Jean-Michel Deiss likes to talk spit. That his family, winegrowers since 1744, are established as the Alsatian version of winemaking royalty probably helps him to get away with it. “Wine today is an industrial project,” he told me (through interpretation) during a media tour visit to Domaine Marcel Deiss‘ Bergheim winery. “But great wine is…
Category: elegant wines
Turning Tables To Turning Heads (Trestle Thirty One 2015 Finger Lakes Riesling)
For Riesling lovers, the last four years in particular have been a good time to be alive. On one side of the shiny Riesling-fine-wine-world-market coin, Europe’s traditional flag-bearing regions of that grape been performing well; on the other side, we’ve seen the emergence of up-and-coming areas that, while far from wine-drinking household names, undoubtedly have…
Contact Points (A Decade Of Cà Maiol’s Molin Lugana)
Walter Contato knew potential when he saw it. Like an inordinate number of Italians before and after him, this successful Milan-born businessman took holidays in the sometimes-too-charming-for-words (as in, how-the-hell-are-we-gonna-get-the-car-through-these-narrow-Medieval-streets?!?? levels of charming) Lake Garda town of Sirmione. As an inordinate number of successful white businessmen seem to want to still do, Contato eventually decided…
37th Heaven (Highlights From The 2017 San Francisco International Wine Competition)
By the time that you read these words, the results of the 37th (!!) annual San Francisco International Wine Competition should be publicly available, so I thought that I would share some of the highlights among the event’s big winners. The SFIWC is one of my favorite weekends of the year. Under the watchful eyes…