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| Oxer Bastegieta “Gure Arbasoak” Bizkaiko Txakolina Spain 2024 Iliana Malihin “Young Vines” Vidiano Crete 2024 Zlatan Otok “Bilo Idro” Plavac Mali Croatia 2022 Lou Dumont Bourgogne Passe-tout-Grains France 2023 Caparsa “Rosso di Caparsa” Rosso Toscano 2022 |
| This week, we’re pouring a selection of wines that are either new to the shop or are newly released vintages of old favorites. One grumble we hear from our customers is that we churn our stock too rapidly, and just when they fall in love with a certain wine, it’s no longer available on our shelves. We are in the happiness business, and gain zero satisfaction from disappointing folks, but the truth is that there’s so much exciting wine happening right now—even within the narrow spectrum of wineries we choose to work with—and we want to get them in your hands today, even if that means moving on from a wine that proves popular. Another side of this is that some of the most delicious wines we offer are available in scarce quantities; evanescent pleasures that come and go, not to be had again until the next vintage. It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that wines, at least the wines we dig, are agricultural products with a finite quantum, just like the last of the season cherries; you yearn for them long after you’ve had the last of the harvest.
We’re starting with two dry, complex white wines. The first is the new vintage of the amazing old-vine Txakolina from Oxer Bastegieta, made mostly from two traditional Basque varieties: hondarrrabi zuri and hondarrrabi zuri zerratia. Fermented in a mix of large barrel and stainless, this evocative wine, zero sugar, manages to be both nutty/pomaceous, but also crisp and taut on the finish. You may have had a bottle or two of fizzy, frivolous Txakoli, but this is a more serious facet of the wine, with zero bubbles. The label sports an old Basque incantation that, as I’ve been told, means “I like to party.” Next, a wine from the brilliant Iliana Malihin, the young Cretan grower who is saving the vidiano grape from extinction on the island. She was a victim of devastating wildfires in central Crete, and I’m glad she was able to retain a few acres of her vineyards, as she’s pushing the edge of the envelope with what to expect from vidiano, showing us a glimmer of its potential. Following that, a Croatian wine made from the main red variety cultivated in that country, plavac mali. A lot of plavac mali is chunky and monolithic, the kind of red wine that can put hair on your chest: this wine is light, hardly tannic at all, and could be served chilled, as we are tonight. Then, two red wines that could not be more different from one another. One is a type of old-school Burgundy called “passe-tout-grains,” which translates as “throw it all in.” At one time, this sort of Burgundy was a way to use up odd lots of grapes that didn’t make it into the press, and often the results were, meh. Today, it’s always a blend of two grapes, gamay and pinot, and this wine is quite the opposite of meh, both delicate and vibrant. To finish, a sangiovese-based wine from Caparsa, a militantly old school Chianti Classico producer whom we try to stock whenever the wines are available—this is classified simply as Toscana, and is made in a less structured and more gluggable fashion than Caparsa’s more serious wines. |