A Holiday Gift From NOT DRINKING POISON

The year's 5 most popular natural wine reports. And 3 new stories from Champagne: Salima & Alain Cordeuil, Domaine de Bichery, & Thomas de Marne.

Holiday Spoonie.

The end of the year, for me, is always a time for reflection: I look back at the months that have disappeared forever, like so many species of bird, and each year I observe, poignantly, that I have once again failed to make any money.

Oh well. 2023 was profitable in other ways. It brought us numerous fine wienerschitzels. We examined the ambient controversy trailing the RAW Wine fairs. We searched for natural wine in Bohemia and Moravia. We launched a podcast. We made more wine from abandoned vines. We sounded the alarm about machine harvesting in the natural wine scene. We exposed threats of bodily harm from an aggrieved Sancerre vigneron. We toured volcanic hillsides in Slovakia. We moderated a debate about natural wine at Noma. We spoke with an expert in commercial litigation in an attempt to understand news of asset seizure in the southern Jura. We eulogized, as best we could, two titans of natural winemaking.

I say “we” because I can’t do any of this without subscribers like you. By way of thanks, here’s a holiday gift from NOT DRINKING POISON: I removed the paywall on the five most popular subscriber-only articles of the year.

Here they are, with additional commentary:

The Legacy of Les Capriades - May 2023

One amusing exchanged that didn’t fit into the original post occurred when I asked if Potaire did anything with the bucket of lees ejected from his disgorgement. I mentioned I’d had really good results conserving the soupy mess and letting it decant and bottling the rest as a tiny quantity of still wine. He laughed and said, “I think you may have invented a new wine category.”

Remembering Alain Castex - June 2023

The afternoon I heard the news about Castex, I recalled that a pokey natural wine shop on my street run by the owner of a neighboring dive bar contained a weirdly large stock of Castex’s 2016s. It was not without a faint sense of shame that I went there that very day to purchase five bottles (all I could afford). “Do you know these wines?” asked the lady working at the shop. I said I did and let it go at that, since it felt unwise (and morbid) to inform her, mid-purchase, that the winemaker had just passed away. Sure enough, by the following day, Castex’s wines had disappeared from the shop’s shelves.

Remembering Julie Balagny - July 2023

I haven’t been back to the Beaujolais since Balagny’s wake at the estate in July, so my information may not be entirely up to date. But I was told that her team, aided by her sister and local vigneron friends, will produce one last Fleurie in 2023 from the estate’s vines. But I’m given to understand that the estate will continue no further.

Paris Natural Wine Lifers Ep. 2: Kevin Blackwell - July 2023

It was nice to see this podcast episode get so many listens - a little confirmation of Blackwell’s enduring, low-key influence among French natural wine lovers of my generation.

For Meinklang, A Harvesting Machine Is Just A Tool - August 2023

As my friend the wine journalist Felicity Carter pointed out, Meinklang’s angry response to this interview was surely partly due to differing journalistic conventions in Austria (and Germany), where quote approval is standard practice. Anyway, the kerfuffle certainly illuminated the political risk of justifying machine harvesting by claiming its results to be superior to manual harvesting by unmotivated foreign vineyard workers. It would have been way easier and less controversial to simply say that machine-harvesting is more cost-effective.

Lastly, for subscribers, here’s a trio of new reports from the Aube in Champagne:

• An INTERVIEW with THOMAS DE MARNE, Aube organic champagne vigneronne VALERIE FRISON’s son, who since 2020 has had CARTE BLANCHE in vinification at the estate, which is in MID-TRANSITION to its new identity: CHAMPAGNE THOMAS DE MARNE.

• A visit to DOMAINE DE BICHERY in NEUVILLE-SUR-SEINE, where HANNAH & RAPHAEL PICONNET are laying the long-term foundations for UNDOSED, UNSULFITED, ORGANIC CHAMPAGNE production of rare FINESSE.

• A joint INTERVIEW with SALIMA & ALAIN CORDEUIL, organic champagne ICONOCLASTS and committed NATURAL WINE ENTHUSIASTS who will soon debut their 2019 VINTAGE, their first produced entirely WITHOUT SULFITAGE. (Nor dosage, nor YEAST ADDITION, for that matter.)

That’s all for now. I’ll be in touch after Christmas with a vital and entirely subjective list of my wines of the year, and a special episode of the podcast, featuring one of my musical heroes. Many thanks for reading, as always!

Aaron

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It’s December 23rd. Need an intangible stocking-stuffer for a natural wine lover in your life?