When I visited venerable Alsatian wine icon Hugel on a media jaunt earlier this year (2017), they were nary a year removed from the family tragedy of Etienne Hugel’s untimely death, and their CEO had left the company the week prior to my visit. When I mentioned to 13th-generation family member Marc-André Hugel that many…
Category: elegant wines
Cheap Tricks (Domaines Schlumberger Recent Releases)
“We are very cheap for a Grand Cru!” It could be said that Domaines Schlumberger‘s Thomas Schlumberger doesn’t fully understand the negative connotations of the word “cheap” in the English language. I write that because, as he told me the above quote during a media visit to the Guebwiller property that has been in his…
Spit Shine (Domaine Marcel Deiss Recent Releases)
Jean-Michel Deiss likes to talk spit. That his family, winegrowers since 1744, are established as the Alsatian version of winemaking royalty probably helps him to get away with it. “Wine today is an industrial project,” he told me (through interpretation) during a media tour visit to Domaine Marcel Deiss‘ Bergheim winery. “But great wine is…
Turning Tables To Turning Heads (Trestle Thirty One 2015 Finger Lakes Riesling)
For Riesling lovers, the last four years in particular have been a good time to be alive. On one side of the shiny Riesling-fine-wine-world-market coin, Europe’s traditional flag-bearing regions of that grape been performing well; on the other side, we’ve seen the emergence of up-and-coming areas that, while far from wine-drinking household names, undoubtedly have…