Insights

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.

When we began working with Olivier Giroux and his Domaine Clos des Rocs almost a decade ago, we knew we had a future star on our hands. His home appellation of Pouilly-Loché may remain little known, but Olivier’s hugely expressive single-site bottlings stand comfortably alongside any white Burgundies from those pricier zip codes to the north. Furthermore, rather than hewing to the modish hyper-reductivity mold, Olivier’s wines are effusive, reveling in their Maconnais lusciousness while simultaneously delivering a frank and profound minerality.

The ongoing renaissance of the Beaujolais has been a joy to behold. As more and more growers have adopted better farming practices, more thoughtful approaches to vinification, and an increased emphasis on site-specific bottlings, the immense potential of these bucolic hillsides has been unlocked to an unprecedented extent. At the forefront of this movement is Anita Kuhnel, a former professional cyclist who launched her eponymous domaine with the 2015 vintage.

On Monday, May 1, the world-renowned trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis joined four-time Emmy award-winner Randy Cohen at RWM HQ for a live broadcast of PERSON PLACE THING.

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.