Notable: Late December 2025
Wines to lift the curtain of night
Happy New Year, and welcome back to Notable, where twice a month I share notes on the best wines from recent tastings.
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 us 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 more 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.
For more on port, see my illustrated feature Whither Port? and my essay Barefoot in the Douro.
For the tech nerds: According to Rui Ribeiro, who led the tawny tasting, the objective Baumé for Graham’s, prior to fortification, is 3.84°(which translates to about 69 g/L sugar), whereas for Dow’s it is 3.4° to 3.5°(61 to 63 g/L sugar).