It is with relish that we begin our partnership with the La Raia estate in Gavi, in the rolling hills of Piedmont’s southeast. A fully functioning biodynamic farm, La Raia encompasses 180 hectares, with 48 hectares planted to grapevines and the remainder devoted to pastures and to woodlands of chestnut, elder, and acacia which teem with wildlife.

Our launch earlier this year of Josef “Joe” Fischer’s ebullient wines from the Danube’s southern banks met with immediate success, and we are thrilled to expand our work with this up-and-coming Wachau superstar this fall. 

We are thrilled to introduce Domaine de la Touraize—the eighth grower in RWM’s long history with the Jura. André-Jean (“A-J”) Morin is the eighth generation of Morin to tend the vine in Arbois, beginning with his ancestor Etienne in 1704, but the family enterprise nearly didn’t survive the calamitous 20th century.

A new wine from the legendary Giampiero Bea is always a cause for celebration. “Cotidie” ("quotidian" in Latin) was conceived as an "everyday" wine, at least for its relatively easygoing and drinkable spirit (with only 1,647 bottles produced, its likelihood to be an actual daily drinker is exceedingly small).

Within Tuscany’s relatively conservative winegrowing culture, Maria Sole Gianelli’s wines are a breath of fresh air. Maria Sole’s farm is called Ficomontanino (roughly, “Little Fig Mountain”), a property her grandfather acquired in the 1960s as a place to produce olive oil and breed horses.

Even among our family of modestly sized growers, however, Nadir Cuneaz in the Valle d’Aosta stands apart. With less than a single hectare’s worth of family holdings, Nadir qualifies as our very smallest producer in Italy, and the handful of cases we buy from him each year are true homemade wines in every sense of the word.

Domaine Levet in Côte-Rôtie has been a cornerstone of our portfolio since the 1983 vintage—the first they ever produced. Bernard and Nicole Levet started their domaine with three and a half hectares of enviable holdings around Ampuis, passed down through Nicole’s father Marius Chambeyron...

2019 was yet another dry, scorching-hot growing season, and Agnès ended up harvesting rather late—beginning the 20th of September—because the vines stopped maturing in August for a spell due to hydric stress. While the wines reflect the vintage in their formidable structure, the tannins are buffered by a great deal of fruit which manages to remain fresh and penetrating rather than overripe. Although the forward nature of the fruit might tempt one to open a 2019 on the early side, these are wines to stash deep in the cellar for maximum impact.