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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

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.

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.”

Left: Giovanna Bagnasco holding Pinot Noir harvested from Brandini’s Alta Langa vineyard grown at over 600m Right: Wechsler Scheurebe in the hands of Manuel, Katharina’s new husband! Europe is in full harvest and vinification mode, and 2023 will go down as a challenging one for many regions. Of course, the usual culprits chipped away at the morale of the growers from the start of the season with the arrival of frost, torrential floods, relentless mildew pressure, soul-crushing hailstorms late in the season, and untimely rain on nearly ripe grapes. Few regions were spared but there is still great hope for quality. As usual, we’ll know when we know. In the meantime, there are a lot of superb wines making their way to our shores from the 2018-2022 vintages. In anticipation of a strong second half of the year, we have a massive dose of wines arriving. No one saw the breadth of the industry-wide entertainment strike coming until it was here, and it’s yet another one of our industry’s major speed bumps that began with the tariffs in 2018 and got worse shortly thereafter and hasn’t quite rebounded in full yet. We’re in this one with you again, and after having been through so much together already, we know we’ll make it to the other side of this situation, too. And with the writers now returning to work, we’re at least part of the way there. Another installment of the Rare & Allocated Flight Tastings trade event is on the schedule. Seats are limited so check with your salesperson to grab a spot. The lineup includes all organic wines and a broad snapshot of our European imports. Our Champagne flights include a new organic and biodynamic micro-producer from the Pinot Noir focused appellation of Les Riceys, Eric Collinet, as well as wines from one of Champagne’s biodynamic gurus, Vincent Charlot, and the bubbles from Pascal Mazet’s vintage wines blended with about 40% of their solera foudre that’s been topped with wine since 1981. Then we dig into some white wines with Tegernseerhof’s top 2021 Smaragd Grüner Veltliners and Rieslings. Katharina Wechsler’s highly anticipated 2021 dry Riesling crus, Benn, Kirchspiel, and Morstein are arriving. A new batch of Montlouis from the sulfite-free Domaine Vallée Moray, and then Augalevada's flor yeast wines. On the red sets, we focus on Italy with Burgundy-trained Giacomo Baraldo’s Sangiovese crus, Dave Fletcher’s three Barbaresco crus and finally a series of new Barolo from Brandini, possibly with its winemaker, Giovanna Bagnasco, in attendance. Photo borrowed from Austrianwine.com Many of these wines (particularly Augalevada, Vallée Moray and possibly Fletcher) will be shown only at these events, so please try to secure your spot ASAP. We will have four one-hour seatings starting at 11 a.m., with the last at 2 p.m. Los Angeles - Wednesday, October 25th at Truffle Brothers San Francisco - Thursday, October 26th at Fort Mason Second on our October calendar is a visit from La Casaccia’s Margherita Rava, a producer of some of the best terroir and culture-rich value boutique wines in our portfolio. Her schedule is below. Margherita Rava picking Freisa harvest 2023, photo taken by her mom, Elena. Los Angeles, October 16th-18th San Diego, October 19th-20th San Francisco, October 23rd-24th Central Coast, October 25th-27th Katharina Wechsler is on a roll. She got married in August, had some rave reviews (not important to us, but they don’t hurt), and just released what is likely her top Riesling vintage to date. Last month we released Wechsler’s classic dry wine starter kit with the 2021 Scheurebe Trocken, 2021 Riesling Trocken, and the 2021 Riesling Trocken “Kalk,” formerly known as Westhofen Trocken. This month we have two of the 2021 Cloudy by Nature wines: the orange 2021 Scheurebe “Fehlfarbe” and 2021 Pinot Noir Rosé “Sexy MF.” Both are superb and without any added sulfites. The bottles of 2021 Sexy MF have some carbonic gas and need a gentle jostle once open, but once it shakes loose, it is as sexy as the name suggests. Perfectly clean lees come through with sweet red and pink flowers and first of the season sunny wild strawberries. Its slightly more overcast side (albeit still quite illuminating) is a slight tilt toward cranberry and sweet orange peel. It’s far too easy to drink, so bring out two bottles for each occasion of more than two people. As upfront and fun as it is, tasted next to the Scheurebe Fehlfarbe, Sexy MF comes across as discreet. Named after a famous 1980s German punk rock band, Fehlfarbe’s tone and energy is a match: a spicy, zesty, leesy, yeasty explosion! The aromas are completely untamed and eye-widening fun. By comparison, the palate is more Pink Floyd: dreamy, zingy and tightly effervescent with coarse enough tannins to keep you locked in the trance, stoned and coming back for more of the jasmine, white flowers, earl grey and lavender tea aromas. During Katharina and Manuel’s wedding, I focused on the 2021 Riesling Crus: Benn, Kirchspiel, and Morstein. The three wines were dynamic and such a pleasure on an unexpectedly cool, wet and windy August weekend. Benn presented its most compelling argument since I first encountered Wechsler's wines and is a pretty successful bid to clear its name as the third wheel in Katharina’s big three. The most surprising uptick is its more pronounced mineral impressions and core depth than in the past. It’s a perfect vintage for Kirchspiel and its predominance of loess topsoil above limestone bedrock, which tends to push it to be the most extroverted of the bunch. In a vintage of fruit that’s understated compared to that of hotter years, it’s more wound up and regal than in the past. This colder season seems to have given center stage to the limestone bedrock to do more chalking early on. As I was drowning in the operatic emotion of Morstein and the weight of their wedding, I pondered what it means to get married to someone, what it’s like to watch people possibly taking on the biggest commitment of their life. There were a lot of other special wedding wines from local superstars, and the one I wanted the most was Katharina’s Morstein. It was a monumental wine for a spectacular day. Martin Mittelbach continues his ascent in the Wachau’s pecking order. Unlike many of his famous friends and winemaking colleagues, he’s been in control of his family’s winery since his mid-twenties. Many his age (now around fifty) still have parents who claim retirement but don’t completely let go of the stylistic steering wheel and the company business. But this is understandable given that the oldest generation was the one who recovered their towns and the wine industry after World War II. They understand war and poverty and had to do the heavy lifting to rebuild their culture and once again earn the respect of the world. It’s hard to let that go. One of the most important recent changes for Martin is his embrace and certification of organic farming, which alone sets him apart from most of the Vinea Wachau’s ruling class, who can’t seem to break their addiction to “conventional” farming. He’s a fifth-generation winegrower (though Tegernseerhof dates back more than a thousand years), and his philosophical compass always pointed toward natural farming. Like most producers, Tegernseerhof’s Riesling vineyards are also mostly located on the steep upper terraces composed of gneiss, and the Grüner Veltliners are on lower loess and alluvial terraces. However, Martin has three Grüner Veltliner crus on gneiss bedrock with little to no covering of loess: Ried Höhereck and Ried Schütt, bottled as a Smaragd, and the Federspiel, Ried Superin. His range is also distinguished by his exclusive use of steel vats and vigorous sorting to remove any density-adding botrytis and slightly shriveled and sunburnt clusters. 2022 was a hot year, which makes the usually zippy Federspiels more attractive to a wider audience. The Dürnstein Grüner Veltliner Federspiel is a mix of many different parcels low on the terraced slopes and on loess plateaus next to the Danube. The bedrock and topsoil are primarily loess and river alluvium. This is the grü grü of Tegernseerhof’s range and offers an expansive and soft overall dry, chalky profile with fresh fruits, pastoral summer flowers, and Veltliner spice. Martin’s Ried Superin Grüner Veltliner Federspiel comes from a spot down by the river on gneiss bedrock cleared of any loess deposits yet replaced by river alluvium. The roots here are in contact with the bedrock. The bedrock coupled with rocky topsoil makes for a contrast to the sunbathed and deep loess soil parcels of the Durnstein bottling. It’s more rocky and minerally in profile; spicy, deeply salty, and with a tighter and straighter frame. Tegernseerhof’s Dürnstein Riesling Federspiel comes from many steeply terraced vineyards with southerly exposures in the eastern end of the Wachau, most notably from the crus, Loibenberg and Kellerberg. The bedrock is mostly gneiss and the topsoil is gneiss with some loess. The 2022 version is another gateway drug for non-Riesling drinkers to discover this variety. It combines open-knit yet ornate aromas with tight framing and tension. I’m sure I will sing the praises of the 2021s from my first tastes in the spring of ‘22 til the day I can’t taste a thing. I remain floored by the quality of the wines and cannot get enough. Aside from Tegernseerhof and Veyder-Malberg, I’m also lapping up various Federspiel wines over here in Europe from the great Wachau producers we don’t import. (Teaser: three main ones begin with the letters A, K, and P.) At around 12% alcohol, Federspiel is what I want to drink from the Wachau these days. Their freshness and fruit profiles match my calibration. However, the two growers we work with in the Wachau that make Smaragd-style wines—Veyder-Malberg doesn’t use the Vinea Wachau classifications—are closer in overall profile to Smaragd wines of the past (minus the botrytis), and closer to the Federspiels of today. Martin makes glorious Smaragd wines for those who go for a lean and focused body and texture. Fluidity is one of his hallmarks and one of Riesling’s most important attractions. Other great white grapes, like Chardonnay and Chenin Blanc, can get away with noisy yet compelling wines steeped in deep textures, but a great dry Riesling needs to express fluidity. This is one of the elements that I believe have separated Austrian dry Rieslings from German for many decades, though the Germans are certainly catching up. (Indeed, there are certain German individuals who broke through long ago, but the Austrians were cranking out fabulous dry Rieslings for many decades before many Germans began to rediscover them.) Tegernseerhof’s newer wines find that greater fluidity and this is especially important at this time when wines can go full monster under the sun after a few extra days left on the vine. I may again take the liberty to partially credit this to an even softer, more natural approach in the vineyards. (If presented with two peaches of the same type and same ripeness level, one organic and one conventional, do you think you could tell the difference? Beyond the sugar, acid and textural balance, I think chances are high that you would. It’s the same with grapes.) Ried Loibenberg is the main hill of the north side of the east end of the Wachau and probably the most photographed series of vineyards. From a terroir perspective, its diversity is due to its size, both vertically and length, and the variation of bedrock and topsoil. But one consistent characteristic is that it is one of the warmest hill slopes in the Wachau. It has few ravines that pass through it which creates a non-stop hot mountain face. Usually, when there is a substantial ravine cutting through a hill, the hills take on a different name and have wines with different expressions. Rieslings sit in the upper section of the hill on gneiss bedrock while mid-slope and toward the foot of the hill are the Grüner Veltliners, though this is not always the case. Loibenberg is almost always the first picked each season for the Smaragd wines and Martin picks even earlier than most. He has many parcels scattered about the hill (as most growers do) with some Grüner Veltliner at the extreme top and Riesling closer to the bottom, offering him a wide window in which to pick. Just to the west of Loibenberg are the Grüner Veltliner sites of Martin’s Ried Schütt and Ried Höhereck. Both sit partially inside of a ravine (known as the Mental Gorge, or Mentalgraben) where water erosion separated them from Loibenberg. The combe floods with cold air from the Waldviertel forest behind and above the vineyards, contributing tension to balance out its deep power. With an unusual appearance for a great cru site, Schütt is a relatively flat vineyard with only slight terracing below the steeper Höhereck. It’s composed primarily of hard orthogneiss bedrock and decomposed gneiss topsoil with a mixture of different-sized, unsorted gneiss rocks and sand deposited by the former water flow. Replanted in 1951, Tegernseerhof’s  Höhereck is the Grüner Veltliner parentage of many Tegernseerhof vines in the area. A rare Grüner Veltliner planted almost exclusively on the acidic metamorphic rock, gneiss, rather than the sandy, nutrient-rich and water-retentive loess, typical for this variety with a beneficial southeast exposure inside and just popping out of the ravine with great access to forest freshness and mountain winds and an early summer and autumn sunset, Martin says that the most important element of Höhereck is its genetic heritage. This half-hectare (1.25 acre) vineyard has been a growing field for centuries for ancient Grüner Veltliner biotypes, thus contributing to the complexity of this wine and Martin’s entire range of Veltliners, with all new plantations made with its genetic material. Höhereck produces dynamic wines that still manage to show great restraint, though this is perhaps due to its great abundance of layers that unfold once the bottle is open. Kellerberg Martin’s Ried Steinertal Riesling Smaragd comes from one of the greatest Riesling sites in all of Austria and its aromas beam from the glass with enticing and full-of-energy, high-toned mineral impressions. These elements are likely due to its growth in purely gneiss rock, spare topsoil and Martin’s preference for earlier picking and rigorous sorting to remove any concentrated botrytis grapes. The vineyard’s heat-trapping amphitheater shape and the steep ravines on both sides also create a teeter-totter of hot days and the cold nocturnal mountain air that breezes in and cools down the vineyard. If one were to ask a knowledgeable wine professional about the greatest vineyards in Austria, the Wachau’s Kellerberg would likely be mentioned in their first breath. Tegernseerhof’s Ried Kellerberg Riesling Smaragd is the fullest Riesling in their range, surely vying for the top spot with Steinertal. The hill faces mostly southeast, giving it good sun exposure in the morning but also an earlier sunset than the neighboring Riesling vineyards with more southerly and sometimes western exposures, like Steinertal and parts of Loibenberg. Kellerberg is also exposed to a large open ravine to the east that brings in a rush of cool air during the night. The aspect and exposure to this ravine, along with mostly unplanted hills just to the west, allows the fruit to mature to ripeness without imparting excessive fruitiness while highlighting its pedigreed gneiss bedrock and spare topsoil. It has a deep range of topsoil from volcanic, loess and bedrock-derived gneiss, and Tegernseerhof has six parcels inside its boundary that cover these soil types. Loess brings richness and lift, gneiss the tension and focus. Even more important than the nuances is the way this wine makes you feel: the energy, the profound reservation, and at the same time its generosity. Kellerberg is formidable and does indeed comfortably sit among the world’s greatest vineyards. We’ve waited quite a few years for another opportunity to walk down memory lane with Southern Rhône wines like Eric and Sophie Ughetto’s 2021s bottled under Domaine la Roubine. We love full-throttle, deeply flavorful versions of their organic wines (certified since 2000) in warmer years, which they manage masterfully every year, but we love even more their wines from cooler years, like 2021, which seem to be a once-in-a-decade occurrence—perhaps 2013 was the most recent one with those seasonal features. Similar to the limited Rioja section on many wine lists where there is almost exclusively preserved for the fabulous historic R. López de Heredia wines, those from the Southern Rhône without association to the name Reynaud hold many fewer positions compared to what they once did. With the greater demand for lower alcohol wines (for obvious reasons) in the face of the south’s naturally higher alcohols, its warm climate, and the longer season needed for phenolic ripeness to bring, Grenache, one of the world’s most noble grape varieties and the south’s leading red wine (and rosé, and white!) protagonist from tannic austerity to the potential for sublime texture and aroma is a short window before the wines quickly pack on the muscle and more mature fruit. But even above 16% alcohol, Grenache can miraculously achieve balance (though it may take away the drinker’s): consider those from the Châteauneuf-du-Pape luminaries, Rayas and Vieille Julienne. (Somehow many wine pros insist on low-alcohol wines but quickly blur their lines when presented with an opportunity for the holy grail and singularly perfumed yet blockbuster-level alcohol wines of the Rayas-associated domaines.) Whole cluster and long fermentations are one of Roubine’s signature characteristics, and this keeps their wines fresher and more savory without getting overrun by the south’s big fruitiness. Whole cluster ferments take a month in the case of their two Côtes-du-Rhône Villages, Sablet and Seguret, and about 45 days for Vacqueras and Gigondas. This leaves even their most unassuming and price-friendly red starter range raised in concrete and fiberglass tanks to deliver unexpectedly ornate details for commonly forceful wines from these parts. Both Vacqueras and Gigondas still represent supreme value and often age effortlessly. I recently pulled out some cellared bottles of Domaine des Pallieres, vintages 2001 and 2004. They were fabulous and didn’t yet seem to be on top of their aromatic potential—a grossly underappreciated and nearly forgotten element of aged Grenache. Dentelles de Montmirail All of La Roubine’s vineyards are on the north-facing end of the Dentelles de Montmirail. This adds the benefit of less directly south-facing positions. The results are less desiccation of fruit and perhaps “cleaner” and more precise, taut fruit characteristics. The Sablet comes from four hectares planted in the early 1990s on northwest-facing limestone terraces of sand, sandstone and quartz. The 2021 blend of 70% Grenache, 25% Syrah and 5% Cinsault delivers inviting earthy aromas lifted with mild lavender, black pepper, cedar smoke and herb-dusted black raspberry. Its polished, fine-grained tannins point to an evolved wine of a much higher caliber. (Disappointingly, we didn’t receive a single case of their beguiling Seguret this year.) Roubine’s Vacqueras comes from five hectares planted in the 1960s on limestone and calcareous clay facing west on the west side of the Dentelles de Montmirail. The 2021 blend of 70% Grenache, 15% Mourvedre, 15% Syrah offers clean, spicy florals on the nose that follow through the silky mouthfeel. Candied red fruits and delicately smoked meat flavors inform this extremely elegant version. At the top of their food chain, and a sort of super-second appellation (behind Châteauneuf-du-Pape) is Roubine’s Gigondas. They have five hectares of 50-year-old vines on the north side of the Dentelles de Montmirail, with one flat parcel at 150-160 meters on iron-rich red clay and cobbles, and the other is a series of north-facing terraces at 260-300 meters on quartzite, limestone and alluvium. The 2021 blend is 70% Grenache, 15% Mourvedre, and 15% Syrah and renders a deep wine rich in aromas of perfectly ripe blue and red fruits with remarkable earth notes that push through the dense mid-palate flavors of cherry liqueur, black pepper, garrigue and subtle smoke. It’s seamless and already fully integrated, even as early in its life as it is. What makes Dave Fletcher such a talent is the juxtaposition between his technical confidence and strong opinions with an outward insecurity about what people think of his wines. (This makes him a lot of fun to tease, and I never do this directly if I don’t like the person or the wine.) I don’t think it’s only Dave’s strengths that have brought him to where he is today, it’s also his openness to not only share the technical details of his crafting and vineyard terroirs but to allow us into his thought processes where he not only shares the triumphs of each season but the challenges and how they’ve irreversibly marked the wines. He openly and sometimes painfully admits what he sees as his mistakes in each wine, even when the hair on your arms and neck and sides of your face are goosebumped from the emotion stirred by the Nebbiolo in your glass. There have been many successful wines (I can’t say I’ve had an unsuccessful one) since he started his winery; Dave has progressed quickly and his 2020 Barbarescos are undeniably contenders for the very best he’s done. Does a wine’s aging potential make it a greater wine than those that may have less potential to age well longer but that have a longer optimal drinking window? Perhaps it does from the point of view of producers and critics because their legacy is important to them, but is it important to us? I think some of them might claim that the 2020s’ more modest tannins could be a hindrance toward aging, but I don’t agree. California’s legendary Syrah winemaker, Bob Lindquist, from Qupé, told me while at my last restaurant post as a sommelier at Wine Cask in Santa Barbara in the early 2000s, that balance is what’s most important for a wine to age well. We were tasting some of his Bien Nacido Hillside Estate Syrahs after long cellar aging and they were wonderful. I can still taste those wines from that day and see Bob’s earnest eyes inside his glasses, and what he said always stuck with me. Sometimes I think the great Nebbiolo producers put too much value on Nebbiolo’s tannin level; the grape’s talent isn’t always best expressed in the vin de garde form. It’s extremely versatile, from Langhe Nebbiolo to bubbles, as well as its ability to achieve greatness in quite different terroirs, from the calcareous sands and mountainous, Mediterranean climate of the Langhe, but also the acidic igneous and volcanic rocks in the mountain climates of Alto Piemonte and Lombardia. I can’t speak for everyone else’s 2020 Barbarescos, but I am a big believer in Dave’s entire range. 2020 Barbaresco and Barolo are sandwiched between some pretty serious years, but for me, it may be the dark horse challenger for the 2019s and 2021s with some producers—not only in the medium tier producers but the uppers too. However, time will tell. Fletcher’s 2020 Barbarescos are readier than the already upfront 2019s, but they don’t seem to lack anything, except stern tannin to fruit balance in their youth. “I prefer this kind of vintage [2020] because they’re a little rounder and softer to begin with, but Nebbiolo still has plenty of tannin in the background.” -Dave Fletcher Dave is a university-educated Australian enologist living in Barbaresco since 2009. He also has the area’s coolest cantina (maybe even literally): a remodel of the historic Barbaresco train station. He began working at the famous Ceretto Barolo and Barbaresco cantina as an intern, eventually becoming the head maker of their reds. Now he makes his own wines from more than a dozen vineyards around Barbaresco, Alba and inside the Roero. All vineyards farmed by Dave are either certified organic or under conversion (some with biodynamic practices as well), and leased vineyards worked by their owners are encouraged toward organic farming. In addition to his Barbaresco range, he’s experimenting with local varieties, like Barbera with partial cluster ferments and Arneis orange wine, and others that grow well in his hood, like Chardonnay. “There wasn’t a lot of rain in the winter and there was almost no snowpack, which led to slow growth. Then in May, it rained a ton and the vegetation took off. Then we went into a dry spell through the summer which took us from saturation to dryness which caused rapid development of the fruit—a hallmark of the vintage. The fruit is super expressive and dense but not as tannic as the 2019s where there was a longer season for slower ripening compared to 2020. I prefer this kind of vintage because they’re a little rounder and softer to begin with but Nebbiolo still has plenty of tannin in the background.” Everything is hand-harvested, destemmed, and naturally fermented for 14-60 days (two to three weeks for the 2019s and 2020s; three to four weeks for the 2021s) with a single gentle daily extraction by hand. The first sulfites are added after malolactic and all the Nebbiolos are aged in 10-15-year-old small oak barrels (two years for Barbaresco, one year for Nebbiolo) prior to bottling without fining or filtration. There’s a lot of talk about the high quality of the 2021 vintage in the Langhe. Many growers were talking about it as though it’s one of the best they’ve seen, but they seem to say that a lot these days. Dave’s on the fence, but he doesn’t question the season’s high overall quality. We’ll get into that next year as Dave’s 2021 Barbarescos are about to be bottled right after the 2023 harvest. In the meantime, Dave released his 2021 Langhe Nebbiolo (formerly bottled as Nebbiolo d’Alba) and it’s a beautiful precursor to what will come with the 2021 Barbarescos. It’s sourced from Scaparoni, across the Tanaro River west of Alba, Montà, further north toward Roero DOCG, and Barbaresco, close to Fletcher’s winery. The vineyards are principally calcareous marls, sand and clay on a multitude of southerly expositions and altitudes. It’s also fermented and aged the same as all the Barbarescos but about half the time in wood. The 2021 is yet another example of Dave’s fine tuning, and always punches well above its class, especially because it parallels Barbarescos’ DOCG cellar regulations. The alcohol balance in Fletcher’s 2020s seems optimal, even with an average of 14.5%. Those of us who want to experience/drink more all want less alcohol (personally, I wish they tasted the same without any alcohol), but in this case, it brings a tiny dash of sweetness that compliments Nebbiolo and lifts the retro nasal spicy, earthy, woodsy perfume. I suggest serving the 2020s cooler to keep their voluptuous assets tight and in place, especially the curvy Starderi. Named after Dave’s familial Scottish clan, Fletcher, Shoot Straight translates the unique name given to the Barbaresco “Recta Pete.” The 2020 is a blend of 50% Roncaglie, 30% Starderi and 20% Ronchi, the latter a less-known vineyard adjacent and south of Montestefano facing south-southeast on a steep limestone sand and calcareous marl hillside. (The other crus, Roncaglie and Starderi, will be covered inside the profiles of each respective wine.) This Barbaresco is meant to be an early charmer, but with all of the crus so charming out of the gates (even if the Roncaglie is more stoic compared to the others) it represents a great value and better availability in the range, even if the quantities are miniscule. We will start with Faset, the puncher in the group with great tableside manners and charm. Tasted in late September with Max Stefanelli, a recent addition to our team, along with my wife, Faset opened with a flurry of sappy red fruit and chocolate. In the mouth, it’s upfront, bigger, and rounder compared to the other Fletcher crus, with maybe a little more freshness on the palate—perhaps a credit to the vineyard’s greater clay content. It’s muscular at first and works to impress while the second pour tightens a touch with more earthy notes. An hour later the forest begins to thicken and the nose is denser and the wine calmer and less extroverted. Faset seems more universally appealing for drinkers who prefer a little more richness and weight at the expense of pointed and lifted aromatics. It was my wife’s favorite of the bunch on both days. Faset comes from vines planted in the mid-1980s on a south-facing steeply terraced amphitheater at 200-250 meters on calcareous sand and limestone marls with a high clay content. Fall flavors of sweet and dried fig, roasted chestnut, cedar box, anise, sweet red and dark licorice, pumpkin, persimmon, unfrosted carrot cake, and a strong finish in the back palate of Starderi provide a notable contrast from Faset’s straightforward fruit and earth punch. In the context of the three crus, it was the most charming from the first sip to the last sip on day two. The nose is intoxicating and lifted volatile compounds ride the edge as happens with so many wines from great producers. It’s immediate and seems to ready itself knowing the cork is about to be pulled. Warmth and joy emit as it takes in deeper breaths. The aromatic notes don’t change too much with time, except that they snug up and lift even more. The tannins nibble at the palate but never settle this uncontrollably extroverted wine down. This was Max’s favorite wine from start to finish. Dave’s parcel of Starderi is planted in one of the sunniest plots in Barbaresco and is very close to the Tanaro River. His 0.10 hectares were planted in 1985 on a south-southwest-facing, medium slope of calcareous marl bedrock (~30% sand, 55% clay & 15% sandstone) and topsoil at an altitude of 200-210 meters. If Starderi is the last born in its buoyant personality, Roncaglie is the first. Roncaglie is the most regal and articulate of the 2020 trio and initially expresses itself sparingly with short powerful bursts. Tighter upon opening compared to the Starderi and Faset, it has a balance of woodsy notes that lead over its floral and fruit spectrum. Aromatically, it’s a forest floor littered with chanterelles and the invigorating smell of disintegrating fallen redwood after a rain and old wood furniture with good patina. The aromas lift with rose, allspice, and patchouli. The fineness of the aromas misleads the palate as the first taste went off like a backdraft, sharply and endlessly expanding in dimension with power and precision. Once it settles after a few full gasps of air, the guard goes down and Roncaglie offers deep, soft and pleasantly revitalizing floral aromas. Rongcalie is very serious, and while it’s not as stunning as Starderi, it may be more beautiful. Even if it’s hard to pick a favorite, the tense beginning and constant evolution upward over hours made it the most compelling of the three, at least for this taster. Roncaglie comes from vines planted between 1970-2010 on a south-southwest, steeply terraced amphitheater of calcareous sand and limestone marls at 240-280 meters.

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.)

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.

Txakoli vineyards of Alfredo Egia We have a lot of supernaturalists hitting the streets this month. Our first two are from very different corners of Iberia, Alfredo Egia from Spain’s green and wet Txakoli and Menina d’Uva from Portugal’s high altitude, arid moorland, Trás-os-Montes. Mid-month we'll feature the second round with two of our newest and most exciting growers, one from the Loire Valley and another from Rías Baixas. First, let’s dig into Egia and Menina. What happens when biodynamics-practitioner and no-sulfite winegrower Alfredo Egia adds a dash of sulfites to one Txakoli wine? Fifteen tiny little milligrams per liter of added sulfites? IZAKI! I didn’t expect Alfredo’s 2021 Izaki to be as fabulous as Rebel Rebel and Hegan Egin because it’s the third wine in the range and about half the price of the latter. Alfredo sent me two bottles that sat in my cellar for six weeks before I pulled the first cork, at which time I sent a barrage of enthusiastic text messages minutes after opening. His response: “And they’re only tank samples.” IZAKI! Izaki means “Creature,” in Basque, and is a blend of 80% Petit Courbu and 20% Gros Courbu from Alfredo’s biodynamic vineyard and a parcel in conversion just next to it. (Rebel Rebel and Hegan Egan have been biodynamic since the beginning.) The biodynamic grapes (35%) are vinified and raised in two old, 400-liter barrels, while the plot in conversion is in stainless steel. The tank sample followed up by the finished version were stunners. While we received a bit more than Rebel Rebel, it likely won’t be enough to satisfy the demand for this micro-producer. The 2020 Rebel Rebel is a great follow up to the more tense 2019. 2020 was a hotter year and the wine is a little more fruit forward and gentle than the savory, citrusy, power-punching, shredder, 2019. The longboard soul-surfer between the two, the 2020 Rebel Rebel may take a minute to get out of first gear, but when it does it’s a steady and uninterrupted climb—a perfectly clean and pure SO2-free white wine. A blend of 80% Hondarrabi Zerratia and 20% Izkiriota Txikia, the grapes are similarly processed as Izaki, with whole-cluster pressing and the malolactic fermentation that usually overlaps with the end of the alcoholic fermentation and finishes by the end of spring. The wines remain on their lees without bâtonnage (lees stirring), and some barrels are topped off while others are intentionally left untopped so they can oxidize a little, adding to the layers of complexity and softening the fruit’s dominance. Before the following harvest, the wine is blended into steel where it rests for another six to ten months prior to bottling. Rebel Rebel is neither filtered nor fined. A visit to Trás-os-Montes, with Riccardo and Frederico at Arribas Wine Company and Aline at Menina d’Uva, was long overdue. Even though I live in northern Portugal, it takes three and a half hours to drive directly east for the 180 miles in between. With Gino Della Porto, from Nizza Monferrato’s newest cutting-edge project, Sette, in tow, we passed through Vinho Verde’s densely green subzones during a wet, early spring. Then we moved on to Douro’s expansive and often breathtaking river valleys of the Baixo Corgo and Cima Corgo subzones, and continued through the gentler countryside of Douro Superior for a quick overnighter with Mateus Nicolau de Almeida and his wife and winegrowing partner at Trans-Douro-Express, Teresa Ameztoy. We finally arrived early the following morning to one of the most isolated areas of mainland Portugal, the serine and enchanting Trás-os-Montes—a Portuguese land seemingly frozen in time. Riccardo and Frederico continue to impress with their already spectacular and budget-friendly Saroto wines. The range remains familiar and in line with the previous years, but their last half decade of tinkering helped clarify their direction in the cellar and resulted in yet another new level with the incoming 2022s, which will arrive in the fall. More on that in a few months. We arrived in the afternoon to the microscopic village, Uva, for our visit with the warm and softly charming Aline Dominguez, who was sporting a little belly bump. The baby is expected during harvest time this year; she and her partner, Emanuele, from Abruzzo Italy, have joined forces in life as well as in wine. Normally Aline’s wines would have arrived last year, but due to global freight delays she had difficulty securing glass. Forced by the short supply of Burgundy-shaped bottles, she bought some with Bordeaux’s more linear posture to finish the job. Perhaps with too much time on their hands as the remodel of their cellar was delayed due to the extreme inflation of material costs, she and Emanuele changed the labels from elegant black and white to, as you can see by the label images, a more playful set, and both fit perfectly with Aline’s lighthearted and quietly deep wines. When we tasted them this April, Menina d’Uva’s Gamay-nosed, tense, and spritely 2022 Ciste, fired with citrus, rhubarb, watermelon, coriander, resinous high desert plants (Ciste) and leather. It’s especially fresh and bright this year, even if it’s sporting 12.5% alcohol. The mixture remains relatively the same as in the past, with 70% red grapes, Bastardo Preta (Trousseau in France) and Negreda (Mouratón in Spanish), and 30% white, with Malvasia, Bastardo Branco, Formosa, and some others in minuscule quantities. The grapes are completely whole bunch and co-fermented for a few days and aged exclusively 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; she wants to keep this wine truer to the expression of the place and less to a fermentation technique that pushes up too much fruit and fermentative aromas to the forefront. Photo lifted from Menina d’Uva’s Instagram: Tinta gorda, Moscatel roxo, Verdelho, Bastardo roxo, Bastardo preta The 2022 Palomba follows suit with all its previous vintages with its lightly reductive nose upon opening, but this year it quickly moves past it, opening wide and leading with more fruit than it did before. When at the cellar in early March, I was convinced this was her best Palomba yet. It has sweet plum, Persian mulberry, a tense palate (less than Ciste, but clearly a mark of the vintage), Trás-os-Montes countryside high desert plant and flower aromas, and a harmonious range of blue to dark red fruits and a finish of lifted and taut red currant. Palomba is made of 90% Negreda, also known as Mouratón in Spain. This leader in the blend is known to produce big, juicy, dark-colored wines with surprisingly little in the way of tannin. It’s mixed with other reds that few outside 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. The pressure points within Aline’s wines are deep and fully mouth filling while remaining ethereal and tense. The follow-up bottle I tasted in April at home confirmed that it may be (at least for this taster) her top effort.

Matera, November 2023 Yes! Finally rid of you, you…2023! It’s January, and that means we’ll either commit even more to our goals with great preparations for the coming year, or we’ll pivot and aim for something else. Or maybe we’ll just plan nothing at all in rebellion against our own interests… If you do have goals for 2024, then this is the moment to dig in your heels, take off the gloves, burn the midnight oil (and whatever other overused idiomatic expressions come to mind), but reconsider that Dry January thing because isn’t life too short to drink nothing at all for an entire month? Two weeks? We’re going to start this year with the inspiring story of Laurent (Lolo) Marre, a wine-crazy Frenchman, who in his late forties almost died, and when given a new lease on life he refocused on a lifelong dream. I hope you enjoy the story about this passionate no-sulfite-added, natural, biodynamic, self-described “neo-vigneron” in Cahors living the life many of us on the other side of the wine trade dream of. In the meantime, best of luck to you this year, and welcome once again to the beginning of the rest of your life! After twenty-five years as a sommelier, wine wholesaler and the owner of a Parisian wine bar, forty-eight-year-old Cahors native, Laurent Marre, found himself in a hospital bed. Unexpected life-threatening circumstances and four months confined to a hospital can change anyone’s perspective. After he was released, Laurent and his wife, Nathalie, started to plan a return to Laurent’s familial homeland. Since 2018, they’ve been raising horses (Nathalie’s métier, along with plowing the vineyards) and farming eight biodynamic hectares of vines on their 30-hectare plot surrounded by forest on one of Cahors’ geologically diverse and high-altitude limestone plateaus. Our first interaction with Laurent’s impeccably balanced, no-sulfites-added “natural-wine” range (white included), evoked a whole-body YES! The range begins with C’Juste, a welcome and unexpectedly intense mineral and fresh, amphora-raised Gros Manseng, followed by a series of emotion-inducing and minerally fresh Malbecs raised in concrete, amphora, and large old French oak barrels and foudres. Laurent offering wild onion growing in his vineyards No one’s body stays young forever, but at fifty-something, Laurent’s mind seems to have turned back the clock. From the abyss of his hospital bed came rebirth and revelation that brought him back home to Cahors and a dream he had almost forgotten. Laurent was in line to be the fifth generation of operators of the Cahors hotel and restaurant, Le Terminus. Hospitality, wine, culinary arts and living well from one meal to the next were their family heritage. They took their vacations in wine countries with good restaurants, and it set the course for his adventures abroad. After high school, he attended viticulture and enology university in Toulouse. Instead of jumping straight into the vineyard and cellar, he worked in Alsace for three years at L’Auberge de l’Ill with Serge Dubs, one of his great mentors and the winner of the 1989 “Best Sommelier of the World” competition. Eventually, Laurent owned a wine bar and also represented various vignerons in the Paris market. “I always wanted to be a winemaker. But not coming from a farming family, my former job as a sommelier allowed me to achieve this dream of working in the wine world. Then a serious health issue in 2016 pushed me to achieve my dream to become a vigneron.” Put on hold and then nearly forgotten, his original dream took a backseat as he got accustomed to Parisian life where he watched the rest of France and the world passing through the iconic Ville lumière. Now he’s a new-world mind in Cahors’ old-world setting, and there are few vignerons we’ve encountered so sure of their calling to the vines as Laurent. It’s rare in France for outsiders of the wine community (even if they’re French) to make the leap from life in restaurants and wine bars to that of a vigneron. Laurent is an exception with his quarter century in helping to promote young vignerons’ names and reputations in Paris and elsewhere. With full idealism intact, his splash was immediate and perhaps surprising to some. But it wasn’t for those who are familiar with his immeasurable urgency to live life that followed years of reflection on the nature of wine, and the words and ideas of the thousands of vignerons, sommeliers and talented tasters and thinkers who crossed his path. With clarity in his practice, his ideas have come together quickly yet he remains as endlessly curious and enthusiastic as Pollux, his canine vineyard companion. During our first visit, Laurent and Pollux were hardly able to contain themselves, moving quickly through their vineyard and forest playground poking and sniffing, analyzing flowers and herbs and limestone rocks like they’d just discovered them. Laurent paused as we examined the curious six-inch porcelain plates on white limestone rock and he explained that below are highly porous terracotta amphoras beside newly planted vines to offer them micro-doses of water and temperature regulation needed to thread the needle through the hot and dry summers in their crucial years before fruit production and greater root development; these clever and cute pots are a useful gardening technique he saw in Japan that replaces drip irrigation. Some people use punctured plastic containers as well, but that’s neither sexy, cool, nor aesthetically pleasing in such a natural setting. You can take the man out of the wine bar, but you can’t take the wine bar out of the man (or something like that). Laurent transformed from rustic wine grower to hospitable Parisian barman (which may seem like an oxymoron) the moment he held the cellar door for us to pass into his winemaking workshop. He described his objectives with each aging container while patiently watching and offering a light commentary to preserve the mystery for each of us to bond with his wine in our own way: to discover something completely new or uncannily familiar; to let our interpretations and creative juices flow; to make our relationship personal and deep in a matter of sips with our unique perceptions that only we sometimes understand. As Andrew Jefford writes in the opening sentence of Drinking with the Valkyries, “We know no moment quite like this.” Childhood friend and business partner at Le Vent des Jours, François Sudreau is not only a great supporter of Laurent’s dream, he is also one of his biggest fans. With his infectious smile and eyes enlarged by his glasses, a bottle or glass in hand (and sometimes a cigarette in the other), like Laurent, he closely attends to his guests: Water? Wine? A smoke? Perhaps some rillette de canard? A great friend to have for any epicurean, François’ 130-year-old family business carries from the late-1800s to our century the ancient craft of charcuterie quack: confits, rillettes, pâtés, and foie gras a hundred ways. Sudreau-Côte Cave is an evil temptation in the center of Cahors that preys on those of us who lack restraint for France’s Michelin-starred picnic fair. His shop is lined with all their ancient recipes in jar and tin, and also a fabulous collection of wines, piles of the most mythological French cheeses and sausages (especially those from the southwest), along with a room in which to sit, pull corks, enjoy everything on offer, and commune. François brings a dangerously good accompaniment to visits at Le Vent des Jours, and he surely pushes harvest lunches and a quick casse-croûte to a stratospheric level. Once a prolific variety used for its color and structure contribution to Bordeaux, a frost in 1956 exposed Malbec’s Achilles’ heel for this once rare seasonal challenge compared to the Cabernet brothers and Merlot. Commonly referred to as Cot (pronounced like the abbreviation for company: Co.) in other areas of France, its thick skins and dark, lip-and-mouth-staining color earned the name, Malbec, which Laurent explains in the local dialect of Cahors means “bad mouth.” (The Vin de Cahors website, vindecahors.fr says the name’s origin involves a dubiously named and seemingly shameless self-promoter, Mr. Malbeck.) A half-sibling of Merlot, among many other winding vinous relations, Cahors (presumably made with Cot/Malbec) was also an inspiration for the Roman poets, Horace and Virgil. I suppose this shouldn’t surprise us that Horace wrote about it given that he was from modern-day Basilicata’s Venosa (in his time it was called Venusia and part of Apuglia), a central hub for Aglianico wines of Vulture. Assuming the Cahors of his time was Malbec, this grape is of an equally dark color and structure as Aglianico, though perhaps a little less intense by comparison when measuring tannins and perhaps naturally juicier and more seductive. In Bordeaux, Malbec was used as a blending component to beef up Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. But in Cahors, Malbec performs on a world-class level as a single-varietal terroir wine at higher altitudes on limestone bedrock and calcareous topsoil. Perhaps more so than the low-lying and largely alluvial soils of Bordeaux, also similar to the many vineyards inside the Lot River gorge on former flood plains, the limestone roche mare of Cahors seems to naturally impart a more linear and strict architecture to the aromatic and palate textures to this often fruit-heavy wine. An hour and a half northwest of Toulouse, three hours by car from the city center of Bordeaux, four hours from Lyon, five from Marseille, and eighteen hours by car, or 400 hours by foot from Horace’s hometown, one doesn’t “happen” to cross Cahors by car on the way to somewhere else. (Imagine how sound the Cahors must have been to travel so far over 2000 years ago and still inspire Horace to immortalize it!) Located just west of the western end of France’s Massif Central, an ancient igneous and metamorphic rock mountain range with some young-ish, seemingly (hopefully) dead volcanoes, Cahors is a land of Jurassic limestone plateaus (referred to in French as causse) above a deeply carved, Mosel-like, dizzying meander of the Lot River. The Lot sprung near the Massif Central’s Cévennes and carried a variety of different rock types from the ancient massif to the Lot River Valley, depositing them in cobble form along the limestone ridges and eventually joining the Garonne River after 485 kilometers of travel from its source. Malbec is perfectly situated in Cahors for many reasons. The most influential factor in determining a grape’s ideal place in the world is the climate. The southwest is generally mild in the winter, wet in the spring, hot in the summer, and humid in the fall. It’s more influenced by oceanic conditions despite being relatively equidistant from the Atlantic and Mediterranean. At the western base of the Massif Central’s Parc Naturel Régional des Causses du Quercy, Lot’s path has a convergence of strong opposing natural forces. The Pyrenees to the south block much of the intense African and Mediterranean heat and spring storms, and, like the Massif Central to the east and north, offer cool mountain air relief; the Massif’s north winds also bring Cahors’ biggest threat of frost. Toward the west, it’s open to the Atlantic, which brings autumnal rains and cool winds. With similarities to Southern France’s famously howling cold north wind, the Mistral, the opposing warm Autan winds originate above the Sahara and roar through the Languedoc and Roussillon gap between the Massif Central and the Pyrenees, through Carcassonne, Toulouse and finally Cahors, and it can be beneficial or dangerous, depending on its duration and timing. Laurent says that it often carries a lot of desert sand, and, like the Mistral, it’s said that it usually lasts for three, six or nine days. If it arrives late in the growing season, it can dry grapes and reduce yields, as it did in 2023. However, Laurent’s biggest concern among these multidimensional influences is hail. The vines have been under biodynamic culture now for almost two decades. The conversion began with Fabien Jouves (Mas del Périé), a biodynamic-natural wine vigneron who sold the vines to Laurent and François in 2017. What great fortune to walk into such a thriving ecosystem! The following is a lightly edited version of Laurent’s responses to some of our questions, though it should be noted that he speaks English well. My agricultural philosophy as a neo-winemaker is as simple as possible. First, the size of the estate is a human scale: eight hectares of vines to make our living, eleven are made up of woods and pastures for our horses, eight for the sheep, one for the truffle oaks, and one with woods for our beehives. I try to apply a “farmer’s” common sense and replace most Phyto treatments with infusions, porridges, and natural minerals. If my schedule allows it, I follow the planet’s calendar; if I can’t, I deal with those processes the following days. Our animals eat organic hay and graze on organic lands, so they make organic manure which we recover to make our supply of organic elements for our soil health. Our horses also pull our plows and our sheep are part-time mowers and fertilizers. Our bees make honey for our breakfast and to treat our horses’ wounds. White clay is also used to heal the wounds of animals or ours, but we also spray it on the vines as a way of using a natural substance to fight against leafhoppers effectively. All these natural products cost almost nothing, unlike Bayer or Monsanto products which are accompanied by very harmful effects. Since 2022 we leave the grass cover [which is extremely spare anyway] in the center of the vine rows and till only directly under the vine lines in autumn to build a mound around the vines for winter protection. At the beginning of spring, we put the mound back. Ultimately, Laurent’s philosophy is to first respect nature and work in its flow as fluidly as possible when creating their wines. The second is to make sure his wines bring clear sensations related to this historic vineyard land and most importantly to the rocky and fully exposed terroir. “Aside from an empty bottle, the greatest compliment is to taste my wine blind and tell me it’s Malbec on limestone.”-Laurent Marre On their thirty hectares, just southwest of Cahors’ town center and east of the village, Villesèque, Laurent and François have a single, contiguous, eight-hectare vineyard plot on a limestone plateau. “Maintained with love,” the bordering forests on the north and east offer some frost protection, and the 284-310 meters of altitude (higher compared to neighboring appellations, Bergerac and Gaillac) brings good air circulation that reduces fungus populations resulting in fewer vineyard treatments during the vegetative cycle. Laurent explains that the seasonal average of sulfur and copper treatments is around six to seven times, though in the hot 2022, there were only three, and in the dismal 2023 there were 13, though they still lost 60% of their crop. The summer’s diurnal shift when perched up on the causse plateaus is dramatic. The days often hit highs between 36-42°C and then at night plunge to 16-22°C, with the wind always present. The white limestone also keeps the ground cooler in this fully exposed setting, which pushes harvest times (during the last decade) of Malbec to late September and sometimes into early October. Even if it’s a small piece of land, Laurent explains that there are three distinct geological settings. The differences are most evident with Malbec picked over 10-12 days with the first grapes harvested where the central plot thickens with red clay (Quaternary geological age), followed by the red-tinted Jurassic limestone section at the bottom, and the last of the Malbec is picked from the white Jurassic limestone sections in the upper part of the vineyard where the sheep hang out the most. The Jurassic age of the limestones is dated to the Kimmeridgian (Upper Jurassic). Though they’re more similar than different from the famous sharp but friable and soft Kimmerdigian marls of Chablis and the Upper Loire Valley, they’re hundreds of kilometers away and are not exactly the same. Much of the limestone formations have heavy faulting that allows roots opportunities to dig deep. On the top areas of the causse with what seems like impenetrable limestone, the rock is broken up over time from cryofracturing (among many other names with perhaps the most common reference, the freeze-thaw cycle) where water enters gaps in rock and freezes and expands, wedging the rock apart. No known hard rock can resist the 10-11% expansion when water turns to ice, but uniquely, the softer the rock the less it is affected by freezing water; for example, because of the plasticity of mudstones and claystones, they’re not affected. Malbec is the focus of the domaine and the vine age ranges between 25 to 45 years old (2023). It’s planted with 5000 vines per hectare, which is half of what is typical in the Côte d’Or. It grows on all the soil types, but principally on the rockier limestone sections. The 40-year-old Merlot vines are planted on the heaviest red clay. The 25-year-old Gros Manseng and Ugni Blanc (10% of the C’Juste blend) are on the Quaternay section (red clay) as well but with a large vein of white clay. Chardonnay and Viognier are also inherited and were planted 25 years ago on the poorest limestone soils. As a former sommelier who’s had every French wine at his fingertips, it’s understandable that Laurent is not completely satisfied growing what was already planted. This prompted him to cultivate other varieties he loves that thrive perfectly on limestone and clay; they’re also varieties that we love: Chenin Blanc, Pinot Noir, Trousseau, and Syrah. With 90% of C’Juste composed of Gros Manseng grown on the large veins of white clay in warm-to-hot summer conditions and without added sulfites, we may expect its takeoff to be like the first throttle on the tarmac in a fast but chubby commercial liner; however, it’s more like (what I imagine) being pressed against the seat of screaming fighter jet during takeoff. We, for one, find C’Juste yet another impressive no-sulfites-added white wine that demonstrates what’s possible if done correctly in the cellar. It’s as inviting as it is electric, and once open the bottle tends to empty rather quickly. Laurent describes C’Juste as, “a rich wine due to the typicity of Gros Manseng. From one year to the next, the Victoria pineapple side (a note not often found in colder and wetter climate Gros Manseng wines) remains the common thread, while the 10% of Ugni Blanc brings freshness and acidity—the lemon side on the finish. It’s for the meal rather than apero hour and can compete with a fine Chardonnay in terms of power and the freshness of a great Chenin Blanc.” Once in the cellar, the grapes are first left for 24 hours in concrete to cool down, then they’re whole-cluster pressed before being returned to the same medium. At the end of the 10-15-day natural fermentation, the wine is racked off the gross lees into four 8hl Italian terracotta amphoras for 11 months before bottling. There is no sulfite added to this wine at any time, though the exception is the 2020 version. C’Juste is lightly filtered but not fined. The red starter in Laurent’s range is also the wildest of his no-sulfite-added Cahors. It’s not made every year but reserved for years (like 2018, 2021, and 2023) where certain lots don’t hit the stylistic mark for the Les Calades and Les Moutons bottlings. Initially, the wine is explosive, shooting aromas in all directions. A member of our talented team at The Source, Tyler Kavanaugh, tasted the 2021 over five days after the wines arrived stateside and sent notes that perfectly sum up this wine: “It’s wild and swerving out of the gates; lots of raw and pungent primary fermentation elements raging around; a little awkward at first.” On the second day open after only a little taste on the first, he describes it as though the angst backed off and the wine is more subdued and approachable, though still sanguine and raw. On day five he pulled it from his refrigerator, “And wow, what a remarkably stable and intriguing wine without SO2. It softened into this delicate, powdery wine; the acidity and volatile elements zenned out; nothing weird, out of place, or fault-adjacent to be found. Much of the raw and unhinged qualities are no more. It’s honestly become a geeky pleasure to drink to the point I may very well polish the bottle.” Other pronounced notes include high-toned purple fruits, purple flowers (iris, hibiscus, petunia), beets (fresh and roasted), freshly tilled soil, dark and earthen; smells of a nursery/gardening store; Sichuan pepper and Chinese five spice. “Un Jour ou l’Autre must be my everyday, financially accessible Cahors; a 100% Malbec for thirst, aperitif, sausage, barbeque.” -Laurent Because it comes from the plots used for Les Moutons or Les Calades, it’s composed of a combination of Upper Jurassic limestone bedrock and the Quaternary white clay and limestone rock topsoil. (For more on the terroir read “The Plot” and “On the Range” sections.) Once in the cellar, the grapes are 80-90% destemmed before a 20-30-day natural fermentation in open concrete vats. Two pump-overs a day are employed early in the maceration period and almost nothing is done during fermentation. It’s aged in 50hl concrete tanks for seven months before bottling with a light filtration. No sulfites are added. A blend of Malbec from their three different soil types (see The Plot section) picked at different times within a 10 to 12-day span, it is for this that Laurent’s mid-range Cahors, Les Calades, is the most accessible and widely appealing. He describes it as the flagship of their range, “a pure Malbec with power and freshness that represents the king grape variety of our appellation on limestone, and the new generation of Cahors: more fluid, rich and balanced with a distinct and very present mineral and marine finish.” Each plot has an average age of around 40 years (2023) and naturally ferments in separate concrete vats with 10% of whole bunches between three weeks to a month. Because Malbec already provides a lot of substance from its very thick skin, he does a single short pump-over every two days to preserve the hygiene of the cap of about 300 liters in total of the 50hl vat. After fermentation, the grapes are pressed and mixed with the free-run wine and aged for 11-13 months equally between Italian terracotta amphora, old 30hl French oak vats and six-year-old 225l French oak barrels. They’re lightly filtered at bottling without any added sulfites. Again, we defer to Tyler Kavanaugh for a thorough description of the 2020 Les Calades tasted around Thanksgiving: “A deep and focused black-red fruit medley and purple flowers with a refreshing graphite-cool mouthfeel. It’s soft and broad in the mouth and a little sanguine in a steely, iodine-forward sense. The tannins are pleasantly chewy with sweeter black and red berries (though not ripe/overripe) and loads of freshness. It feels firm in the middle on weight, structure and acidity with a nicely detailed direction to the fruit that keeps you coming back to the tart blackberry and boysenberry, bramble, florist fridge fresh dark flowers and leaves and stems in the cold. It’s solid on the second day with the floral aromatics lifting well above the fruit with the tannins lightly tightening up. It didn't last beyond the second day due to its deliciousness factor, which kept me pulling it from my ‘secret’ Thanksgiving bag.” Les Moutons comes from Laurent’s favorite Malbec plot at the top of the hill on its poorest rocky topsoil on Jurassic limestone bedrock. This is where les moutons (the sheep) like to hang out the most, eating and fertilizing—“a sort of organic doping of the vineyards,” Laurent says. “Les Moutons is destined to be my grand cuvée,” Laurent says This 0.45ha upper plot in the vineyard always produces extraordinary wine from its 45-year-old vines, which he partially attributes to the plot’s spare soils and the regularity of sheep contributions. But perhaps the most significant factor is that it’s not made every year. Laurent’s vision for this wine is to have something serious and precise, and when the year doesn’t line up the way he wants it to, like 2021 and 2023, he blends it into Les Calades. Tyler’s take on the wine was that it has “a more finely etched and detailed frame with dustier but more precise tannins; it’s more elegant and less fruit nuanced than Les Calades.” This fineness and savory character is not only by design from Laurent but also by the forceful voice of this section of his vineyard. Once the grapes arrive, half are destemmed and layered, “millefeuille style,” with the whole bunch clusters in a 30hl tronconic wood vat for around three weeks of natural fermentation with a control of between 12-14°C. The must is pumped over once per day until pressing. Despite the notable beauty and class of the wine each year that it’s made, Laurent says that he’s still finding his way to fully realize his vision for this wine. In 2019, it was aged for 13 months in equal parts amphora, foudre and barrel. All of the 2020 was aged in 8hl Italian terracotta amphoras, and in 2022 it was four-year-old French oak barrels (at least from October 2022 to October 2023). As with the other reds, Les Moutons is not fined but passes through a light filtration, and has no added sulfites at any time. Each season is quite different and despite the notably erratic behavior today, it’s wild every year regardless of climate change. The most notable challenge today is how the extremes are even more extreme. Laurent has provided a quick overview of his most recent vintages. 2019 was very sunny which resulted in a lot of sugar which, of course, raises the alcohol. The natural yield was 32hl/ha. 2020 was a perfect vintage that resulted in magnificent Malbecs. 2020 was the first season they used pheromones to confuse the grape worms during their reproductive period. Laurent describes this as a smashing success. There was almost no rot in the vineyards and the yield was 36hl/ha. Laurent refers to 2021 as a “shitty year!” with nine months of rain over 18 months. “Luckily it was cold, so we didn’t have mildew problems.” It was difficult to have the sugar levels they wanted and also difficult to harvest with showers every day. The final yield was an average of 23hl/ha. Regardless of the growing season, the 2021 C’Juste is spectacular! 2022 was a very beautiful vintage, similar to 2020 but with four months of drought from May to August and temperatures between 36 and 42°C. However, there was little water stress thanks to the depth of the old vines’ roots. The yield was 38hl/ha. 2023 was a very complicated year because of a lot of rain in spring with 220mm (almost nine inches) in three days at the beginning of June and storms every evening in May. The spring and summer were very hot and there was a permanent attack of mildew, very similar to what happened in many other European wine regions. At the beginning of September, the hot Autan wind dried many of the remaining grapes. Many winegrowers didn’t even harvest. The average yield was 12hl/ha.

At precisely 4:15 Manu insisted that we leave the tasting. Traffic could be a bear going north on a Friday and we had a three-hour drive from Porto Vecchio to Bastia to catch our boat. Last year our trip was a more fluid route with less back and forth across the island. We started in Bastia and made one loop around the island and left from Ajaccio. Manu was nervous about the time but we made it with plenty to spare. On the boat’s ninth floor lounge we ordered a couple of Pietra beers, the most well known Corsican suds. The waitress reluctantly took our order and that of a table next to us and then seemed to disappear. After twenty minutes passed I told Manu to forget it and to go to the bar to order what he wanted. He returned with a couple of beers and some peanuts and told the table next to us that someone told him she wasn’t coming back. We never did see her again. A pair of singers started performing with recorded background music, occasionally playing a saxophone or guitar to add some complexity to their set. They were surprisingly good for a couple of ferry singers; the man sounded like Art Garfunkel and I had to look twice to make sure it wasn’t him. The ferry was a time warp between the music, the deteriorating décor and all the people dressed in 1980s fashion. I couldn’t decide if it was a rundown version of The Love Boat, or an at-sea version of the first act in The Shining. We had a great view of the port of Bastia with the city lights illuminating the town’s colorful buildings and church. The light of our last day on Corsica was almost gone when the boat pushed off and curved north and the view changed to the dark sea between Corsica and Italy. Dinner was quick and passable. We drank a bottle of Dolcetto di Dogliani and had the seafood pasta special (a perfect pairing, I know…). After dinner I was toast. I went to my cabin, brushed my teeth and hit the sack—hard. People joke that I live the easy life and my trips are a vacation, but they are by far the most exhausting days of my work. These trips throw the body off rhythm for weeks, and in my case, months. My body temperature changes dramatically between being in vineyards in the freezing wind, rain and sometimes snow, with hours a day in cold cellars. It’s not hard physical work, but with all the standing, talking and tasting, it’s a slow breakdown and it can take forever to get the chill out of the bones. All of my senses are activated for more than fourteen hours a day. My eyes feast on the scenery and the people, and my nose is in the gym doing rep after rep. My tongue feels like a snake that sheds its skin every three weeks—loving high acid wine has its drawbacks. I’m hard of hearing, so I sometimes have to strain to catch and understand all the French thrown my way what with all its dialects that contain so many subtleties. My mind is on overdrive and my limitations are tested regularly, especially after first six weeks straight of tasting and travel on a ten-week trip. I woke up at six with the help of the cabin crew announcement of our arrival to Toulon in one hour and as I showered I was thankful for the seven hours I slept. I met up with Manu and we headed down to his truck to disembark. It was early in France and late back home. No one was around and Manu and I took advantage of the free mental space of the early morning drive back to Avignon and stared off into road ahead without saying much. We were bushed and happy for the arrival of the weekend. Manu dropped me at the Avignon TGV station. I grabbed my new rental car—number two of what would end up as seven on this trip—and headed back to La Fabrique to get some sleep and await the arrival of my wife the following Monday. I had thirty-six hours off and I took them. There is no département in France quite like Corsica. Its separation from France by the sea and closer proximity to Italy is evident in every bit of its culture. I have been to France and Italy many times over the last two decades, and aside from the French language, the preservation of its Italian roots is obvious within the wines made from the island’s ancient varietals. Corsican wines weren’t love at first taste for me; nor were many wines I’ve come to adore with time. There are many generic, rustic and unnecessarily heavy red wines that I could do without, Nielluciu for one, a beast that has yet to inspire me. I keep asking myself if I’m missing something and I look forward to my ah-ha moment with this grape. Vermentinu is without a doubt a white wine of great potential. There is a broad range of styles from dense to lithe, and most are loaded with smells of ocean spray and minerals, unless they’ve been obliterated by oak. Rosé is an obvious talent for Corsica. The red grapes there lend themselves perfectly for this kind of salty fresh wine with no shortage of aromatic expression and beauté. They’re tremendously pleasurable, many are seductive, and at the top domaines it’s easy to find sophistication. The simplicity employed in the making of these wines seems to serve them well and it’s when they’re done in this manner that they most carry the taste of the island. Sciacarellu is the most compelling prospect, at least for me. Granite soils encourage a greater degree of elegance and salinity in the wines and this combination is one of the rare matches made in wine heaven. (I would also be interested to see more of it produced in the Patrimonio area on limestone and bottled alone). Sciacarellu has plenty of x-factor and will stand alone as a complex and pure wine of nobility without the addition of other grapes, no matter what soil it’s grown in. I’ve fallen for this grape and can’t wait to see it blossom even more with the rise of so many domaines. I have no profound conclusion from my trips to the island and the time in-between, I’ve only found a better idea of what Corsican wine is to me. There are compelling high-end wines made by a select group of vignerons, and the quality across the island seems to be on the rise. Yet it is the basic range of wines from top producers, the least touched and overwrought, that best capture the joy and the charm of the island and its people.

Just to the south of Apremont is Mont Granier, a colossal roughly-hewn trapezoid of limestone with a thick evergreen forest at its base. Its sheer cliffs suggest the usual erosion and fall away, but in 1248, the entire twenty-three hundred foot north face of the mountain broke off. The resulting rockslide rumbled across many miles, destroyed five villages and killed three thousand people. The limestone spread out and covered the surrounding terrain so that the lines of the Apremont appellation are actually drawn by the stones from the mountain. Beyond all this limestone, the surface soil has different types of metamorphic rock as well, such as schist. Like the Jura, the Savoie has some grapes that aren’t usually grown elsewhere. Though the region also grows varietals such as Gringet, Altesse and Roussanne, wines in Apremont are exclusively whites made from Jacquère. Ted prefers the Jacquère from Apremont, citing its “electric charge,” a descriptor he uses often and one that really drives his selections. Jacquère is not known to be a great aging wine, but the producer we were going to see makes some that does so surprisingly well. Jean Claude Masson came stomping down the stone steps of his contemporary two-story house that would have been at home in any Midwestern suburb. He let Andrea know where the facilities were and when I indicated that I could use them as well, he pointed up the hillside toward his vineyards. Ted translated his rapid-fire French: “that’s where the men go.” He’s big and barrel-chested (and bellied) from years of playing rugby and drinking beer—not your usual wine snob. His face is deeply tanned and lined from spending decades in his fields and pursuing myriad other activities outside. He had a constant smile on his big round face, with its thin graying beard and a mischievous look in eyes. Without a lick of English, he was constantly jocular, chuckling at all his punch lines in a contagious manner that made me laugh even though I had little understanding of what he was saying. Ted would translate and it was usually something self-effacing about his own whacky behavior, partying a lot when he was younger and his affinity for sports, all as he floored his SUV up the narrow winding dirt road without really needing to look at it. If opposing traffic came our way, he hit the gas even harder and the other car flinched and made way every time. When Ted fired off questions about the soil and vines, Masson switched in and out of an earnest tone, while never losing that wry smile. Though he can come across as irreverent most of the time, I gathered from much of what Ted translated that he takes his craft very seriously. As part of the natural wine movement, he uses organic, plant-based vineyard treatments that don’t harm the bees, the most important of all insects. He prides himself on being a free man who will do what he needs to do to survive, but aims for the highest of ideals in accordance with nature. While he isn’t confined to the strictures of organic certification, he tries to adhere to those guidelines as much as possible, without putting his business in danger, which can happen when emergencies like epidemics occur. But he added that people who always do whatever they want in the vineyard and the cellar are no different than those who misbehave all week, then go to church on Sunday to ask for forgiveness. We got to the top of the hill where the bulk of his plots spread out on a rolling slope. There was an incredible view of the verdant valley below, beyond clusters of houses and countless more vineyards. Masson gestured to a bush and said that’s where I could do what I needed to do. As I excused myself, I wondered if all male guests were encouraged to take care of business out in the vineyard. Maybe out of sheer masculine principle, because we can. When I returned, Masson was pointing way off to the south at our right where loomed the rock of Mont Granier, the mother of all the soil beneath our feet. He then gestured down the valley, recounting the history of the catastrophic slide. He and Ted talked about it like a favorite old subject that one never minds repeating with someone who knows it well, in case some uncovered piece of information might be exchanged. They both spoke with a sort of reverence reserved for those who never lose their awe of something so monumental. Ted put his loupe to his eye and held a piece of limestone up close as Andrea shot photos of the land, vines and Masson from every angle. Masson mugged for the camera and also did his fair share of ignoring it as he watched Ted with amusement; he seemed to be one of the producers who’s a little mystified by Ted’s intense enthusiasm for geology. He pointed out a couple of plots he had recently purchased and talked of new vines that he would plant in the coming year. With a quick drive across the hill and down, he showed us a few more of his vineyards and pointed out a rock the size of a big house covered in graffiti, which struck me as incongruous out in the middle of that grassy field. It was a piece of Granier that somehow ended up there in the slide, rolling for many miles, who knows how fast, crushing everything in its path—a thrilling thought. Next: Masson the Caveman

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

It's been a long wait, but Jean-Noël Gagnard's 2017s finally made it. Within our group of restaurant sommeliers, Jean-Noël Gagnard has some seriously devout fans that have snapped up our minuscule supply for their restaurant programs since we began to import her wines a decade ago, starting with the 2008 vintage. Perhaps it’s because the range is a match made for classical French countryside cooking that doesn’t stray too far off the path and into trendy winemaking. While Gagnard's Chassagne-Montrachets drink beautifully without an accompaniment of food, it’s a pity not to pair them up with something like slow roasted chicken, or even a richer French classic fish preparation, like à la meunière—a dish I think could be a top choice with the aromatic and taste profile of these Chardonnay wines.Is 2017 one of the white Burgundy vintages of a generation? For a quick anecdote about the 2017 Côte d’Or whites, I will borrow the words of Pierre Morey (by way of a conversation with his daughter, Anne), a quiet legendary winegrower who made his reputation as the régisseur (the wine director) for Domaine Leflaive during twenty years’ time. He played a largely influential role in Leflaive's conversion to biodynamic farming, along with his own biodynamically-run domaine, Pierre Morey. As I recall, Anne stated her father said it was among the most beautiful Chardonnay fruit he has ever seen. What else is there to say? A Brief Story & Details On The Wines The style at this Chardonnay focused domaine is one of subtlety led with gentle sweet golden earth tones. Often found in Caroline’s range of whites are beautiful wild mushrooms scents of chanterelles and porcinis, brown butter, dried herbs and always some kind of citrus tones, often like a Meyer lemon or the unique purity of an Amalfi Coast lemon grown on steep limestone terraces overlooking the Mediterranean. It’s hard to know exactly why her style is unique in this way—I can’t find another that I could say is a mirror image—and even to ask her why her wines are the way they are brings her to a full smile, often bursts of laughter, followed by little explanation except that it’s just the way she does it. In the cellar, the wines are made in a straightforward style, and thankfully gimmick-free within a white Burgundy world of too much of one thing, or not enough of another. There are no games with reduction, so the perception of mineral nuances is textured and aromatically present and finely tuned. Flashy wood techniques and other fooling about simply aren’t her style either, just a confidently crafted set of wines that demonstrates—and concedes to—the differences between their terroirs with striking clarity. When one does organic farming like she does (along with certification for it), as well as following many biodynamic principals and treatments, a soft touch in the cellar seems the logical approach. We begin with Gagnard’s Hautes-Côtes de Beaune "Sous Éguisons." This small Chardonnay parcel was planted in the early to mid-2000s high above Saint-Aubin, west of Chassagne-Montrachet. It’s delicious and serious Chardonnay deeply marked by its terroir: 430-450 meters of altitude (30% higher than most that lie on the Côte), colder weather than vineyards on the Côte d’Or main slope, spare clay and limestone rock topsoil and limestone bedrock. This is the highest energy and frequency in her range of still white wines and over delivers on expectations, even from this special winegrower. Gagnard's Chassagne-Montrachet "Les Chaumes" is always a tough one for us because of the quality of the wine and its price—at least for those who have a budget for Burgundy—and the minuscule quantity we get each year. Burgundy can be confusing and when one tries to dig into the lieux-dits of premier cru wines it can get a little hairy, but few more than the south side of Chassagne-Montrachet. In this specific area of the commune, known for its darker red clay soil, the premier crus, Boudriottes and Morgeot, are singular parcels in their own right, but they can swallow many of the less famous premier crus surrounding them and put their names on the label despite being different vineyards. To make it more confusing, there is a parcel of premier cru also named Les Chaumes, but Gagnard’s village parcel Les Chaumes abuts the premier cru, Boudriotte, just to the south. This wine always exceeds the expectation and given its proximity to one of the village’s most well-known vineyards, it’s no surprise. Gagnard’s parcel of Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru Les Chaumées (not to be confused with the previous village wine, Les Chaumes) begins at 300 meters altitude and faces northeast on a relatively steep slope composed of shallow rocky white clay soil and limestone bedrock. It sits within the mouth of the east to west valley that opens up into Saint-Aubin and is exposed to cooler winds than those more protected in the middle of the Côte and far away from the valley. The characteristic trait of this type of terroir is expressed by Caroline through strikingly fine cords and a harmoniously high, but gently flowing analog frequency. Given this terroir’s natural tendency for tension, freshness and excesses of stone and mineral-like impressions, it’s all tucked into its read-between-the-lines style. This is not a tour de force Chassagne, but a tour de finesse. Les Chaumées' discreet nature will resonate with those who enjoy quietly beautiful, confident and thoroughly complex wines. The Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru Blanchot-Dessus is one of Gagnard’s best wines. It’s grandiose in a grand cru way with its heavyweight body and richness for a good premier cru price. The premier cru, Blanchot-Dessus, (not the village lieu-dit close by), is the story of seemingly an unlucky fault break in the limestone bedrock that may have led to this vineyard ultimately being stripped of the name, Blanchot-Batard-Montrachet, which if it weren't it would have catapulted it into eternal glory as the sixth Montrachet grand cru. Now it's one of the few remaining secrets for Burgundy insiders. There’s a lot more story behind this vineyard (which you can read about here), but suffice it to say that with only three cases imported each year into California, and with this banner year, it's a no-brainer for those with a bit of money set aside for special and rare bottles. The Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru Les Caillerets is Gagnard's top premier cru; some consider it to be the grandest cru on the south hill of the commune. Gagnard’s parcels are prime, and located in En Caillerets on the spine of the hill and Les Combards, higher up on the slope. The other two vineyards within the commune that can be labeled as Les Caillerets are Vigne Derrière and Chassagne—yes, a vineyard in Chassagne-Montrachet is simply named Chassagne. What’s interesting about Gagnard’s parcels is that they are either quite steep (Les Combards) or on what appears to be more of a strongly convex section (En Caillerets), making for—in theory—even less topsoil than others that have a more concave slope, like much of Vigne Derrière, the vineyard just north of En Caillerets with the village on the other side. What a convex hill slope means is likely more cut, freshness and stoniness to go along with Les Caillerets’ fabulous body. The only critique I would dare to send the direction of Les Caillerets (and this is a stretched criticism) is that sometimes it’s too good at everything—like the MVP-type quarterback in American football that can throw perfectly and run with the speed and agility of a spooked deer. Caillerets’ imperfections are few. However, its shortcomings may be found by those who adore the imperfections in a wine that make it stand out, so long as the losses are made up with authenticity and honesty—for me, this is often the case with wine, and friends too. Everything is in line with Les Caillerets and it’s a tough one to beat, and criticize. Once the cork is pulled, take your time; this wine needs it. It will show you its magnificence one slow layer at a time and will surely earn your respect, as it confidently carries the reputation of Chassagne-Montrachet on its very capable shoulders. One extremely memorable bottle of Gagnard's Santenay Rouge 1er Cru Clos de Tavannes was opened for me on a recent visit to Caroline's cellar. It was decades old (I’m embarrassed to say that I can’t tell you what vintage it was!), and it floored me. It made a permanent believer out of me concerning the quality of Pinot Noir that is often overlooked in Santenay and Chassagne-Montrachet. Clos de Tavannes sits just across the border toward the southeast from Chassagne-Montrachet on perfect red wine soil: iron and calcium rich red clay and limestone. My suggestion is to forget about this wine once in your possession and occasionally check out its pretty label—one of my favorites in Burgundy. Caroline L’Estimé, the winegrower for decades now, and daughter of Jean-Noël Gagnard, destems the grapes completely but isn’t afraid to extract old school tannins to create a wine designed for the long haul. This renders a young wine with a stern palate but strikingly bright red fruit aromas that can be misleading for its early approachability. We were allocated only 48 bottles of this wine and a few will make it to my cellar, as they do each year. 2017 should offer a wine with much more upfront appeal than past years, but I’d still suggest to wait.

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

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