Through our many years of partnership, we have advocated incessantly for broader recognition of the greatness of Chateau Simone. Super-famous in their homeland and gracing the list of seemingly every good restaurant in France, Simone for many years was something of an underground phenomenon in the US, known to some cognoscenti but virtually unrecognized by the larger wine-drinking public.

Delphine’s wines capture the best qualities of great Aube Champagne, achieving an extraordinary balance of delicacy and power. Sleekly elegant yet with pronounced musculature, they wear their absence of dosage not as austerity but as mineral directness, and their acidity is clean and pert without being aggressive.

Delétraz possesses a golden combination of intellect, sensitivity, and humility, and he is blessed with holdings in one of Switzerland’s most fascinating cantons: the commune of Fully, in the Valais’ westernmost reaches. Fully represents the only gneiss mother-rock to be found in the country, and its sandy, acidic topsoil contains little clay and no limestone. Furthermore, its eye-poppingly vertiginous slopes prevent the possibility of any type of mechanization—thus making chemical-free farming like Alexandre practices a Herculean feat of labor.

At Pradeaux no shortcuts are taken, no compromises made. Mourvèdre, this ornery, late-maturing grape with nearly black skin rife with ferocious tannins, is the king of the Pradeaux domain. 

With holdings both in Sancerre and the nearby Coteaux du Giennois appellation, Bertrand Graillot produces wines which combine typicity and individuality in highly appealing fashion.

From the outset, Clementi aimed to produce in a non-flashy, traditional style—a style that speaks of the inherent acidity and freshness obtainable in these high-altitude slopes of sandy chalk. Tasting modern exemplars of Amarone, one might be hard-pressed to sense the terroir through the carefully engineered opulence, but this late-picked appassimento style works in theory precisely because its source fruit is so bright and lifted—at least when grown in Valpolicella’s historical communes.

Recent excursions have taken us far afield of our traditional turf—to viticultural Austria last spring, and, more recently, to Andalucía and the paradigm-shifting bottlings of Equipo Navazos—but our latest partnership with Atlante finds us as distant from mainland Europe as we have ever been: 60 miles off the coast of Morocco, to be precise, on the sun-soaked island of Tenerife.

We are overjoyed to announce a national partnership with Equipo Navazos—a highly esteemed group of Sherry aficionados who, over the past two decades, have discovered, curated, and guided into bottle some of the greatest wines from the region ever brought to market.

One begins to feel like a broken record describing French growing seasons in this era of climate change. Yet, while the 2022 vintage—which comprises the bulk of our offering this year—was broadly similar weather-wise to recent vintages like 2019 and 2020 (very hot and very dry, with early flowering and an early harvest), the overall character of the 2022 rosés is different: nimbler in feel, less weighty on the palate, and slightly lower in alcohol across the board.