A couple of years ago, I got a rare opportunity to drink some baller Priorat. The ballerest of the ballerest, to be honest. This was at Barcelona Wine Week, at a tasting called “The Magnificent Seven of the Wonderful Priorat,” and all the big guns of Catalonia’s prestigious old guard were there. The lineup included such legendary bottles as the 2021 Álvaro Palacios L’Ermita, 2020 Clos i Terrasses Clos Erasmus, and 2020 Familia Nin-Ortiz “Nit de Nin” Mas d’en Cacador—all three have won 100-point scores, and retail for $1,250, $300, and $180 respectively.

“The Magnificent Seven of the Wonderful Priorat” was definitely not a subtle tasting. The various wines were a mix of single-varietal garnacha or carignan, as well as blends, and you could legitimately call these reds “bruisers,” concentrated, ripe, and tannic. Testosterone seemed to course through the conference room at Fira de Barcelona. Most of the wines spent 14 to 18 months in oak, and a few had international varieties like syrah or sabernet sauvignon in the mix. Along with high prices and high scores came high alcohol by volume. The 2019 Mas Doix “1902” Tossal d’en Bou ($500) weighed in at 14.5 percent abv, while 2019 Clos Mogador ($120) turned the dial even higher at 15 percent. Meanwhile, the 2019 Celler Vall Llach ‘Mas de la Rosa’ ($300) clocked in at 15.5 percent.

These are the kinds of macho reds that put Priorat on the world wine map in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it became the darling of critics like Robert Parker. Though this big style of wine is not my normal cup of tea, I appreciate the excellence in something like the Álvaro Palacios L’Ermita. But I can see why I don’t find so much Priorat on the lists of popular wine bars and restaurants in the U.S. These grand wines feel a little out of step today.

Still, during this high-octane tasting, one particular bottle stood out. Not for its muscles and machismo and BDE, but for the opposite. I had to chuckle when the wine journalist moderating the tasting told the audience it was “muy feminina.”

That wine, 2021 Terroir al Límit “Les Manyes,” ($235) is made with garnacha peluda, a rare variant of garnacha (literally “hairy grenache”), from 60-year-old vines grown at more than 2,600 feet elevation. Les Manyes spends only eight months aging in cement, not wood, and has only 13.5 percent abv—the bare minimum alcohol level permitted in Priorat. Tasting this wine is a revelation: Sure, you can call it “pretty.” But it’s unbelievably complex, with delicate, seamless layers of berry, rose, spice, herb, smoke, crushed stone, etched together by incredible freshness and tension. Though Terroir al Límit is only 20 years old, Les Manyes has already won its share of worldwide fame with critics. (The 2016 earned 100 points, if you care about that sort of thing.)

Yet for me and many other Spanish wine lovers, Terroir al Límit represents something more: the next wave of wines from Priorat, along with producers such as Sara Pérez of Mas Martinet, newer luminaries such as Ferrer Bobet or Josep Grau, up-and-coming family estates such as Marco Abella and Trossos del Priorat, biodynamic wineries such as Hodgkinson and Clos Pachem, and natural-leaning winemakers such as Gemma Miró and Iduvina Olmdeo at Mas d’en Perí.

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I’m sending this special nebbiolo Sunday edition of Everyday Drinking to highlight my first wine piece for the Wall Street Journal (published this morning). It’s about my love of Langhe Nebbiolo, the ultimate “Goldilocks wine.’” Please click and read (there is a paywall, my apologies).

People make a bigger deal out of wine-and-food pairings than they need to. My simple rule: Find a “Goldilocks wine”—not too heavy, not too light—and stick with it.

I discovered mine years ago when attempting to find the perfect pairing with radicchio—that notoriously challenging, purple leafy vegetable known for its aggressive bitterness, earthiness and astringency. A bottle of young Italian Nebbiolo was up to the task. Its rambunctious tannins, high acid and contrasting notes of cherry, rose petals and hot summer asphalt worked nicely. A wine that pairs with radicchio will pair with pretty much anything. I had found my Goldilocks.

I believe the only reason why Langhe Nebbiolo is not more widely embraced is that it has few advocates. It’s generally not “natural wine” and the cool natty-wine somms and influencers don’t really promote it. But it’s also not the pricey Barolo beloved by collectors and wine writers.

And then there are the critics who rate with the overhyped, overused 100-point scale:

They seem to follow an unwritten rule that Langhe Nebbiolo must always be rated between 87 and 89 points, in order to leave room for their 95-point Barolos. If Langhe Nebbiolo were reviewed in any other context—where price and value mattered—it would never be rated that low.

If you’re interested in reading, more here is the link.

In celebration of nebbiolo, I am liberating my nebbiolo classic, “Why Barolo Bros Get Barbaresco All Wrong” from behind the paywall, for everyone’s reading pleasure.

Why Barolo Bros Get Barbaresco All Wrong

Is it time for a new way of thinking about Italy’s greatest wine regions?

Not to bring literary theory into the wine chat, but is there such a thing as the “anxiety of influence” in this realm of culture? I ask because I’ve been struggling to write about Barolo and Barbaresco within a wine world where only certain gatekeepers are “allowed” to hold forth on the wines of Italy’s Piedmont. I adore Barolo and Barbaresco. They’re among my favorite wines in the world. I’ve developed my love for Nebbiolo during a lifetime of traveling to (and occasionally living in) Italy. But when you start writing about wine, no matter how good or experienced you are, you quickly learn that your opinion on Nebbiolo doesn’t matter—especially if it conflicts with common wisdom.

I mean, seriously, are there any regions in the world more gatekept than Barolo and Barbaresco? I have about as big of a wine-writing ego as anyone. Yet for the past few weeks, as I’ve been trying to express my own thoughts and feelings about Nebbiolo in Piedmont, I’ve gone into an existential spiral about why people even like wine in the first place.

The gatekeepers tell us that we must wait, patiently, for Barolo. Of course, Barolo must always be aged a minimum of three years, by law, before it can be released. But even after release, the common wisdom espoused by critics, sommeliers, and influencers is that we must wait another 5 or 10 or 20 years—or longer—before a Barolo is truly ready to drink.

The idea that young Barolo is always too big and aggressive—with growling tannins that might rip your face off—is just one of those deeply ingrained beliefs in our wine culture. This reputation has also fostered a certain machismo around Barolo, as well as a strange gendering that happens when Barolo is compared to its neighboring Nebbiolo-based wine, Barbaresco. We’re often told that Barolo is “masculine,” while Barbaresco is “feminine.”

This gendering of Barolo and Barbaresco, mind you, is not a thing of the past. You’ll still regularly find it in wine media, and the most-referenced book on the region is called Barolo and Barbaresco: The King and Queen of Italian Wine. On my recent trip to Piedmont, last month, I was told by several producers: “We call Barolo the king, and Barbaresco the queen.” At least two others told me: “Barolo is the man. Barbaresco is the wife.”

To be clear, in this cringey metaphor, Barbaresco is stereotyped as “feminine” simply because of its reputation of being “approachable” and ready to drink earlier, with softer tannins. Meanwhile Barolo is defined as “masculine” mainly due to the bolder, harder tannins of its youth, before more years of cellar aging.

How this masculine/feminine thing plays out in America is unsurprising. Dudes love Barolo, and mostly give Barbaresco a pass. A friend who works as wine director for a popular Italian restaurant in Manhattan said she often tries to dissuade men—almost always men—from ordering Barolos that are still too young. But her proposals of Barbaresco at similar or lower price points generally fall on deaf ears. “It’s nearly impossible to sell Barbaresco to guys that demand Barolo,” she says.

Narratives in wine, especially Italian wine, are difficult to change. The reason for this is obvious: There are no term limits in wine criticism. Barolo and Barbaresco have been defined by entrenched gatekeepers—such as my former boss—for at least two decades.

“We have to change the way we communicate about these wines,” said Riccardo Sobrino, winemaker at Cascina delle Rose, when I visited Barbaresco last month. “We have to remember that Barolo and Barbaresco are limited. They’re not for everyone. You have to have some experience. If the first wine of your life is a 2016 Barolo, you will be traumatized.”

Over in Barolo, Sobrino’s girlfriend, Caterina Burzi, takes a contrarian view to the old-school bro-style Barolo. “Maybe Barolo will age a long time, but I want to drink them now. I don’t want to wait,” she told me. Burzi, who runs the winery with her brother Alberto, feels more philosophically in line with younger wine drinkers, who mostly do not want to wait a decade to drink the wines they’ve paid a lot of money for.

Beyond generational tastes, there’s an even larger, looming reason why the way we talk about Barolo must shift. “The climate is changing so fast, and no one knows what is best,” Burzi said. “It’s already changed a lot compared to 20 years ago. Now everyone is tasting Barolo after one year of release and it’s already open and approachable. That was not possible in 1999.”

This was the topic of conversation I found all over Piedmont. “2010 was the last vintage of the old climate,” said Andrea Sottimano, when I visited his Sottimano winery in Barbaresco. “Now we live in an almost subtropical climate. We’ll never have 2010 again. The weather has changed. We’ll never go back.”

Besides climate, other things started changing in the 2010s. Global taste trends moved toward fresher styles of red wine. “2010 was the first vintage in which people started saying. ‘It’s too oaky.’ After 2010, producers began changing away from the style of the 1990s.” Among other shifts, some of the so-called modernist producers moved away from the small French oak barriques they’d employed in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, when you visit cellars in Piedmont, you’re more likely to see giant Austrian oak casks (particularly from high-end barrel makers like Stockinger).

Rather than see the changing styles in the region as a bad thing, I suggest we embrace a new way of talking about Nebbiolo. “I believe we are living in the golden age of the region,” said Erik Revello of Carlo Revello & Figli, a terrific up-and-coming Barolo producer. “People think of Barolo as hard to drink. But there’s a shift to making wines that are much more approachable.”

When I visited Massolino, one of Barolo’s largest producers, the message was similar. “Barolo is no longer the tannic wine we knew in the 1980s and 1990s,” Franco Massolino told me. “Honestly, climate change has helped us. People always think, ‘It’s too early to drink a Barolo.’ That we have to wait 30 years. But it’s not true. People are looking for more elegant wines. Not so much the dense, dark style of before.”

Yet there remains a critical bias against any Barolo vintages that are ready to drink early, though more people within Barolo are pushing back against this notion. “Are vintages like we have now a bad thing? No, I don’t think so,” Massolino said. “This is an opportunity to show a Barolo that’s ready to drink now. To show a vintage that’s understandable and easy to drink, one that’s already round and expressive.”

But Massolino also said something else that felt like heresy in current wine-bro culture, as well as the messaging from Piedmont’s gatekeepers.

“We are known as a Barolo producer, but the Barbaresco is an important wine for us. A little bit lighter, but very elegant, and higher finesse than the Barolo,” he told me. “Barolo has the perception of remaining the king. This is the perception of people, correct or not. I have no difficulties in saying there are top Barbaresco that are as good as the top Barolo. But the perception of Barolo as king remains.”

I found the same thing during my visits in Piedmont—and I found myself drawn again and again to the Barbaresco. So I’ll just say it: Barbaresco may be the best under-the-radar value for a prestige wine in the world. Often, top bottles in Barbaresco are half the price of top Barolo.

“Barbaresco was once a wine that people didn’t understand,” said Michela Adriano, of Adriano Marco e Vittorio. “But now the climate is warmer, and the wine is smoother, more approachable, and more elegant to drink”

Of course, Barbaresco is a completely open secret. Collectors have long embraced the wines of top Barbaresco producers such as Angelo Gaja and Bruno Giacosa, and perhaps—judging from recent price jumps—Roagna. But the roster of excellent Barbaresco producers is much longer, including Sottimano, Cascina delle Rose, Adriano Marco e Vittorio, Lodali, Bruno Rocca, Ca’ del Baio, and others. Many top producers known for Barolo, such Oddero or Massolino, also make very fine Barbaresco.

“Our idea of Barolo is based on the 20 brands we know. But in Barbaresco, can you name 20 brands?” said Sottimano.

At home, I often find that even wine people who are supposedly “experts” in Piedmont don’t really know very much about Barbaresco. How often, for instance, do you hear about great vintages in Barbaresco?

“In Barolo, when those 20 well-known brands have a good or bad vintage, everyone repeats that it’s a good or bad vintage,” said Sottimano. “But in Barbaresco, if Gaja and Giacosa meet for an aperitivo, and they say to each other, ‘Let’s make a joke, let’s tell everyone 2021 is shit.’ If that happened, everyone would say 2021 is shit.” As a matter of fact, the 2021 Barbaresco vintage is excellent, and one that people who love Nebbiolo should jump on.

After weeks of grappling with changing times in Piedmont, the most important takeaways are these: Forget about the gatekeeping. Ignore the anxiety of influence. Reject the idea of “masculine” and “feminine” wines. Embrace change. Long live Nebbiolo.

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

Certain things have come to pass and I find myself a 29-year-old divorcee living in a strange, millennial-grey rental house with my parents. It’s Monday night, my kids are with their dad, and I have four old Australian shiraz open before me. Only times as troubling as these would call someone to open a critical mass of 16-percent-alcohol bombs, alone, standing in her kitchen over a girl dinner of chips and salsa. But here we are, and frankly, I am glad we are.

Shiraz, the name for syrah from Down Under, has a rich history as the red wine grape of South Australia. In his brief history of shiraz, Australian wine writer James Halliday says, “Wherever vines were planted, shiraz emerged as the most suitable red grape for table wine.” From the mid to late 20th century, shiraz production in Australia grew exponentially until its peak in 1996. During the early 1990s, critic Robert Parker started including numerous Aussie wines in his roundups of “greatest values” (mostly sub $10 bottles) in Wine Advocate. By the end of the decade, he was awarding high scores to the top bottles of shiraz from South Australia, which were no longer such “great values” at around $40 to $60 per bottle.

As you can imagine, the yuppie wine collectors of the 1990s fully bought into what the finest producers in Australia were bottling around this time. Through the end of the 1990s, exports of Australian wine were at an all-time high.

In many ways, the rise of Aussie shiraz mirrored what was happening across the Pacific, in Napa Valley, which in the 1990s was in the midst of its own “golden decade,” popularly producing a similar style of bold jammy red wines and rich chardonnays. Interestingly enough, at similar price points, Australian wines scored higher among critics throughout the 1990s.

The boom did not last very long. In 2009, Mike Steinberger wrote—in his Slate hit piece subtitled “How Yellow Tail crushed the Australian wine industry”—about the infamous bulk brand and its role in the demise of Australian wine. “The biggest problem is that Australia has made itself synonymous in the minds of many drinkers with cut-rate, generic wines,” Steinberger wrote.

Riding the coattails of Australia’s finest shiraz, Yellowtail and its imitators collapsed the market for Australian wine by pumping out tens of millions of cases of their plonk globally. By the end of the aughts, Australian wine’s reputation was in the toilet. Today, in the U.S. market, virtually no reputation exists at all. Collectors have turned away from the high-end Australian shiraz toward Burgundy, Bordeaux, Barolo, or Brunello. On the low end, grocery stores have filled the demand for cheap, jammy red wine with bulk from South America and Portugal.

So when a small group of male millennial wine collectors, to whom I have a parasocial relationship with, started singing the praises of old Aussie shiraz, I was sure I was being punked. On all other accounts, these wine guys knew their stuff and had me believing in their good taste. So, what was the deal with these “penal colony wines,” as they called them?

Around the time my skeptical curiosity in the classic wines from Down Under started germinating, I happened upon a bottle of 1994 Clarendon Hills shiraz at one of my local wine shops. It sat on a shelf that was full of mature wines that you don’t often encounter in the wild. The shop owner told me he’d been buying entire private wine cellars from aging (or recently deceased) local collectors.

I started visiting the shop weekly and watched this epic collection of aged wine grow. “I can hardly keep up with the requests,” the owner told me. One widow would tell another, and another, and soon he was the person to call when you needed a dead guy’s wine collection valued and liquidated. Sure there were many unicorn bottles: Scarecrow, Petrus, Château d’Yquem, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, etc. But my budget dropped me somewhere between old Amarone, German spatlese riesling, Napa Valley merlot…or Aussie shiraz. That summer I bought a number of old bottles from these now-undervalued categories for less than they sold for on release. (Yeah, summer 2025 was a weird one.)

Then, this April, a box of wine appeared on my doorstep. It was from one of these Millennial Men in Wine from the internet and the selection could best be described as “divorce wines.” It included a 2002 bottle of Kay Brothers ‘Hillside’ shiraz, McLaren Vale’s oldest winery, and another bottle of Clarendon Hills—this time a 1998 bottling from their Piggott Range vineyard in McLaren Vale. I guess nothing mends a broken heart quite like sitting by oneself and contemplating wines from my dad’s generation, wines that are now most forgotten and unwanted.

Clarendon Hills—the pioneer of single-vineyard, single-varietal wines in McLaren Vale—is typically the most restrained version of South Australian shiraz one can find. Of the four old shiraz, this was the one that was predominately savory: salami, olive, tomato, and herbs overshadowed the ripe fruit.

The Kay Brothers, on the other hand, is a gobsmacking 15 percent abv. Its front label, so classic and loquacious, is complete with headshots of both Kay Brothers, a vineyard vista, and a full paragraph of text. It’s the kind of label that makes you really want to hate the wine before you open it.

Yet, at risk of losing my cool-kid™ cred, the wine was absolutely delightful, nuanced, and alive at 24 years old. It offered impressive and surprising fresh fruit like cherry and berries on the nose, balanced by menthol, bloody meat, earth, and other herbs. Deeply concentrated in a way I don’t encounter often, but again, fully in balance. I have to admit, a wee 3 oz pour was the perfect aperitif before hopping in my Uber to dinner, feeling lifted and giggly and satiated. I wouldn’t recommend more than that in a sitting. Even the back label on this standard 750-ml bottle gently reminds you that “this bottle contains 8.9 standard drinks.”

Last week, when I asked my boss if he had any old Australian shiraz in his cellar I could buy off him, he laughed out loud. “Oh absolutely. I have a ton of it,” he said, his face suggesting this was an insane question to ask a man in his 70s who has been collecting wine for five decades. “Mostly 20 to 30 years old,” he told me, and on Monday morning I was greeted at my desk by two bottles: 2005 Shirvington shiraz from McLaren Vale and 2002 Wild Duck Creek Estate ‘Springflat’ shiraz from Heathcote.

Similar to the Kay Brother’s shiraz of the same vintage, the 2002 Wild Duck Creek Estate Springflat shiraz greeted me with bright red fruit on the nose intertwined generously with something primitive and leathery. On the palate it was light on its feet (especially considering the 15.5 percent abv) and opened nimbly to flavors of red plum, eucalyptus, with long barnyardy finish. After revisiting this wine—about 18 hours later—the fruit had finally developed into a wider array of ripe red and black berries, the barnyard had blown off to reveal a more subtle earthy, truffle note that complimented the titillating green herbs woven throughout. This is a slutty, no-holds-barred kind of wine. I couldn’t help going back to top up my glass, thinking to myself, “No one can tell me this doesn’t taste great.” It’s everything you tell yourself you don’t want in a wine—too much fruit, too much alcohol, too much New World, nothing “cool” about it—but put it in your mouth and the joy of being alive can’t help but wash over you.

As I look back at Robert Parker’s original tasting notes on the wines open before me, I notice two things. First, all of these bottles are cheaper to buy now with 20 to 30 years of age (averaging $30 per bottle today) than they were on release. Second, his recommended drinking window for these wines on release seems frightfully short after having tasted them.

For example, all of the shirazes here were rated 91 to 95 points, and Parker recommended on average holding them no more than 10 to 15 years. The 2005 Shirvington shiraz, specifically, he scored 93 points and advised “drink over the next 7-8 years.” Now, at 21 years old and 16 percent abv, this wine still came across a bit hot to me. The oak was heavier than I wanted it to be. It had fresh plum, dried plum, dried herb, clove, eucalyptus, and turned earth—it had layers and layers of opulence. Honestly, the thought of encountering this wine 10 years ago is giving me a headache. But here’s the thing: Given how pleasurable the 2002s were, I would be totally excited to taste this wine again in three to five years.

In some ways, maybe we should be grateful that these big Aussie reds fell so rapidly out of fashion. Potentially, it saved some pretty incredible bottles from an early death. Collectors in the 1990s and 2000s, who opened these bottles early, likely received an unpleasurable punch in the palate. That bodyslamming ripe Aussie fruit would have remained too bold to show anything else any sooner. The wonder of their ageless acid, structure, and evocative complexity would take many more years to come to the fore. And so those collectors likely wrote off their Aussie shiraz and moved on to something else.

Tasting these bottles decades later, it makes me wonder: Will a new generation of drinkers and collectors be introduced to the pleasures of aged wine through the opulent—yet very affordable—option of Australian shiraz? I’m not saying it’s a bad idea.

Related Aged Wine Content

I was definitely the worst-dressed person at the gala dinner for the Rioja Centennial earlier this year. The event, thrown by the Rioja DOCa to celebrate the appellation’s 100th anniversary, could only be described as lavish: elegantly hosted at the Vivanco Museum of Wine Culture, with food by the region’s five Michelin-starred restaurants (Venta Moncalvillo, Ikaro, Ajonegro, El Portal de Echaurren, and Nublo), over 100 wines at the cocktail hour and a dinner table laden with 15 more stunning, classic Rioja pours.

I’d already been in Spain for a few weeks when I received an email explaining that the gala was to be black tie and I’d need a smoking (what they call a tuxedo in Spain). What a darned coincidence!—I’d not packed my smoking into my carry-on bag (note: I do not own a tuxedo). I bought a cheap dark suit at a vintage store in Barcelona, and then a white dress shirt and shiny black tie at a clothing stall next to the produce vendors at the Mercat de Sant Antoni. But on the evening of the event, as I was dressing, I realized the suit was ill-fitting, and the white shirt was so sheer that you could see my chest hair through the fabric. Luckily, there was a Zara across the street from my hotel in Logroño. With minutes to spare, I outfitted myself in a passable fast-fashion outfit, accessorized with worn black New Balance sneakers.

If my attire hadn’t identified me as an outlier, my body of work on Rioja surely did. Over the past five years, I’ve chronicled the new wave of younger winemakers who are redefining what Rioja wine means. In numerous articles, I’ve drawn a line in the sand, advocating for the new wave and throwing a bit of shade on the classic, old-school Rioja wines.

For years, [we’ve] been conditioned to think one way about Rioja, all based on barrel aging: crianza, reserva, gran reserva. For too many wine lovers, Rioja means a big, oaky red that’s reliable but unexciting, especially in an era when big, oaky reds aren’t in fashion.

The wine from Rioja that I’m excited about is something completely different: freshness and energy over wood and power, cool wines grown at higher altitudes, blends of several grapes over monovarietal tempranillo, a commitment to organic or biodynamic farming, and, most importantly, a sense of place that’s not dictated by barrel aging…

The new generation largely eschews the traditional Rioja aging designations of crianza, reserva, and gran reserva. “If you put the wine in a barrel as long as the regulations say, you will lose all the fruit, all the freshness, everything that’s interesting about the wine,” says Sandra Bravo of Sierra de Toloño, whose first vintage was in 2012. Most of the new-wave producers mostly choose to bottle as cosecha or genérico (meaning no aging requirements).

At times, Rioja’s new-wave winemakers suggest a revolutionary air. Of Rioja’s crianza system, one winemaker told me: “We need to destroy this system and start over.” Of its oaky wines, another winemaker told me: “Rioja has become a flavor, not a region.”

The new wave has pushed Rioja to focus on terroir over cellar aging. Oxer Bastegieta, who arrived in Rioja from Basque Country in 2009 and now makes some of the region’s most coveted bottles, told me:

“Nowhere else in the world has the old vineyards that we have here in Rioja—some of the oldest vines in the world. The problem is that people here don’t believe in themselves. There are so many mediocre wines here because people don’t believe they can make better. They are standing in front of the best vineyards in the world. I believed it from the first fucking moment I got here.”

Of course, there’s always something magnetic and attractive about revolutionaries. For a romantic like me, it’s easy to be drawn to the seeming moral clarity and fearlessness of the rebel.

Having cast my lot with the new wave, it was slightly unnerving to be sitting, poorly dressed, at a table teeming with a who’s-who of classic, traditional Rioja wines:

• 2021 Sierra Cantabria Mágico

• 2020 Marqués de Riscal ‘Baron de Chirel’

• 2018 CVNE Monopole Clásico Gran Reserva

• 2016 Bodega Contador

• 2014 López de Heredia Viña Tondonia Gran Reserva\

• 2011 La Rioja Alta Gran Reserva 890

• 1978 Bilbaínas ‘Gran Zaco’

• 1964 Bodegas Riojanas Monte Real Gran Reserva.

I sat next to Álvaro Palacios, the winemaker who’d made his reputation among the new wave in Priorat in the 1990s, with powerful, full-throttled reds. Álvaro was at the Centennial Celebration to present his gorgeous, benchmark 2023 Quiñón de Valdelareina, made from 103-year-old vines of garnacha from his family’s Palacios Remondo estate in Rioja Oriental.

This was followed by the only wine at the gala that I would consider to be “new-wave”: 2023 Artuke ‘La Condenada’ —among Spain’s greatest reds, a field blend from vines planted in 1920. In his presentation, Artuke’s winemaker Arturo de Miguel, cited Álvaro as a role model.

As everyone at the table swooned over the Artuke, I asked Álvaro what he thought of Rioja’s new wave, and he said with a wink and a shrug, “There’s always a new wave.”

There’s always a new wave. That statement has stayed with me in the months since the Rioja Centennial Celebration. It’s true: All of the world’s great established wine regions eventually go through a generational shift, a reconsideration of the past. A reigning style has always received critical acclaim. But at some point, it becomes stodgy, outdated—your grandfather’s wine. A restlessness among the younger generation stirs. Ideas filter in from other regions. A new philosophy emerges. But when that happens, what do we do with the great wines of the “old wave”?

Ironically, those big 1990s “new wave” Priorat wines of Álvaro Palacios and his contemporaries—which became the darlings of critics like Robert Parker—now feel out of fashion in 2026. I can remember tasting Álvaro Palacios’s L’Ermita (priced at $1,300 a bottle) at a tasting of baller Priorat during Barcelona Wine Week a few years ago. This was a high-octane grand tasting, full of muscle and machismo, and I had to chuckle when the guy moderating told the audience that one bottle—Terroir al Límit “Les Manyes,” from the newest of Priorat’s new wave, awarded 100 points by several critics—was “muy feminina.”

Perhaps this is the way things will always go with wine, each generation endlessly casting shade on each other, back and forth. Over the years, I’ve certainly done my share to fuel this sort of intergenerational antagonism. So maybe it’s hypocritical for me to say this, but I’m starting to wonder if our framing of wine as “new wave versus old wave” is misguided.

For instance, what does talk of new-wave-versus-old-wave do for our appreciation of a stunning bottle like the 1978 Bodegas Bilbaínas ‘Gran Zaco’ that was poured at the Rioja gala, a profound gran reserva that spent nearly a decade aging in American oak. By our stupid, cool-kid 2026 wine standards, this wine would be ignored. But the 1978 Gran Zaco was impossible to ignore and simply brilliant, combining freshness with unique flavors of bergamot, soy sauce, cigar wrapper, and antique furniture varnish. It left a deep impression on me.

What does a new-school-versus-old-school framing do for our understanding of Remírez de Ganuza’s breathtaking 2018 Olagar Gran Reserva? It’s one of Rioja’s greatest white wines, from a 40-year-old vineyard sited 2,300 feet above sea level. It spends nearly a year in oak, and the nose is almost chenin-blanc-like, with aromas of bees wax, lavender, and yellow apple. On the palate, there’s ripe apple and pear, and an underlying and appealing waxy, unctuous quality. Is it Rioja by way of trendy Loire Valley? Or is it something else entirely?

I regard Remírez de Ganuza’s winemaker, Jesús Mendoza, among Rioja’s new wave. Yet Mendoza describes Remírez de Ganuza like this: “of the modern side we are the most classic, and of the classic side, we are the most modern.”

Of course, in even setting the terms of a “new wave,” the term new is also up for debate. “People say, ‘Oh, you’re the new style of Rioja,’ but we’re actually the real classic style,” Arturo de Miguel of Artuke once told me. “People think new oak and vanilla is the classic style. But it’s not. Consider us as the traditional way they worked a hundred years ago.”

The Rioja we think we know—the “old wave”—really only dates to the late 19th century. When the phylloxera plague devastated France, Bordeaux needed wine to sell and looked south to Rioja. Many important historic wineries, such as Muga, CVNE, López de Heredia, and La Rioja Alta, operate in the area near the old train station in Haro, which was built during that era to connect to Bordeaux. So is that 19th-century French influence really the “classic” or “traditional” style—in a centuries-old wine region that dates back to the Phoenicians?

The real issue in Rioja isn’t new versus old. The real conflict—as it is for wine regions around the world—is quality wines versus manipulated industrial wines. Rioja’s wine industry transformed during the mid-20th century, as growers started cooperatives and the traditional small cellars disappeared after the Spanish Civil War. By the late 20th century, growers in Rioja were ripping out nearly all other grapes and planting tempranillo, often in places it should not be planted. Today, tempranillo accounts for more than 80 percent of all vines, making the region basically a monoculture. The area under vine in the region has grown from around 38,000 hectares in 1985 to over 66,000 hectares today, an increase of more than 70 percent in four decades. In 2023, there were about 150 million liters of bulk wine, unwanted by the market, sitting in cellars. There’s simply too much middling wine, and it’s created a crisis.

Earlier in the day of the Rioja Centennial gala, there had been a grand “prestige” tasting of two dozen benchmark wines. The tasting was organized and emceed by Pedro Ballesteros, a legendary Spanish Master of Wine, who insisted there was no particular order to the lineup. “Order destroys beauty,” Ballesteros said.

I was surprised to see how many “new wave producers” had been included in this anniversary tasting. These were standout bottles such as Jose Gil’s 2024 El Bardallo (“the kind of wine people like to drink now,” said Ballesteros), Bodegas Luis Cañas’ bottling of 100 percent benedicto, a historic, nearly-lost grape, and Miguel Merino’s 2022 La Loma, an elegant, precise blend of tempranillo and garnacha, which Ballesteros described as “one of the most moving wines in Rioja.”

Those new-wave wines shared the stage with classic such as 2021 CVNE ‘Imperial’ Gran Reserva, 2008 Contino Viña del Olivo (“the first single vineyard wine in Spain”), 2004 López de Heredia Viña Tondonia, 1986 Marqués de Murrieta Castillo de Ygay, and 1964 Faustino I (considered Rioja’s greatest 20th century vintage).

The showstopper, however, was the 1956 vintage of Marqués de Riscal, so deep, meaty, and savory, and yet so much freshness for a 70-year-old wine. We maybe now think of Marqués de Riscal as a wine factory, cranking out more than six million bottles a year, or maybe its flashy, garish Frank Gehry-designed hotel. But only a fool who doesn’t like wine could taste that 1956 and not appreciate its beauty. “They invented Rioja,” Ballesteros said. “This was not a classic region before them.”

The tasting, Ballesteros insisted numerous times, was about expressing Rioja’s “diversity” of styles. Perhaps it’s easy to roll one’s eyes about tossing a loaded term like “diversity” into a wine tasting. But his larger point stands. “To say ‘Rioja’ means nothing,” he told the audience. How can one sum up “Rioja” in an easy, orderly fashion? A region like Rioja is big enough and great enough to embrace both the new wave and the old wave of quality wines.

There’s always a new wave. I may never own a tuxedo, but I hope I live long enough to see what the next new wave will be, as well as the one after that.

Look for my report on my top-25 favorite “new wave” Rioja wines, coming next Friday, for paid subscribers only.

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Did Benjamin Franklin really say, “In all your amours, prefer old women to young ones”? That’s what Stephen Vizinczey suggests in the opening of In Praise of Older Women, where he argues that “modern culture—American culture—glorifies the young; on the lost continent of old Europe it was the affair of the young man and his older mistress that had the glamour of perfection.”

Substitute mistress with white wine, and you’ll have the point of this essay. And, of course, I want to pique everyone’s interest in the merits of older white wines. I suspect, however, that the more experienced among us already know the pleasures they offer, while the younger ones have yet to discover them.

It turns out that white wines would very much like us to believe they can age gracefully. Well, I say white wines, but what I really mean is the Italian wine consortiums and the like. Their job is to convince people like me, who in turn try to convince people like you, that mature white wines can offer the kind of pleasure to the discerning collector that was once thought to be the exclusive preserve of structured reds.

This charm offensive has meant that, over the past three years, I’ve been invited to a number of events designed to showcase the aging potential of Gavi, tocai friulano, sauvignon blanc and, most recently, Lugana. As a result, I’ve tasted some truly fabulous older white wines—sometimes in even more fabulous locations, lucky me!—and had the chance to reflect on why so many white wines capable of aging remain wines we almost always drink young.

The premise of every event has been the same: people usually drink Lugana/Gavi /sauvignon blanc…while they’re young. But here are some older bottles. Aren’t they great?

And the premise holds true not only for wines with a reputation for being easy-drinking whites, such as Lugana, but also for wines with an established reputation for longevity, such as top white Burgundy. Octavian Wine, one of the world’s leading bonded fine wine storage providers, with more than £2 billion worth of wine under management, shared some striking data when I asked: What is the average age of a wine when it leaves your warehouse and is delivered to a customer’s home address (presumably to be drunk)?

Of course, Octavian caters to collectors, and the wines stored there are, by definition, collectible. Yet even in this setting, the contrast between white and red wines is striking. The overwhelming majority (78 percent) of white wines shipped to customers came from the previous six vintages, whereas only 40 percent of red wines fell into the same age bracket, with the remainder distributed much more evenly across older vintages. At the other end of the spectrum, just 2.5 percent of white wines delivered were more than 20 years old, compared with 10 percent of reds. In other words, even among serious collectors, white wines are consumed far earlier than reds.

So, can we say that white wines have a reputation problem? (Isn’t it a bit like the old belief that men get better with age, while women, well… they don’t?) Could part of it still be a legacy of the premature oxidation (“premox”) crisis that emerged in white Burgundy in the early 2000s?

The problem known as “premox”—the imperfectly understood phenomenon of white Burgundies aging far more quickly than they should, with some bottles becoming completely oxidized—began to emerge in wines from the 1995 vintage and affected many wines produced through the mid-2000s. Even great Puligny-Montrachet and Meursault, including bottles from some of Burgundy’s finest producers, were not spared. It spread through the region like the plague. Corks, sulphur dioxide, and a host of other factors were blamed. Yet, despite years of research, there is still no consensus on what caused the problem in the first place—or, perhaps more intriguingly, why it seems to have largely disappeared.

While that may well have scared collectors into favoring younger Burgundies, I’d argue that—particularly in Italy—we’re dealing with something different, something more of a chicken-and-egg problem. Italian producers tend to rush their white wines to market rather than holding back stocks for later release. As a result, consumers rarely encounter mature bottles, very few people are systematically tasting mature vintages, and there is little opportunity to build confidence in how these wines age. When invited on press trips producers pour superb older vintages, and in most cases they come from the family’s personal cellar, giving critics the chance to experience and write about just how well some of these wines can evolve, but only anecdotally rather than in any systematic way. These wines almost never reach the market, they exist as demonstrations rather than products. While critics may leave convinced, consumers remain unconvinced because without those experiences, confidence in the wines’ longevity never becomes firmly established.

This, I think, is the heart of the issue. A wine’s ability to age and its reputation for aging are two different things.

The first is determined by the wine itself—its acidity, concentration and balance. On this front, research is advancing along two complementary lines.

One seeks to establish whether a grape variety possesses intrinsic aging potential by identifying its reservoir of aroma precursors and understanding how these evolve over time—whether they generate new layers of complexity during ageing or simply fade as the wine oxidizes. For example, the team at the University of Verona, led by Professor Maurizio Ugliano, has been mapping the volatile compounds and aroma precursors of dozens of Italian grape varieties (including turbiana, the grape of Lugana) to understand how each develops its own distinctive aromatic signature with age.

The other line of research seeks to answer a more practical question: what do producers need to do in the vineyard and the winery to craft wines that age well? While Chardonnay’s capacity for aging is well established, the Burgundy Wine Board (BIVB), perhaps prompted by the lingering shadow of the premox crisis, sponsored a six-year study (VOLTA) to investigate how vineyard and winemaking practices influence the longevity of white Burgundy. The study concluded that much of a wine’s ageing potential is built during pressing and élevage, rather than being determined by the grape variety alone.

Yet aging potential alone is not enough to create a reputation for longevity. That reputation is built by the market. A region only earns a reputation for longevity when producers keep back stock, critics regularly taste mature vintages (as they do with features such as “Bordeaux 10 Years On”) merchants sell them and consumers learn what those wines become with time. Without that ecosystem, even genuinely age-worthy wines continue to be treated as wines to drink young.

Only two of the Lugana producers I visited in my recent press trip hold back stock. And even then, the quantities they retain don’t seem sufficient to create a meaningful secondary market or establish a culture of drinking mature vintages. There is, of course, an obvious reason for this. Holding back wine requires producers to sacrifice current cash flow while investing in additional storage capacity—whether barrels, tanks or bottle aging—in the hope of selling the wine later at a higher price. I recently tried to estimate what aging actually costs a producer (calculations from Credible Signals):

A good barrique costs around €1,000 and can be used new or seasoned. Assume it’s used once: after losses you get 200 liters of wine, so the barrel cost is €5 per liter. Labour and electricity add €0.40 per liter. Storage costs €6 per month per barrique — about €0.40 per liter per year. Financing adds another €0.30 per liter if you borrow at 5% on €5.80 (barrel + handling + storage). That’s roughly €6 per liter, or €4.50 per bottle. If you use the barrique three times, the additional cost drops below €2 per bottle.

Bottle aging is cheaper but still significant. Storage might cost €6 per month per pallet (600 bottles), or €0.12 per bottle per year. The real cost is the so-called opportunity cost: if a wine could sell now for €10 but doesn’t, the producer must finance that cash flow, adding roughly €0.50 per bottle in interest. The total cost for an extra year in bottle is around €0.62 per bottle.

Depending on the aging method, every extra year can cost a producer anywhere from around $0.77 to $5.14 per bottle before any additional profit is realized. Building a reputation for longevity requires producers to sacrifice that cash flow in exchange for uncertain future returns.

For collectors, however, that scarcity creates an unusual opportunity. Because relatively few mature white wines reach the market, the category remains underdeveloped. Prices often reflect how these wines are consumed rather than how well they actually perform with age.

I realize this may sound a little far-fetched, but indulge me for a moment. Imagine collecting Meursault in the 1970s or 1980s. On a recent trip to Burgundy, the president of the Comité Bourgogne told me that many Meursault producers in those days barely made ends meet because the wines simply weren’t in fashion. (I can’t help wondering whether the dominance of Robert Parker’s Bordeaux-centric era played some part in that...) Those who bought and cellared Meursault back then weren’t following trends but instead investing in something before the rest of the market caught on. Looking back today, it’s hard not to envy them. They were able to buy extraordinary wines at prices that seem unimaginable now.

I’m not predicting that Lugana, Gavi, or Soave will become the next Meursault. That’s beside the point. Every great collecting category was once obscure. The excitement of collecting lies in the possibility of discovering tomorrow’s classics before everyone else does. Mature Italian white wines feel like one of those rare corners of the wine world where there is still genuine room for exploration.

Unlike Bordeaux or Burgundy, where decades of criticism have established fairly clear hierarchies, many Italian white wines remain largely unexplored territory. We don’t yet know which producers will prove the most age-worthy, which vintages will shine brightest or which wines will ultimately define their regions. We simply don’t have enough evidence yet. And perhaps that’s precisely what makes this journey so fun. The reality is that many producers themselves are still discovering the ageing potential of their own wines.

But things are turning. From tasting a number of Lugana, I can say that some are genuinely age-worthy and compelling, while others are less convincing. In some of the less successful examples, the oak dominates, overwhelming rather than complementing the grape’s delicate aromatics. More broadly, I think Lugana—and some other emerging fine wine regions—is still searching for its signature style. By that, I mean that producers are still working out which winemaking techniques best express the region and its native grape. The balance between oak, lees aging, texture, freshness and fruit purity has yet to reach the level of consensus and refinement seen in more established fine wine regions.

That impression was echoed by Davide Slaghenaufi, an oenologist and biotechnologist at the University of Verona, where he is part of the team studying the aging potential of turbiana in Lugana. Having also trained in Bordeaux under Denis Dubourdieu, he believes that Italian producers, particularly when working with the country’s many indigenous grape varieties, still have much to learn about the use of oak from their French counterparts.

Yet the progress already made is remarkable. Some producers have demonstrated just how extraordinary mature Lugana can become. Zenato’s Lugana Riserva ‘Sergio Zenato’ 2005 was one of the finest mature white wines I tasted on these trips, offering a glimpse of what the region is capable of when terroir, viticulture and winemaking come together.

Elsewhere, there are producers trying to build a reputation for age-worthy white wines almost single-handedly. Villa Bogdano, for example, is championing the little-known Lison DOCG, investing in research, innovation and a deeper understanding of tocai friulano, despite the financial incentives that often favour uprooting old vineyards rather than preserving them. Changing perceptions of an obscure appellation is a slow and expensive undertaking.

That may sound like a limitation, but I increasingly see it as an opportunity. Collectors often dream of discovering great wines before everyone else does and that’s why mature Italian white wines are exciting.

They are not a finished story. They are a story still being written.

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Of course, Jason was the jerk as usual, the “wine snob.”

I was at my friend Rachel’s beach house for a happy hour, and I’d been tasked with uncorking the next wine. I opened the fridge to grab the Ampeleia ‘Unlitro Bianco’ I’d brought, and I saw it: the bottle of Chloe chardonnay with the cute bow on the label. Rachel and I have a long-standing joke about her love of buttery Josh chardonnay, and so I shouted to her: “Chloe? Wtf is this? Is this Josh’s age-gap girlfriend?”

But Rachel had not bought the Chloe, some other guest had, and this person heard my dig and immediately got defensive. “You know, Jason, I never know what to bring if you’re at the party,” she said.

I felt bad. In shaming the bringer of the Chloe, I had violated one of the central tenets of contemporary wine culture: the doctrine of “drink what you like,” the idea that any bottle anyone is enjoying is a net positive for Wine. The “drink what you like” ethos, as it’s come to be practiced on social media and in social settings, vilifies any judgement about one wine being higher quality than another, dismissing that judgement as “snobbery.”

Of all the cultural pursuits, wine is the one that most easily gets derailed by accusations of “snobbery.” Wine people are so afraid of being called snobs that they’re always twisting themselves into pretzels. “Drink what you like!” they exclaim, with fake smiles.

In a world of “drink what you like,” one must remain always positive. Even if one wants to advocate for certain wines—made the right way, sustainably, from high-quality artisan producers—one must do so gently. One is discouraged and disincentivized from ever talking bad about the big, ubiquitous brands, regardless of whether or not they are sourced from cheap bulk wine, grown with questionable agricultural practices, or made with manipulation and additives. At least not publicly. To do so is to be seen, at best, a killjoy curmudgeon, and at worst, an enemy of the wine industry.

Yet the fact is, the market is flooded with so many poor-quality, branded wines with little transparency. For the most part, we have no clue what is inside the bottle, how it was grown, if anything was added. They leave us wondering how a wine made in California can cost between $11 and $13—the exact price range which is cratering in sales, and is the locus of the wine crisis. Bottles like these demand some critical thinking and questioning on their role in the demise of wine, not a free pass on the back of “drink what you like.”

A few days after my happy-hour faux pas, I found myself in Florida at a busy, popular beach restaurant—the kind of place that’s in every beach resort and is likely a good customer of Sysco. The wine list had 23 still wines. Those wines were: Seaglass Pinot Grigio, Ferrari Carano Pinot Grigio, Unshackled by The Prisoner Chardonnay, Seaglass Chardonnay, The Calling Chardonnay, Jordan Chardonnay, Far Niente Chardonnay, Seaglass Sauvignon Blanc, Silverado Sauvignon Blanc, Crossings Sauvignon Blanc, Hampton Water rosé, Studio by Miraval rosé, Seaglass Pinot Noir, Meiomi Pinot Noir, Belle Glos Pinot Noir, Four Graces Pinot Noir, Seaglass Cabernet Sauvignon, Joel Gott Cabernet Sauvignon, Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon, Austin Hope Cabernet Sauvignon, The Prisoner Red Blend. Oh, and two offerings from Caymus: a liter bottle of its Cabernet Sauvignon, and The Walking Fool red blend.

That’s a wine list possibly created by a single distributor. It’s the kind of nightmare list that would give a wine lover hives, filled with manipulated, mass-produced wines. Yet this kind of wine list can be found nearly everywhere, all across the U.S., at the sorts of popular middlebrow restaurants that everyday people frequent. In fact, this may be the only kind of wine list that most middle- and upper-middle-class Americans are exposed to. Wine selections like this are so widespread that their ubiquity creates a feedback loop. These wines aren’t popular because people seek them out. They’re popular because, in most cases, it’s the only thing available. To someone who’s only ever been exposed to this kind of wine—at an artificially low price—how can you even suggest a better-made alternative?

This is why the anti-snob “drink what you like” message not only fails, but ends up unequally promoting bad mass-market wines, protecting them from any kind of qualitative comparison with better wines. These mass-market wines are so ever-present and over-available that they’ve superseded even the average consumer’s own personal taste.

But that omnipresence is not by accident. It’s the result of careful business decisions by corporate wineries and their distributors. To explore this further, I’m bringing contributor Caroline Lamb into this piece. Caroline has worked in wine distribution, and her experience includes years selling mass-market wines for a big distributor—before reclaiming her power for good.

Caroline: The View From Inside Distribution

Despite the seemingly endless array of wine choices available in the United States—more than 115,000 new labels are approved by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau every year—it’s all an illusion of choice. What mostly you get are store shelves and wine lists with selections from only a handful of corporate wineries.

This is no different than the chain restaurant with a 15-page food menu offering hundreds of “choices” for dinner. In reality, the majority of American restaurants are reheating factory-made food supplied by Sysco, America’s largest food distributor.

Criticism of Sysco has recently gone mainstream. There are reels on Instagram and threads on Reddit with millions of views and thousand comments chronicling exactly why a corporate monopoly related to our food supply is bad and should concern anyone who eats at restaurants in America. The Sysco discourse online has us thinking it’s time to talk about the similarities in our alcohol distribution system and exactly how that leads to the pervasive mass-market wine lists that Jason mentions earlier.

According to data published by the American Association of Wine Economists in 2024, 71 percent of wine in the United States is controlled by the top 11 wine suppliers. It is safe to assume that the dominance of these top suppliers has grown in the two years since—thanks to the continued and aggressive mergers and acquisitions happening across the industry. And the consolidation doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Mark Chaplin, president of commercial sales at Southern Glazer’s, the largest alcohol distributor in the U.S., recently told The Spirits Business to expect “continued consolidation across all three tiers.”

A single company, Gallo, controlled 33 percent of all wine in the market in 2023. Since then, they have acquired major players like Rombauer (3.8 million+ bottles annually) and Hahn Family Wines (3.6 million+ bottles annually), as well as newer wineries like Massican (120,000+ bottles annually), Whiny Baby (120,000 bottles annually) and Bev canned wine (10,000+ cases annually).

Over the last twenty years, the number of independent wine distributors has fallen dramatically—from roughly 3,000 in the 1990s to just over 1,000 today. According to 2024 numbers from Shanken’s Impact Databank, the three dominant players in distribution—Breakthru, RNDC, and Southern Glazer’s—controlled 53 percent of wine and spirits distribution in America. RNDC, formerly the second-largest distributor with roughly $12.2 billion in yearly sales, is no longer a player. The company has been in a years-long tailspin and now is selling off its remaining business to a handful of distributors nationwide. Which means even greater consolidation.

Following Breakthru’s recent acquisition of RNDC’s joint ventures in Indiana and Kentucky, the company has grown into the second-largest distributor nationally, with projected revenues nearing $8.7 billion. That figure is eclipsed by Southern Glazer’s, which at $26 billion in projected revenue controls roughly a third of all distribution outright.

A whopping 81 percent of wine sold in the United States moves through just the top ten distributors—mirroring the same concentration of power we see at the supplier level. With portfolios at these large distributors comprising upward of 7,000 brands, only wineries with serious marketing budgets and a dedicated sales rep in every market get placements. Smaller wineries get completely lost in the mix.

When honest tactics fail to deliver the growth these suppliers demand, the game gets dirty. I can say that from experience. From within the business, you often hear of shady corporate suppliers offering “programming”—code for free goods—to secure coveted by-the-glass placements on restaurant menus or floor stacks in retail stores. The practice is illegal, but it’s so normalized at the distribution tier that even some small- and mid-sized distributors play along just to compete with the major players in their market.

What happens when free goods start flooding the market? Restaurateurs already running on razor-thin margins see a chance to make extra money in exchange for loyalty to one manipulative distributor. These distributors mostly sell wine manufactured to taste the same year after year, operating largely outside the normal constraints of agricultural scarcity. The public accepts this because companies like Sysco have conditioned us to forget that produce is finite and seasonal. Nothing worth putting in your body should be produced at near-infinite scale, available at any time.

Given that most suppliers mark up their wine 50 to 100 percent from production cost, most suppliers can easily absorb the cost of a free case here or there. But when suppliers give in to the pressure of the free goods game, it plants a seed: Their wine isn’t worth what they're charging for it. That cheapens the value of wine across the board and, more critically, at the ground level where taste actually gets shaped: Among the restaurant and retail buyers deciding what reaches the rest of us.

The end result is that consumers experience only a fraction of the wine available in the U.S. How could they ever drink what they like if they haven’t experienced enough wine to even know what they like?

Yet the “drink what you like,” all-wine-is-good narrative is strictly followed in the industry. That’s because no one knows who they might one day wind up working for. There is an unwritten rule when you work for a big distributor who reps the corporate suppliers: Never talk badly about another winery—even if you know their wines are shit—because next week’s acquistion by one of your corporate suppliers might leave you selling that same wine next week.

This refusal to call out any wine—or even to engage in honest critical comparison—has normalized wine lists full of questionable quality across the country.

Back to Jason: The Cheesesteak Egg Rolls of Wine

Around the turn of the 21st century, some chef in Philadelphia invented the cheesesteak egg roll—a cheeky take on Philly’s most famous food item. The cheesesteak egg roll was a fun, inventive bar snack, and you quickly started seeing them on menus all around the region. Soon enough, however, big corporate food distributors jumped on the cheesesteak egg roll and started selling pre-made, fully-cooked versions that restaurants could just reheat and serve. By now, the corporate cheesesteak egg roll is a pervasive bar menu item. Its presence signals something about the kitchen to the observant diner. I have friends who’ve become skeptical about eating at a place that has a cheesesteak egg roll on the menu.

I hope wine drinkers become equally observant and skeptical about seeing certain corporate wines on wine lists. The wine world needs to drop the “drink what you like” act and start calling out poor-quality wines that exist simply because of sheer marketing will.

Wine culture and the wine industry are not going to be saved by playing nice nor by being polite and accommodating to the big brands—big brands, to be clear, who would be more than happy if smaller artisan wineries disappeared from the face of the earth. It’s time to break out the pitchforks, folks.

In the comments below—in our Everyday Drinking safe space where “drink what you like” doesn’t apply—tell us which wines are on your personal reject list, the ones that signal to you that a wine list was written by corporate interest.

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A few weeks ago, the WSET unveiled what it’s calling a “brand refresh” and others in the trade are calling a “major rebranding exercise.” Out is the old official name, Wine & Spirit Education Trust, in favor of just the acronym. Also out is the old “wine goddess” logo, a design move that feels oddly similar to Cracker Barrel canceling the old man in its…

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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 Die…

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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 p…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Verdejo For People Who Hate Verdejo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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