Bermejos produces one of our favorite rosés, year after year — particularly if you love savory, serious rosé à la Bandol.
It's made from Lístan Negro, perhaps the most familiar of the evocative and intense grapes native to these islands. With flavors of strawberry, salted watermelon, and blood orange to remind you of its maritime provenance, and a wisp of smoke, you’re sure to fall in love. Take our advice and open this handsome bottle with tinned fish and some fresh radishes and butter or castelvetrano olives.

Sylvain Pataille is low-key one of the great winemakers in Burgundy. There’s no doubt he’s great: his wines make it to top wine lists and a select band of insiders love to collect them too. He’s been consulting oenologist to top producers for ages.

Why do top Barolo producers in the village of Verduno – like the Castello di Verduno, Burlotto, and Alessandria – continue to devote time and precious vineyard space to Pelaverga? Well, it provides so much of the magic of Nebbiolo (its aromatics, its cherry fruit) without its weight or structure. Pelaverga is "lighter than air," according to Burlotto, and its bright red fruit is married to thyme and rosemary.

For many years, one of the most beautiful sites in Nuits-Saint-Georges wasn’t making a wine that truly reflected its soul.

That site was Clos de la Maréchale, the southernmost Premier Cru in the village, and the only one under the care of Frédéric Mugnier. For decades, Mugnier had leased the vineyard to Faiveley, who made a perfectly respectable version of the wine — structured, firm, and very much in the style of Nuits as we’ve come to expect it. But when the lease finally ended in 2004, Mugnier took back the reins and began to show what this vineyard could truly be.

Bérêche’s Brut Reserve is a wine fleeting in nature — when we are lucky enough to have it in stock, it’s usually not for long. In fact, there’s a very good chance this release won’t end up on the shelf at all, because our faithful newsletter readers tend to snap this Champagne up ferociously. And, we’ll admit, we usually try to hold back a bottle or two to enjoy after hours…it’s just that good!

We all know that wine trends move in waves. But vines don’t care about trends, and you certainly can’t plan for them if one day you want to drink wine produced from 80 year-old vines. That’s the story behind Aperture’s Chenin Blanc. The vines were planted in the 1940s, in a quiet pocket of the North Coast, at a time when California was planting almost anything but Chenin

Valtellina isn’t the only place where Nebbiolo thrives in the mountains. Alto Piemonte has had its renaissance, too. But where Alto Piemonte gives you cooler soils and a mix of grapes and terroirs, Valtellina is purer, more focused: Nebbiolo alone, grown high and hard against the rock, with a clarity and tension that’s unlike anything else.

There’s no shortage of flash in Barolo these days, with sleek new cellars, soaring scores, crus that demand cult-like devotion. But in the hills of Castiglione Falletto, Azelia keeps to its rhythm—quiet, steady, deeply rooted. The Scavino family has worked this land for five generations, and their Barolo has never been about the spotlight. It’s about place. It’s about time.

Coombsville isn’t the first place most people think of when they think “Napa Cab.” And that’s kind of the point. Tucked into Napa’s southeastern corner, closer to the bay than to Highway 29, it’s cooler here. Slower. The soils are volcanic ash and cobblestone. The fog lingers. And the wines—well, they’re different.

“Un Rosé très osé” — that’s how Didier Gimonnet describes this wine. “A very daring rosé.” And coming from a house that built its reputation on crystalline Blanc de Blancs, it is at least a little daring — but in the most Gimonnet way possible.

Ask a Piemontese winemaker what they drink with lunch, and odds are, it’s not Barolo. It’s Barbera. Or maybe Nebbiolo—but not the kind that needs a decade in the cellar. These are what we call the Little Grapes of Piedmont, though there's nothing small about their charm, versatility, or place on the local table. They remind us that Piedmont is far more than just a hunting ground for trophy collectors. 

Every year, when the new vintage of Arnot-Roberts Pinot Noirs land, we get excited. Not because they’re flashy or hyped — they’re not — but because they deliver something that has been far too rare in California for far too long: purity, precision, and place.