My friends and I let out a collective post-wedding exhale over a handful of half-drank bottles of wine, haphazard snack foods, and mismatched Airbnb glassware. We were all gathered to celebrate the marriage of our close friend Anastasia. After we drained a few liters, I spotted a clear bottle at the back of the fridge. “I know that wine,” I thought, plucking the 2018 Montesecondo ‘Tïn’ from behind the tub of guacamole.

In 2019, Anastasia and I had enjoyed this same vintage of Montesecondo ‘Tïn’ around an enormous farmhouse table, with friends, over a bowl of polenta with Tuscan kale. A skin-contact blend of trebbiano and malvasia from a small village on the northern edge of Chianti Classico, it was now, at eight years old, even better than I remembered.

Trebbiano toscano is possibly the most unremarkable white wine grape in the world, mostly cultivated to criminally high yields and produced into wines without much flavor or character. But this mature bottle of Montesecondo’s trebbiano toscano was incredible, and awakened memories of the season I spent in Tuscany. More broadly, it reminded me of the largely misunderstood and overlooked white wines of the region.

Anastasia and I worked together at Montesecondo during the 2019 harvest. We had both come to Tuscany curious to find what was below the tidal wave of bulk Chianti that we were positive was composed of equal parts cab concentrate, American oak, and Round-Up.

Montesecondo is a pioneering biodynamic winery in the village of San Casciano in Val di Pesa within the Chianti Classico DOCG, founded by Silvio Messana after taking control of his mother’s old vineyard in the 1990s. At the time, being an innovator in Tuscany meant looking back to the traditional way from the early 20th century and earlier. Silvio’s wife Catalina pushed him to find a better, more natural way to farm their land, while most neighboring vignaioli doubled down on industrialized farming and score-chasing wines to compete with the Parkerized reds of the era. Gradually, they were introduced to other contemporary biodynamic pioneers in Italy and France, and by 2003 were a fully integrated biodynamic farm, vinifying their first complete vintage with indigenous yeast in 2004. During our time there, we guided countless indigenous ferments in cement, stainless steel, clay, and wood—each its own special experiment in transparent, terroir-driven winemaking.

Though we produced wines labeled Chianti Classico DOCG, the real focus and excitement of the production lived inside the winery among the twenty-some clay tinaja (what wine lovers more commonly call amphora) crafted by Juan Padilla, Spain’s most internationally renowned artisan. This is where wines like the Tïn were macerated and fermented on their skins and seeds in the so-traditional-it’s-now-experimental way. Due to the fact that Tuscany has a weak system of white wine appellations, most of Tuscany’s cutting-edge white wines are labeled IGT—Indicazione Geografica Tipica—a catch-all geographic designation one step above table wine.

The white wines we made at Montesecondo were produced in much smaller quantities than the reds due to lower demand, which meant the process was more intimate: moving grapes to the winery in handheld bins without the high-low, filling bucket after bucket with fermented grapes and wine to carry to a small antique press that we took turns cranking until the pomace was as dry as it could get.

Many afternoons we would break up the long hot days on the crush pad with a leisurely lunch at Agriosteria del Frontoio in nearby Scandicci. This restaurant serves only hyper-local Tuscan food, most of the produce grown in their own garden, and an all Tuscan wine list spanning from the Apennines to Montalcino to the island of Giglio. Here, I discovered traditional sparkling from the aleatico grape, from the terraced vineyards on the island of Capraia, or lightly-macerated vermentino nero from the northern corner where Tuscany meets Liguria, or many other surprises and delights from the diverse range of Tuscan white wines.

The most widely planted white grape in Tuscany is trebbiano toscano. Once sanctioned for use in Chianti Classico, it was banned by the consortium in 2006. Older vines of trebbiano that have been preserved in the Chianti zone, like the 50-year-olds used in Montesecondo’s Tïn, benefit from the reduced yield and complexity that can only come from old vines. Trebbiano toscano also responds well to fermenting with its skins to produce orange wine, another way winemakers add depth and age-worthiness to the workhorse native white grape.

About 100 kilometers to the west of Chianti on the Tuscan coast, Massa-Carrara and Maremma are home to a growing number of quality white wines made from vermentino, albarola, and ansonica. It is widely accepted that these varieties thrive in proximity to the sea, where they often mirror their surroundings in a distinct salinity. In Colline Metallifere, the mineral-rich hills high above Maremma, Ampeleia is pioneering quality winegrowing in a region not historically known for agriculture. Jason has written about Ampeleia’s bianco before, a blend of trebbiano toscano, malvasia, and ansonica. They just released a bianco version of their hugely popular Unlitro to celebrate 15 years of the rosso, a bottling of vermentino, trebbiano, and malvasia picked early to preserve acidity and keep alcohol low—in line with the global trend toward lighter, lower-alcohol whites.

Malvasia grows widely across Tuscany, and like trebbiano was historically used in the blend of Chianti Classico DOCG wines. Now, it’s mostly used to make Vin Santo. Malvasia thrives at elevation or near the coast, where its tendency for producing high-alcohol wines can be more easily controlled than the valley floors. Down in the Val d’Orcia, home of Brunello di Montalcino, there are a few producers experimenting with Rhône white grapes like marsanne, roussane, and viognier. These heat-tolerant whites are finding success in the mineral rich clay soils of the valley.

Beyond the cloak of bulk Chianti, the innovations occurring at the margins of Tuscan wine are some of the most exciting happening in any legacy region right now. The diverse whites produced here offer a new path into an ancient place. As producers across Europe continue to push back against appellation regulations, often created to protect deep-pocketed players at the expense of small, natural producers, I hope more of them follow Montesecondo’s lead, putting their energy behind the lesser-known wines worth preserving.

8 Untypical Tuscan Whites To Try

These are exciting days for Tuscan whites, with a lot of experimentation going on in the lesser-known parts of Tuscany. Here are eight bottles to look for. As always, recommendations and tasting notes are for paid subscribers only. Upgrade today!

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Back in March, I spent a few wonderful days in Valle de Guadalupe in Baja, Mexico. I adore Valle de Guadalupe. It’s such a unique place and, from a travel perspective, it’s among my favorite regions to visit. A few years ago, I wrote a feature about the challenges of making wine in such a dry place for San Diego Magazine.

On my latest trip, I was on assignment for Wine Enthusiast, in an attempt to unravel the mystery of Mexican nebbiolo. You can read my article here.

One gorgeous spring day in Valle de Guadalupe, as a band played a romantic Mexican folk song, I tasted two Nebbiolos under a 450-year-old oak tree at Casa Magoni winery. Or perhaps I should say I tasted one Nebbiolo and one “Nebbiolo”—in big air quotes.

I was with the 85-year-old winemaker Camillo Magoni, who poured two different bottlings. First, his 2016 Nebbiolo Clone 34, grown from vines native to Valtellina in Italy’s Lombardy region, where Magoni was born. Next came his 2019 Nebbiolo de Baja. The difference was stark: Clone 34 had the light color, finesse, and rose and cherry notes of a young Piemontese Nebbiolo. The Nebbiolo de Baja was darker, more muscular, and more brooding. I enjoyed both, but the question was unavoidable: How were these two wines from the same grape variety?

Other Baja winemakers are more blunt about their skepticism toward the so-called Nebbiolo that grows in Baja. “Some people say that it’s Dolcetto or Lambrusco,” said Lulú Martinez Ojeda, winemaker at Bruma, one of Valle de Guadalupe’s most highly regarded producers. “All I can say is it’s not Nebbiolo. I love it, but it’s not Nebbiolo.” Martinez Ojeda says a Mexican-American sommelier in New York once asked about her wine, “So is this Nebbiolo, or is this Nebbio-cholo?”

So, if the Nebbiolo in Valle de Guadalupe is not really Nebbiolo, then what is it?

You’ll have to go to Wine Enthusiast to get the answer of that question, but suffice to say that Nebbiolo de Baja is quite different from what you’d recognize in Italian wines made from it, like Barolo or Barbaresco.

Like most up-and-coming wine regions, Valle de Guadalupe has struggled to find a signature grape. The region’s drought conditions and heat lead to a lot of experimentation, and many vineyards grow chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon. Some grow very good chenin blanc. Some believe Rhône varieties like mourvèdre and grenache do best. Others veer toward Spanish varieties like tempranillo. Others still insist on Italian grapes like sangiovese, montepulciano, and aglianico.

But for now, the signature grape in Valle de Guadalupe is nebbiolo. Or “nebbiolo” as the case may be.

My Travel Recs for Valle de Guadalupe

If you’ve never been, I strongly recommend that you make a wine and food journey to this part of Mexico. Valle de Guadalupe stretches northeast from the Baja coast, near Ensenada, less than two hours’ drive from San Diego. It’s a perfect two-to-three day trip.

Taste: If you have a couple of days, prioritize these wineries: Bruma, Casa Magoni, Lechuza, Solar Fortún, Bodegas Henri Lurton, Madera 5, and Viñas de le Erre. Also, check out Baja Divina (right next to Finca Altozano) a wine shop with a good selection of smaller production wines curated by sommelier Lauren Plascencia.

Drink: Have you ever sipped natural wine in a bar shaped like a head of garlic? Well, you can and you should at a wine bar called Bloodlust.

Eat: Seafood fresh from the nearby coast is generally a can’t-miss in Valle de Guadalupe. Dinner at Fauna (#17 among Latin America’s 50 Best restaurants), overlooking Bruma’s vineyards, is a must-do. Chef David Castro Hussong’s menu is always changing, and this video shows what I ate on my last visit:

At Javier Plascencia’s mainstay Finca Altozano, there was a fabulous lunch of bluefin tosada and lamb birria. Javier Plascencia’s flagship restaurant, the Michelin-starred Animalón, is a more modern take on Mexican wine country cooking, with more international fare of foie gras, sea urchin, lobster ravioli, or perhaps beer-braised barbacoa, wrapped in a banana leaf, steamed and smoked in a pig's bladder, and served tableside—dramatically, under a 200-year-old oak tree.

Wineries such as Casa Magoni and Solar Fortún are nice spots for casual al fresco lunches. In my Wine Enthusiast piece, I already talked about Casa Magoni’s lovely courtyard, tasting and eating under a 450-year-old oak tree. I’ve also really enjoyed the marlin tacos and salpicón de pulpo while tasting wines at Solar Fortún.

Stay: If you can afford it, stay at Bruma winery’s exclusive and beautiful resort. Even more exclusive is the six-room Hotel Partana. For a more budget option, I’ve also enjoyed Casa Entrevez at a fraction of the price.

Related Nebbiolo Content on Everyday Drinking

When you first hear about the scandal, it’s like something out of a Wes Anderson movie: the Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben—a blaufränkisch from century-old vines, hailed by critics as a masterpiece, the greatest Burgenland wine of all time, awarded 100 points—has been rejected by the official Austrian wine tasting panel as faulty, and must now be relabelled and sold as mere table wine. At a press conference during Austria’s premier wine salon in Vienna, two grown men engage in a shouting match. Insiders question the motives behind the tasting panel and call the Austrian wine law “bankrupt.” A shadowy article appears in a trade magazine accusing the winemaker and critic of conspiring to orchestrate a PR stunt. Both the winemaker and the critic make Instagram videos threatening legal action.

My colleague Simon Woolf has posted an excellent account of the kerfluffle over the Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben at The Morning Claret.

The Morning Claret

Austria's Wine Law is Bankrupt

Visitors to VieVinum - Austria’s most prestigious wine fair, held last weekend in Vienna - were expecting three days of deliciousness and conviviality. The sight of two grown men shouting at each other during a press conference was not supposed to be on the agenda…

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22 days ago · 32 likes · 16 comments · Simon J Woolf

The wine in question, the 2023 vintage of Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben, was made by Roland Velich of Moric, perhaps Burgenland’s most famed winemaker. It is, without doubt, among Austria’s greatest red wines, from 80- to 100-year-old vines, a wine that can stand next to top reds all over the world. I profiled Velich and his wines in my book Godforsaken Grapes, as well as here at Everyday Drinking.

In that article, I reviewed the 2021 Moric Alte Reben Lutzmannsburg, calling it:

“Fragrant, perfumed nose of wild herb, cherry, wet stone, a hint of smoke. On the palate, it’s bright and crunchy, but refined, elegant, and complex, with lots of fresh red fruit, hints of licorice and tobacco, profound at the midpalate and a long, long finish. Deep and earthy, it’s like picking berries in beautiful, ancient forest after a heavy rain. An incredible wine.” (Yes, like all wine writers, I can be over-the-top sometimes.)

In any case, the idea that this wine could be “faulty” or “flawed” is ludicrous. According to Woolf, Roland Velich had good reason to be angry at the official tasting panel ruling, and suggested a wider conspiracy:

In particular, [Velich] outlined how growers who work with minimal intervention—spontaneous fermentation, no additives or corrections, no filtering or clarification—are regularly penalized for making wines that are supposedly “not typical.”

Anyone who covers Austrian wine knows that the official tasting panel regularly penalizes natural winemakers like Christian Tschida, Claus Preisinger, Franz Weninger, and others. Woolf says:

As I wrote in 2024, countless low-intervention winemakers have abandoned the quality wine system, instead declassifying their entire output to table wine, and accepting that they cannot mention geographic terms on the label. Growers usually make this choice after their wines are repeatedly refused the prüfnummer [the official certification to be labelled a quality wine]. The usual reasons given by tasting panels are that the wines are cloudy or hazy, they are not typical of the stated variety or region, or that they display a fault such as volatile acidity.

In response to the scandal, Rudolf Schmid, head of wine at the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture, poured gasoline on the fire, accusing Velich of gaming the critic’s 100-point score purely for marketing purposes. This, according to Woolf, made no sense:

Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben 2023 first made the headlines in late September 2025, shortly after wine critic Stuart Pigott—at that time employed by JamesSuckling.com - tasted and rated the wine with a perfect 100 points. Others also praised the wine. Falstaff’s Peter Moser scored it 99 points in November 2025…Velich bottled the wine on 4th September 2025, and made it available for critics to taste shortly after. He had every expectation that it would receive its prüfnummer—its passport to be labelled a quality wine from Mittelburgenland—as it had for the previous two decades. He submitted the wine to the tasting panel twice, first on 26th November 2025 and then again at the end of January 2026. It was rejected both times.

For me, the strangest part of the controversy is the two video statements posted on Instagram by Pigott, the critic who scored the wine 100 points—the second reel to vehemently deny that he is part of a “conspiracy.”

Woolf’s blunt assessment of the Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben fiasco: “There is little doubt that the system is broken.”

While I agree with Woolf, I believe the issue is even bigger and wider than that. Because this Austrian wine controversy is really about two broken, bankrupt systems colliding at the same moment: One the one hand, a quasi-fascist, judge-jury-and-executioner, self-important tasting panel; on the other hand, the gatekeeping, bullshitting, self-important business of scoring wines on a 100-point scale.

I mean, let’s be super honest here. In this controversy, we’re basically asked to take sides about who’s right: an imperious tasting panel’s ruling of “faulty wine” or a gatekeeping wine critic’s rating of 100 points. That’s a pretty cringe choice, if you ask me. After all, a $150 wine rated 100 points by JamesSuckling.com is a wine that’s going to be so heavily allocated that you will likely never taste it. If you’re taking the side of the wine critic, please take a moment to watch a video of that critic’s employer explaining how he rates on a 100-point scale:

As we all know, we are living in a nightmare era of conspiracy. Whether it’s the social media algorithms manipulating our consumer decisions, technofascists forcing AI down our throats, the Epstein files, the purging of January 6th by the Department of Justice, or PACs with questionable intent spending millions in our local elections, people are finally starting to question the broader, darker forces at play in their everyday lives. Most of us come to wine and spirits to escape all this.

But alas, as we’ve talked about many times here in this newsletter, the forces that influence what we drink are just as pervasive as in the rest of our lives. The only solution, as always, is to distrust the institutions—all of them, both “official” and self appointed—hell-bent on defining taste and quality for you. The first step in rejecting established hierarchy, arbitrary ratings and rankings, and received knowledge is independent tasting and thinking. Since you’ve read all the way to the end of this post, I believe you know where to find that.

Related Conspiracy Content on Everyday Drinking

Sara is Italian-born, living in Madrid via London, with a background in investments and a stint selling wine in China. Her newsletter, In the Mood for Wine, sits somewhere between her two loves: wine and numbers. Sara tends to look at wine analytically. “Some say that takes the romance out of wine,” she says. “Perhaps. But what I’m really trying to do is make each dollar spent on wine count.”

“All you have to do is write one true sentence,” Ernest Hemingway would say to himself, to combat his writer’s block. “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

Can that be applied to data? It’s worth trying, as I’ve been stuck on this analysis for what feels like forever.

For the past six months, I’ve worked with a start-up, WineLabs, and its founder, Ilias Miraoui, to build what is the largest analysis of wine lists from 1,063 Michelin-starred restaurants worldwide. The idea was simple: if these are the best restaurants, with the best sommeliers and the deepest cellars, what do they actually serve? My hypothesis was that we would uncover niche wine markets—hidden gems known only to insiders. But that’s not what we found.

The truest sentence I know is this:

After six months of cleaning data, Ilias and I found that Krug and Dom Pérignon appear on 42 percent of all Michelin wine lists.

Among the most represented producers, beyond these two Champagne houses, the pattern is equally conventional: Château d’Yquem, Gaja, Bollinger, Louis Roederer, Sassicaia, Château Margaux, Ruinart, Domaine Leflaive, Château Mouton Rothschild, Vega Sicilia, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and Château Haut-Brion.

Hopefully, that is not where the story ends, but it is where it starts. It starts with a question: are wine choices at the top end of the market homogeneous— homogeneous to the point of being boring?

The data suggests they are. Around 60 percent of wine lists are dominated by French regions, primarily Burgundy, Bordeaux and Champagne, with smaller contributions from the Rhône and the Loire. Italy is a distant second, accounting for roughly 10 to 20 percent of listings.

This concentration is not entirely organic. On the topic of Champagne, Michelin-starred restaurants sometimes have exclusivity agreements with certain houses, whereby a glass is served on arrival and bottles are available at a more favourable price. “However,” a sommelier at one such restaurant told me, “it becomes difficult to sell anything else sparkling.”

Another equally predictable finding: median bottle prices increase with star level, US$197 for one-star, US$325 for two-star, and US$446 for three-star Michelin restaurants. A quarter of two-star and a third of a 3-star menus are comprised of bottles above $1,000. Meanwhile, only 6 percent of the menus consist of bottles less than $100.

For context, the median price of the most expensive tasting menus is US$165, US$256 and US$356 for one-, two- and three-star restaurants, respectively1. Given that a tasting menu usually lasts between two and four hours, it is not unreasonable to assume that at least one bottle of wine will be consumed per person. Those bottles of wine will each be priced 18 percent to 27 percent above the most expensive tasting menu.

Having spoken to sommeliers, low- and no-alcohol pairings are becoming increasingly popular. Alternatives—low- and no-alcohol beverages, cocktails, and, not least, water—come in at way less than half the price of wine.

Does this mean that fine wine is pricing itself out of, arguably, the only establishments that can realistically sell bottles above $1,000—and where wine producers themselves want to be present—all in the pursuit of status and high prices for their own sake? Is status what’s killing fine wine?

I keep seeing statements like “alcohol is in structural decline due to changing youth culture and GLP-1s dampening consumption” presented as fact—but they are assumptions, not facts. I disagree; I think the decline is primarily driven by price, and more importantly by the availability of better value-for-money alternatives.

I can’t untangle which came first: fine wine producers raising prices to excess, or high-end restaurants treating wine as a cash cow. What starts as positioning becomes pricing. What starts as pricing becomes expectation. And what starts as expectation becomes a system that is very hard to unwind. But the outcome of this vicious cycle is clear—the lack of fine wine at reasonable prices is what puts consumers off.

One sommelier told me that when they started working at a Michelin-starred restaurant, they saw the same wine they had sold in a shop priced at eight times as much. “The ambience, the food and the scenography of a Michelin-star restaurant do a lot to elevate the wine.”

I find it infuriating myself: going to a restaurant—admittedly rarely a Michelin-starred one—where the choice is between an expensive glass of Veuve Clicquot or a non-descript “wine from Chile” at an excessive price. More often than not, I just get a beer.

In other words, consumers are not necessarily drinking less—they are substituting. And in that substitution, wine is losing.

Academic research points in the same direction. A recently published study by Riccardo Saracino, Stefano Corsi and Chiara Mazzocchi, “The STAR WARS of Michelin Guide restaurants: a wine list perspective — a case study from Italy,” analyzes the factors influencing restaurant ratings, including wine lists. “It turns out that,” they write, “wine list characteristics play a significant role in shaping customer satisfaction.”

Evidence suggests that customers appreciate wine lists offering a balance between affordable and premium-priced wines, suggesting that price diversity is a valued feature. While higher prices can increase customer satisfaction, this effect reverses beyond a certain point. In the case of wine, lower median prices are associated with higher ratings, suggesting that customers are sensitive not just to price, but to value.

At the same time, wine lists that are too narrow—whether overly local or overly conventional—tend to perform worse.

In other words, consumers are not rejecting wine; they are rejecting overpriced and predictable wine—which, incidentally, is what these menus increasingly offer.

The question is whether Michelin’s methodology, which clearly rewards a certain way of delivering excellence in food, is also painting the world of food and wine “beige.” A kind of “beigification”, technically flawless, globally consistent, but lacking distinction. And that is exactly what the data reflects: not a lack of quality, but a convergence of choices.

On YouTube, I came across an urban architect showing images of new builds and asking: “Why does this look like it could be anywhere, while these”—showing Amsterdam, Santorini and Brooklyn—“are clearly from a specific place?”

He explains it through the idea of a “sense of place,” the elements that make a location distinctive. Brooklyn’s brownstones come from locally available stone; Dutch brick architecture reflects an abundance of clay and a lack of natural stone; Santorini’s white houses are designed to reflect heat. These places are memorable because they respond to their environment.

There are faint signs of this in wine lists—South America leaning towards Mendoza, North America towards Napa Valley. But broadly, the “sense of place,” or terroir, so central to the production of wine itself, does not seem to carry through to the top end of dining. The result is carefully constructed, technically excellent—and increasingly forgettable—wine experiences. In a category built on terroir, the disappearance of place at the point of consumption is a striking contradiction.

Menu depth appears to increase with the number of stars: the median one-star restaurant lists 77 unique estates, while a three-star lists 184. But as the share of French wines rises alongside this, it raises the question: are three-star restaurants simply adding more of the same names? The data would suggest so. Depth is increasing, but differentiation is not.

This led me to ask a few questions: is there a written—or unwritten—rule about what wines are expected, either by the Michelin Guide inspector or by the restaurant-goer? Another hypothesis is that fine dining guests expect to find the rarest wines, rather than niche or good-value ones. That may well be. For all the emphasis sommeliers place on how wine can elevate food (and vice versa), it is also true that the Michelin Guide does not include the wine list in its scoring.

Some of these dynamics are reinforced structurally. For example, the Court of Master Sommeliers explicitly references “traditional” producers within regions, effectively establishing a canon. Many of those building wine lists treat these producers as the gold standard—names that must be present. The presence of these names on a list does not mean they are actually bought. Anecdotal evidence from several sommeliers suggests they account for as little as 5 percent of wine sales. More niche or interesting choices are often confined to pairing menus, which are narrower by design.

At the same time, the typical Michelin guest is a mix of price-sensitive and not particularly knowledgeable about wine, which makes recognizable brands easier to sell.

Only a handful of restaurants approach food and wine as a true pairing, where one is conceived alongside the other. In most cases, they remain separate worlds, where the business of hospitality takes precedence over more interesting, and potentially more coherent, choices.

And that may be the core issue. Not that fine wine has lost relevance—but that, in the places where it should matter most, it has become predictable, overpriced, and disconnected from the experience it is meant to elevate.

There’s a well-known anecdote in France about how Henri IV, the first Bourbon king, was baptized in 1554 in the city of Pau with a clove of garlic and a few drops of the local sweet Jurançon wine rubbed on his lips.

I read this story en route to Southwest France this winter, and as I walked past the castle in Pau where the future king was christened, I found myself wondering what that baptismal wine must have tasted like, and what 16th-century drinkers would think of the region’s wines today. That’s because Jurançon is swiftly moving past its traditional reputation for sweet wines.

A growing number of independent winemakers—many farming organically or biodynamically and working with minimal intervention in the cellar—have turned their focus to dry wines. At their best, these wines can rival Loire chenin or white wines from the Jura for their tension, texture, sapidity, aging potential, and ability to express terroir. Jurançon is still an important sweet wine region, of course, but it’s also the source of some of France’s most compelling dry white wines.

The success of Jurançon wines, both dry and sweet, is thanks to the dynamic between its two most-planted grape varieties, petit manseng and gros manseng. These native grapes are well-adapted to the climate: Jurançon is one of the wettest wine regions in France, warm and humid, with up to 1200 millimeters of rainfall every year, but these grapes have thick skins resistant to botrytis and fungal disease.

Petit manseng, the offspring of savagnin and a sibling of chenin blanc, tends to dominate blends for sweet wines, as it can accumulate high sugar (and thus alcohol), but retains searing acidity. Gros manseng, meanwhile, is typically the majority in blends for dry wines. It’s less aromatic and intense, but it keeps the alcohol content of the dry wines in check. The two varieties complement and balance each other in this way between the two styles. (Despite the name, there’s some doubt as to whether petit manseng is closely related, if at all, to gros manseng.)

Petit manseng and gros manseng are grown mostly on Jurançon’s poudingues soil, or puddingstone, a fast-draining conglomerate that defines the majority of the region. “Petit manseng matures on the poudingues at 15 and a half percent alcohol,” explained winemaker Jean-Marc Grussaute of Camin Larredya. “And it can go up to 16, 17, 18, very easily, very quickly.”

Grussaute is among the earliest independent winemakers in Jurançon and has raised the profile of its dry wines. A former professional rugby player, Grussaute took over his family’s domaine in 1988 and converted the vines to organics and then biodynamics. He now farms a little more than 12 hectares across three different terroirs: poudingues, limestone, and alluvial gravel.

About 75 percent of his production is dry wine, labeled Jurançon Sec. It’s one of three different designations that can appear on the label of an appellation wine in Jurançon: the other two are Jurançon (sweet) or Jurançon Vendanges Tardives (late-harvest).

“In the past, you put the bad grapes into dry wine, and you saved the good grapes for sweet wine,” Grussaute told me, explaining that the creation of the Jurançon Sec designation in 1975 was intended to improve the quality of sweet wines, by setting a minimum amount of residual sugar for grapes to be included and thus diverting poor quality grapes to dry wines.

But Grussaute is one of the Jurançon producers who set out to craft exceptional dry wines with a capacity for aging. He poured some older vintages for me to taste, from as far back as 2004. They showed beautiful notes of dried mango, truffles, and hay. There was still plenty of fruit on the palate, and the phenolic pithiness that these wines can have in youth had resolved into a vibrancy on the palate.

The pivot to dry wines in Jurançon began with the rise of independent vignerons like Grussaute in the region. For almost 50 years after the appellation was established, there was only a cooperative in Jurançon; the first independent vine growers weren’t established until the 1970s and 1980s.

Among them were Grussaute and Jean-Bernard Larrieu of Clos Lapeyre. Larrieu is a third-generation farmer who took over his family’s domaine in 1985. The domaine’s vineyards are near the top of steep hillsides, at altitudes of up to 400 meters, facing south and southwest with a stunning view of the Pyrenees, just 25 kilometers away. Among his 18 hectares, Larrieu works one very unique parcel in fermage (a farming tenancy). It’s a vineyard with the oldest vines in the region, some more than 100 years old, a traditional co-plantation of petit manseng, gros manseng, and a bit of camaralet and courbu (or petit courbu, as it’s sometimes called).

On the day of my visit, everything was bright green and lush under clear skies after weeks of rain. Dusk fell as we tasted wines on the patio of the domaine, and in the distance fires dotted the slopes of the mountains, set by French Basque shepherds to open up pasture for their sheep to graze. Larrieu, ever the farmer, hopped on his tractor as dark fell to do some final work for the day, and I got the sense that he could have made the sharp turns down the steep rows wearing a blindfold, steering from memory after 40 years of working in these vines.

There’s a generation of younger producers who are continuing what Larrieu, Grussaute, and others began with Jurançon Sec. Franck Lihour of Domaine Castéra noted that there is a great opportunity for making dry wines in Jurançon because it’s a blank slate: there is no standard profile for the style yet. But he also emphasized that it will take a lot of work to learn more and continue to improve the wines.

Lihour practices plot-by-plot winemaking for all his wines, dry and sweet. The minimalist vinification process is the same for all of the wines. “We have so much difference between grapes, terroir, and so much to learn about it. For me, I don’t want to bring something new in the cellar,” he explained. To that end, his barrel room feels a bit like a viticultural research library, where you can taste the impact of different soil types, vine age, massale selection, and exposition on four different varieties aging in large format oak.

His friend and peer in Jurançon, Maxime Salharang of Clos Larrouyat, farms three hectares of vines on a thin band of Triassic limestone that runs through the appellation. It gives typicity to his wines, with beautiful key lime and lemon verbena notes and powerful, linear acidity. The wines are fermented and aged in used barriques for six months; they also see a bit of bâtonnage depending on the vintage. Different winemakers on different terroirs, with different approaches in the cellar—there’s no uniform approach in the region right now, and the different results are incredibly exciting.

The dry wines of Jurançon have thrilling potential, but its sweet wines are still a revered and essential part of production for independent producers, too. Even Salharang, who focuses on Jurançon Sec, makes tiny quantities of sweet wine from a segment of his vineyard where the vines produce smaller yields and higher sugar concentration. It’s a testament to his time working at Domaine de Souch, an iconic producer of sweet Jurançon wines and one of the very first independent domaines in the region.

Domaine de Souch was originally the project of Yvonne Hégoburu, who renovated the abandoned property and ran the winery with her son, Jean-René Hégoburu, after her husband’s death in 1987. Along with Larrieu and Grussaute, she was one of the first organic and biodynamic producers in the region, inspired by seeing these practices in Pomerol. (She passed away in 2023, but you can see her at the very beginning of the 2004 documentary Mondovino.) Today her son runs the estate, and I met with winemaker Emmanuel Jecker, who has worked at Domaine de Souch for 18 years.

“Fifteen years ago, as with many sweet wine appellations, demand fell,” Jecker said. “We had the luck that dry wines were increasing and an opportunity to develop their quality. So we had less damage than other big sweet wine appellations, and now the sweet wines are developing again.”

Not that that ever affected the domaine’s focus. The winery’s dry wines are outstanding, but Domaine de Souch is renowned for, and focuses on, its sweet wines, including Jurançon, exceptional Vendanges Tardives, and a wholly unique cuvée made with passerillage (dried grapes) called Marie Kattalin. There is an exceptional freshness and power in these wines that has to be tasted to be believed.

“We are making great dry wines in Jurançon, no doubt, but our very specific wine is sweet wine, because you cannot achieve balance like this everywhere,” Lihour of Domaine Castéra affirmed.

It would be easy to see Jurançon’s evolution as a pursuit of fashion—whether riding the tide of increasing dry white wine consumption, or counting on a resurgence in sweet wines. But the winemakers I met aren’t chasing trends. They are making the wines they’ve always wanted to make, shaped as much by curiosity and conviction as by vintage and place.

Jurançon may never be an “it” region. That might be exactly why it’s worth watching.

20 Jurançon Jams, Both Dry and Sweet

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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 a…

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“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 fluct…

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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.

Related Wine Media Content

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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