Class Recaps, 2026

Lineup notes and recaps for classes hosted in 2026. Updated periodically!

“spain” @ vine wine, 3/30 [tickets]
“italy” @ plus de vin, 3/29 [tickets]
riesling riesling riesling @ vine wine, 3/23 [tickets]
industry blind tasting, 3/23 [register]
jura @ plus de vin, 3/22 [tickets]
industry blind tasting, 3/16 [register]
catalunya @ plus de vin, 3/15 [tickets]
industry blind tasting, 3/9
fermentation is magic @ liz’s book bar, 3/6
all things pinot, 3/2
industry blind tasting 3/2
champagne, pet-nat, sparkling, 2/9
industry blind tasting, 2/9
burgenland, 2/8
industry blind tasting, 2/2
wine 101, 2/2
alpine wines, 1/21
emilia romagna, 1/18

3/6 a deep dive into natural wine
FERMENTATION IS MAGIC!

Gregoletto glera prosecco col fondo the way the grandparents made fizzy wine: put in bottle after a cold winter, refermenting there in the warmth of spring. It spends the rest of its life on the slurry of spent yeast (lees) trapped in the bottle. The lees change the wine, too: texture, aroma, flavor…

Erde albariño + grüner veltliner ‘Suspended in Light’ Columbia Gorge foot-stomped whole clusters in big open bins (part of the reason it feels a little thicker — the other part is two years of lees aging after fermentation finishes, which layers some savory yeast-derived stuff onto the more aromatic albariño and grüner). This was Kirk’s second vintage — he started his little project (just 250 cases or so) after leaving NYC restaurants and moving to the Pacific Northwest in the heart of the pandemic.

Santa Julia skin contact chardonnay ‘El Zorrito’ Mendoza poor chardonnay! It never did anything other than be really easy to grow and really easy to project style onto. Here, it’s fermented on the skins (“orange wine,” a style whose worldwide embrace co-evolved with the rise of the natural wine movement—you can read a little history of the media discourse and why fermenting this way might matter at the link).

Naboso skin contact field blend ‘Doma’ Little Carpathians I’m glad a lot of you liked this bottle! Nadja and Andrej make some of my favorite wines in Central Europe. (For more proof: I used a different bottle from them in last fall’s wine club.) The full slew of varieties in this field blend: welschriesling (ubiquitous throughout ex-Hapsburg central Europe and for example the most-planted white grape in Croatia), grüner veltliner, riesling, and two rare color mutations, red traminer and red sylvaner.

Lapierre gamay ‘Raisins Gaulois’ Beaujolais “chillable red” from the birthplace of the French natural wine movement and a producer who was part of it from the beginning (although it’s Marcel’s kids now). More on chilled red’s rise and rise and why Beaujolais and natural wine are intertwined in the newsletter.

Thierry Germain cabernet franc ‘Domaine’ Saumur Cabernet franc is often described in classical wine resources as vegetal and green — but what about tamarind paste? What about red pepper coulis, curry leaf, oolong, pepper? We’re in the heart of the Loire, here, west of Tours, on buttery yellow tuffeau limestone that 80ish million years ago was the floor of shallow tropical seas swum by plesiosaurs and spiral-shelled ammonites.

3/2 all things pinot
GRIS, WEISS, NOIR, MEUNIER …

Pinot blanc from Robert Sinskey, in Napa Valley from 2018, finding richness via time on the lees + aging under cork once bottled, softer + rounder with time. it’s almost impossible to track pinot blanc’s history past a certain point — historically, it was also a name for chardonnay, and the two varieties were frequently confused in the vineyard

Pinot auxerrois from Trapet, in Alsace one of pinot’s many children with gouais blanc, and, in Alsace, often blended together with pinot blanc / used interchangeably.

Pinot gris from Barnaby and Gisela of Teutonic Wine Co, which makes Alsatian-inspired wines in Portland, Oregon pink-skinned pinot mutation, often found amidst the pinot noir in old vineyards, made paradoxically into everything from insipid, light pinot grigio to slightly sweet, unctuous white in Alsace to coppery or rose gold skin contacts that look like rosé and are built like orange wines and drink a little like light reds — a true chameleon

Pinot noir in its birthplace from David Trousselle, in a little valley off of the Côte d’Or’s main drag, better known for racy, electric white wines, and here showing the lean, rhubarb and beet side of pinot noir when it is cool and bright

Pinot meunier from the O.G. in the Willamette, Jason Lett of Eyrie regeneratively farmed, own-rooted, beautifully expressive wines with the capacity to age for decades. Meunier, the “miller’s pinot,” named for the fine downy white fuzz on the underside of its leaves that looks like a dusting of flour, is often treated as a totally different grape from pinot noir — but it’s just a more noticeable mutant. Often softer, as well, with a sappy, lavender and violet side to its aromatics

Pinot noir on the West Coast from Bien Nacido, a Santa Maria Valley vineyard site probably better known as a source of prestige fruit for a slew of ambitious California producers than it is for its own wines. This is a plush, darker-fruited, richer side to pinot noir that may be a little closer to what a lot of people picture when they say they “like a pinot” in a bar or a retail store — the inverse of the lean and savory side of Trousselle’s bottling

Bonus! — pinot meunier grower champagne from organic farming pioneer George Laval in Cumières, in the heart of the Vallée de Marne 2017, from a single vineyard plot planted between the ’30s and ’40s, with a pink-fruited perfume and deep, vinous bassline — really special stuff

3/2 industry blind tasting

We tasted backwards, from F to A:

F. PRIMA PIUMA nebbiolo Monferrato, Piedmont
E. CLENDENON nebbiolo Santa Maria Valley, Central Coast 2018

Younger, fresher, lighter extraction coupled with full ripeness and a warmth of alcohol (14.5%) + zero sulfur on one hand — long extraction, 3-year oxidative aging in barrel and 5 more years under cork on the other

D. ANNE PICHON, ‘Sauvage’ viognier Vaucluse, Southern Rhône
C. ILLAHE, viognier Willamette Valley

Viognier, tamed?

B. JORCO, ‘Las Cabañuelas’ garnacha Sierra de Gredos
A. DAMASE, grenache Vaucluse, Southern Rhône

More on Gredos, and on grenache.

2/9 sparkling!
CHAMPAGNE, PET NAT, and MORE

We tasted Crémant de Jura from a small co-op in the foothills of the French Alps — ‘crémant’ is champagne-method wine with a regional designation like the Jura, the Loire, Burgundy, etc — and talked about how champagne technology works.

We tasted Sparkling Vouvray, another appellation for champagne-method wine in France outside of Champagne — how does shifting the grape variety to chenin change the wine?

We tasted Montlouis Pét-Nat, chenin just across the Loire river from Vouvray, made by bottling the fizzing fermenting wine before it finishes so that it can complete its fermentation in bottle. How does this more direct, lo-fi way to make a wine sparkling compare to the same grape and region made like champagne?

We tasted a skin-contact pét nat out of rebula and chardonnay from Slovenia, on the border with Italy, to talk about the wide spectrum and wild range of possibility of pét nats and other alt sparklings. Just how many different ways could they taste?

And finally, we tasted two grower champagnes side by sie, both on the forested crown of the Montagne de Reims, to celebrate the new generation of farmers bottling the fruits of their labor and dive deep into the little differences:

Sadi Malot’s ‘Les Crêtes’ is a blanc de blancs (100% chardonnay, unusual up here), largely from a single vintage with about a fifth of the wine blended from a perpetual solera reserve started in 2010. They are certified organic — vanishingly rare in Champagne, although the number of farmers committing has grown significantly over the last decade. (Pre-pandemic, only 8% of Champagne’s vines were farmed without chemicals.)

Vincent Cuillier’s ‘Chemin du Rois’ meanwhile is a co-planted parcel — about 70/30 pinot noir / chardonnay — whose farming is even more noteworthy, not just organic but embracing year-round cover crop, no-till regenerative practices to build soil microbiology and sequester carbon, and agro-forestry, introducing trees and building an ecosystem in the midst of industrial monoculture. The wine is avant-garde too, fermented without additions including yeast or sulfur, disgorged by hand without dosage — transparent, expressive, and the antithesis of the big house champagnes that defined the region for two centuries and focused on brand consistency above all else.

2/9 industry blind tasting

we tasted backwards, started with the final two wines and ending with the whites at A & B:

E. Bloomer Creek, ‘Vin d’Ete’ cabernet franc Finger Lakes
F. Villeneuve, Saumur-Champigny cabernet franc Loire

Semi-carbonic infusion in steel tank versus cold soak + a crusher-destemmer and a little bit of oak. I think the focus on “pyrazine = green bell pepper” as a tasting note does a disservice to cabernet franc and how it can actually show up — in warm vintages or at full phenolic ripeness that herbaceous / forest / pepper streak feels more like red pepper coulis, curry leaf, Red Hots candies. One of my favorite things to do at Kabawa is to deploy cabernet franc in this vein against warming spices.

I also have a side theory that the widespread way Finger Lakes cabernet franc doesn’t “taste like cab franc” — it’s often more sour cherry driven, without the tea leaf or pepper you’d expect — might be clonal selection. Someone was telling me that Cornell released a cabernet franc clone a few decades ago that was widely planted throughout the Great Lakes and New York that was supposed to be more resistant to rot, and I’ve wondered if the apparent varietal difference I’ve heard so many people talk about when tasting Finger Lakes cab franc might have as much to do with vine selection as with place.

C. Kewin Descombes, ‘Keke’ gamay Beaujolais
D. Laurent Lebled, ‘Ça C’est Bon!’ gamay Cheverny
bonus (not pictured) Villemade, ‘Bovin’ gamay Cheverny liter

Semi-carbonic on granite, full carbonic in steel on clay-limestone (and, with apologies to Laurent Lebled, super mousey and volatile — hence the bonus Villemade, which I opened partly to give another bite at the apple and partly to show that zero sulfur doesn’t have to mean microbially flawed).

A. Leo Steen, chenin, Dry Creek Valley
B. Sérol, ‘Pourquoi Faire Sans Blanc?’ chenin, Loire Volcanique aka Côte Roannaise

This was a cool face of chenin from Sérol, all the way down among the extinct volcanoes of the Côte Roannaise — I was only previously familiar with their gamay d’Auvergne (which always has, whether it’s soil or genetics, a distinct pepper-flint structure and smokiness).

Leo Steen’s, meanwhile, gave us a chance to talk about the way that chenin can fool you — late ripening, phenolically dense and complicated, it can also be vegetatively productive and innocuous especially if irrigated in a hot place, pushed to work, and harvested a little too early. Chenin before it’s fully ripe kinda tastes like tart pinot grigio, and in a lot of the sites it was planted in South Africa and California it was being used more for its ability to be a high-acid vigorous blending grape (or distilling grape) than for its capacity to transmit place. If you don’t understand that chenin has two faces, you’ll always be surprised when it shows you its other one.

2/8 @ plus de vin — community.
BURGENLAND, or who makes a wine region?

Burgenland facts:

1. where are we? curled around the second largest lake in Europe (the Neusiedlersee), shallow and reed-choked and home to many migratory birds, at its deepest it would only come up to my eyebrows

behind us, the last bit of the Alps, the schist hills of the Leithaberg

in front, the wide steppe

2. we‘re also curled around a border (not drawn here), that was hardened — tank emplacements and barbed wire — within living memory

it’s also a border that has ~moved~

after a 1921 plebiscite, Sopron, the region‘s historic capital, became Hungarian. The rest? Austria‘s newest state.

3. oh btw the lake isn’t fed by rivers, in technical terms it’s a giant puddle

it has also dried up completely from time to time, most recently in the 1840s, which sounds like a nightmare, dried mud and dust storms

4. like a lot of borderlands, wine wise, Burgenland‘s whole situation isn’t a lot like whatever “Austrian wine” is supposed to be (statistically, white wine, mostly grüner and dry riesling in both fancy versions — the roman-era terraces of the Wachau, north of Vienna — and friendly screwcap liters)

5. Burgenland has red wine — most of the red wine Austria makes is from here

and the white grapes aren’t riesling or (mostly) grüner, they’re a Central European slew of cultivars like welschriesling and weissburgunder and muscat ottonel and neuburger

6. Burgenland was historically poorer than the rest of Austria, and post WWII there was a ton of infrastructure investment + support for its wine industry, with the result that what you have today is a lot of young people taking over and radicalizing prosperous family wineries from the 70s/80s

7. those kids have often lived and worked outside of the region and then come home (like Stefanie Renner of Rennersistas, below, who did harvests with Tom Shobbrook in Australia and Tom Lubbe in the Roussillon, both foundational natural wine guys of their respective regions) — and over the last 15 years or Burgenland has become a nexus for Austria’s natural wine movement, home to icons like Claus Preisinger, Christian Tschida, and very culty Gut Oggau as well as dynamic and younger newcomers

8. the wines cover the gamut, in technicolor.

About those reds: there’s blaufrankisch (“Blue, from the Franks”, called the same thing, ‘kekfrankos’, on the Hungarian side), which reminds me of something between syrah and cab franc, pepper + smoke

9. there’s also (cue ominous music) Austria‘s signature red grape and the most planted grape in the country, widely adopted in the 60s and 70s after a few surviving vines were rescued postwar and named by the in honor of the scientist who had made the cross, in the 1920s: zweigelt 💀

10. we’ve got to talk about zweigelt

Dr. Friedrich Zweigelt was (this had been conveniently forgotten) an enthusiastic Nazi — a Party member even in the days when the party was illegal. After German annexation his fortunes rose, he reported colleagues and ran an Aryan viticultural journal, etc. (Read the full story here)

11. this history resurfaces in 2018 and there’s a fair bit of conversation around what to do about it, which is still ongoing.

some folks prefer to use the original name given to the variety, “rotburger”, rather than glorify a Nazi scientist (unfortunately, it’s a bit generic — “red vine”)

12. others say erasing the name erases the history — they’d prefer the reminder on a practical level, decades were spent making “zweigelt” recognizable in export markets — it’s not a niche! it’s their most-planted red grape! — so there’s a real sense of paralysis / inability to move forward

13. as an outsider, I don’t have a solution other than to talk about the history when I pour the wine (and I often choose to list the wines as rotburger on my menus)

14. to sum up: – borderlands! – nexus of Austrian natural wine scene – rainbow of wine styles, (mostly) not grüner – soils, high to low: schist in the hills, then limestone, then squelchy – curled around giant puddle – cool birdwatching – the past isn’t over, it’s not even past – exciting to drink from because of the community of maker that has coalesced around this place over the last two decades

Here’s what we tasted!

Nittnaus, ‘Elektra‘ grüner veltliner Gols
Rennersistas, ‘Intergalactic’ welschriesling, muscat ottonel, gewürz, weissburgunder… Gols

weirdo version of ‘standard-issue Austrian white’ (grüner! — but with a few days of skin contact, raised in concrete egg, deeper and richer because of climate) versus hazy, fragrant kitchen sink blend that captures the slew of grape varieties in the ground

Meinklang, ‘Graupert’ skin contact pinot gris Pamhagen
Judith Beck, ‘Bambule’ pinot noir Gols

brief detour into ‘what is a grape variety’ corner with pinot two ways, a rose-gold pinkish skin contact from a huge biodynamic farm and a lean, rhubarb-and-beet inflected pinot noir from Judith Beck

Claus Preisinger, ‘Kieselstein’ zweigelt aka rotberger Gols

we’ve gotta, as we said, talk about zweigelt! Claus Preisinger’s biodynamic winery looks like a Star Trek: The Original Series shuttlecraft.

2/2 @ vine wine — wine 101.
SAVVY B? PINOT? DRY? ORANGE? these questions and more.

Vimbio ‘ACL’, albariño, caiño blanco, loureiro Rías Baixas, Green Spain
OR ‘DO YOU HAVE A SAUVIGNON BLANC?’
In a universe with only four commercial white wine styles, sauvignon blanc is the one that isn’t sweet (like stereotypical riesling), buttery (like stereotypical chardonnay), or tastes like nothing (like stereotypical pinot grigio).

Luckily, we live in a world with more than four grape varieties! Here, on the river that splits northern Portugal from northwestern Spain, in the mild green verdant Atlantic-facing region of Rías Baixas, zesty albariño is grown alongside two local rarities: caiño blanco (more umami-savory and saline) and loureiro (creamier and rounder).

Plenty of freshness and a kind of orange peel quality here, but there’s more going on than in your typical grocery store albariño, especially after it warms up a little.

l’Epinay ‘Clisson’, melon b Muscadet, Loire Valley 2019
OR ‘CAN WHITE WINE AGE?’
The mouth of the Loire Valley around Nantes is a place where wines won’t find richness because of the warmth of the sun. If you’re going to put meat on the bones of your fresh, high-acid white wines, you need time and a little bit of winemaking on your side.

This bottling, from historically prized granite slopes around the village of Clisson, spends three years aging on the slurry of spent yeast that falls to the bottom of the cement tanks where it ferments. The lees aging (aka spending time on that yeast slurry) gives a pillow-y, marshmallow-y cheesy richness to wine that would otherwise be all oyster shell, no give. After bottling it has spent another three years evolving under cork, with that little bit of exposure to oxygen making it more savory, soft, and contemplative.

Muscadet is often talked about as a simple shellfish wine for bistros, refreshing and crisp, but this shows off muscadet’s deeper side: candelight, kombu, and time.

Troupis ‘Hoof & Lur’, moschofilero Peloponnese, Greece
OR ‘ORANGE WINE?’
What happens when you steep skins in fermenting juice? The same thing as when you steep tea leaves in hot water: color, aromatics, texture. (The tannin molecules in grapeskins and in tea are functionally the same).

This is basically how we make red wine: steep blue-purple skins in their pale juice for the whole length of fermentation. Rosé? Really weak tea — a couple of hours, or a day at most. White? Usually no skin steeping at all — the juice runs off the press clear.

This wine, though, presents one of my favorite paradoxes: what do you get when you take a pink-skinned grape associated with direct-press white wine (here, moschofilero, a floral and delicate Peloponnese native, but it could equally be pinot gris, or gewürztraminer), ferment it on the skins like an orange wine, and end up with a wine somewhere between the color of a summer sunset, a bronze kettle, or a dark rosé?

Vine has been selling this bottle since I worked there over a decade ago, and every year it’s a little bit different. This year, the floral aromatics were really amped up — skin contact can do that, especially with naturally aromatic varieties — and it was so pink most of the class wondered whether there was any orange wine to taste at all.

What matters more? Aesthetics, or process?

Temps de Cerises ‘Avanti Popolo’, grenache, merlot, cabernet sauvignon, syrah Languedoc
OR ‘CAN I CHILL THIS RED?’
From 23-year natural wine stalwart Axel Prüfer, a great example of how grape variety (big-boy cultivars like merlot and syrah) is not destiny. A blend of direct-press juice and short maceration, it’s a wine that is all about finding freshness in a place where ripeness and intensity is a given.

It’s also a zero-addition wild child, holding itself together for our tasting but with a whisper on the finish that tells you it’ll go mousey in a few hours or the next day. We talked about how this stage of barely-there mouse can be off-putting if it’s all you’re left with but dovetails nicely with certain foods: bitter braised greens, mushrooms, barley tea, kimchi, shrimp and Thai basil…

A Tribute to Grace ‘Santa Barbera County’, grenache Santa Barbara, California
OR ‘DO YOU HAVE A PINOT?’
TKTK

Tiberio ‘Montepulciano d’Abruzzo’, montepulciano Abruzzo
OR ‘IS THIS DRY?’
TKTK

2/2 @ vine wine — industry blind tasting

1/21 @ with others — alpine wines.
BUGEY, SAVOIE, VALLE D’AOSTA. every mountain valley is an island.

Vigne Sauvage, ‘l’Insouciance’ chasselas Lake Geneva
Chasselas is a quiet, barely-there variety that, at its best, is all about minimalism and springwater clarity. At its worst, people just call it boring. You can find it in southern Baden, Alsace, and in a few pockets in Central / Eastern Europe, but the place where it gets the most respect and care is in Switzerland.

Swiss wine is, on average, carefully farmed, high quality, and drunk almost entirely by Swiss people. Only a tiny fraction is exported, and it tends to be super expensive once it makes it to the other side of the Atlantic. This is as close as we’ll get to Swiss wine in this tasting, but it’s not so far off: an hour bike ride from the border, on the French shores of Lake Geneva (Lac Lémant).

David Humbert of Vigne Sauvage farms two little postage stamps of land there that together amount to just one and a half hectares, grown on glacial scree and limestone — a little bit bigger than Gramercy Park, or a major league baseball field. He makes his wines in a little garage-sized room lined with plywood, in a handful of small vats made out of stainless steel and fiberglass, and bottles them without addition or subtraction.

des Eclaz, ‘Fleurus’ altesse Bugey
les Cortis, ‘Napées’ altesse Bugey
What is Bugey, anyway?

Let’s talk about it!

Politically it was a fief of the House of Savoy for almost 600 years, before European nation-states began to coalesce like planets. It was ceded to France in the 1601 treaty of Lyon, which concluded a yearlong war between the King of France and the Savoyards over a little French enclave in the Piedmont called Saluzzo. (Motto of the marquisate: Non sol per questo, ‘Not only because of this’.)

Geographically it’s defined by a loop of the Rhône river around the crumpled-up southernmost foothills of the Jura mountains: little island clusters of vines separated by forested limestone plateaus mostly trying to face south and soak up the sun. And those clusters are tiny — Bugey as a whole only has 500 scattered hectares under vine, a drop in the bucket compared to Saint-Joseph (~1200), Croze-Hermitage (~1800), or oh my god the southern Rhône (50,000++?!!). There are structural reasons you’ll find Côtes du Rhône in Costco and not Bugey, you know what I mean?

As for the wines themselves, it’s a place where you feel the transition between that Alpine energy and Lyon, due west, with Beaujolais orbiting that city like a purple granite moon. There’s Savoyard altesse and mondeuse, but also Burgundians like gamay and chardonnay and pinot noir. Bugey makes, proportionally, a lot of sparkling wine.

Here, we get a side-by-side of one of my favorite Alpine white grapes: altesse. (Literally, ‘your highness’.) Princess-peachy, a kind of reddish-bronze when fully ripe, like a softer chenin.

These two growers are a 24 minute bike ride from one another. Apart from all of the tiny differences that can make wines from basically the same place taste a little bit different, the biggest one here is probably the amount of air these two fermentations breathe. One was pressed into stainless steel (less air, tighter, fresher), and the other into a big 600L neutral barrel (more air, looser, wider).

Can you guess which was which?

(des Eclaz = Jean-Pierre Gros and Michel Roussille, first vintage 2017. Les Cortis = Jérémy and Isabelle Decoster Coffier, first vintage 2016. Bugey is dynamic!)

Grosjean, ‘Torette’, petit rouge Valle d’Aosta
du Fables, ‘Les Astres Invisibles’ mondeuse Savoie
The Alps are a wall, but they’re also a crossroads.

On the one hand: immense isolation, every valley its own pocket universe, like a chain of islands, each one with its own dialect and local wildflowers, an incredible diversity of genetic variation, grape varieties, and customs. The Valle d’Aosta, today Italy’s smallest wine region, has a dizzying range of native varieties, including not just petit rouge but humagne (called cornalin in Swizterland), neyret, petit arvine, prié blanc, the red-fleshed roussin de morgex, fumin,

On the other hand, connection and movement. Aosta, fiercely independent, and populated by speakers of Valdôtain, a variety of Franco-Provençal, was ruled by the House of Savoy for something like 800 years, and has had French as an official language since 1536. (It only became part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.)

You can see this, too, with a grape like mondeuse, on the one hand the unique specialty red of the Savoie, on the other related both to syrah and viognier (in the northern Rhône) and teroldego (in the Italian Dolomites).

In what ways do these two red varieties remind you of each other?

How are they different?

1/18 @ plus de vin — ferment.
EMILIA ROMAGNA. a rainbow of alt sparkling

Koi, ‘Chi Mera’ pignoletto, montuni Samoggia valley, southwest of Bologna 2021

Tasted next to a Corpinnat, a Catalán grower sparkling from Mas Candí, and in fairness to all of us, this is a less straightforward comp with champagne-method sparkling than you might think!

While it’s hazier and wilder than traditional method sparkling, it is aged col fondo, on those lees, for years, after a second ferment in the bottle, which lets it tiptoe towards some of the bread-ier, yeastier, less fruit forward tones of far fancier fizzy wines.

(It’s not so much a pet-nat as a rifermentato, which we’ll come back to: rather than being bottled before fermentation is over, it’s bottled and the second ferment started with frozen juice from the year’s harvest. 

This bottle was harvested in 2021, so it’s been waiting quite a while to end up in our glass!)

Koi was started by Flavio Restani in 2018 out of a collection of vine parcels farmed by his parents and grandparents. Flavio wears very technical zipped cargo pants and chose the koi for his label as a symbol of perseverance and non-conformity. 

This bottling is from a single co-planted parcel of very obscure local white grapes that was planted in the early ’60s, farmed without chemicals, fermented with native yeasts, and bottled without filtration or sulfur.

Ca’ de Noci, ‘Le Rose’ malvasia di candia near Reggio Emilia
Pradarolo, ‘Vej 240’ malvasia di candia near Parma

Malvasia di candia is a lightly aromatic, orange-blossomy variety pushed further into perfume and dimension by the skin contact in both of these wines. Malvasias were prized for thousands of years for their ability to ripen to high sugars and turn into golden wines that could survive a sea voyage. They were traded throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and often named for the ports they set sail from (in this case, Candia, in Greece).

Ca’ de Noci (walnut farm) was started by brothers Giovanni and Alberto Masini way back in 1993, which makes them very early to the northern Italian natural wine party. This lightly sparkling wine (it’s sealed with a regular cork, which makes it a little nerve-wracking to open) is bottled after a short (4-5 days, I think?) time on the skins while it’s still fermenting, with a little more juice to help it along the way. 

Alberto and Claudia Carretti of Pradarolo are also old-school — Alberto converted the farm to fulltime winemaking in I want to say 1989 — and their wines are slow-cooked braises, favoring long, long extractions and extended maceration, all bottled without sulfur. (In this case, 240 days on the skins in concrete tanks.) They make some sparkling wines, too, in a similiarly serious vein: very rustic champagne-method, refermenting base wines a lot like this one and then aging them on the lees for years before disgorgement. 

Camillo Donati, Lambrusco mostly lambrusco maestri near ParmaQuarticello, “Barbacane” lambruscos maestri, salamino, and grasparossa near Reggio Emilia

Maybe the best way to put these two producers into context — bone-dry rifermentato from organically farmed grapes bottled with zero sulfur — is to compare them to what mainline industrial lambrusco looks like. 

Riunite was a consortium of nine cooperative wineries in Emilia founded in 1950 whose lambrusco was brought to the U.S. in 1967; the wine, marketed by Banfi, was at one point the number one imported wine in the country, and at its height in the mid-80s it was selling over 11 million cases per year. Today, the co-op group has 1,450 grower members, and sales hover around 7 million cases annually. It sits on a shelf for less than $10.

For Riunite’s lambrusco, and the other conventional lambruscos like it that still dominate the market, grapes will be mechanically harvested and (largely) farmed with chemical inputs. Fermentations take place under controlled conditions, in giant steel tanks, assisted with cultured yeasts and added nutrients. After a short maceration and fermentation, the bubbles are obtained as in prosecco: a second fermentation (more yeast and sugar) in another giant tank before bottling, so the wine (unlike champagne, and unlike ancestral rifermentato) doesn’t have any of the characteristics imparted by lees in the bottle. It’s bottled after a sterile filtration and about 100ppm of sulfur addition to keep it as shelf stable as a can of Coke. (Coke has a little over 100 grams/liter of sugar; Riunite Lambrusco has 58. It also clocks in at only 8% alcohol — the 58 grams are the sugars that would have fermented it to the 12.5 or 13% of the wines we tasted.)