, very interesting guy he adds, he let them make a barrel of wine with him. And lastly in 2020 they came to Burgundy, working with various people, big domaines or also for Christian and Morgane of Dandelion, and they made 3 barrels here with the help of Jon and other people around, after which they felt confident to look for vineyards. visiting with Aaron, Laurence was working there then. Laurence and his partner Nina met initially in New Zealand in 2017, she had come there for the harvest as she was already working in the wine trade (in London if I understood correctly); they then on the same ..read more

Cher valley, Touraine (Loire) This time of winter is the season when winemakers and growers can rest a bit, the wines are usually well past their active and shaky early life and the pruning, if already begub, can pause for a while. That's why these major tasting events in and around Angers & Saumur take place in these bleak days at the end of january and early february. I happened to have had the visit of Bryn & Feffrey of who had just visited a couple in both Angers and Saumur. to my surprise they told me it was not as crowded as feared and they could exchange with the many winemakers ..read more

This october 21st there was a small wine event that could get bigger in the following years : The is a small wine fair which was first launched in 2019 and is centered around the wines made from rare varieties. As you may know there were many more grape varieties grown in France in the 19th century when wine was made locally in all the French regions, then, with the replanting after the Phylloxera and above all after the ill-thought decision of the Appellation administrations to restrict the authorized varieties in the different wine regions to a handful of fashionable varieties, we saw the pl ..read more

This year I missed the harvest and had a glimpse of its preparation and also of its conclusion. From what I heard this is a very generous vintage, in spite of the high temperature at times during the summer, there was rain in august, the vineyard got what it needed to yield nice volumes of overall healthy grapes. This comes after two consecutive years of hardship for the growers (hail and frost notably), each with truncated volumes. The weather through early october had been very enjoyable, even if in the early part of the harvest in september, temperatures were pretty high, forcing picking te ..read more

started their wine operation in 2019 near PennValley, a small community located near the charming town of Nevada City (main street pictured on left). Both of them were previously living in Washington D.C. and worked in restaurants (around 9 years of experience in the field), that's where they met, Bryn was at the service and Jeffrey was a cook. He knew the wines of Gideon Beinstock and then heard about , the winery operated by Aaron and Kara, and came here to do the harvest with them in 2018. On her side, at the same time, Bryn travelled to Spain to do the northern part of the Camino de Santia ..read more

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Overview of two of the tasting rooms (there were three) There are always some tastings restarting at that time of the year, generally on mondays like here for professional events, I was tipped about this one otherwise I'd have missed it, this was the second edition of being a Paris-based distributor of artisan, biodynamic and natural wines who set up now every year a tasting with their winegrowers so that their buyers can get a feel of the available (or soon-to-be) cuvées (their ). There were a large number of vignerons (see the names below) in this tasting on january 16, many working on a sma ..read more

I managed to get in time in my Loire hideout just in time for the last days of harvest and toured a few producers, some by myself and some with Lexie Jordan who was at the time picking with . Lexie is living in Paris mostly and she imports wine for her San Francisco-based company (actually in Mill Valley, Marin county). Several producers had in fact already just finished picking, some still had a couple parcels yet to be picked, for which they were waiting for a bit more maturity. This story will be most a picture story, first because I/we visited unannounced (in some instances there was no bo ..read more

This was really a quick visit here, we're here at which is run by two childhood friends, Zoltán Németi and Zoltán Kerekes who make wine from a small overall surface 1,5 hectare, plus from the equivalent of 0,5 hectare of purchased grapes, for a total yearly production of 5 to 6000 bottles. We're here in a family house in the village that was refurbished as a small winery facility by Zoltán Kerekes who had himself a 10-year experience working in a local winery. Zoltán Németi is himself an IT specialist in Budapest and spends his weekends here for this venture. This small facility has all the hy ..read more