Author Archives: James Sligh

Catalunya

I keep coming back to Catalunya in these classes. I think in a lot of ways this place captures what’s exciting about wine today, and a lot of the dynamics that are shaping the emergence and re-emergence of great wines from local grape varieties and surprising corners of the world. You have, in Terra Alta,Continue reading “Catalunya”

Taste the Rainbow!

How much do we miss when we reduce wine to a couple of colors? It feels natural to self-describe as “more of a white wine person” or “more into red,” but what we’re actually communicating has less to do with the appearance of the wine in our glass than we think. We say ‘red’, butContinue reading “Taste the Rainbow!”

Ligurian Sea

Class was on Wednesday, January 27th. These were the wines: How you’d see it on a listSulauze, “Galinette”, Côteau d’Aix-en-Provence, France 2018 Who made it? Karina and Guillaume Lefèvre, and their team.Out of what? Grenache blanc, ugni blanc (alias trebbiano toscano), clairette and vermentino planted on sand over limestone in Provence, on a 29 hectare biodynamically certified estateContinue reading “Ligurian Sea”

Rebels in Classic Wine Regions, Vol. 2

Class was on Saturday, January 23. These were the wines: How you might see it on a listDirty & Rowdy, “Skin and Concrete Egg Fermented Sémillon”, Yountville, Napa Valley, California Who made it? Hardy Wallace & teamOut of what? Head-trained, dry-farmed sémillon purchased from a 2.4 hectare block planted on alluvial gravels in 1962 in Yount Mill,Continue reading “Rebels in Classic Wine Regions, Vol. 2”

U.S. Wines for After the Inauguration

Class was on Thursday, January 21. These were the wines: How you might see it on a listEarly Mountain, chambourçin, “Young Wine”, Shenandoah Valley, Virginia Who made it? Ben Jordan (winemaker), with Maya Hood White (associate winemaker / viticulturalist), Dustin Wade (vineyard manager), and a team that manages 55 acres of vineyard on a 350 acresContinue reading “U.S. Wines for After the Inauguration”

One Grape 3 Ways: Cinsault

One of those red grapes that sloshed around the western Mediterranean for a few hundred years and always seems to end up in blends, cinsault isn’t an obvious candidate for a class all to itself. It wasn’t until I’d had enough single-variety expressions of the grape that I really loved that I started to getContinue reading “One Grape 3 Ways: Cinsault”

Greek Islands

The islands of the Aegean and Ionian seas are both home to ancient histories of winegrowing and experiencing a revival that’s extraordinarily recent. This is one of those classes I give not out of any particular expertise but because I’ve stumbled over a bunch of interesting wines that I can’t place, and I want toContinue reading “Greek Islands”

‘There’s a crack in everything’ [PLAYLIST]

I’ve had a hard time writing, even thinking, retrospectively about this year. In so many ways, it’s because 2020 isn’t really ending on December 31st. For wine folks like me, this year has been defined by a pandemic that is not just ongoing, but worse in the United States than it’s ever been; by theContinue reading “‘There’s a crack in everything’ [PLAYLIST]”

Green Spain

Verdant, and green, and mild, we’re a long way away, literally and figuratively, from the sangría/bullfight/flamenco/paella Spain that lives in a lot of our imaginations. From the French border on the Bay of Biscay to the fractal Atlantic-facing coastline of Galicia, this is a land of cod fisheries and sidrerías, bagpipes and runes carved inContinue reading “Green Spain”