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

I know I report on these quite regularly. That’s because the estate is remarkably interesting and consequential, and because they are very good about sending me samples. With this collection I’m unusually timely, as the Crus on the market are (still) the 2023s, and all the other wines were current when I visited them last April.   There are two more reasons for paying this degree of attention. One is, even with a winery as reliable as this one, the occasional flub sneaks thr

“HGS” as he was known to most of us, succumbed at last to the various maladies that had dimmed his aura in recent years.   He will – already has, when he turned 80 – receive a clamor of encomia both for the impact he had on viticulture and for the gentle soul he was personally. I paid tribute to him when he “retired” from Müller-Catoir back in July 2002. You can find it on this website by looking under “portfolio” and then downloading my 2003 Germany catalog. There aren’t man

As you know, Selbachs make the wines now, following the passings of the Merkelbach brothers. Rolf and Alfred’s methods are being followed, in order to preserve their Edenic style, their lightness, and their freedom from affect.   What I don’t know is whether the old viticulture is being continued, including harvesting dates and methods. I trust it is being followed at least in spirit, because a precise facsimile seems impossible. Given that most of the vines grow in the class

[Editor's note: Find all of Terry's Tea Thoughts here. ] Don’t expect the explicit muscatel “attack” we had with the 2024s. I liked that, it was fun, but at times it was so uniform it felt like it was grafted on. Still, the few ’24 teas I have left are a reminder of why the term “muscatel” exists at all; the teas can be overtly grapey. I noticed its absence when the first ‘25 teas arrived, and thought it might be a problem, but these teas have deeper and more inscrutable tric

I have to say Spain was great except for when I got locked into a public toilet in San Sebastián and the police had to be called to spring me loose. It began innocently enough; Karen had used the thing and held the door open for me to follow, but as I was standing over the bowl and starting to whizz I was suddenly sprayed with a cleaning material from nozzles in the ceiling, so I jumped back and had a moment of “WTF” and then the floor nozzles opened up and sprayed my shoes,