I. Distractions In 1987, when I was 18 and a dollar was worth more than twice as much as it is today, I started reading magazines: M, Esquire, GQ. Nearby, in our somewhat cultured Texas town, a new bookstore opened in a cavernous space that had formerly housed the shag-carpeted roller skating rink of our childhood. Through the front windows, which had before been darkly tinted to give the place an alluring den-of-prepubescent-iniquity vibe, now streamed bright, clean light, showcasing a look and layout that would become the interior design gestalt of today’s national-chain, big-box book superstore. The rows upon rows of open, dustless shelving bearing a veritable warehouse of volumes; the ceiling hung with its industrial innards on display; the enfilade of check-out cubicles; and the wall – the great wall – that displayed a preposterous-to-behold assortment of glossies, quarterlies, journals, newsweeklies, fanzines, tabloids, almanacs, and all other flora and fauna of magazines arrayed upon a rack perhaps 50 feet long.  I went in there to look for a book. I liked books, and, one day, I was sure I wanted to write one. But I got distracted and bought a magazine instead – that August’s issue of GQ, which still stands out in my mind as a thing of formative significance. At that time, the zeitgeist was defined by a Walkman-wearing version of the American Renaissance Man – the highly-ambitious, status-obsessed, money-motivated, health-nut known as a Yuppie. No magazine positioned itself more authoritatively in defining this new sociological creature’s lifestyle than GQ, and it did it with whiter teeth, snappier suspenders, better accessories, bigger polka dots and more caffeine in the ink of its display copy.  I remember that issue less for the photos by Richard Avedon or Steven Meisel, the words of Martin Amis or Frederick Exley, than for this: Erzeugerabfüllung. It was one of the longest, strangest strings of letters from the Roman alphabet I had ever seen. Neither did it seem designed to come out of someone’s mouth. But there it was in Alan Richman’s Wine & Spirits column, accompanied by a lovely still-life photograph of his topic: two bottles of Riesling Kabinetts on a white, sun-dappled tablecloth. Richman’s main point – made almost 35 years ago – still holds true: estate-bottled, table-quality German wines remain some of the least expensive, most delicious wines in the world, chiefly because – then as now – the labels, as he wrote, “cannot be understood by anyone who is not a part-time oenophile, linguist and cartographer”. One US dollar in Richman’s pocket, as I have already said, bought what roughly two-dollars-and-fifty-cents does today; what he was on the hunt for was a good dry white in a range that would now cost somewhere between 12 and 30 bucks, and he easily accomplished that by finding a dealer in New York City who carried a good selection of wines from the Mosel and Rheingau. At the time, I didn’t know the meaning or significance of any of this, but it staked a claim in my brain. The only wine I had ever tasted was the one served at our Episcopal church during Eucharist on Sundays. The flavour it had was of a strange, super-concentrated jam that somehow warmed your upper body. Even as a young kid, I liked it. But the adjectives these German bottles were squeezing out of Richman – “citrus-like”, “honeyed”, “tart-sweet” – weren’t close to describing what was in that chalice, even if you believed in transubstantiation. Was it because Richman’s wine was white, and the parish’s was red? Perhaps, but both colours of grape juice bottled by Welch’s tasted pretty much the same to me. No, I sensed there was something – a lot – I had to learn, and, along with the romance and beauty of the labels, and the contextual air of well-bred taste and cultural with-it-ness featured on the other pages, this, I feel sure, was the decisive moment, the true origin point, when I came to believe that among the many extraordinary things that make life worth living, not just words but wine reigns at the top.  I warned you about distractions, didn’t I? Because that would be my excuse for now informing you, as a quite apropos footnote, that, yes, there was something unusual about our church’s Communion wine. It was, as I have confirmed with the church, actually port (Taylor’s Tawny, to be more accurate), cut, according to tradition, with water. There is a good and fascinating reason for this. In 1701, when the War of the Spanish Succession kicked off, France also became an enemy of England, and its wines, as a result, were no longer made available for import. The Anglican Church searched for and found a replacement, the fortified wines of its new ally, Portugal, and port continues to be an acceptable option to pair with the Host.  II. Distillations A satisfying story, not unlike a satisfying life, is one that surprises you with the mystery of its unfolding. A thing pulls in a certain direction long enough to reach the proximity of something else which then turns toward a new destination. I had actually gone into that bookstore, as I said, to look at books. But I came out, even though I didn’t yet know it, with a different compass point. Within a few years, shortly after graduating from college, in 1992, I got hired by The New Yorker, where I stayed for almost nine years. I then met my future wife, who wisely laughed at the thought we might be able to survive in New York City on my meagre salary, so I went to Vogue, and soon after became the founding editor of Men’s Vogue. After 23 issues, and four years, the financial crisis laid an axe to many magazines, including that one. Eventually, I took on the editorship of Town & Country. Then, finally, in 2016, I moved up to Esquire, the magazine, as it happens, that didn’t offer me a job when The New Yorker did, and became that storied magazine’s editor in chief, until – well, you best read about that in The New York Times.  As far as distractions go, magazines were a good one. They made me who I am, gave me a tremendously worldly education, honed my taste, introduced me to all manner of accomplished people, required me to build quite a wardrobe, and paid me pretty well to do all of this, often with a glass of wine not far out of the picture. There was really no other way I would have ever got to taste all the bottles I have (a lot of the big names people whisper about from Burgundy and Bordeaux, Champagne and also Piedmont, Tuscany and Napa). I built a modest cave à vin of my own by buying the Smith Haut Lafittes of the world way before hedge-fund hoi polloi ran up the prices, and by having access to rare offerings, like 12 bottles of Fiorano, the legendary white wine Alberico Boncompagni Ludovisi, prince of Venosa, made before ripping out all his vines. I smelled the musty perfume of Margaux in the cellar as I watched the workers rack the wine by candlelight. I lured Jay McInerney away from the Wall Street Journal to become my wine columnist; and I once stood in Bordeaux’s town square, tight on 2002 Pétrus, trying with great focus to commune with the statue of Michel de Montaigne while my French friend, a true oenophile, extolled the majesty of the Big Mac’s special sauce.  As the editor of a magazine, curiosity is your profession, even to the point of distraction. Editors – writers, too – are prone to it. It’s a hazard of the gift, and having a jumble of ideas, if you’re any good, is key to making a magazine of any real intellectual or creative daring. Now as a husband and father of three, working from home and trying to be ‘present’, and a still youngish former editor and occasional micro-influencer trying to stave off the solitude to fathom and plot the next phase of a fruitful future, this skill of mine, the strength of which became even more magnified over two decades, is something of a family project.  The way I most often hear the word ‘distraction’ now, for instance, is when it’s being hurled at me in verb form by my wife or daughters accusing me of being more of a phone-enslaved screen vegetable than they are. (I respectfully disagree.) But it’s a sore point for two reasons. One, what I did as an editor is, in a nutshell, now what a smartphone essentially does. Not very imaginatively, of course, and not with taste or charm or originality, but with a bloody, money-grubbing ruthlessness that stalks every step of our digital peregrinations and doesn’t give a twist if the algorithms that are its brain make us its slave by retrofitting our attention spans for kindergarten.  The smartphone – not the former me or any of my fellow kind still in the media biz – is now the true croupier of culture, dealing out a targeted shuffle of Pavlovian temptations to the point of daily mental exhaustion. And, though this thing is in many ways my personal nemesis, I am, against every fibre of my being, too often its obedient servant. Aiming not to live according to the famous line by T.S. Eliot – “distracted from distraction by distraction” – I recently decided to at least take a serious inventory of my favourite ones, both those of the pre-digital sort (tennis, The Walking Dead, checking the mailbox, my sock collection) and those of the post-digital sort (the any and everything I do because my phone wants me to). Then I caught myself watching tennis on my phone and realised this might be harder than I thought. It’s enough to drive a person to drink, thank god! With that in mind, I like to keep a special something for the occasion around, in this case – what else? – two bottles of Riesling Kabinett, for it had struck me as more than a little weird that I’ve probably tasted fewer than a handful of German wines in my entire life. Part of the reason is that those I had were bad, and, like a lot of other simpletons about this great wine region of the world, I’d come to think of Riesling as a cloying elixir equal parts green Jolly Rancher, apple cider vinegar, and hairspray. This, I knew, was wrong, not true and, in terms of wine equity and inclusion, on the wrong side of history. But, if you happen to live in a place like I do – a bourgie swathe of Connecticut bordering New York City where the shops cater heavily to Cali-Fran-Taly banker’s tastes – it might take you a few stops to find what Richman recommended, an erzeugerabfüllung (estate-bottled) Kabinett (wine made from grapes with a minimum must weight/sugar content) Riesling, and when you do it will probably be coated in a fine sift of years-old dust. I bought a green (Mosel) bottle for US$16 and a brown (Rhine) bottle for US$20, both handsomely labelled. I opened them a few minutes ago and took several investigative swigs. The words bright, invigorating and snappy came to mind. One is indeed sweeter, and, though not my usual jam, it is tamped by a pleasing peachy tartness, and the classic overtone of honey isn’t making my palate feel doused with syrup. The other example is, as Richman said so long ago, a very finely layered creature with mineral clarity and an echo of baked bread, something a gluten-free person like me finds particularly appealing. A rather obvious thought: why haven’t I been buying this instead of throwing a ton of endless money at affordably bad white Burgundy, which is mostly a product aimed at fulfilling a desired outcome, like White Claw hard seltzer? III. Words But don’t let me get distracted, again. A writer really has to be careful about such things. Just think about it. Unlike, say, a painter or musician or actor or photographer, the process of writing requires zero physical exertion, no chance to score an endorphin release while sitting staring anxiously at a blank page. Of the many things in life that vie against the counter intuitive impulse to be glued to a desk, Cyril Connolly, in Enemies of Promise, his classic study of the things that distracted him (and others) from becoming a great writer, names the temptations but does not say much about why they’re so deeply tempting to someone who would otherwise be sitting alone in an empty room. Praise, money, fame, social prominence, affairs and journalism are the most common boltholes, according to Connolly, who, as a famously late sleeper that married three times, might have also added the bliss of unconsciousness and excessive alimony. In 1938, the year the book was published, he would never have imagined how hard the task might get without a cigarette. Smoking is a death wish, I know, but when you want to off yourself for still having a hundred pages to go, being able to snap open a nice lighter, flick some ash, stub a butt and inhale some lungfuls of focus-enhancing nicotine must have been kind of helpful. Connolly also doesn’t have much to say about drink except that artists who drink to excess do so “out of the consciousness of wasted ability”. According to that, the 20th century’s most famous literary alcoholics – Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Styron, Elizabeth Bishop, James Joyce, Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner – might have left behind even greater treasures than they did. Because Ernest Hemingway did almost everything with more gusto than any of his peers, including running up his bar tab, as a drinker he belongs in his own sentence. He is the novelist who most romanced a good drink or nice bottle of wine as one of life’s great pleasures. Who didn’t want to have a vermouth with Jake when reading The Sun Also Rises? (Don’t, it’s gross, at least if you order it at one of those kiosks in Montmartre where the bottles are hung upside down with spring-loaded dispensers.) Or, track down a bottle of Valdepeñas, Hemingway’s favourite variety of Spanish wine. Or, get a drink at the bar named after him at the Ritz, in Paris, and then go somewhere on the Left Bank to order “a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of the dry white wine”.  In the early work, he is not boastful about drinking so much as he is the possessor of an unusual appetite for a good buzz. He is also, like Connolly, aware of the need to keep writing separate from drinking, and drinking within his control. It is hard to read the first paragraph of A Moveable Feast, in which he describes an “evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness”, except as a kind of terrifying admonition to himself. It is tragic that he didn’t heed his own advice. Late in his life, Hemingway became fond of rum daiquiris at the Floridita, his favourite bar in Havana, which might explain his taste for a prose style that soon became too often cloying self-parody. In one of the most extraordinary drinking sessions ever committed to words, in the roman à clef Across the River and Into the Trees, a 50-year-old Hemingway, who was smitten with a teenage Italian countess from Venice, fictionalises his infatuation with a last muse. In one stretch (that covers an evening-to-dawn crawl from Harry’s Bar, the grill at the Gritti Palace, a gondola and a hotel room), one half or another of the couple imbibes: one scotch whisky and soda; six Montgomery Martinis (15 parts gin; 1 part vermouth), two of which are described in size as ‘super’; a bottle of Capri Bianco; two bottles of Valpolicella; two bottles of Roederer Brut ’42; and two bottles of Perrier-Jouët. That is, I suppose, one extreme, and, clearly, not one to be tried at home.  The other might have been espoused by Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great critic and lexicographer. As a young man, he’d drained “many a bottle of wine” but loved port especially. (Perhaps Johnson, a devout Anglican who was born in 1709, in the midst of England’s 14-year war with Spain, also first encountered port as a boy at the Communion altar.) He describes himself to friend and biographer James Boswell as having been “apt to go to excess in it”, adding that, “therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it”.  Boswell, who worried about his own dependence on alcohol, even keeping a journal of his intake in an attempt to enforce moderation, argued for a third way, which some of the Romantics later adopted. Wine, he claimed, “produces truth; in vino veritas”. Hoping to persuade Johnson of his point, Boswell once convinced the critic to come down off the wagon for just one glass of claret, so Johnson “might judge, not from recollection, which might be dim, but from immediate sensation”. Boswell reports what happened after the glass was emptied: “Johnson shook his head, and said, ‘Poor stuff! No, Sir, claret is the liquor for boys; port, for men,’” adding, “‘A man would be drowned by it before it made him drunk.’”  That actually reminds me of something I think I forgot to mention about Riesling Kabinetts – they’re also highly admired for their low percentage of alcohol. On that note, I think I’ll have another glass.  This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue Two.

Jay Fielden, former editor of Men’s Vogue, Town & Country and Esquire, recalls how a magazine column on wine, read in a Texas bookstore, shifted his ambitions beyond journalism and set him on the path to becoming a writer of books.

Former Esquire editor-in-chief Jay Fielden reflects on magazines, writing, Riesling Kabinett and the distractions that shaped a life in words and wine.

Jay Fielden on Wine, Words and Distraction

How one became another  

Dagli inizi nel Beaujolais negli anni ’80, il movimento del vino naturale è diventato un fenomeno globale. Ma quale influenza ha avuto poco più a nord, nelle storiche denominazioni della Borgogna? Simon J Woolf esplora il confine sempre più sfumato tra viticoltura classica e naturale

From Beaujolais to Burgundy, how has the natural wine movement shaped a terroir-driven region? For FONDATA Simon J Woolf explores the changing landscape.

Natural Wine’s Influence on Burgundy

Natura vs. Intervento: la ricerca della vera identità della Borgogna

Every now and then, the word ‘singularity’ is used to describe a particular wine that stands apart, for whatever reason, from other wines of its type. But just what is singularity, and how can wine express it? Wine writer Tamlyn Currin investigates.

What makes a wine truly singular? Tamlyn Currin explores the rare bottles that defy convention and challenge the rules of the wine world.

Searching for Singularity in wine

Searching for Singularity

L’en primeur è il sistema di acquisto di vino giovane e non finito, essenzialmente come “futures”. I vini vengono venduti mentre sono ancora in affinamento in botte e spediti, una volta imbottigliati, agli appassionati di tutto il mondo. Bordeaux ha pionierizzato il sistema, e rimane importante nella regione, sebbene l’en primeur si sia ormai diffuso e vini da Borgogna, Rodano, Italia, USA, Australia e oltre siano ora venduti in questo modo. Ma come è iniziato? Sebbene i consumatori acquistino il vino en primeur solo dagli anni ’80, il vino è stato venduto “non finito” ai mercanti per secoli. Tradizionalmente il vino non veniva imbottigliato o venduto dagli châteaux; una volta messo in botte, veniva trasferito ai négociants che lo avrebbero affinato nei loro magazzini nel quartiere dei Chartrons a Bordeaux, e sarebbero stati responsabili della sua vendita e distribuzione – un’attività poco decorosa che non si addiceva ai nobili proprietari dei castelli. Il vino veniva poi imbottigliato a Bordeaux oppure spedito in botte verso mercati come il Regno Unito, per essere lì imbottigliato e venduto ai consumatori. Sebbene oggi Bordeaux possa sembrare lucida e raffinata, con i suoi grandi château, i prati curatissimi e le cantine immacolate, l’industria vinicola della regione non è sempre stata così prospera. A metà Ottocento arrivò la peronospora che devastò gran parte dei vigneti europei, seguita dall’arrivo della fillossera, che uccise le viti e costrinse i produttori a reimpiantare. Quando i viticoltori si ripresero dagli attacchi di Madre Natura, sopraggiunsero la Prima e la Seconda guerra mondiale, portando ulteriori difficoltà economiche. I produttori avevano bisogno di modi per finanziare la loro attività, mentre i mercanti erano sempre alla ricerca di un modo per assicurarsi scorte e il miglior prezzo possibile. Mentre i produttori faticavano, ricorsero alla vendita dell’uva quando era ancora sulla pianta, “sur souche”, concordando un prezzo basato sulla vendemmia precedente e scommettendo sulla qualità finale del raccolto. Le vendite sur souche continuarono fino agli anni ’60 – per poi diminuire quando i produttori rimasero scottati dai 1961, a bassa resa, eccellenti e tristemente sottovalutati. Quando i tempi erano particolarmente duri, gli château – anche gli indirizzi più leggendari – si impegnavano a vendere il loro raccolto fino a 10 anni a un prezzo fisso a un mercante, legandosi a un “abonnement”, garantendosi un livello di reddito base, ma rinunciando a potenziali profitti se o quando i prezzi fossero saliti. Fino a questo punto, le vendite anticipate di vino (o uva) erano avvenute solo ai négociants di Bordeaux, ma la crisi petrolifera del 1973 provocò un cambiamento. Il crollo successivo lasciò produttori, négociants e ogni livello del commercio del vino in disperato bisogno di fondi. Avendo faticato a vendere l’annata 1972, gli château non avevano i soldi per investire nella produzione delle difficili annate ’73 e ’74. La stagione di crescita del 1975 arrivò con condizioni più favorevoli e i vini mostrarono potenziale; campioni furono spediti a Londra perché gli acquirenti potessero assaggiare e vendere. L’en primeur decollò davvero, però, con l’annata 1982 di Bordeaux. Robert Parker aveva iniziato a scrivere la sua newsletter nel 1978, introducendo al mondo il suo sistema di valutazione del vino in 100 punti. Si pronunciò presto con un deciso endorsement dei 1982 e incoraggiando i consumatori a comprarli; quando altri erano meno convinti. Molti, specialmente negli Stati Uniti, colsero l’occasione per acquistare i vini en primeur – e furono puntualmente ricompensati, con l’annata ora considerata leggendaria. La vendita anticipata dei vini alleviò i problemi di flusso di cassa per produttori e négociants, mentre mercanti e consumatori beneficiarono della possibilità di assicurarsi scorte di vini a un prezzo favorevole. Con la crescita delle vendite en primeur, le proprietà divennero aziende molto più redditizie, in grado di reinvestire nei loro vigneti e nelle cantine. Allo stesso tempo, la proprietà delle tenute stava cambiando. Nel 1981, le tasse di successione raddoppiarono, rendendo più difficile per le famiglie mantenere gli château e le aziende – dalle assicurazioni ai beni di lusso e tutto il resto iniziarono ad acquistare proprietà. Sebbene alcune corporation si concentrassero sulla quantità piuttosto che sulla qualità, molte arrivarono con le risorse finanziarie necessarie per spingere la qualità in avanti. Gli anni ’90 videro molte tenute introdurre i secondi vini, consentendo di elevare ulteriormente la qualità del loro Grand Vin, e l’influenza di Parker continuò a crescere. Tutti questi elementi si combinarono per vedere Bordeaux e i suoi vini evolversi rapidamente – dando ancora più motivo per assicurarsi subito una nuova annata. Per i consumatori, l’en primeur offriva un modo per assicurarsi i vini più ricercati ai prezzi migliori. Nelle annate di vertice, i vini offrivano anche ritorni significativi – e ne seguì la speculazione. Il mercato del vino si espanse, con nuovo interesse da parte di acquirenti giapponesi e cinesi. Il mercato esplose quando Hong Kong abolì la tassa sul vino nel 2008. La frenesia aumentò e i prezzi salirono – con le annate più quotate 2009 e 2010 che raggiunsero nuovi, gonfiati massimi. L’en primeur non offriva più il ritorno sicuro di un tempo. La bolla scoppiò. Château, mercanti e collezionisti rimasero tutti scottati, e ora c’è una maggiore consapevolezza della potenziale inflazione del mercato. Questa coscienza e comprensione ha stabilizzato il mercato e reso l’en primeur nuovamente rilevante, fortunatamente senza la speculazione delle annate precedenti. Nel 2012, Ch. Latour annunciò l’abbandono del sistema en primeur – decidendo invece di offrire i vini solo quando pronti da bere, con il 2011 come ultima annata offerta come futures. Fu un colpo significativo per l’en primeur vedere un Premier Cru abbandonare il sistema, ma sebbene si temesse che questo passo potesse aprire le chiuse, nessun altro ha ancora seguito il Premier Cru. Oggi, l’en primeur rimane significativo per Bordeaux. In aprile di ogni anno, il commercio mondiale del vino converge su Bordeaux per assaggiare l’ultima annata (vendemmiata l’anno precedente). Organizzata dall’Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux, la settimana dei “Primeurs” è una macchina pubblicitaria impressionante, che concentra l’attenzione sulla regione – e mentre i riflettori potrebbero essere puntati sulle proprietà di vertice, c’è un chiaro effetto alone su tutta la regione. C’è stata una tendenza per le tenute a trattenere un po’ più di scorte, alcune delle quali possono essere offerte ex-château in un secondo momento, ma la maggior parte dei Cru Classés vende ancora tra il 70 e il 90% dell’intera produzione en primeur. I benefici per Bordeaux e i suoi château sono evidenti, ma cosa c’è per chi vuole comprare il vino? Molti dei motivi per acquistare en primeur sono immutati. Non ci sono garanzie che si realizzi un ritorno finanziario con l’en primeur, ma inevitabilmente i vini diventano più rari col passare del tempo; quando i vini entrano nella loro finestra di beva, diventano più desiderabili (e spesso aumentano di valore) e, con il tempo, diventano più scarsi, man mano che le bottiglie vengono stappate e l’offerta finita di una specifica annata si riduce. In tal senso, l’en primeur può offrire un modo utile per assicurarsi scorte di vini, in particolare quelli di piccole proprietà molto ricercate che possono essere quasi impossibili da ottenere dopo l’uscita. Acquistare en primeur offre anche una provenienza impeccabile. Il vino si muoverà dalla tenuta al luogo in cui conservate il vostro vino, e poi una sola volta quando verrà prelevato per il consumo, garantendo condizioni ottimali di maturazione e mantenendo il massimo valore qualora decideste di vendere piuttosto che bere. Un ulteriore lusso dell’acquisto en primeur è la possibilità di acquistare qualsiasi formato; non essendo ancora imbottigliato, potete acquistare mezze bottiglie, magnum, jeroboam, imperiali o qualsiasi altra dimensione desideriate con facilità. Anche se i punteggi dei critici influenzano certamente ancora la vendita dei vini, nessuna singola voce ha il potere che Robert Parker aveva ai suoi tempi d’oro. Oggi, ci sono più critici che mai – con singoli autori che si staccano da pubblicazioni più grandi come il Wine Advocate per creare la propria piattaforma, ciascuno con i propri gusti, offrendo prospettive diverse sull’annata – dando, si può dire, ai consumatori più informazioni che mai. Non sorprende che altre regioni abbiano adottato il sistema, con la Borgogna in particolare che ha abbracciato l’en primeur. Le opportunità indubbiamente restano – come dimostra un’annata come il 2019, venduta nel pieno del 2020 e della pandemia di Covid-19. Di fronte a un mercato incerto, i produttori abbassarono i prezzi e i consumatori si precipitarono ad acquistare i vini di Bordeaux. L’annata si rivelò spettacolare, con gli acquirenti giustamente ricompensati per aver investito nei vini. Quando un’annata è buona e il prezzo è giusto, non c’è davvero nulla come il palpabile fermento e l’eccitazione che la stagione dei Primeurs porta nel mondo del vino. Scoprite di più sull’en primeur, compreso come funziona, o sfogliate tutti i vini attualmente disponibili en primeur

Ogni anno, le principali regioni vinicole pregiate offrono i loro vini en primeur, o come "wine futures", ma non è sempre stato così. Sophie Thorpe approfondisce le origini e la storia del sistema, e il suo significato per gli amanti del vino di oggi.

En primeur is the system of buying wine futures: we delve into its origins, history and what it means today for chateaux, negociants merchants and wine-lovers

What is en primeur? Explaining wine futures

Cos'è l'en primeur: le origini dei futures sul vino

To Kalon. For any Californian winemaker, those two words represent the Holy Grail. This vineyard in Oakville, Napa, is undeniably the region’s most famous. Perched at the foot of the Mayacamas, west of Highway 29, this site has been recognised for producing fine wine since the 19th century. Literally translating as the “highest beauty” or “highest good” from Greek, today To Kalon is home to some of Napa’s oldest vines and best Cabernet Sauvignon. “This is a Grand Cru – a premier property,” Paul Hobbs tells me, a winemaker who has a long history with the site. As a grad student at UC Davis, Hobbs would swipe the second crop from a vineyard on Walnut Drive – what happened to be BV4, Beaulieu Vineyard’s original block of To Kalon. At Mondavi – the largest holder of the hallowed site – he got to walk the rows more legitimately, and used those holdings to build Opus One – the company’s joint venture with Ch. Mouton Rothschild (although the association with the site has generally been played down). Under his own label, he’s been making wine from the Beckstoffer section of the vineyard since 1999 – and his wines, along with those from Schrader, were some of the early bottlings that put the vineyard firmly on the fine wine map, earning high scores – and lots of attention. Indeed, it was a Paul Hobbs wine that made Tor Kenward believe the vineyard was truly special. André Tchelistcheff had spoken to Kenward about BV4, but it was one of Hobbs’s bottlings that made him realise its potential. He started working with Beckstoffer plots from 2005. 
“It’s not visually impressive; it doesn’t have that ‘wow factor’,” Kenward tells me. But start digging below the surface, and you realise that you’re in the “tenderloin of Napa”, with old creek beds that run through the site. It’s an alluvial fan that runs down from the Mayacamas, sitting almost on a bench – with very little elevation. But the soils here are varied, with deep, well-drained gravels that make it perfect for Cabernet Sauvignon.  Andy Erickson – a winemaker whose resume includes Screaming Eagle, Harlan, Dalla Valle, Mayacamas and many more – first worked with the site in 2012, on a single-barrel charity lot for an auction at his children’s school. When Constellation (owners of Mondavi and co-owners of Opus One) called him to give him the chance to work with it again in 2016, he didn’t hesitate. That year, he made the first wine for the To Kalon Vineyard Company – a project that is a revival of the brand created by H.W. Crabb (known variously as Henry Walker, Hiram Walker or Hamilton Walker Crabb) in 1886, the vineyard’s godfather. “Most people know the recent history of the vineyard, and the acclaim of the wines from the past 15-20 years. But the vineyard was known for producing remarkable wines all the way back in the late 19th century. Clearly there is something there,” Erickson says.  But this vineyard is weighed down with controversy – its borders endlessly debated, with producers vying for use of the To Kalon name.  The history of the To Kalon Vineyard It’s impossible to look at To Kalon today without tracing its origins. H.W. Crabb came west from Ohio during the Gold Rush, spending six months digging in the Sierras before settling in Oakville in 1868, buying 240 acres of land at the corner of Highway 29 and Walnut Drive. He planted a wide range of crops, first making wine in 1872 under the name Hermosa Vineyards (“hermosa” meaning “beautiful” in Spanish). In 1881, he acquired another 119 acres from Eliza Yount (whose name lives on in Yountville). On land to the west of his plots, owned by John Davis, he planted additional vines – buying the fruit off Davis to feed his increasing production. In 1886, he gave his company a new name: “To Kalon Vineyard Company” – and the legend was born. Crabb reportedly said, “The name To-Kalon… means the highest beauty, or the highest good, but I try to make it mean the boss vineyard.”
 To Kalon Vineyard Company rapidly became one of the region’s largest – and most well-respected – wine producers. His wines started winning awards at competitions around the world, and he was the first to start selling wine along the East Coast. He had planted a huge range of grapes – around 400 different varieties, including Malvasia, Riesling, Chasselas, Muscat, Refosco and Cabernet Sauvignon, with the latter in particular thriving. In 1889, he bought 168 acres on the hillside to the south, close to where Harlan is now based, although it was never planted with vines during Crabb’s lifetime. In 1891, Crabb bought Davis’s 135 acres (from which he’d already been buying the fruit). In total, Crabb had more than 359 acres.  But his success wasn’t to last – phylloxera arrived in the late 19th century, and recession along with it. In 1898, Crabb sold the 135 acres he’d bought just eight years earlier – and died one year later in 1899. The vines were ripped out, replaced by cherry trees under David Perry Doak in 1911, who in turn purchased another 500 acres of vines from John Benson, south of the border of the original To Kalon (across Oakville Grade Road), which is now all owned by Constellation (used for Mondavi or Opus One). After Crabb’s death, what remained of the To Kalon Vineyard Company was sold to ES Churchill at auction, taken over by his widow Mary Churchill when he died in 1903. Wines continued to be sold under the label until the arrival of Prohibition in 1920. The winery reopened briefly to sell wine in bulk in the 1930s, but the winery building burnt down in 1939. Four years later, Martin Stelling bought most of the property – 337 acres – and replanted. He sold 90 acres to Beaulieu Vineyard (the block that became known as BV4 – and was the plot used by André Tschelistcheff made Georges de Latour Reserve). In 1944, Stelling bought an additional 1,700 acres – the McGill Ranch, which included the parcels owned by Doak (both Crabb’s 1891 parcel and the 500 acres area south of Oakville Grade Road). He named the entire property Tokalon Vineyards, and in 1945 planted Sauvignon Blanc in I Block – the legendary parcel that is today used for Mondavi’s prized, old-vine To Kalon Fumé Blanc.  Tragedy struck again, however, with Stelling killed in a car crash in 1950. The property was once more divided, sold off in pieces by his widow.   
Rosa Mondavi, along with her sons Robert and Peter, purchased 132 hectares in 1962 for the family winery, Charles Krug. After Robert struck out on his own, he bought 12 acres for himself in 1966 (that remained in the Stelling family) – in the northeast corner of the 1968 Crabb parcel, where the Mondavi winery and visitor centre remains today. He bought a further 230 acres in 1968, and then took the Charles Krug section from the rest of his family in 1978. The first time the To Kalon name appeared on a Mondavi label – and the first time since the demise of the To Kalon Vineyard Company – was on the 1986 Fumé Blanc Reserve. The I Block – the Sauvignon Blanc vines planted by Stelling in 1945 – were singled out for the first time in 1995, for the vines’ 50th anniversary. The first red – Mondavi’s To Kalon Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon – appeared with the 1997 vintage. The To Kalon Vineyard’s terroir As already mentioned, To Kalon is largely an alluvial fan that stretches down from the Mayacamas to Highway 29. It is, however, a large piece of land (the exact area depending on where you draw its borders – see below for more on the controversy around this) – and as such the terroir varies considerably. The soils are richer downslope, closer to the Highway; poorer and better-drained higher up (where many – including Hobbs and Kenward – prefer to be). The gravel composition varies with the subtle slope differences and underground water.  “It’s like any cut of meat – there are better parts than others,” Hobbs says. With over 300 original acres (at least), this is a substantial vineyard (for comparison, Clos Vougeot is 125 acres). “It’s great if you have the name To Kalon, but could be pretty average stuff.” The Beckstoffer section is numbered and lettered: A to F, from road to mountain, with A1 south of A2. For Hobbs, he likes the blocks closer to the mountains, and those that aren’t shaded by the huge walnut trees that line Walnut Drive (to the south). Hobbs noted how much warmer Oakville is than Yountville – something he used to notice when driving in the evening home from Oakville to Yountville. The mountains block the sea breezes, meaning that the cooling effect happens, but more slowly. This is partly what makes it such a special place. Tor Kenward similarly prefers some of the middle blocks in B and C, where there are some of the vineyard’s oldest vines, but with lower vigour, as well as the leaner soils closest to the mountains. As for the MacDonald or Horton block: “You could argue it’s every bit as good as Andy’s piece,” Kenward says. It, along with the Detert block, was planted in the 1940s – and in fact those two blocks are now home to some of the valley’s oldest vines. Even closer to the mountains, the gravel content is even higher, and the fruit is picked up to a month earlier than elsewhere in To Kalon. Although until now most of that fruit has been sold to Constellation, there will be opportunity for others to work with it as that contract comes to an end.   
The Beckstoffer plots of To Kalon Andy Beckstoffer bought Beaulieu Vineyard’s block, BV4, in 1993. He’d just lost a prized site – Liparita, on Howell Mountain – when the 89 acres of BV4 came up. He’d worked the site for years and leapt at the opportunity to buy it. “It’s a mystery to me why they sold it,” Paul Hobbs told me, although word on the grapevine was that they needed to liquidate funds – indeed, it was around the same time that Mondavi went public for similar reasons. Phylloxera was once more raging through the region thanks to the widely used, non-resistant AXR rootstock.  The BV4 block was in bad shape when Beckstoffer took it over and he had to replant the entire site. Paul Hobbs was one of the first to use fruit from Beckstoffer’s plots, starting to work with him from 1995/96. “Andy didn’t really realise he had a Grand Cru property,” Hobbs says. Hobbs was given free rein to pick his plots, opting for four or five plots on the western side, furthest from Highway 29. The vineyard produced its first fruit in 1997; 1998 was a difficult year; but in 1999 Hobbs was able to produce his first To Kalon bottling (although it couldn’t say so on the label). “I was loathe to tell people how young it was – but the quality was so good,” Hobbs says, still starry eyed thinking about it. “It was only four years old, but producing stunning wines.” Most fruit is sold on its weight, by the ton, but Andy Beckstoffer created a different model – one that is intricately tied to the vineyard’s name and reputation – and arguably has increased its reputation. Producers who use his fruit pay him 175 times the bottle price per ton, with a ceiling at $50,000/ton; tying the value of the fruit to the value of the final wine. “For producers like me in those days, when I didn’t have the land or ability to buy land, Andy was a saviour of sorts,” Hobbs tells me. “Because I had access to one of the top vineyards in all of Napa. I had to pay – but at least I had access.”
  The To Kalon controversy: how big is it? And is it a brand or a place? Mondavi trademarked the name “To Kalon” in 1988, and “To Kalon Vineyard” in 1994. This gave them the right to use the name on any wine from anywhere – even beyond California – and meant that no one else could use the name, even if they had plots in what was considered the original To Kalon vineyard. The first Beckstoffer bottlings only mentioned the name on the back label; but in 2000, Schrader decided to put it on the front label. The now famous lawsuit commenced. “They shouldn’t have been able to trademark it,” Hobbs tells me. “Anyone from the original To Kalon estate should have the right to the trademark as well.” In 2002, Mondavi sued Schrader for using the name on their Beckstoffer bottling. Countersuing ensued, from both Schrader and Beckstoffer (the latter arguing that Mondavi was misleading clients by using the name for wines made with fruit from beyond the vineyard’s original borders). A settlement – the details of which remain a mystery – was made in 2003, but wines made from the Beckstoffer section can now bear the name “Beckstoffer To Kalon”.  Constellation bought Mondavi in 2004, and then Schrader in 2017. Reportedly attempts were made to trademark “To Kalon Wine Company”, “To Kalon Vineyard Company” and “Rooted in To Kalon” – something, unsurprisingly, that Beckstoffer objected to. The legal battle continues today, with a fight over the naming of To Kalon Creek, and The Vineyard House – owned by Jeremy Nickel, which sits on the 1889 hillside section – arguing for the use of the name as well.  The borders of the vineyard are a constant source of debate – and given the history above, you can see why.  Andy Beckstoffer considers the original To Kalon to be only the parcels bought by Crabb in 1868 and 1881. The 1889 parcel was never planted by Crabb, so most aren’t inclined to include it as “original To Kalon”. The Detert and MacDonald plots, however, aren’t acknowledged by Beckstoffer, but were planted – and, albeit more briefly than other plots, owned by Crabb. Then there’s the “Stelling extension”, the southern section added after Crabb’s death under Martin Stelling, that Mondavi considers part of the original vineyard, but some others do not. Given the sums fruit – and wine – bearing the To Kalon name command, it’s unsurprising that its usage is so disputed.  
To Kalon: what does the wine taste like?  So what makes the wine so special? Why do winemakers fight for the fruit, and consumers for the bottles they produce? Despite the sheer variety of the site, Tor Kenward is adamant that there’s a continuity, with a profile that that site gives Cabernet. He describes it as “wall-to-wall carpeting”, a plushness to the mid-palate, a softness, that means the Cabernet isn’t hard-edged. “There’s something about the ground there,” Andy Erickson agrees. For him, To Kalon has a distinct tannin texture – not as rugged as hillside sites, but richer, with a generosity in the wines. “They are dark, aromatic, but very broad and polished,” he says. “I think the vineyard brings forward many of the complexities of Cabernet Sauvignon, but delivers it in a very approachable and elegant package.” “It’s very identifiable,” Paul Hobbs says. “It’s a structural and textural thing mostly. It’s a freshness to this sort of tannin. It has grip, but it has this uplifting character.” He explains it like a skipping stone – you think you’ve got it, then another wave comes, the wine shifting on the palate. For him, one of the most distinctive things is that Cabernet sings alone here – much better than blended with other varietals. “It didn’t need the help of its brothers,” he says. “It’s a wine that’s at peace with itself… It doesn’t shock you, except in its beauty.”
 Who owns what today in To Kalon? Robert Mondavi: From the original 12 acres, Mondavi now owns 328 acres of To Kalon, including the Stelling extension. Has the rights to use the To Kalon name.  Opus One: The 35-acre Q Block was sold to the joint venture by Mondavi in 1981, with K block acquired in 2008. Although under Constellation’s ownership they could likely use the To Kalon name, Opus One doesn’t trade on this. (To Kalon Vineyard Company uses fruit from Constellation’s holdings, both Opus One and Mondavi plots.) UC Davis: a research block that was key in developing phylloxera-resistant rootstock
Beckstoffer: 89 acres, with fruit sold to a range of producers (currently 23), including Paul Hobbs, Tor Kenward and Schrader. Producers can use the name “Beckstoffer To Kalon” on their labels. MacDonald (sometimes referenced as Horton): Graeme and Alex MacDonald are the current generation, owning 21 acres of the 1891 parcel. When their great-grandparents bought the site in 1954 (along with the Detert plot – see below – from Caroline Stelling, Martin Stelling’s widow) it was planted with cherry trees. Advised by Robert Mondavi, the MacDonalds planted vines. From 1966, they sold grapes to Mondavi – holding some back for personal use from 2004, with the first MacDonald commercial release in 2010 (just 92 cases). Although historically 75% of production here has been sold to Mondavi, I’m led to believe that the contract is coming to a close and won’t be renewed. The MacDonalds can’t use the To Kalon name on their wines currently. Detert: Today owned by Tom Garrett, a cousin of the MacDonalds. This 25-acre plot was bought in 1954, along with the MacDonald parcel – divided between the buyers’ children giving the two plots today. There’s more Cabernet Franc in this section. Most of the fruit is sold to Mondavi (with the contract, as for MacDonald, coming to an end soon), and Detert can’t use the To Kalon name on their wines. The Vineyard House: Many dispute whether or not this is original To Kalon; it’s on the hillside area purchased (but not planted) by Crabb in 1891. This plot is owned by Jeremy Justin Nickel, who is the son of the late Far Niente proprietor Gil Nickel. It’s thought to have first been planted with vines in 1980. They can’t use the To Kalon name on their wines, but have taken court action over the issue.  Wineries with To Kalon bottlings  NB Not all of these will bear the To Kalon name on the label Mondavi Winery, Opus One, To Kalon Vineyard Company, MacDonald, Detert, Alpha Omega, Amici, Alejandro Bulgheroni Estate, AXR, Bacio Divino, B Cellars, Boich Family, Bounty Hunter, Cain Concept, Carter cellars, Ch Boswell, Jacquelynn, Kitchak, Cliff Lede, Morlet, Realm Cellars, Tor Kenward, Paul Hobbs, Schrader Cellars Read more Editorial 

The Napa Valley has many incredible vineyards, but To Kalon undoubtedly sits at the top of the tree. As the To Kalon Vineyard Company releases their latest vintage, Sophie Thorpe delves into the story of this iconic site – from its 19th century origins to the fight to use its hallowed name

Explore the history of To Kalon vineyard – and what makes it such an iconic site today. We spoke to Andy Erickson, Paul Hobbs and Tor Kenward to find out more

The tale of Napa’s iconic To Kalon vineyard

The tale of To Kalon

Il cognome di Jaime Araujo è ben noto ai collezionisti di Napa. I suoi genitori, Daphne e Bart Araujo, acquistarono il celebre Eisele Vineyard a Calistoga nel 1990, fondando poco dopo la loro omonima cantina. All’epoca, Jaime era all’università e non si unì ai genitori a Napa per molti anni, trascorrendo invece oltre due decenni in Europa, studiando e lavorando, anche per Moët Hennessy. Tornò a Napa nel 2012 per collaborare come consulente aziendale, ma il lavoro durò poco: nel 2013 la tenuta e il vigneto Eisele furono venduti ad Artémis Domaines (la società madre di Château Latour). Mentre i suoi genitori fondavano Accendo Cellars, con Jaime e il fratello come soci, in lei cresceva il desiderio di creare qualcosa di proprio. “Ho sempre voluto gestire un’azienda come forza positiva,” racconta. L’occasione arrivò durante la prima vendemmia di Accendo nel 2013, quando trasformò un lotto di Cabernet Sauvignon non adatto agli assemblaggi principali nelle prime 300 casse di Trois Noix (“tre noci” in francese, un riferimento scherzoso ai suoi due figli e alla figlia del fratello). Nonostante l’eredità familiare e la tentazione di puntare sul lusso, Jaime voleva creare vini accessibili e sostenibili. La sua strategia di prezzo lo riflette: bottiglie tra 30 e 50 dollari, con il Cabernet più costoso a 150. “Non lo faccio per diventare miliardaria,” sorride. “È importante che Napa resti accessibile a tutti. Bisogna accogliere e creare vini per ogni tipo di persona.” Molto prima che Jaime sviluppasse il suo marchio, Steve Matthiasson si era già affermato come uno dei massimi esperti di viticoltura biologica di Napa. Dopo gli studi in orticoltura all’Università di California Davis, iniziò la carriera come consulente viticolo nel 1995, stabilendosi a Napa con la moglie Jill Klein Matthiasson nel 2002. Dal 2007 collabora strettamente con la famiglia Araujo, prima all’Eisele Vineyard e poi ad Accendo, lavorando anche con nomi come Dalla Valle, Spottswoode e Chappellet. Diventare anche vinificatore è stato un processo graduale. Steve imparò “per osmosi”, partecipando a degustazioni dei clienti e osservando con attenzione. Nel 2003 produsse solo 120 casse con la moglie; nel 2017, però, raggiunse un traguardo importante acquistando una piccola cantina e un vigneto nell’Oak Knoll AVA. Oggi produce circa 12.000 casse l’anno, distribuite su 25 cuvée. Coltiva personalmente quasi tutti i vigneti da cui provengono i suoi vini, incluso quello domestico, dove sperimenta vitigni del Nord Italia come Refosco, Ribolla Gialla e Schioppettino. All’interno della compatta cantina Matthiasson, foudres e botti occupano ogni spazio. In un angolo, grandi vasi di vetro contengono infusi aromatici per il vermouth che Steve e Jill producono insieme a olio d’oliva e marmellate – accompagnamenti ideali ai loro vini, che spaziano da Cabernet da singolo vigneto a fermentazioni di frutta e vino. Anche se non è un nome noto ai collezionisti, Steve è molto rispettato dai sommelier: “Ci piace dire che siamo i musicisti dei musicisti,” scherza. Sia Jaime che Steve credono che le loro aziende debbano essere responsabili sul piano ambientale e sociale. “È fondamentale difendere ciò in cui credi,” sottolinea Jaime. Oggi Trois Noix vanta diverse iniziative sostenibili, tra cui la certificazione B Corp, riconoscimento che solo altre due cantine di Napa possiedono. La B Corp certifica l’impatto positivo sull’ambiente e sulla comunità, oltre al profitto. Tutti i vigneti coltivati da Steve per Matthiasson sono biologici, una certificazione per lui fondamentale, che rappresenta un ritorno alle sue origini agricole. “L’agricoltura biologica è ormai accettata e abbracciata qui,” afferma, “non è più un’eccezione, neppure tra le cantine più rinomate. E non è solo marketing: credono davvero che produca vini migliori.” I vini di Trois Noix e Matthiasson sono realizzati in uno stile fresco, incentrato sul frutto e sul terroir, piuttosto che sul legno o sull’estrazione pesante. Jaime punta a ricreare lo spirito di Napa di 50 anni fa, usando un tocco leggero. “A Napa abbiamo iniziato a fare vini sempre più ricchi e potenti, ed è giusto, ma possiamo fare anche questo, e farlo bene.” Alla Matthiasson Winery, la raccolta avviene presto per mantenere alcol basso e acidità viva. Oltre a un minimo uso di zolfo, non vengono aggiunti altri elementi. “Utilizziamo metodi tradizionali,” dice Steve, precisando con una risata che c’è differenza tra “vino naturale” e “natty wine”: l’obiettivo è creare vini puliti e freschi da frutti sani. Non utilizza selezionatrici ottiche, ma si affida alla cura del vigneto e a raccolte mirate. “Siamo sempre stati una comunità agricola, ma per molto tempo nessuno voleva parlarne,” racconta Jaime. Crede che il futuro di Napa risieda nella qualità, nella storia e nella comunità. Lo dimostra anche il suo nuovo ruolo come Presidente del Consiglio dei Napa Valley Vintners, associazione fondata nel 1944 che rappresenta oltre 500 produttori della valle. “Sono un ponte tra vecchio e nuovo,” spiega, “voglio portare una prospettiva fresca che rifletta la diversità di stili, prezzi e persone.” Steve condivide la stessa visione: “Il mondo del vino è pieno di artifici, ma noi vogliamo aprirlo alle persone.” Matthiasson e Trois Noix hanno collaborato a un lotto speciale per Premiere Napa Valley lo scorso anno – un lotto che abbiamo acquistato e che sarà presto disponibile. Contatta il tuo Account Manager per registrare il tuo interesse.

In una regione dove il vino è sinonimo di lusso, due produttori vogliono ricordare le umili origini di Napa. Rachael Ryan, Senior Buyer per Vinfolio, parla con Jaime Araujo e Steve Matthiasson della loro filosofia, del loro approccio alla viticoltura e alla produzione del vino.

Two Napa wine producers are championing economic, environmental and social sustainability: we talk to Trois Noix’s Jaime Araujo and Steve Matthiasson 

Farming for the future: Trois Noix and Matthiasson 

L'agricoltura del futuro: Trois Noix e Matthiasson

Quando Alain Hudelot si ritirò nel 2008, fu suo nipote a prendere le redini della tenuta di famiglia, il Domaine Hudelot-Noëllat. Charles van Canneyt – allora appena ventenne e fresco di studi enologici – si ritrovò improvvisamente a gestire 10 ettari di vigneti e un’intera cantina. Ma non era un ventenne qualunque. Gradualmente modernizzando le attrezzature della tenuta e perfezionando la vinificazione (in particolare moderando l’estrazione), trasformò la reputazione del domaine. In breve tempo divenne noto come una delle stelle emergenti della Borgogna, con Domaine Hudelot-Noëllat presto tra i nomi più rispettati della regione. Non incline alla compiacenza, nel 2012 avviò un’etichetta négoce, offrendo un’ulteriore via per gli amanti della Borgogna di accedere al suo talento enologico. Oggi, insieme alla moglie Anne-Sophie, ha intrapreso una nuova sfida, acquistando una nuova proprietà: il Domaine des Chézeaux. Probabilmente non conoscerete il nome di questa tenuta di Gevrey-Chambertin, ma quasi certamente ne conoscerete i vigneti. La storia del Domaine des Chézeaux Il Domaine des Chézeaux fu creato da François Mercier nel 1982, anche se la famiglia possedeva vigneti a Gevrey-Chambertin dal 1928. Il nome della tenuta deriva dal Clos des Chézeaux, il vigneto recintato accanto al domaine. La famiglia era proprietaria terriera più che vinicola, quindi tutti i vigneti erano affittati – en métayage – ad altri produttori. Questa pratica è comune in Borgogna: i vignaioli che affittano i vigneti li gestiscono tutto l’anno e producono il vino, cedendo una parte della produzione (spesso circa un terzo) al proprietario come affitto. La storica tenuta crebbe dai possedimenti originari e, dal 1994, contava circa quattro ettari. I vigneti erano divisi tra tre produttori: Domaine Ponsot (poi Laurent Ponsot), René Leclerc e Domaine Berthaut (poi Domaine Berthaut-Gerbet). Ponsot affittava il lotto originale di 0,89 ettari di Griotte-Chambertin, così come i parcelle di Clos Saint-Denis*, Chambertin e Chambolle-Musigny Premier Cru Les Charmes. Domaine Berthaut affittava due Premier Cru di Gevrey-Chambertin (Les Cazetiers e Lavaux-Saint-Jacques) e i parcelle del villaggio, incluso il Clos des Chézeaux. Pur essendo tecnicamente un monopole, Berthaut non possedendo il terreno non poteva rivendicarne tale status. Prima della vendemmia 1994, la famiglia Mercier acquistò un altro lotto di Griotte-Chambertin, 0,68 ettari appartenuti a Suzanne Thomas di Thomas Bassot, ottenendo il maggior possedimento di questo Grand Cru. La famiglia Esmonin coltivava già le vigne, vendendo parte dei frutti a Jadot; i Mercier affittarono poi il lotto a René Leclerc (pur continuando la vinificazione di alcune bottiglie da parte della famiglia Esmonin fino al 1999). Una parte dei vini finiti era imbottigliata con l’etichetta Domaine des Chézeaux, ma identica a quella dei produttori Ponsot, Leclerc o Berthaut, spesso a un prezzo inferiore. Domaine des Chézeaux oggi Nel 2021 Charles van Canneyt riuscì ad acquistare la tenuta e i suoi prestigiosi vigneti. Con tutti i vigneti sotto contratto en métayage, la sfida successiva fu riottenerli – negoziando con ciascun produttore. Nel 2022 ottenne il monopole Clos des Chézeaux e Premier Cru Les Cazetiers, ma vendette i frutti. Nel 2023, recuperato un lotto di Griotte-Chambertin, realizzò i primi vini dalla proprietà. Nel 2024 riuscì a recuperare tutti i vigneti – aggiungendo Chambertin, Clos Saint-Denis e Chambolle-Musigny Premier Cru Les Charmes. Come parte delle negoziazioni, furono venduti i parcelle Lavaux-Saint-Jacques, alcune vigne di Gevrey-Chambertin village e due piccoli lotti di Griotte-Chambertin. I vigneti sono generalmente vecchi in tutta la tenuta, e coltivazione e vinificazione seguono gli stessi metodi di Hudelot-Noëllat: frutti totalmente diraspati e estrazione molto delicata. Le prime annate furono vinificate a Domaine Hudelot-Noëllat (ma affinano nelle cantine del Domaine des Chézeaux) e è iniziata la costruzione di una nuova cantina, prevista per la fine del 2025. Van Canneyt ha già notato una maturazione diversa delle uve a Chézeaux, con cantine fresche e umide che rallentano l’élevage e richiedono meno rabbocco. Prevede quindi di affinare i vini più a lungo rispetto a Hudelot-Noëllat. La tenuta mantiene il nome storico, ma con nuove etichette – per differenziare le bottiglie precedenti all’arrivo di Van Canneyt. Il nome ha la stessa origine di Echezeaux: chesaux – plurale di chesal (dal latino casellum o casalis) – che significa casa o edificio in pietra. I vigneti del Domaine des Chézeaux Oggi la tenuta conta circa tre ettari di vigneti, di cui oltre la metà Grand Cru, distribuiti su sei appellations: Gevrey-Chambertin Clos des Chézeaux: monopole di 0,5 ettari, alcune vigne quasi centenarie (piantate nel 1929), su pendio medio esposto sud-est, su suoli profondi argillosi e ghiaiosi. Gevrey-Chambertin Premier Cru Les Cazetiers: 0,216 ettari in due parcelle, nord 0,1615 e sud 0,045 ha. Chambolle-Musigny Premier Cru Les Charmes: circa 0,6 ha, con ulteriore parcella a Domaine Hudelot-Noëllat. Clos Saint-Denis Grand Cru: 0,3776 ha, comparirà nel 2024 con un solo barile, ora reimpiantato fino al 2029. Chambertin Grand Cru: 0,143 ha nel cuore del Grand Cru. Griotte-Chambertin Grand Cru: 1,264 ha, il lotto più grande del piccolo Grand Cru, cuore dell’appellation. Focus su Griotte-Chambertin Griotte-Chambertin, o En Griotte, è il più piccolo dei Chambertin Grands Crus (2,69 ha) e tra i più piccoli della Côte d’Or, insieme a La Romanée, La Romanée-Conti e La Grande Rue. Situato sotto Clos de Bèze, con esposizione nord-est, permette maturazioni lente, vini delicati, aromatici e profumati, meno muscolosi rispetto al tipico Gevrey-Chambertin. Suoli ghiaiosi e calcarei con argilla a pendio. Domaine des Chézeaux è il maggiore proprietario (1,246 ha, quasi metà del vigneto). Altri proprietari: Joseph Drouhin, Fourrier, Claude Dugat, Marchand Frères, Joseph Roty, Duroché, Laurent Ponsot e un investitore che affitta il lotto a Cécile Tremblay. L’origine del nome è dibattuta: “griotte” (ciliegia amarena) o “criotte” (piccola pietra calcarea nei suoli). Storia delle etichette Griotte-Chambertin Le bottiglie storiche sono state un segreto per gli insiders, spesso Ponsot o René Leclerc sotto altre etichette. 1982–1993: unico lotto di Griotte-Chambertin, affittato a Ponsot. 1994: prima annata con secondo lotto, affittato a René Leclerc, blendato con il primo. 1995–2001: due imbottigliamenti identici senza indicazione del produttore. Dal 2002: produttore indicato sulle etichette. Fino al 2004 due bottiglie, dal 2005 René Leclerc solo occasionalmente. Il futuro del Domaine des Chézeaux Nonostante la lunga storia per una tenuta moderna, è solo l’inizio. Con un vignaiolo talentuoso come Charles van Canneyt e vigneti così prestigiosi, la qualità è destinata a crescere e i vini diventeranno presto ambiti quanto quelli di Hudelot-Noëllat. Annate 2023 del Domaine des Chézeaux 2023 Gevrey-Chambertin Clos des Chézeaux: 0,5 ha, vigne quasi centenarie, frutto rosso intenso, fiori di iris e violetta, tannini fini e salinità nel finale lungo. 2023 Gevrey-Chambertin Premier Cru Les Cazetiers: vigne vecchie, vino delicato, minerale e floreale, frutti trasparenti e tannini minerali equilibrati. Cinque barili prodotti. 2023 Griotte-Chambertin Grand Cru: lotto più grande del Grand Cru, aromatico ed elegante, frutti rossi succosi, spezie dolci e leggeri toni tostati, struttura che richiede tempo. Debutto superbo. Tenete d’occhio le prime uscite dei vini del nuovo Domaine des Chézeaux; nel frattempo, scoprite di più sulla Borgogna.

Nel 2021 Charles van Canneyt del Domaine Hudelot-Noëllat ha acquistato il poco noto Domaine des Chézeaux. In vista della prima annata, esploriamo la storia di questa proprietà di Gevrey-Chambertin, destinata a diventare uno dei nuovi indirizzi più interessanti della Côte de Nuits.

Everything you need to know about this Gevrey-Chambertin wine estate, now owned by Charles van Canneyt of Domaine Hudelot-Noellat  

The new Domaine des Chezeaux, Gevrey-Chambertin 

Il nuovo Domaine des Chézeaux 

Wine, though the most intimate of pleasures, lends itself to the most expansive of texts. We drink wine most often – tastings aside – in pairings of two, or in lonesome but agreeable solitude, and, its narcotic pleasure being felt internally, we feel its effects as we feel a fever: almost secretly, in shivers. Though wine is like sex in its intimacy, unlike sex, the form in which we fetishise wine – our vine erotica – is not hushed and illicit but encyclopedic. On the shelves of any wine drinker, there are likely to be catalogues, dictionaries organised by region, old Parker buying guides some 600 pages long that somehow, though dated, can’t be discarded.  Wine seems singular among human pleasures in this. We don’t, as a rule, rush from reading a poem to great anthologies of poetry, or add to the savour of seeing a play by reading a big atlas of dramatic literature – not, at least, after we graduate from school. Sports fans, it’s true, like big books of statistics, but then sports-watching is a social act in the first instance – the more people in the stands, the merrier the occasion. With wine, we like the macro with our micro: with a solitary glass in hand, we look, in print, over the next hill, or the current vintage, at the vineyard across the way, or the vintage yet to come. It’s part of the pleasure the glass provides. The reasons for this micro and macro turn are, on reflection, commercial and artisanal as much as aesthetic. The business of wine needs a big picture of its domain, its resources, and its potential market – scale sets the stage for commerce. The makers of wine like to place themselves on a broader map of where wine is and what it’s made with. The great Bordeaux classification of 1855 is not just the noblest public monument to a beverage ever attempted, but a model of market-making and even market price-fixing. Once a hierarchy of growths has been established, it is easy to slot in the price tags. But there is a truth of taste beneath the ordering of value. With wine, we know that what we are experiencing is, however singular, still an intersection of opposed forces – as the peerless wine writer Jancis Robinson MW says of her first glass of Chambolle-Musigny 1959; “I knew at once that there was something in the glass that was sensually delicious but that it was also made, produced, and therefore suggested a history of intellect and discernment.” The pleasure of wine is the crossing of a place, a grape and a people; and so, we turn to the big books to frame the small pleasures.  What distinguishes wine from even a good glass of ale or a local brew is the specificity of the pleasure set against the scale of the system that made it – one that historically embraces the planet. It’s a First Growth, or a domaine Burgundy, or a Ridge Zinfandel or a New Zealand Pinot Noir made to a Burgundy model by American wine makers … the more we know, the more we’re free to feel. Most sensory pleasures are specific to the point of being illicit – aside from the bemused fetishist, romance is a spontaneous pleasure, often aided, to be sure, by a systematic wine. Wine is premeditated; we choose a bottle, let it ripen, and break it open. Even casual table drinking has a tale to tell, a journey to trace on a map. These thoughts are brought to mind in contemplation of Wine Grapes, the monosyllabically titled but unprecedentedly expansive dictionary of grape varieties grown to be crushed and fermented on this green planet. Authored by Robinson, along with Julia Harding MW and the geneticist Dr José Vouillamoz, it marks an epoch – several epochs – in our understanding of wine, from both a professional planet-straddling and an amateur glass-in-hand perspective. A book of its time (published in 2012), it was made possible, in part, by a revolution in the DNA analysis of wine grapes to help discover their origins and histories.  The DNA profiling of wine grapes only began in 1993, and the first ‘paternity test’ successfully concluded in 1997 – a mere few days ago by historical perspective – with specialists, Dr Vouillamoz among them, drawing astonishing Darwinian lines among seemingly unrelated grapes. Zinfandel, it has been discovered in the last 40 years, is not only the Siamese twin of Primitivo, but its Croatian Siamese twin. In proper Darwinian fashion, the book tells us, “It looks increasingly as though an enormous proportion of the grapes we know today are members of a few key families.”  The leading families of wine, Pinot and Nebbiolo and the rest, like the leading houses of Westeros, jostle and engage in incestuous inter-breeding as they move towards dominance. As Jancis Robinson admits, the quest for the origins of grapes can become surprisingly emotional. “The Zin quest is so … heated. There was a Zinfandel conference in Croatia, with all the great Zin makers, even Joel ‘King of Zin’ Peterson from Ravenswood, and we all had to present our various things about Zinfandel. There was a small cohort of people from Montenegro who reckoned that their variety – whose name is unpronounceable – was the true progenitor of modern Zinfandel, not the Croatian one. It became so … Balkan! And you know what? They may be right!” Wine Grapes is of its time in another sense as well, marking the moment when we have started to think of wine not solely in terms of region, but much more in terms of variety, with the semi-mystical term ‘terroir’ acting as a kind of Holy Spirit between them. Thinking ‘grape’ more than ‘place’ releases our imaginations. The wholesome instructive pleasures of the book, to which we’ll come, shrink beside the unwholesome, guilty pleasures of turning the pages to meet the failures among grapes – the near-misses, the long-forgotten and forlorn lost toys – which please more than the patterns of primacy. The pleasure of reading about the grapes whose juice we do drink is nothing compared to reading about those we don’t. In dictionaries, oddities and parentheses fascinate us more than the major entries. No one turns to the dictionary to study ‘and’; we go to study ‘antediluvian’. So, turning these pages, flipping through the P’s on our way to encounter the great Pinot families, we come upon the lesser gods, even the little misshapen gnomes and dwarves of the wine world, and we delight in meeting them. (A fascination added to by the forthright sub-heads the editors provide.) On our way to Burgundy and Pinot Noir, we also meet Pinotin, a ‘recent obscure Swiss hybrid’ which edges into Pionnier, ‘a minor but complex, cold-hardy American hybrid used in blends in Québec’, and, of course, Pinotage ‘South Africa’s very own cross, both loved and despised’, which leads us on to Pugnitello and even Pukhliakovsky (a Russian variety ‘with erratic yields producing light wines’) and even unto Pules – ‘a minor Albanian white’. Radiating out from five pages on the major Merlot, we bump into Merseguera, ‘an uninspiring variety’ from Spain, and Merzifon Karasi, and Merzling, dismissed as a ‘very minor disease-resistant German hybrid’. Why these lost or obscure kinds of grapes bring so much delight with them is a fascinating question. It has in part to do with our general appetite for oddities and obscurities, which once produced ‘freak shows’ and still makes us fascinated with archaic musical instruments: we are curious to hear the sackbut because we want to know what led to the trombone. It is also the virtuous case that variety is the safeguard of continuity. In an age of ever-decreasing biodiversity with just a few varieties taking the place of many possibilities, one Quixotic California winemaker, driving through the fields of Cabernet and Chardonnay, dismissed them all – with a wave of the hand – as “chocolate and vanilla, chocolate and vanilla”.  The health of the planet is safeguarded by the persistence of so many kinds. It is also because the existence of these minor yet still thriving varieties gives us a satisfying picture of adaptation, the central biological act. Each of these grapes has found a home in the world. It may not be much of a home, but then neither, face the facts, is ours. We identify with the unknown grape. We are all more like a very minor disease-resistant German, or a cold-hardy Québec hybrid, than we are something noble and complicated. Few of us are bottles of Burgundy; we can all identify as minor Albanian whites. In conversation, Jancis Robinson, sheltering at home near Kings Cross in London, a home with a view of a graveyard (though a cheerful one she assures an interviewer) – talks of the wine almanac with the blunt enthusiasm that marks her writing. Robinson, in addition to her obvious honours and credentials, is a rare thing in the wine world, or any world: a writer who writes with equal parts brio and expertise. She explains the origins of Wine Grapes. “What happened was that one of the co-authors, Dr José Vouillamoz, who had been at University of California, Davis, felt that he needed to earn more of a living, and came back to Switzerland and got a job working on Alpine botanicals. But he didn’t want to lose his relationship with wine, and he came to me and said that he’d like to collaborate on a book about grape varieties. I’d already written one in 1986, based on our very fractional knowledge then.  Over lunch, I took along Julia Harding, a wine writer who works on my website. She’s extremely punctilious.” (Robinson, punctilious herself, says this with such emphasis that the listener feels that, with Harding, we must be talking about new frontiers, not to say dimensions, in punctiliousness.) “She had exactly the right sort of brain for a project like this. José suggested that we focus on the 10 or 12 most planted grape varieties to help simplify it. I thought that that book didn’t sound interesting enough. I waited until we were quite far down a bottle of Valpolicella and said, ‘I think our book should be about every single grape variety we can find.’ He gulped and said, ‘Then that’s what we shall do!’” The idea of creating a ‘perfect map’ of a subject is one of the itches that govern modern life. John James Audubon set out to describe not the major but every bird and beast in North America, and that’s what he did. Similar ‘almanacs of everything’ fill our botanical and anthropological shelves. It is an ambition so tied to modernity that in the mid-19th century, Lewis Carroll perfectly satirised it in his novel, Sylvie & Bruno, where two mad professors talk about their dream of making a map that would be on a one-to-one relation to the actual world – utterly perfect, if impossible to unroll. “I loved the scale of the thing,” Robinson says of her perfect map. “So, we carved things up: José did all the DNA stuff and history because he had good access to it, Julia, bless her, did the footwork – how much of each grape is planted where – while trying to taste as many as possible, too! And I wrote the entries on the best-known varieties, and the introduction and read every single word.  As with any dictionary, we used what came before: we went through appellation lists, with all of the varieties allowed, some of them almost extinct. A nice little detail of the book is that we persuaded the publisher that it should have some colour plates, and we were particularly keen to include the plates from the world’s first oenological book, L’Ampélographie: Traité Général de Viticulture, of 1901 … just out of copyright!” She pauses. “Of course,” she adds reflectively, “it was José, naturally, who discovered that Pinot and Syrah are related.” The offhand nature of her mention can’t conceal the significance of the remark. Of all the discoveries offered in the book, this is perhaps, for the amateur wine drinker, the most exemplary and astonishing. Painstakingly tracing the DNA heritage of the varieties, these two noble houses, Syrah and Pinot – the grapes of the Rhône Valley and those of Burgundy, the heart of Côte-Rôtie and the soul of Chambertin – are unified as cousins. This happened not through willed cultivation but in the natural evolutionary way: through variation and adaptation. Initially, the elegance of Pinot Noir was transformed through the usual evolutionary pressures of place and mutations, into the earthy pleasures of Syrah.  Chance mutation and lucky planting turned one grape into its near opposite. (‘Cross-fertilisation’, we’re told, ‘was common until the early 20th century because several grape varieties were often intermixed in the vineyards, facilitating natural crossings between distinct grape varieties’.) The phylloxera epidemic in France from the 1860s on – though it did not destroy as much as is sometimes thought – acted as a kind of sieve or filter of grape varieties, a sort of extinction event in large-scale natural history, forcing hard choices and making obscure varieties less desirable to save by root grafting with New World vines.   One virtue of the book is to propose, in effect, a new order of wines by celebrating ‘secondary’ grape varieties. “For me, among the obscure wines, something about as well-known as Cinsault stands out – it can make such lovely wines,” Robinson says. “There’s been such a sea change as the century turned. Everybody once wanted to make fruit bombs to one of three standard recipes. Then in this century, higher acidity, lighter wines are finally revaluing, and so Cinsault comes into its own. “Sometimes I come across a grape that isn’t well known but that’s so obviously superior. There’s Aglianico – the name suggests it’s Greek, though no Greek variety has ever been found and you only get it in Southern Italy. Perfect for late ripeness, and not for cool climates – and now it has travelled to Australia, where they’re desperate for hot weather varieties.  The whole array of Portuguese and Greek grape varieties are so fantastic! And so individual. And I love that after a dalliance with international varieties, both countries are now celebrating their own. There’s another white grape, an Iberian variety that’s stunning, and, again, I’m not sure it’s yet been planted much: Godello! It’s a bit crass to say it makes wines that taste like Montrachet, if a little more terroir-y and mineral … but it does. I could drink Cinsault for red and Godello for white into the next century. “There’s such a gap nowadays,” Robinson goes on, “between the Napa Cab thing, and these young people who are buying unknown grape varieties that sell for a fraction of the price, that are really good. Such a lot has happened in the field of recuperating old vines, some so obscure that they don’t even have a name. Miguel Torres, the scion of that great company in northeast Spain became very interested in grapes.  At first, he said, ‘Hey Dad, we need the posh varieties, Cabernet and Chardonnay’ – and made all these wines which did well in the Judgement of Paris. But, with time, he realised that it made more sense to concentrate on the indigenous varieties. He’s been engaged for 30 years, putting classified ads in the local press – ‘If you know of a wine grape that you can’t identify, let us know of it, and – if we think we can propagate out – we’ll do micro-vinification.’ He’s actually rescued Catalan varieties that were on the brink of disappearing; I think he found 30 varieties, and recuperated eight for micro-vinification with sufficient character to give them a new lease of life. And much the same thing has been happening all over Italy. If we published the book today, we’d be up to at least 1,500 kinds of grapes.” The great sorting question of our time, of course, is the question of climate change and its effects on wine cultivation. Robinson is cautiously hopeful about Burgundy. “I was lucky enough to go there and spend some time. The 2020 harvest is the earliest ever, at least since the 14th century. But, whereas the 2003 vintage, that legendary hot summer in France, produced wines that were pretty bizarre, the 2019s seem as fresh as a daisy, with pure fruit. I’m no plant biologist, but the vines seem to be getting used to the conditions … or the winemakers are. They’re not extracting as heavily, but, given that, there’s no sign of added acidity (it’s routinely added in the southern hemisphere), the acidity is coming from the grapes as well. Even some real old Burgundy hands, when you ask why the wines are so fresh, say, ‘I really don’t know.’” About the Southern Rhône, though, she is more pessimistic. “They’re not helping themselves in the Southern Rhône: too many are trying to make concentrated, high alcohol, 16% wines. And maybe consultants are too powerful down there – one consultant can be responsible for 20 or 30 labels, and so you’re going to have 20 or 30 wines that reflect that.” It’s here, though, that the knowledge of grapes, and our possession of this specialist dictionary, seems particularly valuable. If wine is to save itself from the vagaries of climate change, it will probably be through the introduction and new use of ‘marginal’ or forgotten ‘heirloom’ grapes. Only recently, France’s Institut National de l’Origine et de la Qualité (INAO) officially approved six new varieties: four red grapes – Arinarnoa, Castes, Marselan, and Touriga Nacional; and two whites – Alvarinho and Liliorila – all described as ‘well-adapted to alleviate hydric stress associated with temperature increases and shorter growing cycles’, potential saviours of the region against the villain of global warming. All of them, of course, are charted and explicated in Wine Grapes.

In the end, the great strange truth of wine is the truth of life: a thousand vectors press down on us at once – place, history, time, temperature, luck and breeding – and somehow in the intersection we find, or make, our pleasures. The question of type and variation was very different before Darwin who wrote, oddly (or perhaps not so oddly) almost simultaneously with the great classification of Bordeaux, publishing On the Origin of Species in 1859.  (Oddly because his theory would have been true in any other time; not so oddly because the urge to map the world, for the ‘almanac of everything’, was typical of mid-19th century confidence, as Carroll’s satire suggests.) Before Darwin, who loved wine, the fundamental view of the world was that the superintending categories, species and varieties, were the fixed things in the world. Everyone took it for granted that the ‘kind’ the ‘essence’, was the real thing and all the little variants merely particular shades away from it. A grape was a better or worse instance of its variety. Grapes, like apes, were of one fixed sort. Darwin’s great overriding insight was that only particulars exist, and that species and superintending categories are the labile and ever-changing kinds. Every kind of living thing came from somewhere weird and is on its way to somewhere weirder, with a brief stopover at being the thing it is now. The elegance of Pinot Noir is a close cousin of the earthiness of Syrah, one state is simply a moment in the life of the other, and each are moments in the life of the surging, unfixable whole. Wine, braiding through the planet and only coming to rest on a name for a moment in one place, is a bit of scientific epistemology in your glass, the truth of the particular made potable. It’s a fine destiny for a simple pleasure. This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue One Photography by Gavin Bond; floral set design by Studio Lupine

Essayist and author Adam Gopnik takes a look at the world of wine through the lens of seminal wine-lover’s bible, Wine Grapes, and talks to one of its three co-authors, Jancis Robinson MW about the joy of discovering long-forgotten indigenous grape varieties

Adam Gopnik talks to Wine Grapes co-author Jancis Robinson MW about the joy of discovering long-forgotten indigenous grape varieties

FONDATA: Pleasure in the detail

Pleasure in the detail

ORIGINS

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mostra tutti gli articoli che attualmente conservi con noi. Questi articoli possono essere venduti, consegnati o trasferiti.

Presso {shortName}

La tua allocazione verrà annullata. Sei sicuro di voler continuare?

Il tuo articolo pre-ordinato verrà eliminato. Sei sicuro di voler continuare?

La tua richiesta di consegna verrà annullata. Sei sicuro di voler procedere?

rappresenta tutti i vini che sono in tuo possesso e che sono stati consumati.

Questo è il prezzo che hai pagato per questo articolo.

Prezzo di costo

Dopo aver aggiunto il nuovo indirizzo, verrai reindirizzato a questa pagina.

Crea un nuovo indirizzo

La tua notifica verrà eliminata. Sei sicuro di voler continuare?

Il prezzo minimo al quale sei disposto a vendere. Se il prezzo di listino scende al di sotto di questo valore, la tua inserzione verrà rimossa.

mostra tutti gli articoli che hai pre-ordinato, inclusi i vini en primeur, e tutti gli articoli nella tua watchlist.

Futures

È possibile impostare un prezzo minimo per gli articoli in vendita basato su una percentuale del valore netto unitario attuale.

Puoi impostare un prezzo di mercato per gli articoli che stai vendendo basato su una percentuale del valore netto unitario corrente.

mostra tutte le azioni che hai effettuato sugli articoli nel tuo Portafoglio.

raggruppa ogni azione per tipo - Acquisto, Vendita, Consegna e Trasferimento in entrata - così è chiaro a colpo d'occhio cosa è successo a ciascun articolo.

Storico

mostra tutti gli articoli attualmente in transito da o verso {shortName}.

In transito

La consegna locale è gratuita per ordini superiori a 1.800 HK$ (in un'unica destinazione). Per ordini inferiori a questo importo, la consegna costa 150 HK$ fino a quattro casse e 50 HK$ per ogni cassa aggiuntiva.

Le spedizioni partono da €15 in Italia e da €45 verso la Svizzera e il resto d’Europa per un massimo di 48 bottiglie (75 cl). I costi variano in base alla destinazione. Per spedizioni più grandi è possibile richiedere un preventivo.

La data indicata di seguito è quella in cui il tuo ordine verrà spedito dal nostro magazzino locale. La data di consegna finale, insieme ai dettagli completi di tracciamento, ti verrà fornita una volta che il nostro team avrà elaborato la tua richiesta.

Puoi organizzare il ritiro presso il nostro negozio al 22° piano, 8 Wyndham Street, Central Hong Kong.
Gli orari di ritiro sono dalle 9:30 alle 18:00, da lunedì a venerdì.

Puoi organizzare il ritiro presso il nostro magazzino STI INTERNAZIONALE SPA, in Viale del Lavoro 57, 37051 Bovolone, Verona.
Gli orari di ritiro sono dalle 8:30 alle 12:30 e dalle 13:30 alle 17:30, dal lunedì al venerdì. Siamo chiusi nei giorni festivi.

Questo è il valore di mercato stimato attuale per questo articolo.

I prezzi impostati manualmente verranno sovrascritti. I vini già inseriti non sono interessati.

Aggiorna tutti i vini non inseriti al prezzo di mercato corrente.

Imposta tutto al prezzo di mercato

rappresenta tutti i vini attualmente presenti nel tuo Portafoglio che non sono conservati con noi. Premi l'icona

La mia cantina

Nome

Prezzo netto

Nuovo portafoglio disponibile

Nuovo portafoglio

Non hai alcuna fattura in questo momento.

mostra tutti gli articoli del tuo Portafoglio che sono attualmente sul mercato.

In vendita

mostra tutti gli articoli attualmente presenti nel tuo Portafoglio. Da questa pagina puoi eseguire azioni individuali su di essi.

Panoramica

mostra tutti gli articoli attualmente in attesa di un'azione da parte dell'utente.

In sospeso

Questo è il prezzo di mercato dinamico dell'articolo al netto del margine di negoziazione.

Questo è l'importo del profitto che riceverai se la tua inserzione verrà venduta.

I pagamenti pre-autorizzati consentono transazioni automatiche per tuo conto, garantendo pagamenti fluidi e senza complicazioni. Questo permette di elaborare addebiti ricorrenti, abbonamenti o pagamenti programmati senza approvazione manuale ogni volta.

Il numero di casse che desideri mettere in vendita

Il tuo articolo del catalogo verrà archiviato. Sei sicuro di voler continuare?

I tuoi articoli del catalogo verranno archiviati. Sei sicuro di voler continuare?

Prima di richiedere la consegna, puoi modificare la quantità per ciascun articolo nella tua selezione qui sotto.

*Il prezzo di mercato è dinamico e può variare. Al momento della vendita, dal prezzo finale sarà detratta una commissione di negoziazione del 10%.

Prezzo di mercato totale*

Il prezzo fisso personalizzato al quale desideri vendere ciascun articolo.

Dividi in {caseSize} singole bottiglie da {bottleSize}cl.

Titolo

mostra tutti gli articoli che attualmente conservi con noi. Questi articoli possono essere venduti.

Disponibili per la vendita — gli articoli conservati con {name} sono idonei per essere inseriti nel marketplace.

Profilo

Questo articolo si trova presso FINE+RARE.

Questo articolo si trova presso FINE+RARE HOME Hong Kong, ed è disponibile per la consegna o il ritiro in sede. La maggior parte delle consegne a Hong Kong può essere effettuata entro 3 giorni lavorativi; la data esatta sarà comunicata al momento dell'organizzazione della consegna. Le consegne internazionali richiedono tempi più lunghi, ti preghiamo di contattarci per maggiori dettagli.

I vini venduti en primeur saranno rilasciati dal produttore dopo limbottigliamento, tipicamente 18 mesi dopo la fine della cosiddetta campagna. Il tuo vino sarà poi conservato da FINE+RARE in un deposito doganale fino a quando deciderai di richiederne la consegna.

Ci riforniremo di questo articolo al prezzo garantito dalla nostra rete di fornitori e organizzeremo una spedizione rapida a FINE+RARE.
 I tempi di consegna dipendono da molte variabili, ma in genere per un approvvigionamento rapido sono 2-4 settimane.
 Una volta confermato l'ordine, ti terremo aggiornato sulla data di arrivo prevista.
 Ogni articolo viene controllato all'arrivo dal nostro team di esperti e le fotografie sono disponibili su richiesta (si prega di notare che potrebbero essere applicati dei costi).

Reperiremo questo articolo attraverso la nostra rete di fornitori e ne organizzeremo la spedizione a FINE+RARE.
 I tempi di consegna dipendono da molte variabili, ma una stima media è di 6-12 settimane.
 Una volta confermato lordine, ti terremo aggiornato sulla data di arrivo prevista.
 Ogni articolo viene controllato al momento della ricezione dal nostro team di esperti, con fotografie disponibili su richiesta (si prega di notare che potrebbero essere applicati dei costi).

ORIGINS

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