Un Voyage dans les Vignes “Grololo” Vin de France 2022
Calafata “Scapigliato” IGT Toscano 2021
Sara Schioppettino Friuli Colli Orientali 2021
Tessier “Chemin Noir” (pineau d’aunis) Vin de France 2022
Old World Winery “Ecstatic Consciousness” Sonoma 2022

On any given week we taste anywhere from 50 to 200 hundred wines at the shop (sometimes much more than that, but rarely much less). It’s an extraordinary privilege. Folks schlep to our shop and open wines for us to pick through, pick apart, and sometimes select. Some of the wines we’re exposed to are unforgivably bad; others are snore fests, while a much smaller number murmur, “buy me.” (in my tasting notes, I often denote such wines with the word “fuck!” with a circle around it: I do not know the reason for the circle). If you’re not in the wine trade, this practice may appear to be a perk of the job—you get to drink on the job! And it is a perk, in a way, but also a bit of a challenge, as I challenge anyone to stay sober, chipper, and civil after tasting through ten dozen wines. And then it’s five PM, and I have a slight hangover that no amount of seltzer or a matcha latte will alleviate.

I thought for this week’s tasting to feature some of the wines we’ve tasted over the past few weeks and selected for our shelves. This week’s tasting features five wines that are either new to the shop or are new vintages of old favorites. In addition, all contain, at least in part, grapes that are unique to their region, and transmit something of the cosmos of the people who have cultivated the same varieties for hundreds of years. We’re starting with “Grololo,” a wine made primarily from the Loire Valley red grape variety grolleau, a grape that has until recently been on a steady decline. The reasons for this are varied, but part of the explanation is that vignerons once used quite a lot of grolleau to make an off-dry style of rose called Rosé d’Anjou that often contained a considerable quantity of residual sugar—an old-fashioned style of wine, meant for an earlier era of late afternoon dust motes, doilies, antimacassars, and pinky drinking. The audience for this wine is steadily declining, and as a result, a fair number of growers have chosen to graft over their grolleau with more marketable grapes. This is a shame, as grolleau, as you will witness tonight, can also make lithe, light, and pithy red wines of the sort a lot of us want to drink today. We’re also tasting another Loire specialty, pineau d’aunis because pineau d’aunis. We’re finishing with a wine that contains old vine abouriou, a cranky old Basque variety only cultivated in California by Derek Trowbridge, from vines planted by his great-grandfather.