We also farm iron rich gravels and sands, a promising mix but, as in Bordeaux, prone to podzolization and pans. Deep ripping required.

Good sleuthing - this is a dummy bottle.

Not a showy wine. Lynch, GPL did that job. But even these seemed retiring compared to Leoville Barton.

My notes from blind ‘20 MW tasting this spring. Maybe try the Pedesclaux if you’re craving extra astringency.

They’re all Airbnb guests so they experience it as novelty, to bring it back to Dwight.

Sherry and Madeira production is elaborate and generative, but the end product can be inert. We may not step into the same river twice but the flow downstream is lazy.

Elevage is like the last act of a play that brings the drama of fermentation to its conclusion. Dwight’s depiction is too chaotic. Predication tends to be repetitive vis a vis grape varieties/regions/cru, but isn’t that because outcomes are broadly predictable?

We need Joe Strummer’s bullshit detector.

Natural v conventional is a rhetorical strategy, whereas the shift to domaine bottling was a properly generative event. Individual estates found a way of escaping the demands of large scale production. Low SO2 is a good example of producers working things out for themselves.

Just refuse the categories natural/conventional, and enjoy individual wines.

Octagon Pinot.

And there was me thinking y’all too cool for school.

What I think is interesting, again taking Chardonnay as the example, is that the points of escape - delayed malo/the slow pace of wild ferments - that come into play when our control is rolled back, tend to consistently produce better wines.

Production is certainly impelled from within by yeast and bacteria, but the surprise for me is the repetition in outcomes. Chardonnay made in barrel is an almost frictionless process yet you usually end up in the same precinct even with wild aldehydic detours. Soil is the hidden, regulating hand.

Alchemy

The lack within accumulation, but then you discover money and burgundy both smell like shit.

I’d argue it’s a often a flight from accumulation, but old habits and all that…

Absolutely.

Burgundy Bingo - ‘pigeage’, ‘whole-cluster’ ‘delayed malo’. So much desire, overshoot, relative to consumption.

Barthes wrote an essay ‘One always fails to write about what one loves’ which is worth reading. Certainly easier going than W’s Tractatus.

Isn’t wine as much about our desire as it is about our consumption. Writing can be part of this excess: an unopened original wooden case, the stem of a Zalto; the cold weight of Lafite 2000 in the cellar. Writing that irritates and seems irrelevant to some can feel like poetry to others.

The difficult shift from accumulation to pleasure. Nice work, Peter.

Too many seduced by a view or a chateau, when it’s the work of wine, certainly expensive wine, to render the invisible visible. Yours, John , Southend on Sea.

I want to scream.

Yes. Part of Coterie’s empire building project.

They have inventory via L&W. How much of the plan is storage?

Soho in the 80s. Quite a few of us got plastered with Francis Bacon in the Colony Rooms.

We had a Dachshund bitch for 10yrs:- she spent her life anchored to my side; insisted on being carried home from walks; freaked big dogs out; but, notably, was a relentless scavenger. The adorable cockroach of the dog world.

French often mangle the mixing of the old and the new but this is stunning.

Standing up and holding your arms out to steady a rocking boat. Think there are better solutions.

Vote Quimby