Today, we offer to you a producer that is widely considered one of the best, and often the very best, of Gigondas: Santa Duc. They are a very old name in the region and they have many of the best sites.
As most of you know by now, we believe that wine offers adventure. Every time you open a bottle of wine, itโs like you are traveling to another place (a terroir), another time (a vintage) and another culture (local wine traditions). Bottles of wine have brought us to some farflung places, like the mountains of Corsica, the volcanoes of the Canary Islands, and deep into central Asia.
Michel Theron, the one-man show behind Clos du Jaugueyron, can be applauded simply for his small scale of production. Or for his commitment to biodynamic farming, which is far more challenging โ and quite a bit more rare โ on the perpetually humid Left Bank than in most places. But none of that would matter much if Theron wasnโt a supremely gifted winemaker.
Truly talented people have a knack for making their best work look effortless. Likewise,Division's winesmake it seem like all Oregon should be affordable and exquisite. The wines share a taut hum of acidity, harmoniously enshrined in cool, restrained fruit, floating in a pool of minerality, the structure so seamless, soโฆeffortless.
Muscadetโlike Burgundy, Champagne, the Mosel, Piedmont, and a few other wine regions of the worldโhas become known for the terroir of individual parcels. At its best, Muscadet is one of the great, terroir-driven (and cellar-worthy!) dry white wines of the world. And yet, it costs just a fraction of what most of the others do.
Autumn is here, and that means itโs time to drink Riesling. Not sweet Riesling โ weโll get to that when the weather cools off some more โ but something dry. Letโs drink something from Eva Fricke.
We love Peay Vineyards and have written about them quite a few times. Whatโs not to love about passionate wine producers pioneering in the wild, cold climates of Sonomaโs Pacific coast? Well, we have yet another reason for you to love them today.
Crochet has long been one of the best in the entire Loire, and a cornerstone of the Neal Rosenthal portfolio for over 40 years. They have some of the best plots in Buรฉ, where the domaine is based, as well as Vinon and Crรฉzancy. Unsurprisingly, their straight Sancerre Blanc is several rungs above your average Sancerre-by-the-glass.
Here's a story of someone who really cares about vineyards. Who does everything to allow the vineyard to express its characters through wine. This requires attentive farming, preferably organic and without irrigation. It requires hands-off wine-making, using traditional techniques that the monks in Burgundy figured out long ago.
Recaredo from Penedes has been at the frontier of high quality Spanish sparkling wines since the 1920s. It started with Josep Mata Capellades, a disgorger and winemaker by trade, digging a cellar out from under his home in San Sadurnรญ dโAnoia. From humble beginnings theyโve made quite a name for themselves.
What is a perfect white wine? In on warm evening late in the summer, it will be a wine that is effortless. It will be the wine that can be invisible: so drinkable that it seemingly disappears without notice; so unfussy that nobody will feel compelled to discuss it. And yet so deliciousโand just complex enoughโthat if anyone cares to stop and think it will be well worth the moment.
La Boutanche is a collaboration between venerable natural wine importer Selection Massale and some of their best winemakers. Famous for brightly colored labels depicting different imbibing humanoid animals, each one distinct to the corresponding winemakers, these humbly priced wines have become sought after for their crowd pleasing powers and natural wine converting abilities.
