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

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

Before we consider the delicious doings at Bründlmayer , a small bit of news. Joshua Dunning has written an excellent article on the history of sugar in Champagne; not only dosage, but the evolution of tastes among Champagne’s customers, and how it seems to have landed on a creed whereby any residual sugar is held in the deepest suspicion. Mr. Dunning’s piece is here: https://wordonthegrapevine.co.uk/dosage-champagne/ I’m quoted, as you’ll see, which is hardly surprising as

These days I’m preoccupied with trying to do what one puny guy can do to make wine less forbidding so that we can slow down (or even stop) the attrition of drinkers. A dialogue I had with my friend Meg Maker was published in the latest World Of Fine Wine and seemed to tickle some vagus nerve of the zeitgeist, and even engendered a bit of snark from some chap whose piece circled the drain while missing the points that Meg and I were addressing. But most of the subsequent onlin