Nicolas Rébut, his sales agent there. We had dinner two nights in a row and I was immediately fond of him. Yves is gentle and hospitable, and meeting his son Lisandru was like meeting him again, when he was younger. Lisandru took us for a tour of his simply designed cellar and talked about the changes he wanted to make to the domaine, including more work with biodynamic principles, starting with the incorporation of higher level organic farming. The wines we tasted out of tank (2016, 2017) showed clear promise and the red was a lot more elegant than what I associate with Patrimonio, despite it being 100% Niellucciu grown on clay and limestone soils—three ingredients that can easily make more of a beast than a beauty. I have no doubt that Domaine Leccia will rise again and become one of the top domaines in Patrimonio. Lucky for us, Jerome Brenot, The Source’s resident Grenouille, sniffed that one out at the beginning of the domaine’s renaissance and we’re now importing his wines. Next Week: Of Corse, Part 3 of 9: Josée and the Alérian Plains

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.■

Spain’s Asturian Coast Maybe I’m just imagining it because I’ve been gone for so long, but everyone here in California seems to smile more and is generally more friendly than I remember. Perhaps it’s because I’m so happy to see people out and about, or maybe it’s because I can finally see people’s mouths again! On the other hand, I am sorry to see the prices of everything climbing so much. It’s been two years since I was last in the States, and I didn’t have a personal American pandemic experience, but the changes that have come about since 2019 are incredible; I hope that the quickly rising inflation will be curbed soon and return closer to a more manageable level. We’ll see… Wine News: The good, the bad, and, well, a touch of the rest… The prices of European wines in general haven’t yet seen any unpredictable increases, aside from those caused by the freight woes that have thus far been counterbalanced by the dollar’s increased strength against the euro over the last quarter. We should also expect some shifts given the increased cost of basic materials like bottles, labels, and corks. These are only a few of the factors that might increase prices, which are proportionately negligible for expensive wines, but for wines of lower price points, the differences will be more noticeable and may push some of them up into the next tier; those $20 retail bottles might soon be $23/$24, and the $9.99s might hit $11.99. Thankfully, we’re not there yet. Prices in regions like Burgundy are always on the rise, while most others remain more stable. Burgundy has for many years suffered greatly on many fronts, what with the Côte d’Or’s hailstorms of the early 2010s, the massive heat in 2018, 2019, and 2020, followed by the terribly difficult 2021 vintage yet on another front was cold and wet, a paradise for fungus. The expectation of fresher and tighter wines with lower natural alcohol that are sometimes paler and even harder in their youth are showing signs of possible irreversible change toward a bolder style, despite the efforts of gentler handling and earlier picking. Many regions that are known and counted on for their snappy, fresh wines seem to be hanging on by a thread to their past iterations, and it’s hard to know how long they will be able to hold the line. Continental/Mediterranean climate wine regions furthest from mountains and oceans seem to be suffering the most. Eventually we will have to accept that our expectations for what was and even for what is, at this very moment, will have to shift. Some regions who in the past could barely find market-friendly ripeness in their wines are finding new success, while others seem to be experiencing a very different style of wine than in the past, or are in a concerning and heartbreaking decline. There are a couple of solutions, including the obvious dramatic change in the way humanity goes about its daily life by making the necessary adjustments to curb climate change (which in itself would be a paradoxical goal for a wine importer to fulfill). Another approach, like any other investment, is to explore a greater diversity with our wine choices in search of newly emerging talents in incredible terroirs that have been lost to the economic crisis of generations past, many of whom work toward the goal of environmental preservation. Anyone who has followed us for a while knows that we’ve greatly expanded our European foothold. Our adventures have led us to a wider range of wines outside of France (our traditionally strongest country) and further into Spain, Portugal, Italy, with a dab here and there in Germany and Austria. Wines from the latter three countries were long supplied to us by other importers, whereas today we import them all directly ourselves. New Terroir Map – Trás-os-Montes, Portugal I’m holding onto many geological maps that we’ve finished so we can release them as nice support material for the arrival of new wines from those regions, and this month we have one for our releases from Trás-os-Montes, in the far northeastern region of Portugal. It’s a remote place near the border of Spain to the north and east with gorgeous earth colors from orange to red to even yellow earth, a rainbow of wild shrubs, and a vast open blue or star-pocked sky, framed by rugged and severely-eroded mountains that are now big hills and short mountains, at best, but are thought to have once been as tall as today’s Himalayas. This is an agricultural land with a massive output of olive oil, grapes, vegetables, fruit trees, and animal products. For our growers there, Menina d’uva and Arribas Wine Company, it’s a land endowed with a natural talent for wine from ancient, indigenous vines that often have dozens of names for the same grape variety. It’s a colorful map because this is a land of great geological variety in a very arid landscape. Enjoy it and read further into this newsletter for more about wines arriving this month from our producers in this region. The Best News: Containers are arriving now! Some of our long-awaited new producers are finally touching down after the first batch of enormously delayed containers, along with some wines that are nearly a couple of years late. A few orders on this boat were dispatched more than six months ago! Last month it was Italian arrivals, this month they’re all from France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal. France is the slowest of all countries door-to-door, and our container from France was launched almost two months before the Iberian container, and they’re landing at the same time. Crazy days... Portugal I know of no other producers in the wine world with a greater commitment to finding extraordinary terroirs in the middle of nowhere than our two from Trás-os-Montes: Arribas Wine Company and Menina d’uva. Most winemakers want at least a little contact with inspired restaurant cooking and access to a good market. Here, there is nothing of the sort for hours by car, and these two are even separated by a forty minute drive, even though they rely on each other when they need to borrow winery equipment and materials. I tip my hat to their pursuit, funded solely by their own pocketbooks and a sincere desire to make something special in the isolation of what appears to be a dying wine region. Menina d'uva's "Ciste" Menina d’uva The new arrivals from French transplant with Portuguese heritage, Aline Domigues, under her Menina d’uva label are the same three cuvées that blitzed through our wholesale channels last year. Her white wine, Líquen, is deeply textured (a classic white profile from the top to the bottom of this country) raised in stainless steel and mostly composed of Malvasia, along with a field blend of ancient varieties grown on her area’s mix of metamorphic rocks—various slates, schists and gneiss. Líquen’s characteristic aromas evoke the sense of highland grasslands with dried flora, rock outcroppings, and open blue skies. It’s overtly savory, which makes it ideal for food; in fact, it’s kinda like food, with its attractive aromas of dried pasta, bread dough, and dried herbs and grasses. The fruit is in the white-flesh spectrum, with pear, apple and cherimoya. Texturally, Líquen is a mouthful despite no intentional skin contact outside of a gentle crush by foot prior to pressing. The high amplitude metal and mineral sensations in its youth are palate staining and resonate with a streak of fresh acidity down the center and back into the throat. The finish is lengthy and activates all points on the palate, from the front, sides, middle, and back. Overall, it’s an extremely pleasant wine and its freshness is a welcome surprise from this region known for its weighty, less interesting, white wines. Aline holding a ciste, the image used for her Ciste label. The first red-colored wine in Aline’s range, Ciste, is a mixture of 70% Bastardo Preta (Trousseau, in France and Brancellao in Spain, among its many other names) and Negreda (known in Spain as Mouratón, Tinta Gorda, and Juan Garcia), and 30% white, with Malvasia, Bastardo Branco, Formosa, and others in minuscule amounts. Here in the two villages of these vineyards, Junqueira and Matela, the soil is more clay-rich and alluvial, which makes for a supple wine despite its high aromatic lift, fabulous textures, and unexpected palate weight—it looks like a lightweight but feels like a middleweight. The grapes are completely whole bunch and co-fermented for only four days and aged in stainless steel. The short time on skins is intended to achieve good fruit and floral extraction without digging too far before carbonic characteristics overwhelm the wine. Aline wants to keep this one truer to the expression of the place without using fermentation techniques that push too much fruit and fermentative aromas to the forefront. The first vintage, 2018, was lights-out delicious. The following vintage was the same, and this year should be even better. In its youth, it’s aromatically effusive and bright, and carries the scents of this arid countryside and its moorland brush and sweet, poppy-like aromas. The fruit characteristics are concentrated around reds, oranges and yellows—think wild and snappy-to-the-tooth cherries, pomegranate, and the bright flavor of early fall Fuyu persimmons. Menina d’uva's vineyard that produces her wine, Ciste. Menina d’Uva’s Palomba is made of 90% Negreda, a vine known to produce big, juicy, dark-colored berries but with surprisingly very little tannin. It’s mixed with other red grapes few outside or even inside of Portugal have heard of, like Uva de Rei, Moscatel Preta, Moscatel Roxo, among others. It comes from five different plots located in the villages of Uva, Mora and Vale de Algoso, and is grown on a mixture of schist and quartz scattered about on the surface of the vineyards. However, a walk through many of the plots revealed stone walls made with gneiss, slate, and schist—a clear indicator that it’s not so easy to say precisely what the bedrock is underfoot in the area, even in small parcels. In the cellar, Palomba was about one-third destemmed by hand, the fermentation lasted for two weeks and was gently extracted throughout by foot. Negreda has a tendency for taking on reductive characteristics and often needs more time in the bottle before it’s time to dig in. Aline’s wine, Ciste, by contrast, is off to the races upon opening. The pressure points within Aline’s wines are deep and fully mouth filling while remaining ethereal and tense. Both red wines mirror their maker and are filled with generosity, joy, calm, energy, and subtle wit. Arribas Wine Company The guys over at Arribas Wine Company, Ricardo Alves and Frederico Machado, continue their reclamation project in the far eastern edge of Trás-os-Montes, always within sight of the Douro River and the Spanish border. Never have I seen two people so committed in mind, body, soul, blood, sweat and youth, to their massive project to protect what remains of this landscape and its more than fifty indigenous grape varieties (and counting!) from big-business wine companies. All their wines are co-fermented field blends from dozens of parcels with so many geologically different spots (mostly igneous rocks and to a lesser degree, metamorphic) along the Douro River where a short length of river acts as the physical northeastern border between Spain and Portugal. Arribas Wine Company parcels scattered below with the Douro River in view. These guys don’t know the proportion of grape varieties that make up their wines because it’s simply impossible to ascertain, but there are few blended grape wines in the world with such terroir distinction as theirs. These wines taste and feel of the summer sun and its freezing summer nights that can swing more than 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Some wines are bright red and with 11.5% alcohol, like the seventy cases produced of Quilómetro; others are inky black and animal but with 12% alcohol and raging freshness, like Raiola, with just over a hundred cases made. Their starting red, Saroto Tinto, is a perfect balance of high and low tones—the result of more than fifty different ancient, indigenous, old-vine varieties farmed in different plots picked together and forged into one masterful and profoundly complex wine that should fall within any curious wine drinker’s budget. The reds of Arribas are tremendous, and while Quilómetro and Raiola are spendy, they are well worth it for the experience. Drone selfie taken in the Trás-os-Montes Arribas Wine Company has new additions arriving on this boat for which I had to push their buttons to increase our allocation: Saroto Branco and Saroto Rosé wines. This dizzying duo is extremely low production—considerably smaller than the already limited Saroto Tinto—with loads of familiar, beautiful nuances, and with characteristics that may be a first for many, even those with a lot of experience with Portuguese wine. Like the rest, both are field blends of uncountable grape varieties and made in a very simple way using a mix of barrel and concrete aging. Interestingly, the rosé is an equal blend of red and white grapes. It’s easy to see that neither of these Saroto wines are fined or filtered, and they represent extremely well made natty (not nasty!) wines. Given the overwhelming demand for orange wines (Saroto white is really an orange wine) and the drastic limit on the rosé, these wines will evaporate quickly, so reach out as soon as possible if you are interested. Spain Manuel Moldes Things would be a lot easier with Manuel Moldes’ wines if we could buy them by the container. The reality is that we can’t, and what we do get disappears in a flash—which is only fun if you're fast on the draw. We cut our teeth some years ago with a good Albariño producer in the south of Rías Baixas, in the subzone of Contado de Tea, just across the Miño River from Portugal’s most renowned subzone of Vinho Verde, Monção e Melgaço. Salnés, home to Manuel’s Albariños, is ground zero for the top wines and producers in the entire region. Most vineyards are within sight of the Atlantic, and its regulating effect and generally cold temperatures supercharge its Albariños with high acidity levels rarely equaled in still white wine, the world over. Manuel (whose friends and family call him Chicho—same nickname for his father and older brother…) is not just a fortunate producer who benefits from the magnificent terroirs of Salnés, he’s also widely considered one of its very best, along with wineries like Albamar, Nanclares, Zárate, and, perhaps most of all (at least for me), Forjas del Salnes’ Leirana wines, a collaboration of the Spanish luminaries Raúl Pérez and Rodrigo Mendes. Manuel’s white wine range is a sure thing, and 2019 is a perfectly-suited vintage for his style: intense mineral, zippy freshness, citrus for days, and gobs of subtle complexities. The first Albariño in his range, 2019 Afelio, comes from a collection of different parcels (more than twenty) mostly grown on granite soils and a smidge of the rare and prized vineyards grown on schist. It’s aged in a mix of tanks and neutral French oak barrels. For those of you who know Arnaud Lambert’s gorgeous Saumur Chenin Blanc, Clos du Midi, from Brézé, this is a solid answer to it from Rías Baixas. It’s simply far too good for its price, and its limited quantity makes it hard to spread around too far. Coming from a very rare bedrock and topsoil composition of severely decomposed schist, 2019 A Capela de Aios is serious business. In contrast to Afelio and its quasi-Clos du Midi characteristics floating high in the ether, this wine has substance that could easily be compared to other Chenin Blancs we work with from Patrick Baudouin, in France’s Anjou, an area with many vineyards on the same rock type developed during the same series of geological events that took place around three-hundred million years ago: the Variscan orogeny. This wine is aged solely in old 500-liter French oak barrels for a year or so before bottling in order to sculpt its powerful body and dynamic power. Even more limited than Afelio, it’s simply a must for anyone seriously into dry Riesling, Chenin Blanc, Chablis, and the Savoie’s ripper, Jacquère. A mighty wine with seriously fine trim. Last in the range of Manuel’s Albariños is the 2019 As Dunas, perhaps the newest and most important unicorn in the world of serious white wine. Manuel, Raúl Pérez and Rodrigo Mendes discovered this small collection of vineyards grown on extremely fine-grained beach sand derived from schist, in the far south of Salnés, overlooking the Ría de Pontevedra and the Atlantic. With an almost entirely new and exciting face of Albariño, these three winegrowers are splitting the parcels and bottling them under each of their own labels. Its combination of fine schist sand and the open face to Atlantic winds renders an Albariño with extremely refined nuances of citrus and slightly golden-brown sweet spices, and an explosive pallet supercharged by acidic freshness and deep salinity. As Dunas, translated as the dunes, is as rare as it is special. With only 120 bottles of this wine imported for the entire US, there simply won’t be enough to go around. Manuel and the As Dunas sands Manuel’s red 2018 Acios Mouros comes from Rías Baixas and is composed of 60% Caiño Redondo, 20% Espadeiro, and 20% Loureiro Tinto. The first two of these grapes have more acid than tannin and bright aromatics, while the latter is darker with an equally high level of matching tannin and acidity. In Rías Baixas and Northern Portugal’s Monção e Melgaço, red wine historically had a majority share of vineyard land, whereas today it’s the opposite. Red wines of Rías Baixas are often terribly acidic and intense with bright aromas, but there are those that manage to wrangle what may have been beasts in another cellar into something more pleasant, aromatically addicting and much more inviting—while still maintaining the vigorous energy of a white wine. Grown on a mixture of granite and schist bedrock, many of the vines are ancient, with some of them on pre-phylloxera rootstocks that are as old as two hundred years. The average age of vines is around fifty, which helps curb what may be excessive energy from the youngest of them. The old and ancient vines also impart a richer mid-palate with sappier fruit—both welcome flesh enhancers for this otherwise straight-shooting red that feels every bit as much a white, save the tannins, red and black fruits, and earthy savory notes accentuated with nuances of bay leaf and spice. 2018 was a much warmer vintage than the surrounding years, which makes this year’s Acios Mouros a standout from any iteration bottled before it. It’s special and as rare as the others in Manuel’s range. Salnés subzone of Spain's Rías Baixas A long-time friendly connection with Bierzo producer José Antonio Garcia resulted in the creation of Lentura, a complete outlier in Manuel’s lineup. In this land known for its rustic, heavy wines, 2019 Lentura is a Bierzo wine led by vibrant natural tension and freshness, red and black fruits, pointed mineral textures, and medium-to-low-weight alcohol compared to most of the wines made in this region. Alcohol and power are easy to achieve in Bierzo; it’s finding balanced elegance that presents the much greater challenge. A little more than three hours toward the east from Rías Baixas, the climate in Bierzo is extreme with a much more continental/Mediterranean influence and very little influence from the Atlantic. The summer days can be as hot as 45°C (113°F) while the nights can drop to 15°C (59°F), making for one of the most extreme diurnal summertime shifts in the entire world of wine. During winter it often reaches temperatures as low as -8°C (18°F), or maybe even colder. Bierzo also claims the distinction of the oldest average vine age within Spain, and quite possibly all of Europe. The mix for the 2019 Lentura is 70% Mencia and 30% Alicante Buschet (the 2018 was 60% Alicante Buschet and 40% Mencia), making for a more elegant version than last year’s Lentura, which was already a delicious, fuller-bodied wine. Its altitude and geologic setting are as broad as its diurnal shift. On the valley floor at an altitude of 300 meters, the vines are grown on clay, sand and large cobbles, while high up on the hills toward the west, the altitude can exceed 1000 meters and is grown on pizarra (slate) bedrock and topsoil. Manuel’s Bierzo is rendered from vines with an average age of seventy years and comes from both the valley floor and high up on the slate hillside. In the cellar it is fermented with 20% whole bunches for five to seven days, followed by aging in an equal balance of stainless steel and old, 300-liter barrels. Manuel really hit the mark in 2019, making this his best yet. Germany Wasenhaus vineyards for Am Kreuz wines, official vineyard name: Staufener Rotemberg. Wasenhaus The much-anticipated new vintage from Wasenhaus is finally arriving! There are a half dozen or more new cuvées added to our roster this year and the problem is that the quantities are so minuscule that it will be hard to satisfy the demand. Despite their obviously superb and game-changing quality, I am so surprised by how well these wines have been received by the market; who would’ve thought that German Spätburgunder and Weissburgunder have become some of the most coveted wines in our entire portfolio? Apologies in advance that we won’t be able to satisfy all requests. For those of you who will acquire some, enjoy this glimpse into the bright future of non-Riesling German wines. There’s a video on our website of Alex Götze taking us through their entire range. Don’t miss it! The boys of Wasenhaus, Alex Götze (left) and Christoph Wolber (right). Weingut Wechsler In recent years, there haven’t been many more exciting new arrivals to our collection than Katharina Wechsler, a superstar-in-the-making German Riesling producer with ridiculous vineyard holdings in the epicenter for dry German Riesling, Rheinhessen’s Westhofen and Flörsheim-Dalsheim. This organic (certified since 2021 vintage) and biodynamic winegrower is the owner of enviable holdings of the vineyard, Kirchspiel, and a small chunk of perhaps the most coveted of all, Morstein. With not only Riesling in play, Katharina loves concocting wines that range from pure pleasure and fun, like Sexy MF, her Pinot Noir rosé that is too delicious to be true, her savory orange wines, to her classically-styled dry wines, like the knockout Scheurebe Trocken, also arriving on this container. However, the most important wine arriving this month (the big cru wines will come on the next container) is her entry-level Riesling Trocken. It will give any of Germany’s top entry-level dry Rieslings a run for the money, but highlights the lifted and elegant exotic characteristics of Riesling only found in this part of the world. There’s a good first batch of it, but we expect it to quickly disappear. Everyone at The Source is happy to finally have German Riesling as a part of our portfolio once again, and we’re so lucky it’s this one! Two of Wechsler’s famous German Riesling crus, Kirchspiel on the left and Morstein on the right. France Rodolphe Demougeot Rodolphe Demougeot’s 2018s and 2019s have both arrived on our French container, and a double-up of Burgundy vintages on the same shipment has never happened for us before (Duband’s incoming wines will repeat the phenomenon!), but we have no choice if we want to get back on track with the normal release schedule and without missing anything. Demougeot’s wines are extremely reliable—dare I say it, predictable, in the best possible ways: overall quality, very measured bandwidth, and no extremes. He has committed to organic farming since the early 2000s and shortly after that his interest leaned toward a sleeker wine profile. This is great news for his 2018 reds, which don’t follow the vintage’s trend of heavier weight. All the wines remain aromatic, with ripeness kept in check and a much higher degree of fresher fruits than can be found throughout much of the Côte d’Or in 2018. 2019 red Burgundy is also a fuller year with perhaps a touch of redder fruit in the mix with the dominant darker fruit notes. The vintage is touted yet another great, but it’s very early to know how great it might just be. In any case, there is plenty of freshness to be found with Demougeot’s wines (as with Duband’s 2019s) and we feel fortunate to have Demougeot on our team; he fits in perfectly. Inside Pommard's Grande Combe, Les Vignots sits on the upper slope in the middle of the picture and the premier crus, La Chanière and Les Arvelets, lower on the slope and in the foreground. Domaine Chardigny Despite their very successful first vintage in 2016, the movement in overall quality of the wines crafted by the brotherhood at Domaine Chardigny has known only one direction: up. Initially, Pierre-Maxime and Victor Chardigny took the reins from their father, Jean-Michel, a French cartoon-character-of-a-man, with his exaggerated French accent, sweetness, accommodating nature and perennial smile. Then the middle brother, Jean-Baptiste, who spent quite a few years as the vineyard manager for Joseph Leflaive’s biodynamic Mâconnais domaine after he finished enology school, finally rejoined the ensemble of this joy-filled family. The quality from the Chardigny boys in the 2019 and 2020 vintages is a notably different level than their first three vintages, 2016-2018, which is partly due to the better balance of these seasons compared to the previous ones, but even more so to their rapid development as winegrowers. Despite the rise in quality of their Beaujolais wines, it’s Chardigny’s white Burgundies that have made the greatest strides. We have taken a stronger position with their Saint-Véran “Vieille Vignes” (from 50-year-old vines) and Saint-Véran “Bois de Fée”, named after the hill itself, facing directly south toward Beaujolais and on the other side with Saint-Amour and Juliénas in view. It’s right at the divergent point of the acidic igneous and metamorphic rocks of France’s ancient Massif Centrale and the limestone and clay that begins precisely at the bottom of Bois de Fée and moves north into Burgundy. What was missing in the past—the complete package from bright fresh notes balanced with the charm and roundness of good white Burgundy—has come into full view with these two. While Côte d’Or whites continue to vault further out of reach for those of us on a wine budget (yes, I too stick to a “realistic” budget despite my fortunate access), these wines raised for a year in 500-liter to 228-liter oak barrels are even more valuable to Chardonnay seekers with a great appreciation for Old World wine. Victor Chardigny thiefing their 2020 Saint-Amour À la Folie 2019 Beaujolais is a wonderful vintage reminiscent of the early 2010s. The fruit is redder and the wines less sun-drenched than 2015, 2017 and 2018. There are certainly many successes to be had between 2017 and 2018, but we are happy to see this more familiar face of Beaujolais once again. Chardigny’s 2019 Saint-Amour Clos du Chapitre continues to dazzle with its trim figure and subtler notes than its counterpart, the 2019 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 they ran most of their experiments on with different aging vessels between concrete, stainless steel, foudre, and small oak barrels (called fûts de chêne, or simply fût, in Burgundy). In 2020, the boys—they all always have such boyish charm, just like their father—really figured this wine out. Tasted out of barrel with Victor and Pierre-Maxime this summer, the 2020 Saint-Amour “À la Folie” was stunning. I asked to taste more barrels to see if it was only the first that was so glorious, and all were the same emotionally invigorating experience. More precise and gorgeous than ever before, all the barrels felt more like Burgundy than Beaujolais! There is a new bottling from the Chardignys that we will begin to import with the 2020 vintage labelled Beaujolais-Leynes, named after their hometown. It’s a Beaujolais-Village appellation wine sourced from vineyards at the previously mentioned 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. Given the shortage of fabulous Beaujolais at affordable price points, we’re bringing in more of this wine to try to fill some of the massive demand. It will easily fall into the right range for many restaurant by-the-glass programs and should hit wine retail shelves at only a hair over $20. For organically certified Beaujolais from a small domaine, that’s a steal. You’ll see…

Our good friend, guru and professional skipper, Dino Giordano, in the Amalfi Coast Every year it’s the same story: How did summer fly by so quickly? It really is hard to accept that it’s already September. After a long road trip visiting friends/producers, I’ve returned to an overload of work, yet I still manage to find time to sit down and work on our newsletter. The truth is, this is my favorite of all the pieces I write. Well, here we go on number seven, and I haven’t missed one since the first rolled out in March of this year. There’s always so much to share and since I rarely get to see anyone other than our producers face-to-face anymore, this is one of the ways of keeping you apprised of what’s going on. I was on the road for six weeks through Northern Spain, Southern France, Northern Italy, Austria, Germany, and back through Champagne, Chablis and Côte d’Or, and then on to my final work stop in Beaujolais—always a good place to have the last bash. It’s hard to keep going after visiting those guys because they often prefer to drink during the day more than work, with the first glass poured at lunch and the river of Beaujolais still flowing well past midnight. During the trip I started a travel journal that I’ve appended to the bottom of the last few newsletters where I recount a bit of the play-by-play. It was one of the best work trips through Europe I’ve had, and with these entries I enjoy sharing my experiences and the things I’ve learned along the route. Nevertheless, the tradition of including the journal with each newsletter will be short-lived. Instead, it’ll be published separately and probably around the middle of each month to help keep these notices shorter and more purely focused on the new goodies we have coming in from Europe. However, there is one addition to this newsletter introducing a new companion I had with me on my trip in the form of a drone. I started filming from the sky this year (and of course I’ve crashed a couple of times already, though I’m getting better) and it’s brought me a fresh perspective on our wine world. It’s totally different from anything I’ve experienced over the years and it’s prompted some new lines of thinking. I’m editing the footage to make videos and aerial photos available for you to browse on our website and an introduction to the endeavor, A Drone’s Eye View, can be found at the bottom of this issue. This month I will release the first in-flight video that covers the right bank of Chablis. Like every other importer, we’ve had to push and shove our way into the line to get our boats full of goods across the Atlantic, and the ocean journeys are only the first half of the problem. The second occurs once shipments enter the domestic freight system, which has been moving just as slowly as the shipping lines. So, what’s happening? Well, prices are now obscene on some fronts (even with our local wholesale delivery services), with cost quotes that are sometimes downright offensive. However, many of our producers have been real champions in their understanding of the global predicament. They have problems too, like simply getting the glass and corks and boxes they need to finish the job with their wines. It’s comforting to know—and more importantly, to feel—that we are all in this debacle together, and we need to make it as easy on each other as possible. We’re all on the mend, but each of us seems to have to work twice as hard as we claw our way back to something that feels like the good ol’ days (of not even two years ago, though it seems like decades), as are all of you who are reading this right now. We can never thank those who support what we do enough. But here’s one more: Thank you for staying with us. Every order we receive means we get to continue to move forward, and we appreciate all of them, no matter how small. Here’s another one of our new terroir maps. This time it’s Spain’s most historically important Galician wine region, Ribeiro, and it’s for that reason that we have more producers there than in any other appellation in the country. You can see the entirety of the map and its support materials on our website at https://thesourceimports.com/terroir-maps/  New Arrivals Chablis premier crus, Montmains (below) and Vaillons (to the far left), and the grand cru slope beyond the village France We have a good-sized shipment coming from both of our Chablis producers. We try not to overlap them but we’re playing catch up with everyone and it’s currently necessary to consolidate orders from single zones. Those who know the wines from Christophe et Fils and Jean Collet know that their styles illustrate a considerable contrast from within this same appellation. I love 2019 Chablis. Why? Because I like to drink bottles of it and this vintage overflows with the things I want out of good Chablis. The 2019s seem closer this year in some ways to the wines of Côte d’Or than in the past. It’s a fabulous freak of a vintage with full ripeness, while still maintaining classic Chablisienne characteristic fruits (citrus, stone fruit pits, a welcoming slight bitterness), yet from a Côte d’Or perspective, I find them closer to pre-sunburn era Corton-Charlemagne, minus the big body. Despite the vintage’s strength being heavier on the thunder than on the lightning, the acidity is still electric and balances the wines out surprisingly well. Some 2019s may even need a few years to really find their groove, a good sign considering some of the previous years (excluding 2017) where the ripeness of the fruit springs out of the glass but the lack of acidity clips its wings. Domaine Christophe et Fils, the more angular and vertical house style between our two Chablis producers, works in a very minimal way with the full range. His 2019 Petit Chablis and 2019 Chablis are arriving while the premier crus will follow later in the season. Christophe’s entry-level wines highlight the striking differences between the left and right bank of Chablis. All his Petit Chablis grapes are sourced from the right bank (east side) of the north-flowing Serein, just above and around the grand cru slope and the hill of Montée de Tonnerre. The vineyards are super rocky, but their wines are generally stouter than those from the left bank. In general, the right bank—and this is to include most of the best premier cru sites and the grand crus, too—are generally less angular while being softer in mineral impressions than the left bank wines because there’s most often a greater topsoil depth and less root contact with the Kimmeridgian marls below, leading to a bigger, flatter punch. This is obviously true when tasting Christophe’s Petit Chablis because it could easily be mistaken for a notch (or two) above its classification on palate weight alone. The Chablis appellation wine from Christophe is always one of the more compelling inside the appellation, and like the Petit Chablis, it comes exclusively from the right bank. In contrast to Christophe’s Petit Chablis grown on the harder Portlandian limestone bedrock, those Kimmeridgian marls from the underlying bedrock in the Chablis classified vineyards come through with more lines and angles, a more intense aroma of that Chablisienne gassy flintiness, and greater texture and core power. I’ve been to Christophe’s vineyards every year since we started working together and my favorite parcels are those found around Fyé, inside the valley that separates Montée de Tonnerre from the grand crus. These Chablis village vineyards are steep and composed of Kimmeridgian marls with nearly microscopic oyster shells that, other than a modicum of organic matter, make up the entirety of the topsoil. It’s interesting that in Chablis many vineyards classified as village appellation sites have just as compelling soil and bedrock structure as many of the premier cru sites, but they are downgraded from premier cru status because of their historically unfavorable exposure. Surely that will change when the previously advantaged vineyards may not be able to produce balanced grapes in coming years. It seems that in the last decade, half the vintages have been on the riper side without the acidic snap present to maintain the freshness expected from this region. Also, those vineyards on the historically unfavorable positions often benefit from their later budbreak than the more exposed sites, as this helps them to miss some of the season’s frost. Domaine Jean Collet continues to knock it out of the park and the list we have coming in looks so good! Here’s the star-studded lineup: Chablis Vieilles Vignes, a single 90-year-old parcel with deep soils—perfect for warmer vintages; 1er Cru Montmains, the most minerally beast of the range due to an almost complete absence of topsoil; 1er Cru Vaillons, usually in my top three of the range of premier crus because of its impeccable balance year in and year out; 1er Cru Les Forêts, the most exotic and alluring of the bunch; 1er Cru Butteaux, the biggest of the premier crus in weight and power from the right bank; 1er Cru Montée de Tonnerre, commonly considered the king of the premier crus, with which Romain Collet always has an unexpectedly light touch; Valmur Grand Cru, a privileged northwest-facing section of the cru that renders wines with a massive body and great freshness and minerality to match; and, finally, Les Clos Grand Cru, sourced from the bottom of the slope on a steep angle, producing perhaps the most well-rounded wine in the range—it truly lives up to the expectation of this celebrated grand cru, though Valmur is its equal, at least at Domaine Jean Collet. The only problem with this much Collet arriving at once (if it could be called a “problem”) is that there are almost too many choices! And every year Collet continues to ratchet up the overall quality of the range. Most of them are certified organic, and for the price, they are a total steal. It’s crazy that Chablis remains so modest in overall pricing compared to Côte d’Or because the quality can be so outstanding on the average with the right year, and 2019 is no exception. Moving further west to the Atlantic seaboard, we have another young vigneron (at least younger than me!) doing wonderful things: Alexandre Déramé’s Domaine de la Morandière, located in Muscadet Sèvre-et-Maine. This month I revamped his profile on our website to bring more context to these quietly mighty wines that have silly-good prices. Unfortunately, Muscadet seems to go in and out of fashion more than other famous French appellations and I can’t understand why. They offer so much for so little, especially when you find the right producers. None of them break the bank, even the most revered from the appellation. And for all the mineral-heavy appellations in the world, Muscadet ranks in the top tier. We have two coming from Morandière, but we should have bought a lot more than what is arriving. (We’re already working on that one…) First, there is the 2019 La Morandière, which is no ordinary Muscadet, although it maintains an ordinary price. The vines are old, mostly around fifty years, and grow on loamy topsoil atop gabbro, a super hard, pale green and black intrusive igneous rock. This nearly unbreakable rock seems to build almost unbreakable wines, and to support this idea one only needs to recall the ageability of those from Michel Bregeon before he retired, which were also grown on gabbro. Next is Morandière’s 2014 Les Roches Gaudinières, Vieille Vignes. This is the crowning jewel and one of the most formidable wines from the entire appellation. It’s a total powerhouse, grown on gabbro bedrock and clay with a lot of gabbro rock in the topsoil. The vines are a mix of massale selections and old biotypes with three-quarters from 80-year-old vines and the rest about fifty years old. This magnesium and iron-rich rock, the clay-rich and rocky topsoil, the old vines and their extremely low natural yields of 25-30hl/ha at most in any given year, imparts dense power that needs extensive aging before being enjoyable to drink. L.R.G is a vinous marvel that needs to be experienced to be understood. Next, we jump to France’s Southern Rhône Valley for a few goodies from the very user-friendly Côtes-du-Rhône appellations. Some from Domaine Pique-Basse are finally coming back in and this is one of our producers whose wines evaporated with their initial arrival prior to the onset of the pandemic. It’s taken a while for us to get some back in stock, but don’t wait if you’ve got a slot to fill in the cellar with CdR, because there is very little available on this container. If Pique-Basse’s owner/vigneron, Olivier Tropet, had vineyards in appellations like Côte Rôtie, Cornas or Châteauneuf-du-Pape, he’d be more likely to garner wide acclaim, but he lives in Roaix, the Southern Rhône Valley’s tiniest Côtes-du-Rhône Village appellation. It’s hard to believe what he achieves within this relatively unknown village with his range of wines that have been organically certified since 2009 and are as soulful as they are exquisitely crafted. The reds are savory, deeply flavored, trim, and laced with a surprising degree of subtlety for the power they possess. Pique-Basse’s La Brusquembille is a blend of 70% Syrah and 30% Carignan and shares the same position around the family domaine as the entry-level Grenache, along with the other that just arrived, Le Chasse-Coeur. Syrah from the Southern Rhône Valley is often not that compelling because it can be a little weedy and lacking in the cool spice and exotic notes that come with Syrah further up into the Northern Rhône Valley. However, La Brusquembille may throw you for a loop if you share this opinion. 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. It’s not as sleek in profile because it’s still from the south, but the savory red and black nuances can be a close match. I love Grenache, and I think it’s a real pity that this extremely noble and versatile grape has lost favor in the current market trend. Olivier picks the grapes for Le Chasse-Coeur on the earlier side and farms accordingly for earlier ripeness with the intention to maintain lower alcohol and more freshness. It’s a blend of 80% Grenache, 10% Syrah and 10% Carignan, and is more dominated by red fruit notes than black—perhaps that’s what the bright red label is hinting at. It’s aged in cement vats (and sometimes stainless steel if the vintage is plentiful) to preserve the tension and to avoid Grenache’s predisposition for easy oxidation. Both Le Chasse-Coeur and La Brusquembille offer immense value for such serious wines. A wine from one of our favorite characters in the southern Rhône area, Jean David, is back. All of Jean’s vineyards have been farmed organically since 1979, making him one of the region’s natural wine OGs. These days everything is made by his son-in-law, Jean-Luc, but they remain true to form with Jean still looking over his shoulder. We only brought in the Côtes-du-Rhône Rouge this time, but we also have the Seguret coming in later this year, or early next. The inside scoop is Jean David’s Côtes-du-Rhône is made completely of Seguret fruit but comes from the younger vines (those with more than fifty years are the only ones he allows in his Seguret appellation bottlings) and for me, is just as thrilling as their range of Segurets. It’s fresh and bright and offers much more on the complexity meter than expected. It’s elegant and lighter than most from this part of France due to the combination of the vines on limestone and sedimentary rock terraces inside the Ouvèze river valley, the cold winds from the mountains to the east, the vigorous and energetic nature of younger vines, and the extremely sandy soils. Typically, it’s a blend of 55% Grenache, 20% Carignan, 10% Syrah, 10% Counoise, and 5% Mourvedre Austria As expected, Peter Veyder-Malberg (pictured above) continues his upward trajectory in quality, but with less quantity than in recent vintages we’re ready with a flurry of apologies that will likely accompany our allocations this year. 2018 was an exceptionally short crop for Veyder-Malberg due to hail, so we decided to bring in his 2018 and 2019 wines at the same time. What many in the industry may expect as a hotter version of Veyder-Malberg’s typical style will be pleasantly surprised by the elegance and freshness of the 2018s. Difficult vintages challenge winegrowers and often turn out to be some of the most compelling wines they make in their lifetime. Peter is proud of his effort here and it shows in the wines. The virtues of the 2019 vintage are clear across all of Austria: it’s unquestionably a banner year for most of the country. It started out warm and dry in the winter, moving into cooler weather with rain in the spring which slowed the vegetative cycle, and in the late summer it cooled again after warm weather conditions in June and July. By September things stabilized and Grüner Veltliner ripened quickly, but the Rieslings benefited from additional hang time with consistent enough weather for the growers to pick when each parcel found its optimal balance. I’ve had the opportunity to taste Peter’s 2019s a few times and drink a bottle of each of the Rieslings and I’ve concluded that 2019 is not to be missed. Dürnstein Castle I have more great news! After many years of contemplating the move while already farming in a higher quality, eco-friendlier vineyard culture than most of his buddies in the Wachau, Martin Mittelbach, the owner of Tegernseerhof, began full conversion to organic farming a couple of years ago! Everything that’s arriving now is from the fabulous 2019 vintage and Tegernseerhof’s lineup already represents perhaps the best value from one of the Wachau’s top growers working exclusively with fruit grown themselves. In the Grüner Veltliner (GV) range, there are three: Dürnstein Federspiel, named after the ancient and extremely charming medieval village, Dürnstein (with its famous castle perched on a rocky crag where King Richard the Lionheart was once imprisoned—yes, the one in the Robin Hood tale), formerly labeled Frauenweingarten (a wise marketing decision to move away from that tongue twister), and grown mostly on the loess terraces between the Danube and the steep hillsides; Superin Federspiel, a single vineyard wine grown just next to the ancient city walls of Dürnstein and the river, on a gentle slope composed mostly of the famous gneiss bedrock thanks to Danube flooding that kept the site mostly clear of loess depositions, making for a more minerally GV; and Bergdistel Smaragd produced from a series of small vineyard parcels scattered throughout the Loiben and Joching areas of the Wachau. The first two are well-known to our historic customer base, and the latter has been a total knockout as an affordable GV Smaragd that’s been gobbled up in by-the-glass programs listing wines at higher price points. Bergdistel demonstrates that blends of great vineyards can be equally, if not more interesting and dynamic than the single-vineyard bottlings (and they’re always priced better). We also have a few Rieslings arriving from Tegernseerhof in 2019: Dürnstein Federspiel, a blend of earlier-picked grapes from all of their top sites (Kellerberg, Loibenberg and Steinertal) making it an absolute bargain bottle of zingy, minerally Riesling for the quality and price; and Bergdistel Smaragd, like GV Bergdistel, it’s Smaragd level grapes taken from vineyard parcels in Loiben and Joching, and offers the fuller array of deliciously complex fruit characteristics that can be achieved by perfectly ripened Wachau Riesling. Malat Vineyard Kremstal wines from the right bank (south side) of the Danube offer some of the best terroir-rich values in the world, and the entry-level range from Weingut Malat stands next to the best. Like the Malat family, the wines are friendly, but also extremely serious when expected to be. This is the first vintage we’ve imported directly from the Malats after working through another importer over the last six or seven years. On this boat, we have the entry-level Grüner Veltliner, Riesling and Pinot Noir (which may present a pleasant surprise for many Pinot Noir fans), all labeled as “Furth” (formerly labeled Furth-Palt). The whites come from the 2020 vintage and express Michael Malat’s style led by freshness and tension. His 2020s are reminiscent of his 2013s, one of Michael’s earliest vintages and may have been his big entrance onto the Austrian scene. It may be hard to find better Austrian Riesling and Grüner Veltliner for the price (of course there are many truly great producers with entry-level wines in this range) from a grower working exclusively with their own estate fruit and who is not a behemoth producer by comparison. The devil is in the details and it’s easier to lose track of that fact, the bigger a company gets. The Malats exhibit focused presence in the vineyard and cellar, and their production is modest when considering much of it is for the two entry-level whites. There’s also a small batch of 2019 Grüner Veltliner Höhlgraben, a wonderful wine from an excellent vintage grown on shallow loess topsoil on granulite bedrock, a high-grade metamorphic rock similar to the gneiss found in other nearby regions. We’re happy to have the Malats back on board after missing most of the last two years. They are such a pleasure to work with and are in constant pursuit of bettering their previous bests. On our website there is an interview I did in Austria with Michael Malat during my summer trip. In typical fashion, as was done with the Thierry Richoux video, I try to stay out of it as much as possible (an impossible task for most of the painfully arduous Zoom videos created during the pandemic) to condense the material and make it as time efficient as possible. Italy Falkenstein vineyards in Italy’s Südtirol Staying on the Austrian Riesling theme is Falkenstein, an Italian cantina with Austrian heritage, both in familial history and the greater influences on their wine style. Borrowing from last month’s newsletter travel journal section on Falkenstein (in case you missed it), it’s a winery located in Italy’s Südtirol/Alto Adige that produces many fantastic different wines (Weissburgunder, Sauvignon, Pinot Noir—all grapes that have been cultivated here for centuries) and many consider the Pratzner family the most compelling Riesling producer in Italy. The vineyard and winery are in one of the many glacial valleys in the north of Italy’s alpine country, with a typical relief of a flat valley floor surrounded by gorgeous, steep mountains, which creates starkly contrasting shades and colors throughout. All the vineyards in these parts must have the correct exposure on northern positions that provide some angle of a south face, otherwise there is no chance of achieving palatable ripeness. The vineyards here are some of the world’s most stunning, and it’s surprising how many are tucked into the valleys of Trentino (the bordering region to the south) and the Südtirol. Arriving from Falkenstein are small quantities Riesling, Weissburgunder, Sauvignon, and Pinot Noir, the latter a surprisingly fantastic alpine version of this celebrated and talented grape that has called Südtirol home for centuries. I recently had a sampling of their range, including a bottle of the 2017 Pinot Noir arriving this month, with a few growers here in Portugal (from Quinta do Ameal, Constantino Ramos, and the guys from Arribas Wine Company) and they were stunned by the spectrum of complexity in all the wines, especially the Pinot Noir. The Pinot Noir is not Burgundian in style (how could it be if grown on metamorphic rock on a mountainside glacial valley?) but it unearths the best quality of the grape: freshness, layered complexity, finesse, and beautiful bright fruit aromas. Sometimes, depending on the day, it shows a little bit of oak upon opening (I suppose that may be the most predictable Burgundian thing about it), but after a little while it’s gorgeous and pure, tucking the wood so far back inside that it’s unnoticeable. Unfortunately, we only have seven cases on the container. Last but certainly not least, and likely the first to fly out the door upon arrival, is the 2019 Riecine Chianti Classico. While it may not be a classico Chianti Classico for the staunch traditionalists, it’s for wine lovers who love delicious things. I’ve visited the cantina a couple of times, and it’s taken all the time in between my first tour and the very moment of writing this for me to realize why their wines are so joyful: it’s the people who work at the cantina! Riecine is a collective of youngsters (again, at least mostly younger than me!) who I’ve literally heard whistling while they work. The setting of this place in one of the higher altitude zones of Tuscan wine country has workers (mostly Italians but I think some foreigners too) who constantly show a welcoming smile and have pep in their step as they work in their sun-filled bubble tucked back into their forest in the Chianti hills. Optimism is in their eyes and ingrained in the company spirit. The possibilities afforded to each staff member to make a personal contribution is apparent in their energy and comradery led by the open-minded and very progressive leader, Alessandro Campatelli. They’re a crew on a mission, working as one to free Chianti Classico from the constraints of its traditional introversion(!), to show that Sangiovese can be exuberant, sexy and sophisticated as it heads for a party instead of a stuffy dinner. Just look at the landing page (pictured below) for the winery’s website and you’ll see the origin of the illumination in these wines: it comes from inside its company’s culture; they’re happy and they’re having fun! Do you care about reviews? I don’t. But some people do, and that’s a bad thing if you like Riecine and you’re not up to speed with what the critics are saying; Riecine gets very good reviews, sometimes great ones, and they keep coming every year. But the 2019 Chianti Classico grabbed the attention of a lot of new buyers who have come out of the woodwork asking us for quantities we simply can’t supply because of the latest press from Decanter (95 points and a gold medal in the 2021 Decanter World Wine Awards, if you must know…). Don’t sit on your hands, especially if you’ve followed this producer already. If you want some, please tell us soon. Riecine Team

Little in the world of wine was more exciting than the recent news that cable giant USA Network is producing a show that may be inspired by wine forger Rudy Kurniawan. According to Variety, “Connoisseurs” will center “around Clay Park … a brilliant con artist who dupes the wealthiest, most powerful people in the country into paying millions for fake wine, but his hustle forces him into a deadly bargain with an organized crime syndicate, puts him in the cross-hairs of the FBI, and unearths the details of a tragedy that fractured his family years ago in Korea.” Attached to the show as lead is Korean-born actor John Cho, best known as Sulu in the recent Star Trek movies. Producers deny that Rudy was the inspiration (issuing the statement, “It’s clear that this show is not based on the real life story of Rudy Kurniawan. The real Kurniawan was born in Indonesia, not Korea.”) Nevertheless, newly found documents make it clear that USA must have been exploring tv shows featuring Kurniawan-inspired characters for a while. The documents, rescued intact from stacks destined for the shredder, were made public last week. Below are concepts that were clearly rejected for one reason or another. The Ducs of Burgundy: Brothers Rudy (John Cho) and Luc Duc are wine hustlers in Burgundy County, Louisiana. They drive around in a custom-fitted red Tesla— the General Leroy—hustling rich wine buyers with their country concoctions. All the while, they barely elude the snorting, stomping French expat Boss Frogg, commissioner of Burgundy County. The fake wines are expertly blended by their overall-clad uncle, while their short-shorts wearing sister Rose, a local sommelier, can always be relied upon to distract the police with a little sex appeal as well as free-flowing glasses of forged wines. This action-packed series features lots of fast paced chases, hilarious wine scams, and slow-motion spraying of Champagne over Rose. Many episodes end with Boss Frog screaming, “They got away again! But at least we got the 1945 Mouton.” With a wink at his deputy, Frogg uncorks a bottle to make sure it’s the real deal. Dagnamit! Two Buck Chuck again! (Spit take, roll credits.) Faking Bad: John Cho plays Walter Blanc, whose career as a brilliant cult winemaker in Napa Valley fell apart after a dispute with a greedy vintner. Exiled, Blanc ends up at a backwater wine college in dusty Eastern Washington, teaching wine to indifferent farmers who have planted wine grapes in their former wheat fields. Blanc’s life is a disaster—he can’t pay the bills and is diagnosed with a serious sulfite allergy. Enter Jesse Drinkman, a local sommelier and former student, who Blanc one day observes duping some customers who ordered 1961 Haut Brion with fake wine. After confronting Drinkman, Blanc says he wants in on the scam, but insists on doing it right. From various locations, including a garage, a trailer, and even a custom crush facility, Blanc brings his expertise to creating new bottles of legendary old wines that even experts have a hard time authenticating. In wine cellars across the country, rumor gets out about a mysterious mastermind known only as Kaiserberg. Tense drama ensues as the pair of forgers find themselves navigating an increasingly dangerous world, pursued at every turn by adversaries, including crusading master of wine, Maureen Frowney and vengeful hacker Don Cornas. Winos: Pablo Echezeaux is a humble vigneron of the Hautes Côtes de Bourgogne. Every day he looks down at the vineyards of Vosne-Romanee, seething with envy about the fine lives those privileged, aristocratic producers have. At some point, he gets the idea that he can blend his own inferior wine with older stuff from the local villages and pass it off to hungry American auction houses as DRC or Leroy. Soon the Americans can’t get enough! Echezeaux expands production, creating huge outdoor bottling facilities in the middle of remote vineyards and ruthlessly dealing with rivals, who include gray marketeers and negociants. As the Feds try to shut him down, Echezeaux must find increasingly creative ways to smuggle his fake wine into the US. He grows rich and, with shocking ease, is invited into Burgundian high society. Here he is at lunch with Jean-Charles Boisset. There he is in photo ops with Burghound. All the while, the village of Vosne-Romanée is turning into one of the most violent places in the Côte de Nuits. Vineyard workers find a severed head in Richebourg. A white van burns on the Route de Grands Crus. Meanwhile, special agents begin to close in. Rudy Donovan: Rudy Donovan (Jason Cho) is wine ‘fixer.’ When Hollywood’s elite needs that fancy bottle, he is on call, and somehow always comes to the rescue with the perfect wine. While Rudy is clothed in a certain hardboiled glamour, he has a darkly criminal past, and no one knows exactly where he gets all this old wine. His two brothers, one an alcoholic sommelier and the other a washed-up wine writer, alternately complicate and animate his life. It’s all copacetic, however, until Rudy’s father, Hardy Rodenstock, just released from 20 yrs of hard time comes to town to get in on the action. The Trellis: Set in gritty Lompoc ghetto, a Rudy-led gang of wine forgers battle against other gangs for control over the fake wine trade, while the well-meaning but dysfunctional Lompoc PD struggles to bring them to justice. Honest wine ghetto winemakers struggle to keep their nobility amid a growing epidemic of fake Pinot Noir and wanton violence. Orange is the New Rosé: This show takes place inside the maximum security prison for wine criminals, including Rudy (Jason Cho). Watch as the characters navigate the complicated, dangerous environment of a wine prison block, trying desperately to survive, much less make parole. See them navigate the turf war being waged by the ruthless prison gangs—Special Club, IPOB, VDP—while at the same time fermenting fruit cocktail into fake Sauternes, selling fraudulent wine futures, and pairing cellblock hooch with prison food.

I was jolted awake in the morning by a banging on the iron gate of my ancient Airbnb, followed by more knocks on the front door. I got out of bed in just my boxer briefs and immediately saw three police officers in black fatigues just outside the window on the tiny porch. One glanced over at me, and I stood there exposed and stunned, my pre-coffee brain failing to process what I was seeing for an instant before I dodged to the side and out of sight. I fumbled to pull my pants on, hopped on one foot as I tried to get my second leg in, slid into a T-shirt, opened the door and blinked at them in confusion. They politely yet tersely informed me that the spot where the owner of the Airbnb told me to park actually belonged to a local resident and I had to move the white wagon or I would be towed. My weak protests got me nowhere and I stumbled out to the car and drove from the fortress, down to a public lot at the bottom of the hill. Then I marched back up under a dark cloud full of assorted keyboard epithet symbols as I cooked up a scathing review that I knew I’d never be able to get Ted to write about the Airbnb host. I checked my phone when I got back and noticed that I had forgotten to set my alarm the night before and the police had actually awakened me at exactly the time I would have set if I’d remembered. I had just enough time to make some breakfast before heading back to Nico’s house. And just like that, annoyance turned to gratitude toward those lovely members of the gendarmerie. The day before, we had stopped at a convenience store where I bought some eggs, so farm fresh that they were covered with feathers and specks of what I hoped was dirt. This would never fly in the states and my cynical brain had me convinced that it was done purely for effect in France, a rural marketing tool. I scrambled some, brewed coffee from the pods the host provided (so generous, so thoughtful), and vacuumed it all up. I got to Nico’s place right after they had all finished breakfast. Leticia asked me if I’d like some cereal as she pointed at a wide selection of colorful boxes. I said I’d just eaten some eggs and both she and Nico shot me a strange look. Ted commented on my determination to eat them for breakfast every day and I was surprised to learn that this was unusual over there; they’re actually more likely to eat them for lunch or even dinner. I did take her up on a coffee though, and drank it down in one gulp so we could get back on the road. After goodbyes, hugs, handshakes and promises to see each other again in just a few days, we jumped into the white wagon and headed west for Côte-Rôtie, to meet with a big name in that region. He was a bit of a celebrity and a hard man to connect with, so Nico was going to pull some strings to get Ted in the door. But first things first: we had a midday meeting set with someone from the other end of the spectrum, a man who was officially the smallest producer in Côte-Rôtie. We passed through Vienne, a picturesque city of new buildings and old, as well as many crumbling with antiquity. Every style seemed to adhere to the beige limestone and terra cotta rooftop construction of so many towns we’d passed through, with a few ancient church spires and castle turrets in the distance. The flat and green Rhône river drifted imperceptibly beside us, placid as a long thin lake. Just a couple miles south, we entered the commune of Ampuis. The road took us along the base of the steep Côte Brune hills, where vineyards stretching into the horizon grow at angles as steep as forty-five degrees. Côte-Rôtie is split up into two sections according to soil type: the Brune (brown) hills are chock full of iron-rich schist, while its sister hill, Côte Blonde, is pale in some parts with granitic soil, also mixed with schist. The sharp angles preclude the use of machines and must all be worked by hand. In the blinding hot sun of that day, I was daunted by the idea of pruning and picking under that relentless exposure. We entered the small town of Condrieu, a wash of peach, beige and gray stone and concrete, like a pale sun-bleached Mediterranean village. As we weaved through its narrow streets and alleys, we jockeyed with other swerving drivers for a parking spot; there was a farmers market in a small town square nearby, so it got a little cutthroat and took a while. Once on foot, we strolled down the narrow, shop-lined, cobblestone walkways, grateful for the coolness of the shade. The appointment prior to the later mission with Big Name was in a small courtyard of ivy-covered walls, and ancient wooden doors with old iron fittings marked the spot: the cave of Pierre Bénétière. Inside was a minimally illuminated cellar with splotchy concrete and old stone walls and a low brick ceiling. A gravel-covered floor crunched loudly under our feet. Bénétière has a reputation for being a bit of a recluse and other rumors even painted him as taciturn and distant, so we proceeded with caution. Ted warned us not to take too many photos, like the vigneron was some sort of wild animal that might scare easily, or take quick offense like a primadonna. Pierre greeted each of us with a warm handshake, intense eye contact and a glimmer of amusement twinkling in his eyes. He has a long, broad gray beard that blends in with the gray U of hair circling his shiny, tan pate and but for his gray jeans and the thermal vest over his t-shirt that day, he definitely resembled some fictional version of a hermit. He spoke nearly perfect English, yet still excused himself for his lack of proficiency—I got the distinct impression that while his accent was spot on, his vocabulary was a little limited or rusty. Ted immediately let him off the hook with his solid French. Then he found out Andrea was from Chile and started speaking fluent Spanish with her, something that came easily since his wife was from Spain. Maybe because of this, he showed absolutely no objection to her taking as many photos as she liked, so she clicked away. I might have just been imagining that he shot me a quick look of dismay when I snuck one, like I was still limited by that early warning from Ted and it just seemed that Andrea’s Spanish garnered her favoritism. Where was the cranky loner? This guy was charming, witty and friendly in the shoot you a grin as he gives you the side-eye sort of way. I began to think that the early reports of his behavior were the result of visits on off days, or maybe he just didn’t like those visitors that much. He handed us glasses and got his long glass pipette, started pulling from the aging barrels, and treated us to tastes. The wines were big and earthy, young and blunt, with obvious promise. We sipped and swished, then followed his lead by spitting right onto the gravel floor. He and Ted talked about some missed communications, some email or other that had gone without a response. Pierre admitted that he wasn’t much for correspondence or social media; in fact, he doesn’t even have a website for his business. Ted told me that two years earlier he had promised a few cases of wine to The Source, but never fulfilled the order. Then Jérôme Brenot, from La Grenouille Selections and the point of contact for Bénétière, made a second visit again a couple years later and the order was still sitting there in the corner of the dock. On this day, Pierre quickly made promises to Ted that he would get those cases going, along with some from the new vintages. All of this made it clear that what people mistook for reclusion and evasiveness was really a case of frustrating yet comical disorganization. And to be clear: he has no interest in changing and he doesn’t need to, because his wines are extraordinary; he’s like the absentminded genius who accomplishes great things but at the end of the day can’t find his car in the parking lot. His assistant ducked in to relay a message, and when he left, Pierre informed us with a wink that we had just met his Paduan. (For those who don’t know, a Paduan is a Jedi student learning under a master in the Star Wars movie franchise.) I’m a movie buff and this man was speaking my language. He took us over to where a few of his bottles stood in line on an upended barrel in the corner. Andrea, Ted and I gathered around as he popped corks and poured. He asked Ted if anyone ever told him he looked like Jude Law. Ted shrugged and said, “maybe?” Then Pierre turned to me and asked if I was from Ireland and said, “You Irish… A bit crazy, all of you, yes?” I responded that no, I was American, but he smile-frowned like he didn’t believe me. At any rate, my heritage is written all over my face and hair, so how could I argue? Pierre told us that his parents were wine merchants who sold to local businesses, and he was the first in his family to go to enology school and make his own wine from land that he bought, tore up and replanted himself in the 1980s. He produces three wines from two holdings in Côte-Rôtie and one from just to the south in Condrieu. His Cordeloux label comes from the granitic soils of Côte Blonde, while his Dolium comes from Côte Brune and is only available in the best of years, when it yields only two barrels. His Condrieu comes from less than two hectares from Le Riollement, above the famous Château Grillet. They were all miles away, so there was no time to jump into a car and tour them like Ted likes to do (and I could see his wheels turning as he tried to figure out how we might fit it in), so Pierre grabbed a beat up and dirty plastic topographical map from where it leaned against the wall and pointed out each location like a geography teacher. As we tasted, Ted raved that the 2015 Côte Brune was “floral and earthy, savory but not too salty and not sweet.” Pierre uses SO2, but the wines show clear signs of an otherwise natural process. He’s one of the few producers who use the stems, and Ted said they express “a sleek, elegant and spare quality that shows no signs of the superficial power that comes with too much fertilization of the soil.” Ted waxed on: we were “drinking the iron in the soil and the toil of the people.” There were “exotic tastes like green and blue notes, spice with juniper and lavender and a bit of pepper.” When we all brought up how well the wine would pair with food and Ted mentioned the great dairy in the region, Pierre offhandedly responded, “I’ll start drinking milk when cows start eating grapes.” Ted then complimented him on his simple labels and Pierre said, “yeah, they’re not like the other guys’, who seem to be selling shampoo.” With no time spent in his vineyards, the trip was the shortest one so far. I know I’m not just speaking for myself when I say that I wished it could have been longer. “Like his wines, he isn’t flamboyant, but he’s fun and smart, earnest, with a playful side,” Ted said. He’s fond of finding parallels between the makers and their products and he vowed to go back and just hang out with him at some point. I shook Pierre’s hand as we left and there he was again with that intense eye contact. He said, “you’ve got to look someone in the eye to tell who they really are.” I heartily agreed and he squinted at me sideways, shook his finger and said, “Irish,” as if that somehow summed me up in a nutshell. I laughed and conceded the point. Later we would go on to meet the famous Big Maker in the region, which turned out to be a comedy of errors and a bit of a letdown, especially after the pleasant surprise that was our encounter with Pierre Bénétière. But that's a story for another time... Next: A Breather in the Magical Land of La Fabrique

As evening approached, we were on our way to see Ted’s good friend Nico Rebut, a former sommelier of great talent and repute who has since become a very successful wine distributor in Paris. Each week, he makes the five-hour drive or train ride from the Alps to Paris, his primary market and where he also consults quite a few restaurants on the development and maintenance of their lists. He and Ted met through a connection with one of Ted’s favorite French sommeliers in Los Angeles, Emmanuel Faure and they became fast friends. Back when Nico was working at Alain Ducasse, the Michelin three star in Monaco, he was well on his way to being a top contender for Le Meilleur Sommelier de France, an annual competition with one champion. But Ducasse himself forbade him from pursuing the goal, insisting that he concentrate on his work at the restaurant instead of other accolades; Ducasse clearly wasn’t a fan of sharing the limelight. Nico moved on to Maurice, another three star, where his fame grew. Ted has met sommeliers as far away as Austria who know him personally, or at least by reputation. Nico’s house in the Alps is a stylish, newly constructed modern structure with a minimalist front and glass back, on a hillside overlooking a stunning view of the long valley in the Savoie commune of Mercury, just outside of Albertville. The mountains across the way were still snow-capped in late spring, and a snowy Mont Blanc was visible about thirty miles to the northeast. We were greeted at the door by Nico, a wiry man of medium height, with a characteristically French aquiline nose and thin lips, and an intense but friendly gaze. His wife Leticia, charming and cute, with big surprised-looking blue eyes, beckoned us in as their two daughters danced about in pajamas. The little girls shyly waved hellos before Leticia ushered them upstairs to bed. We sunk into a couple of white modern sofas that were much more comfortable than they looked, as Nico poured big glasses of white Burgundy. There was some local cheese on the table next to a big bowl of spicy Doritos, which I thought a peculiar accompaniment and laughed at, then immediately started to inhale. Ted and Nico caught up and talked shop as I took in the lovely view and well-appointed modernist surroundings. There was a huge wine scent essence kit open in display on the fireplace mantle and I wondered if Nico could nail them all, then immediately assumed that of course he could. I have a set a quarter that size and regularly get half of them wrong when I practice. Nico said that he was having some difficulty with an employee and lamented the difficulty of firing someone in France; it can only be done after multiple egregious events, not for lack of performance. The laws there are so on the side of the employee that if someone gets hurt or sick, the employer still has to pay them for as long as they are out. They went on to talk about how very few salespeople (like Nico’s guy) make commission in France, that almost everyone is on salary. As with restaurant servers who don’t work for tips like they do in the States and service suffers without the incentive, the same thing happens with salespeople who end up coasting for their paycheck. Then employers like Nico are stuck with the dead weight for the duration. Leticia joined us and I remarked on the snow on the surrounding mountains and asked if they skied. She said they do, a bit, Chamonix on Mont Blanc being so close and a great resort. But though there was still some visible snow, very little had fallen during the season, so the conditions weren’t great. Of course I was asking about this, since skiing is a major preoccupation of mine and I’ve read about Chamonix since I was a kid. It’s definitely on my bucket list. Night had fallen and I watched Nico throw some big steaks on a grill on his expansive deck, in the dark, as Ted and Andrea chatted with Leticia inside. It was cold and windy, so there would be no eating at the nearby patio table. There was a tiny vineyard on the hill beside his house from which neighbors made small batches of their own wine. He leaned over as if the someone might be listening and whispered, “of course it’s terrible.” Leticia had put out sautéed squash, a couscous salad, some local sausage and yellow potatoes. It was a simple, rustic meal accompanied by some great wines that I gulped to help soothe my jetlag-induced delirium; I was fading fast. But it was fun to watch Ted and Andrea chat with these close friends so far from home. Whereas I’m somewhat introverted and can count my good friends on two hands, they’re so socially active that they have a huge network of people all over the world who would gladly have them over to dinner at a moment’s notice. I asked Leticia how she and Nico met and she said it started when she was a teller at a bank in Paris. He always made sure to go to her window and it became a regular occurrence, with their conversations getting longer and more intimate each time. When he finally asked her out, she agreed, in large part (she joked, that night in their home) because she had seen his bank balance. Everyone had a big laugh and of course I thought this sarcasm-tinged honesty charming as hell. But then I shuddered at the thought of any woman I was interested in seeing my own balance. (Don’t pursue a writer for their money is a cardinal rule.) I finally caved to fatigue and excused myself before desert. Ted and Andrea would stay the night at Nico’s, while I headed over to an Airbnb in the nearby town of Albertville, the host site of the 1992 Winter Olympics. I took the rental car and it was my first time driving in France. The last time I had driven in Europe was in Italy, back when it was all rumpled paper maps in my navigator’s hands. Tired as I was, I was in no mood for any of that and was incredibly grateful for the guidance of the droning navigation lady in the dashboard. My room was in a stone and concrete cottage guarded by an arched iron doorway in a narrow stone-walled tunnel. It was one of many offshoots from a rutted dirt road just wide enough for a one horse cart that wound through more stone and concrete structures, some with cylindrical sections and conical roofs, all enclosed by a towering stone wall with a huge iron gate for an entrance. Basically, I was staying in some sort of medieval fortress; the only thing missing was a moat. As I plugged in my phone and shivered in the chilly and dim room, I realized that I had no cell reception or wifi. But being in the Dark Ages was fine. I was asleep inside of five minutes. Next: A Rude Awakening and Pierre Bénétière, a Hermit Full of Surprises

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.

Everyone in the wine business got their start with a few memorable bottles, and believe it or not, mine were from California, back when I was nineteen and had just moved to Arizona from Nowhereville (Kalispell), Montana. It doesn’t matter where you start, you’ll always have a soft spot for the wines you got to know in those early years. One of those wines happened to be Zinfandel from great producers in California, like Williams Selyem, Ridge and Rafanelli. Back in the mid-90s, Zinfandel was hotter than Pinot Noir, Syrah, and probably only fifth in the fine wine division behind Cabernet, Merlot, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, with Viognier having a temporary uptick. The trends in California seem to change from one season to the next, probably more frequently than in any wine region in the world. But as a standalone economic global power, California residents consume enough of the state’s wines to keep it booming regardless of what trends come into play. One of my closest friends, psychiatrist Reuben Weinenger, once told me, “when you are surrounded by chaos, you need to stand still.” Wine trends can be chaotic, and there are producers who follow them and those who stay their own course. These producers who work in the eye of the storm make small changes along the way, but instead of executing radical alterations to fit the market, they focus their energies on mastering their craft. This way, they’re able to grow while keeping their identity intact. The Rafanelli’s are one of those rocks from the annals of old-school, traditional California wine. They’ve hardly changed a thing over the years, and every bottle brings me back to the first time I tasted them in 2001, when I started working at Spago Beverly Hills with the late, legendary Master Sommelier, Michael Bonaccorsi. Smack dab in the middle of the age of extraction, Mike remained committed to that old California taste and Rafanelli filled the Zinfandel department perfectly. Zinfandel’s reputation needs a reboot from its association with over-extraction, monstrous alcohol and marmalade fruit, not to mention good ol’ White Zinfandel, a trend that has thankfully come and gone from the fine wine world—in the 90’s even the very best restaurants had it on the list. If you’re going to add Zinfandel to your list then you should double down on your Aussi Shiraz selection too, right? No, not really. (From what I understand there is a reboot is happening Down Under too.) California Zinfandel remains California's unique heritage grape and some of the younger winemakers who’ve gone from one trend to the next are starting to quietly play with it again. (I won’t name names so they can surprise everyone when they’re ready to announce it themselves.) To better know the future we need to be conscious of the past and there is a reason why legendary California producers like Joseph Swan, Burt Williams from Williams Selyem and Tom Dehlinger—to name a few—made Zinfandel from Sonoma County alongside their great classically-styled California Pinot Noirs, long before Cali Pinot went sideways. And of course, we cannot fail to mention the fabled Zinfandel wines from the Paul Draper era at Ridge—some of the most compelling wines I’ve had from California. At The Source, we’ve picked a few fights in our market this last decade. I was literally laughed at by a future Master Sommelier for telling him that dry German Riesling was going to become a hot commodity—at the time we were selling Keller, Schönleber and Clemens Busch. We fought the good fight as we pitted the elegant Nebbiolo based wines from Alto Piemonte against the behemoths of the Langhe’s Barolo and Barbaresco back in 2010 with Tenuta Sella, when Cristiano Garella was in control of the estate and the wines had a short but remarkable run between the 2004 and 2008 vintages. Now there's a gold rush to Northern Piedmont, and dry German Riesling is on every well-rounded wine list. So, here we go again… Rafanelli is clearly a legendary Zinfandel producer, with the distinction of being fourth generation winegrowers in the Dry Creek Valley, and they’ve been making Zinfandel since the 1950s. When we agreed to work together, Shelly Rafanelli (the winemaker) brought me a couple bottles of old Zinfandels (1992 and 1989) her father dug out of his personal stash for me, and they were of the last bottles I drank before I moved to Italy this September. I was instantly transported back to the earlier years of my love affair with wine—the perfect sendoff to the country his ancestors emigrated from four generations ago. This summer I had dinner with Burt Williams, the long since retired wine alchemist of the historic Williams and Selyem winery, and told him that we started working with the Rafanelli family. His face lit up and he said, “That’s great. They were always one of the best.” ______________________________________ We sell the Rafanelli family's wines only to our top restaurants in California, but if you are not in the restaurant business and want the wines you can buy them directly from them at https://www.arafanelliwinery.com/, or go to many of California's top restaurants and enjoy them over dinner. (They are not usually sold to retailers anywhere in the country, except those that buy directly from the mailing list themselves.)

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.”

I’ve dreamt of filming the Wachau’s section of the Danube River gorge for years, and even proposed to Emmerich Knoll, a good friend and the current president of the Vinea Wachau, about ten years ago to rent a helicopter (before drones were really around). The idea was to film the whole thing to use for a US tasting tour with top Wachau producers and all their importers under one roof, kind of like it was in Austria’s golden age when US importer, Vin Divino, had just about everyone important from the Wachau and Austria, outside of what at the time was a much smaller portfolio of Austrian producers from Thierry Theise. Once Vin Divino sold, the flow slowed to a trickle (it seems, because I haven’t heard of any tastings happening like the ones I attended twenty years ago) and left new generations of sommeliers and wine professionals a little in the dark on the subject. I was lucky to join those tastings Vin Divino put on; they were like a miniature version of Austria’s fabulous semi-annual trade show Vie Vinum. It really opened my eyes. Emmerich liked the idea of the filming from up high, but it never materialized. Hard Choice: Schnitzel or Kebab? Rain was in the forecast, bad weather for the drone. After about thirty minutes of good footage with ominous clouds overhead, Martin Mittelbach, the owner of Weingut Tegernseerhof and my host for the day, headed over to his family’s heuriger (a wine country tavern usually owned and operated by a wine producer) for a bite. Of course, it would be wiener schnitzel for me—another one of my food obsessions—and Martin’s partner in crime, Eva, had already told her friends and the staff that that is what I would order. It’d been too many years since my last, and I wasn’t about to let another meal pass by if a good one was available. I am always on the hunt in Austria for the best wiener schnitzel experience. It’s not an extraordinarily complex meal, in fact it’s quite simple. But I like simple things too. The best food and wine come in simple forms but have someone’s all put into perfecting its simplicity. I was in a famous restaurant in Vienna known for its traditional wiener schnitzels, always made with veal, never pork, the latter of which should be more properly listed as schwein schnitzel (always ask if what’s on offer is really made with veal because some are pork), and I asked for some spicy mustard to go with it. The waitress, probably in her mid-forties but looked mid-fifties, grimaced with a look of disgust—that look would mark the last time that request was ever made in Austria to accompany my schnitzel, even though I always want it, especially when they are a little on the dry side. I have the same obsession with döner kebab (kebap) and Turkish pizzas, also Mexican food, surely my favorite overall hand-held food along with burgers. On average, the best kebaps are to be found in southern Spain, Austria and Germany, but I had one in Dublin once with ingredients that ranked up there with the very best but didn’t bring it home in the flavor department as much as others I’ve had elsewhere. The most satisfying I’ve ever had (and probably the cheapest, too) was in Granada, Spain, at a tiny place on a side street just off a grungy, busy square, that served the “Taj Mahal.” The Taj Mahal at this place (a name I’ve not seen since in a kebab place) is a perfect balance of big-time spicy heat and a coolant of herb-rich, cold yogurt with crispy but still-soft-on-the-inside meat carved from the spinning cone of stacked slices, and a freshly baked flatbread to roll it all up. I was able to find this place again by memory thirteen years after I went there the first time in 2004. I was surprised that it was just as good as I remembered. I don’t remember the name of the place and still can’t find it on a map, but I know where it is once I get into Granada’s city center. Unexpectedly, one of my favorite schnitzels came from a restaurant in Santa Barbara, California, where I lived for fifteen years, called the Dutch Garden—commonly referred to as the “D.G.” by locals. They were a greasy mess and not really so traditional because they used panko as the crust, but it was my favorite schwein schnitzel, even when compared to most in Europe. Sadly, during the pandemic, this place that locals had seen as an institution closed down permanently after seventy-five years, and I didn’t even get to have a farewell schnitzel. What a great loss to the restaurant scene in that town. It was probably the most underrated Santa Barbara restaurant that served real home cooking like I think my German ancestors would’ve loved. It was kind of a dumpy place, but the food was as heartwarming as it was artery clogging. The weisswurst, potato salad and sauerkraut all warrant honorable mentions. Rest in peace, D.G… After I scarfed down the schnitzel accompanied by the last of a bottle of 2010 Tegernseerhof Steinertal Riesling Smaragd (my favorite in Martin’s range), we headed back to the winery to do a little more filming, including an interview where he talks about each of his wines. Some people are great on camera because they act naturally. For Martin, it evolved into a cheesy comedy sketch, like an old show filled with exaggerated, corny pitches on each wine, and a constant barrage of interruptions from his family and friends in search of the next bottle. He’s a hard one to pin down in one spot for long because he has so much energy that explodes into random bursts of laughter, followed by a completely serious face. He did well enough on the filming, and now that you know a little backstory, you can check out the interview on our website soon to watch as he tries to contain himself with a squirmy attempt to act normal, whatever that is. He’s one of the most fun guys we know in Austria, and a tireless host that goes out of his way to make sure you are taken care of, no matter how many days you happen to be there. Martin has changed his game in recent years by converting his vineyards to organic culture. This is a big break from the older members of the pack in the Wachau who still hold a firm grip on many in the younger generation as they try to keep things from veering too far from the path they rebuilt relatively recently, after the Soviets left Austria in 1955. These parents of many producers grew up in tough times and brought things back from ruin, so it’s understandable that they want to preserve what they worked so hard for. But Martin’s father has been retired now for a long time and Martin has been uninhibited in calling the shots at Tegernseerhof since he was in his mid-twenties. The Wachau has been one of the most conservative and impenetrable regions for welcoming more eco-friendly farming. Though many still considered to be Austria’s preeminent wine region, it’s pretty far behind the curve on progressive and ecological considerations, and yet it is moving in the right direction, albeit slowly. In fact, they may rank last in all of Austria’s most important wine regions for percentage of organically farmed (or better) vineyards. Most growers in the appellation still use herbicides and it’s easy to see it in the spring when the first sprays are made that make the vineyards look like a hair-dye session gone terribly wrong. Most of the terraced areas of the Wachau are impossible to plow, so it’s either done by hand, small machine, or herbicide. From an economic perspective with regard to labor, herbicide is clearly the most efficient and inexpensive on steep terraces or flat land. Much of the vineyard land in the Wachau bears surface level markings inside its vineyards of continued herbicide use and it seems most growers won’t change this until they’re forced to. I’m happy to say that both producers we work with in the Wachau—the other is Veyder-Malberg—are organically farming, and they are two among less than ten percent of the entire appellation who are doing so (and I think I'm being generous with this number). It’s too bad that the region is so far behind the times compared to so many of the world’s great wine regions, especially since they remain the flag bearer of great wines in a country with a large organic and biodynamic culture everywhere else, though this dominant position may be diminishing. I’m excited for Martin to have broken through on organic farming (but the truth is, he was very close in practice for so many years prior) and onto another chapter that will hopefully set an example for his friends to pull their head out of the rocks, tell dad to chill out, and let the beautiful surrounding nature have more say in the characteristics of the wines. The following morning, I had an early visit with biodynamic guru, Birgit Braunstein. She’s 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, she lives the 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 you feel the reverence she has for everything around her, including you. She’s our Austrian Mother Goose. Of course, we did some drone filming. The producers love it. They get to see their vineyards from a vantage they may have never seen, and, as mentioned in the first segment of this 2021 Travel Journal series, sometimes it takes half the drone’s battery life to figure out which parcels are theirs from four hundred feet up. However, Birgit’s are easier because they are the greenest patches, and when I was there, purple too, due to a huge bloom of flowers between the rows. The spring rains stopped the week before I arrived in Austria and there was a drastic heat spike that supercharged growth everywhere. The herbs and flowers between Birgit’s rows were jungles and almost impossible to walk through, with vine shoots growing like tomato plants on an overdose of nitrogen and sunshine. After the high-flying action, we went back to the winery and set up for a video interview with Birgit, so she could talk about her range of wines. Inside, there were a lot of mosquitos, bigger than I’ve ever seen, the size of mosquito hawks. They seem to thrive in her refreshingly cool tasting room constructed of rock. It’s no surprise to have these prehistoric-sized mosquitos in these parts because the Neusiedler See (Lake Neusiedl), a massive, shallow lake with a maximum depth around six or seven feet is close, and it’s a perfect breeding ground for this insect that seems to serve no purpose other than to disturb our sleep, make us itch (even if we just see them or hear them prior to their attempted jab), though I suppose that they really exist as a primary food source for a lot of birds and bats. One was just hanging around on Birgit’s head through much of the interview and I wanted to reach across the table to smack it off of her but it just stayed in her hair, where it seemed to get lost. While Birgit is most known for her Blaufrankish red wines and atypical but very well-done experimental wines, the shock wine of my tasting with her was her entry-level Chardonnay, simply labeled Chardonnay Felsenstein. It’s grown entirely on limestone, and there’s no doubt about it given its aromas and taste. It’s impressive and was more fun to drink than almost any Mâconnais Chardonnay I’ve had in recent years that are even close to this in price. It’s not at all overplayed in any direction, but rather highlights Chardonnay’s best assets when grown on pure limestone: freshness, x-factor, tense white fruit, and mineral sensations for days. I don’t expect the world to look toward Austrian Chardonnay merely on account of this one, but for those on a budget looking for a real terroir experience at a reasonable price, this is one to not miss. Another Chardonnay of equal impression and value is from La Casaccia, a cantina in Asti whose vineyards grow on pure chalk. Birgit’s zillion different cuvées of experimental wines are mostly sold in Austria. I like a lot of them because they are pleasurable with solid terroir trimmings. But I get the sense that the global market isn’t quite ready for Austrian glou glou. Maybe it’s too weird for people to imagine Austrians loosening up so much and breaking out of the hyper-sophisticated, buttoned-up culture with which they are associated—while some parts of Germany made the leap a long time ago, especially Berliners. But make no mistake, Austrians know how to party. It’s just hard to imagine in more quiet places like Burgenland. The following day, I dropped in on the boys over at Weingut Weszeli, Davis Weszeli (on the left) and his winemaker, viticulturist, and right-hand man, German ex-pat, Thomas Ganser (on the right). After some drone-time, we did a vertical tasting of the last four years (2015-2018) of bottled Grüner Veltliners and Rieslings from all their cru wines. What a treat that was, and how eye-opening! From the sky with all the twists and turns and hills covered in green vines everywhere, it was almost impossible to navigate Kamptal’s vineyards by air. I shot from a position standing in the famous vineyard, Seeberg, and managed to grab some good shots of the more famous hillsides of Heilingenstein and Gaisberg to the southeast. Here’s a big deal you probably didn’t know: Weszeli’s cru wines spend three years in large wood casks before bottling. Almost nobody does that and judging by how seriously complex their wines are, it’s strange that it’s so uncommon. Many years ago, when I worked in a limited capacity in California with Ernie Loosen’s wines from the Mosel, we introduced Rieslings that were aged one, two and three years in wood before bottling. Ernie learned about this practice when he discovered his grandfather’s old cellar notebook and it was a revelation. It wasn’t really new to me because Weszeli was already doing it, but, in my opinion, they did it far too quietly. They should’ve been shouting from the rooftops about this unusual but seemingly historical and nearly forgotten approach because it yields fabulously unique results. The problem with Weszeli is that it’s taken a long time to realize the potential of their extended aging in barrel. Three years is a long time, and this is compounded by another two in bottle, which in most cases is four times longer than the aging that goes into most other famous Austrian grower’s top wines. 2017 is a breakthrough for Weszeli on many levels. It was the right vintage for their extended cellar aging approach and the wines end up built like Thomas: muscular and defined, like a mythological warrior statue. They’re impressive and complex, so deeply complex that they stop just short of overwhelming—like Puligny-Montrachet big hitters tend to do. If layers of complexity and depth are defining measures for great wine (which they are) the 2017s from Weszeli would be scored in the mid to high 90s on that alone. But more than just their tastes and smells, you can feel the life of their organically farmed vineyards vibrating through their wines. The three years in oak heavily curbs what would otherwise evoke the same ubiquitous (and sometimes boring) characteristics of Austrian Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners that go through a short aging before bottling, by cutting the primary fruit down to size and sculpting the wines around their secondary and tertiary distinctions. Weszeli’s wines are almost unrecognizable when compared to other young wines in the region, save their fully endowed natural acidity, a structural element that doesn’t depart unless tampered with. Weszeli is on a path that few winegrowers in their region will be able to follow closely because of the time it takes, and the investment needed to go from the fast annual turnaround to waiting it out for four or five years before you sell your top wines, which also happen to be your most expensive to make. Other Austrian wineries might do well to take note of what Weszeli’s wines offer that those of other great producers don’t. I feel lucky to be involved with these guys and to finally, after six years of working together, be able to offer the results of the ideas hatched more than a decade ago. Kudos to them. Austria is lucky to have the diversity of their wines and people should take a closer look.■ Next month it’s Veyder-Malberg, and then off to Germany to meet up with two of the most exciting young producers making unexpected waves.

Co-authored and co-researched by MSc Geology and PhD Student at the University of Vigo, Ivan Rodriguez, and Ted Vance, from The Source Imports. Preface The geological setting of Navarra and Rioja can be distilled down to what is mostly sedimentary rock including limestones, marls, sandstones, and shales with a broad spectrum of different compositions, size grains (clay, silt, sand gravel, etc.), all formed under different conditions than those in the surrounding mountain ranges. This geological story is worth further exploration for anyone interested in northern Spain and southwest and southern France, and the mysterious and gorgeous Pyrenees mountains that stand between these countries. Undoubtedly, surrounding reliefs (mountains and hills; the topography) of a specific place are the primary indicators as to the formation of the soils in that area. In this case, the mountain ranges of the Pyrenees and Sistema Ibérico (Ibérian Range) surrounding the subregions of Navarra and Rioja are the major contributors to the vineyard land in the southern portion of these areas. Of special note is the composition of what has been inserted into certain depositions and whether they have calcareous origins. Many high-quality wines are produced in more calcareous environments, so it’s important to note if it’s present. The Pyrenean Range The Pyrenean Range includes the Cantabrian Range, which starts next to the northernmost subzone of the Iberian Massif, in the north coast of Galicia, where it rises from the ocean and runs east along the northern Atlantic Spanish coastline until it draws a natural barrier and border between France and Spain and ends at the Mediterranean Sea. Spanning around 800km (~500 miles) from east to west and 150km (~90 miles) from north to south, the geological history of this mountain chain originated with the Variscan and Alpine orogenies (mountain-building events). The Variscan orogeny (the unifying geological event that connected all the continents to form Pangaea; see our brief essay on Pangaea here) took place between 370-290 million years ago and its remnants make up the setting for many of today’s wine regions located on the Iberian Massif in western Spain and most of mainland Portugal; France’s Armorican Massif, Massif Central and most of Corsica; Italy’s Sardinia and parts of Calabria; Central Europe’s Bohemian Massif (think Riesling and Grüner Veltliner countries), and others. Nearly all of what is left of the Variscan Mountains is rooted in igneous rocks like granites or volcanic, and metamorphic formations such as slate, schist and gneiss. After the Variscan orogeny (also known as the Hercynian), Pangaea started to break up, separating land masses and creating new continents, eventually leading to our current global environment. The once gigantic Variscan range may have stood as high as today’s Himalayas but lost thousands of feet to erosion over a two-hundred-million-year period. During that time, the Iberian Peninsula had two major elevated reliefs left from the Variscan range: the Iberian Massif, which covers the western side of Spain and almost all of mainland Portugal, and to the east the Ebro Massif, sandwiched between Catalonia and southernmost areas of France. The latter shares its name with the long, cone-shaped Ebro Basin opening toward the southeast, with its famous river, the 930km long Río Ebro that starts in Cantabrian mountains and flows southeast through Rioja and Navarra, eventually spilling into the Mediterranean just south of the Priorat and Montsant wine regions. Most remnants of the Ebro Massif are now covered by younger sediments down in the Ebro Basin, but in the Pyrenees, they are steep, rocky mountains referred to as the Axial Zone. These remnants are also present in Catalonian wine regions and France’s Roussillon (Banyuls and Collioure, among others). The Alpine Orogeny and the formation of the Pyrenees and the Ebro Basin The next stage of development of this landscape is due to the Alpine orogeny, which is still active today. The African and Indian tectonic plates continue their mashup as they head north, pressing against the Eurasian plate (today’s Europe and Asia), causing the formation of most of the higher peaks that can be found in Europe, North Africa, and Asia. These tectonic movements coupled with the formation of the Atlantic Ocean led to the opening of the Bay of Biscay, the large Atlantic section between Northern Spain and Western France. The underwater part of Northwest Spain (Galicia and Asturias) and Western France (Brittany and the western end of the Loire Valley) that were a single landmass during the Variscan Orogeny began to separate. Through this millions-of-years process, the Iberian Peninsula pivoted about thirty-five degrees in a counterclockwise direction. This produced convergence forces between the Iberian plate and the southwesternmost part of the Eurasian plate, and uplifted today’s Pyrenees. In France, this pivot set the stage for the development of France’s Aquitaine Basin, home to Bordeaux and many other wine regions, to cite one of many examples of its far-reaching influence on Western European wine regions. The Alpine Orogeny is much more recent, and is related with the formation of the Alps and too many other mountain ranges to mention from Western Europe (only as far as Spain), Morocco, and through the Middle East to Asia, and even into Indonesia. Its name is not to imply that they are all considered part of the Alps mountain range, it’s that the Alpine Orogeny is the established geological time frame that includes all mountains on Earth that developed during this specific period. After this second tectonic cycle there was a more relaxed period with few volcanic eruptions and earthquakes caused by tectonic movements. During these tens of millions of years, the higher parts of the mountain chain began their intense erosion (which of course is still happening today), while in the lower parts, those eroded sediments were deposited over tens of millions of years, forming younger nearby basins usually associated with big rivers and, consequently, a lot of wine regions: Spain’s Duero Basin, whose river, the Duero, is surrounded by vineyards for almost the entirety of its extensive run through Spain and Portugal, where the Portuguese call it, Douro; the Ebro Basin to the south of the Pyrenees, known in Spain as the Pirineos, among other Spanish dialects, and Pyrénées, in French; and the Aquitaine Basin in France, on the north side of the Pyrenees. More recently, during the ice ages (the last few million years) the erosion in the higher altitude areas began to carve out U-shaped valleys due to the action of glaciers. While there can be found igneous and metamorphic rocks in the Eastern part of the Pyrenees and in some parts of the Cantabrian Range, the type of rock most present toward the south of the Pyrenees, in the depressions of the Basque-Cantabrian Basin (the northeastern most section of the greater Ebro Basin), home to the Navarra and Rioja, are largely of sedimentary origin, some marine sedimentation and other non-marine, continental rock depositions. Navarra Overview The geology of Navarra shows a great diversity in rock type as well as the age of their formation. Geologists divide this region into five geological units, and Navarra’s subregions are also five. To keep it clear, the Navarra’s DO subregions are in red and italicized. Navarra’s largest geological zone is the Ebro Massif, which is connected with all of the Navarra DO subregions, but the Ribera Alta and Ribera Baja subregions are entirely within this geological unit. Here, the landscape is covered by a thick layer of young Cenozoic sediments. During the middle part of the Cenozoic (35 to 25 million years ago) a huge shallow lake was present over this area and extended from Rioja to the east through the Ebro Basin, which led to the formation of rocks, mainly mudstones, often rich in salt. Non-marine calcareous rocks are also present but in less proportion compared to Navarra’s vineyards further north. More recently, the activity of the Ebro River formed fluvial terraces along its course, with abundance of sand, silt, and clay originating from continental erosion with little influence from marine sediments, resulting in more rounded wines compared to those grown on more rocky soils further north. On the eastern end of Navarra is the geological unit known as the Pyrenean Zone and also the northern part of Navarra’s Baja Montaña subregion. Prior to the Alpine Orogeny, this area was a tropical sea with different depths which developed an extensive variety of calcareous rocks formed by the calcium-carbonate skeletons of the organisms living in those environments, rocks like limestones, marls, sandy limestones, etc. Unique to this Navarra subregion are numerous valleys that run north-south, perpendicular to the Pyrenees. The southernmost part of the geological unit connected to Navarra is called the Transition Zone and corresponds to the northern part of the Valdizarbe subregion. Here, characteristics from both the Pyrenean Zone and the Basque-Cantabrian Zone are present. The westernmost limit is in the Estella-Elizondo area, which gradually changes to the Pyrenean Zone towards the east. Like Baja Montaña, Valdizarbe has a great diversity of calcareous rock formations. The northern part of Navarra’s western Tierra Estella subregion continues along the limestone Cantabrian Range where the Rioja subregion, Rioja Alavesa, ends. This area is what geologists refer to as the Basque-Cantabrian Zone (an extension of the Basque Arc/Basque Mountains). Geographically, it is the eastern part of the Cantabrian Range, but is also considered as the transition point with the Pyrenees. Like the Pyrenean Zone, it has a lot of calcareous sedimentary rocks, but these formations are not a dominant feature. The rocks here are from the Cretaceous and were developed in more continental environments, like deltas or estuaries, and shallow and sometimes deeper tropical sea areas. (While the northernmost geological unit of this area, the Paleozoic Massif, has nothing to do with Navarra as an appellation, it’s worth noting that it is home to igneous and metamorphic rock types related to the Axial Zone.) Rioja Overview Rioja’s DOCa is geologically divided into three units: 1) the northwestern corner at the easternmost part of the Cantabrian Range; 2) The Iberian Range in the southern half of the region, formed by two mountain chains known as La Demanda and Cameros; and 3) the cone-shaped Ebro Basin that starts in the northern half and opens wider toward the southeast. The Cantabrian Range connected to Rioja (the picturesque limestone mountain cliffs to the north) and the eastern part of the Iberian Range were uplifted during the Alpine Orogeny. Here we find marine sediments (limestones, etc.) as well as continental sediments (non-calcareous materials). This demonstrates the evidence of several different past environments, like shallow seas, deltas, estuaries, lakes, and rivers. In the western part of the Iberian Range are the La Demanda Mountains, which act as a natural southern border of Rioja’s DOs, the oldest rocks of this region are found. Older than 350 million years, these Paleozoic metamorphic rocks were developed before the Variscan Orogeny and are mainly composed of schist, slate and quartzite, which contributed to many of today’s continental deposits of conglomerates and sandstones. The Ebro Basin was formed by sedimentary rocks of continental origin from millions of years of sedimentation from the Iberian Massif and Ebro Massifs. Any existing calcareous rock formations (excluding recent calcareous depositions) were not formed under a marine environment but may have been caused by either biological origins (ancient deposits of tiny, calcareous skeletons of freshwater organisms) or by chemical origin in the form of evaporative concentration, or both, corresponding with lacustrine (lake) environments—similar to some tuffeau formations in France’s Loire Valley. However, calcareous marine sediments occur in the vineyards close to the Cantabrian and Iberian ranges in both Rioja and Navarra, due to the influence of these limestone mountains. Unfortunately, the Rioja Alavesa subregion’s geological information is excluded from this map. The Ebro Basin, where almost all of the vineyards of Rioja and Navarra are located, is a massive depression triangularly boxed in by the Pyrenean Range to the north (which technically includes the Cantabrian Range), the Iberian Range to the south/southwest, and the Catalan Coastal Range. The Ebro Basin’s sediments began to accumulate about 35 million years ago where a large lake developed. Likely between eight to thirteen million years ago, the constant deposit of continental, non-marine sediments in the bottom of the basin gave rise to this lake, eventually forcing it to breach the Catalan Coastal Range that blocked its access to the Mediterranean where it ultimately drained, and carved out a pathway to the Mediterranean for today’s Ebro River. In this basin, the sediments are as deep as 5km and make up most of the surrounding areas of Logroño, the capital of the department of La Rioja. Rioja Subregions Rioja’s subregions are located mainly within the geological unit of the Ebro Basin, with the exception of the south and southwestern parts of the Rioja Baja subregion, at the northern extreme of the Iberian Range. However, inside the Rioja DOCa areas there are two different reliefs (mountain areas, in this case) near many vineyards that are close enough to influence their soil composition. One is the southernmost Cantabrian Range (the Sierra Cantabria-Montes Obarenes), on the northern boundary of Rioja, in contact with vineyards from the Rioja Alavesa and the northernmost zones of Rioja Alta. Similar to Navarra’s northern subregions, this part of the Cantabrian Range is formed by diverse Cretaceous calcareous bedrock (limestones, sandy limestones, and calcareous sandstones) and sediments predominantly made of sandstones from the Utrillas Formation, one of the most spread out and well-known formations in Spain from the Cretaceous (110-95 million years ago); it’s formed predominantly by siliciclastic sandstones (non-calcareous) with a small proportion of mudstones and coal, deposited in a fluvial environment. However, more recent research suggests that these rocks are related to arid conditions, remnants of the dunes from a big desert that extended to central Spain. The southeastern part of Rioja, in the Rioja Baja, some of the southernmost vineyards are in contact with the Cameros Mountains (the northernmost zone of the Iberian Range) and, contrary to its namesake, Baja, it has some of the highest altitude vineyards in Rioja. The lower parts correspond with Early Jurassic calcareous rocks: limestones, dolostones, muddy limestones, and marls. However, the low mountains of Sierra La Hez (including its arm up to Quel locality) and Yerga are a different story. These are the remnants of the southern margin of the lake covering the Ebro Basin before it found its path to the Mediterranean Sea. Here, it is formed predominantly by Paleogene conglomerates, sandstones, and red mudstones. However, if we go further south from there to Alhama Valley, we have the same rocks as in Cameros mountains and from a geological perspective it could be considered part of Cameros. The higher parts of these mountains are formed by a mixture of Cretaceous conglomerates, sandstones, mudstones and, in less proportion, calcareous rocks, including marls and limestones. The more southerly parts on the south face of these small ranges are Early-Middle Jurassic calcareous rocks: limestones, dolostones, muddy limestones, and marls; for example, the formations between Yerga Sierra Range and the town of Grávalos. However there are exceptions, for instance, the area around Igea corresponds with the non-marine, Cretaceous continental rocks. The soils in the Rioja DOCa have been intensively studied over the last decades, highlighting the average characteristics of the vineyard soils as poor in organic matter (less than 1%), alkaline pH (higher than 8), with an average total carbonate content of 20% and a texture type of soil corresponding to loam (sand: 41%; silt: 38%; clay: 21%) according to studies from the University and the Government of La Rioja (Peregrina et al., 2010; Iñigo et al., 2021). In the Rioja Region, inceptisols, entisols, aridisols and alfisols are present (USDA soil taxonomy); however, a more simplified classification of the soil by Ruiz-Hernandez (1974) divides them into three main types, including a map of their distribution: 1) Calcareous-clay soils with a yellowish color, composed of sandstones, marls, and a variable component of clay which are found mostly in Rioja Alavesa and the nearby Rioja Alta zones; 2) Ferruginous-clays with a red/orange color, composed of clay, sandstone, marl, and limonite, a mix of iron-bearing minerals which give it its ferruginous characteristic (Fe, as in the atomic symbol for iron), are found mostly in Rioja Alta and Rioja Baja; 3) Alluvial soil formed by the river sediments from the Demanda mountains that are present in most of the valley. Rioja has many freestanding hills inside the Ebro Basin referred to as cerros, like the picturesque hilltops of the historical villages of San Vicente de la Sonsierra and Laguardia. These hills, along with the region's many fluvial terraces (a result of processes associated with the activity of rivers and streams). These terraces are also an important geological formation when considering the objective of a winegrower, whether it is for quality or quantity. Terraces at higher altitudes have more sandstones and calcareous materials present, while the lower areas generally have a deeper topsoil with more detritic (non-calcareous) depositions. Throughout Rioja, cerros extend along the Ebro Basin and were formed once the massive lake began to spill into the Mediterranean, followed by continued erosion by rivers and streams. Areas with harder rock gave greater resistance to the erosion, allowing these hills to stand alone. Clays and small grain-sized sandstones are easier to erode when compared with harder limestones located at higher altitudes. Regarding the carbonate content of these soils​​—a seemingly ineffable asset often involved with high quality wine, Ruiz-Hernandez says that the calcareous-clay soils possess more than 25% of total calcium carbonate content while the others are far less rich in this mineral. More recently, Iñigo et al (2021), made a soil spatial variability of several components of the soil, measuring levels of total carbonate of up to 54% on the subsoil in the Rioja Alavesa, the highest overall among the subregions, but obviously similar to vineyards in Rioja Alta with close proximity to the limestone Cantabrian Range. These maps demonstrate the general soil structure of Rioja, which unfortunately excludes Navarra. Rioja and Navarra Comparison: Where the limestone ends… Many of the vineyards from Rioja Alavesa and northern Rioja Alta are in direct contact with, or nearby (less than 5 km), the Cantabrian Range, which was formed by a succession of calcareous and siliciclastic formations during the Cretaceous. These sections, with township names added to give a general range of the location for these formations, could be divided from west to east: 1) Foncea-Cellorigo: limestones and dolostones; 2) Cellorigo-Villalba de Rioja: Utrillas Formation (sands, conglomerates and sandstones); 3) Ermita de San Felices-Briñas: alternation of Utrillas Formation with limestones, sandy limestones, and dolostones; 4) Labastida: conglomerates, sandstones and red clays with a very low calcium carbonate content (less than 13% according to Iñigo et al., 2021); 5) Eastern Labastida-Rivas de Tereso: limestones and dolostones, with the exception of Peña Colorada where the Utrillas Formation is present; 6) Leza-Kripán: Conglomerates with scarce outcrops of limestones and dolostones; 7) Kripán-Lapoblación: limestones, sandy limestones and dolostones; 8) Lapoblación-Estella: conglomerates, sandstones and red clays with a surprisingly high carbonate content (see details below); 9) Estella-Abarzuza: marlstones, limestones and calcareous sandstones; and 10) Abarzuza-Pamplona: predominantly calcareous sandstones and marls, but also limestones (less calcareous than in Estella-Abarzuza). Iñigo et al. (2021) compared calcareous/non-calcareous sections to the total carbonate content in soil within the Rioja Alavesa and northern Rioja Alta, and there seemed to be consistent variations of carbonates. However, small variations might be not represented in the publication by Iñigo et al, due to the area sampling size. There are also anomalies around every corner; for example, the eastern sections of Rioja around Lapoblación (a largely non-calcareous region) there is a notable spike in carbonate levels, which raises the question of the origin of these carbonates as there may have been a more complex system of sediment transport within the triangle of Laguardia-Logroño-Viana. Concluding notes, as of now: Rioja and Navarra share more geographical and geological similarities than differences, and the same applies to their histories and cultures, which we have left to other essays. When considering the quality of a terroir, it is always most important to consider each one for its own unique characteristics, rather than lumping them in with a region’s collective categorization. Acknowledgements: We want to thank Dr. Fernando Peregrina, researcher from the University of La Rioja, for taking time to make numerous useful suggestions that improved this essay. References: Agirrezabala, L.M., Alonso, J.L., Anglada, E., Aranburu, A., Arranz, E., Aurell, M., […] and Villas, E. (2004). La Cordillera Pirenaica. In Geología de España. IGME, Madrid. Barnolas, A. and Pujalte, V. (2004). La Cordillera Pirenaica: Definición, límites y división. In Geología de España. IGME, Madrid. Bellido, N. P., and Cristóbal, A. C. (1995). Distribución espacial del viñedo de Rioja en relación con los condicionantes ambientales. Berceo, (129), 75-95. Caja Navarra (1990). Gran Enciclopedia de Navarra: Geología. http://www.enciclopedianavarra.com/?page_id=10472 [Checked on 01/10/2022] Castiella, J., Solé, J., Villalobos, L. (1977). Mapa geológico y memoria de la Hoja nº 243 (Calahorra). Mapa Geológico de España E. 1:50.000 (MAGNA), Segunda Serie, Primera edición. IGME, 27 pp. Choukroune, P. (1992). Tectonic evolution of the Pyrenees. Annual Review of Earth andPlanetary Sciences, 20(1), 143-158. Consejería de Turismo, Medio Ambiente y Política Territorial de La Rioja (2005). Mapa geológico de la Comunidad Autónoma de La Rioja a escala 1:200.000. https://www.larioja.org/industria-energia/es/minas/jornadas-estudios-publicaciones-tecnicas/elaboracion-mapa-geologico-rioja Durantez, O., Sole, J., Castiella, J., Villalobos, L. (1982). Mapa geológico y memoria de la Hoja nº 281 (Cervera del Rio Alhama). Mapa Geológico de España E. 1:50.000 (MAGNA), Segunda Serie, Primera edición. IGME, 41 pp. Gong, Z., Langereis, C. G., and Mullender, T. A. T. (2008). The rotation of Iberia during the Aptian and the opening of the Bay of Biscay. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 273(1-2), 80-93. Iñigo, V., Marín, Á., Andrades, M. S., & Jiménez-Ballesta, R. (2021). Soil spatial variability in the vineyards of La Rioja PDOC (Spain). International Journal of Environmental Studies, 1-11. Peregrina, F., López, D., Zaballa, O., Villar, M. T., González, G., & García-Escudero, E. (2010). Calidad de los suelos de viñedo en la Denominación de Origen Rioja: Índice de riesgo de encostramiento (FAO-PNUMA), contenido de carbono orgánico y relación con la fertilidad del suelo. Revista de Ciências Agrárias, 33(1), 338-345. Portero-García, J.M., Ramírez del Pozo, J., Aguilar-Tomás, M. J. (1978). Mapa geológico y Memoria de la Hoja nº 169 (Casalarreina). Mapa Geológico de España E. 1:50.000 (MAGNA), Segunda Serie, Primera edición. IGME, 41 pp. Portero-García, J.M., Ramírez del Pozo, J., Aguilar-Tomás, M. J. (1979). Mapa geológico y Memoria de la Hoja nº 170 (Haro). Mapa Geológico de España E. 1:50.000 (MAGNA), Segunda Serie, Primera edición. IGME, 43 pp. Ruiz-Hernández, M. (1974). Estudio de la trascendencia vitivinícola de los diversos perfiles de suelos en Rioja. La Semana Vitivinícola 1453/1974, 80-90. Sibuet, J. C., Srivastava, S. P., and Spakman, W. (2004). Pyrenean orogeny and plate kinematics. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 109(B8). Vergés, J., Kullberg, J. C., Casas-Sainz, A., de Vicente, G., Duarte, L. V., Fernández, M., [...] and Vegas, R. (2019). An introduction to the Alpine cycle in Iberia. In The geology of Iberia: a geodynamic approach. Springer, Cham.

I meant to write something about my experience in Corsica last year, but I was overwhelmed and couldn’t get it together. I went with my wife, Andrea, and Emmanuel (Manu) Gagnepain, a very well-respected enologist and viticulturist who quietly consults with a large helping of top clients in Corsica—Abbatucci, Vaccelli and Sebastian Poly are a few highlights. We made twelve visits in three days and covered a lot of ground on the island the first time. Just when I began to grasp one thing, we sped off to the next. It was an intense trip, so this time around I knew what to expect; my wife did too, which is why she turned down the opportunity to go back. This year’s trip was going to be a mix of tasting the 2015, 2016 and 2017 vintages. 2015 was a solid year, with bigger, solar-powered wines. The 2016s were more elegant and high-toned (aérien, a terribly difficult word to pronounce correctly, even for the French), and 2017 was a ripe vintage that created some unique challenges. It was going to be an interesting tour. After a day and half of rest at La Fabrique, my usual place of respite in Provence, with my friends, Pierre and Sonya, I had just enough time to do my laundry and pack it up again for another five days out. I’d just spent twenty days travelling through Burgundy, Champagne and the Loire Valley with visits to just over thirty domaines, eating way too much meat, bread and cheese, and very little vegetables, so I was desperate for some greens. Luckily, Pierre and Sonya filled the weekend with the season’s first artichokes, white asparagus, and loads of greens and strawberries, along with mussels, fish, and the usual intake of secondhand smoke from my nicotine committed friends. I jumped into Manu’s new blue VW pickup truck and within the first minute, we made an agreement: I would speak French while he spoke English. (My wife and I are planning to relocate to Italy in September and I wanted two solid weeks of French practice before I moved on to Italian and the next leg of my life.) Immediately we picked up the wine talk where we left off last year and it didn’t stop during every waking hour over three days—another reason my wife wanted sit this one out. I was introduced to Manu’s wines by a well-known French sommelier, Fabrice Langlois, who visited me at La Fabrique last year. I loved them and asked for an introduction, so Fabrice and I went to Manu’s house in Avignon right after lunch. Manu looks more German than French; he’s tall and blond with fair skin that only finds different shades of red and pink from the sun. He speaks softly yet is always intensely focused. His French comes out quietly but at a blistering pace. I speak and understand French reasonably well but I can hardly understand anything he says, though I’m sure that my being half deaf in one ear doesn’t help. Manu works with many producers in the south of France, but he’s fanatical about Corsica and has a love affair with the island, its people and its wines. His dream is to live there and have his own domaine, a dream that has started to come to fruition through a partnership with his most famous client, Jean-Charles Abbatucci. He told me how many producers he worked with in Corsica, and after only two hours after meeting him, I mustered up the gall to ask him if I could come along sometime to learn about it. I was surprised when he happily agreed. Four weeks later, Manu and I were en route to Bastia, Corsica, after my wife and I had spent some time in Austria and Italy. We had a good feeling about each other; it felt like I’d known him for years and I think he felt the same. After our previous trip I realized I didn’t know as much about him outside of the wine culture as I wanted to. I scoured the internet and came up with next to nothing. The only thing I found was a mention in a small piece Kermit Lynch wrote when he began to import a lot of the best Corsican wines to the States. Later on, Manu told me that he consciously avoids social media because he thinks it creates problems when his clients don’t get equal attention on his feed, and he’s right, I’ve experienced that firsthand with some of our producers. So he prefers to do things the old-school way, relying on word of mouth; the wine world is small and word travels fast when wines are great. Over the years he’s amassed a client base of more than seventy domaines (with a long waiting list) and earned a tremendous reputation amongst top scientific thinkers of the French wine world. I’ve never seen someone sustain his level of consistent intensity and he does it all alone. Manu was born in Beaune, the heart of Burgundy and perhaps its most famous historic village. Originally he wanted to be a doctor, but there was a timing issue with his application to medical school. His second choice was wine, so he moved to Dijon after he finished his Baccalaureat (the French equivalent of a high school diploma) and attained the highest degree of formal education given in the country for enology and viticulture. His scientific knowledge about wine and the vine are as impressive as they are intimidating, and he approaches the subject like a doctor with his patient. He has an inexhaustible palate; he smells and tastes with tremendous speed and focus while rattling off his diagnoses, which is quickly followed by his suggestion for the remedy (if one is needed). He visits his domaines once a month to follow the wines more closely and to avoid making decisions based on one moment of each wine’s evolution. To spend three days with him analyzing wine is enough to make me feel I’ve learned a lot, while at the same time is deeply humbling. We boarded our Italian-run ferry in Toulon, a somewhat rough military town in the Côte d’Azur that had seen better days. It’s not the nicest town in Côte, but the beautiful landscape reminded me of why people lived there in the first place. It’s just a pity they had to put a military base in the middle of it all. We drove Manu’s truck onto the ferry and checked in to our rooms. After a marginal but acceptable dinner in a fancy restaurant on the ninth floor of the ferry, which included a bottle of Italian Barbera d’Alba—my first Italian wine in over three weeks, and not worth the wait—we settled into our cabins. After a couple of hours of tossing and turning I finally went to sleep. I figure I’d caught only about four hours before there was an announcement from the crew that we needed to get it together for our arrival in Bastia. We had our longest day of the trip ahead of us and Manu was anxious to hit the road. Next Week: Of Corse, Part 2 of 9: Patrimonio and the Rebirth of an Old Domaine

Off-roading through a bumpy, hilly and winding dirt road for what seemed an eternity, we headed into the Itata Valley wilderness, our destination an ancient granite vineyard surrounded by pine and eucalyptus. Along the way we were joined by one of Pedro’s grape growers, Juan Palma.  Juan comes from a family with a 300-year-old lineage, centuries of passed down vineyard wisdom.  He took the lead in the caravan and we followed closely behind on the dirt road, windows down, eating dirt the entire time. The road was terribly dusty and our car was filled with it. Pedro didn’t seem to mind, though, and I figured this was the norm in hot weather with no AC in the Itata backcountry. After about thirty minutes we pulled into our first stop.  Immediately we were met with warm dry wafts of wind pushing their way through the pine and eucalyptus trees lining the roads.  Standing in the vineyards, it’s impossible not to notice the eucalyptus and pine aromas in the air at all times. Pedro setup an eraser board to illustrate Chile’s geological heritage and how the country was divided up in a simple way: the Andes were volcanic and metamorphic rocks, the Central Valley was filled with alluvial materials from the erosion of the Andes, and the coastal mountains were largely made of granite, an intrusive igneous rock. Years ago, the Chilean government erroneously decided that the old granite hills of the Itata weren’t useful for vineyards.  They designated them for growing trees, mostly for making paper products—a controversial ecological dispute in these parts, because of the environmental damage from the pulp mills.  Ironically, the native Mapuche Indians continue to light the forests on fire in rebellion to this catastrophe. Just as we were about to go up to visit one of Pedro’s many soil pits (he’s famous for digging massive holes in vineyards), we had an unexpected visitor.  At first glance, I thought she was one of the vineyard owners.  Why wouldn’t I think that?  We were in a vineyard out in the boonies.  But as she got closer, we saw a very small woman with a wind burnt, dark face, sunken in brown eyes, with lines carved into her face from many years of sun exposure. She wore a raggedy, but somewhat classy looking purple overcoat.  She walked up to us with her hand extended, mumbling to herself, but really talking to us.  She came for money.  Pedro quickly went into his car and gave her some Chilean pesos.  She made her rounds to the rest of us and Pedro told her that he had given her money for all of us.  She smiled and slowly disappeared back into the forest. Pedro explained that big companies often pay 80 Chilean pesos per kilo of grapes—the equivalent of $.05 per pound. Like in the U.S., the poor in Chile stay poor, only a lot poorer.  Even Chileans who work full time jobs often live in shanty houses made of cardboard and tin siding with dirt floors, even right in the middle of Santiago.  In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been such a surprise to see this poor woman out in the middle of nowhere. In the Itata, big companies from the north have come in to try to dupe the locals out of their land for pennies on the dollar of its potential value.  Thankfully, most winegrowers of the Itata haven’t sold their vineyards.  Instead, the growers maintain their work and they know that if they did sell, they wouldn’t have any alternatives except to become employees of the company that just bought their land.  To them, selling is not an option. While grapes in high-demand regions of California can go for well over $6000 per ton ($3.00 per pound), Pedro explained that big companies often pay 80 Chilean pesos per kilo of grapes—the equivalent of $.05 per pound. It’s an extraordinarily cheap price to pay for grapes, especially when they come from dry-farmed ancient vineyards with vines that can be older than 200 years.  However, more than the ancient vines, the true magic of the Itata are the pink granite soils. Over 500 years ago, the granite soils of the Itata were one of the first places the Spanish conquistadors planted vines. If they make the leap, something truly special could happen: they could be making wines authentically Chilean, instead of the big, generic, internationally styled ones. They got it right back then, and Chile forgot about these vines and the people farming them; at least until producers like DeMartino and Pedro Parra came around.  Pedro now pays $.50 per pound for grapes and Juan thought he was stupid to offer to pay him such ridiculous prices.  Pedro insisted to Juan that they were worth at least that. Pedro believes that if the farmers realize what they have, they will be able to flip the balance of power out of the hands of the big wineries.  These farmers hold onto their vineyards, despite only making something like $20K each year for their entire family. Yet they know they have no economic future without their vineyards.  Pedro believes that if the big companies weren’t able to buy fruit for almost nothing, they would likely start to fail.  In fact, it’s thought that some of these old-vine parcels make up significant proportions of their top wines. One of Pedro’s life dreams is to help the growers in this region make their own commercial wines.  His great idea is to gather enough money to take them to other wine regions to see first-hand the story of how extremely poor regions with gifted terroirs (like Piedmont’s Barolo and Barbaresco regions) rose to become frontrunners in the world of wine. If they make the leap, something truly special could happen: they could be making wines authentically Chilean, instead of the big, generic, internationally styled ones. After the lady in purple disappeared back into the forest, Pedro brought us a little way up the hill to view the first of many holes he’d dug in the vineyards. They were about eight feet deep with stairs carved out at the entry.  Smiling, Pedro made sure to point out that this hole wasn’t dug just for us, but for the many people that come to the Itata to see the beautiful soils Pedro evangelizes all over the world.   Pedro entered the pit and invited us to come down.  With his hammer, he began to pull slabs off the walls that have existed in place for 200 million years.  He pointed out the vertical fractures that helped the roots easily find their way down into the many levels of the soil.  It’s awe inspiring when you first expose a stone to the sunshine after it’s been buried for millions of years. Part 4 of 6, "Chicken and Lettuce" will post next week. Find Pedro Parra Wines here To keep up with this story you can sign up to our email list, or check in next week at the same time and you will find part 4.

It was time to head south for Provence. We had a hundred and thirty-miles to go to reach the legendary La Fabrique, in Graveson, a place I’d heard Ted talk about for many years, and while it’s normally a two hour drive, it was the Friday before Easter, so we were looking at more like three. We quickly hit Los Angeles level traffic, stuck bumper-to-bumper with the thousands of French Catholics who had taken the day off. So we settled in and Ted took the time to give me a review primer on our destination. La Fabrique is the home of Sonya Behar and Pierre Castel, and their place is an oasis and way station where Ted can stop for a spell during his long months on the road in Europe. He met them in 2004 when Fabien, his co-worker at The Ojai Vineyard at the time, told him he should stay there the next time he was passing through. Fabien is Pierre’s son (and Sonya’s stepson), and a charming and incredibly friendly man in his own right; every time I see him, we quickly break through small talk and get into discussions about the difficulties in day-to-day existence and how to achieve small victories. In recent years he’s gotten into serious yoga practice to combat (or surrender to) his stressors and now has the warm-eyed glint of those who can see past it all, if even for just some of the time. Ted took Fabien’s advice and spent more than a couple weeks at La Fabrique that year, and has done so every year since. Ted considers Sonya and Pierre a crucial ingredient in the success of his business. Not only are they inexhaustible hosts who offer housing and the most incredible food to him and whoever he brings along, they also let him have producers ship sample cases to the estate, so he can try wines before he decides to visit a winery. At times, stacks of boxes accumulate in one of their outbuildings before he can get there and start putting a dent in them, which he does with a little help from Sonya and Pierre as well any other friends who might be around. We pulled in through a big open gate and turned past a sign reading, Mas La Fabrique, in big looping letters. The grounds were covered with a pear, maple and eucalyptus trees hovering over a huge lush green lawn, the ends of which stretched to well out of sight; the foliage was so dense that I couldn’t see the distant edge of the property, which is about 18 acres in total. The landscape was breathtaking, truly some sort of fantasy of what an estate in Provence would look like. Cars were lined up outside a building to our left that was rented out to a small cluster of families. Beyond that was the main house, a big, ancient edifice with a beige stucco façade beside a newer addition that’s only a couple hundred years old and painted a bright terra-cotta. Pierre would later tell me proudly that the original house was hundreds of years old and made entirely of huge stone blocks. Two big black dogs charged us as we approached the house, growling and barking with earnest menace. Sonya got up from a big, square outdoor table that could easily seat twelve and shouted, “Jazz! Jongo! Shut up!” The dogs quieted down and circled us, sniffing. It being early evening, the tabletop was already scattered with wine bottles, scotch, Coke and grenadine for mixing, Pernod and pitchers of water (also mainly for mixing). She gave Ted and Andrea long hugs and lingered with a big gape-toothed smile at Ted like he was a son come home from the war. She shook my hand and remembered to put down the cigarette in her hand only after the greetings were over. Sonya has a wild bush of shoulder length gray hair and a hawkish face made more intense by her sharp gaze, shot through thick, tortoise shell, horn-rimmed glasses like those a SOHO artist might wear. She studied me as she shook my hand, a smile in her eyes that at the same time seemed to be reading me completely. Ted said hello to Thierry, one of Pierre’s cousins, and his wife Nicole, who I would never see without a cigarette dangling from her lips or fingers in the coming days. She was just finishing one glass of Pernod and was pouring another with a splash of water for her and Sonya. Sonya offered us aperitifs, but we declined, citing a need to settle in and maybe go for a run. Ted and Andrea went over to a new guesthouse near the groves and Sonya led me inside the oldest wing of the compound. As she showed me through, we passed by dining rooms and salons filled with dark wood antiques, at least one bar or bar cart chock full of spirits, and every corner and surface packed with bric-a-brac. It was a huge house with wings and floors that I would only catch glimpses of but never enter. I was overwhelmed by a strong smell like nothing I’d ever experienced. It was a mixture of cigarette smoke, alcohol, cooking (that would be incessant in the coming days), perfume, jasmine, sandalwood, coffee and other herbal and spice scents that I just couldn’t put my finger on. She led me up a tiled staircase that turned past walls of three-foot by two-foot blocks of sandstone painted a pale yellow. My room was on the second floor and done in a brighter yellow with accents of emerald green. I thanked her and changed for a much needed jog. Ted and I ran slowly through the countryside at first, and I followed him down a narrow road between fields of crops with ankle-high plants, too young to reveal their produce and a few greenhouses in neat lines on almost every plot. It was humid, the sun was blazing and I had not run in quite a while (mountain biking being my cardio of choice), so Ted quickly left me in the dust as my every joint began to protest and I slowed to a trot. But it was good enough to work up an appetite, and I thought that maybe if I could keep up some daily exercise it would counteract all the eating we’d been doing. And I had no idea how decadent it was about to get. Pierre the patriarch had come out by the time we returned, and he sat smoking and drinking whiskey with water as he oversaw his domain. He was dressed in baggy linen pants and a tight white tank top undershirt and was sweating and in the heat. His eyes were puffy but smiling as he smoked and coughed and spoke with a hoarse, rasping voice. During every meal and discussion around the table, he would suddenly burst out in an unexpected, booming laugh, even when nobody else was doing the same. At almost eighty years old, he had a thick scar down the center of his barrel chest from heart surgery a couple years earlier. But here he was, still drinking and smoking up a storm, the epitome of the French Paradox—immortal hedonists, all. Ted produced a bottle of wine from the prospective client cache and he, Andrea and I finally took our aperitifs in the form of a light, crisp rosé from the Cote Roannaise, a region tucked up into the Massif Central. It was incredibly refreshing on that sultry evening. He then pulled out a long line of samples that we would drink well into the night. Good Friday dinner was the best thing I’d eaten in I don’t know how long; I quickly came to understand why people drive for hundreds of miles for Sonya’s cooking (in addition to her lovely company). There was a cooked carrot salad with caramelized onions, sesames and cilantro, an egg, salmon and dill tart, similar to a quiche with the flakiest of crusts, and a Turkish dish of white cheese and phyllo dough called breque which everyone joked should be called brick. Though Sonya grew up in Lyon, she and her parents moved over from Turkey when she was a child and this was a longtime favorite of hers from that country. I couldn’t get enough of it, but definitely felt like I was building a schoolhouse in my stomach. I knew I was done for when Sonya brought out a huge stainless steel mixing bowl brimming with chocolate mousse; she makes it every time Ted comes because she knows it’s his favorite. It was even better than the one we had in Beaune: light and fluffy and somehow much richer than any I’d ever had. Thierry brought out a huge plate of cheeses of different shapes, sizes, colors and rinds. He passed it around and we finished off the meal in the proper French manner. The bulk of the conversation was in rapid French, since Thierry and Nancy didn’t speak English. Halfway through the meal I met their son Roman, who was in his late twenties and spoke it pretty well. We got to talking about mountain biking; he had done a race on Mont Blanc a year before and said it was a hellish but fun experience. He showed me pictures of his bicycle and legs caked with mud and I told him I would love to do that ride one day. His son and daughter, Mattisse and Leiah, were there as well, both under ten and beautiful. They ate quickly and politely before running off to play with some of the kids who lived in the rental house. Of all the people who I tried my French on, they were the least able to understand me. It didn’t help that I did things like conflate the words horse and hair (cheval and cheveux). At least I kept making them laugh. Sonya switched easily between the languages and was talking about how yet another riding lawn mower had been stolen from the property. It was strange to me that this place, essentially farmland, could be so prone to crime. But gypsies wandered the area and snuck onto estates at night to abscond with coveted tools that they could then sell a few towns over. At that moment, Jazz and Jango happened to be barking loudly at a guest who had gone to their car for something and returned. I asked if the dogs weren’t good deterrents since they had and would continue to scare the crap out of me every time I approached the house. She said they had tried that with other dogs in the past, but the thieves just gave them meat filled with poison, which killed them. Since then, they have always kept their pets in the house at night. She started talking about all the great vegetables of the season, especially her favorite, white asparagus, which usually appears between May through early June; we would be eating it at every meal for the next few days. Then she asked me what I would write about the trip and I told her, pretty much everything, including her, the vegetables, thieves and my feeling certain that her dogs wanted to kill me. She said they once had a writer in residence who used to stay for months at a time. He didn’t pay rent, but was treated as any other guest. I was instantly taken with the fantasy of such a life, an image I had read about in many a novel or seen in movies. Usually the writer gets stuck with writer’s block and languishes in the paradise until he maybe falls into unrequited love with one of the other guests who passes through. Or a love does ensue, but ends in heartbreak. I was probably inventing all this, but I instantly figured one of those scenarios would happen to me. I said something to Sonya to the effect of taking his place and drifting in a state of ennui, of indulging in the old Baudelarian sense of lingering nothingness in overall existence, clearly colored by my melancholy state of mind during recent months. Since ennui simply means “boredom” in French, she seemed to take issue with the notion that I could possibly live in such a state under her care and hospitality. I tried to explain the literary context of the word as I understood it, and then backpedalled completely, but the damage was done; she shot me a wry smile, blew air through pursed lips, then turned to Ted and Andrea and told them that they eventually gave the writer the boot when small items around the house began to disappear. Pierre spoke halting English that eventually smoothed out the more he talked to me. He stopped smoking only long enough to eat dinner, then immediately lit up again in the break before the mousse came. Throughout every meal, he refilled his highball glass with his own bottle of cheap rose that he bought in bulk. He let me try it at one point, and admitted as I did so that it was rough stuff but “did the job.” He tapped his ashes into one of the little round steel ashtrays with hinged lids that were clipped to the edges of the table, all the way around, and hacked his throat clear. He told me about when he was younger and working with essences made for perfumes he had a dream that he was never able to fulfill: he wanted to invent an organ that put off scents when you played the keys. “Scents are a beautiful thing,” he said. Then he pointed at his bulbous red nose. “But they are gone to me; I can’t smell a thing anymore.” He went on to say that at one point he was working on an essence of violets that they were putting into Beaujolais. I looked over at Ted, incredulous, but he was busy with another conversation. I turned back to Pierre and said, “no way,” to which he responded, “you are young.” He put a finger on his bottom eyelid and pulled down, the old gesture that means, “open your eyes.” I told the story to Ted days later and he reflexively laughed, then stopped dead and said, “really?” His wheels seemed to start turning and I thought maybe he was silently questioning the wine practices of decades past. While everyone else showed no signs of stopping, it was nearly midnight when I helped clear the table and excused myself. In my bright yellow room, I quickly did the opposite of Pierre’s advice, closed my eyes and fell into a deep and welcome food coma. Next: Some Downtime Wandering

After our visit at de Montille’s garden, Ted’s friends decided on a restaurant for dinner in Beaune, the nearby, perfectly preserved and walled-in medieval city at the center of Burgundy’s Côte de Beaune. We rolled down its one-lane cobblestone streets between ancient buildings with storybook gables and spires until we came to a modernized town center. It was full of squat two-story houses with old wooden shutters on their second floors above sleek, glass front pharmacies and cafés at street level. La Dilletante is a cozy little establishment with a façade of thirty-three small rectangular windows with wooden panes. Inside, there is an entire wall of upright bottles: a colorful three-dimensional wine list to choose from. The owner, Laurent, is a bearded bear of a man, a jolly Bluto with rosy cheeks who greeted us with a shout. Once a popular maître d’ at another restaurant in town, he brought throngs of his following along to his own successful venture. A jambon à los (cured pork leg) sat poised for slicing on a shiny steel cutter in the tiny open kitchen toward the back. The owner’s wife, Rika, attended to the countertops and stove and chatted with customers on the other side of a low glass divider as she filled orders for things like their croque monsieur, a specialty of the house. I had one, and with its crunchy and buttery toast, melty cheese and savory ham, it was the epitome of decadent comfort food. One of those things where when I was devouring it I could have sworn it was the best thing I’d ever eaten. (Not the last time I would think this on the trip). The guys debated the selection of the first bottle at the wine wall and Ted voted for a Beaujolais, the 2014 Marcel Lapierre Morgon Cuvée MMXIV. Ted said, “I’ve had enough mouse for the day and I need a guarantee if we are going to pay for the bottle.” They brought it and three others to our table and of course would soon ask the server to bring more. Debates and agreements commenced about which were the best producers and which ones tried their best but continuously missed the mark. Discussion of the worst bottles somehow (yet naturally) led to mention of Donald Trump’s recent victory. The ex-patriots were mortified for their country and countrymen, and reinforced in the choices that took them away from their home states. Whenever anyone over there mentioned the subject, I felt inclined to groan and say, I didn’t vote for him! In truth, this seemed somehow implicit by my presence there as an observer and chronicler of high culture. I may be making a leap in thinking his base wouldn’t be in France on a journey through wine country, but I’d prefer to think of it as an educated guess. And then, as if on cue, another bottle was popped and there it was: the dreaded mouse, a literal stink to overlay the running conversation. Everyone thought back to Ted’s first choice and remarked on the Morgon, the hit of the night, and perhaps one of the greatest modern day Beaujolais wines to be put to bottle. It was a memory of a recent and better time, which somehow reminded me of the comparatively halcyon days of Obama. To rid our palettes of mice and Small Hands, we ordered some of La Dilletante’s famous, rich and fluffy chocolate mousse. It was a sweet and slightly bitter cocoa mouth cloud, and immediately blew the stench from the air. Ted chatted with a young woman who worked for Kermit Lynch, one of the best-known American importers in France and the states. A wine she and Ted both liked was only exporting to the east coast, which they both found curious. The conversation zigged to the common occurrence of "books" (portfolios of producers that importers carry) moving around and seeing this for what it was, a strange and mercurial practice. I was eavesdropping on importer shoptalk and doing my best to keep up. The gang started to joke about moving on to a nearby bar to close it down, a place notorious for things taking a left turn as the night approached dawn. Beaune is a small town, with only about twenty thousand residents, the kind of place where everyone always sees the same people at the regular haunts. The joint in question apparently offers copious amounts of revolving coupling. But few in the group were single, and thankfully, no one seemed up to the task——least of all me and my jet-lagged brain. The group broke apart out on the street with everyone promising to see each other sooner rather than later. Ted, Andrea and I went back to the Airbnb, where I fell into a fitful sleep, snoring the grind of a garbage disposal the entire night (according to reports the next morning). I’m not a great sleeper to begin with, but I don’t usually do this, and wondered if it had something to do with the earache and the antibiotics I was on. The label read, “Do not drink alcohol while taking this medication.” As if that would be possible on this particular trip. NEXT: Crédoz, Chateau Chalone and The Meat of Mâcon