Vinous Table: Sunday Night Supper Club
United States: New York, Vinous Table
, Dec 2020
After tasting hundreds of wines over the week, it was nice to spend some time with a few bottles and my closest inner circle, watch a little NFL football and forget about all the stresses of 2020, even if just for a little while.
Champagne: 2020 New Releases
France: Champagne, featured
, Aug 2020
For the first time in a dozen years, this past spring I was unable to travel to Champagne to taste the new vintage and survey the latest releases. Given the extraordinary challenges this year of both traveling and collecting hundreds of samples in a timely fashion, we will be publishing Champagne reviews within this article in a continuous stream over coming weeks and months, as I taste the wines. This latest installment covers wines tasted in October and November 2020. The best way to stay up to date on additions is to make sure you are receiving our emails and turn on notifications within the Vinous app.
Barbaresco: The Highs & Lows of 2016-2020
Italy: Piedmont, featured
, Oct 2020
Readers will find a wide range of wines from Barbaresco in the market ranging from majestic, soaring 2016s to the far more variable 2017s and the first 2018 releases. With its stunningly beautiful, hillside vineyards, Barbaresco remains a terrific destination for consumers looking for site-specific, Old World wines that won’t break the bank.
Vinous in London: Cappellano 1971-2012
Italy: Piedmont, featured
, Oct 2020
This retrospective of Cappellano back to 1971, held in London for a small group of Vinous readers, was a fabulous opportunity to revisit a number of wines during what was a very different time in the world. The Cappellano Barolos remain some of the most idiosyncratic and deeply personal wines in the world.
2016 Barolo, Part 2 & Late Releases
Italy: Piedmont, featured
, Oct 2020
As is our custom, we present our annual Barolo coverage in two installments. This article covers recently bottled 2016 Barolos and a number of other late releases that are in the market. Readers will find everything from benchmark producers to lesser-known growers who made some of their best wines ever.
Cellar Favorite: 1955 Maison Leroy La Romanée Grand Cru
France: Burgundy, cellar favorite, Cellar Favorites
, Oct 2020
Maison Leroy’s 1955 La Romanée Grand Cru is a historic wine for many reasons, and not just because of its age. It was the year Henri Leroy asked his daughter Lalou, then 23, to join the family business and help him select the wines for the maison’s portfolio. To this day, Lalou Bize-Leroy has an extraordinary memory of those early wines she tasted with her father.
Vinous Lockdown Special
Austria, France, General Interest, featured
, Oct 2020
As the reality of a prolonged lockdown started to settle-in this past Spring, I thought it would be fun to do something different, to write an article on regions and estates I don’t usually cover and that have been missing from our pages. I hope you enjoy this tour through some of my favorite properties.
Alto Piemonte & Valtellina, Continued…
Italy: Piedmont, featured
, Sep 2020
Keeping up with the fervent pace of change in Alto Piemonte and Valtellina is no easy task these days given the ever-increasing number of estates making fabulous, noteworthy wines. I had originally intended to add the producers in this report to my article Nebbiolo in Its Many Guises: Alto Piemonte & Valtellina, published earlier in the year, but as I tasted through the wines I became convinced these estates, many of them new to Vinous, deserved to be showcased in a separate article.
Krug: 2006 In Three Acts
France: Champagne, featured
, Sep 2020
Clos du Mesnil is one of the most revered sites in Champagne. Rémi and Henri Krug bought the 1.84-hectare vineyard in 1971 with the goal of securing a high-quality fruit source. But once they started working with the fruit, they realized they had something special. The first Clos du Mesnil, the 1979, remains epic to this day. Although not be design, Clos du Mesnil is also the archetype for what many grower Champagnes would later become – single vineyard, single variety, single vintage wines. I recently had the chance to taste the 2006 Clos du Mesnil, the latest release, with Olivier Krug over Zoom, which is how everything seems to happen these days.
Penultimate: A New Chapter at Promontory
United States: California, featured
, Sep 2020
About ten years ago I met Bill Harlan at a small winery a stone’s throw from Meadowood and The Napa Valley Reserve. Harlan took a set of maps and spread them out over a coffee table. “This is our latest project,” he told me as his eyes lit up. Harlan explained that he had chanced upon the property while hiking back in the 1980s and used evocative phrases like “the land” and “the territory” to describe a place that sounded like something out of the Wild West or a fairy tale, possibly both. That sort of mysticism is not often associated with Napa Valley, but Napa Valley can be that way once you move away from the well-known areas. That place was Promontory. I recently had a chance to taste the first three vintages of Penultimate, the newest wine from the property, with Will Harlan and Winemakers Cory Empting and David Cilli.