a fine wine tasting archive
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The Côte de Nuits allows white grapes in exactly one grand cru, and exactly one domaine makes it. After replanting, de Vogüé sold this wine as humble Bourgogne Blanc for 21 vintages — the grand cru label returned only in 2015. This is the third vintage of the comeback.
Concerto was the first Lambrusco to carry a single vineyard and a single vintage, and the first dry one to win Italy's top guide award. The 2017 came from a year of frost and then a summer they named after the devil.
Clos de l'Arlot is a walled monopole at the southern tip of Nuits-Saint-Georges, farmed biodynamically and fermented with whole bunches in the Dujac manner. The 2017, from a quiet year after a brutal one, was the young wine on a table of old ones.
The estate that made its name refusing Sangiovese puts it in the entry wine. 2017 was a drought year, and small berries left their mark on everything Tuscany bottled.
Eighteen months in old French oak, no fining, from one block planted in 1992. Section 94 is the Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc built to argue with everything the region is known for — and three weeks earlier, a bottle of exactly that had been on the table.
Marc Colin had four children and the family domaine has been dividing itself ever since. This bottle is from the youngest son's first real vintage under his own name — seven hectares, nineteen cuvées, and a label nobody had seen before.
A week earlier the 2018 had been on the table — a cool year picked in October. The 2017 is its mirror image: a Labor Day heat wave, a rushed pick, a crop down by a fifth.
Belle Côte usually hangs two or three weeks longer than any other Chardonnay in Napa or Sonoma. In 2017 the picking finished on 28 September — ten days before the fires.
An April frost cost Fontodi a large part of the 2017 crop, and then the summer turned hot and dry. Giovanni Manetti has argued that the first disaster is what protected the estate from the second. Opened half an hour after a Côte-Rôtie, on the same table.
A house that stopped using wood at the end of the 1960s, a vintage that lost half its crop to April frost, and a 375ml bottle on a weeknight table. Very little was hidden.
Matt Courtney spent eight years making wine at Marcassin before starting Ferren. The 2017 Sonoma Coast Chardonnay shows what he took with him — and what he deliberately left behind.
2017 is the Napa vintage people remember for the October fires. Merlot ripens ahead of Cabernet, and in that year the difference of a few weeks was the whole story.