Firstly, a note that if you missed the previous two tastings from March '26, they can be found here: Dautel and here: Glatzer . This might be a time to revisit my practice of always tasting a wine from at least two different glasses. I’d say that the wines are the same (or close enough) maybe a quarter of the time. That’s to say it didn’t matter which glass I used. The other 75% of the time there was a decisive difference, important enough to look for a through-line to try a

No one drinks wine any more. Fewer and fewer people drink alcohol of any kind, thanks to a WHO report that will be contradicted in five years by another WHO report. But we here are interested in wine.   Let’s leave aside the question of wine’s status as an “alcoholic beverage.” And then let’s admit that wine is singularly unattractive to anyone but we who’ve been bitten by the bug. Let’s further admit that wine is unattractive because we who are nuts about it are also unattra

I’m not that much of a weeper, though I don’t mind crying and I do it easily when it’s worth doing. I think of Roger Ebert’s line about crying at the movies: we don’t cry from sadness, we cry from goodness. That is true for me. But I’ll go weeks without tears and then I have a couple soggy days in a row. As happened recently.   I have a folder of bookmarks of musical performances, and I was thumbing through it when I had one of those time units where I couldn’t start somethin

Ludwig “Senior” appears to have actually retired. He came back to the winery after a lengthy absence to say hi to me, I was told. This isn’t common; often the elders stick around, if only to ensure the kids aren’t getting up to any mischief. But my old friend Ludwig is off to the rest of his life, leaving the estate in the able hands of his sons.   In a fundamental way, Hiedlers will always be Hiedlers. Their website is eloquent on that score. The question I find myself askin