An odd range in some ways, omitting the best among the GGs in favor of three Chardonnays and an equally odd group of the 1er Crus. The estate, like many in the Deidesheim-Wachenheim nexus, is capacious. Only Forst has seemed to preserve the classic “small-grower” culture. But let’s see about those Chards; there must have been a reason they were included. But first, two of the red GGs. There’s an entire range of nine red wines, mostly but not exclusively Pinot Noir, among wh

There was talk recently about whether the term “fine wine” had about it a stench of exclusivity, as though the very wines themselves wished you to know you weren’t cultured enough to suss their esoteric gifts. It’s a symptom – yet another symptom – of the current wine malaise, in which all of us are casting about feverishly trying to figure out how to make wine enticing again. Anything smacking of <ulp> connoisseurship is clearly infra dig, at least for persons who do not d

I have a case of samples, eight dry wines and four “sweet” wines. All Rieslings, though I do miss the Pinot Blanc. This is a grower of special consequence in my view, as opposed to just-another-excellent estate. Coincidentally, I’m tasting these yet again when our backyard crabapple tree is a day or two from blooming. It isn’t on purpose, but sems to be a sort of kismet I’m willing to believe isn’t random. As my half-sister Rhonda likes to say, “Coincidence is how God pres

A friend arrived for dinner bearing two wines he wanted me to taste blind. He said he was curious to know what I’d think of them, which told me these were not just random wines, but that they were noteworthy in some way. One was white, the other red. The white wine first struck me as an ambitious Aligoté. It was coarse and disjointed; if it were a car it would have had rattles and dings. I couldn’t guess where it was from. It had no particular signature. I drank it again

If the best idea is held in the tenderest hand, these Champagnes couldn’t possibly be more convincing. I was reading a catalogue for a retreat center offering various wellness/vedic/meditation/spirituality stuff, and at the end they printed a letter from a “satisfied customer” that gave me a feeling adjacent to an ice cream headache. The luckless author of said document made reference to “walking mindfully” or some such thing. I was surprised, because I couldn’t fathom how

Andi means to send me samples; he’s just busy and forgets. So it’s been a few years, and because of that he sent me what amounts to (mostly) a vertical collection of his two GGs, rather than the current assortment in its entirety. It would be churlish to complain, but those are highly interesting wines I’ve sometimes found to be closer-in to the soul of the domain. Should you be wondering, those wines include a Muschelkalk Trocken, an Oestricher Doosberg Scharfenstein (a ca

My immense regard for Prieler is surely no secret. This is a culling of recent bottlings, omitting the (often lovely) St. Laurent and the entry-level Pinot Blanc. If I knew the reasons for omitting them, I have forgotten. Let the (abbreviated) games begin. This will be good.

Jancis Robinson published a piece in the Financial Times and enlarged upon it on her website, about the many vagaries of bottle variation. She (and the redoubtable Tamlyn Currin) cited the many external factors whereby bottles of the same wine might differ. Many of them would surprise you, unless you were in the wine trade or handled shipping logistics. It needed saying, because wine reviewers are often taken to task for the divergences of praise (and ugh, “scores”) among d

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