Today’s wines are coincidentally all Californian. We start with two new releases from Mayacamas, a Chardonnay and a Merlot. Next are a Pinot noir rosé and a Chardonnay from Alma de Cattleya, the second label of winemaker Bibiana González Rave. To finish we have four crisp whites from Cadre Wines in the Saint Luis Obispo Coast.

Mayacamas

Mayacamas sprawls across 475 acres of Mt. Veeder, the appellation on the western blade of Napa Valley. The estate’s been farmed since 1889, when John Henry Fisher purchased land and built the original stone winery that still stands today. Jack and Mary Taylor bought the property in 1941, renaming it Mayacamas and introducing improvements to the winemaking. They also planted the site’s first Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon vines.

In 1968 Bob Travers began his long tenure at Mayacamas, making wine until 2013, when apparel entrepreneur Jay Schottenstein bought the estate. Schottenstein launched a vineyard refresh overseen by veteran viticulturist Phil Coturri. He also hired twenty-six-year-old winemaker Braiden Albrecht, plus a consulting winemaker and consulting viticulturist.

The literal fruits of this reboot were just coming ripe in 2023 and 2024 when the two wines below were produced. Farming of the estate’s 50 acres of vines follows organic and biodynamic practices. The winemaking is classical, relying on neutral wooden vessels ranging from large foudre to barrique.

Mayacamas Chardonnay Mt. Veeder Napa Valley 2024

13.5% ABV | $65
Made from Chardonnay grown in various estate plots, hand-harvested and pressed whole cluster block by block. It was fermented and aged in wood, and malolactic was suppressed. It’s a quiet wine at first, unfurling slowly in a sense of citrus and spring flowers. The texture is utterly bewitching, satiny and dimensional, and the acid floats. Restrained and elegant, serious but not without levity. Lovely.

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I have two Italian wines, a Barolo from Vajra and a Dogliani Dolcetto from Pecchinino. Most of the rest are French, including a crackling crémant d’Alsace rosé from Lucien Albrecht, a red Hautes-Côtes de Beaune from Philippe & Arnaud Dubreuil, and a creamy Montagny from Château de la Crée. There are also two wines from the southern Rhône, from Château du Trignon and Arnoux et Fils. Over the last few decades, southern Rhône reds have become more ripe and powerful, and the influence of critics who favor the blockbuster style has been easily felt in the glass and the morning after. So I was pleased to taste two examples that feel both ripe and fresh.

But to start I have a single American wine, an outstanding Cabernet Franc from Napa producer Ashes & Diamonds, made by one of my favorite California winemakers, Steve Matthiasson.

American idyll

Ashes & Diamonds Cabernet Franc No. 3 Napa Valley 2016

13.4% ABV | $80 | Ashes & Diamonds
Varietal Cabernet Franc is unusual in Napa Valley. John Skupny of Lang & Reed has used this red Loire grape for decades (along with its white counterpart, Chenin blanc), and I’ve tasted other examples from Corison, Gallica, and Ehlers. But the grape remains largely unexplored here despite its great potential, likely because it costs just as much to farm as Cabernet Sauvignon but cannot fetch that grape’s high prices. Ashes & Diamonds is a relatively young project near Yountville, and their expert team of consulting winemakers, including Diana Snowden Seysses and Steve Matthiasson, makes a slender roster of wines. For this bottling, Matthiasson used fruit grown in Los Carneros, Oak Knoll, and Yountville, fermenting in steel and aging the wine for twenty months in barrel, partially new. The results are silky, sluicy, fluid, a flexible matrix of acid and tannin carrying ripe and succulent fruits. It is a seamless experience from start to close; in my notes I wrote “beautiful liquidity,” which isn’t as absurd as it sounds once you’ve had it on your tongue. More Napa Cab Franc, please.

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Welcome back to Notable, where twice a month I share the best wines from recent tasting.

Our focus today is on Rhône varieties, vinified both in their native territory and abroad. There is a gorgeous Saint-Joseph Rouge from Faury, in the northern Rhône, and a Ventoux from organic Château Pesquié in the south, plus four wines from Troon, a regenerative organic producer in southern Oregon: Amphora Amber Vermentino, Amphora Grenache, Amphora Mourvèdre, and a Rhône-style blend called Druid’s Red.

A note about Notable: with this edition it has become a Section, which in Substack parlance means it is now its own sub-newsletter, allowing readers to subscribe specifically to this content. (By default I’ve opted everyone in.) And if you like what you read here, please comment, like, share—and subscribe! Paying subscribers help keep this independent wine commentary flowing. Thank you.

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Lionel Faury Saint-Joseph Rouge 2019

14% ABV | About $37; we purchased this bottle in 2022 for $32. Faury is imported by Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant.

Saint-Joseph is a rangy terroir stretching for fifty kilometers along the northern Rhône’s right bank. The vines cling to steep hillsides on the eastern flank of the Massif Centrale, and soils are granite in various stages of disrepair.

Jean Faury began farming in Chavanay, at the northern end of the Saint-Joseph appellation, in 1950. He raised livestock and planted tree fruits and grapes, selling some wine in bulk (en vrac) to local bistros. His son, Philippe, who succeeded him in 1979, gradually phased out the fruit trees and invested in higher quality viticulture and winemaking. Philippe’s son, Lionel, took over the estate in 2006 at the tender age of 23.

Today Lionel farms in Saint-Joseph, Condrieu, and Côte-Rôtie, following lutte raisonnée. Syrah is his cornerstone, and he bottles two different Côte-Rôtie, two Saint-Joseph Rouge, and two Syrah Collines Rhodaniennes IGP. He also produces Condrieu and Saint-Joseph Blanc, the latter a blend of Marsanne and Roussanne. Case production is about 7,000 annually.

Lionel Faury’s wines are serious, self-assured, confidently old-school but never rustic. The higher-tier Saint-Joseph, “La Gloriette,” comes from three vineyards planted in the 1950s. This wine, the basic Saint-Joseph, is grown on younger Syrah, planted between 1979 and 2007. It spends about a year in a mix of wooden vessels, from foudre to barrique, only 10 percent new. Faury is not a fan of young wood.

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Welcome back to Notable, where twice a month I reflect on the best wines of recent tasting.

Last week New York Times Cooking ran an article titled “I Need Herbs and I Need Citrus.” Girl, I feel you. Temperatures in Northern New England were hovering in the single digits and I was suffering a head cold, medicating myself with lemongrass ginger tea and balms of menthol-eucalyptus. That’s perhaps an unwise admission at the top of a tasting roundup, but my cold was mild and the sinus distress paradoxically only heightened my olfactory powers. Sometimes it pays to be sensitive.

But winter’s clench is easing. The sky’s become less gray, more blue and yellow, and there’s fresh energy in the sunlight now that we’ve passed Imbolc, which Christians call Candlemas and Americans call Groundhog Day. It’s that moment midway between Solstice and Equinox when the house plants reawaken, my Mediterranean Bay unfurling delicate new leaves, bronze and shiny, my 40-plus-year-old Philodendron, purchased for my freshman dorm room, reaching windoward with tender shoots.

My cat’s been chasing sunbeams around the house. I’ve been growing grass for her in batches, soaking soft winter wheat berries for a day, then covering the container with cheesecloth and rinsing regularly to encourage sprouting. By the third or fourth day roots appear, then shoots, at which point I collapse the cheesecloth onto the berries to make a kind of sterile medium, then move it to the windowsill.

I’ve tried using soil and metal mesh and other substrates, but none allow a small carnivore unaccustomed to herbivory to snack on grass without mayhem. So twice a day, usually at her command, I sit with her on the floor, picking off individual blades to feed her, one at a time. Most make their way down her gullet, but some get mauled and spat sideways onto the rug. No matter. Mom’s always ready with another.

The things we do for vitamins and sunshine and love.

Notable Wines

Below are my notes on a handful of wines that recently stood apart from the pack. There’s a Ferrari Brut Trentodoc, a traditional method sparkler from the Dolomites opened in honor of the Winter Olympics; a 2017 Barboursville Octagon, a red-bend winner in the 2025 Virginia Governor’s Cup; a 1995 Chateau Montelena Estate Napa Cabernet, perfectly aged; a 2000 Château d’Armailhac Pauillac, opened alongside the Montelena just because; and a 1990 Domaine Touchais Coteaux du Layon, a sweet botrytised Chenin for the ages. Enjoy.

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Last week the Northeast was hit with a paralyzing blizzard. Arctic air collided with continental moisture to smother the region with a foot and a half of frigid snow. Travel was nearly impossible, and those who ventured onto roads did so at their peril; several local accidents involved the plow trucks themselves. It has remained bitter cold, well below 0°F overnight and scraping single digits during daylight, so we are still blanketed in the refrigerated remains of this storm.

Everyone’s cold and hungry. Our yard is crisscrossed with the tracks of woodland creatures, a palimpsest of their ceaseless expeditions in search of nourishment. Yesterday I watched a red-tailed hawk dive at three gray squirrels foraging in our old Christmas tree, which I stake out as a makeshift bird feeder. A few days earlier I’d seen a large bobcat policing our perimeter, and overnight the animal visited the tree, hunting the meadow voles who tunnel for seeds dropped by busy birds. Although I’ve no hard proof it was the cat, not a deer or coyote or fox, I believe it was him by his track: no paw prints per se (the snow’s too deep and fluffy), but instead a trough just cat-wide and cat-deep where he’d dragged his hungry belly.

It’s hard not to see “paralyzing storm” and “survival in extremes” as a metaphor for our country’s moment. (Not to mention “waiting for ice-out.”) And it’s hard to commit to writing about wine when that’s not what’s keeping me awake in dark hours. Given the magnitude of the current struggle, wine, and wine writing, seem laughably irrelevant. But I also don’t see that self-censorship, tools down, would be helpful while speech is under attack. Plus, one of the things we’re rooting for is comfort and safety, the ability to nourish and feed ourselves. Those aren’t just creature comforts—although all creatures need them—they’re needs both literal and figurative. Wine helps fill the void and, for me, so does the writing about it. So, I press on.

Notable Wines

Below are my reports on a 1990 Cos d’Estournel, an old-vine Chinon from Olga Raffault, a rare varietal Nerello Cappuccio from Benanti, three elegant Prosecco Superiore from La Farra, and three traditional method sparklers from Scharffenberger. Levity for cold, dark times.

Cos d’Estournel Saint-Estèphe 1990

A friend with a deep cellar read my recent posts about tasting the 2015 Cos d’Estournel and the 2018 Pagodes de Cos, the producer’s second label, and offered a taste of his 1990. He’d purchased it off the shelf in 1992 or 1993 at a private shop in Washington, D.C., and stored it in his cold Vermont basement.

The 1990 Bordeaux vintage was hot and sunny, like 1989 but drier, and two torrid summers in a row had stressed the vines. According to Robert M. Parker Jr., in his Bordeaux guide (3rd. ed., 1998), vineyards with heavier, moisture-holding soils fared best in 1990, particularly those in St.-Estèphe, Fronsac, and portions of St.-Emilion. But vineyards planted in lighter, gravelly, well-drained soils, like those of Margaux and the Graves, struggled in the heat, and many producers were compelled to pick earlier than desirable lest the grapes desiccate on the vine.

The best Bordeaux wines from 1990 were fruit-forward and concentrated, and—surprise!—Parker loved them. He called it the best vintage since 1982, which in his view had been “the modern-day reference for the greatness Bordeaux can achieve.” Parker especially liked what Cos d’Estournel, a St.-Estèphe estate, had achieved in 1990, and rated them among his top producers for the vintage. In December 2001, he re-tasted the 1990 Cos and declared it ready, with fifteen years of life ahead.

We’ve overrun Parker’s runway by about ten years, and the wine was showing its age but was still enormously pleasurable. Deep amber red, its robe was tea-stained and shrouded with abundant tartrate sediment, a signal that the tannins had softened. The wine’s texture was diaphanous, drifting off in a whisper. A sense of nut and violets and fresh tobacco wreathed the wine, and flavors of red berries and coffee anchored its midsection. The fruit was no longer opulent and concentrated but attenuated and ethereal. The texture, for me, won the day.

13% ABV | This vintage is currently available at various U.S. merchants for about $350; the wines are currently imported by Millesima

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Olga Raffault Les Picasses Chinon 2019

Olga and Pierre Raffault farmed a site near the Loire and Vienne Rivers. When Pierre died suddenly, in 1947, Olga was left with two small children and fruit hanging on the vines. She was able to enlist the help of Ernest Zeinninger, a former German prisoner of war who’d been in service to the estate. He went on to make the wine for many years, tutoring the Raffaults’ son, Jean.

Today Jean’s daughter, Sylvie Raffault, along with her husband, Eric de la Vigerie, and their son, Arnaud de la Vigerie, manage production. The estate has 24 hectares in vine, 23 of which are Cabernet Franc for Chinon Rouge and Rosé, with the remaining hectare planted to Chenin. Farming is certified organic, and the winemaking is old-fangled.

“Les Picasses” is a plot of fifty-plus-year-old vines. The wine spends two to three years in oak tanks and is usually released four years after the vintage. It is profusely aromatic, sylvan, wild smelling, a mélange of feral fruits and flowers with a leathery, tea-like fringe. But it also feels completely alive, with focus and shiny acidity. It’s fully mature, concentrated, and sophisticated but also playful.

13.5% ABV | About $30; Imported by Louis/Dressner Selections, LDM Wines Inc.

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Benanti Nerello Cappuccio Terre Siciliane IGT 2021

I’ve written previously about my visits to Benanti winery, in Viagrande on the southeast slope of Etna (find a full tasting report here and the Etna Rosso in a recent Notable). This wine is 100 percent Nerello Cappuccio, a grape native to Etna but almost always blended with Nerello Mascalese, the volcano’s more famous red grape. Cappuccio brings color, acidity, and fruit flavors to the blend while moderating Nerello’s grippy bite. Benanti first bottled it as a varietal wine in 1998.

I love this wine, but I can understand why most winemakers would blend the grape; in lesser hands Cappuccio as a monovarietal might feel too delicate, even vaporous. Benanti’s wine is lissome but not without substance. Its fragrance mingles roses with spearmint, sea air, and smoke. The first sip offers pleasing fruit, then the wine seems to vanish for a moment before it rushes back with flavors of rare meat and violets, anise and orange peel. Much later, I got a hit of cinnamon. Yes, a lot going on, but it’s a lovely glass of wine, and given its rarity a privilege to taste.

13.5% ABV | About $36; imported by Wilson Daniels, Inc.

La Farra Prosecco

Prosecco has a bad rap in the U.S. The criticism is mostly well earned, since the overwhelming majority of the stuff sold here is utterly characterless. But better Prosecco does exist, grown in Asolo or in the hilly zone between Valdobbiadene and Conegliano, where vineyards stripe the chunky “hogback” hills. There the Glera vines struggle more than in the fertile Venetian lowlands (the source of the uninspired fizz), and struggle builds character. The terrain also demands hand cultivation, and handwork means producers must pay attention.

Certain designated regions in this zone, called rive, produce the highest quality grapes, and producers are permitted to put named rive on the label alongside the protected designation of origin, Prosecco Superiore DOCG. Glera, the grape, originated hereabouts and was, until 2009, called Prosecco. That was the year the DOCG was approved, and the name was changed to eliminate confusion between the grape and the legally demarcated region. It also allowed the Italians to go after anyone outside of Italy using the Prosecco name for Prosecco-grape wines (although the Australians, in particular, largely ignored their entreaties).

I’ve visited Conegliano-Valdobbiadene and Asolo several times to taste the Superiore wines. The best have a fine, pearly bead, aromas of white flowers, and flavors of stone and pome fruits. Although made in styles from bone dry to sweet, much Superiore is Brut, making it a fine aperitif that can also slide into the meal.

Recently I tasted a trio of Prosecco Superiore from La Farra. The company is run by Adamaria, Innocente, and Guido Nardi, siblings who took over from their father, Gian Domenico Nardi, in 1997. They farm about 25 hectares in Conegliano-Valdobbiadene, including plots in the rive of Farra di Soligo, Pieve di Soligo, Follina, and San Pietro di Feletto. Farming is SQNPI certified.

La Farra Brut Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore 2024

Pale, elegant, dimensional. The fizz from the pour quickly settles into a quiet bead. There is a sense of bread, white flowers, and white orchard fruits, with a finish like pear nectar. Seamless, balanced, no elbows or knees.
11% ABV| About $19 (sample)

La Farra Extra Brut Rive di Farra di Soligo Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore 2024

A rive wine, Extra Brut. Pale and delicate, it has a fragrance of bread, apple, pear, and spring flowers. Its texture is fine and pearlescent, carrying flavors of ripe pear, both skin and flesh. It finishes clean, almost bracing, but the fruit lingers. Elegant and refined.
11.5% ABV | About $20 (sample)

La Farra Extra Dry Rive di Farra di Soligo Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore 2024

The same wine but Extra Dry, the sweetness not distracting but instead more like a yellow highlighter on the pear and apple fruit. It smells riper, fuller, but still finishes clean.
11.5% ABV | About $20 (sample)

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Three Scharffenberger Sparklers

We pivot to another sparkling wine producer nearly half a world away, in California’s Anderson Valley.

In 1973, John Scharffenberger was a fresh graduate of UC Berkeley with a major he’d cobbled together from courses in soil science, botany, geology, and landscape architecture. That year he purchased a 1,255-acre ranch in Mendocino County and started to plant it to vines. His single goal was to produce traditional method sparkling wines, and over the next decade, while his site matured, he worked at a handful of wineries and took classes at UC Davis to build his skills.

The first vintage of Scharffenberger Cellars was 1981, with winemaking in a warehouse space in Ukiah. By 1989 Scharffenberger had enjoyed enough success to catch the attention of the parent company of Champagne Pommery, and their fresh investments let him buy new property and build a new winery facility in Philo. It opened in 1991, the year John turned forty.

But four years later, in 1995, Scharffenberger completely exited the wine business. He sold his stake to the French parent and pivoted to another luxury industry, launching Scharffen Berger Chocolate. He and his business partner sold that company to Hershey ten years later.

In 2004, The Roederer Collection acquired Scharffenberger Winery, and today Jeffrey Jindra is winemaker and Bob Gibson directs vineyard operations. The 120-acre estate is sustainably farmed. A hallmark of the Scharffenberger style is the use of about 12 percent reserve wine in the nonvintage cuvées, plus the fact that about 80 percent of lots go through malolactic conversion. These techniques add toasty, nutty, and caramel notes that can be overpowering if the acidity and texture aren’t in balance.

When I’ve tasted these wines in the past, I found those notes distracting, but these three bottles changed my mind. They felt charming: accessible, friendly, and well priced. They’d be good choices for a wedding or shower or picnic or lawn party or fill-in-the-blank festive gathering where you want an affordable sparkler that doesn’t scream Look at me, it just says Drink me.

Scharffenberger Brut Excellence Mendocino County NV

A 60/40 blend of Chardonnay and Pinot noir with a dosage of 8.5 g/L. It smells like pastry and marzipan and tastes like red and yellow apple, toasted almond, and caramel. But it also has a kind of grippy, woodsy seriousness that grounds it. It finishes round and fruity, lightly ambrosial. Just the right side of not too sweet.
12.5% ABV | $24 (sample)

Scharffenberger Rosé Mendocino County NV

Pale shell pink, quite pretty, the color achieved from adding 4 to 5 percent Pinot noir prior to bottle fermentation. The finished blend is 55 percent Chardonnay and 45 percent Pinot noir, and the dosage, like that of the Brut Excellence, is 8.5 g/L. It’s fragrant of strawberries, pastry, marzipan. It’s open-textured, as is the Brut, with melodious berry fruit and a touch of cream and almond.
12.5% ABV | $30 (sample)

Scharffenberger Blanc de Noirs Mendocino County 2019

This vintage blanc de noirs is a blend of 40 percent Pinot noir, 33 percent Pinot gris (stretching “noir” a bit), and 27 percent Meunier. The dosage is slightly lower, at 8 g/L, and the metrics for titratable acidity and pH reveal it to be a sharper wine. The mousse is busy, active, and the wine offers scents of lime and cherries. The flavors are likewise fruity but its acidity feels bracing and breezy. Touches of toast and marzipan add depth, but overall it’s cleansing, cooling, fresh.
12.5% ABV | $40 (sample)

All photos ©2026 Meg Maker. Some wines (indicated) were samples for review.

Welcome back to Notable, where twice a month I round up the best, or at least most engaging, wines from recent tasting.

We start off with three Lambrusco (Lambruschi?) made in a range of methods: charmat, traditional method, and ancestral. They’re from a newer, organic producer, Ventiventi, in Emilia-Romagna. To honor their territory, I’ve illustrated the entire post with photos from my trip to the region in 2019. Read more about that visit, and see more photos, in Artful Wine: A field report from Emilia-Romagna.

We then turn homeward, tracking two natural wines from La Garagista, in Vermont, again both fizzy. One’s made from grapes, the other from apples, but it’s all just “wine” to makers Deirdre Heekin and Caleb Barber. Get a further taste of their work, and that of other Vermont cider makers, in a short film I made in 2020, Vermont Terroir Cider: A Moment in Time.

There’s a red wine from Quinta da Fonte Souto in Alentejo. It’s a project by the Symington family; they’re best known for port but, like many other producers in the Douro, have recently branched into still wines to meet the market.

Finally, we visit the Willamette Valley of Oregon to taste a vineyard designate from organic Bethel Heights, one of the region’s earliest Pinot producers, and an AVA bottling from Lemelson, an organic producer with a gonzo gravity-fed winery. I visited both in 2014 and have admired their wines ever since. Enjoy.

Three dry Lambrusco

Cantina Ventiventi is a new-ish project located north of Modena. The Razzaboni family bought the land in 2014, planted in 2016, and had their first release in 2020—ventiventi means “twenty-twenty” in Italian. They prioritize the local grapes Lambrusco di Sorbara, Lambrusco Salamino, Pignoletto, and Ancellotta, but also have some Pinot bianco and Chardonnay. Their 30 hectares of vines and their winery are organic certified, and they use only estate-grown fruit for their sparkling and still wines. The wines are imported into the U.S. by Wineberry and Vinea, Inc.

Ventiventi La Vie Lambrusco Rosso di Modena Brut 2024

A charmat method wine, like most modern Lambrusco.1 The grape is Lambrusco di Sorbara, one of the ten forms of the Lambrusco grape recognized in a 2010 Italian vine census. The wine erases the sweet aftertaste of the commodity Lambrusco that washed our shores in the 1980s. It’s a clear raspberry color, dry, tart, and piquant, with biting effervescence and snappy notes of cranberry and strawberry. Also: ten percent alcohol! Less is more.
10% ABV | $24 (sample)

Ventiventi Metodo Classico Lambrusco Rosato di Modena 2020

Also a varietal Lambrusco di Sorbara, this time a rosé wine made in the traditional method (metodo classico), like champagne. This is not common in Emilia and suggests the makers posit it as a prestige cuvée. This bottle was disgorged in late 2023. The wine is a pale onion skin color that twinkles pink in the busy bead. Not a creamy wine, not toasty despite the time on lees, it reads as dry, young, and vital: apple and sage, bread and strawberries sprinkled with salt. The foamy mousse fizzles out slowly, leaving pleasurable bitterness.
12% ABV | $30 (sample)

Ventiventi Happy Selvaggio Ancestrale Lambrusco dell’Emilia NV

A third Lambrusco di Sorbara, this time made in the ancestral method (metodo ancestrale), which was common in ye olden days before tank production took root. It’s deep red, the color of cranberry juice, but cloudy from the leesy sediment. The texture is huge and spumy, carrying flavors of bitter blackberry—in a nice way, like biting into blackberry flesh and crunching blackberry seeds. It’s bone dry and savory, yet it blooms in the finish with a sense of spring flowers. Drink it with salumi; wash it down.
11% ABV | $25 (sample)

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Two fizzy wines from La Garagista

La Garagista farms four plots in Vermont: at their home, in Barnard, and at sites in West Addison, Bridgewater, and Vergennes. They follow organics and biodynamics, allow ambient cultures to do the work, and use no sulfites, fining, or filtration. They work with hybrid grapes that can tolerate Vermont’s gelid climate, along with apples and other fruits sourced from the landscape.

La Garagista Lupo in Bocca Frizzante Rosé Vermont 2022

It’s labeled “rosé” but it’s a skin-contact wine made from Frontenac gris, a hybrid whose grapes are light coppery-purple. The juice stayed in contact with skins long enough to take on a rich amber hue, then oxidative aging deepened the color. The wine earned sparkle in bottle. “Lupo in Bocca” is a catchy twist on an old Italian expression, In bocca al lupo, literally “in the wolf’s mouth,” used to wish someone good luck. (I mean, it’s not any crazier than “break a leg.”) Maybe I’m suggestible, but this wine has teeth. It’s active, prickly, textural. Flavors of dried apricot mingle with burning leaves, fresh and dried herbs. It’s more about structure than fruit, more about texture than flavor. Not a wine I can understand after a single glass.
12% ABV | $48 (sample)

La Garagista The Flesh and the Bone Cider Vermont 2023

An ancestral method cider made from apples grown at La Garagista’s Barnard property. It’s honeyed, with a sense of burning sweetgrass and bruised apple. Curiously both firmly malic (it is cider, after all) and also a bit lactic, the two jostling within the chewy fizz. The finish grips and foams. This cider tastes to me like autumn in Vermont, and I fully understand if you’re not familiar with that flavor but hope you taste it someday.
10% ABV | $46

Quinta da Fonte Souto Red Alentejo 2020

And now for something completely different, a red blend from the Alentejo, south of Lisbon. It’s made from Alicante Bouchet, Alfrocheiro, Syrah, and Touriga Nacional, a blend not only of grapes but grape origins. Its robe is inky and the wine darkens into flavors of cured meat, red fruit, and black coffee. Brooding and chewy and faintly reminiscent of a Northern Rhône Syrah, it’s not an aperitif wine—it’s too savory and dense—but it’s a bold contender with roasted meat.
14.5% ABV | $32 (sample); imported by Premium Port Wines

Two Willamette Valley Pinots

Bethel Heights Pinot Noir Aeolian Eola-Amity Hills Willamette Valley 2022

Bethel Heights farms eighty acres in the Eola-Amity Hills, mostly planted to Pinot noir with a little Chardonnay and Pinot blanc. Farming is organic, LIVE, and Salmon Safe certified. Founded in 1977 by siblings named Casteel who ran it collaboratively with their spouses, it’s now helmed by the second generation, with Mimi Casteel as viticulturist and Ben Casteel as winemaker. The Aeolian bottling uses fruit from older blocks known for yielding wines of finesse. The result is dark with light flashes, or maybe the other way around. Limpid cherry color, glimmers of red fruit, flares of cherrystone acidity, but also earth, loam, coffee, and more tannin than usual in Willamette Pinot. A wine to be taken seriously.
13.4% ABV | $50

Lemelson Pinot Noir Thea’s Selection Willamette Valley 2022

Lemelson Vineyards, another organic producer, is a somewhat younger project, producing their first vintage in 2001. Founder Eric Lemelson was an environmental lawyer and advocate, and when it was time to build a winery, he worked with green building architects to create a multi-level facility that allows all grapes and wine to be moved by gravity. Thea’s Selection uses fruit from five estate vineyards. Fermentation is with ambient cultures and the wine is un-fined and un-filtered. Highly perfumed, it yields a sense of strawberry and hibiscus, cranberry, tart blueberry, with a little back-palate kick of spice—not barrel spice but fruit spice given the prominence of Pommard and Wädenswil clones. In my notes I wrote, “It smells the way red velvet should taste.” I’ll just leave it there.
13.5% ABV | $40

All photos ©2026 Meg Maker. Some wines (indicated) were samples for review.

We venture widely with this week’s roundup, starting in France, heading west to Vermont and California, then landing at last in Portugal. These are celebratory wines, opened to wave away the darkness and remind of summer’s promise.

Drink more Burgundy!

Benoît Cantin La Grand Côte Irancy 2019

A wine evocative of field and forest, croft and cottage (an old farm but a working one, rough at the edges but with a tidy potager), sheep grazing, chickens in the rows, bells tinkling across the pasture. Redolent of earth and cherries, loam and lavender. I always hesitate to use “Old World” but this wine is a journey back.
13% ABV, $33; imported by Kermit Lynch; Benoît Cantin

Vermont hybrid fizz

La Garagista Ci Confonde Bianco Vermont 2024

A resolutely New World wine but with a leafy Old World vibe. One hundred percent Brianna, an interspecific hybrid grape bred by Elmore Swenson, über cold tolerant and highly perfumed. Winemakers Deirdre Heekin and Caleb Barber fashion it into a white pét-nat sparkler for their line called ci confonde (literally, “it confounds us”). It’s likely to confound others, too, with its leesy sludge in the punt that fogs the fizzy pour. But then the perfume hits, conjuring all that’s sweet and holy: acacia honey, tarragon, anise, one-hundred-year-old candle, the chapel before dawn. Bizarre and beautiful at once.
11% ABV | $41; La Garagista

La Garagista Ci Confonde Rosé Vermont 2024

Another “confounding” wine, this one a rosé, cloudy like is bianco sister. One hundred percent Frontenac Gris, a variety I grow at my own home in Lyme thanks to long friendship with Deidre and Caleb; he claims it as his favorite grape. It’s another hybrid, developed at University of Minnesota by breeder Peter Hemstad. As a gris its skins are coppery-pink-purple; now here is the chapel at dusk. I chewed this wine’s fine foam the better to savor its flavors of honey, apricot, and dried orange peel. There is acetic here, and other acids, too, of course, not a fault but an uplift. It’s fully alive, vital, invigorating. I could drink it daily.
11% ABV | $41; La Garagista

Pinot, Pinot, Chardonnay (and Pinot)

Domaine Anderson Pinot Noir Estate Vineyard Anderson Valley 2022

A wine grown in two organic Anderson Valley vineyards, floral and woodsy, as if you’d macerated raspberries with sun-dried tomato in a red cedar bowl. The mid-experience is dappled with spice and sunlight. It’s a glittery wine, transparent.
14.5% ABV | $55 (sample); Domaine Anderson

Domaine Anderson Pinot Noir Pinoli Vineyard Anderson Valley 2022

Chewier than the Estate wine, earthier, even shadowy, as if the clouds had gathered over the vineyard and maybe it’ll rain soon, too. Suede, sous-bois, pine needles, and, again, sun-dried tomato, an umami burst. Spangled with flowers that light up the darkness. Pace yourself; both wines are high-alcohol.
14.9% ABV | $70 (sample); Domaine Anderson

Presqu’ile Brut Cuvée Santa Maria Valley NV

Weighty, dimensional, celebratory. It’s a traditional method sparkling wine made from a perpetual cuvée (they call it a solera) started in 2017. This blend’s got a little more Chardonnay than Pinot Noir, and it’s an animated wine, busy, with flavors of sherry and biscuit and marzipan plus a crunchy, salty finish. Loud enough for a party.
12.9% ABV | $45 (sample); Presqu’ile Vineyard

Tawny A meets Tawny B

In September of 2019, I sat down at Quinta do Bomfim for a memorable tasting of tawny ports from Graham’s and Dow’s. There were 10-, 20-, 30-, and 40-year-old wines, plus a few colheitas, which are tawny ports from a single vintage. The houses are owned by the Symington family, whose portfolio also includes Cockburn’s and Warre’s. Over the previous five days I’d traveled up and down the Douro (and sometimes on it) to visit their various estates and watch wine being made.1

Tawny port is a wine of effort, but it’s also a traditional wine whose making perpetuates, and honors, a centuries-old process. First, the grapes are made swiftly into wine, a period lasting merely three to four days. Next the wine is fortified to arrest fermentation before all of the sugar is gone. Then, it’s transferred to large, elongated barrels, called pipes, which are carefully designed to let it experience the right mix of wood and air over a long aging period. Finally the wine is blended and bottled and makes its way out into the world. It’s all a bit improbable and miraculous.

The tawny tasting at Bomfim was meant to showcase the different house styles. Dow’s tawny ports are dryer, darker, more savory. The wine gets agitated more during the brief fermentation, so it also has more tannin. Graham’s is a sweeter style, not treacly but noticeable in its forward expression of sugar.2

As with all my travels in wine country, I was alone among peers, viz., not on vacation, and especially not on vacation with my spouse. But after gushing to him about this tasting at dinner recently, I realized I could offer him a flavor of it as a Christmas gift. I could only afford one each of the 20-year wines; more would have been better, but these two wink, at least, at the larger story.

Graham’s 20-year Tawny Port

Dark honey, caramel apple, maple custard, tarte tatin. Sultry, smooth, and generous, expansive, lifting (surprise!) into flavors of red apple. Then: red velvet and a Renaissance still life, fruits and nuts, hanging fowl, copper pots, dark wine in fragile glass. Sweet-toned, charming, it welcomes like a bell.
20% ABV | About $75; imported by Premium Port Wines; Graham’s Port

Dow’s 20-year Tawny Port

More dark honey but also bitter nut, orange peel, licorice, rubescent fruit, old wood. Dense and savory, more extract, more structure, glazed with a mineral craquelure. I think about landscape, now, not interior but exterior, not still life but moving, the darkening forest at last light, woodland creatures in the underbrush finding their supper or their bed. A glowing coal of a wine, one to end the evening.
20% ABV | About $75; imported by Premium Port Wines; Dow’s Port

Flag Day: Variations ©2025 Meg Maker. Starting in January 2026, Notable will be a paid feature.

Here in Lyme, N.H., we were surprised by early snow. It hit just after Thanksgiving and stuck around, building up after subsequent dustings as temperatures dipped below zero Fahrenheit. When I was a kid, growing up in Maine, winter always came this early, but in the last decade we’ve not gotten snow that sticks until well into the new year.

To honor the prospect of a snowy Yule, I’ve plucked photos from my archive of backyard winter visitors and scenes to illustrate this post, some taken from the very desk at which I’m typing now. It’s a grab-bag of critters to accompany a grab-bag of wines, which I’ve chosen, almost at random, to order by style: sparkling, white, red. Enjoy.

Three Sparklers from Roederer Estate

Roederer Estate is the California project of the historic champagne house Louis Roederer. Founded in the Anderson Valley in 1982, they produce only traditional method sparkling wines using fruit sourced exclusively from their 580-acre estate. Farming is organic and biodynamic, and in the cellar, they maintain a reserve program with oak aging to add dimension to their cuvées. The wines are consistently high quality and deliver terrific value.

Roederer Estate Brut Anderson Valley NV

A 60/40 blend of Chardonnay and Pinot noir with 10 to 15 percent reserve wine and a dosage of 8 grams per liter. It’s pale yellow with a busy bead that blooms in notes of citrus and marzipan. It has a solid fruit core and a succulent finish, and while I’d prefer a touch less sweetness, the dosage does balance the wine’s firm acidity.
12.5% ABV | $32 (sample)

Roederer Estate Brut Rosé Anderson Valley NV

The Rosé is 56 percent Pinot noir and 44 percent Chardonnay, with, again, 10 to 15 percent reserve wine. The dosage is slightly lower than that of the Brut, at 7 grams. It is light salmon pink with a fragrance that suggests strawberries, pastries, and mint. The texture is lavish, crackly, carrying flavors of berries and biscuit. The sugar melts into the wine just right.
12.5% ABV | $39 (sample)

Roederer Estate Clark Road Sparkling Wine Anderson Valley 2021

The Clark Road vineyard sits at a particularly cool, slow-ripening spot in Anderson Valley. The blend for this vintage wine is 78 percent Pinot noir and 22 percent Chardonnay, the fruit partially fermented in oak casks. The winemakers used about 5 percent cask-aged reserve wine in this bottling. The finished acidity is remarkable (for the geeks: pH 2.96 and TA 9.3 g/L), while the dosage is the lowest of these three at 5.5 grams. That adds up to a wine that feels electric, crackling with citrusy salinity but grounded by a sherry-almond bass note. The mousse is fine and creamy, soothing the nervy tension of the attack. It’s a sparkler that really demands food.
12.5% ABV | $55 (sample)

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Merriam Vineyards Blanc de Noirs Russian River Valley 2022

Merriam farms two estates in the Russian River Valley, one planted exclusively to Bordeaux varieties, the other to Chardonnay, Pinot noir, Sauvignon blanc, and a smattering of others. Farming is C.C.O.F. certified organic. This Blanc de Noirs is their only sparkling wine, made in the traditional method from 100 percent Pinot noir. It’s rose gold with a breezy fragrance of red fruit, and the mousse is fine, delivering a mouthful of watermelon, peach, and apricot. The finish is salty with a touch of leesy savoriness. Overall it’s a ripe wine, ample, one to pair with buttery, salty, crispy snacks.
14% ABV | $58 (sample)

Smith-Madrone Estate Riesling Spring Mountain District Napa Valley 2021

Stuart Smith founded Smith-Madrone in 1971, planting Chardonnay, Riesling, and Cabernet Sauvignon on the steep slopes of Spring Mountain. Earlier this fall I recommended their Cabernet, and here’s the Riesling. Vintage 2021 is the current release, suggesting the winery holds onto the wine until it has a strong sense of self. As a Riesling it feels totally correct; in my notes I wrote “smells like Riesling,” which is not a given with so many American bottlings. It has that hydrocarbon note, like new plastic but flowery, as if the plastic grew on blooming trees. The texture is silken, the modest acidity beautifully integrated, and I got suggestions of dried flowers, tart pear, green tea, maybe green olive. I loved this wine and cannot wait to try the 2022 and 2023 when the winery decides to send them out into the world.
13.2% ABV | $40 (sample)

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Barboursville Vermentino Reserve Virginia 2023

This varietal Vermentino, from Barboursville Vineyards, was the overall winner at the Virginia Governor’s Cup competition earlier this year. The grape, originally from the Mediterranean, does well in Virginia’s piedmont, especially in the hands of winemaker Luca Paschina, originally from the other Piedmont, in Italy. This version is redolent of bay leaf, lime, and rain on rocks, and its flavors are citrusy, with an herbal finish that also has a bite of grapefruit bitterness. It’s textural, with good weight and a light grip. Pleasing, shiny, and a good value.
13.5% ABV | $23 (sample)

Troon Vineyard Druid’s White Applegate Valley 2024

Troon Vineyard is a regenerative organic and biodynamic project in the Applegate Valley, in southern Oregon. This wine is a blend of varieties originally from another valley half a world away, the Rhône. It’s about half Grenache blanc with portions, in decreasing order, of Bourboulenc, Roussanne, Vermentino, Clairette blanche, and Picpoul. The fruit was whole-cluster pressed and the wine fermented with ambient cultures in a mix of neutral barrel and concrete; it went through full malolactic conversion. The result is lightly cloudy with flowery-sweet notes of apple blossom, pear, and lemongrass with a finish like lemon drop. My notes say “it’s like lying in summer grass,” perhaps aspirational in mid-December, but what more could one ask?
12.4% ABV | $30 (sample)

Chardonnay and Pinot noir from Talley Vineyards

The Talley family has been farming in San Luis Obispo since 1948, at first just vegetables, but in 1982 they added grapes, committing to Pinot noir and Chardonnay. In 1987, the family planted the 28-acre Rosemary’s Vineyard, named for the founder’s daughter-in-law. Viticulture is certified sustainable and fermentations are spontaneous; the wines are bottled unfined and unfiltered.

Talley Vineyards Chardonnay Rosemary’s Vineyard Arroyo Grande Valley 2023

Rosemary’s Chardonnay was whole-cluster pressed and fermented in French oak barriques and puncheons, one-quarter new. It aged sur lie for 14 months prior to bottling and went through full malolactic. It’s a wine with profuse aromas and flavors: citrus peel, lemon-curd, grass, vanilla, toast. Texturally substantial, it is lifted up at the end by zingy acidity.
13.3% ABV | $75 (sample)

Talley Vineyards Pinot noir Rosemary’s Vineyard Arroyo Grande Valley 2023

Fruit for the Rosemary’s Vineyard Pinot comes from the original blocks, planted in 1987 to own-rooted Wädenswil clones. Clear cherry red, it’s perfumed of wild rose and raspberry, and the texture is light, with faint tannic grip. The flavors darken from red to black, with a nutty bitterness at the finish adding interest.
13.8% ABV | $95 (sample)

Montinore Estate Pinot Noir Red Cap Willamette Valley 2023

I’ll close out this Notable with a weeknight libation, not a sample but instead a wine we keep on our rack to crack open (literally; it has a screw cap) when we want red refreshment. Montinore’s farming is Demeter and C.C.O.F. certified. It’s juicy wine with a scent of pine, wintergreen, flowers, and cherries. Pleasantly grippy, the flavors skew toward red currant and cranberry with hints of resinous herbs. It’s crunchy, uplifting, and more interesting than you’d guess at first sip.
13.4% ABV | About $30

All images ©Meg Maker. Most wines (indicated) were samples for review.

The weather’s been sniveling and it’s snowing as I write this, although I don’t expect the stuff to last for long. Winter has been coming later to New England, and lasting later into spring—when we most want it to be gone. So I’ve been opening earthy reds, including favorites from Italy and France, plus a handful of whites that shine light into the evening gloom of Standard Time.

Two Chardonnays from Merry Edwards

Merry Edwards started making wine in the mid-1970s, first at Mount Eden Vineyards, in the Santa Cruz mountains, and later at Matanzas Creek, in Santa Rosa. In 1997 she launched her own label, Merry Edwards Winery, to focus on Pinot noir from the Sonoma Coast and Russian River Valley. She grew her vineyard holdings to 80 acres and became best known for single-vineyard bottlings. The company also obtained Certified California Sustainable Winery status.

In 2019 she sold the winery to Maison Louis Roederer and retired from daily production, passing those reins to her hand-picked successor, Heidi Von der Mehden. Nicole Carter serves as president, so the company has the distinction of being led by three women, rare even in 2025.

I have a number of Merry Edwards Pinots on my sample shelf and will get to them presently. But first, two Chardonnays.

Merry Edwards Chardonnay Anderson Valley 2023

A juicy, light-textured Chardonnay characteristic of this cooler-climate valley. The texture is silken, with a creamy mid-palate and bright finish. Sunny flavors of citrus, especially grapefruit, add levity. The wine was both barrel fermented and aged in French oak, one-quarter new, but the wood doesn’t sit like a heavy coat; it’s more like a shawl around the shoulders. It’s pleasurable especially with dishes with a bit of salt and fat (I mean, what wine isn’t).
14% ABV | $45 (sample)

Merry Edwards Chardonnay Olivet Lane Russian River Valley 2023

Olivet Lane Vineyard, in Santa Rosa, owned and farmed by the Pellegrini family, is planted exclusively to Pinot noir and Chardonnay. Its customers include top producers like Williams-Selyem, Gary Farrell, Kosta Browne, and Merry Edwards. Like the Anderson Valley wine, fruit was barrel fermented and aged in French oak, but with a higher percentage of new wood. If the Anderson Valley wine is bright, this wine is dark. The texture is weighty, like heavy satin, and the wine reads as savory, with notes of dried citrus peel, herbs, and salt. So serious it’s almost stony, but it gives you a warm smile at the end. Not a wine to take for granted.
13.8% ABV | $70 (sample)

There’s always room for Etna Rosso

Longtime readers know my fondness for Etna wines, both white and red. I’ve visited the region on several occasions, most recently in September 2024 (read that trip report here). Below are two widely available Etna Rosso wines from notable producers.

Benanti Etna Rosso 2022

I admire Benanti’s wines, having twice tasted at the winery with Salvino Benanti, one of the second-generation twin brothers now in charge of the estate. The winery, located in Viagrande, owns vineyards all over the volcano and works only with indigenous varieties—Nerello Mascalese, Nerello Cappuccio, and Carricante—to produce white, rosé, red, and sparkling. Their Etna Rosso is 80 percent Nerello Mascalese with 20 percent Nerello Cappuccio, and the blend ages in both stainless steel and oak. The perfume is floral, piquant, a bouquet of dried rose petals and spice. The texture’s light, with vanishing tannins and crunchy fruit: cranberry, pomegranate, red currant. It’s a brisk red, with a forthrightness that feels correct and welcome.
13.5% ABV | About $30; imported by Wilson Daniels

Graci Etna Rosso 2023

Graci is located on the north slope of Etna, near Passopisciaro. They farm in several highly regarded contradas, including Feudo di Mezzo, Muganazzi, and Santo Spirito. This varietal Nerello Mascalese is grown at 600 to 700 meters above sea level, and the fruit is vinified with ambient yeast without temperature control in oak vats. The wine ages for 18 months. It’s limpid red and perfumed of flowers and cherries, strawberries macerated with balsamic, cinnamon and allspice. This profusion dissipates as the wine hits the palate and flows in a tight, straight line to the finish. Floral and cleansing at once, it was terrific with a fish dish accented with ginger and soy.
14% ABV | About $25; imported by Massanois

What would the ancestors say?

Earlier this month, I praised three wines from Albert Bichot, an ancient producer of Chablis, Burgundy, and Beaujolais wines now run by the 6th generation. I love to imagine the reaction of the original Monsieur Bichot on learning that his successors had slapped the family’s label on a passetoutgrain, offered it for $30, and actually won a customer.

Because passetoutgrain is historically a drinkable quaff of the people, not the peerage. Originally a field blend of Gamay and Pinot noir, harvested together and co-fermented—passe tout grains suggesting one should “put all the grapes together into the vat”—it’s intended as a lightly colored, fruity wine to be drunk young.

Even after Gamay was banished from the Côte d’Or, in the late 14th century, plantings remained for production of passetoutgrain, sometimes written passe-tout-grains. In the modern era, the wine earned legal AOC status in 1937, and the current rules stipulate the blend must contain a minimum of 30 percent Pinot noir and 15 percent Gamay.

Albert Bichot Bourgogne Passetoutgrain 2021

Bichot sources the Pinot noir and Gamay for their passetoutgrain from vineyards in the Côte d’Or and northern Saône-et-Loire départements. They still follow the ancient practice of co-vinification, and the wine is aged in stainless steel for eight or nine months before bottling. At first it’s grippy and astringent, the aromatics tinted green. But air loosens its resolve, and it starts to yield flavors of cherries and earth. Rummaging in its dark mid-section, I’m rewarded with savoriness and leather, a kick of peppery spice. I would not classify this as a lighthearted quaff, and it needs some babysitting in a decanter to be fully accessible. But it’s worth the effort to taste this bit of ancient history.
12.5% ABV | About $30; imported by Albert Bichot USA

All images ©2025 Meg Maker. Some wines (indicated) were samples for review.

I’ve been working through a raft of older Napa Cabernets—nothing extreme (not like this lineup)—just eight- or nine-year-old wines made by reputable producers. On release they’re boisterous, like puppies who have yet to earn manners, but a touch of age shows glimmers of personality, of charm. Or should. I thought I’d find a few easy wins to roll into this Notable, but I’m discovering the experience demands a longer post for another day.

So instead I’ve gathered a handful of wines that feel timely given the need to provision our racks for the Thanksgiving feast. There’s an American wine, a trio from the French (they did help us win independence, after all), and a humble Chilean Cab that shows us how, with wine, at least, time is on our side.

Oregon Pinot for an American holiday

My household drinks a lot of Pinot noir. Not fancy stuff, mostly Bourgogne rouge or Burgundian villages and neighborhoods,1 plus wines from Germany and Austria and the American West. Oregon Pinot is in regular rotation. I admire the wines for their freshness and spirit, and have enjoyed watching the second generation take over from their pioneering parents, the ones who kicked things off in the mid-sixties and early seventies—Eyrie, Bethel Heights, Sokol Blosser, Adelsheim, Ponzi. Producers are now leaning even further into regenerative viticultural practices and land stewardship.

Ken Wright Cellars Pinot Noir Willamette Valley 2024

Ken Wright has been farming wine in Carlton for nearly fifty years, making vineyard-designates from thirteen sites in the Willamette Valley, including the sub-AVAs of Yamhill-Carlton, Ribbon Ridge, Eola-Amity Hills, and Dundee Hills. Farming is certified organic and the sites are vinified separately in small, open-top fermenters, then released as individual expressions. The Willamette Valley AVA bottling blends grapes grown in the northern part of the appellation. It delivers plummy fruit, a peppery kick, and bracing acidity. It’s a cleansing, shiny wine, equally at home with fish, pork, poultry, vegetables, with hints of spice that readily tie it to certain seasonings: ginger, clove, cinnamon, chili, soy.
13.8% ABV | $28

Modest investment, solid return

A colleague recently asked what wine I’d serve with a special holiday meal if price were no object. Lovely thought, but I’m a writer. Price is always an object. Fortunately, even some affordable wines earn specialness through cellar aging, delivering nuances that are otherwise bought with cash. Côtes du Rhône red is one example, ditto nonvintage traditional method sparkling wine. Here’s another, one that surprised me, actually, cellared since 2021 and originally just $16.

De Martino Estate Cabernet Sauvignon Maipo Valley 2020

De Martino, founded in Chile’s Maipo Valley in 1934, is today a significant organic producer working with estate fruit and a vast network of other vineyard sources. Just five years post-harvest, this Cab has earned tea-like flavors that complement its crunchy red fruit and leafy aromatics. It’s light-textured, with a silky mid-section and a touch of minty levity at the finish. I’d like to try aging their estate Carménère.
14% ABV | $16 (sample); imported by Broadbent Selections

A French trio: bulles, blanc, rouge

Albert Bichot, with headquarters in Beaune, traces its Burgundian heritage to 1350, when the family arrived to settle in Châteauneuf-en-Auxois. They entered the wine trade in 1831, operating at first exclusively as a négociant, but soon began buying estates and sites throughout the region. Albéric Bichot, the 6th generation, currently heads the company and has overseen conversion of all estates to organic practices. They own six châteaux, from Chablis through Beaujolais, each with its own production facility, as well as plots in many top Côte d’Or neighborhoods. They still operate as a négociant but buy only grapes, not finished wine, to ensure control and oversight.

Bichot produces more than two million bottles each year, a fact that may make one wonder about quality, but their reputation is strong, especially for white wines. I’ve yet to taste the top cuvées from their most prestigious sites (visit their “site Web” and click Wines; just look at that lineup), but I’ve found their entry-level offerings to be solid performers. Below is a trio that would work well for Thanksgiving: pleasing, food-friendly, lower alcohol, affordable. A bottle of each will set you back less than $75.

Albert Bichot Crémant de Bourgogne Brut Réserve NV

A 60/40 blend of Chardonnay and Pinot noir grown up and down the district, specifically in the Châtillonnais, Côte Chalonnaise, and Mâconnais. The blend includes 15 percent reserve wine and the bottles age for 18 to 20 months before disgorgement; the dosage is 7 g/L. It’s a soft gold color with a quiet, pearly bead. The aromas are honeyed, nutty, suggesting beeswax and lemon; I wrote “candlelit autumn fruits,” more evocation than flavor. The texture is spirited, carrying flavors of citrus and salt, and the wine exits in a flourish of juicy lime. Curiously complex for such a modest wine, offering an experiential arc from burnished through bright.
12.5% ABV | About $23

Albert Bichot Domaine Long-Depaquit Chablis 2023

Long-Depaquit is one of Bichot’s five owned château, farmed, as they all are, exclusively with organic practices. This Chablis AOP is produced from a number of different plots, the grapes vinified cold in stainless steel and aged on fine lees for nine or ten months before bottling. It’s gold with green glints (as Chablis should be) with a cooling fragrance of grapefruit peel and pith and something stony, like wet clay. It’s texturally satisfying, think whole milk not cream or skim, with scintillant acidity that lifts the finish.
12.5% ABV | About $30

Albert Bichot Origines Bourgogne Rouge 2023

Fruit for the Origines bottling likewise comes from various plots throughout the appellation, all on calcareous clay. It’s fermented in steel, then 80 percent ages in steel and the remainder in oak barrel for about a year. It’s not fleshy wine (even though their tech sheet says so), but a sinewy one, which actually feels correct for Bourgogne AOP. It’s limpid ruby with a stony cherry, lightly earthy fragrance. It has a light texture and youthful tannins, with flavors heading toward bitter cherry, fennel, and mint. This wine profits from a bit of air, so swirl it into a decanter (or large mason jar, whatever you’ve got) for a half an hour before serving. It will reward you with charming refreshment.
13% ABV | About $20
All wines are imported by Albert Bichot USA.

All photos ©2025 Meg Maker. Some wines (indicated) were samples for review.

Welcome back to Notable, where twice a month I highlight salient wines from recent tastings.

As the weather cools in New England, I’m rummaging my cellar and sample rack for wines with structure and depth. I have a lot of California Cabs to taste! But today there’s also news of a Chablis and two pink wines, because summer is not so far behind.

Chablis and memories

Jean-Marc Brocard Vieilles Vignes V.V.46 Chablis 2023

In July 2014, during on a brief holiday in Chablis with my husband, I booked a tasting at Jean-Marc Brocard. We arrived at the appointed time of 10:00 a.m. thinking we’d be wrapped by lunch. No dice. Our guide, Sebastien, toured us around the cellars before leading us through a tasting of twenty Village, Premier Cru, and Grand Cru wines. Then we moved to the dining room to enjoy a luncheon with the principals and other guests. After coffee, we squeezed into Sebastien’s tiny car and toured the rain-soaked Grand Cru vineyards, stopping at an ancient stone farmhouse where Brocard produces their biodynamic preparations. En route back to the winery, Sebastien ducked into a pastry shop, emerging to thrust nine perfect macarons into our astonished hands.

Later at our diminutive rental apartment, exhausted, we ravaged the macarons like feral beasts.

At lunch I’d been seated across from Julien Brocard, son of founder Jean-Marc and current head of operations. We talked about the vintage and the weather. I’d just learned the French word for hail, grêle, which was on every Burgundian’s mind that week. I also asked about the company’s embrace of biodynamics. I’m a long-time organic grower but dubious about the mystical elements of biodynamic practice. Apparently, so was Julien’s father, Jean-Marc. Nonetheless, two decades ago he’d granted Julien an experimental plot to tinker and to learn.

“Biodynamics is the Taoism of agriculture,” Julien told me (not exactly assuaging my doubts). “With conventional practice, you just erase the consequences of the disease. The main thing is to reach a balance between animals, vines, birds, insects—everything.” He said he’d seen an increase in the number of swallows in the vineyard, for instance, along with a marked difference in the quality of the soils and vineyard biota. “If the plants grow in harmony, you’ll feel it in the wine. You feel lively—the energy of nature. You feel it in your mouth.”

Coda: In 2023 we opened a bottle we’d brought back from our visit to Brocard, the Chablis Vau de Vey 2011. Find my notes on that wine (and more photos) here.

The Chardonnay for the Brocard Vieilles Vignes V.V.46 Chablis comes from old vines (vieilles vignes) planted in 1946. Fruit was vinified with ambient cultures with temperature control, and the wine completed full malolactic before aging in stainless steel. Green gold, it’s redolent of pear, lemon, apple, and wet clay. The texture is heavy, satiny, almost unctuous, but the wine vanishes in a flourish of light honey and citrus, sage and slate. I can feel it in my mouth.
13% ABV | About $40; imported by Boston Wine Co Ltd.

Rosé, but make it interesting

We like wine better when it has a back story—personal or cultural or viticultural or something else, but anyway a narrative that lets us slot it into our own storyline. This is especially true of pink wines, which we tend to lump together into one nameless, faceless style: “I’ll have a glass of the Montrachet, she’ll have the Malbec, and he’ll have the rosé.” And so, below, two pink wines that say something, at least to me.

Domaine des Peirecèdes Château la Tulipe Noire Côtes de Provence Rosé 2021

I have a cousin who lives in the south of France. Like me she grew up in Maine, but shortly after college married a French man, had two daughters, and went native. This summer when she visited us in the States she presented a rosé made in a village near her now-hometown.

“It’s the best rosé in the world!” she declared. I eyed her skeptically. “No, really. It just won a competition,” she said. I looked it up.

The wine is produced by Domaine des Peirecèdes, in Cuers, midway between Marseille and St. Tropez. They had submitted it to Vinalies Internationales 2025, an annual competition of over three thousand wines from all over the world. Judges award Grand Gold to the best wines and Palm d’Or to the top wine from each category. La Tulipe Noire took this year’s Palm d’Or in rosé, leading the producer to declare it “Meilleur rosé du monde!”

Peirecèdes was planted to grapes in 1900 and has been continuously farmed by successive generations of the same family. In 1991, Alain and Véronique Baccino added a vinification cellar to bottle their own wines, and today the couple’s daughters are part of the effort, Audrey as winemaker and Leslie in administration. Farming is organic, the production principally rosé and white with a smidgen of red. The family also maintains three guest houses for vacationers.

Château la Tulipe Noire Rosé 2021 is shell pink with a floral-peach aroma touched with herbs and spearmint. The texture is crisp but the wine expands in waves of peach and pear nectar plus guava, mango, passion fruit, banana—did I mention tropical fruit? It is a concentrated, succulent wine, ripe, almost floridly so, but with a calm finish that keeps it from spinning out of sight. Perhaps it’s not the best rosé in the entire monde, but it’s still a triumph for a tiny domaine.
14% ABV | About $25 in Europe (no U.S. importer)

Pietradolce Etna Rosato 2024

Earlier this month I effused about the wines of Pietradolce, recommending their entry-level Etna Rosso. I admire the wines and the mindset and wish I could afford their contrada bottlings on the regular. This is the only pink they make, and, along with their Etna Rosso, is on rotation in my household, a reminder of sunny days visiting the volcano.

Etna—like the rest of Italy, honestly—isn’t known for pink wine. It’s a pity, because the structured red grapes native to the mountain make an enchanting, savory rosato. Etna Rosato DOC must be at least 80 percent Nerello Mascalese with the balance made up of Nerello Cappuccio or Cappuccio mixed with other Sicilian grapes. According to Benjamin North Spencer, an Etna winemaker and the author of The New Wines of Mount Etna, the wine is usually direct-pressed, but makers might alternatively de-stem and let the berries macerate, sans oxygen, for up to 48 hours before drawing off juice for fermentation.

Pietradolce makes their Etna Rosato from 100 percent Nerello Mascalese, grown at 2,000 feet of elevation on the north slope and pressed and vinified in stainless steel. Salmon colored and fragrant of spearmint and peach, it has flavors of apricot muddled with dried strawberry. It has a mouthwatering midsection, the acidity serene but structured, and the finish feels limitless. It is a luscious rosé with great composure: charming but not unserious, fruity but also muscular, refreshing but lingeringly delicious.
13% ABV | About $34; imported by Empson Inc.

Spring Mountain throwdown, 2018 edition

I sometimes hold onto wine samples until I think they’re ready to drink. This drives publicists bonkers, but it’s a often question of “Too young” now versus “Terrific” five years later. (Although given the media cycle, publicists might still prefer the former.)

Opening a California Cabernet on release is infanticide, because the bottles leave the winery at the direction of the accountant, not the winemaker. The sales sheet might advise buyers to “drink now or hold for N years,” but N is often a vast understatement of the timeline along which the wine comes into itself. Well made California Cabernet can age gracefully for decades (read my tasting report on a special flight of vintages from 1974 to 2013), but even just five years of cellaring can offer glimmers of the wine’s trajectory and reveal truths about both vintage and vintner. Those notes help buyers assess whether to purchase the current release and if so, how long to hold it, and may even encourage them to acquire back vintages.

I recently opened two Napa Cabs from the Spring Mountain District, situated in the Mayacamas range just west of (and above) St. Helena. Both are the 2018 vintage, and I’d held onto them for a few years to see what they could do.

Meadowcroft Wines Cabernet Sauvignon Spring Mountain District Napa Valley 2018

Meadowcroft purchased the grapes for this bottling from a vineyard on the eastern slope of the range. They produced just this one vintage of the wine, only about 200 cases (so, yeah—my aging strategy did not pan out for buyers this time). It’s 100 percent Cabernet and looks more youthful than I expected, an opaque ruby color with a pale pink rim. It smells more youthful, too, suggesting red and black raspberry with only a touch of tawny oxidation. But on the palate the wine turns feral, darkening into hide or leather, something animal, with firm tannins and more oxidation. Strangely, the core of fruit feels almost candied, too concentrated. So, is this bottle too young, ready now, or over the hill? Yes, and no. The state of its structural elements suggests it could age for a couple more years, but by then the wine might have lost all freshness and levity, faded like last week’s flower arrangement. So, drink now (or last year) if you happen to have a bottle in your stash.
14.5% ABV | $125 on release (sample)

Smith-Madrone Cabernet Sauvignon Spring Mountain District Napa Valley 2018

This wine is not varietal but a blend of 86.5 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 7.5 percent Cabernet Franc, and 6 percent Merlot, all sourced from Smith-Madrone’s dry-farmed estate vineyard. One thousand cases were made. The robe is deep cherry with the faintest shimmer of auburn, and the perfume is intense, a potent mélange of juniper, pine, black fruits, red fruits. These themes continue in flavors of cherry and fennel with a velvety layer of soy-umami. The texture is like corduroy (I wrote “pettable”), and the acidity lavish and shimmery. In the finish there’s a flare of mint before the wine fades into savory darkness. This was truly an outstanding wine experience and, given the price of well-made Napa Cab, a terrific value; the 2021 vintage (the current release) will set you back just $65. I’m so glad I waited.
14.5% ABV | $62 on release (sample)

All photos ©2025 Meg Maker. Some wines (indicated) were samples for review.

Welcome back to Notable, where twice a month I highlight thoughtful wines from recent tastings.

Below are eight wines from Italy (well, two are from Sicily; not quite the same thing), all made from native or autoctono grapes. Such wines are, by nature, uniquely expressive of territorio,1 yet despite their far-flung distribution, the three reds, at least, evince strong kinship. They are textural, structured and tannic; they grip and scrub and lift. They are savory, earthy, and black fruited, with woodsy depths. They are dark but not starless; they shine without eclipsing the table.

Speaking of the table, a word about alcohol. As I’ve written previously (most recently in my last Notable), I favor digestibility and prefer wines below 14%. Only one of the following wines—predictably, the white—hits that mark. I raised these concerns in a digital tasting with Christian Pepi, who produces three of the wines below. “Vino Nobile has a lot of tannin, structure, and ripeness,” I said. “It can be in balance at fourteen and a half or fifteen degrees. But how do you think about the growing market preference for lower alcohol, given what your territory hands you?”

“Meg, I think it’s very hard!” he said, smiling and shaking his head. “Here, it’s very hard. Also in Barolo, in Amarone, in Primitivo area, in Nero d’Avola area. It’s very hard. Maybe we’ll start to blend with some other grapes, for example Canaiolo Nero, which is lower alcohol. We could add the maximum of white grapes, five percent. But it’ll be a challenge. It’s hard to deal with global warming. The maturation of the grapes is not like years ago. Every year the wines have a little more alcohol.”

“Are you considering using clonal selections to achieve physiological ripeness at lower potential alcohol?” I asked.

“Yes, I think we have to start working with clones. We have three universities—Bologna, Firenze, and Pisa—that are doing a long project on the clones of Sangiovese. At Talosa we have eight hectares of Prugnolo Gentile, but the rest is Sangiovese from a selection from Chianti. It’s easy, but it’s standard. My Sangiovese is like any other Sangiovese! The project that we have for Montepulciano—and it will take twenty, thirty years—is to take, once again, the native grapes and replace those vineyards from the 1980s and 1990s. But we need time.”

I can wait.

First up: Two Wines from Etna

Cottanera Etna Bianco 2023

The Cottanera family farms in Castiglione di Sicilia, on the north slope of Mt. Etna. If the mountain were a giant clock, it’s at about 1:30. Francesco Cottanera arrived there in 1962, at first tending a hundred acres of hazelnuts plus grapes he sold to the cooperative. In the 1980s the family ripped out the economically marginal nut trees and planted more vines, making some wine to sell in bulk to the enoteca. In the 1990s, Francesco’s son, Guglielmo, further commercialized the operation, tinkering with Merlot, Cabernet, and Syrah to appeal to broader markets. But by the early part of this century, the team was grafting those vines back to Nerello Mascalese and Carricante (thank goodness) to slake a newfound thirst for Etna Rosso and Etna Bianco. Now the third generation, Francesco, Mariangela, and Emanuele, run the show.

The Cottanera Etna Bianco is a varietal Carricante, straw yellow with a fragrance of pear and citrus and flavors of pear nectar, nectarine, and salt. The texture is zippy and salivating but with a coating midsection. The finish is herbal-saline-savory; the Italians would call this sapidità, “sapidity,” by which they mean, essentially, salty-savory. The wine is delicious and multidimensional, delivering fruit, refreshment, crunch.
12.5% ABV | About $32; imported by Indigenous Selections

Pietradolce Etna Rosso 2023

I love, love, love Pietradolce’s wines. I first encountered them on a tour of Etna in 2017, visiting their vineyards near Solicchiata (at about 1:00 on the mountain clock) with agronomist Giuseppe Parlavecchio. In their main plot, fifteen hectares are planted as bush vines, called alberello or “little tree.”

“It’s the best system,” Parlavecchio told me. “The plants feel all around them the air, the sun. The grape is always in the center. This is the best exposure for the grape.”

Etna delivers harsh growing conditions; “We have fifteen to twenty days per year with snow,” he said. But the mountain’s native red likes it here. “Nerello is a wild grape, a wild plant. It’s a rustic plant that survived in the summer, the heat, and the winter. It’s a strong grape, a strong variety.”

That strength saw some of Etna’s vines through phylloxera, and Pietradolce is privileged to farm an old-soul, centenarian plot in Contrada Rampante. I adore the wine they make from this site, called Barbagalli. On my repeat trips to Etna I’ve had the opportunity to re-taste it along with their other wines, which include old-vine, contrada, and standard Etna DOC wines in red, white, and pink. (View my report from my last comprehensive tasting, at Etna Days in 2024; scroll to the Tasting Notes section.)

The Pietradolce Etna Rosso is a varietal Nerello, grown in Solicchiata on the northern slopes of the volcano at 700 to 800 meters of elevation. Limpid red, it offers aromas of red fruits, violets, and fresh air. Its texture leans on acidity more than tannin, forming a delicate armature for flavors of strawberry and blood orange. I also get hints of rosemary and citrus peel at the end. It’s a clean, crystalline wine with fine details and a bracing finish. Wake up!
14.5% ABV | About $30; imported by Empson USA

Talosa Nobile di Montepulciano

An ancient cave lies beneath the main square in Montepulciano, in southeastern Tuscany. Originally excavated by the Etruscans and used to store salumi, cheese, and other foodstuffs, it was expanded in the 15th century with the help of neighboring Florentines grateful for the townspeople’s help in defeating the Sienese. Florence donated expertise and materials to construct vaulted rooms in the cave’s sandy, calcareous soils. During WWII, the corridors served as a refuge from fighting for nearly two thousand inhabitants.

Angelo Talosa bought the site in 1972, transforming it into a production facility for wines grown at Villa Talosa, two kilometers out of town. Today the cellars, at a constant 55℉ and 80% humidity, are used to age wines and host visitors. Fattoria della Talosa produces a hundred thousand bottles annually and is the process of organic conversion. Christian Pepi, who hosted that virtual tasting I mentioned in my introduction, trained in enology in Florence and is responsible for the blending.

Talosa Alboreto Nobile di Montalcino 2021

Garnet color with aromas that mix red with green: red berries, juniper berries, juniper leaf. The texture is velvety but firm and the acidity feels cleansing. The flavors recapitulate that sense of juniper- and rosemary-steeped fruits. Balanced and drinkable.
ABV 14.5% | $40 (sample)

Talosa Nobile di Montalcino Riserva 2020

The Riserva, aged a year longer, has a tawny cast and aromas of tea, wood, and dark berries. Texturally it’s smooth, with supple tannins and medium acidity. The flavors are likewise woodsy, but mostly about forest not barrel. The finish is drying, slightly astringent, lit up.
ABV 14.5% | $50 (sample)

Talosa Filai Lunghi Nobile di Montalcino 2021

This wine is made from a selection of their best grapes. It’s seamlessly knit, the acidity and tannins and fruit a tapestry of textures and flavors. There are aromas of berries, fresh air, and cedar, and the palate feels piquant: red fruits shiny with alcohol and acid and a finish like cinnamon.
ABV 15% | $60 (sample)
Talosa is imported by Wine Situation and other U.S. importers.

Josetta Saffirio

I joined another virtual tasting with Sara Vezza, winemaker and owner of Josetta Saffirio, in Monforte d’Alba. She is the fifth generation to head the estate founded by her ancestor in the early 1800s. In the 1980s, her mother, Josetta Saffirio, decided to stop selling grapes and start making wine. She enjoyed some success but soon realized it wasn’t the life for her. Sara was distraught at the prospect of losing the estate and the family’s agricultural lifestyle, so despite her youth and lack of training, she asked her parents for permission to take over. “I’m a determined person and I like hard work,” she said. She was twenty-two when she produced her first harvest, just one thousand bottles.

Over time Sara built a new cellar while converting production from conventional to organic. “I couldn’t suffer the chemicals in the vineyard,” she said. “It was a personal need. To be organic is a choice you do for yourself, because you want to live in a healthy place.” She embraced an ecological philosophy, replanting sixteen hectares of forest with truffle trees and tenderly husbanding surrounding fields to support a finicky native orchid. Most recently she has abandoned formal organic certification because she felt it didn’t go far enough; it was more about bureaucracy than biodiversity.

In 2023 the company partnered with Renzo Rosso, an Italian fashion mogul and wine-curious investor (he also finances Benanti, on Mt. Etna). The flood of cash is helping her renovate her cellar, acquire more vineyards, and refresh the brand. “I’m very happy to have this opportunity and this partner,” she said, “because they left the governance to me. It’s good for both sides.”

Josetta Saffirio Monforte d’Alba Barolo 2020

This bottling is the anchor of their production. The grapes have ten to twenty days of skin contact and the wine goes through malolactic in stainless, then ages two years in oak casks. The 2020 vintage was warm. The wine shows aromas of black tea, blackberries, and forest, and the tannins are smooth and even. Overall the wine feels youthful, approachable, easy to like.
14.5% ABV | $50 (sample)

Josetta Saffirio Millenovecento48 Castelletto Riserva Barolo 2017

The fruit for this bottling, made only in exceptional years, derives from a vineyard planted by Sara’s grandfather after the war, in 1948 (hence its name; millenovecento48 means nineteenhundred48). “I’m very bonded to this vineyard because it’s the beginning of everything for our family,” Sara said. The wine stays longer on the skins, thirty to forty days, and after pressing ages in Slavonian oak. Vintage 2017 was warm like 2020, and Sara feels the wine balances structure with elegance. The color is holding steady, only faintly tinted with age, and the fragrance suggests cherries and tea. The flavors are leathery and brambly, and the finish lightens up while the tannins dry down. The whole thing ends up feeling almost weightless, sylphlike, sleek.
14.5% ABV | $160 (sample)
Josetta Saffirio is imported by Metropolis and other U.S. importers.

All photos ©2025 Meg Maker. I’m grateful to AB Comunicazione for coordinating my virtual tastings with Cristian Pepi Talosa and Sara Vezza.

The opening salvo: a favorite white

White wine is for summer. White wine is also for fall, winter, and spring.

Feudi di San Gregorio Greco di Tufo 2022

This satiny white from Feudi di San Gregorio, located near Avellino, about 30 miles east of Naples, has been a favorite for years. It offers impressions of lemon, salt, and herbs, and while the acidity feels modest at first it builds to lemon-drop at the finish. It’s bracing and briny, great with snacks but substantial enough for complex fare.
12.5% ABV | About $23; imported by Terlato Wines Intl.

Three (expensive!) rosés

How many times have you paid more than $25 for a bottle of rosé? I can count mine on one hand. But on the other hand (the one not shelling out dollars), why must we assume rosé should be cheap? Good fruit, carefully farmed, from premium territory, is never inexpensive, and while cellaring costs are lower for whites and pinks than reds, labor and other production demands aren’t so different. Still, I hesitated to accept these three rosé samples from Domaines Ott simply due to their pricing tier. Then my curiosity overcame me.

Marcel Ott, an engineer from Alsace, decamped to Provence in 1896 and spent the next decade figuring out where (and probably how) to make wine. He bought Château de Selle, in Côtes de Provence, in 1912 and neighboring Clos Mireille in 1936. Twenty years later, the company added Château Romassan, in Bandol. The estates of Domaines Ott sit on different soil types: schist in Clos Mireille, limestone at de Selle, and a motley of sandy calcaire at Romassan. In 2007, Domaines Ott was acquired by the Roederer Collection, although the family remains involved. The wines have been certified organic since 2022.

Domaines Ott Château de Selle Rosé Côtes de Provence 2024

The blend is about half Grenache and one-third Cinsault with doses of Mourvèdre and Syrah. It’s seashell pink with focused yellow stone fruit aromas and a whiff of cut grass. It expands on the palate with mouth-filling flavors of peach nectar and dried apricots, and the finish blooms with more tangy fruit. Overall it’s a ripe, succulent wine that proves that pale does not mean insipid.
13.5% ABV | $65 (sample); imported by Maisons Marques & Domaines

Domaines Ott Château Romassan Rosé Bandol 2024

This wine is based on Mourvèdre, sixty percent, with the balance split between Cinsault and Grenache. Whereas the Château de Selle reads yellow, this wine reads red—red peach, blood orange, nectarine—with a whiff of something stonier, saltier. It’s equally concentrated, delivering a mouthful of fruit, but it has more nerve and structure. It’s my favorite of these three.
13.5% ABV | $69 (sample); imported by Maisons Marques & Domaines

Domaines Ott Étoile Vin de France 2023

This wine was a surprise. It’s an earlier vintage. It’s made from fruit from all three estates. The blend is eighty-five percent Grenache and fifteen percent Mourvèdre, although apparently the cuvée changes each year. And it’s subdued, almost inaccessible at first, yielding only a faint wet stone aroma. As it warms that shifts toward fruit without ever settling down. There are quiet flavors of peach or apricot and profound salinity, a sense of something green that grows by the sea. Its style is so unlike that of the other two I wondered if the bottle had been compromised—light strike being the most probable culprit, because they’re all packaged in flint glass (a bad idea; see more about it in my earlier article on rosé). But I didn’t get the swampy notes I’d expect from that flaw, and anyway the winery boasts about the wine’s delicacy, so perhaps its reticence is fully intentional. I used a Coravin on all of the bottles and tasted them over a few days, finally pulling the corks when it became conspicuously stupid to waste capsules on dregs. This wine eventually limbered up, but fruit never became its central through-line. If the other two wines are sunny, this one is sincere. Sometimes you want one, sometimes you want the other.
13.5% ABV | $175 (sample); imported by Maisons Marques & Domaines

Red wines for sweater weather

Sure, drink white and pink year-round, whatever. But last week we had our first frost, so laissez les bons temps rouler. Below is a hearty trio of reds, two French and one Italian, that I would pour with earthier autumnal cuisine.

Domaine Rimbert Les Travers de Marceau St. Chinian 2021

St. Chinian is a strange territory. It’s bisected into a northern region of schist, which gives the wines unmistakable smokiness, and a southern region of limestone, which gives them shiny, fizzy fruit. The division would seem a concise argument against geological terroir as the defining vector of an AOP, but the winemakers consider themselves a community, and I guess that’s enough for the INAO and, frankly, anyone who cares about keeping the Languedoc in vine. Domaine Rimbert farms in both soils, and all wines are certified organic. This bottling is a schist-based wine, half Syrah blended with Carignan, Mourvèdre, and Cinsault, hand harvested and fermented with ambient cultures. It’s crowd-pleasing, a deep garnet color with savory, earthy aromas and flavors of blackberries, black cherries, and licorice. It finishes with a dark and appealing funk. Roast some meat, my friends.
12.5% ABV | About $30; imported by Jenny & François Selections

Pagodes de Cos St-Estèphe 2018

Pagodes de Cos is the second wine of Cos d’Estournel, one of the deuxièmes crus classés of the Medoc. The second wine is not a Second Growth; that’s reserved for the Grand Vin, the eponymous Cos d’Estournel. Confused? Bewilderment evaporates as the cork is pulled. The wine is deep red, perfumed with sandalwood and cedar and every black fruit in the orchard. The texture is scintillant, shimmery, with wily acidity and tannins as fine as talc. The 2018 is perfectly ready now but has stuffing and structure to cellar several years. I should drink more Bordeaux.
14.5% ABV | $60 (sample); imported by Monsieur Touton Selection Ltd.

Il Poggione Brunello di Montalcino 2019

Hand me a bottle of wine at 15% alcohol by volume and I will scrunch my brow. I rarely find such wines in balance, and since I intend to drink the wine, not daub it behind my ears, I want it to be digestible. But this one’s a Brunello, and 14.5% and higher is the going rate these days given warming vintages and Sangiovese’s felicity in that territory. Tenuta Il Poggione farms 125 hectares of vines in the hills of Montalcino, making it one of the region’s largest producers. This wine is hand harvested from vines that are a minimum of 20 years old, and the wine ages for three years in barriques and two in bottle before release. The robe is dark garnet with a clear rim and the wine is fragrant of spice and balsamic; it smells youthful despite the aging protocols. The tannins are graphitic, fine at first, building toward chewy, and finishing silky smooth. The acid dazzles the mid-palate and retreats in a juicy flare. The fruit experience starts late: strawberries, cherries, raspberries. Later, in the deep finish, the wine darkens into savory favors of walnut and black plum. It evolved, unhurriedly, over an hour or two at the table. The alcohol was pronounced, a fluorescent highlighter on the acidity and fruit, but the rest of the elements were also bright enough, and dark enough, to make a balanced composition. I should drink more Brunello.
15% ABV | $100 (sample); imported by Terlato Wines Intl.

All photos ©2025 Meg Maker

Welcome to Notable, a new feature of Maker’s Table.

I taste many wines over the course of a month, and used to cover the best in individual posts, mostly for reasons of SEO. When I migrated to Substack I shed that unwieldy tactic and switched to tasting reports, like this one on the 2024 Massicans and this one on the 2020 Ratti Barolos.

But I taste more wines than I can feature at length, and so this post inaugurates a new regular column, Notable: notes from the table. It’s free for now, but may convert to a paid offering in the future. Although wine-heavy, it’ll occasionally include non-wine products thanks to my interest in cheese and other special foods. I hope you enjoy it.

Fragrant Portuguese skin-contact whites

Mendes & Symington is a collaboration between Anselmo Mendes, in Portugal’s Vinho Verde, and Symington Family Estates, an historic producer of port wines from the houses of Graham’s, Dow’s, Warre’s, and Cockburn’s. Like many port makers, the Symingtons are increasingly adding table wines to their portfolio to offer consumers broader choice and keep vineyards in production. I visited Symington properties in the fall of 2019 (see more about them and port wine generally in my illustrated feature, Wither Port). I separately visited Anselmo Mendes when I was in the Vinho Verde region in 2016, tasting with enologist Constantino Ramos, who has since started his own label. The Mendes & Symington wines are imported by Premium Port Wines.

Mendes & Symington Contacto Alvarinho Monção e Melgaço Vinho Verde 2024

Mendes was making a skin-contact Alvarinho even a decade ago; at the winery I tasted the 2015, which had had twelve hours of skin contact, giving it a ripe, rich texture. This wine gets de-stemmed and enjoys a short skin maceration before fermentation and aging in stainless steel, with lees stirring. The wine’s aroma is perfumed, green fruited (lime peel), with a citrusy, juicy palate.
12.5% ABV | $22

Mendes & Symington Contacto Loureiro Vinho Verde 2024

The Contacto Loureiro is made exactly like the Alvarinho, so having them open together presents an opportunity to understand the essential flavors of each grape (with their skins). It’s flowery, with a scintillant palate and flavors of pear and citrus. It’s lightly bitter at the finish, which feels correct for this grape. In neither wine does the skin contact feel pronounced. It seems rather (perhaps along with lees stirring) to add muscle their otherwise lithe and delicate frames.
12% ABV | $22

Classical Nebbiolo from Manzone

Stefano Manzone founded the estate in Monforte d’Alba in 1863. Today, the fifth generation, Patrizia, Mirella, and Mauro, run production. Their 8.5 hectares of Dolcetto, Barbera, and Nebbiolo all fall within Barolo. Viticulture is environmentally sensitive; they host beehives and bat houses and have installed photovoltaics to help power the winery. Fermentations are spontaneous and the wines age in large oak cask and concrete tank. The wines are bottled unfined and unfiltered. Manzone is imported by Banville Wine Merchants.

Manzone Il Crutin Langhe Nebbiolo 2023

Il Crutin is their entry-level Nebbiolo; the word means “small cellar” in the local dialect and is the name of an old house hand-carved into the rock near the vineyard. The wine’s robe is shiny, limpid, fragrant of cherries, raspberry, and rosemary. The texture is huge if slightly astringent, carrying flavors of black fruit and licorice. It deserves another year or so of bottle age.
13.5% ABV | $25

Manzone Castelletto Barolo 2020

Pale, rosy, tea-like, with a woodsy fragrance of dried flowers and spice. The wine is piquant, spicy, with flavors of forest and red fruit. But fruit isn’t the main attraction here; the wine’s charms arise from a youthful and scintillant texture.
15% ABV | $45

Manzone Bricat Barolo 2019

Bricat is similar in many ways to the Castelletto in its offerings of rose, tea, wood, and potpourri. But it’s a darker wine overall, more angular and astringent but also more concentrated, with deep fruit and a kind of walnut flavor at the finish. Stern, upright, and slightly brooding, it’s a wine that rewards cellaring.
14% ABV | $55

Manzone Cento Anni Barolo Riserva 2009

The winery advised three hours of decanting and I gave it about two. The color is brickish but limpid. There are noticeable oxidative aromas; it smells like a paneled room in candlelight, with pronounced acetic and caramel warmth. The fruit has mostly fallen away, and the wine feels serious, sober, quiet, with supple, powdery tannins and a glittery, bitter finish.
14% ABV | $300

Notable wines from Tomasella

Tenute Tomasella straddles two northern Italian regions, the Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and they make wines in both denominations, sixteen in all, including sparkling, still, and sweet. Prosecco is the bulk of it, both white and rosé. The winery was founded in 1965 by Luigi Tomasella, and today his son, Paolo, runs the business. They are in the process of an organic conversion that will be complete in 2026. They are currently SQNPI certified and maintain an arboreal bee oasis with twenty hives. The winery is seeking a new U.S. importer.

Tenute Tomasella Friulano Friuli 2024

This wine is a varietal Friulano. Half of the grapes were direct pressed while the remainder were treated to ten hours of cold maceration. The juice fermented cold, and the wine went through full malolactic. The result is stony and sharp at first, offering aromas of wet clay (faint reduction), flavors of citrus peel and pith, and a saline bite. With air it unfurls, and the palate softens and spreads out in flavors of stone fruit. There’s a curious but pleasant basil note in the mid-palate. The wine held well for four days in the fridge.
12.5% ABV | About $15 in Italy

Tenute Tomasella Rigole Rosso Trevenezie 2022

A blend of 85 percent Merlot and 15 percent Refosco del peduncolo rosso, a regional variety. It’s a lovely bright red with aromas of red cherry and roses. Juicy and sharp, it has firm tannins and a finish like bitter cherry. It feels cleansing, a good counterpoint for richly savory dishes. It would also profit from a few years of bottle age.
12.5% ABV | About $22 in Italy

Tenute Tomasella Chinomoro Vino Aromatizzato NV

This wine is a curiosity, a nod to Barolo chinato, the aromatized Nebbiolo from Piemonte. Tomasella uses Merlot grapes, which they vinify in the Veneto and transfer to Piedmont for the chinatura process, which involves fortification with grape spirit and flavoring with bitter, herbal, and aromatic extracts including absinth, coriander, rhubarb, cinchona, orange, elder flower, and more. The results are aged in oak barrels before bottling. The aroma is chocolatey, medicinal, herbal, vanilla. Woody notes come forward in the mid-palate as the wine blooms with bitter sweetness (it has 200 g/L of residual sugar). The winery suggests using it in cocktails (try it in a Negroni or spritz) or serving over ice as an aperitif or lightly chilled as a digestif. It’s also a good partner for chocolate and other complex, semi-sweet desserts. An opened bottle lasts for weeks in the fridge. Intriguing, stimulating, unique.
16% ABV | About $45 in Italy

All wines were samples for review.
Photos ©2025 Meg Maker