So I’m writing for Wine Enthusiast once again, and I have a number of pieces coming out that I’ll be linking to over the next few months. My first is a feature in their May “Bubbles” issues on—what else?—the ongoing drama in Catalonia’s sparkling wine scene, and the rise of Corpinnat.

Readers of Everyday Drinking know this isn’t the first time I’ve written about Corpinnat, which in the past I’ve cited as a “wine of resistance.”

Over the past decade and a half, few corners of the wine world have experienced as much upheaval as Catalonia’s sparkling wine sector. Less than 20 years ago, almost all the bubbly made in Penedès was simply called Cava, Spain’s most famous sparkling wine. At the top end, Cava is considered Spain’s version of Champagne. Unfortunately, many people know Cava for the bottom end. While there are 300 wineries in Cava, more than 80% of the production comes from three houses— Freixenet, Codorníu, García Carrión—who influence the Denominación de Origen (D.O.). In Spain, 90% of Cava retails for under 10 euros. “Most Cava is basic-level sparkling wine. I have friends in the States who tell me, ‘Oh, I use Cava in my mimosa,’” said Roc Gramona [the sixth-generation winemaker of the venerable Gramona estate and the current vice president of Corpinnat].

For producers of higher-quality, higher-priced sparkling wine, being associated with an ocean of inexpensive Cava became unsustainable. “The situation was so bad that we realized we all had to get together to survive,” said Ton Mata, CEO of Recaredo and the first president of Corpinnat.

One of the major issues for Catalonia’s disgruntled sparkling winemakers is that the Cava D.O. lacks a clear geographic identity. Cava can be produced in over 20 different regions across Spain, as long as it’s made in the méthode traditionnelle. In Cava’s spiritual home of Catalonia, this lack of terroir has always rubbed producers the wrong way.

Please click here to read the whole feature, which I promise is worth your while.

Every time I write about Corpinnat, it keeps growing: At the time of my reporting there were 21 members. Among the big news I reported is that legendary winery Juvé & Camps, which makes more than 2 million bottles of long-aged sparkling wines each year, recently announced they will leave Cava to join Corpinnat. Meanwhile Cava’s sales continue to decline, dropping more than 13 percent, and by more than 18 percent in international export markets, from 2023.

“The ongoing effervescence in the world of Catalan bubbles might not mean much to entry-level and price-sensitive consumers, but the fact that some of our benchmark, flagship sparklers are not DO Cava anymore is likely to play out differently in premium segments of the trade,” says my colleague, Barcelona-based consultant and educator Nika Shevela, DipWSET and founder of Wine Alphabet.

As Corpinnat grows, I hope the confusion of naming Catalonia’s best sparkling wines will eventually become clearer. For those keeping count, if you buy a sparkling wine made in Penedès right now, it could be called by one of five different names: Cava, Corpinnat, Clàssic Penedès, Conca del Riu Anoia (used by Raventós i Blanc), or Vino de Mesa, a.k.a. table wine (used by wineries such as Mas Gomà and Terra de Marca).

Because Corpinnat is registered as a trade organization rather than an appellation, it moves differently than the typical European AOCs, DOCs, or DOs. As Ton Mata of Recaredo told me, “we can put more strict rules into place than an appellation can.”

This is an aspect of the story that was too broad in scope for my Wine Enthusiast feature. I believe the rise of organizations like Corpinnat, or the VDP in Germany (a trade group of around 200 top wineries that promotes strict quality standards) raises a bigger question: Do appellations matter as much as they once did? “There is certainly an ongoing debate over the relevance of appellations globally,” Shevela said.

The pushback against traditional appellations is happening in two ways. First, there is a long European tradition of maverick winemakers leaving the strict rules and confines of appellations, particularly in France. Sarah Parker Jang explored this phenomenon in her recent piece about Provence for Everyday Drinking.

Vin de France has become shorthand to consumers (especially young ones) for experimental winemaking, often minimal or low intervention. This serves a purpose for marketing—Vin de France is now a brand of its own, in a way. But will there come a day when the INAO has a mess of Corpinnats and Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüters (VDPs)—private organizations that broke away from the appellation systems—to contend with? How many Château Lafleurs will it take before things change?

Maybe this battle will simply devolve further along the lines it’s already taken, where the consumer has to simply know producer names—both the AOCs/Château Pradeauxs and the Vins de France/Le Temps des Rêveurs of the French wine world—and the story behind them to know who is making the styles of wines they want to drink in the way that consumer prefers that they be made: traditionally, transparently, organically, regeneratively, low-intervention, etc. For so many wine consumers who think in this dimension, appellation labels are already just that—simply a label.

But in numerous legacy regions, there is a pushback from winemakers who want stricter rules, who believe that the traditional appellations have become too mired in the past, too lax on quality standards, and lacked a commitment to terroir—often due to influence from big companies and cooperatives who sell cheap wine. This is what’s happening in Corpinnat. “We never made Cava because it wasn’t interesting,” said Jordi Annan of Celler Pardas. “It was only when Corpinnat started that we decided to make sparkling wine.”

In Rioja, as another example, a new-wave of smaller wineries has pushed for radical change, and to the Consejo’s credit, they are listening and (slowly) shifting. For years, Rioja classifications were based on oak aging (crianza, reserva, gran reserva). The focus is now much more on conveying a sense of place.

In Germany, the VDP’s focus on single vineyards and its classifying of “Erstes Gewächs” and “Großes Gewächs” (essentially Premier and Grand Crus) has led to the German Winegrowers’ Association adopting that classification for all of Germany. Changes to the German wine laws will be based on the VDP’s well-established classification pyramid vineyard sites. The VDP’s focus on special vineyards and terroir has superseded German wine’s old, dated classification of sweetness levels.

I wrote about those changes in Germany. It’s a bold move in this current era of wine, when so much so-called consumer “education” is about “demystifying” wine and avoiding so-called “confusing” talk of about the value of place in an age of terroir denial.

I’ve observed that a certain type of wine influencer/educator has begun to steer completely clear of talk about terroir. At the low end, the focus is on a certain populism…But much of the higher-end natural wine chatter also avoids a deep discussion of place. While the best natural-wine producers are committed terroirists, a lot of the derivative, middling natty wine talk is way more about winemaking technique and philosophy—which are similar whether we’re talking about Sicily, Loire, Oregon, or elsewhere. After all, you can make “zero/zero” wine anywhere.

With Corpinnat, the organization was built on very strict rules. Grapes must be 100 percent organic and harvested by hand, and all wine must be made at the winery, with no juice bought from outside. If Corpinnat wineries buy grapes, they are obligated to pay growers a premium under long-term contracts. Aging rules are also strict: All Corpinnat wines must spend at least 18 months on the lees (meaning all wines qualify as reserva), and wineries must make at least one wine that ages 60 months or more on the lees.

And those rules will soon get even stricter. From my Wine Enthusiast article:

Perhaps the biggest rule that Corpinnat has instituted, the one that will most profoundly alter winemaking in Penedès, is its plan to ban international grapes like chardonnay and pinot noir. Starting in 2035, Corpinnat producers will only be allowed to use xarel-lo, macabeo, parellada, and malvasia de Sitges for whites, and garnacha, monastrell, xarello vermell, and sumoll for reds. “My father was very against outlawing chardonnay,” Gramona said. “But we can only be an alternative to Champagne if we use our own grapes.”

Ton Mata of Recaredo took me to a vineyard that had originally been planted in 1996 with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, which they ripped out. 2014 was the last vintage they had both. “What was working in 1996 isn’t working today,” he said. “I’m glad the young people today already know this.”

12 Spanish Sparklers You Should Not Call Cava (Because They’re Corpinnat)

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Today, I’m thrilled to publish this profile of Arianna Occhipinti (one of Everyday Drinking’s favorite winemakers) by Robert Camuto, whose wine and travel writing I’ve long admired. For me, Robert’s 2010 book Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey was a model of what wine writing could be as I began writing seriously about wine. After many years writing for Wine Spectator, Robert is now publishing a newsletter on Substack, Italy Matters, which you should definitely check out.

The first time I drove through the Sicilian countryside to meet Arianna Occhipinti was in the summer of 2008, when she was on the verge of becoming a phenom—a 25-year old who’d returned home from enology school to make wine from a 2.5-acre vineyard.

Vittoria, Sicily was no country for young men. Let alone young women.

Yet here she was in her fifth vintage. She was a symbol that grew with time—a smart and attractive Sicilian with a great mane of thick black hair—who chose to stick around and not escape with much of her generation to Milan or London or New York. What’s more, she was an Italian woman speaking about wine not in a cocktail dress but in work boots dusted with soil.

She was also a living poster for “natural wines,” with her infectiously simplistic view of winemaking.

“You squeeze the fruit, let it ferment, and basta,” she told me.

But she was too smart and driven to settle for “the-wine-makes-itself” schtick, and to bottle stuff that wreaked of volatile acidity and brettanomyces while tiptoeing towards vinegar.

That year she would produce her first red vintage of the wine that kicked her business into hight gear. SP 68 – named for the main two-lane road that cuts through Ragusa province on the southeast of the island-- was a traditional Vittoria blend of light zingy frappato and darker, brooding nero d ‘avola.

Fermented in stainless steel and released amid the 2009 financial crisis at $25, the wine hit a bullseye for drinkability and affordability. (The New York Times’ Eric Asimov, called it “fresh, juicy, and joyous”). Stocks quickly sold out.

When I visited Arianna five years later, I was stunned by the signs of her success. She was rushing to complete an enormous new winery on a 60-acre farm of vineyards, citrus and olive groves, wheat fields and a majestic 19^th-century baglio (Sicilian farmhouse) in Contrada Bomboleri.

She was a producer of 120,000 bottles a year—wines that were becoming fresher and cleaner tasting and shedding their “must-be-organic” naïve mantle. Though she wouldn’t say it, she’d left most of the natural wine world in the dust.

And she made the smartest statement I’ve ever heard from a young winemaker.

“Wine should be a mirror of a place-- not a mirror of our mistakes,” she said.

In other words, Arianna was on a quest to make great wine and to show the world her corner of Sicily.

“My idea was always the same-- to express this territory,” she went on, her hand chopping the air in front of her. “I will finish my life with the same idea.”

Organics, biodynamics, fermenting on indigenous yeasts, no filtering, scant use of sulfites, gentle and simple winemaking and all the rest, were never an end, but a way to put more distinctive sense of “there” in the glass.

Last week I visited Arianna again, this time as part of a group of somms and Italian journalists to talk about wine and the world, to eat and drink, and discuss her latest obsession.

Arianna’s first wine obsession was, of course, frappato. Her wines broke the mold of the Sicilian heartland as a producer of wines that resembled sun-parched leather. She coaxed out freshness and saltiness with a ruby-colored liquid that almost seemed lighter than its weight in the glass.

At 43, with the first small lines of exprerience gathering around her dark intense eyes, Arianna now makes four versions of frappato—a wine that in her youth was viewed as “an entry level pizza wine.”

All four are fermented in aged in cement takes without barrels. There is her flagship “Il Frappato” and three single vineyard crus called PT, FL and BB, planted on variations of the local soils: white sands and red sands, compact limestone and porous calcareeous tufa

In recent years, with demand for her wines outstripping supply, Arianna has turned her gaze to grillo, one of Sicily’s most planted white grapes chiefly on the western side of the island near her birthplace of Marsala.

Grillo, a late-19th-century cross of Sicily’s Catarratto and Zibibbo (Muscat of Alexandria) was bred to be blended for aged and fortified Marsala wines. In recent decades it has been vinified alone as a dry table wine—with results that vary from vinous fruit punch to exquisite.

Arianna was inspired in Marsala by the dry, salty grillo wines of Marco de Bartoli’s son Renato and decided to try her hand at it in Vittoria, where the grape is known as riddu.

“Grillo is a grape of the sea,” she says. “It has a great potential to absorb the flavors of sea stones. It actually has a lot in common with chardonnay.”

To make her Grillo wines, Arianna has focused on two vineyards where limestone dominates, planting them both with massal cuttings from De Bartoli vineyards.

The first was in the Chiaramonte di Gulfi, Called Santa Margherita—a high altitiude clay and limestone vineyard about a halfhour drive from her winery. The wine called SM was first vinified in 2020, showing power and body under its elegant surface.

The second wine, launched with the 2025 vintage and set for release this spring, is called Serracalcara, from her the redder sands and calcareous pebbles of her Bombolieri farm. It’s a blade-sharp version that begs for a plate of delicate raw gamberi rossi (Mediterranean red prawns) fresh off the Sicilian fishing boats that dock about five miles from her winery.

The wines are delicious. But, as always with Arianna, the variety is not the end—it’s a vehicle to show off the vineyards.

On the second day of her gathering we tromped through wet and muddy vines blanketed with chest high wildflowers and cover crops. We tasted and tasted some more, and toured her cellars—Arianna the whole time gesticulating, chattering a mile a minute. Geology. Soils. Technical details of the wines. Southern Sicily that sits at a latitude south of Tunis, Tunisia.

We spoke about the wine crisis, the human crisis, wine “storytelling”, and ethics, while one of her staff put color- coded Post-it notes on a whiteboard.

Arianna has a total of 30 employees—twenty of whom work in the vineyards. Her team is young and energetic. They drink together, cook together and seem to enjoy hanging out.

She is her own enologist and doesn’t use a consulting winemaker. Rather she uses the services of a consulting psychologist for group and one-on-one motivation.

At first she says her grizzled vineyard workers were suspicious. Had anybody ever asked how they felt?

“He helps people work at their potential,” Arianna says. Then, as if it were necessary to explain, she says, “I make people work at maximum speed.”

Out the front gate of her farm runs SP 68, which connects her world and in Sicilian wine has come to be known as the fast lane.

Related Sicily Content on Everyday Drinking

“Spring is here. Do you care?” That’s the headline of a piece that ran last weekend in The New York Times Style section. Spring, according to the article, has fallen far behind autumn—with its cozy, sweaters-and-pumpkin-spice vibe—as Americans’ favorite season.

Spring, by contrast, can seem so muddy and disappointing. It is seen as a time of wildly fluctuating temperatures and pollen-induced sneezing fits. Recent surveys of Americans’ seasonal preferences place it a distant second or even third to autumn, the runaway winner.

But now, as crocuses and snowdrops pop up from the ground after months of bitter weather across much of the United States, there are signs that spring may be primed for a cultural comeback.

The article suggests that Spring is in dire need of a rebrand. In fact, they brought in the creative director of a marketing firm, Jamie Falkowski at Day One Agency, and asked what, if Spring were his client, he would to do improve the season’s image:

Mr. Falkowski emphasized that a successful campaign would account for the negatives associated with the season—Tax Day; mud; allergies; the sense that one minute you’re shivering in a puffer coat and the next you’re cursing the heat and humidity. Once that was dealt with, he would try to spin spring’s brevity and unpredictability into a positive.

“The line I would try to build around is: ‘Don’t Sleep on Spring,’” Mr. Falkowski said. “We’d try to build a full 360 campaign. I’d try to find a creative who could capture the essence of the season really well.”…I’d want to bring in someone to build out the dream message: ‘Hey, this season is short — don’t sleep on it!’”

Well, good luck with that, I guess.

I’m not sure this moment is really the right time for a spring rebrand—what with the grim job market and the ongoing affordability crisis and the AI taking over everything—as well as the U.S. government’s insane, deadly flirtation with World War III.

And yet, spring is now most certainly here, a reprieve from what has been an especially cold and snowy winter, at least in the northeast. Baseball season starts tomorrow. It’s sweatshirt-and-shorts weather. People are posting Mary Oliver poems on Instagram (“Well, who doesn’t want the sun after a long winter?”). Perhaps this is not enough to totally forget about the bad things, the world on fire, but at least we can be thankful for some sunny days.

I also know a lot of us are nearly broke. So instead of spending $22 for a single glass at a wine bar, why not take that money, buy a liter of wine, and bring it to the park with some cheese and bread for a boozy picnic.

Last spring, my newsletter about wine in liters was one of my most popular posts of the year. And so, over the past few months, I’ve been on the lookout for liters I love to recommend again this spring.

We’re definitely still in a Liter Renaissance of good, honest, crowd-pleasing wine in larger format bottles. It’s one of the best micro trends happening in wine right now. Even a dummy can understand the appeal: Why spend $15 or $25 on the usual 750 milliliters when you can get a third more wine for basically the same price?

This year, all of my liter picks were under $30, several under $20. What am I looking for in a good liter? Lower alcohol, good acidity, freshness, juiciness, little or no oak. Reds that can be slightly chilled, whites that have some structure. Wines that can move from late afternoon into dinner and pair with a lot of different foods. And that elusive concept: Drinkability.

A Load of Liters To Love This Spring

Eight liters from $15 to $26 that are perfect for your sunny spring picnic.

Normally, I put my bottle recommendations behind the paywall, but today, I guess I’m feeling spring fever vibes and would like to share them. If you appreciate what I do at Everyday Drinking, please consider supporting the work by upgrading.

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Felix R&B NV ($15)

An exciting new collab from importer Winemonger and Stefan Wellanschitz of Kolfok from Burgenland, Austria. This is a blend of blaufränkisch and rotburger (they chose to use the local name of zweigelt to avoid its complicated and controversial associations). But there’s nothing complicated or controversial about this juicy, crunchy, fresh, and delightful wine with a great balance of savory herb, red fruit, and peppery notes. A wonderfully affordable spring red.

Cocchonnet 2023 ($26)

This fun, bright, peppery rendition of gamay comes from Côte Roannaise, which is technically a part of the Loire, but often considered the unofficial “11th Cru of the Beaujolais.” The name means “little piggy,” which is also the name for the tiny ball used as the target in pétanque. It’s a perfect chilled red with lots of zest and energy.

Milan Nestarec ‘Běl’ 2024 ($26)

Milan Nestarec is a natural-wine star from the Moravia region of Czechia. He bottles his least expensive wines in liter bottles with a crown cap—and frankly, I wish more producers did it this way. This is an exciting, fresh blend of grüner veltliner, welschriesling, and müller-thurgau. Like all of Nestarec’s wines, it’s got great acidity and minerality, and

Milan Nestarec ‘Růž’ 2024 ($26)

The name means pink, but is this a rosé or light red? Does it matter? You’re going to chill it either way. This is a delicious blend of blaufränkisch and zweigelt from Moravia, that’s fruity and earthy, a little wild, very fresh, and exactly what you want to drink on a spring day.

Ampeleia ‘Unilitro’ Toscana Rosso 2024 ($19)

Still one of the best-value reds you can find, from anywhere. From Tuscany’s coastal Maremma, it’s a rather non-Tuscan blend of grenache, carignan, mourvèdre, sangiovese and alicante bouschet, aged six months in cement. Bright, popping, slightly tingly, with tart cherry with an underlying earthiness, a touch of natty in the very best way. This is a collaboration with Elisabetta Foradori, one of Italy’s legendary low-intervention, biodynamic producers, whose teroldego wines I have always loved.

Wonderwerk ‘Big Orange’ 2024 ($25)

Yes, the label looks like it’s inspired by 1970s kids television (Schoolhouse Rock?) and this California skin-contact blend is as fun and sunny as it promises. Made with a very untypical California blend of 43% muscat canelli and 15% sauvignon blanc from Clarksburg, and 33% symphony (a weird cross of garnacha cris and muscat of alexandria that you can find in San Joaquin). Notes of orange peel, apricot and citrus blossom, and surprising good structure. A crowd pleaser.

Kiki & Juan Blanco 2024 ($17)

The liters by this Spanish négociant—who sources organic grapes from Utiel Requena DO in Valencia —are getting super popular in the U.S. (I saw it for $22 at Erewhon if you want to overpay). This blend of 90% macabeo and 10% sauvignon blanc is fermented on native yeasts and spends 9 months on the lees in stainless steel. The result is crisp and dry, with notes of orchard fruit and melon, and you’ll be seeing this on the beach all summer.

Ercole Barbera del Monferrato 2024 ($18)

Made by a small, independent co-op in Piedmont from 30- to 50-year-old barbera vines (with most of the growers certified organic), and fermented and aged in concrete. This is the kind of wine that makes think: If I don’t like this, do I really like wine at all?

So I’ve been looking at what concerts are coming to Philadelphia over the next few months. Seems like a roundup of usual suspects: Tame Impala, Morgan Wallen, Bruno Mars, Waxahatchee & MJ Lenderman, Cardi B, Noah Kahan. I’m certain this is …

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This is a rare Saturday morning post from me, but I want to update readers. I’ve been traveling in Spain over the past couple of weeks, filling up the ol’ content tank with fresh reporting and tasting. Last week, I was inside the chaotic bubble of Barcelona Wine Week, and this past week I’ve been visiting winemakers in Catalonia. Look for several upcoming posts on my latest Spanish wine adventures and discoveries. Also, paid subscribers, look for the next (slightly delayed) installment of Thinking & Drinking on Wednesday, which will be Spanish themed.

Last Sunday, a sunny Barcelona afternoon, I attended a lovely, surprising tasting at a feminist bookstore hosted by Sarah Sioli, who writes the newsletter Next Tasting and is one of my favorite Barcelona wine people. The cheeky theme: Verdejo Haters.

There is an ocean of cheap verdejo in Spain, undoubtedly the country’s most popular white wine. Most of it comes from Rueda, the appellation in Castilla y León that is synonymous with the grape. This ocean of verdejo is mostly middling, inoffensive, and uninspiring. Too often, it can be worse. I wouldn’t say I am a “verdejo hater.” Hate would imply having strong feelings about verdejo. I mostly just shrug and ignore it.

My first inkling that verdejo could be something more happened at last year’s Barcelona Wine Week, when I tasted the wines of Barco del Corneta, which releases its wines as Tierra de Castilla y León, outside the Rueda appellation. “We must remember that verdejo is a local grape,” said Barco del Corneta’s winemaker Félix Crespo Álvarez. “People think of it like sauvignon blanc—but it’s not. It’s local. Verdejo has great potential and is a great grape, but it’s been in bad hands.”

The bottles Sarah poured for ‘Verdejo Haters,’ more natural-leaning examples from Esmeralda García and Microbio (as well as a wild-card bottling made in Sicily by Badalucco de la Iglesia Garcia) showed that the grape has even another level.

The thing with verdejo (similar to other high-yield grapes like carignan) is that it demands old vines. Like, very old vines, 80 to 100 years or more. One bottle we tasted, from Esmeralda García, came from 200-year-old vines.

I came away thinking differently about verdejo. But it was just one of many surprises from my travels. More to come!

Verdejo For People Who Hate Verdejo

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A couple of years ago, I ran this story about my friends, Pierre and David Avedissian, and the generous tasting of 1980’s Bordeaux they shared with me. During the recent holiday season, Pierre sadly passed away. In his memory, I wanted to repost this essay, which I hope gets at the heart of why people collect and age wine.

Not too long ago, I attended a tasting of Bordeaux wines from the 1980s. This wasn’t in a fancy tasting room or a Michelin-starred restaurant, hosted by a master sommelier. No. It happened at a table in my cramped office, in a small town in South Jersey, where my friend David Avedissian and his 86-year-old father, Pierre, generously shared a few bottles from their cellar.

The Avedissians are not billionaire collectors. David is a local attorney, and Pierre, for many years, ran a hair salon in our town. At some point in the early 1980s, Pierre decided to start buying Bordeaux—perhaps as a remembrance of growing up in France, from where he emigrated at age 17. “Actually, I don’t know that much about wine,” he admitted, with a laugh. In fact, during the early 2000s, before David had any interest in wine, Pierre nearly sold his entire collection. “I was ready to sell it all to a guy,” he said. “But the guy never came to get it. I waited. After about four years, I decided to keep it and give it all to David”—who has since extended and deepened the collection.

After tasting through their amazing bottles, I gotta say: I am deeply grateful that guy, whoever he was, never showed up.

Which makes me sort of a hypocrite. In my book, Godforsaken Grapes, which advocates for obscure wines from lesser-known places, high-end Bordeaux is one of the main villains—along with critics like Robert Parker and other gatekeepers of a status-quo wine hierarchy. In a chapter called “Château du Blah Blah Blah,” I tell how I was once humiliated during a tasting with Prince Robert de Luxembourg, managing director of Château Haut-Brion, whose attitude seemed to be: “How the hell did you get an appointment with me?” Of my tasting with the prince, I wrote, “I haven’t felt so foolish since middle school when I forgot to wear shorts to a basketball game, and pulled down my sweatpants to reveal my tighty-whities to the crowd.”

Contemporary high-end Bordeaux can so easily represent everything wrong with wine—its pretension, its bloated prices, its power over critics and discourse, its showy, high-alcohol wines, its focus on a handful of estates coasting on prestige bestowed during the Second French Empire in the mid-19th century, its inaccessibility to younger wine enthusiasts.

But here’s the thing: It wasn’t always like this. Not so long ago, many people could afford to buy and cellar good Bordeaux wines. The 1980s, when Americans first got excited about wine, coincided with several excellent Bordeaux vintages, including 1982, 1985, 1986, and 1988. Much of which you could purchase at your local wine shop: no futures, no allocations, no auctions, no nonsense.

Pierre acquired much of his collection at one liquor store in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, one that also sold cigarettes and lottery tickets. “I got lucky,” Pierre said. “When I first built my wine cellar, that’s when the 1982s were just coming out. At the time, they were saying ’82 was a good vintage. But it ended up being one of the best.”

That was, of course, long before the advent of niche wine stores staffed by people studying for advanced WSET certifications. But you could still occasionally find a knowledgeable, passionate wine person in a standard-issue liquor store. “I was lucky that I had a guy,” Pierre said. “I used to subscribe to the Wine Spectator, and I had a wine encyclopedia. But the guy at my local store knew what was good.”

Our group at the tasting spanned several generations. David and I are Gen Xers. Our friends Mike and Alexa, a Millennial couple just starting to collect wine, came over, as did our friend John, a young boomer who also has a solid collection of Bordeaux. John brought a selection of cheeses worthy of these wines—Pierre insisted that there be brie, “the very best pairing with Bordeaux”—and we sipped a pleasant pre-game 2015 Bordeaux Supérieur from Château Labatut ($15) while we waited for Pierre and David to fiddle with the corks. I put on a playlist that was heavy on ‘80s synths.

We began with a 1982 Château Bahans Haut-Brion (known today as Le Clarence), the second label of First Growth Château Haut-Brion. This was a dive into the deep end of well-aged Bordeaux: at first earthy and musky, then opening up with aromas of cedar and leather, and deep flavors of olive and pepper, mellowed, silky tannins, and a pretty good finish. It elicited nods of approval throughout the room. “I always want a little bit of earthiness with old Bordeaux,” David said. “I want the olive. I want the cedar.”

“My tasting note is ‘tapenade,’” said John.

For Mike and Alexa, this was the first time they’d tasted such an old wine, and they grew quiet as they wrapped their heads around these flavors and aromas. Alexa noted that its vintage was only a year younger than her. Meanwhile, Pierre sounded a little unimpressed. “I think I like the 2015 better,” he said, chuckling, as he cut another hunk of brie.

A couple of things about the Bahans Haut-Brion impressed me. It was incredible how much freshness this four-decade-old wine still displayed. Also, at a mere 11.5 percent abv, it’s noteworthy how completely different the drinking experience was compared to the 14.5 percent hammers now routinely found throughout Bordeaux. It still had great energy, even if it might be slightly in decline and walked with a slight limp, or a cane. Also noteworthy: the price. In the mid 1980s, Pierre bought this Bahans Haut-Brion for around $20, which would be about $63 today. Compare that to the 2022 Le Clarence, which runs around $180.

1982 famously established Robert Parker’s reputation. Almost all other critics declared 1982 in Bordeaux to be a poor year, too ripe and too low in acidity. But Parker effusively praised the vintage—and especially bottles from Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Growth producers that, in those years, were still very gently priced. Whatever people think of critics like Parker now, his predictions on the 1982 vintage were totally correct, and it became wildly sought-after.

So, in a way, the omnipresence of the 100-point scale—the legacy of which, many argue, burdens the wine world today—stems from the ageworthiness of Bordeaux’s 1982 vintage. We may be in the waning days of both the 1982 vintage and scores. This may be a generalization, but I’ve tasted a number of 1982s over the past few years, and while there’s still freshness and drinkability, many bottles at this stage have slipped past their prime. Some of this may be how the wines I’ve tasted have been cellared. But I also wonder whether that rich, ripe vintage (which predated many modern growing and winemaking techniques) is finally entering its decline. If you have 1982s, I’d open them now.

The wines at this tasting had been cellared well. Pierre does not have a fancy, custom-made wine cellar. “It’s all natural, three sides dirt and one stone wall. When I built the house, it was going to be a crawl space, but I said, ‘No, no, let’s make it a wine cellar.’” He added: “I’ve never had a bad bottle that’s been stored there.”

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As good as the Bahans Haut-Brion had been, the next bottle—1985 Château Lynch-Bages—was the wine of the night. It’s drawn raves pretty much since it was released. (Wine Spectator named it their No. 1 wine of the year in 1988.) Given that, it’s somewhat surprising that Lynch-Bages, from Pauillac, is a Fifth Growth, not a Premier Cru. In the 1980s, critics used this bottle as an example for Americans, many of whom were new to wine collecting, to look for value outside of Bordeaux’s traditional hierarchy. In that era, Pierre bought his for under $40, or around $100 in today’s dollars. Today you’ll find the 1985 Lynch-Bages selling for around $400. The 2022 vintage’s release price, by contrast, is $140.

It’s the second time I’ve had this wine—the first was maybe five or six years ago—and it still sings beautifully. It starts with deep, dark forest floor notes, then moves to cedar, smoke, leather, and mint. An amazing, youthful core of fresh black and red fruit persists, with a hint of elegant tannins and a long savory finish. It’s seamless, and it’s everything that people who love old Bordeaux desire.

Critics at Decanter, Vinous, and Wine Advocate all revisited this wine in 2023 and all raved about its staying power. Decanter perhaps said it best: “It is tough to put into words how much I love this wine…In the two dozen or so times that I have drunk this wine it has never been anything short of spectacular.” The writer added: “There is no benefit from waiting, but there is also no rush.”

At my office table, our tasting discussion was light on tasting notes, and high on superlatives. “Normally, I prefer Bordeaux at around 10 years,” said David, “But this is amazing.”

Even Pierre was impressed by this one. “I thought I was losing my sense of taste,” he said. “But tasting this, wow. Clearly, I am not.”

“I’ve never tasted anything like this,” said Mike. As a new collector, he wanted to know: How would he even begin to start building a cellar with bottles like this? Hundreds of dollars for already-aged bottles would be out of the question. Our advice was both simple and complicated: Find the wines from regions and grapes that will last, and may someday increase in value. Which led Mike to ask: How do I know what wines those will be? We all shrugged. More than anything else, we said, buy wines that bring you joy—so much joy that you’re willing to save some of that joy for later.

Aging, after all, is what separates wine from almost all other consumable goods. Since Roman times, aging has defined wine’s elevated place in the culture. But it’s complicated. A dark art. It takes time and patience. 

It also takes luck. Sometimes, you have to know a guy. Other times, you have to hope the other guy never shows up.

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This first appeared in The New Wine Review (now owned by Unicorn Auctions).

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If someone mentions “Provence” and “wine” in the same breath, chances are they’re referring to rosé. Specifically, they probably mean the grenache-dominated, high-volume rosé that’s rapidly pressed and fermented with cultured yeast, before spending minimal time in tanks—the goal being to get it in the bottle and onto the shelf as quickly and cheaply as possible.

In 2024, rosé accounted for a whopping 91 percent of all AOC wine produced in the region, a pink ocean filling more than 130 million bottles. And the vast majority of that, regrettably, is pale wine that tastes like…not much of anything. Or any place. (I’m sorry, but “garrigue”—the overused word for the fragrant scrubland in the region that pops up as a descriptor in endless tasting notes—does not terroir make.) To get away from high-volume, generic Provençal wine with no real sense of place, you either have to look for a handful of very small, delimited areas, or simply don’t worry about appellations.

Why should a consumer expect to know the differences between a wine from Côtes de Provence and Côtes d’Aix-en-Provence? There are four subzones in Côtes de Provence: Sainte-Victoire, Fréjus, La Londe, and Pierrefeu. I’ve never seen a producer use any of those, so who really cares?

To find wines of place in Provence, I headed west from Nice this September into Bandol, an appellation famed for its dark, tannic, ageworthy red wines made principally from mourvèdre. It’s the only appellation in France that requires a focus on this late-ripening variety, which must be 50 to 95 percent of the blend for reds; the rest is grenache, cinsault, and sometimes syrah or carignan. It’s a small appellation of about 1,600 hectares, with less than 70 producers. As I drove along the Côte d’Azur, a pattern of condos-pizza restaurant-ice cream shop passed by the car window like a repeat pan in an old Hanna-Barbera cartoon.

I reached Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer in the west of the appellation, a small coastal town with scrub-covered rocky hillsides looking out onto the International Klein Blue of the sea. On the outskirts of town, I pulled into the long drive of Château Pradeaux, a benchmark traditionalist producer for both Bandol and Provence. The domaine’s peachy-pink house with turquoise shutters dates to the 17th century, and the property is dotted with ancient olive trees, some as old as 1000 years. Étienne Portalis met me at the cellar door and we walked through the vines radiating out in rows from the house. The estate has been owned by the Portalis family since 1752, when Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis—an author of the Napoleonic Code—inherited it. Étienne’s grandmother, Arlette Portalis, and her mother Suzanne fled to the estate in World War II to live in the unoccupied zone libre (the free zone) and revive the property. Arlette was a key figure in the creation of the Bandol appellation, which was approved in 1941. Now, her grandsons Étienne and his brother Edouard share management of the domaine.

As we walked past the vines, farmed organically with some biodynamic practices on limestone and clay soils, his hound dog started eating some of the grapes hanging heavy from the vine, and Portalis called him away. “Once they begin to eat the grapes, you know it’s time for harvest,” he said. His team would begin picking grapes for the domaine’s rosés in just a few days. The best Bandol rosés, with a high percentage of mourvèdre, are often deep in color, complex, structured, and ageworthy—a far cry from the pale, dull examples found throughout much of the region. But rosé is not what defines Bandol.

Portalis’ grandmother rehabilitated the domaine’s vineyards after the Germans and Italians occupied the property in 1942 and destroyed the vines, replanting mostly with mourvèdre. That variety is the star of the show here, making up 90 to 95 percent of Château Pradeaux’s Bandol red—“the soul of the estate”—rounded out by varieties like cinsault or carignan to bring freshness and lower alcohol.

Portalis said it would be a struggle to find a grape that fits as well to the terroir. “It’s really the place for mourvèdre,” he said. “Pradeaux” gets its name from the fact that it is near the water (près de l’eau), about a half a mile away from the sea. Bandol is in an amphitheater formed by the surrounding hills, and the winds circulate throughout the appellation from off the Mediterranean. “It creates a microclimate that allows the mourvèdre to grow slowly,” Portalis said, “so we have a good balance between alcohol and structure.”

We stepped into the winery, where the handpicked grapes for the reds would be sorted and put into tanks to begin fermentation, without destemming. They’re then put in large oak foudres for aging. Bandol’s appellation rules stipulate a minimum of 18 months in barrel for Bandol reds; Château Pradeaux ages theirs for four years.

“That’s not a fashionable wine,” Portalis admitted. “But the best way to not be old-fashioned is to not be a fashionable wine.”

The regulations will likely be changing though: the majority of the growers in the Bandol producers’ association want to lower the requirement to age the reds to only 12 months, in the face of more and more hot vintages producing wines that don’t need to age for the full 18.

Portalis believes this is a poor idea. It seems like a simple tradition versus a the-times-they-are-a-changin’ argument. But some of this is future-proofing, to his mind. “The Provence rosé sales will decrease,” he predicted. “So in Bandol, it’s important to keep the identity here.” Even if the aging requirement is lowered, it won’t change the way anything is done at Château Pradeaux.

Daniel Ravier, winemaker at the storied Bandol producer Domaine Tempier, expressed similar thoughts when I met with him later that week. Domaine Tempier’s Bandol rosé has become a benchmark and highly sought after by collectors. (When the recent vintage landed at my local wine shop in Manhattan, it was sold out within an hour.)

Yet as popular as his rosé has become, Ravier is adamant that Bandol’s identity is its reds, not its pink wines.

Lucie (“Lulu”) and Lucien Peyraud of Domaine Tempier (along with Arlette Portalis) were among those who helped to establish the Bandol appellation. Ravier took over the role of winemaker from the Peyraud family in 2000 and has overseen converting the domaine to biodynamics. We walked through the cellar, full of barrels for aging the reds ranging in age, size, and cooperage—from Stockinger to Valery Desfrieches Cognac barrels. Ravier calls it “a museum of foudre.”

Bandol reds are wines of incredible longevity; they can take 10 to 15 years to just begin to reach their potential, as demonstrated by a tasting of 2011 and 1981 Tempier bottlings in the winery. They may promote longevity in their drinkers as well. We tasted the wines under a large photo of the legendary Lulu. In a satisfying affront to those who obsessively count how many ounces of water they consume daily, when Lulu Peyraud turned 100 in 2017, “she was drinking red wines and Champagne—no water,” Ravier told me. “She would say, ‘L’eau, même sous la douche, je ferme la bouche’”—for water, even in the shower, I keep my mouth shut. She lived to the age of 102.

When talk turned to the appellation rules, Ravier felt strongly that a proposed change to allow 100 percent mourvèdre bottlings was a negative one: making Bandol a blend is part of the appellation’s identity. “Sometimes if the mourvèdre is too aggressive, and you have 3 to 5 percent of very interesting carignan or something in the blend, the dimension is even greater,” he explained.

He lamented the unpopularity of the 18-month elevage rule with the growers as well, though he felt that there should be some flexibility built in, contingent on conditions, while still preserving the idea of aging the wines over two winters in wood.

Working Beyond Appellation in Provence

Pulling back for a moment from the world of Bandol, these discussions may seem like splitting hairs to a lot of wine drinkers. What’s the difference between 12 and 18 months, really? Does 95 percent versus 100 percent mourvèdre make that much of an impact? It does when you have a strong identity to protect—one that’s highly distinct from the Provence Rosé brand.

But I was about to get a little palate cleanser from all the appellation rules. Later that week, I drove east from Aix-en-Provence, bustling with students returning for classes and tourists in town for a blockbuster exhibit of the city’s most famous resident, Paul Cezanne. Heading into the foothills of the Mont Sainte-Victoire mountain range, the air was distinctly cooler and fresher. I glimpsed lavender farms, the plants long-past bloom and wet with morning dew, through breaks in the trees as I followed the winding road.

In the tiny little town of Pourrières, I met winemaker Jérôme Maillot, of Le Temps des Rêveurs. He started his winery in 2014, when he took over his family’s vines that grew grapes for the local cooperative. Working organically and biodynamically from the outset, he planted more vines and now works over 6 hectares. Maillot farms four sites in this dry, windswept part of the region, where the elevation gives a greater diurnal range, slowing ripening and retaining acidity in the grapes. His winemaking is experimental and minimalist, with just a touch of SO2 at bottling. The resulting wines are ones of remarkable freshness in this hot region.

He works with old-vine carignan and ugni blanc planted by his grandfather. Old vines are a rarity in Provence: they tend to get replanted when yields aren’t high enough to meet the massive demand for rosé. Maillot has also grafted massal selections of grenache, syrah, grenache gris, carignan gris and blanc, and macabeu, choosing late-ripening varieties resistant to climate change.

But it’s the carignan, dismissed historically as a “workhorse” grape, that he especially loves to work with. “It’s a variety which is very easy to read, how the vine is growing and developing,” Maillot explained. Carignan doesn’t have the reputation of a great variety because in the past it would produce big yields and ripened too late. With old carignan vines, Maillot’s yields are naturally restricted on these soils, producing wines of concentration and complexity.

Maillot works within the delimited area for Côtes de Provence, but he eschews the appellation because it accommodates neither his experimental vinification methods nor his love of carignan. His Eric Pfifferling-esque red wine, Sirène, for example, uses the classic blend of grapes: grenache, mourvèdre, cinsault, a bit of cabernet sauvignon. But with Maillot’s winemaking techniques, it exists in that beautiful liminal space between a rosé and a red wine—outside of that bugbear “typicity” with which the Bandol producer organization is so preoccupied.

Maillot also has two 100-percent bottlings of his old-vine carignan, which is not allowed under the appellation’s mandate for blends. All his wines are thus bottled as Vin de France. This doesn’t bother him, though; he would rather put the effort he would spend fighting the appellation rules to better use selling his wines to the consumers who will appreciate what he’s doing.

There’s a lot of this happening in Provence. Beyond Bandol and maybe a few other areas, the appellation system won’t help you much. Its purpose is ostensibly quality control, but I drank some very poor AOC wines while in Provence, and several of the best I tasted were non-appellation.

I tried some gorgeous rosés while I was there, too, but there are impressive wines of every hue and style being made, both within and without the appellation system. It’s a shame that the forward-looking spirit of a lot of winemaking here is overshadowed both by Provence Rosé’s dominance and the rigid appellation regulations. One of the most stunning rosés that I tasted was Château Pradeaux’s Vesprée cuvée, but even this wine—Bandol through and through—butt up against the appellation system: in the past, it was denied Bandol appellation status multiple times for stylistic reasons, and labeled Vin de France.

All of this is to say, winemakers have so far defaulted to Vin de France when AOC regulations prove too inflexible, in Provence and throughout the country. Vin de France has become shorthand to consumers (especially young ones) for experimental winemaking, often minimal or low intervention. This serves a purpose for marketing—Vin de France is now a brand of its own, in a way. But will there come a day when the INAO has a mess of Corpinnats and Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüters (VDPs)—private organizations that broke away from the appellation systems—to contend with? How many Château Lafleurs will it take before things change?

Maybe this battle will simply devolve further along the lines it’s already taken, where the consumer has to simply know producer names—both the AOCs/Château Pradeauxs and the Vins de France/Le Temps des Rêveurs of the French wine world—and the story behind them to know who is making the styles of wines they want to drink in the way that consumer prefers that they be made: traditionally, transparently, organically, regeneratively, low-intervention, etc. For so many wine consumers who think in this dimension, appellation labels are already just that—simply a label.

26 Wines from Bandol and Beyond

Below are a mix of AOC wines and Vins de France from Provence, of every style and hue; some of them may not yet be available stateside, but I’ve linked to the importer’s site where wine-searcher.com comes up empty-handed. Note to importers of Provence wines: the people want more than rosé!

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As someone who harbors pretensions about being part of the wine cognoscenti, I guess I should apologize: I have never visited the Republic of Georgia. I know that a lot of my wine friends have been there to experience the ancient Georgian winemaking culture that reportedly dates back to at least 6,000 B.C. But they are cooler than me.

I did write about about Georgian grapes such as rkatsiteli, kisi, mtsvane and saperavi in Godforsaken Grapes. But the closest I’ve ever come to Georgia is to dine at my favorite Georgian restaurant, in the Russian-speaking neighborhood around Bustleton Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia, where I’ve enjoyed khachapuri, khinkali, and phkhali for years.

Fortunately for me, last weekend, a bunch of top winemakers from Georgia came to New York to pour more than 150 wines at an event called Amber Georgia, organized by Alexis Percival, partner in Ruffian wine bar and a friend of Everyday Drinking. Amber Georgia was a great example of the sort of themed, well-curated, focused—but totally fun and open to the public—events that should be be the future of wine tastings. (Karakterre a few weeks back was another example)

In Georgia, they’ve been making skin-contact wines, aged in earthenware vessels called qvevri, for thousands of years—long before the idea of orange wine became a mainstream trend. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that Georgian winemakers have a bit of a chip on their shoulder to be lump in with all the johnny-come-lately orange wines. “Part of today is that they’re trying to reclaim ‘amber’ from ‘orange’ wine,” Percival told me on Saturday.

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So I finally got around to reading that stupid Vanity Fair article about orange wine from a few weeks ago, “The Case Against Orange Wine.” I want to say that it raises so many questions, but honestly it only raises one: Has Vanity Fair become so desperate for relevance that it’s now publishing half-baked, outdated rage-bait about orange wine? Really? I mean, 2019 called, and wants its orange-wine rant back.

The author of this piece, Byron Houdayer, fancies himself quite the curmudgeon. In his previous Vanity Fair column, he waged a lukewarm argument against the scourge of standing ovations at film festivals. I mean, I get it: It’s cute to be a catty, snarky critic. It’s not like I don’t know the rush of that particular drug.

But to be that critic, it means you have to bring at least some knowledge of the thing you’re holding forth against. It also helps to bring specific examples (which also means knowing something about the topic at hand). Houdayer does neither, and in a flurry of generalities, stumbles immediately into the usual rhetorical fallacies of these tiresome rants, which is to conflate orange wine with natural wine:

“What began as an earnest flirtation with low-intervention winemaking has curdled into something faintly cultish: oxidized, seditious liquids sloshed from reclaimed carafes in Bushwick, Kreuzberg, or in Hackney, praised in reverent tones by men in harem pants and cycling caps.

Against better judgment, I have tried these orange wines, egged on by sommeliers with the sort of facial hair that suggests either deep conviction or an elaborate dare. These wines appear smugly on menus alongside foraged disappointment served on filament-lit sharing plates. Cider, aged in a dried boot. Redolent of barnyard regret.

Orange wine is a low-sulfite con—a prolonged student prank passed off as enlightenment, and like many student pranks, it smells of manure and failure. There is a juvenile glee in rejecting filtration, stability, or even consistency as moral virtues. Murkiness isn’t a feature, it’s a flaw.

This is not progress. It is a collapsed scaffolding of taste.”

Houdayer checks off the hallmark clichés we always find in these diatribes: “Bushwick,” the idea that orange/natural wine is a “con,” the notion that those who recommend “cultish” orange wines (snobby sommeliers with “facial hair”) do so “smugly,” the description of orange wines as “cider” or “barnyard” and finally—of course—the idea that orange wine always has “flaws.”

He informs us that “in the high temples of good wine, like Le Bon Georges in the 9th arrondissement, the sommelier never misses. Every bottle earns its place. Here, nuance and humility reign.” (Cool name drop, bro.)

On the other hand, Houdayer writes:

“Natural wine, by contrast, is curated anarchy—a celebration of faults dressed up as flavor. Volatile acidity, oxidation, Brettanomyces: all indulged and all rebranded as ‘expressive.’ One might as well declare damp plaster ‘textured’ or stale bread ‘whimsical.’ Drinking orange wine is like being mugged by a wellness retreat.”

Here’s how I picture the writer after he dashed off that last line:

And I use this dated meme because, again, none of what’s in the Vanity Fair piece is new. As I alluded to above, the New Yorker ran (six years ago!) a memorably cringe anti-orange wine piece, “How the Orange-Wine Fad Became an Irresistible Assault on Pleasure,” by Troy Patterson. It’s interesting to note how little the anti-orange-wine argument has evolved.

“Orange wine has arrived to slap jaded palates around,” Patterson wrote back then. “The severity of orange wine’s structure and taste presents an especially dramatic example of aggressions against taste buds. The acerbic fizz of kombucha, the barnyard funk of fancy ciders, the ruckling tartness of sour beers—these and other harshnesses are ascendant among people who regard a hard seltzer as an instance of philistine minimalism.”

Patterson, like Houdayer, presents orange wine as something impossibly esoteric that’s embraced by a certain type of wine snob.

A wine with a finish like sucking on a grapefruit rind is not a wine to drink for enjoyment. It is a wine to suffer through—the suffering is proof that the drink is morally improving—and then to enjoy talking about. The talking is the proof of the drinker’s good taste.

All this tepid curmudgeonly sameness raises an even wider question for me: Why do the big-name cultural magazines always cover wine so badly? I’ve talked about this before, about the standard problems that happen when big media sprains its ankles to talk about wine—which apparently can never be written about like any other normal part of culture. I delved into this in my 2023 piece “Does Wine Writing Have to be so Embarrassing?” which took to task a particularly mortifying wine feature published in the New York Times Magazine:

“I’d bet the Times would never send a writer to profile Shohei Ohtani who didn’t totally understand baseball, or a reporter to profile Taylor Swift who didn’t have experience interviewing other pop music stars. But when it comes to wine, all bets are off. And I’m starting to wonder if this is by design.

With wine, general-interest magazines seem to always need an exaggerated conflict, some kind of straw man lurking as villain…there’s always something that feels false in the thesis, the framing, and/or the execution of these sorts of wine pieces…

Perhaps it’s the writer’s own issues and insecurities with the capital-W concept of Wine and how people talk about it? Or perhaps it’s the Times editors cynically and lazily tapping into the old populist tropes of “wine snobbery” to shape a simple angle they can lean into.”

In any case, I want to remind whoever needs reminding that what we call “orange wine” is more accurately called skin-contact wine, and it’s just white wine that macerates on its grape skins. It is simply a winemaking technique that imparts different textures, flavors, aromas, and colors than your typical white wine. Orange wine is not necessarily natural wine, though it certainly can be. Likewise, not all natural wine is orange wine.

Orange wine is its own diverse category of wine, with many styles and variations.

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People want experiences, not things. How many times have those of us in the lifestyle space heard this trope? For more than a decade, it’s been nearly gospel in the world of fashion, entertainment, media, and hospitality: Younger generations of consumers would rather spend money on experiences than on acquiring goods. Outlets from Ad Age to Scientific American to Psychology Today have delved into the various underlying reasons for this shift, but there is no denying that it’s become the prevailing consumer ethos. It’s now the common wisdom.

The “buy experiences, not things” mantra is perhaps the most pernicious of late-capitalist messaging—selling us on a virtue-signaling path to happiness that washes away all the sins of materialism and conspicuous consumption. In its purest sense, “experiences over things” is a nice ideal for society to aspire to. Yet in reality, the “experiences, not things” chatter of the marketplace almost never involves, say, going for a walk in the park on a sunny day, or talking to a stranger at the local dive bar, or staying up late in a deep conversation with friends, or spending the day in bed with someone you love. The “experiences” are almost always, like, spending thousands on a “spontaneous” weekend in Vegas or Paris or Nashville, or heading off to dive with dolphins/sharks/stingrays, or squeezing into an overcrowded, uninspired music festival, or flying thousands of miles to stand in line at some famous landmark, so you can take the same photo you saw on Instagram.

Ok, maybe as someone who makes his living on the lifestyle beat, I’m being a bit negative. But I guess I’m wondering how wine actually fits into this “experiences over things” philosophy. A bottle of wine is a thing, a consumer good to be acquired. Yet wine is also a catalyst for an experience, or at least it can be. Perhaps wine’s position here, stuck somewhere in the middle of the experiences-versus-things dichotomy, is part of the reason the wine industry is facing a worldwide crisis.

I’ve been thinking about all this since I read a short piece in The Economist a few weeks ago, headlined (in print) “The parable of Château d’Yquem.” The article uses Château d’Yquem, the legendary Sauternes—the pricey, sweet, noble-rot wine of Bordeaux—as its example of a “luxury asset” in decline. By 2023, a bottle of Château d’Yquem had risen in price around 60 percent since the decade before. This was basically the same rise for classic cars, aged whiskeys, private jets, boats, watches, etc. In fact, a “luxury-investment index” produced by Knight Frank, showed a 70 percent increase in luxury goods from 2015 to 2023.

Then, in 2023, things started changing. The Knight Frank luxury goods index is now down six percent and further decline is predicted. The price of first-growth Bordeaux wine is down 20 percent, second-hand Rolex watches are down 30 percent, sales of fine art are in steep decline. Apparently, young consumers are not the only ones eschewing luxury goods. So are the ultra-rich, of all ages.

“Why the bear market in plutocrat assets?” asked The Economist. “It seems unlikely that the super-rich are struggling.”

By way of explanation, the writer reaches for Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 social-science classic, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen famously argues that luxury is defined by “scarcity and rivalrousness.” Or in The Economist’s translation: “A good is truly luxurious not just because it is costly, but because one person’s consumption diminishes others’ ability to have it.”

Which, let’s be candid, is kinda gross when you think about it in those naked terms. But this is precisely where we are in the world of wine right now. What are you really flaunting, after all, when you post that unicorn bottle on Instagram?

The problem right now is that “fancy goods are everywhere,” according to The Economist:

“Lots of vineyards make great wine: is the best Bordeaux really that much better? Lab-grown diamonds are identical to the real thing. Anyone with a bit of dosh can claim a Kiton jacket from a second-hand marketplace or charter a private jet. Art-world innovators talk of “fractionalizing” old masters, with hundreds of people owning a piece of a Rembrandt. These days everyone enjoys the finer things in life—and they post about it on social media. Such things are no longer scarce or rivalrous. So they no longer seem as luxurious.”

What is now seen as luxurious? Experiences, obviously. Dinners at three-star Michelin restaurants (some rising nearly 80 percent in price since 2015), enjoying the rooftop pool at Le Bristol hotel in Paris (doubling in price since 2019), being in the audience at a New York fashion week show, tickets to the Super Bowl, Wimbledon, or the Met Gala—all of which have doubled in price in just the past few years.

To track this, The Economist constructed an “ultra-luxury-services index,” which shows that the market for “experiences” has risen by 90 percent since 2019, and has soared since the luxury goods index declined in 2023.

On experiences like these, says The Economist, “there are no good deals any more, which makes it even more satisfying to tell others that they were not there.” When eating at a Michelin-starred restaurant, “you buy not just the food—but the knowledge that, for those few hours, nobody else on Earth could sit at your table.”

So, where does wine fit into all of this? Obviously, the idea of scarcity in wine has changed. Rare unicorn wines still command attention and are still a rivalrous flex. But often they’re off-piste wines like Domaine des Miroirs from Jura, Domaine Belluard from Savoie, Richard Leroy from Anjou, or the only bottle of 1950 Bründlmayer St. Laurent in existence that I tasted from the cellar (if I’m feeling rivalrous). If you’re rich enough, you can always buy something like Jacque Selosse or Clos Rougeard or Domaine Coche-Dury or Domaine Ganevat. But this kind of unicorn hunting is the douchey aspect of wine that people supposedly hate.

On a less unicorn level, we explored how the idea of traditional prestige wines has broken down in our Everyday Drinking Wine Bar Index a few months ago. Older generations’ idea of prestige wines (Napa, Brunello, Bordeaux, etc.) holds almost no meaning to the younger wine drinker. The wine bar itself has perhaps become the most accessibly curated experience, particularly at bars with lists focused around specific regions or styles—Central and Eastern Europe, New Spain, orange wine, etc.

But even the classic wine experiences feel old hat. Any night of the week, you can pay to attend a wine dinner hosted by a winemaker and/or a distributor sales rep. Wine tasting rooms are so crowded in popular regions (looking at you Napa and Sonoma) that you often need to book reservations and pay exorbitant fees. I’ve been impressed by the new generation of consumer tasting events that attempt to appeal to a younger generation—such as Karakterre in Williamsburg that I wrote about last week, or the Pop et Hip Hop event in Champagne event that Sarah Parker Jang will be writing about soon.

But I wonder if wine needs to try so hard to present itself as more of an experience than a thing. After all, simply opening a bottle of wine—on a sunny day in the park, during a late night conversation on a roof deck, on a lazy, decadent afternoon in bed—is the prelude to experience. The drinking of the wine in a place with people is the experience. We would do well to remember that. Perhaps it’s more a matter of shifting perspective, framing, and being open to more possibilities.

Since The Economist brought up Château d’Yquem, let’s stay with Sauternes as an example. Outside of that one prestige brand, Sauternes in general has been in crisis for at least a decade. “Why is no one buying Sauternes?” asked Drinks Business, in 2015.

In the late 2010s, out of survival mode, some Sauternes producers started looking at cocktail culture, and pitching the sweet wine as a cocktail ingredient. There was even a riff on the mojito called the saujito. This was innovation in a time of crisis.

But the mere thought of using Sauternes in cocktails caused an outrage in staid Bordeaux. In 2020, Count Alexandre de Lur Saluces—the former owner of Château d’Yquem—wrote an angry open letter to the French publication Terre de Vins, railing against the trend of using Sauternes in cocktails, saying it was “arrogant” to think that Sauternes wines could be enhanced through mixology.

“You seem convinced that as it stands, [Sauternes] has no future. That this wine belongs to the past,” wrote the Count. “So you want to improve it with various subterfuges: ice cubes in the glasses, orange or lemon zests, sparkling water, etc. No doubt you were thinking of shock as a ‘marketing’ means to shake the consumer. I wish you luck. He is not that silly and will not be manipulated.”

The Count ended on an aristocratic flourish: “Sauternes wine does not deserve an improvement but a protection, that which one grants to the witnesses of civilization.”

When this kerfuffle happened, cocktail historian Derek Brown wrote a counter-argument, entitled “Cocktails Will Save Sauternes.” In it, Brown wrote: “Though it may offend Count Lur Saluces’ sensibilities, history is on the side of the mixologist. Using still, sparkling, and dessert wines—even Sauternes—is an old and enduring tradition, one that I think Sauternes producers would do well to embrace to boost sales and preserve their own traditions.”

Is a cocktail more of an experience than a wine? I don’t know. Maybe that is like asking if a hot dog is a sandwich. But is the participatory or experiential aspect of cocktails—where one can play along at home with a shaker—why wine has lost ground to cocktails over the last decade? I don’t know. But I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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My new neighborhood bar in Philadelphia, Bad Brother, has a late-night happy hour. Last night—as a group of High-Life-swilling Temple University football coaches chanted so loudly that the bartender almost tossed them out—I ordered the house white. That house white, during happy hour, is a $6 glass of Austrian grüner veltliner.

Take a bow, Austrian Wine Marketing Board. If grüner veltliner is now being poured in this context, then Austrian wine has insinuated itself deep into the fabric of America. In the late Obama years, we were talking about grüner veltliner as an “obscure” variety, something to be “discovered.” Times have certainly changed.

I’ve had Austrian wines on the brain this week. That’s mainly because, last weekend, I attended Karakterre, “the leading wine festival and community showcasing organic, biodynamic, and natural wines, as well as farming practices of Central and Eastern Europe.” Austrian wines are a major part of Karakterre, which happened this year in Domino Park, along the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—which, of course it did.

When the Austrians come to town, this means Team Everyday Drinking has an occasion to dip its toes into New York’s natural-wine scene, and so we attended the Markus Altenburger takeover at Babysips, the Elias Muster takeover at Rhodora, and a few other spots on our Everyday Drinking Wine Bar Index. I still don’t understand how you can open a wine bar without a menu, and make people wait in line for a private little consultation with the sommelier for their by-the-glass order, then have them sit on the ground to wait for their food. But hey, I live in Philadelphia, so what do I know.

Anyway, Karakterre was a super fun event, and I got to taste a lot of Austrian wine. During the sunny, crisp autumn morning, I decided to focus on whites. I expected to taste a lot of grüner veltliner, but what immediately struck me was the array of Austrian whites that were not GV. I tasted a bunch of great weissburgunder (pinot blanc), grauburgunder (pinot gris), welschriesling, neuburger, sauvignon blanc, muscat, and even chardonnay—many of these in blends, sometimes with grüner veltliner.

I’d found the same things at a few recent trade tastings. After years of writing about Austrian wine, and being focused on grüner veltliner, it’s refreshing to see some of Austria’s other grapes explored. Not that I don’t love grüner veltliner—it’s what I pour at home most often. But the diversity of grapes, and the quality of winemaking, suggests that Austrian wine is entering an even more advanced era.

12 Austrian Whites Beyond Grüner

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This past weekend, I celebrated ‘No Kings’ day in the People’s Republic of Vermont—specifically Burlington, home of Bernie Sanders and one of America’s most reliably progressive cities. The assembled crowd at Burlington’s City Hall Park did not disappoint. Many seemed like the same folks who—back when I was in college here—were protesting the U.S. support of right-wing contras in Nicaragua, or who chanted on the UVM campus when a group of my fellow students forcefully took over and occupied the president’s office to protest the university’s embarrassing lack of racial diversity.

Which is to say that it warmed my heart to see they’re still fighting the good fight here in this small northern corner of our degraded country—even while so many of us feel powerless as a gestapo enters our cities and oligarchs advance their plans to install an AI-driven technocratic feudalism. (Note to my European readers: There is a resistance, I swear).

Ahem. Yes, right. This is a wine newsletter, so let’s move on to the wine. It was also a wine-soaked weekend, to be clear.

For a small city, Burlington actually has a really good wine scene. I’m always finding great bottles on the wine lists here—often with an Alpine or Central/Eastern European slant. At Honey Road, I had a great Croatian Škrlet by the glass. At Rogue Rabbit, I had a cool Slovenian skin-contact sivi pinot (aka pinot gris). At Frankie’s I drank a wonderful cornalin from mountainous Vallee d’Aosta

But on this weekend of American introspection, the wines that struck me most were American wines—specifically from California. At Bar Renée, in fact, I tasted three amazing California wines on their by-the-glass list, from Broc Cellars, Les Lunes, and Stirm. Honestly, these days, it’s a rarity at a wine bar on the east coast to have this many California wines on the list (as we saw in our recent Everyday Drinking Wine Bar Index).

These bottles were not the usual cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir, zinfandel, or chardonnay that we’ve come to expect from the legacy regions like Napa or Sonoma. Broc Cellars ‘Got Grapes’ was 100 percent orange muscat from Lodi. Les Lunes ‘Astral Blend’ was a blend of zinfandel, syrah, pinot noir, and chardonnay from the North Coast. And the Stirm ‘Neptunute’ Rosé was a blend of riesling, chenin blanc, cabernet pfeffer from San Benito County.

Last week, in Brooklyn—before I headed up to Vermont—I also had a chance to taste through the lineup of Ruth Lewandowski wines, made by iconoclastic winemaker Evan Lewandowski.

I wouldn’t necessarily call these California wines “new wave”—Broc Cellars, for instance, has been around for a while. There’s definitely been an evolution in style happening slowly in California over the past decade, with smaller wineries working with different grapes and in more contemporary, natural-leaning styles. When I visit family occasionally in the Bay Area and in Sacramento, I get to taste these wines, so they’re not “new” by any stretch. Maybe, for now, it’s better to call them “alt California.”

Of course, this isn’t news in California. But out here, in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and other points east—where European wines remain most popular—we’re starting to see more and more of these alt California wines. I don’t know why it’s taken so long, but we are definitely beginning to see a critical mass. Perhaps this is an effect of the Trump tariffs? I don’t know.

Whatever is happening, it’s making me reopen my eyes to California wines—which were my first love way back when I was first getting into wine. I know that I’ve been mostly Euro-focused here at Everyday Drinking. I also know that I have been disparaging of cheap California wine in the recent past. These are not those.

But I can tell you that we’ll be having some deeper dives into what’s happening in California in the coming months. For now, here’s ten wines that opened my eyes.

10 ‘Alt California’ Wines

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The first course of my meal at Arbane, a new restaurant that opened last year in Reims, was meticulously arranged on the table in front of me. Seven small dishes, each with different brightly colored ingredients representing a different grape variety: celery and kiwi for chardonnay, beetroot and strawberry for pinot noir, radish and raspberry for meunier, mushrooms for pinot gris, Chaource cheese and rhubarb for pinot blanc, white asparagus and grape for petit meslier, and cucumber and yuzu for arbane (after which, as you can guess, the restaurant is named).

This dish is Chef Philippe Mille’s homage to the seven grape varieties that are permitted in Champagne. Those first three grapes—chardonnay, pinot noir, and meunier—are well-known to wine drinkers as the “traditional” Champagne varieties, but the last four are more difficult to remember, even for some bubble enthusiasts.

Arbane (sometimes spelled “arbanne”), petit meslier, fromenteau (aka pinot gris), and blanc vrai (the local name for pinot blanc) are four “forgotten” varieties that can legally go into Champagne under the AOC rules. They’re all white grapes, and they’re just a miniscule fraction of plantings in the region at less than 0.3 percent. Champagnes made using these varieties have been considered “niche cuvées” by critics and consumers—rare, to be sure, but still just oddities.

But the revival of these varieties is more than a micro trend: it’s a facet of the grower-led movement in Champagne to craft wines of place. With a sense of place comes an appreciation of history, and that of the forgotten four varieties in Champagne goes back for centuries. Arbane, petit meslier, pinot gris, and pinot blanc were grown in significant quantities in the region until phylloxera decimated Champagne in the late 19th century. With a postwar focus on quantity over quality in the region, those four varieties were abandoned primarily because ripening was poor and yields were too low. But now, with a warming climate and some vignerons pivoting away from the high yields of industrial winemaking, what was once a disadvantage can be a virtue.

But perhaps a bigger question is, how do these four varieties impact the taste of Champagne? For a better understanding of that, I had to go to one of the few estates where they are still grown. I drove through Bar-sur-Aube, in southern Champagne, to meet with Michel Drappier, who runs his family’s domaine in Urville with his children, Charline, Hugo, and Antoine. Champagne Drappier was founded in the early 19th century, and it’s one of the most forward-thinking estates in the region, with an early commitment to organic farming and sustainability. It became the first carbon-neutral Champagne producer in 2015.

It is also one of the few estates to have plantings of all seven permitted varieties. Michel planted arbane, petit meslier, and pinot gris on the estate, beginning in 2000. His motivation was purely conservation. “The idea was to preserve history, to preserve biodiversity,” Michel told me, likening it to raising heritage horse breeds like the local Ardennais—the very breed that plows the Drappier vineyard planted to arbane and petit meslier.

While preserving heirloom varieties may have been the original intention, it has since proved useful to have more choice in the vineyards in a region with notoriously fickle weather. “Champagne has a very inconsistent climate. Last year, we had weather like the west coast of Ireland all year, and you see today, it’s like Morocco,” Michel chuckled and gestured to the bright, cloudless sky of a sweltering summer day. “If you have a number of varieties, you can cope with that.”

Take Arbane, for example. “Arbane is a lot more traditional than chardonnay and pinot. It was here in Champagne 700 years before those grapes,” Michel told me. It is indigenous to Champagne, of unknown parentage, with no identified siblings or offspring. It’s also the rarest of the seven varieties in Champagne, and Drappier has the most plantings. Arbane is a high-acid variety that’s very late ripening. That’s probably the reason it was abandoned, but this former weakness is now a strength in the face of hotter growing seasons.

But beyond just history and a new tool against climate change, the four forgotten grapes contribute unique qualities to the blend. Arbane, for instance, with its herbal and savory aromas, “has finesse, elegance, and interesting notes that are not typical for Champagne,” Drappier said. These four grapes, he said, are “a way of building something new with something old.”

That “something new” includes Drappier’s Quattuor cuvée—a blend of equal parts arbane, petit meslier, pinot blanc, and chardonnay—and “Trop M’en Faut!”, a bottling of 100 percent pinot gris. It’s important to note that the pinot blanc and pinot gris in these wines are also varieties that are unique to Champagne; this is not the pinot blanc you’ll find in Alsace or Burgundy, or the pinot grigio growing in Italy. As Michel explained to me, it’s planting material that has grown here for centuries and is adapted to the region.

Experimentation with these four forgotten varieties is concentrated among Champagne’s artisanal winemakers—vignerons, like Drappier, typically associated with the grower-Champagne movement. Etienne Calsac, Agrapart et Fils, Tarlant, and Geoffroy all make blends with these grapes. Cédric Bouchard makes a single-varietal bottling from rare old-vine pinot blanc, called La Bolorée. Moutard and Olivier Horiot in the Aube both make very rare bottlings of 100-percent arbane. Meanwhile, Lelarge-Pugeot just planted an experimental vineyard of pinot gris this year.

It’s rare for a single producer to have plantings of all seven varieties in Champagne, as Drappier does. Another producer that can make that claim is Laherte Frères, in the Coteaux Sud d’Épernay. Laherte Frères is a family domaine with 13 hectares of vines, mostly in Chavot, and Aurélian Laherte is the seventh generation to run the estate.

Aurélian is one of the few winemakers in Champagne with a keen interest in petit meslier. The domaine has a single plot with all seven varieties, planted in 2003 by Aurélian’s father Thierry, from which Aurélian makes a blended cuvée called Les 7. Inspired by monovarietal bottlings of petit meslier from other winemakers (including Olivier Horiot), Aurélian made massal selections of that variety from the Les 7 plot to plant more of it.

“It gave me a sensation that I had never had before from Champagne,” Aurélian said. “It was so fresh, so energetic.” Petit meslier has concentrated fruit flavors that can show tropical notes when fully ripe—a delicious “pineapple sorbet” note, as Aurélian described it.

But for Aurélian it’s also the performance of the variety in the vineyard, too. Petit meslier needs to ripen fully to avoid herbaceous flavors, but it retains high acidity like its parent savagnin—a boon when facing rising temperatures. As Aurélian put it, “sometimes the things from the past can be used for the future.”

Laherte Frères’ popular entry-level cuvée, Ultradition, is a blend of meunier, chardonnay, and pinot noir, but soon it will include petit meslier. Starting with the 2024 bottling, the blend will include 3 percent of the variety to add freshness and complexity. And from those massal selection vines planted in 2014 in Chavot, Aurélian now bottles a 100-percent petit meslier Champagne.

But this is an experiment that takes a long time; rehabilitating a variety is not as easy as just planting more of it. A vigneron working with these varieties is a bit like a zookeeper trying to figure out how to care for an animal thought to be long-extinct. “It’s such an old variety, more or less lost, that we don’t have enough knowledge about it now. We have to restart,” Aurélian told me. He is growing the variety on chalky and clay soils, to see how the resulting wines differ and develop. The bottle he poured for me to taste is only the fourth edition of the cuvée, and he continues to experiment and make adjustments with the grape growing and winemaking. Ultimately, he said, “what I want is that people enjoy it for the discovery and to explore different tastes in Champagne, different possibilities.”

He poured more of the domaine’s wines for me to taste, including Les 7, a blend of all seven varieties from the single plot in Chavot. Half of the blend was from 2021, and half was from a true, sherry-style solera dating back to 2005. “It’s the opposite of a vintage,” Aurélian said. “The idea is that all the grapes together bring out a bit of each variety, bring some personality.” It’s one of those wines that behaves like a kaleidoscope. Each time I returned to the glass, a new, precise aroma or flavor appeared. Each variety emerged from the blend, yet it was seamless—the whole greater than the sum of its parts. This is probably as close as you can get to tasting what Champagne was like 200 years ago.

There’s a movement in some legacy wine regions—like in Jerez and Bordeaux—to permit the use of new or long-forgotten native grape varieties, to give producers freer rein in the face of climate change, disease pressure, and declining consumption. With the discussion of legalization of more grape varieties there can be a lot of hand-wringing over what that means for “typicity” in a legacy region—whether a wine tastes like it originated from that particular place.

Champagne might be lucky to avoid debate at the regulatory level, inasmuch as these varieties are already permitted by the AOC. But because of their scarcity, they will still be unfamiliar to most Champagne drinkers. Are the qualities that these grape varieties bring to a wine “typical” of Champagne? No, and that’s part of what makes them so important. Reviving old grapes and changing styles in Champagne—or Bordeaux, or Jerez, or any legacy wine region—can attract new consumers and feed the creative energy of new-wave vignerons.

After my meeting with Aurélian Laherte, I thought about the taste of Les 7, and about my first night in Reims. I happened to be there for Fête de la Musique, an annual music festival that takes place on the streets and in public spaces, free for all to enjoy. It felt like every person in Reims and the surrounding towns under the age of 30 was in the streets, packing the city center.

I broke free from the crowds on Place Drouet-d’Erlon and headed toward Reims Cathedral, the 13th-century Gothic structure at the heart of the city, where the kings of France were crowned. Over the centuries, it has survived fire, revolution, and war. As I walked up, a light show projected on the façade of the cathedral was just beginning. Washes of color cascaded and radiated over the stained glass, the tracery, over each carved saint, angel, and demon. A crowd had gathered in the plaza in front of the cathedral to watch the show—teenagers, families with small children, elderly couples—all of them gazing up in wonder at an 800-year-old structure, seeing it in a new light. We can still be awed by history, by the past. Rather than being hidebound by it, we can take inspiration from it, find solutions from it, and build something new.

A few days later, in Urville, I was in the Drappier winery’s reception hall, looking at family photos hung on the walls and propped on the fireplace mantel. Photos of André Drappier and his wife Micheline, their son Michel, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. André would have turned 99 years old after this year’s harvest, but he passed away in March. Michel told me that his father had enjoyed a daily glass of Champagne. (Neo-prohibitionists and teetotalers, take note.) “He was my best customer,” Michel said with a smile. “My best argument for drinking Champagne every day.”

It was obvious from the family photos that André had delighted in the company of his great-grandchildren—among them a little girl, born in the summer of 2022. She was named after a grape ripening on her family’s estate when she came into the world, an ancient vine with a promising future: Arbanne.

Finding Forgotten Grapes: 10 Unique Champagnes

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Even in bad years, winemakers have to make wine. As the old adage goes: Anyone can make decent wine in good years. The bad years are the ones that show who’s great and who’s merely average. Bad years are when dogma, status quo, the common wisdom, and dated marketing strategies must be …

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There are good years and bad years. This has been a bad year, a very bad year, in so many ways. No, I am not just talking about wine. At least, not in the facile way that wine people usually talk about years. I write this from my little balcony on the Plaza del Mercado in Logroño, the capital of Rioja, listening to the cathedral bells ring at sunset, as people begin crowding the bars for their evening pintxos. But I feel only partly here, with part of me tethered online watching what feels like the unraveling of the American experiment.

There’s been a lot written lately about the crisis of cultural criticism. But the cultural sphere of wine seems to exist outside this discourse. “There are years that ask questions and years that answer,” Zora Neale Hurston famously wrote. If Hurston had been a middling wine writer she might have added: …and years that are ‘challenging’ and years that are ‘vintages of the century.’

As it happens, this is also not a good year in Rioja. Now, I am talking about wine. It’s harvest time, and the vineyards of Rioja have been devastated by hail and mildew during this summer’s growing season. All over the region, you hear winegrowers talk about having lost 30 or 60 or 80 percent or in some cases, all of their grapes this year. There’s a lot of talk of 2025’s vintage being “challenging,” which is wine people’s universal euphemism for “shitty.”

“It’s a negative year. People are in a bad mood,” winemaker Javier Arizcuren told me, over lunch at Casa Tila, a tiny arrocería with five tables in the hilltop village of Clavijo.

Arizcuren is an architect whose father and grandfather were winegrowers, but in 2013 he took over the family vineyards and started his own eponymous wine label. He’s part of a new wave of winemakers in Rioja—“a movement to recover our roots,” as he calls it—pushing against the industrial model that’s existed in Rioja for decades, since the mid-20^th century when, after the Spanish Civil War, small family wineries were usurped by big cooperatives.

“There’s a difference between a good vintage and good year,” Arizcuren said. “It’s not just about the weather, it’s also the environment. Farmers are upset about grape prices, everything. Farmers need to be able to be proud of their jobs, and they have to be paid.” All over the world, wine faces this crisis. People don’t drink as much as they used to—and when they do, they don’t want the cheap, bulk wine that the industry has been based on for decades. Over in France, half of that country’s winemakers will retire over the next 10 years, and there are not enough young people willing to replace them.

There are simply less and less people like Arizcuren who want to take over their family’s vineyards. “We have to recover our aim, the life path. But it’s difficult now to find it, to see the future, to think about the future, a future working in the vineyard with your family. We’ve lost this right now,” he said.

Things weren’t all bad. Even though Arizcuren was muddling through this negative harvest season, we enjoyed a lovely, decadent Spanish lunch beginning at 2:30 pm and stretching until almost 6:00 pm, starting with a degustación of heirloom tomatoes, fresh from the restaurant’s garden, moving on with pisto (a Riojan vegetable stew similar to ratatouille or caponata) and finally arriving at Casa Tila’s main event, the slow-cooked, paella-like rice dishes. We chose arroz de patitas with tender baby lamb leg, and creamy arroz meloso de iberíco, with pork ribs. This long lunch itself felt like a small protest against productivity and hustle culture.

We opened a white wine, Sierra de Toloño ‘Nahikun,’ made by Sandra Bravo, a fellow winemaker also among Rioja’s new-wave movement. Bravo, when I’ve spoken to her, is more blunt about her resistance to the industrial wine model. “We have to destroy this system and start over again,” she once told me.

As we drank Bravo’s exceptional field blend, made from 80 year-old vines, Arizcuren and I talked about the upcoming harvests of his own old vineyards. His oldest, Barranco del Prado, grows at more 2,500 feet elevation, and is 130 years old—meaning they survived the phylloxera parasite that devastated European vineyards in the 19th century.

You hear a lot about “old vines” in wine talk. It’s an overused, nebulous term, which often causes normal everyday wine drinkers to roll their eyes. As Bravo once told me: “People got interested in old vines and then everything was old vines. Suddenly, there were no more young vines in the whole world.” It’s one of those precious wine concepts that seems fake or pretend.

When people ask, “Why do old vines make better (or at least more complex or intense) wines?” there certainly is a standard agricultural answer: As the vine ages, it produces less grapes, but those grapes are more concentrated; and vines that have survived for so long tend to adapt better to years with bad weather. But I find that this rarely seems to satisfy someone skeptical of “old vines.”

“Old” vines can mean different ages in different parts of the world. I’ve had winemakers in Barolo and Napa and Loire define 30- or 40-year-old vineyards to me as “old vines.” Meanwhile, in Rioja, it’s commonplace to find vines planted 80, 90, or 100 years ago—thick, gnarled, twisted trunks that look more like a bush or a tree than trellised younger vines, usually offering just a few precious hanging bunches of grapes.

A few days before lunch with Arizcuren at Casa Tila, I’d dined with another of the region’s new-wave winemakers, Oxer Bastegieta of Oxer Wines. We tasted the 2024 vintage of Oxer’s top red wine, Kalamity, which comes from a 102-year-old vineyard plot, in the Basque part of Rioja. “This is my nemesis,” he said of Kalamity. “He will teach me everything. The light and the dark, the yin and the yang. I don’t sleep because of this one.”

Oxer often speaks like this. When I tasted the 2024 vintage of Kalamity a few months prior, straight from the barrel in his cellar, he asked, “Are you ready to talk to god?” as he poured it from the pipette into my glass. He once told me that he didn’t like wines with a lot of oak aging because, “I don’t like wine that feels like I’m sucking the nose of Pinocchio.”

I appreciate the way that, on his labels, Oxer quotes from writers like Goethe, Shakespeare, and Herman Hesse. He names his 100 percent garnacha for the classic Leonard Cohen song “Suzanne.” Kalamity’s quote comes from Carl Jung: “In all chaos, there is a cosmos, in all disorder, a secret order.”

Oxer was born in Gernika, the Basque town most of us know by its Spanish name Guernica—bombed by the Nazis during the Spanish Civil in 1937 at the request of then-emerging dictator Francisco Franco. The violence and destruction inspired Pablo Picasso’s powerful, moving anti-war painting. Oxer said Guernica inspired the label for Ahari, his entry-level wine, named after a mischief-making elf in Basque mythology with a tortured face. The quote on that bottle comes from Picasso: “Everything you can imagine is real.”

Oxer arrived in Rioja from Basque Country in 2009. “Nowhere else in the world has the old vineyards that we have here in Rioja, some of the oldest vines in the world,” he told me. “The problem is that people here don’t believe in themselves. There are so many mediocre wines here because people don’t believe they can make better. They are standing in front of the best vineyards in the world. They have to believe in themselves.” He added: “I believed it from the first fucking moment I got here.”

His 2024 Kalamity had just been bottled, so Oxer brought it to our lunch at Restaurante Alameda in Fuenmayor—honestly, one of my favorite restaurants in the world. We kept coming back to Kalamity as we moved through courses of shrimp-filled ravioli, delicately roasted red mullet, and the star of Alameda’s menu, the massive chuletón, or bone-in ribeye.

Kalamity is one of the most coveted bottles in Rioja, and I’ve been sampling it through several vintages now—it’s always fresh, crunchy, perfumed, with lively swirling tannins and beautiful, black fruit, and aromas and flavors of wild herb, pepper and spice, and darker, forest notes. But that’s just tasting notes. This 2024 is on a different level, one that is hard describe. It’s a wine with tension, a wine that makes you feel things.

I remember being in the Kalamity vineyard last September, while Oxer harvested this wine. Chaos and disorder seemed to rule that day, and there was a sense of tension and urgency, possibly because Oxer had made a decision to harvest early because rains were coming. Could the old vines sense that urgency? Can you taste that tension in the wine? Some of you will likely roll your eyes. But remember what Picasso said: “Everything you can imagine is real.”

For Oxer, there’s a porous boundary between the human, plant, and spiritual worlds. “You have to feel the plant like a companion, not something you own and use,” he once told me. “Can you imagine what a 100-year-old vineyard knows? He learns the climate, he learns the conditions, the patterns. He begins to regulate himself. The plants can live without us. We can’t live without them.”

As we entered hour three of our lunch, I asked Oxer why he thinks people can be so skeptical about the concept of old vines. “In some way,” he said, “we’ve lost our connection with the old world, the spiritual world. We think too much about the scientific world rather than the spiritual world, but we should join both worlds.” He added, cryptically as always: “Soil is darkness, but always in the darkness, there’s light. Soil is a world we don’t really understand. It’s mix of magic and microbiology.”

As we finished our meal with a Basque style cheesecake, Oxer told me that 2025 will be a different story than 2024. He’d lost at least 60 percent of this year’s grapes to the summer hailstorms.

A few days after my lunch with Oxer, I visited Juan Carlos Sancha, a university professor with a doctorate in enology who started his own wine label in 2008. Many of the winemakers of Rioja’s new wave were his students. The day I visited Sancha was the first day of his harvest. “It’s incredible how early the harvest is!” he said. “My father and grandfather never harvested here until October.” This, and not just extreme weather events like hail, is the new normal in Rioja.

Before Sancha took me to his own 120-year-old family vineyard, he drove to a forested area near his village of Baños de Río Tobía to show me something truly amazing. Here, along a quiet trail, were 223 plants of vitis sylvestris, the ancient grape species, winding through the trees.

Vitis sylvestris is the ancestor of vitis vinifera, from which most modern wine is made. Modern vitis vinifera plants are hermaphroditic, meaning they have both male and female reproductive structures, and can self-pollinate. But these ancient vitis sylvestris in the forest were all either male or female. Each of the 223 plants gave a completely different grape variety, and when they reproduced, a completely new variety would be created—just like human beings. Sancha had written an academic paper on these vines, and even made micro-batches of wine with their grapes. He reports that the wine was green, bitter, and undrinkable.

Now, yes, this is all super wine nerd stuff. But to put it into perspective, seeing vines that existed as they were before humans first domesticated grapevines is sort is like encountering some wolf-like creature that existed before humans first domesticated the dog. “These came before humans,” Sancha told me. “There’s no need for pruning. They take care of themselves. The first human people probably ate these grapes. And they probably made wine from them. But we don’t really know.”

We don’t really know. We too often pretend that we know everything about everything—whether it’s about wine or anything else. And if we don’t, we think we can just ask ChatGPT. But there is so much we don’t really know, and never will know. Looking at these ancient vines, I remembered that wine goes so far back into human pre-history that the root word of wine predates the advent of Indo-European languages, and is the same in nearly all human language families. So we have no idea when or how the first wine was made, or by who. But we can imagine it, whether real or not. Though, we would do well to remember, that imagining can serve many narratives.

After I parted ways with Javier Arizcuren after our lunch in Clavijo, I tried to take some photos of the village’s 9th century castle, built by the Moors. Unfortunately, it was covered in scaffolding, under renovation. Legend has it that, in 844, the Battle of Clavijo took place between the Christian troops of the Spanish king and the Muslim troops of the Emir of Córdoba. Saint James, one of Jesus’ apostles, (allegedly) appeared in the king’s dreams, and promised victory—and indeed, the Christians (allegedly) won the battle. For centuries, the Battle of Clavijo was a symbol of the Christians expulsion of the Muslims from the Iberian peninsula. Modern historians agree that the battle is fictional—made up in the 13th century as propaganda—and never actually happened.

I’m told that people in and around Clavijo still believe it’s true.

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From a dusty overlook on the side of the road, across the street from a touristy little cafe on a steep hill in Chiroubles, I could see all of Beaujolais in a stunning panoramic view beneath blue skies and an intense midsummer sun. Facing southeast, I spotted the crus of Juliénas and Saint-Amour to my far left. Régnié was to the right, with Côte de Brouilly, on the slopes of a dormant volcano, straight ahead in the mid-distance. The flat land of the south stretched into the distance behind it. Lyon was somewhere behind the hills on the horizon.

South of Chiroubles is the cru of Morgon, and I could see Moulin-à-Vent to the east. These two crus are considered to produce the most important and famous Beaujolais wines. But it’s Fleurie, sandwiched between the two, that has the deepest bench of winemaking talent in the region. The most elegant, concentrated wines that I tasted during my time in Beaujolais this summer came from that cru, but I also saw incredible potential in the largely overlooked crus of Chiroubles and Régnié. And it’s Beaujolais-Villages wines from small-scale producers that offer some of the best values in the region right now, especially when they are sourced from declassified cru vines.

Most consumers are familiar with the standard narrative of Beaujolais, but here’s a refresher. About a quarter of wine production in Beaujolais is labeled with one of the ten cru appellations, the top of the quality hierarchy in the region. The crus are on the predominantly granite hills in the north, and the flat south is on limestone soils. The crus of Morgon and Moulin-à-Vent are known for the most powerful, ageworthy wines in Beaujolais, while Fleurie is known for light, fragrant wines (the name doesn’t have anything to do with the floral profile of the wines). The rest of the crus tend to be passed over, or oversimplified as fruity, structured, or somewhere in between. At the other end of the spectrum, much of simple Beaujolais AOC comes from the south, making the cheapest, fruitiest wines, and Beaujolais-Villages is typically a cut above that in quality.

The region is still nursing a tutti frutti hangover from its Beaujolais Nouveau bender that started in the 1980s. That same decade, winemakers Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, Jean-Paul Thévenet, and Guy Breton—importer Kermit Lynch’s “Gang of Four”—kickstarted a new wave of winemaking in the region (and in France) by eschewing sulfur, fertilizer, chaptalization, and cultured yeasts. You might be tempted, looking at the carefully curated shelf of a New York City wine shop, to think that this low-intervention, organic, small-production winemaking is the new norm in Beaujolais, but it is still very much the exception.

One of the latest developments in the region is that the appellations are getting behind the vigneron-led rise in site-specific bottlings. Fleurie is leading the way: in 2023, the cru’s leadership moved to secure premier cru designations for seven lieux-dits (specific named plots made of one or more parcels of vines). That won’t happen for several years, as approvals are pending with the INAO (the French regulatory body for appellations), but renowned vineyards like La Madone and La Roilette will be premier crus in the future. Brouilly and Moulin-à-Vent followed in filing applications.

I was in Beaujolais earlier this summer, and met with some relative newcomers to the region. Michele and David Chapel had their first vintage in 2016, and Domaine Chapel now farms seven hectares of vines across Beaujolais, including a two-hectare parcel in Fleurie called Charbonnières. From the steep slopes of the vineyard, you can see the little chapel that sits at the top of La Madone in the distance. When we arrived, David Chapel was plowing the vineyard with a new tractor, and we walked through the rows, stepping carefully and watching for vipers, which like to coil up near the trunk of the vines.

When Domaine Chapel took over this vineyard, it was already fully organic—actually a rarity for Beaujolais, despite the prevalent narrative. It’s still quite radical to practice organic viticulture there: only a small percentage of the region is farmed that way. "It's changing slowly, but overall it's very difficult to be organic in Beaujolais," Michele said. “You farm organically here because you believe in it.” Many grape growers still use herbicides and sell grapes to négociants for the best price.

Organic viticulture is difficult in Beaujolais partly because the vines are pruned as traditional gobelet (bush vines), at 10,000 vines per hectare. It’s difficult to work in such narrow rows where grass grows tall. Plus, a whopping 96 percent of the region is planted to gamay. A dense monovarietal planting means that disease pressure is high.

The Charbonnières plot we walked through was worked in fermage (a farming tenancy) by winemaker Julien Sunier before Michele and David took it over. I happened to visit Sunier that morning, at his winery up on a high slope in the village of Avenas.

Sunier’s parents were hairdressers in Dijon. He spent lots of time in their shop growing up, and has an unstudied ability to make anyone feel instantly welcome and at ease in his company. We sipped espresso on his terrace, taking in the view to the west, and he told me about how he came to Beaujolais. He worked in various winemaking jobs around the world before landing a position here, making wine—in a vastly different way than he does now—for Mommessin, a négociant owned by Boisset (one of France’s largest wine groups). He started his own domaine in 2008 and now farms nine and half hectares in Fleurie, Régnié, and Morgon.

Sunier converted an old farm on the slope into his winery and cellar. His winery is unusual: it’s an open-air shed, that he calls a “climatic winery,” cooled by the altitude, the surrounding forest, and northerly winds. “In 2013, it was snowing here when I was vinifying in October!” he told me. “The maceration was very long and cold. And then some years it's crazy hot and you have to press the grapes after only eight days, and it's another style of wine.”

Sunier farms organically, and uses wild yeasts and carbonic maceration, with fermentation finishing in wood for well-integrated oak. The wine is moved from the press, to concrete tanks, to barrel and foudre with the aid of gravity alone. The wines see only half a gram of sulfur at bottling. They’re clean, juicy, and inviting. This winemaking is about as far as you can get from so much of Beaujolais production, that still uses cultured yeasts, thermovinification, heavy hits of sulfur, and other grotesqueries to make an end product that’s about as processed as Coca-Cola. The French like their cheap wine, and Beaujolais still makes a lot of it.

Beyond Sunier and Domaine Chapel, other notable producers making wines from vines in Fleurie are Yvon Métras, Marc Delienne, and Anne-Sophie Dubois. But many new-wave vignerons in Beaujolais farm parcels in more than just one cru. Domaine Chapel has vines in Chiroubles and Régnié as well. Michele drove us down winding roads to a plot of the domaine’s young vines in Chiroubles. (I will be forever grateful to her for teaching me that in rural areas in France, traffic entering a road from the right usually has the right-of-way. Suddenly all the exasperated gestures I’d seen from other drivers as I blew past them made perfect sense.)

The plot in Chiroubles is located directly across a narrow rural road from the Morgon cru. These vines are at an elevation of about 460 meters, on steep slopes. Chiroubles is the highest altitude of all the appellations in Beaujolais, as high as 600 meters of elevation. The grapes take longer to ripen there, and the wines have a crisp acidity. This cru, wedged between Fleurie and Morgon, might not be very well-known now, but its altitude could give it an edge with climate change. The wines I tried were juicy and bright, but with surprising complexity and structure. Jules Métras (son of Yvon) also farms parcels in Chiroubles, including a plot of old vines at the very top of the appellation. Domaine de la Grosse Pierre is a newer estate run by Pauline Passot since 2018. Her family is from Chiroubles, and she left her job as a sommelier to return and make wine here.

Beyond Fleurie, Julien Sunier also has plots in Régnié, another underrated cru with incredible potential and great value. Located west of Morgon, Régnié has only been a cru since 1988, which might help explain its underdog status. From grapes grown on pink granite soils, there’s a distinct minerality in these wines, wrapped up in juicy red fruit. Sunier’s younger brother Antoine Sunier also makes wine in Beaujolais—expressive and energetic wines from Régnié. Philippe Viet is another vigneron crafting impressive wines in this cru (as well as Fleurie and Morgon); his Régnié bottlings are elegant and lifted, from a plot at some 450 meters of elevation.

Domaine Chapel also has parcels in Régnié, and included declassified vines from the cru in their 2024 Beaujolais-Villages. Beaujolais-Villages is an entry point for consumers to a lot of domaines—a “bistro wine” that hits that sweet spot between very affordable and very tasty. As Michele put it, “the wine you sell the most of needs to be good.”

The potential for Beaujolais-Villages became most clear to me during my visit to Domaine des Jeunes Pousses in the village of Emeringes, near the Chénas cru. This domaine is an incubator for young winemakers in Beaujolais, a project of vigneron Thibault Liger-Belair and investor Ivan Massonnat. The project gives winemakers control of organically farmed vineyards in Beaujolais for a period of three years, to run the estate and make wine before transferring it to the next crop of jeune pousses (“young shoots”). I visited the domaine just as the third generation of winemakers, Naïs Lombard and Olivier Cossec, were taking over operations from the second generation, Thaïs Lamy and Juliette Lumeau. The project’s vines are on predominantly clay soils, and the resulting wines had a distinct freshness—very different from those wines from granite.

One vigneron that I spoke with told me that prices for vineyards can be as high as $120,000 per hectare in a place like Moulin-à-Vent, but as low as $12,000 to $15,000 for Beaujolais-Villages. At such an attractive price point, the Beaujolais-Villages appellation is an opportunity for younger winemakers with new ideas coming to the region. Plus, not just reds but also white and rosé can be bottled under the appellation. (Cru bottlings are restricted to red wines from gamay.)

Champagne at the Dive Bar

Young Shoots Growing in Beaujolais: Domaine de Jeunes Pousses

Climate change, tariffs, a decline in overall wine consumption but especially among younger people. To put it flatly, things do not look good for the wine industry. Now add to this the gloomy news that there aren’t enough young people making wine in France…

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8 months ago · Sarah Parker Jang

Julien Sunier declassifies his young vines in Régnié for his Wild Soul Beaujolais-Villages cuvée. He wondered if perhaps the name “Beaujolais-Villages” reminds consumers too much of “Beaujolais Nouveau” and conjures similar assumptions about quality. “But it's like Bourgogne Village—it can be awesome, it can be just perfect,” he said.

Harvest has now begun in Beaujolais; Domaine Chapel began picking their grapes this week. The growing season was warm, but mercifully, uneventful. “But until the end, you never know,” Sunier warned. 2024 was (for many French wine regions) a very bad year. Lamy of Domaine des Jeunes Pousses recalled only seven days in May without rain, which led to black rot and excessive grass growth that made it difficult to get into the vines with the tractor. And with hail storms at the end of June, the project lost two-thirds of its production in a matter of three days. A lot of grape growers dropped their organic certification after that season.

But domaines like Jeunes Pousses persist: the project just began a new partnership with a landowner to convert a plot of vines to organic. “It’s a victory for us to know that there's going to be one hectare more that is saved,” said Lamy.

Even with an increase in prices that we can anticipate with tariffs, Beaujolais still has some of the best values in wine—maybe even the best. Seeking out wines from producers like those mentioned in this report—who are living in the region and farming organically, buying vineyards and converting them to organic, changing the region for the better—is not just seizing on that value, but supporting their potential, too.

21 Beaujolais Bangers

Many of the 2023 wines (and the 2024 Beaujolais-Villages) below are arriving in the U.S., and the 2022s are still available.

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