Events

as most of you know, spring has very much sprung here in LA and summer is already on the horizon. with the sun shining again, it seemed like the perfect time to invite winemaker and friend of the shop ashkahn shahparnia over to pour you his latest releases. colorfully labelled, playfully named, and shot through with the bright, carefree energy of the california coast, ashkahn’s wines are true harbingers of spring — we tasted through the new vintage last month and have been especially stoked to share them these last few (very warm) days.

a multidisciplinary artist based in santa maria, ashkahn began his winemaking journey as a harvest intern at presqu’ile winery in 2019 and produced his first solo bottling — a still chardonnay made with fruit from stolpman vineyards — the following year. his second vintage comprised a trio of zippy, laid-back central coast chards; since then, the lineup has expanded, diversified, and matured without losing any of its verve. by now, it includes a rainbow of still and sparkling offerings produced with fruit from some of southern california’s most storied vineyards.

this year, we’re particularly fond of the pet-nats: a delightfully acid-driven sparkling chardonnay named for ashkahn’s daughter, ivy, and a bubbly rosé made with pinot noir from bassi vineyard in SLO county, a gorgeous site 1.2 miles from the pacific ocean that also provides fruit for outward wines and scar of the sea, among others. both sparklers are refreshing additions to any springtime spread, especially as the weather starts to heat up.

on the still side, we’ll be pouring the latest iteration of the chardonnay that started it all, along with the final version of saffron (a bright orange clairette), and the debut bottling of PCH, an experimental crunchy red made by macerating pinot noir in direct press chardonnay.

i’ll be helping out as usual, but the real treat this week will be chatting with ashkahn himself about the project.

looking forward!
vanessa

the auvergne is an exceptional place. few winemaking regions have generated so much lore, even fewer have done so without becoming wildly popular, and basically none have done both of those things without also incurring the attendant reputation for being “overrated.” despite being home to a high concentration of cult producers, auvergne has neither blown up à la jura nor lost any of its cachet among the heads — all the best drinkers i know have a soft spot for it, and none of them ever qualify it.

located in the massif central, in france’s geographical center, auvergne is something of an island, suspended in the no man’s land just east of the beaujolais and south of anywhere that counts as the loire valley proper. once upon a time it had a booming wine industry, but the delayed arrival of phylloxera coupled with industrialization and depopulation (not to mention two world wars) more or less destroyed it. these days, a vanishingly small amount of land is under vine there and the french consider it little more than a great camping destination.

to the extent that auvergne is on the map at all, it was jean maupertuis, the vigneron behind three of this week’s wines, who put it there. a former computer scientist, he studied winemaking in the early 1990s and subsequently set up shop in saint-george-sur-allier. the wines he made early in his career — with stéphane majeune and eric garnier, under the short-lived domaine de peyra label — are by now the stuff of legend, impossible to find and encountered mostly via their legacy, which has attracted such luminaries as patrick bouju and aurélien lefort to the region.

it is tempting to explain auvergne’s uniqueness logically, with appeals to its soil and grapes. and it is surely true that the place’s wines are marked by its special dirt: a basalt-rich tapestry arranged atop rolling volcanic hills. likewise, it is true that the marquee grape here is gamay d’auvergne, a rare variety given to producing reds of uncanny depth with the tenor of a wry smile (brooding but playful, like they know something you don't).

at the same time, though, neither soil nor grape accounts fully for the strange pull auvergne has among its devotees, or for the character of its wines. with land terribly difficult to come by there, most vigneron(ne)s make very few bottles, and many supplement their own yields with fruit from elsewhere. nevertheless, the wines’ sense of place is undiminished — they are no less recognizable, and they all seem to wear their makers’ personalities on their sleeves.

i marveled at this paradox recently while drinking a bottle of sauvignon blanc from catherine dumora. the fruit for that cuvée, which will be featured in sunday’s lineup, came from minervois, in the south, but it tasted quintessentially auvergne to me: fresh, bright, mineral, and radiant. these are qualities i associate so closely with dumora’s wines that i nearly forgot the fruit wasn’t hers. if that’s the case, i wonder, does it really taste like auvergne, or does it just taste like dumora? and what, really, is the difference, if the same can be said for maupertuis, beauger, and the rest of them? and, finally, where does all of this leave terroir?

the truth is i don’t know and i don’t particularly care — the wines from auvergne speak for themselves like those from almost nowhere else, and that’s enough for me. i look forward to sharing a few of them with you this week.

thanks for reading,
vanessa

this week’s lineup comes to us from catalonia, an autonomous region in northeastern spain renowned for its vibrant culinary scene and dynamic natural wine community. the latter has its roots in the 2000s, when the movement’s patron saint, laureano serres of mendall, swore off sulfur for good and founded spain’s first natural wine association with his close friend joan ramón escoda. shortly thereafter, the pair also launched h20 vegetal, a now-iconic zero-zero wine fair, as well as “brutal!!!” an amorphous and (in)famous cult label/concept. under serres and escoda’s spiritual and practical guidance, a revolutionary wave of winemaking has radiated outward from their respective bases in the province of tarragona ever since. as a global, unregulated network, natural wine doesn’t really have a “center” in any meaningful sense of the word, but if it did, one would be forgiven for thinking it was el pinell de brai.

much like his riotous, high-octane wines, laureano’s generosity and charisma are the stuff of legend, a bright red thread running through the plethora of anecdotes about him in constant circulation. a prodigious collector of friends, acolytes, and mentees, his name is often invoked as a kind of shorthand, a helpful way of contextualizing wines from catalonia and beyond that are made in the same free-form, infectiously playful style as mendall’s. so i was at once unsurprised and totally delighted to learn that his daughter alicia had caught the winemaking bug from her father and that the first batch of her wines would arrive at the shop just in time to anchor our catalonia flight.

rounding out the lineup on a slightly different, more serene wavelength will be be two whites (one still, one sparkling) from jordi llorens, a friend of the serres family and eighth-generation winemaker working sixteen hectares of vines in blancafort, in northeast tarragona. made mostly from parellada and macabeo, jordi’s white wines are gentle and refreshing, redolent of spring water and white flowers like jasmine and honeysuckle. my fondest memories of them involve warm sunshine, cool bodies of water, and the intoxicating daze that comes from alternating between the two on a perfect summer day.

— vanessa

as i look ahead to this sunday’s tasting — a lineup of new releases from alice bouvot of domaine de l’octavin — the word “truth” is bouncing around in my head, along with a few closely related concepts, like “trust,” “conviction,” and “intuition.” these ideas come up again and again in the natural wine world, particularly from producers who, like bouvot, work outside of the appellation system and forgo all additives, assuming in the process a variety of social and financial risks. in light of the recent controversy around this year’s iteration of la dive bouteille, one of the world’s largest natural wine salons, i am particularly keen to share these wines this week, and also to talk a bit about what zero-zero winemaking means to this particular producer.

the low- vs. no-additive debate is an old one in natural wine, and it comes up so frequently that “debate” is probably the wrong word for it. it’s more like a fixture of the discursive scene, taking up more or less space at any given moment based on where you are, who you’re talking to, and how sensitive they are to mouse. curious minds can check out aaron ayscough’s article (linked above) for a more thorough summary, but which side of the issue a vigneron(ne) falls on basically boils down to a question of personal philosophy: does one work without additives, accepting that the resulting wines might be less predictable? or is it preferable to, say, add a bit of sulfur at bottling to guarantee (or at least increase the chances of) a certain level of stability?

despite being trained as a classical musician, an agricultural engineer, and an oenologist — all fields where technique is of the essence — bouvot falls firmly in the no-additive camp, preferring to lead with her emotions in the cellar rather than leaning on intervention. this has been her approach since founding octavin in 2005 with her then-partner charles dagand, and she’s unapologetically committed to it, even as she acknowledges the challenges of working without the “safety net” of added sulfites. for bouvot, as for many zero-zero winemakers, the decision is deeply personal and motivated by nothing more or less than the pursuit of truth and coherence — producing this way may leave her wines more vulnerable to things like volatile acidity and mouse, but it’s also what makes them undeniably hers. accepting the risks, then, is simply the cost of living in alignment with her ideals. others are free to do things differently — as bouvot herself puts it, “it’s not about right or wrong, it’s about taste.”

anyway, let’s get to the facts before i get too polemical: since charles’s departure in 2015, bouvot has run octavin on her own, making several cuvées from five hectares of vines in arbois, and many more as part of a négociant project launched in 2014 (for which she also harvests the fruit herself). after much deliberation, we’ve decided to open six bottles this sunday — a mix of estate and négociant bottlings, so as to give those who can make it as broad a sampling of her work as possible. we will also be starting the party early (at 12:30!), since i hear there’s a game on.

cheers + see you there,

vanessa

this sunday, we are joined at the shop by importers and friends chris camo and andy schwartz for a lineup that promises to be an early contender for tasting of the year. i know that’s bold for the first week of february, but since so many of my favorite wine discoveries of last year were camo&co selections, i’m feeling very lucky. as an introduction to the camo portfolio — which focuses mostly on the roussillon but has recently picked up several exciting producers in ardèche, auvergne, and beyond — we’ll be pouring three cuvées from the inimitable samuel boulay alongside two more from his friend and mentee, didier cazac.

though i’ve seen several pictures of his vines, his house, and what i can only assume is his dog, samuel boulay’s aversion to being photographed means i have no mental image of the man himself. this would be mostly unremarkable if not for the additional facts that a) there is no other winemaker i’ve spent so much time thinking about in the last year and b) the wines he produces are just as elusive. in attempting to capture some sense of them for this newsletter, i have generated and abandoned at least a dozen different metaphors, none of which seemed quite right. like all things related to boulay, this difficulty feels cosmically significant.

it’s not that the wines taste alien, or that the sensations they elicit are totally foreign. i can tell you, for example, that my first bottles of rappapeo 2018, an oxidative blend of roussanne and viognier, smelled of freshly ground peanut butter and made my teeth feel fuzzy, as if cloaked in the pulp of overripe pineapple. but there is something missing in that description, which betrays the experience by compressing it and making it seem linear. in real life, the wines are sublime and oracular, possessed of a certain kind of energy that is hard to convey in words, like beautiful music in an unfamiliar key.

unsurprisingly, this energy has brought several other fabulous winemakers into boulay’s orbit, of which didier cazac is one. less camera shy than his mentor but every bit as talented, cazac cut his teeth farming in bordeaux before landing at gilles azzoni’s legendary estate in ardèche and eventually founding his own domaine in the region. from the fruit of two hectares outside of vallon-pont-d’arc, cazac creates a line of cuvées as sensitive as they are surprising, with freshness that belies the warm climate of their origins and purity that leaves no doubt he’s learning from the best.

there is much more to say about ardèche, these wines, and the characters behind them, but i’ll have to save the rest of it for sunday. chris and andy, who visited boulay and cazac last fall, will be on hand to fill in the many gaps i’ve left, and i’m more or less certain sam will be there in spirit.

looking forward,
vanessa

several years ago, a bartender in berlin tried to dissuade me from ordering a glass of alsatian wine by describing it as sehr spezifisch, meaning “very specific.” like most warnings directed at people in their early 20s, this one had the opposite of its intended effect — rather than being put off, i was drawn in even further, determined to try it and also to enjoy it. afterwards, alsace became something of a fascination for me, though the extent of its peculiarity came into sharper focus only much later. with youthful pride (mostly) in the rearview mirror and the wisdom conferred by another decade of drinking, i’m now ready to concede that the bartender had a point: alsace is weird.

sandwiched between the vosges mountains and the rhine river, the region has changed hands four times since 1871, the object of a century-long tug of war between its neighbors france and germany. this history of contested ownership has left the place with a distinct air of liminality. neither wholly french nor entirely german, alsace is instead an odd, third thing — a reality most manifest in its proper nouns, which are replete with idiosyncratic takes on the letter “g” and an overabundance of consonants daunting even to german speakers (if any of you know how to pronounce “ginglinger,” dm me).

and then there’s the wine! like everything else, it’s caught somewhere in the middle, torn between the french obsession with terroir and the teutonic, quasi-egalitarian investment in grape variety. this has engendered something of an identity crisis for those winemakers tracking contemporary market trends, which suggest that old-school alsatian wines — i.e., highly technical aromatic and single-variety whites, mostly humorless and often sweet — do not, in the words of local legend jean-michel deiss, “meet the tastes of the era.” in response, younger vigneron(ne)s and those looking to remain relevant outside of the german tourist economy have had to get creative, which since the 2010s has meant leaning into terroir by blending grapes and reducing sugar, as well as experimenting with lees-aging and maceration.

which brings us, finally, to this week’s tasting, which features three wines from ammerschwihr native christian binner, plus two more from "les vins pirouettes," a collective project and sub-label he launched in 2015. since taking over his family’s domaine in 1998, christian has been at the forefront of what we might call alsace’s “new-ish guard,” doubling down on the estate’s longstanding commitment to minimal intervention by incorporating biodynamics, building a bioclimatic cellar, and eliminating all sulfur additions (as of 2013). les vins pirouettes was created as a way to support like-minded local winemakers without the resources to brand and market — mostly zero-zero as well, these are “artists’ wines” guided by the same philosophy as binner’s, but bearing their makers’ own individual style and stamp.

thanks for reading + see you sunday —

vanessa

we'll be opening a few low-abv ciders and co-ferments on wednesday evening for those of you still on the damp january bandwagon. :)

karl sjöström, co-founder of the malmö-based experimental cider project FRUKTSTEREO, will be on hand pouring a fresh lineup of bottlings designed to embrace the cool climate of his native sweden by foregrounding locally grown fruit, vegetables, and shrubs.5-7pm, $15 for five pours!

cheers, vanessa

Sunday Tasting: 1/21/2024
La Gazzetta

this week, we’ll be pouring some new arrivals from vino gazzetta, the lazio-based project of australian-born winemaker and cantina giardino alum trish nelson. meditating on trish’s wines, which are striking in part because they are so consistent and distinctive, has me thinking a lot about the question of style. in so-called “low-intervention” winemaking, what role does (or should) the winemaker’s own point of view play? is it secondary, amounting to little more than stewardship of high quality soil and fruit? or is it distinct but inseparable, like the framing of a photograph?

without discounting the importance of terroir, i tend to think it’s the latter, mostly because every wine is necessarily the result of a million tiny decisions. when to pick, how to press, whether and how long to macerate, what vessels to use, how long to age — these are just a few of the questions winemakers answer before arriving at their final products. there are ways of foregrounding one’s own unique voice — some vignerons, for example, harvest much earlier or later than their neighbors in order to achieve their preferred style — and ways of doing the opposite (i.e., intentionally making wines that are “typical” in style for the relevant grape or region), but both routes involve conscious and decisive choices on the part of the producer.

which way of doing things one prefers is, like everything, highly subjective. for my part, the wines that hold my attention and really make me think or feel — in other words, the ones that are really worth drinking — are those that strike a balance between the two poles of nature and nurture: they are unmistakably of their place while still capturing their makers’ signature style and perspective. they could neither be from any other place, nor made by any other person.

the best way to understand this special kind of alchemy is by tasting through a talented producer’s lineup, which is why i’m so glad to be sharing five different cuvées from gazzetta this weekend. nelson and her partner, piero, farm roughly eight hectares of vines in lazio and umbria, most of them adjacent to lake bolsena. using a combination of well- and lesser-known local grapes, they produce a range of orange and red wines that are rustic without being simple, and deeply rooted without being predictable. come by the shop on sunday to get a sense of what i mean.

cheers, vanessa

happy 2024 and welcome back to sunday tastings! as we begin another year of learning and drinking together, i find myself reflecting on the gestures at play in this weekly ritual — talking, tasting, sharing — and their place in contemporary (natural) wine culture generally. this is partly an obvious stock-taking reaction to the onset of a new year, but it’s equally inspired by another major event: the eagerly anticipated arrival of new wines from anders frederik steen and his partner, anne bruun blauert.

for the uninitiated, steen is a danish-born ex-chef and -sommelier who transitioned to winemaking in 2013, beginning with fruit purchased from mythic jura legend jean-marc brignot. now based in valvignères and working closely with ardechoise icon gérald oustric, steen and blauert have become leading figures of the scene in their own right — a development owed, i think it’s fair to say, as much to their sparse, instantly recognizable labels and enigmatic cuvée names as to the wines’ compelling experimental style. part poet and part philosopher, steen approaches winemaking less as science than as artistic or spiritual practice. the results, unencumbered by systematicity or expectation, are different every year, consistent only in their unpredictability and, more recently, limited availability.

like all wines that achieve cult status, steen’s are hard to come by for reasons that are mostly fair: even as demand increases, small-scale vignerons like steen and blauert aren’t able or keen to scale up production to match it. the upshot is that prices go up and allocations dwindle; in a market-driven world increasingly thirsty for natural wine, there’s not much we can do about this. still, it does seem a shame that fewer and fewer people should have access to these wines and others like them — partly because they might be worth drinking, but mostly because of the cynical path of speculation and gatekeeping this kind of manufactured scarcity leads us down.

to be clear, i’m not an idealist. markets are markets, there won’t be fewer drinkers any time soon, and no self-respecting winemaker is going to ratchet up production for the hypebeasts (nor should they!). but when i think of those wines that have most moved me — the ones that led and keep me here, chasing a particular feeling and ineffable kind of high — i have to admit that many of them were highly allocated, most of them weren’t mine, and i didn’t drink any of them alone. so at the risk of sounding naïve, i’m committed to natural wine as a community that sustains itself, against all odds, on the basis of improbable generosity, impractical openness, and impassioned discourse. and to the extent that i’m in a position to promote and continue that tradition, i’m going to. 

so, rather than putting it on the shelves, we’ve decided to open much of our anders frederik steen allocation this sunday. it’s a small gesture, but it feels important and correct that we should try, to the best of our ability, to let as many people taste these wines as possible. there will be six cuvées to taste through and a (very) few additional bottles available for in-store purchase only. i look forward to sharing them with those of you who are able to join us. 

due to limited supply (in most cases, we only received two bottles!), space is limited and tickets are required for this tasting. you can reserve them here.

cheers,

vanessa

Grower Champagne & Latkes

This Sunday we host my absolute favorite tasting of the year, and always our grand finale: Grower Champagne. Hooray! I should note, I traveled to Champagne this year, and while it was my second time in the region, it was my first real deep dive. Often, these wine trips can be a let down -- one's fantasy might be punctured in an instant, whether it's seeing a vineyard and realizing a vigneron's farming practices don't match their claims, or spending time with a winemaker you've long revered only to realize midway through the tasting he's borderline Q-anon. But this trip did not disappoint. I got to taste an array of vins clair, attend a festival purely of Coteaux in Chamery, and sit at Cedric Bouchard's dining room table for several hours tasting through old vintages pulled straight from his cellar. Truly a once in a lifetime experience. My week there solidified everything I already felt about the region and its wines: that they are steeped in tradition, that they in fact offer an extreme value, and that a younger generation is making changes of significance that make the region relevant in the context of natural wine. In fact, I wrote a not-totally-incoherent email a couple of years back discussing much of this, and I don't know that I could write anything better so I'll reprint that here... Champagne is a bit of complicated topic when it comes to natural wine, because it’s a category that has largely been eschewed by the zero-zero crowd. You just won’t find many bottles on the shelves or instagram feeds of some of the most iconic natural wine venues, and there are a few reasons for this. For one, Champagne is inherently expensive, and therefore deemed elitist. Perhaps more prominently, Champagne is a wine of process, with such technique being incompatible with the concept of minimal intervention: the winemaker’s hand is always, and necessarily, evident in Champagne. And I suppose a third disqualifying feature of Champagne is the use of added yeast as part of the secondary fermentation. In my mind, it’s pretty easy to answer each of these items. First, it’s hard to support the notion of price being determinative of elitism. With the category of natural wine colliding with fashion, it’s more and more common to see $50-75 bottles of natural wine made in obscure places, from obscure grapes. My argument here is not necessarily to say that Champagne isn’t elitist. It’s to say Natural Wine is (increasingly) equally guilty.  With regard to process, there’s no shortage of that in the vin nature world. Jules Chauvet, considered one of the father’s of the French natural wine movement, pioneered carbonic maceration, an anaerobic fermentation utilizing CO2, that is on oft and even over-utilized technique. Some argue that it’s a homogenizer of aromatics in the same way that artificial yeast can be. Yet, it’s an accepted and almost expected practice within the natural wine world. Meaning, process and natural winemaking are not mutually exclusive. Finally, we come to the question of yeast. The addition of yeast is necessary to spur the secondary (in-bottle) fermentation required in Champagne production. Should this inherently disqualify Champagne from being considered natural? I don’t believe so. For one, there are plenty of Champagne producers who employ yeast native to their winery, using a sort of pied de cuve system: wine from the current harvest, newly fermenting, is essentially a starter that helps propagate enough yeast to be used as the liqueur de tirage. This liqueur de tirage is what spurs a ‘natural’ secondary fermentation. If you’ve had Lambrusco from Donati, Col Fondo from Costadila, or Ancestrale Methode wines from Pascal Potaire (Les Capriades) - the same type of technique is employed. All of this is a very long way of saying, there’s plenty of Champagne on our shelves at Domaine LA, and from a philosophical and ideological standpoint it is very much in concert with the rest of the shop: it’s made by small producers who see their wines from the vines through to the bottle. It’s made without chemical pesticides or fertilizers. It’s made with indigenous yeasts (with limited exceptions). It’s terroir-driven and often site-specific. And, a point I should have made earlier, it costs what it costs not because of excessive marketing budgets, or because somebody decided it was fashionable, but because it takes an immense amount of time, and perhaps an even greater degree of care, to produce. While within the natural wine world, Champagne is not really all that fashionable, I feel strongly that it has no equal. I truly believe it’s what you should be drinking on New Year’s Eve, and really much more frequently than that. If you’re willing to spend $100 on a bottle made by an architect in Pantelleria, you can certainly invest half that amount in a bottle of proper Champagne, made by a third or fourth generation farmer keeping alive the traditions of her family and region. As for this Sunday's event...we'll be joined by three of our excellent sales representatives. Jacob Sharp of Terrestrial, Adam Ohler of Grand Cru Selections, and Cinnamon Sonkarley of Farm Wine who will each present two wines. Vanessa and Sierra will add in a wine or two, for a 7+ bottle line-up that includes the following: NV Herve Rafflin La Nature’L 1er Cru Extra Brut NV NV Herve Rafflin Pinot Meunier 1er Cru Extra Brut NV 2017 Frederic Savart Extra Brut "Ephemere" 2018 Michel Gonet "3 Terroirs" 2020 Benoit Marguet "Shaman" Grand Cru NV Francis Boulard & Fils "Les Murgiers" Brut Nature & more! As if that weren't enough, Jesse Furman of Hot Water Bagels is going to be on hand frying up fresh latkes, to celebrate the season with us and provide tasters with a base layer to soak up all those bubbles. For the uninitiated, fried food makes a perfect foil for Champagne, the fattiness of the former counterbalancing the acidity of the latter. So, please join us from 2 to 5PM this Sunday. It's a veritable bargain at $30 including all the wine & the food & of course the cheer...