on the road
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Cairanne’s Long Game
No one could accuse the Southern Rhône cru Cairanne of rushing into things. For much of its history, Cairanne seems to have been metaphysically hiding from the fine wine world behind its own rocky outcrops. While technically part of the Côtes du Rhône designation since…
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Height Matters (Exceptional Gigondas)
Smack up against the Dentelles de Montmirail mountain range sits Gigondas, a former ancient Roman soldier retirement home area and Southern Rhône cru that, technically, contains more woodlands than vineyards. And that’s after a killer frost in the 1960s wiped out a good portion of…
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“Big Character” (Diving Into Rasteau’s New-Old Identity)
Well… I’m in the unenviable position of having to date myself. Embarrassingly (not because of my age, about which I mostly don’t care, but because of my obvious lack of knowledge), I knew little about the Rasteau appellation prior to visiting it on a recent…
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crowd pleaser wines, elegant wines, kick-ass wines, on the road, overachiever wines, sexy wines, wine reviewSouthern Rhône’s Troubled Middle Child (Welcome To Lirac)
Lirac has a bit of a troubled middle child syndrome on its hands. Being a middle child myself, I can relate. Look at it this way: if I asked you to tell me about some killer Southern Rhône reds (which is 85% of Lirac’s output),…
