The official release date of this year’s delectable juice is Thursday, November 16, and the wine will be available for purchase on that date.
   Here’s the on-the-ground update from France on our TWO Nouveaux!

Reserve yours by calling (510) 524-1524, or visit kermitlynch.com to join our email list to be alerted when the wine is available for purchase online.

Few vignerons are more responsible for changing the perception of the Beaujolais than Jean Foillard. If the chaptalized reds and mass-produced Nouveaux that came to define the region at the end of the last century sit at one end of the Beaujolais spectrum, Jean’s gorgeous Morgons and benchmark Beaujolais-Villages stand tall at the other, showcasing the world-class potential of Gamay planted in the region’s best granite terroirs.
  Now in his mid-twenties, Jean’s son Alex could have taken the easy route and joined his father’s illustrious domaine. Instead, he branched out a few years ago into a very distinct terroir, purchasing one hectare of old vines in Brouilly and producing something intriguingly different enough from Jean’s famous Morgons to catch your attention.

My gateway into sparkling wine was something bubbly from California that my friends and I used to pass around in a circle. It was low-priced and low in alcohol, high in both sugar and carbonation, but it made us feel alive with agency and sophistication. That’s the power of bubbles, I guess. Luckily for me, my palate evolved and was further awakened years later when Kermit offered me a position in our office in Burgundy. There, colleagues and I could order Champagne straight from the domaines of Lassalle, Fourny, and Bara, so often that their wines became our house apéritifs. Gone were the days of sweet swill, welcome were those of fine and balanced grower Champagne.
  There was one small drawback to living in Beaune: the selection of sparkling wines from regions outside of Champagne and Burgundy, let alone other countries, was limited. But the post also bestowed upon us the privileged generosity, especially around the holidays, of growers from every region in France and Italy who regaled us with end-of-year gifts—often, magnums of something home-grown and sparkling. How fortunate we were, in such a small town, to fill our cellars with artisanal frizzante like Davide Vignato’s Primo Incontro from the Veneto, or Moretto’s savory Pignoletto from Emilia-Romagna. We even earned a reputation among friends and locals for opening the most interesting apéritifs with aromatic appeal: exotic sparklers made from a cornucopia of grapes, like Boxler’s Crémant d’Alsace, and delicate Proseccos from Sommariva and Gregoletto. Racy Chenin beauties from the Loire like Thierry Germain’s Saumur “Bulles de Roche” and Champalou’s Vouvray Brut were the antidote to Burgundy’s jaded palates, welcome diversions from an abundance of Chardonnay-based sparklers.
   While we all have our own memories with sparkling wine––be it a coming-of-age tale, a life-changing bottle, or a festive celebration––there’s always something intriguing in our imports with which to create new ones. So without further ado, and with no shortage of expressions to describe these offerings: mousseux, pétillant, frizzante, or spumante . . . dive into our selections and discover what the many regions across France and Italy have to offer.

Now through November 30, take 20% sparkling wines from Champagne, Alsace, Liguria, the Loire, and more! Visit our Berkeley shop or CLICK HERE and use coupon code SPARKLING2023 at checkout.

It’s been said that Les Pallières is more of an “ambiance” than a microclimate. To get there, it’s a bit of a drive from Gigondas village center, heading north, away from the main road, the summer crowds, and the noise. The road follows the Trignon River around some bends and suddenly climbs, up past a few old farmhouses at the base of the hill, and then into that ambiance many have remarked upon at first visit. There’s a calmness in the hills, save the occasional passing of the herd of goats who roam the property, with their shepherdess guiding them through. The estate is vast, much more ground given to forests of pine, oak, and maquis than to vine. The vineyards only begin to appear mid-slope, spread out here and there, never in a single massive block, and always planted horizontally, with each row forming a bit of a notch, creating what looks like a giant stairway to heaven. These steep parcels compose the Racines cuvée. Directly in the heart of those parcels lie the old buildings of Les Pallières, including a house, the winery, a chapel, and some older structures used for various endeavors over the course of centuries, from wine to olive oil to silk-worm rearing. Given the distance of the property from town, this cluster of buildings was long a semi-autonomous, self-sufficient hamlet, a hustle of activity and artisans under the watchful eye of the Roux family, hands-on proprietors who weathered wars and revolutions, prosperity and hard times, and managed to keep things going through countless generations, until they had no more heirs of their own to hand down to.
   While today the grounds are quiet and calm, you can feel the history and energy of all those who lived, prayed, and toiled here. Continuing up the hill, far above the old buildings, are the parcels of the Terrasse du Diable cuvée—some on the top slope and some on the plateau of the hill, completely surrounded by the Mediterranean forest. As of this writing, the 2023 harvest has been safely brought into the winery. It marks a special milestone, as it’s the twenty-fifth vintage that the Brunier / Lynch team has harvested, after taking over from the Roux family to perpetuate the celebrated wines and the ambiance of Les Pallières.

Every Domaine Ostertag creation is a work of art, an individualistic expression of an iconoclastic vigneron’s vision executed from vine to bottle, accompanied by a beautiful and original label.

On a warm night in early June, I stepped out of Le Peletier Metro station in Paris’s ninth arrondissement, five minutes away from learning the answer to a question I’d mulled over for weeks. A month earlier, I’d invited François-Régis Gaudry to meet for an apéro or dinner, but I’d left the location up to him. After all, as the host of “On Va Déguster,” a nationally broadcast radio program about food across France and author of On Va Déguster Paris (out now in the U.S. as Let’s Eat Paris!), Gaudry knows the dining scene in Paris better than almost anyone. Now, I was about to discover which gem in the city’s crown of restaurants France’s most influential gourmand had chosen for our rendezvous.
  It only took a minute upon sitting down at a table outside Lolo Cave à Manger on rue du Châteaudun for Gaudry to confess, “I don’t actually eat dinner, usually.” He must have seen the stunned look on my face because he quickly pulled out his phone and swiped through half a dozen photos of that day’s lunch, a seemingly endless parade of dishes, some of them swimming in cream or butter. Because of his métier, this is how most weekday lunches go, and as a result, he considers his evenings a respite from consumption, a period of recovery that often extends until 10 a.m. the following day. To my surprise, whatever fleeting disappointment I felt that I would not sample the menu of a restaurant hand-picked by the country’s preeminent expert on French and Parisian dining was replaced by relief. For the previous two weeks, as my colleagues and I traversed France and Italy, vignerons served us heaping plates of charcuterie, Comté, and the seasonal white asparagus, as though we were training for the Tour de France and needed to stockpile calories. After such intense eating and countless bottles of wine, I was happy to forgo an extended meal, even if my companion had an unrivaled Rolodex of Paris’s—and France’s—best culinary addresses.
  To know Gaudry’s work, though, is to know that he finds the home-prepared plates of charcuterie, Comté, and white asparagus as fundamental to French cuisine as any Parisian restaurant. After all, in the thirteen years since he started hosting “On Va Déguster”—a sort of “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!” meets “No Reservations,” on French public radio—Gaudry has dedicated an episode to each of these three staples of the French table. If creating an hour’s worth of entertaining radio content around such everyday ingredients as asparagus sounds like an impossible feat, guess again. Assembling a panel each week of producers, chefs, and other culinary experts, Gaudry balances blind tastings, panelist banter, recipe suggestions, wine pairings, field reporting, and more to bring France’s victuals to life in a way that would make Alice Waters or Michael Pollan smile.
  Throughout my two-week-long adventures with my colleagues, “On Va Déguster” popped up unexpectedly on multiple occasions, reaffirming that its audience of a staggering two million weekly live listeners is not limited to Parisian foodies. At Château Thivin, on Beaujolais’ Côte de Brouilly, Gaudry’s fun and comprehensive “encyclopéguide”—part encyclopedia, part guide— On Va Déguster la France peeked out from a stack of books in the dining room. And when I asked Valentin Montanet, a Vézelay vigneron who’d served us our second delicious dish of white asparagus topped with an exquisite mousseline, if he was familiar with the radio host and his program, he replied that he and his family listen to it every Sunday while cooking or doing household chores. “His show reminds listeners that good produce and products form the foundation of French cuisine, and these products come from people who put their hearts into their work. On top of that, his show shines a light on vignerons, vigneronnes, and appellations that sometimes fall outside the mainstream. That’s largely thanks to his panelists, who do a very good job.”
  Michel Tolmer, the renowned illustrator who designed the label for our new Côtes du Rhône Villages at the beginning of this month’s newsletter, also listens to “On Va Déguster” every week and echoed this point about Gaudry’s great taste in panelists and subjects. One of the program’s wine chroniqueurs, Jérome Gagnez, for instance, is such a thoughtful and curious commentator that upon being challenged as a “Bordeaux basher” many years ago, Gagnez dove so deeply into the region’s wines that he eventually packed up his things in Paris and moved to the famed wine city on the Garonne River. 
  As I parted ways with Gaudry around 9 p.m. and walked back to my hotel, the city was still filled with light and the sidewalks teemed with Parisians enjoying a glass of wine or a meal. Crossing through the second arrondissement and into the third, I thought of the home-made pâtés I’d eaten chez Benoît Cantin in Irancy and Alain Pascal in Bandol; Agnès Henry’s vast vegetable garden, also in Bandol; the divine chèvre the Bruniers made from their herd of goats in Gigondas; and, of course, the tender spears of white asparagus prepared by Valentin and his family. As perfectly suited as Gaudry is to his job—with his voracious interest in every aspect of regional French foodways—the success of “On Va Déguster” is also a reflection of a uniquely gourmand people, who remain devoted to the table.