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| La Colombière “La Colombull” pét-nat 2023 Anima Mundi “Gres” Penedès 2024 Outward Wines “Montaña de Oro” Central Coast 2024 Poivre d’Ane “Chair à Canon” Vin de France 2023 Caveau Quinard mondeuse Bugey 2023 |
| A gripe that I regularly hear from our regulars is that just as soon as they fall hard for a wine, they find that it has vanished from our shelves the following week. While we’re not in business to thwart our customers’ desires — quite the contrary — the answer to why we have such rapidly churning stock is both simple and complex. Simple: wine is a seasonal, agricultural product, made from fresh produce in finite quantities, and when a given vintage is exhausted, sadly, there is no more of it until the next vintage, unlike, say, beer, which brewers may produce on demand. Complex: there’s so much exciting wine happening today, and we want it to find its way into our customers’ hands. Too much exciting, mind-expanding wine, even within the narrow spectrum of wines we choose to work with (good farming, no crap added, and no fucked up, anti-wines riddled with pyridines/pyrrolines that jaded hucksters try to peddle to unsuspecting rubes through the jargon of authenticity).
There is quite a lot of exciting stuff happening with wine. If you stop by during the afternoon, you’ll see us at work, tasting through some of it with distributors, importers, and winemakers and making decisions about what’s next. On a slow week, we’ll taste at least fifty wines, but regularly more like 100 to 200 wines. And yes, it does seem like a blissfully utopian way to make a living, one that involves professional drinking on the job. Don’t get me wrong, I love my work, love wine ever more, but I challenge you, even if you have the super-heroic liver of Liver Man, to stay chipper and on game after tasting and expectorating dozens of wines in an afternoon, only to face the physiological inevitability of a mild hangover by mid-evening. No, it’s not working in a coal mine, but nevertheless it is work, and we try our best to do a respectable job of it. Each week, we stock anywhere from five to twenty new wines; some are new to the shelves, while others are new vintages of wines we love. For this week’s tasting, we present five of them to you. We’re starting, as we like to do, with some fizz; this week, a curiosity made from the dark-hued négrette grape from the southwest of France, savory/earthy like a Loire cabernet franc, but without the grassy pyrazines. Next, a stunning, mineral-driven white from a Penedès grower making some of the finest pét-nats known to man and womankind, but as you will see tonight, also lovely still wines. Then, a more textured white from the Central Coast, mostly chenin, aged in old barrels. To finish, two light reds, one from the south of France and made from aubun, a rustic old variety that hardly anyone bothers with these days, and that’s a shame, the other from the east of France and made from mondeuse. |