New Year’s Eve was the perfect night to open a late harvest sweet Pinot Gris wine. Badoux makes this classy Lettres de Noblesse white wine that increases in elegance and richness as it ages in the bottle. The 2011 is now perfect, with apricot and honey notes, great depth and excellent balance between acidity and […]
Zürichsee, pendulum swings
The Lake Zurich region was once a large wine-producing area, hard to believe when you stand anywhere at the edge of Lake Zurich now and see mainly industry and homes. But many of the slopes that are so populated today were once vine-covered. A mere 150 years ago Zürichsee had some 2,000 hectares of vineyard: […]
Servagnin’s 600th birthday
This is the wine you must not miss in 2020. You might have to line up to taste it, but it’s worth the trouble. This is Servagnin’s 600th birthday year. Its story is charming and it is a wine worth celebrating. This may be as close as we get to what Burgundies once tasted like, […]
Citizen-vines: to be loved, to dance, to love
The weather has been clement, holidays are over, and out in the vineyards, the steady snip-snip of electric pruning clippers fills the air, now emptied of migratory birds gone south. I will go home to a fine oaked Syrah tonight, ready after four years maturing and bottle-cellared. First, though, a walk through the vines. The […]
The bark of wine
Uncork now: Humagne Rouge, Maurice Zufferey 2012 It was early evening as I walked across crusty January snow to the trunk of the old apple tree. Dents appeared on the white surface, small shadowed pits of snow gleaming in the late afternoon light. At 120 years the tree’s branches reach high into the sky but […]