a fine wine tasting archive
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In 1936 the surveyors drawing the boundary of Châteauneuf-du-Pape were turned away from a walled hunting estate by its gamekeepers. The vines inside have been Côtes-du-Rhône ever since — surrounded on every side by Châteauneuf, on the same quartz pebbles. Les Quartz is that accident of history in a bottle, from the best year the southern Rhône had seen in some time.
A Pinot Noir specialist plants a few rows of Chenin Blanc on shale above Monterey Bay, and the very first wine off the new site is not Pinot at all. Seventy-five cases, from vines in their third season.
The house that makes Monprivato treats its Barbera exactly the same way it treats its Barolo — old Slavonian casks, nothing else. From a shield-shaped vineyard in Monforte, in a vintage the Langhe still talks about.
Everyone agrees this wine should be drunk within about three years. It was opened in its fifth calendar year, which turned out to be the more interesting experiment.
The plainest wine a great Chassagne address makes, from the year a single April night took roughly a third of Burgundy's crop. At four years, it was brisk, chalky, and entirely unbothered by its own modesty.