The Inama family understood early on the distinctiveness of individual vineyard expressions, even within the small Soave Classico zone. Inama bottles three wines from two Soave Crus: Carbonare, Foscarino and Vigneto du Lot, which hails from a western-facing, Foscarino plot that changes on an annual basis.
Read MoreA world almost entirely closed to travel, a cancelled Bordeaux En Primeur Campaign and persnickety, new DHL compliance requirements in the US are nothing compared to the tenacity of Martin Krajewski, owner of Château Séraphine and Clos Cantenac. And so it was that I held a mini En Primeur chez moi.
Read MoreLoimer NV Rosé Brut Sekt Reserve: This sekt stretches the imagination. A blend of Zweigelt, Pinot Noir and St. Laurent, it would be hard to place it in a blind tasting, even if its fruit purity, fine perlage and long finish clearly place it in a high quality region.
Read MoreThis quartet, indeed, sings with harmony. Each wine overdelivers for its price point. The Il Ghizzano Rosso, Venerosso 2016 and Nambrot drink the most easily now, and each offers a distinctly different drinking experience. I fell head-over-heels for the Il Ghizzano Rosso!
Read MoreLast spring I tasted the first vintage of Laura Díaz Muñoz's Sauvignon Blanc from Ehlers Estate. She joined Ehlers just before harvest in 2018, so I was very curious as to how a vintage fully under her watch might turn out. As I predicted, it's incredibly tasty!
Read MoreGamble Family Vineyards 2019 Rosé Napa Valley: Composed of 51% Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon with 43% Napa Valley Cabernet Franc, 4% Petit Verdot and 2% Merlot, all aged 5 months in stainless steel, this wine is ready to be enjoyed. Only 575 cases were made this year, so make haste to pick up some soon!
Read MoreWhatever format I receive a wine in, I always taste it in a tasting glass. After all, I mostly receive 750-ml bottles. (No, I don't take swigs from the bottle or employ a straw.) What was full-on astonishing to me was the difference in tasting this wine from my glass versus tasting it from the can. The perceptions were smashingly different. Going forward, I'll definitely be tasting wines packaged in cans both ways.
Read MoreJoachim Splichal collaborated with his sons, Nicolas and Stéphane, and the winemaking team of rosé specialist Bruno Tringali to craft the fourth vintage of this estate-grown and decidedly Provençal pink. It is a highly inviting and complex blend of Grenache 48%, Cinsault 35%, Rolle (a.k.a. Vermentino) 6%, Syrah 5%, Carignan 4% and Grenache Blanc 2%.
Read MoreThe last time I tasted the Khareba wines, I was standing in the winery's chilly cellars in the Alazani Valley on a boiling hot August afternoon. The winery and its almost 8 kilometers (five miles) of tunnels are carved into the Caucasus Mountains, like a bunker. I appreciated the inadvertent symbolism, as Russian troops just over the Georgian border recently had been seen patrolling. However, deep in the earth, the wines were cool and safe.
Read MorePerricone Guarnaccio Sicilia DOC 2017: I have been excited knowing this unusual red was waiting in my wine cellar to be tasted. (I thoroughly enjoyed tasting the 2016.) There's not a lot of Perricone out there, and there is even less of it bottled solo. A victim of phylloxera, it's remained mostly the mainstay grape of Ruby Marsala and the blending partner of varietally labeled Nero d'Avola. However, this bottling shows just how much we're missing when it's not showcased on its own.
Read MoreWe're connecting digitally more and more these days, and now we're often doing so over a glass of wine. Bubbly lifts the spirit, making this post on a wide array of sparkling wine styles rather timely. Here's to you and yours!
Read MoreAiming to work in lockstep with nature, the Lageder family pursues environmental responsibility with the same fervor that it pursues great winemaking. They farm biodynamically and work with their contract growers to try to transform partner vineyards into organically or biodynamically managed ecocenters. This means little if the wines don't deliver, but they do with every vintage.
Read MoreIn my experience, the FEL wines are made to emphasize freshness and varietal expression. The 2018 Chardonnay continues this theme. Blended from picking dates ranging just over a month from several vineyards planted with a wide variety of Heritage clones and Dijon selections, the wine is whole cluster pressed, fermented in neutral French oak barrels, limited in malolactic fermentation and aged on lies with no stirring for ten months.
Read MoreWinemaker Todd Graff has been making the wines at Frank Family Vineyards since 2003. The family calls him "our magician", which is a pretty endearing - as well as appropriate - term for a someone who orchestrates the production of about twenty very different wines every vintage. Not only does Todd utilize a wide array of varieties, he makes four sparkling wines, a port and a late harvest wine in addition to all of the still wines!
Read MoreThough this wine's name, Dinotte, translates to "at night", this is a wine that could be enjoyed any time of day OR night. Bursting with peak-of-ripeness berries and plums, this is enticingly delicious. his is so fun and so packed with primary fruit kissed by a lingering dark chocolate finish that it's hard to ask more than what it already offers! And, I'll double down on that statement given this wine's SRP of $10.99.
Read MoreIt’s hard to believe that this is the 30th Anniversary bottling of the Don Melchor Cabernet Sauvignon. I've had the pleasure of drinking it fairly often for about half its life span. Watching its development over time, I have no doubt that this vineyard site - despite being about a century old when this wine debuted - is only getting started!
Read MoreA chance to taste the Rebo grape? Yes, please! I love tasting wines made with relatively new grape varieties, especially when they are hard to find. Rebo is a crossing of Merlot and Teroldego created in 1948 in Trentino by Rebo Rigotti. (I might name a grape this cool after myself, too.) Through this deeply colored variety, the broad suppleness of Merlot meets the raving acidity of Teroldego.
Read MoreThe 2018 vintage in Germany gave whites and reds alike a patina of grace and elegance. These wines are ready for immediate - and unreserved - enjoyment.
Read MoreI have tasted an assortment of wines within the Tenuta Sant'Antonio range several times. I'm disappointed to say that, overall, these were rather lackluster. That's not to say that they aren't drinkable or pleasant enough. They mostly are.
The vintage is not the culprit as each of the four wines comes from its own growing season. The style - or at least the vinification and aging - is different for each wine, too. Moreover, I tasted these wines several months after they arrived at my door, so shipping was not the offender.
Read MoreI remember trying my first Sagrantinos back in the very early aughts, while working in a Manhattan wine store that sold exclusively Italian wines. These Sagrantino wines have evolved with time, taste and climate change. These wines are more approachable than I recall those early aughts wines to be, even though those Caprai wines were overall highly accessible vis-à-vis the otherwise fiercely grippy Sagrantino situation. Today, it is easy that taste that these two wines will provide pleasure now and in years far beyond. Moreover, their age-worthiness-to-price ratio is downright striking considering the price of peer-worthy Piedmontese and Tuscan gems that could age as long.
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