This month’s club selection are all about purity and place. The energy and connectedness here is an inspiration to me – and I think it will be for you. An inspiration to hunt for more wines like these, to drink more wines like these. No easy task, to be sure. Real Italian wine is obscured [...read more]

Burgundy – I wish I could squeeze more of her wines into this club. A new year’s resolution, perhaps? Well, I’ll give it a shot. We’ll kick off 2012 with a three killer bottles of wine from the around the region. Here are three bottlings – a chardonnay from the Mâcon, a seemingly humble Bourgogne [...read more]

Domaine Gramenon was my introduction to Natural Wine. It wasn’t that I hadn’t experience wines made this way before I drank my first bottle of Gramenon, it was just that I hadn’t really known that there was some underlying set of principles that informed or motivated the winemakers that were making them. Late one night [...read more]

Arianna Occhipinti. You’re not going to forget that name. Iconoclast, wine prodigy, natural wine pioneer, twenty-six year old beauty. Arianna bottled her first vintage when she was 21 years old. At the time, she had just one hectare of land in Sicily. Now in her mid-twenties, Arianna’s up to about 10 hectares (25 acres), and [...read more]

d’Aupilhac is another great Languedoc property lost in time and space. Sylvain Fadat’s Domaine is old enough to have known the passing of Roman boots. Looking at the steep, trellised vineyards, one could easily be forgiven for believing that Jupiter himself carved them into the hillside with a volley of thunderbolts. The truth is that [...read more]