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]

Jean-Benoît Cavalier’s family has been farming the family vineyards for thirteen generations. The family’s existence is bound to the land across a timeline that reaches back beyond the World Wars and the French Revolution. The vineyards seem to exist outside of time, in an isolated 25-hectare pocket of land surrounded by 350 hectares of old [...read more]

Thrilling. This isn’t an adjective you see applied to wine very often, but it fits here. Maxime Magnon’s wines – every one of them – will make you stop for a second to contemplate their inner energy. You might like them, you might not. But there’s no denying that there’s something alive about them – [...read more]