Lineup notes and recaps for classes hosted in 2026. Updated periodically!
all things pinot, 2/27
champagne, pet-nat, sparkling, 2/9
burgenland, 2/8
industry blind tasting, 2/2
wine 101, 2/2
alpine wines, 1/21
emilia romagna, 1/18
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.)
Children's Atlas of Wine 