Ten Natural Wine Fascinations of 2025

Ten bottles that counted. Plus: Interviews with Alsace vigneron Pierre Groger, and Jura vigneron Jordan Rudloff of Domaine des Lucioles.

Jan 02, 2026

Quietly recovering after a six-hour drive to Axel Prüfer’s estate’s 20th anniversary party back in May 2024. Photo: Marie Tribouilloy (I think).

Bonjour, folks! It’s the dawn of a new year, the downslope of the 2020s, and we’re creeping ever more perceptibly towards a world in which corrupt governments in thrall to tech barons conduct open warfare in competition for the rare earths required to sustain our societies’ insatiable, energy-hungry appetites for cryptocurrency and AI-generated deepfakes.

In this context - that of a world literally driven to ruin by immaterial online fantasy - it is no wonder many of us find ourselves placing greater value on manual crafts and the production of food and wine. These can be small, good things, in a Raymond Carver-esque sense: solace amid senselessness. Behind every great bottle of natural wine is a value system, waiting to be discerned.

Anyway, below with no paywall is a list of my Ten Natural Wine Fascinations of 2025 - the bottles that sparked the most reflection.

And for subscribers, here are two new reports:

An INTERVIEW with discreet ALSACE restaurateur-turned-vigneron PIERRE GROGER, who produces a small array of SCINTILLATING micro-cuvées in his time off from work for BRUNO SCHUELLER. Read here.
An INTERVIEW with Alsace-born JURA vigneron JORDAN RUDLOFF, who alongside partner ELODIE HECKENMAYER produces magnificent MICRO-CUVEES and haunting HONEY as DOMAINE DES LUCIOLES. Read here.

That’s all for now. On Monday I’m off to the mountains for a few days with the family and the dog. (I haven’t yet decided which mountains. I’ll improvise.) Then soon enough it’ll be salon season again! I’ll be at the Salon Salle à Manger1 in Beaulieu-sur-Layon on January 30th, where two Moravian vignerons whose wines I import - Martin Vajcner and Ales Kovar - will show their racy Znojmo wines in the Loire for the first time. Come say hi if you’re in the area!

Wishing everyone good things, small and large, in 2026!

Aaron

TEN NATURAL WINE FASCINATIONS OF 2025

In alphabetical order. As with previous lists, I removed from consideration any impossible-to-find micro-cuvées. I tried to limit the selection to wines I returned to several times throughout the year, seeking them out on wine lists, or opening them at home with friends.

1. Domaine du Pech - Vin de France “Le Pech Abusé” 2021

Back in 2009, when I first moved to Paris, Ludovic Bonnelle and Magali Tissot’s wines appeared in natural wine bistrots with a ubiquity that belied their challenging, anachronistic profiles. At a time when the “glou-glou” aesthetic was fast going mainstream, Domaine du Pech offered monumental, ripe, long foudre-aged southwestern reds, often brimming with CO2 and residual sugar, from varieties that have become radioactive to many young drinkers (cabernet franc, merlot, cabernet sauvignon…). They were a puzzling experience at the time, as much for me as for the colleagues who accompanied me in my bistrot explorations. Somewhat predictably, the wines have largely vanished from the succeeding generations of natural wine restaurants in the capital.

As I admitted to Bonnelle when I re-encountered him in Strasbourg this past October, it had taken me over a decade to recognize what was going on in the couple’s wines, what made them so unique and, at times, so entrancing. If your unsulfited wines are aging in foudre for several years and retain CO2 and oftentimes a touch of residual sugar at bottling, it means your fermentations are lasting years, which generally bespeaks a very low level of nitrogen in a wine must, which in turn bespeaks a regime of very minimal plowing. A series of bold stances are implied: low yields, very ripe harvests, and an impressive patience awaiting fermentations to finish2. This is not how you make a lot of money. But it is how you make great wines. A case in point is Domaine du Pech’s 2021 “Le Pech Abusé,” a (dry) masterpiece of enveloping tannins and deep, sonorous black fruit, evoking, in the manner of a totem pole, the mysterious authority of a mostly lost art.

2. Double Zéro - Vin de France “Les Ecrivains” 2018

The partners behind natural Burgundy vignerons-négoçiants Double Zéro - Jean-François Cuzin and François Bouillot - led previous careers as vignerons in the Beaujolais and the northern Rhône, respectively. I’ve followed Cuzin’s career on and off since the early 2010s, back when he produced provocatively pure gamay in Quincié-en-Beaujolais. But nothing prepared me for the duo’s 2018 “Les Ecrivains,” which would surely rank as one of the greatest Vin Jaunes of the year if it weren’t produced from a parcel of chardonnay in Burgundy, just southwest of Dijon. (Previously the pair farmed the parcel organically, but decided to relinquish it when it became clear the owner would never sell it to them.) Two barrels sat for seven years without topping up, and, I’m informed, never quite finished their fermentation. The resulting wine is technically off-dry, but thanks to an unlikely equilibrium of volatility, it tastes dry - and strikingly juicy. Rarely are oxidative wines so crushable.

3. Christian & Thibault Ducroux - Vin de France “Patience” 2023

At my shop, I often joke that I am the worst Burgundy salesman on the planet, because when clients enter requesting, innocently enough, wines “from here,” I can’t resist explaining that you find way better value for money in the wines of the Beaujolais and the Ardèche. (Even the cheapest natural red Burgundy is usually twice what French shoppers want to spend.) To illustrate my point, I often draw their attention to the wines of Christian Ducroux (who recently ceded ownership of his estate to his adept young son Thibault), which are among the cheapest in my shop, and also the greatest and most age-worthy. It’s immaculately farmed, horse-plowed, granite-soil, whole-cluster-macerated gamay that sees a twenty-four-hour manual vertical press and barrel fermentation.

The Ducroux’s wines, admittedly, sometimes take a long time to come around. They can be compacted and intense in their youth. (A magnum of 2020 “Patience” we tasted on New Year’s Eve will need another decade, I expect.) Befitting its precocious vintage, the 2023 “Patience” already seems to possess, in miniature, the clear details of its future grandeur. A rosiness, a gleam of structural volatility, a sublime poise. It will be hard to leave it alone in the cellar.

Further reading: The Time I Prevented Someone From Pouring Christian Ducroux A Glassful of Wine Spit (A Brief History of Beaujalien)

4. Pierre Groger - Vin de France “Compliqué” 2024

Back in November, a kind regular brought the influential Paris caviste Gérard Katz (ex-La Cave des Papilles) to lunch at La Cave du Centre. Katz suggested I pick a wine for the table, which naturally sent me into a tailspin of anxiety. How do you surprise the guy who assembled one of the greatest natural wine cellars of Paris?

Knowing the affection Katz (and his successor, Ewan Lemoigne) and I share for the work of Bruno Schueller, I went with the pinot noir of Schueller’s acolyte, neighbor, and employee, Pierre Groger. Amusingly entitled “Compliqué,” due to the loess-and-limestone parcel’s peculiar exposition, which dictates early harvests to avoid the grape clusters grilling in late August, Groger’s pinot is as dazzling and sharp as a shuriken. Notably, it retains a surprising, almost pineau d’aunis-like fruit and spice, in lieu of the metallic notes typical of Alsatian pinot.

To my immense relief, Katz and his friends adored the wine as much as I did. This moment was, incidentally, probably the zenith of my sommelier work this year. (Merci Pierre!)

Further reading: Pierre Groger - A Balance in Life and in Wine

5. Ramaz Nikoladze - Tsolikouri “Orkhvi” 2022

My lone visit to Imereti maestro Ramaz Nikoladze’ winery occurred during a revelrous twenty-person wine tour in 2019, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, and anyway he spoke little English, and was soon quite merry on his own marijuana-infused chacha. Oh well. I’ve followed his winemaking avidly ever since, because, to this distant onlooker, at least, he’s the most inspired Georgian white winemaker of his generation. The glimmer and finesse of his work is also notable for how it transcends certain Georgian wine stereotypes. People expect big wild reds and tannic orange wines. It’s why I often serve Nikoladze’s haunting 2022 Tsolikouri “Orkhvi” to people blind, with a sleeve over the label, letting everyone guess chenin or riesling for five minutes before the big reveal.

6. Bodegas Marenas - Vino Tinto “Casilla de las Flores” 2023

Andalusian olive oil producer (and soon-to-be-vigneron) Luis Duritz introduced me to the wines of Bodegas Marenas last January. Only later did I realize Marenas’ José Miguel Marquez was the Andalusian vigneron for whom my friend Stephana Nicolescou had been working on and off for years. The Marenas range is big and, for this relative newcomer to Andalusian natural winemaking, nearly impossible to follow. But a soaring highlight is the 2023 “Casilla de las Flores,” a mind-bending, oxidative dark rosé of tempranillo and… pinot noir. The wine possesses botrytis-like notes, but I’ve been assured there is no botrytis influence. It marries the desert-wine opulence of Banyuls (or a vin cuit) to the delirious drinkability of a great Beaujolais-Villages.

7. Jean-Yves Péron - Vin de France “Tour Sarazine” 2022

Muscat is a hard sell. Even otherwise open-minded natural wine aficionados often crinkle their nose at the mere mention of an excellent dry muscat, as if the variety’s girly floral aura will ruin a meal. On the contrary, it can make a meal, as Jean-Yves Péron’s stellar 2022 “Tour Sarazine” did over lunch at his winery back in October. Planted on a high, cool plateau, the muscat that goes into “Tour Sarazine” hangs until the end of September, yet reaches only 12° alcohol, a stunningly slow maturity for a grape known for the opposite tendency. (Recall that Matassa’s Tom Lubbe, in rather warmer climes, harvests his muscat towards the end of July.) “Tour Sarazine” 2022 is ever-so-gently, autumnally sun-kissed, with a white-floral glow and a skein of salinity throughout its textured, starfruit tones.

Further reading: Jean-Yves Péron Reinvents Piemonte

8. Domaine des Lucioles - Vin de France “Baume” 2023

“Nothing erases terroir like gamay,” Morgon scion and noted contrarian Mathieu Lapierre once told me, back in mid-2010s, when I was bumbling around the Beaujolais hoping to write a book about the region’s terroir.

Lapierre was being somewhat facetious. We can forgive someone in his position (son of Morgon natural wine legend Marcel Lapierre) for being, surely, sick unto death of wino gasbags going on and on about terroir. Yet the seed of doubt stuck to my socks until this October, when I tasted Domaine des Lucioles’ 2023 “Baume,” the most thought-provoking gamay I’ve tasted in years, and by far the loveliest Jurassien gamay I’ve ever encountered.

Founded in 2021, Domaine des Lucioles is the winemaking project of Alsatian-born Jura vignerons-apiculteurs Jordan Rudloff and Elodie Heckenmayer, who I had the fortune to meet at the Phare O Vins salon back in October. Winemaking is a side-project for the multitalented couple, who both somehow maintain careers as engineers. But you’d never know it to taste their wines, which are uniformly sublime, manifestly the work of some very fast learners.

“Baume,” named for its parcel, derives from an old-vine plot of gamay planted on marne bleue, better known as savagnin terroir. Rudloff says no one knows why someone planted gamay there. Anyway, the results scream from the glass: it’s a wine that marries the delicate rose tones of certain Mâcon-Bray gamays with an abiding salinity more characteristic of, well, savagnin. A gamay de terroir par excellence, in short.

Further reading: Domaine des Lucioles - A Place of Liberty

9. Bruno Schueller - Alsace Riesling “Zérø Défaut” 2015

On some level, Bruno Schueller’s wines are landmines in a wine shop. One doesn’t try to sell them; one spends one’s time instead warning the uninitiated to steer well clear of these affordable, classic-looking Alsatian wines. Even avowed natural wine fans aware of Schueller’s renown often have difficulty stomaching the various aspects of peculiar harmony in his young wines: volatility, high CO2, oxidation, residual sugar, botrytis, etc.

That’s why it’s been a been such a pleasure serving a small allocation of a properly-aged Schueller chef d’oeuvre at the shop this year. His 2015 “Zérø Défaut” is oxidative and does contain a whisper of residual sugar. Yet its supreme, manzanilla-toned harmony is manifest: it’s a wine that can’t help but spread faith that Schueller’s more out-there younger creations will someday “get there,” too.

10. Maison Valette - Mâcon-Chaintré 2019-2022-2023

Gaspard and Baptiste Valette made a surprise appearance at La Cave du Centre’s anniversary party at the end of November, and further delighted me with what turned out to be the wine of the night (for me, at least): a magnum of the family’s Mâcon-Chaintré 2019-2022-2023. The Valettes have been vexed by complicated fermentations in recent years, and cross-vintage assemblages have emerged as the preferred mode of recourse. It’s a commendable move, demonstrating they would rather sacrifice vintage specificity than, say, harvest less ripe to ensure shorter, more predictable fermentations. But it has made the Valette range rather difficult to follow. Cross-vintage assemblages seem often to run the risk of foregrounding a certain leesy, semi-oxidative hardness, as if the older wines talk over the younger ones. Not so with the family’s vivid Mâcon-Chaintré 2019-2022-2023, a seamless, vertical success that displays their distinctive, grandiose terroir as unmistakably as past, single-vintage highlights (like 2017).

FIN

NOT DRINKING POISON

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