For over 30 years, Telmo and his business partner Pablo Eguzkiza have travelled the length and breadth of Spain on their mission: to discover Spain’s lost winemaking heritage, revive its forgotten vineyards and make wines that reflect their site. In the process, they have revitalised Rioja and been pioneers in Sierra de Gredos, alongside further projects in all areas of the country. In returning to long-lost traditions, they have breathed life into Spain’s winemaking culture and invigorated a whole generation of producers. As Telmo himself says, “the future is in the past.”

Here, I talk with Telmo about his career so far, from how it started with his family in Rioja and his education in France, to continuing the fight in Spain today with the Futuro Viñador and Matador Manifesto.

You grew up in Rioja at your family estate but chose to study in Bordeaux. Do you think that international experience has informed your approach since returning to Spain?

For 300 years, France had the monopoly on fine wine and fine dining. Spanish chefs would travel to France to train, and the same was true for wine. If you wanted to make fine wine, you had to go to France. It was where all the inspiration and innovation were happening, and where modern oenology was born. In Rioja, all the most important innovations in wine since the 17th century had come from Bordeaux. So, going to France to study winemaking was the natural thing to do.

I was very lucky because my parents were not wine people. They were very sensitive, special people who found our family property in Rioja and brought it back to life. I saw them do that my whole life, bringing out the potential of this old estate, because if something is exceptional, you must restore its beauty. Since they weren’t wine people, they could focus on the land, and that has become my job.

From Bordeaux, I then went to the Rhône Valley, because I felt that people there were working in a similar way to how I wanted to work in Rioja. I wanted to meet people who fought for their vineyards. It was the same in the south of France, where I worked with people like Éloi Dürrbach at Domaine de Trévallon for three vintages (1990–1992), who fought for the future of Provençal wines. In the end, I realised that when I came back to Spain, I was preparing to fight for the same, and I’ve been fighting for 30 years.

What made you decide to break with the traditions of Rioja at the time?

I didn’t break tradition; I returned to tradition. It was those before me who had broken it, and I instead started to look back to the 17th and 18th centuries to restore Rioja.

The ones who destroy buildings are not traditionalists; they are people who don’t understand tradition. I think Lanzaga is the most traditional project ever done in Rioja because of this.

That reminds me of a Luis Gutiérrez quote about Spanish wine in ‘The New Vignerons’, where he talks about the future of Spanish wine being in its past.

You know, Luis borrowed that quote from me. He asked if he could use it, of course, but that has always been my motto: the future is in the past.

A big part of how you’ve returned to tradition has been with your vineyards. Could you talk us through these sites and this approach?

In the beginning, Lanzaga was a challenge to recuperate the idea of villages. In the 17th century, Rioja as a wine region had much of its identity in village culture. Two of our vineyards are in Labastida, and in 1670 there were 300 growers in the village and 256 underground cellars. In every wine village of Rioja, the neighbourhood was defined by its cellars. This is why I say that “I am the 17th century,” because this is what we are trying to return to: wine as part of local cultural identity. Recovering and restoring old vineyards was as much about recuperating the village identity of ‘Las Beatas’, ‘Tabuerniga’ or ‘La Estrada’ as it was about preserving the land.

I don’t feel very original, because I was just doing what many other regions in the wine world had already done. As with Burgundy and the Mosel, it created a hierarchy of quality. When you talk about single vineyards and villages, this is how every sommelier, wine lover and collector can relate to quality.

The talent of a wine is not in the winery, the brand or the winemaker; it is in the origin of the wine. That origin is a place, a vineyard. Vineyards are like people. There’s a reason why people like David Bowie or Miles Davis are so influential and successful, but their siblings perhaps aren’t. They come from the same place and the same parents, but the talent of Bowie or Miles is one in a million. Talent is something very rare, and a vineyard, a very good vineyard, is very rare.

We have to recognise that talent in vineyards, to take care of and nurture it to achieve greatness. There are a lot of beautiful places in Spain, and they all have something to say.

You started making wines in Sierra de Gredos with Pegaso in the 1990s. What was it then that captivated you about the area? Did you recognise what it would become today?

In the 1990s, Garnacha was being criticised a lot in Spain because at that time international varieties were popular. Garnacha is a very Spanish variety, even though it is widely planted in other countries. It’s versatile and rustic, and even in difficult climates it creates wines that are expressive and fresh. For me, a grape variety is an antenna: it signals what a place is. It tells you where it’s from. I like the idea that our ancestors planted grapes because they knew which ones best expressed the sense of place.

I first learnt about Garnacha in the south of France, in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, tasting wines like Château Rayas. In that region Grenache was celebrated, but in Spain Garnacha was not. Before I even came to Sierra de Gredos, I began my career making Garnacha in Navarra. So, it was a variety I loved and one I knew there was work to be done with.

I am very proud to have been something of a pioneer in Sierra de Gredos, in that I went there before so many others did. But there was also Dani Landi and Fernando García (of Comando G, founded in 2008), and their families, Bodega Marañones and Bodegas Jiménez-Landi, there before too. I am very proud of what they have achieved. You know, Fernando worked with us, and I think that ties into something important about these projects: they can welcome young people in, to have an opportunity to learn and grow.

You can’t revitalise a region alone. I think it’s very important to have the younger generation come in. In that sense, I think Pegaso might be one of my most successful projects, because it achieved this, helping bring more people to an area that I saw potential in.

When I came across Sierra de Gredos, I was following the Cañada Real route and was very impressed by the shape of the Garnacha bush vines in the area. So, I decided to make wine in a place that nobody knew. Imagine, it was only an hour’s drive from Madrid, but no sommelier in the city had ever heard of Sierra de Gredos or Cebreros. That’s not the case today. The soils there are beautiful, granite and slate, and the vineyards are mountainous and difficult to work. It felt so promising.

I am very proud to have been part of reviving a region that today is full of young people. That is the future of Spanish wine: regions with good vineyards and young, excited people fighting to preserve them and their traditions.

What’s especially exciting is seeing how much impact you have already had with this.

For example, Fernando Garcia worked with you and then co-founded Comando G, where Álvar de Dios Hernández worked before starting his own project in Toro. I came across Álvar through Javi Revert, who has been similarly impacted by your work and the Futuro Viñador.

It’s all connected.

I am like a bridge between a very boring generation of producers and wineries managed by business managers rather than people with a passion for wine. They could’ve been growing anything; it could’ve been apricots, it was just business.

But I am part of a generation with people like Álvaro Palacios, Peter Sisseck and José María Vicente (Casa Castillo). We are from the 1960s, and collectively we were of a moment that started a movement in a very natural way. Several of us went to work in France; we experienced other great wines. We learnt from them. You want to produce great wine? You must be in contact with great wine. We were the bridge.

But for me, I think the new generation is even more important. They continue this work, they work hard, and they are the future of Spanish wine.

This feels like a good time to talk about Futuro Viñador, which several of our producers are either members of (Celler del Roure, Adega Algueira, Casa Castillo and Raventós i Blanc) or admirers of the manifesto. Could you talk us through how this movement was founded and its goals?

It started with a meeting that I organised in Madrid. It was a brainstorming session about the great vineyards of Spain. I brought together producers, journalists and merchants, and it was something magical. In fact, we did a tasting afterwards of Sierra de Gredos!

And from this meeting we created the Manifesto Matador [which stated that “the best way to identify [Spanish wines] in relation to their origin, quality, identity and authenticity is to create a pyramid structure. At its base would be wines made from grapes from any place in appellations of origin, then wines from villages and, at the tip of the pyramid, wines from single plots.”]. In that one day, all the energy among these people, it was a volcano that exploded. They wanted to do something.

From there it went crazy. The manifesto spread across the world and was published in many places. After that, we decided to do something similar, specifically in Rioja: Encuentro de Viticultura, an ‘encounter of viticultures’, where 160 producers came together for meetings and talks. It was magical, because it was the first time all of us growers came together as friends. Until then, in Spain, another grower was an enemy because of this idea that if they sold wine, you couldn’t sell wine. It was very disappointing.

These meetings started the Futuro Viñador movement. We want to welcome all good, like-minded producers in Spain to Futuro Viñador, because that is how we build a better Spanish wine industry where vineyards are the priority. We want to celebrate the beauty of our country and save much of the landscape. It sends a message to the Consejo Regulador: the trade of quality has arrived, and you need to decide if you want to join us.

Challenging the Consejo Regulador brings us back to Lanzaga and something interesting about your labels. You originally labelled these as village wines, but because of Consejo Regulador Rioja rules, you had to black this out. It’s a powerful message that you did this instead of simply redesigning the label to fully conform to the rules.

For me, the most important thing is that I want to produce great wines. I don’t want to waste time with administration. I think the people running the Consejo Regulador are not talented. They are completely disconnected; they don’t have passion for wine. They should find new people to run the Consejo. Today, the best appellations are those led by young people. In Priorat and Bierzo, for example, they are doing much more than appellations run by dinosaurs. Here, they think that Rioja is amazing: “we did this, we did that”, but it’s boring, and it’s over! It doesn’t work anymore.

I wish that the big producers would understand that this is also important for them. Look at the Grower Champagne movement. At the start, big producers were very critical of it, but in the end, it was the most important thing to ever happen in Champagne. Now the big producers are becoming more interested in their vineyards and preserving the region. They spotlight the 1er Cru and Grand Cru villages and emphasise their importance.

I don’t care if someone is producing 20 million bottles of Rioja that I will never drink, what I care about is that these producers care about the vineyards, the villages, the growers. Today, Rioja is in crisis because they haven’t done this, and we need to work together to preserve the region’s viticultural heritage. But to do that, the Consejo Regulador needs to change.

You said before that you have been fighting for 30 years, do you think you have made progress?

Yes, I think so. It has been a long fight, and in the beginning, I started with very little, not a lot of vines and not a lot of money, and some of my contemporaries found it funny how I worked because it was not usual. But I always knew I was preparing for the future; I knew what I wanted to achieve. And today we have many beautiful vineyards across the projects, and it has been a lot of fun getting here.

Throughout my career, even though I’ve been fighting, I’ve also had a lot of fun. I’ve been to amazing places, met wonderful and funny people, people with deep knowledge of the areas, telling me to buy certain vineyards and showing me the right places. It was amazing to spend time with people from all these different regions.

So, I can’t complain. Even if it wasn’t always easy, I am proud of what has been achieved. Today, I am very happy because I know we are making very good Spanish wines that show their heritage and the talent of their vineyards.

A version of the article was originally published for Liberty Wines in 2025

Part of our summer holiday this year was spent in Beaujolais, a wine region I drink from widely and regularly, yet had only visited twice before. It’s a beautiful part of the world. Less manicured than Burgundy, immediately south of Mâcon, it’s a patchwork of winding roads, undulating hills and, on a clear day, sprawling views in every direction, including across to Mont Blanc.

I love Burgundy, but Beaujolais is arguably more spectacular to look at and explore, with less of a monoculture of vines.

Driving across the Saône to the various village crus, you pass fields of sunflowers and wheat, and pasture with brown spotted cows lazing in the grass, looking as though they’ve been plucked straight from the pages of a children’s book. It makes for a beautiful, varied landscape, and it’s why Beaujolais has become a hub for organic, biodynamic and regenerative farming, plus a more hands-off winemaking approach. I don’t like calling it natural winemaking. ‘Natural’ wine is too charged and divisive for my liking. I’ve seen how it switches people off when you say the phrase, but also how it lights people up and reels them in. I love the latter but loathe the former, so if I can talk about the concept in a way that engages everyone, I’d rather stick to that. Plus, ‘natural’ wine is indefinable and often used to excuse terrible wine and dirty winemaking, which is lazy and endlessly frustrating.

So, hands-off winemaking is the way I’m going to describe this. Besides, the interesting part really is in the farming vs what happens in the winery.

It is that farming that makes Beaujolais so beautiful and interesting in my eyes. I love that producers are increasingly embracing site-driven winemaking, moving away from intensive farming and nondescript wines. It’s not new per se, as the ‘Gang of Four’ (Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, Jean-Paul Thévenet and Guy Breton, so called by Kermit Lynch) kick-started this ‘revolution’ in the 1980s, though it was slow to catch on widely. What’s remarkable is that it took until the 1980s for that ‘revolution’ to happen at all.

Before the AOC system was created in 1936, French wines were classified by the AO system, with Moulin-à-Vent being one of the first AOs in 1924. This protected then highly sought-after Beaujolais Cru wines, which commanded prices higher than the Côte d’Or’s Grand Crus at the time (a barrel of Moulin-à-Vent once outsold a barrel of Chambertin). But post-World War II, Beaujolais lost its way with overproduction and the rise of Beaujolais Nouveau in the 1970s (more on that later) and is only now finding its way back.

My first experience of Beaujolais was doing harvest in 2016, when organic growing was still uncommon. I went back in 2019 and visited Julien Sunier, who trained under Christophe Roumier in Burgundy and is firm friends with Lapierre and Thévenet. Julien took us on a tour of the region, pointing out the organic and biodynamic vineyards, either certified or in conversion, and explaining how they were becoming more widespread, even if still a minority.

Coming back again this year, 2026, there were even more. As land and labour costs have increased, there have been two schools of thought: lean heavily into site-specific, fine winemaking, or pack it all in and sell off to Georges Duboeuf, who we all must thank for Beaujolais Nouveau’s rabid popularity from the 1970s onwards (in part, igniting the Gang of Four’s ‘revolution’), which set the region back decades. I do enjoy how seriously the people of Swansea take their Beaujolais Nouveau celebrations, though. It is maybe the only good thing to come out of it all. Well, that and how the wine trade has collectively chosen to use the third Thursday of November as an excuse to drink excellent Beaujolais instead.

This has led to an increased number of farming-led winemakers, and I reaped the benefits heavily in the many wine shops we visited during our holiday. In Fleurie, for example, there’s a wine shop run by each winemaker whose wines are stocked there, each taking a day of the month to man the till and host tastings. All of them are working organically, even if uncertified. We ended up bumping into Romain of Château de Grand Pré, whose wines I have long loved and first bought in 2017 for Trinity restaurant, when the brilliant Rupert Taylor first set up Uncharted Wines and started importing excellent Beaujolais. I walked in intending to buy one bottle and left with a mixed case from Château de Grand Pré, Guillaume Chanudet, Domaine Coudert, Domaine de La Madone and Jean-Louis Dutraive.

The beauty of Beaujolais and its hands-off winemakers came into full force when we opted for a long, leisurely lunch at Éphémère in Vauxrenard, near Fleurie. This is Yvon Métras’ house and winery, at the top of winding roads that climb into the hills. Hidden amongst the trees, the house overlooks Yvon and his son Jules’ vines, tables scattered beneath them with patchwork tablecloths and a soft breeze. Yvon’s partner Gusta sets up Éphémère every summer and invites a friend to cook, while she runs the front of house and pulls together a dreamy wine list made by Yvon and their friends. Éphémère translates to short-lived, and this restaurant is just that; open for just a few months each summer. It’s 30 euros for three courses, cash only and pure heaven. I’m not sure there is anywhere else in the world I would want to dine if I only had one day left on earth.

My husband and I sat beneath a tree looking out towards the vineyards and woodland as a small boy from the neighbouring table raced along the rows with his dog. We ate fresh courgette pasta and beef cheek and local cheese and pain perdu, washed down with a bottle of 2024 Yvon Métras’ Beaujolais Villages for 32 euros. Sun-dappled with a breeze we’d been desperate for after many days of 30+C, it was the epitome of why I feel so strongly about Beaujolais being one of the wine world’s great regions: effortlessly beautiful, full of fascinating people with warm hospitality, thoughtful wines and winemakers who care deeply about their region and preserving it for the future.

In the most unassuming places, you find moments and experiences that stay with you long after.

I took the slightly crumpled Éphémère menu with me and folded it into the car door. When we finally made it back to England five days later, I smoothed it out on our dining table and tucked it into a frame with other menu memories I’ve collected over the years. I look at it every day now, when I come through our front door and shake off my coat in the hall. There it is, with its lovely illustration of Gusta and her friend in the vines, glass of wine in hand, filling me with a happy warmth that sustains me until I see it again tomorrow.

I haven’t always loved Sherry. I embarrassingly remember recoiling in horror when tasting Oloroso during the ‘Fortified Wine’ module of my WSET Diploma. In my defence, I was 22 and really didn’t know any better. That said, I have been enthusiastically eating marmite since I was old enough to eat solid food. When I moved to Italy to study at university, the only things I asked people to bring me when they visited were Marmite, Cheddar (dear Italy, I am so sorry) and M&S Percy Pigs. Marmite is a staple of my diet, and since it quite literally tastes like the saltiest, yeastiest, ‘punch you in the face’ styles of Sherry, my aversion to this particular fortified wine never really made sense.

I saw the light, though. I’m not exactly sure when that was, but there is a blur of a few years in my mid-20s where I went in hating Sherry and emerged loving it. I also got a tattoo and developed a love of anchovies, which I feel may also somehow be related. I’ve never looked back. There’s something about its saline tang and a warm yeastiness that reminds me of bakeries, which scratches an itch in my brain. Drinking Sherry makes me immeasurably happy.

My favourite style is Manzanilla, though I do also adore Fino, Amontillado, Palo Cortado and Oloroso. Essentially, I love a dry Sherry. Being English and growing up in a family that drank Harvey’s Bristol Cream at Christmas means I will likely never overcome the hurdle of sweetness in Cream sherries. I’ve made it this far with dry Sherry though, so I think I can give myself a break.

Manzanilla is aged in Sanlúcar de Barrameda on the coast of southern Spain. This ageing location is what sets it apart from Fino, which is basically Manzanilla aged in and around Jerez, much further inland. Being so close to the coast changes the ageing environment for Manzanilla, with higher humidity and cooler temperatures allowing flor (the film of yeast that grows on the top of the wine as it ages) to grow thicker and stronger. This gives the Sherry a much saltier, almost briney character, whereas Fino is much fruitier as its flor isn’t as thick.

I love salty Sherry; therefore, I really love Manzanilla. And I love how it makes so much sense once you realise how it’s aged. Of course I love Manzanilla; it’s deliberately made to be exactly my style.

For me, Sherry is the most affordable fine wine in the world. Which other wine category offers you a single-vineyard wine, from one of the world’s greatest terroirs, aged extensively before release, for less than £20 a bottle?

Case in point, one of my favourite “supermarket” sherries: Hidalgo’s Manzanilla from the Pasada Pastrana vineyard in Miraflores (aka one of the best vineyard areas in Jerez and probably also Spain). It’s £18.75 in Waitrose, and it’s very often on offer, so I regularly snap it up for around £15. The calibre of the wine in the bottle compared to the price on the shelf is mind-boggling. If Sherry ever hits a level of popularity akin to Burgundy, my bank account is fucked, because the same calibre of wine from there would be hundreds of pounds.

Therein lies an important point: Sherry deserves better. It should command a higher price and greater acclaim than it currently does. If I could only recommend one producer to convince you of that, let it be Bodegas De La Riva.

I’ve met and served a lot of very famous people in my time; Rihanna, Oprah, Paul McCartney (that one was an all-time great), Beyoncé, Bruce Willis, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas… It’s always been exciting, but I’ve never had any interest in asking for a photo or trying to commemorate the moment in some way. Then, in Gran Canaria about 3.5 years ago, I squeaked with joy because Ramiro Ibáñez and Willy Perez of Bodegas De La Riva (and also Cota 45 and Luis Pérez respectively) were both at the same party as I was. I remember asking my friend Jamie if he would introduce me, and then I did the thing I never do: I asked for a selfie.

Cringe, I know, but it’s Ramiro Ibáñez and Willy Perez!! The ultimate legends of Sherry, and also two of the loveliest people you’ll probably ever meet. I have no regrets, and I hope this story explains just how much I respect these two and the wines they make at the historic Sherry Bodega they’ve breathed new life into.

Bodegas De La Riva make terroir-driven sherries that reflect their sites more than a specific style. They also use an ancient method of Sherry production called ‘asoleo’, where they dry their grapes naturally in the sun post-harvest to increase their alcohol potential and eliminate the need for fortification. This method is commonly used to make sweet Sherry, but for drier styles it is now very rare. Fortifying with a neutral grape spirit adds something foreign to the wine that removes it further from the vineyard it hails from. When Sherry became increasingly industrialised, the connection to the vineyard was lost. Bodegas De La Riva are at the helm of a revolution seeking to rectify that. Their wines are magic. They’re certainly the more premium option for Sherry, but even their top wines commanding a £100+ RRP seem like an undersell. UK wine lovers, you can buy them from Shrine to the Vine, as Keeling Andrew/Noble Rot have recently taken over their UK distribution. These are wines to make you sit up and pay attention to Sherry as a serious fine wine.

I love you, Sherry. I really do. There is no situation or meal that can’t be enhanced with these lovely salty wines. Heck, I even once discovered an accidentally incredible pairing of Fino and curry that has become a staple thanks to a free-for-all BYO dinner at the famed Whitechapel Punjabi curry house, Tayyabs, a few years ago. It surprises and delights in equal measure.

Though still a category that can hardly be deemed ‘popular’, I find it very reassuring to see it slowly growing a captivated audience. These are classic ‘Sommelier’ wines, because it’s people who love wine geekery and food pairing that really get behind them. And you can still buy quite a good range of dry sherries in UK supermarkets, which again makes me hopeful that people are buying these magic salty wines to drink at home, even if just in a Sherry and tonic (with a slice of lemon on a hot day? Sensational). So, I am very happy. I can buy amazing, world-class, once-in-a-lifetime fine wines with ease and enjoy them with great abandon.

Everyone will catch up eventually, and until then I will keep relishing the opportunity to drink Manzanilla for any and all occasions.

Douglas had a reputation. It was common knowledge amongst women in the UK trade that you should never be alone with him. If you were drinking in his company, you needed to steer clear. It was self-preservation, knowledge sharing and the best we could do to safeguard each other in the absence of concrete evidence of his guilt. We all knew, though. We knew what he was capable of, and I find it very hard to believe that anyone in his circle wasn’t aware of it too.

How much did he get away with because of his ‘position of power’ within the trade? How much was overlooked by people who could do something, who had the capital to report him to the police and fight any libel claims in court?

That has always been the sticking point for me personally. It took me 15 years to save enough for half of a deposit for an ex-council house that’s a 2.5-hour drive from London. I do not have a lot of money. If I tried to speak out about some of the people that I know far too much about, some of whom I have had personal experiences with, the cost would be one that I literally couldn’t afford.

So, I warn others and share my experiences with women who are dangerously close to harm if they ever put a foot wrong in the presence of certain people. I’m careful. I’m not alone. We are all doing the same in some form or another. Women in wine look out for each other after all. But we are all utterly furious.

This culture of enabling is so widespread, and Douglas Wood is just someone who was caught (even if his sentence is laughable). He is one of many. Something can only really be done in terms of justice when someone gets caught out, and there’s enough evidence to take them to court. Douglas’ victim is braver than me. She is braver than all of us, and no doubt she has paid a huge price for her bravery to get through that court case and the less-than-ideal sentencing.

There is a very serious lesson to be learnt here.

We all have a duty of care to each other, but businesses in the wine trade need to uphold that too. And I am not speaking about Douglas’ business, but all the businesses that trade on alcohol, where late nights and entertaining are commonplace and women regularly find themselves in high-risk situations. Even if that is just a night tube home after several glasses of wine where a man from that same event hasn’t got the message and has followed you onto the platform. No one has stopped him. No one has looked out for her. It’s all very preventable.

I urge you to keep an eye on the women in your work and personal life. I wish we lived in a world where we were all safe, regardless of race or gender, but we aren’t. Women and men have a duty to call out behaviour as it happens, safeguard those around them and do everything they can to stop so many of these awful situations from happening. We should all be furious, and we should all be doing more than we are.

If you have been impacted by any of the topics discussed in this article, there are resources available to help. I am also always available if you need to talk.

The Drinks Trust

Hospitality Action

Rape Crisis England & Wales

The Survivors Trust

To paraphrase Miranda Priestly, “Chillable Reds? For Summer? Groundbreaking.”

My wine algorithm has stagnated, and I am now stuck in a never-ending doom scroll of vinfluencers, drinks publications (I’m looking at you Club Oenologique, Drinks Business, Harpers and Decanter) and sommeliers cheerfully exclaiming that we are in the summer of chillable reds. Decanter got their head judges for the 2026 awards to record a reel about it. Majestic, Berry Brothers, Corney & Barrow and The Wine Society have all created shopping collections around putting your red wine in the fridge. Even Lidl is cashing in on what I can only imagine is an SEO buzzword, with its own landing page for chillable reds.

I am not one to judge, though; I was pushing this angle when I worked at The Sourcing Table, trying to get anyone and everyone to buy decent wine with whatever sales hook might catch their attention. I am part of the problem, or at least I was until a few years ago, when I was still actively selling wine to consumers.

Chillable reds? I made that shopping collection; I wrote that blog post, and I sent all those newsletters about it. So, trust me, I understand the allure (heck, I love a chilled red; it’s delicious). But why does it feel like a last-ditch attempt to engage younger drinkers who, I fear, aren’t remotely interested?

My algorithm has stagnated because content centred on the chillable red is at an all-time high. Ecommerce and lifestyle media have jumped in with both feet, presumably because it’s a common Google search. It’s a dead horse that Vogue has been flogging for years, likely as paid content, with no tangible impact (Case in point: Article 1, Article 2, Article 3, Article 4 …).

Yet my own lengthy career in wine ecommerce showed that getting people onto your page with SEO fodder will more often than not lead them somewhere else. Somewhere cheaper. Somewhere with an introductory discount or free shipping threshold. Or to an abandoned basket, when the customer decides that nice chillable red is probably more than they want to spend when they could just have a beer, or even something non alcoholic, instead.

The wine world is having a collective breakdown over how the hell to sell wine and engage a new generation of drinkers who don’t want to drink wine. This fixation on chillable reds as a marketing angle is symptomatic of that.

A lot of Gen Z have mortgages now. They have kids and careers and disposable income. But they don’t want to buy wine; they want to go on holiday, buy expensive and luxurious skincare, be influenced by TikTok Shop and drink buzz balls, if they even drink at all. Then there are millennials like me, who started drinking when craft beer was cool, and gin rebranded so successfully that for a while you couldn’t throw a stone in any populated place without hitting a gin bar. Wine never had that moment, and we are all now far too health-conscious to drink like our predecessors, too anxious to spend money with such an uncertain future and too riddled with ADHD to really commit to engaging with wine long enough to develop an interest. The concept of chilling red wine isn’t going to break through all that.

We lost the average wine consumer when the cult of wine as something mythical and intellectual, that you needed to be wealthy and educated to enjoy, hit its peak. Everything since then has been a slow race to the bottom, and not even Natural Wine can save it, though there was a point between 2015 and 2019 where it looked like it could. After all, you can buy orange wine in the supermarket now, though I don’t think that took off the way the buyers had hoped.

Maybe I am just very pessimistic and jaded. I’ve worked in wine for over 11 years, and I feel like I’ve seen every kind of consumer there is to see. None of them are going to jump onto chillable reds in a way that can save the decline of the global wine market. It’s too little and far too late.

So, what IS the solution? It’s easy for me to sit here at my laptop and share my jaded view of wine and the way younger generations buy. But if I can’t come up with solutions, what is the point of going on and on about the problem?

I probably don’t have the answer, but I’ve spent the last three years working on a lot of trade reports with my job ( Most recently, Premium On-Trade Wine Report 2026, Independent Off-Trade Wine Report 2024), trawling through graphs and data from Nielsen and our own systems, identifying trends and buying habits as they’ve evolved in the last 10+ years.

Here’s what I do know about wine consumers:

• They are buying less volume but buying at a higher average bottle price

• They are drinking more at home than in restaurants

• They are increasingly interested in trying lesser-known grape varieties

• They don’t drink as much as they did 15 years ago

• The majority of wine consumers are buying wine in supermarkets (25% in Tesco alone according to Nielsen!)

The era of selling wine on volume is over. Frankly, the era of driving volume through supermarkets is also over. There’s a reason why canned wine is a fast-emerging category in supermarkets, building upon the massive success of canned cocktails. Look at Vinca wine; they have only been around for just five years (by year three, they’d produced 1 million cans), but their organic, Sicilian canned wines are in Tesco, M&S, Whole Foods, Ocado, Abel & Cole and Planet Organic. These are 187ml cans for £3 a pop, and they’re a huge success. That is the future of wine in supermarkets being sold by volume. 750ml bottles still have a place, but the way we sell them needs to change as people drink less.

To ‘save’ wine, we need to accept this and start focusing on quality and value for money at a higher average price point. Not cheap wine or hyper-fine wine, wines that sit in the £15 to £30 RRP bracket and can still be classed as an everyday, affordable purchase for a range of income levels. To sell those effectively, we, as a trade, need to get better at training our staff and communicating wine to customers. This is where the business owners and their importer/supplier need to pull their weight.

Throw away the usual “it tastes like x herbs, x fruit, x tree bark” and focus on the real USP for these wines: paint a picture of how that wine would fit into the life of the consumer. The house party wine, the picky tea wine, the bad day at the office wine, the UFC live Netflix fight wine. Explain how this or that grape variety makes a wine they should drink, why the region is so cool, why the winemaker is interesting. Or simply, make it easy for the people selling the wines to taste and enjoy the wines themselves and make suggestions on personal experience (“My Friday night Domino’s craves Lambrusco and I’m never going back”).

Set aside some bottles for “homework” and give your team cost price + VAT staff discount so they can try new things in their own time without breaking the bank. Keep it relatable, don’t overcomplicate it, and for the love of God don’t try to overly intellectualise. Draw the consumer in; don’t alienate them.

Chillable reds? It’s the laziest marketing campaign around and akin to throwing a glass of water on a bonfire. We all need to be better. We need to do our research and really get to know consumers today rather than falling back on how it was in the heyday. To do that, we must accept what we cannot change, keep an open mind and give consumers what they want. Otherwise, it really will be far too little and far too late.

This article is entirely my own opinion and in no way associated with my employer.

Pedro Parra is highly respected within the global wine industry. As a renowned soil and vineyard mapping expert with a PhD in terroir, he has been instrumental in transforming the vineyards of many well-known wineries in the Americas and Europe over the past 18 years (many of which are in our portfolio). Great wines start with a great site; few can coax greatness out of a vineyard like Pedro Parra.

In 2013, with his consultancy career firmly established, Pedro embarked on an eponymous winemaking project in Chile’s Itata winemaking region. In the decade since, through lots of trial and error, his wines have become some of Chile’s most enticing, innovative, and sought-after.

It was a pleasure to speak with Pedro over Zoom about his career, discovering more about his work as a terroir consultant, the magic of Itata’s vines and, of course, how his deep love of jazz connects him to wine.

How do you define terroir?

To me, terroir is about space and energy. Everything from nature has energy, a vibrato, which creates a sound. Some sounds are better than others, and some are more difficult to comprehend. My approach is to simply understand the sound and energy of the site and communicate that to the winemakers. So, terroir is energy to me.

Terroir isn’t just about wine, either. Here in Itata, we have tomatoes grown on granitic red soils and tomatoes grown on black basalt soils. They are the same variety, but they taste entirely different. Those from the black soils, the basalt, remind me of being on Mt Etna. The tomatoes are incredible. They are some of the best in the world because they are sweet, soft and juicy. Then, when you move to granite, the tomatoes are more acidic and harsher, with a greener profile. It’s not the same sensation. Interestingly, for wine, granite works incredibly well because what you look for with tomatoes is the opposite for grapes. So, terroir relates to everything. It’s fascinating.

When did you first begin applying your knowledge practically in vineyards?

From day one, really. My PhD was, in part, paid for by the French government, but it was also paid for by a Chilean wine company. The latter wasn’t interested in understanding a large-scale terroir approach. They wanted to drill down into the details to improve their wine. They had some understanding of their vineyards but wanted to go further. So, I could take a practical and pragmatic approach from the start. That was back in the early 2000s. People were looking at vineyards on a macro scale in areas like the Northern Rhône and Champagne, but having such a detailed approach to terroir was unheard of. Mine was the first PhD at the time to do research like this. It changed my life.

Working specifically on one site and tasting the changes and results is pretty amazing, especially now as a wine lover. There aren’t many other instances where you can enjoy a glass of your labour with friends and experience that difference. That is what made me a wine lover; I wasn’t one at the beginning. I quickly became part of this world full of culture, defined by food, wine and travel. I fell in love with wine little by little.

I think that was a really important turning point in my career because the difference between myself and other people working around the world is that my job is for wine. It’s not for soil, not for geology; it’s wine. Wine is my language. I communicate through wine. That’s how I ended up in wine because, at the end of the day, it’s my language.

To succeed, I had to try many wines, travel a lot, and pay attention to small differences. My passion for wine drives my career.

How do you go about assessing the terroir of a site?

When assessing a site, you have to prioritise which parameters have the most influence, and it takes experience to do this. In the beginning, when you start, you will see 25 different parameters and have to work through them all to distinguish which are most impactful. Today, the process is faster, and a lot of that comes from working with the people who work in the vineyard. The number one thing is that you need to listen to those people.

Geology is, of course, important, but no one knows the vineyards better than the people who work them. You need to understand the client, understand what their tastes are, drink wines with them and understand the goals of the project. You need to observe the terroir and the winery, where you may end up tasting 50 wines with the client, to analyse what’s good and what’s not and where improvements could be made.

You then have to change your parameters for different countries and regions because none of them are the same. You need to adjust, and being able to do so is what makes a good consultant. It’s all taken a lot of experience. The first ten years of my career were very different to the second ten years.

Pedro with Alberto Antonini

It’s interesting to hear you talk about your work and terroir like this because Alberto Antonini has said that working with you is like having a ‘translator’ for the soil. He and the growers he works with may know that certain areas in a vineyard achieve certain results, but it wasn’t until you began collaborating that he could understand the why. It’s a human understanding of site.

Alberto is the most important mentor I’ve had in my career. We started collaborating in 2006/2007 and have travelled the world together. I know him very well. I know his tastes and how they’ve changed over the years. We are close friends, but I’ve often said to people that Alberto is also a bit like my manager. I can be wild and irresponsible, quite direct and overly honest. He is much more prudent and much better at dealing with people and creating relationships. He’s good at explaining what we do.

I’ve learnt a lot from him, especially in how to structure my business. I’ve worked with a lot of bigger clients, but now I like to work with small, artisanal producers. I also keep one or two spots open for the kind of people and vineyards I just really want to work with. When that happens, I don’t care about the money. They can pay me 50% fees and 50% wine. I actually have three clients who are 100% wine, one being Comando G. My cellar of Comando G wines is probably the best in the world, and I am very happy with that! What they do with Garnacha on granite in Sierra de Gredos has taught me a lot about my own wines in Itata. It’s an education I can only get in one specific place with very specific people. Plus, it now goes both ways too. Dani and Fernando are actually arriving here on Monday to help press my wines with me. It’s a wonderful friendship and sharing of ideas!

One key thing you do post-site assessment is to match optimal grape varieties to a site. How do you do this?

Again, it’s all about experience. Looking at key regions, you learn some of the basics by observation. In the Rhône, you can see that Syrah grown on granite works well, so you know they are linked. You can read about this in a book but only truly understand when you travel to the vineyards and wineries.

For example, at Château Lafite in 2005, the vines in some areas had grown through the sandy granite layer and would soon reach limestone. The winemaker told me he didn’t like the wines it was making, and when I asked why, he got me to try them. Then, I immediately understood. The limestone brings something to Cabernet that isn’t pleasant. This then begins to make sense because Cabernet is rarely grown in Saint-Émilion, which has fantastic limestone soils. Instead, Merlot is prevalent, so you understand that these two are suited. From there, you can dig into the ground and analyse the soil to see how it all works. It’s been a lot of trial and error, a lot of travelling and tasting.

What made you decide to transition into making your own wines?

When you spend time with great winemakers, and have an honest passion for wine, you pay attention. You learn so much, and eventually have a lot of information in your head about what they do!

There came a point when people asked me why I didn’t make my own wines. It was a good question. Why didn’t I? I understand terroir, I have worked hard to develop my palate, and I have worked with many of the world’s best winemakers. These are now some of my great friends, and they have been so generous with offering advice, not just for winemaking but on the market and helping me make business connections for export. Winemaking was a logical next step.

I’ve found that I am a better consultant now that I make my own wine. It’s given me an understanding of my client’s businesses that I didn’t have before because now I have experienced it first hand. I understand the realities of what they’re doing and what’s feasible within their business model.

Once you made that decision, what was your next step?

If I ever made wine, I knew I’d want to do small, artisanal production. To do this, you need to pick the terroir very carefully because if you don’t have good terroir, it’ll be impossible to make and sell great wine. I chose Itata for this.

If you asked me if I could make the wines I like anywhere else in Chile, the honest answer would be no. I’ve been lucky to begin winemaking later in my career after working across the country and getting to know its vineyards. There are many places making good wine in Chile, but not wines that I personally enjoy drinking, unlike in Itata.

Everyone has their own personal taste, and in my case, this was influenced by Burgundy. The only place I found in Chile that makes wines like this is Itata. It took me a long time to get this right. Initially, I wasn’t convinced I was doing the right thing, but I persevered and worked the land, and now I am very convinced. I am very happy with the wines I am making now. I’m so glad that I decided to invest in Itata.

Some of Pedro’s vines in Itata, Chile

What makes Itata so special?

There is nothing else like Itata in Chile or Argentina. Itata is like a country in itself. It’s a place similar to parts of Galicia or Sierra de Gredos in Spain, Morgon in Beaujolais, or the Swartland in South Africa. Those places are almost floating in space. They’re such unique regions in their countries. They have so much soul and energy, and Itata is the same. They are also frontiers: places that may be more difficult for the market to understand at first because they offer something so different. It’s funny, even 10 years ago, when you learnt about Chilean wines, you’d never learn about Itata.

Itata is an incredible place. It’s coastal and mountainous, with granitic soils. The vines are ungrafted and dry farmed; one of very few places in the world to have this combination in an appellation. It’s a windy place with a lot of airflow in the vines, so you can grow your grapes with minimal intervention due to very low disease pressure. If you work well and carefully, you also don’t need to use any insecticides or herbicides. The land is such that you can only work the soil with a horse, not a tractor, which is also better for soil health. So, it is a really natural place. It’s a paradise!

By the time the grapes get to the winery, they are perfect, which means we can take a very low-intervention approach. The wines are natural in the best way. It’s not that I use less sulphur because I’m trying to be ‘cool’; I use less sulphur because the grapes are excellent. I never brand myself as a natural winemaker, though. It’s not a term I like, but I believe in the system of making good wines as naturally as possible.

I am very pleased to be part of this new generation in Itata that cherishes and preserves its old vineyards. We are at the beginning of a new chapter in the region’s history. There is amazing energy and a trend towards making precise, site-specific wines. It’s hard to convince the market that this new direction and style is right, but we are making it happen. It may take two years, five years, ten years, or twenty years, but it’s inevitable. We are all travelling a lot with our wines, presenting them to sommeliers and wine professionals, and every time we do, people are impressed. We are opening the door for the next generation.

You use the Burgundian Cru system to classify your vineyards. How do you approach this?

This classification terminology is something people can understand clearly, especially in the Sommelier community. It also makes sense to me as my career started in Burgundy. It’s very personal.

I approach it by saying that vineyards, which are 1er Cru, are incredible sites, but not atomic. The Grand Cru are the best I have, making wines with the most ageing potential. However, the Grand Crus will always be better in the future, so those are premature wines, whereas the 1er Cru are approachable and ready to drink earlier.

Speaking about the Cru wines, we would be remiss not to talk about your love of music. You named your Cru wines after famous jazz musicians. How do you feel jazz and wine relate together?

When I was younger, I used to play the saxophone and my teacher used certain words to describe the sound I should try to achieve: grip, tension, complexity. Those words came back again when I worked in Burgundy. People were describing wine the same way. Little by little, I began to understand that the two were connected.

Great wines come from great terroir and a great interpretation of that terroir. This creates something that few wines can have, which is its own sound. It’s a bit like watching American Idol, with 2000 contestants who can all sing, but only one has what it takes to ‘make it’. It’s not about being able to sing well; it’s about having a sound. You can often recognise it immediately because there are imperfections in the sound that make it distinctive. Great jazz is about having a sound, and so is great wine. Those unique ‘imperfections’ that make it taste unlike anything else come from great terroir and great interpretation through the winemaking, in my opinion. The minerality, acidity, tension, complexity, texture, grip … it’s all part of the sound. So, for me, wine and jazz make sense together. They have the same language.

A version of this article was originally published for Liberty Wines

I fell in love with Burgundy roughly two months after my 22nd birthday.

It was late August. I flew to Paris, hired a car and drove to Chablis with a broken sat nav and equally broken French. Roaming wasn’t affordable back then, or perhaps I simply couldn’t afford it. Either way, I had to figure out how to get to Auxerre the next morning and get it fixed, which I did, somehow.

I spent a week driving the length of the Côte d’Or, taking photos, wandering through various Grand Crus, eating a lot of bread and cheese and making friends with anyone happy to speak with me. I drank wonderful wine, read Caitlin Moran’s autobiography on my gîte’s terrace each evening and fell in love with the distinct smell of Burgundy: warm earth, almost sweet, and completely comforting.

I fell in love with Domaine Dujac roughly ten months later, just before my 23rd birthday. It was late June, at the end of a roasting hot day spent working a double at the 10 Cases in Covent Garden. Exhausted and thirsty, I remember plonking myself down at the last remaining terrace table at about 1am, chugging tepid water and tearing chunks from a leftover baguette. I was far too warm, humid and sticky, but also happy. I really loved that job.

A bottle appeared on the table we were all crowded around. Morey-Saint-Denis, 2012. Domaine Dujac. It had a mist on the glass, having been kept at the perfect temperature in the cellar, condensing quickly in the summer night air. I’d never tried it before, but I’d coveted it on our list for months. There are so many wines I’ve tasted across my 11-plus-year career, ones you’d think I’d remember vividly but can barely grasp at in the recesses of my generally overstimulated mind. That 2012 Dujac Morey-Saint-Denis, though, is something I won’t forget.

I’ve sold and tasted and drunk a lot of Dujac since. There’s a very funny photo somewhere on my phone of a post-service glass of 2011 Morey-Saint-Denis from my time with Tom Kerridge: a glass gifted by a guest, tasted while I battled my inbox in our windowless office long after everyone had left (there’s clearly a theme of late-night Dujac drinking here). But it’s always a pleasure to experience Dujac in any situation. They are, undoubtedly, my favourite Burgundy wines.

Which brings me to 2026, two weeks after my 33rd birthday. After driving from Wiltshire to Dover, Dover to Calais, Calais to Reims and Reims to Morey-Saint-Denis, my husband and I stood in the courtyard of Domaine Dujac, greeted by the ever-marvellous Diana Snowden.

The thing about Dujac, and Diana, is how acutely aware they are of the impact of climate change. This year, with fires raging across Europe, decimating historic vineyards and turning cover crops to kindling, that’s probably more obvious than ever. But for Dujac, it’s been at the forefront of their mind for decades. Every year, harvest edges earlier. Eleven years ago, when I first visited Burgundy in late August, harvest was still a long way off. A year later, in 2016, I worked harvest in Savigny-lès-Beaune in late September. In 2026, Dujac are preparing to harvest on August 15th.

Dujac have practised biodynamics for over two decades, which helps, but it’s the work on soil health, reducing herbicides and using cover crops that’s had the biggest impact. Burgundy is, more than any other wine region in the world, a near-complete monoculture of vines; with land at such an eye-watering premium, it’s hard to justify growing anything else. Dujac do what they can to counter this, though, and have even managed to plant a few trees here and there. This all helps with water retention and oxygenation of the vine roots, cooling the soil and giving the vines half a chance in extreme heat.

The cellar at Domaine Dujac is a new, purpose-built construction, designed with the future in mind. The walls are made from hay bales for natural thermal insulation, and the CO2 released during fermentation is now captured and stored, compressed by a company in Ireland who trap it in caves, so it never reaches the atmosphere. It’s a beautiful winery, and I always love seeing spaces designed by winemakers, built to their needs. You’d think somewhere as established as Dujac would overhaul its space every few years, but this is one of their most significant investments in over two decades. Jacques used to favour narrow, tall tanks to make the most of the space, but they created extra work in the long run, since they didn’t allow enough cap contact and needed more manual labour to get the right extraction. Now they have much larger tanks, though with a few more vineyards acquired since, those are already full too!

Winemaking here is by no means an exact science. It’s a team effort, with everyone tasting together to decide how best to create the most transparent expression of site. So much of it comes down to instinct and experience. As Diana says, it’s one of the few careers where getting older is a real advantage, since it takes years to know when to pick, how often to punch down, or how much oak a vintage might need. Jacques originally used 100% new oak, but now Dujac tend to use 70% for Grand Cru and down to 40% for village. Whole-bunch percentages vary between 70 and 80%.

Diana also muses on how difficult it’s become for the younger generation in Burgundy, where each of the last five vintages has differed wildly from the one before. Every year brings extremes outside the norm, though perhaps that is the norm now. Either way, it’s hard to build experience and develop intuition when you’re simply battling Mother Nature just to get anything into the cellar at the end.

It’s a candid comment, but one I’ve pondered a lot over the last few years. I work with their Morey-Saint-Denis neighbour, Domaine Lignier-Michelot, for example, and Virgile’s son Bertin joined the estate during the waterlogged 2024 vintage. It was a rough start, and 2025 proved even harder, while 2026 is now plagued by severe drought. There’s no consistency, just a mad dash to the finish line, a deep breath, and then throwing yourself back into the unknown. (I should note, though, that Bertin is brilliant, and I don’t doubt he’ll have a wonderful career. It’s just a very rough road ahead.)

The Wines

We rounded off our visit in the cellar, tasting a horizontal from 2024 and a vertical of ‘Aux Malconsorts’, the Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru that borders La Tâche. Jeremy acquired this plot in 2004 with help from Etienne de Montille, who purchased the other half of what was on offer.

Every year, Dujac produce a small number of half bottles exclusively for tasting at the domaine. I asked if this affects how the older vintages show, since my experience with half bottles is that they tend to age faster than 75cl. That isn’t an issue here. From bottling to tasting, these 37.5cl wines never move an inch. They age perfectly, in optimal conditions.

2024 Morey-Saint-Denis

2024 was plagued by frost and non-stop rain, and despite still making all their cuvées, quantities were minute. It was a very fast vintage as a result. Jeremy actually waited a week later than most in the region to pick, holding out for the fruit to be as ripe as possible. It was a risk that paid off. Sorting then took place in the vineyard rather than the winery, to ensure only healthy fruit hit the press.

The Morey-Saint-Denis receives the fewest punch downs as it has the most rustic tannins of the wines Dujac make. It has quite an inky and intense nose, though still with a lot of lift. Graphite and sour cherry palate, with a whack of soft herbs, accompanied by plenty of acidity, but the tannins are really soft, not remotely aggressive.

2024 Gevrey-Chambertin 1er Cru ‘Aux Combottes’

This is the only 1er Cru in Burgundy that is bordered by Grand Cru on all four sides. So why isn’t it also a Grand Cru? There’s a small dip at the top of the vineyard where water settles after it rains (hard to believe in this current drought), and it’s this small difference that creates slightly more rustic tannins in the wines.

The palate is silky, with much more earthiness integrated into the fruit profile, which is vibrant and slightly sour: raspberry, cherry. It’s very fruit forward and expressive, with a touch of grip.

2024 ‘Clos de la Roche’ Grand Cru

This is one of the Morey-Saint-Denis Grand Crus that borders two sides of ‘Aux Combottes’. It’s the quintessential Dujac wine and a longtime staple in their offering. Jacques replanted with fresh clonal selection, choosing early-ripening clones. The surface here is solid rock, so much so that he was tempted to use dynamite just to get the vines in. The young, uniform clonal selection means this is usually the first to be picked, reaching higher sugar content than the rest of the vines. It gives the wine more tension.

It’s a bit like a negroni, with that Campari bitterness. Bloody, ferrous notes sit alongside lots of brooding fruit, with firmer, more chalky tannins. This is still a baby, but the length is insane. Apparently, this is consistently quite bloody and gamey, with notes of blood orange, regardless of vintage.

2024 Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru ‘Aux Malconsorts’

It’s very open and inviting, a very classic Burgundy: soft and supple, with savoury cumin spices rather than the clove you get in Morey. The tannin really creeps up on you, but it’s so silky you barely notice it coming. There’s a silty quality in there too, alongside notes of violet.

2023 Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru ‘Aux Malconsorts’

This is much fleshier and broader on the palate, the flavours intensifying and rooting deeper as they go. It feels very anchored, hedonistic and plush, with notes of cola and an insane length. It makes my heart happy, carrying a lot of the exuberance of the vintage.

2020 Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru ‘Aux Malconsorts’

This has a very exuberant nose, with mega intensity and serious perfume. Diana was cross with Jeremy for waiting too long to pick. It’s very intense and big on the nose, very fruit-driven, and super plush, with lots more ripeness. It may age well, but it’s so intense even now.

2012 Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru ‘Aux Malconsorts’

This is perfect. So many layers upon layers of vibrant, primary fruit sit on top of soft herbs, cumin and a touch of cinnamon, with porcini mushroom (almost sweet?) and an intensity that’s just magic. Elegant. Classic! Heaven.

2005 Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru ‘Aux Malconsorts’

This is technically under the Dujac Père et Fils label (which denotes wines made from grower fruit), as they completed the purchase after the vintage and so didn’t farm it themselves until 2006. There’s a lot of new oak, which isn’t my preference, and I think it masks some of the exuberance and intensity. A shame, as it’s a fantastic vintage, but it’s interesting to see how much this vineyard changes once they have control over the farming.

With thanks to Diana for such a wonderful morning and tasting, with so many fascinating insights shared and conversations had.

Adi Badenhorst had literally just finished picking the 2021 vintage when he sat down to chat with us via Zoom, and he’s smiling from ear to ear as he says how much he’s looking forward to the annual end-of-harvest party.

It was a pretty unusual one, even by non-pandemic standards. It started slow, had a cool growing season and rain just when it was needed most. The Swartland is normally sun-soaked and dry - the joke is that usually during harvest, you wash in grape juice, water is reserved for winery cleaning only! Covid restrictions made it a hard vintage, but Mother Nature gave Adi and his team a break.

New growth in the vines, photographed by Dee Lourens

Adi was born on a farm in Constantia, where winemaking in South Africa essentially started. Groot Constantia, where his grandfather worked as the farm manager, is the oldest wine estate in the country. From childhood, Adi had an interest in farming, but particularly the history and tradition of grape growing. By his own admission, he scraped through school, always more interested in the vineyards than his textbooks. After school, he travelled the world, vintage hopping from France to New Zealand, before ending up back in South Africa, making the wines at Stellenbosch winery Rustenberg.

In 2007, he visited a dilapidated old winery on the northern side of the Paardeberg Mountain in the Swartland. It was rough around the edges but had bags of potential, with magnificent old vineyards that just needed a bit of love. Along with his cousin and his wife, Adi left Stellenbosch, fixed up the old winery and started making his own wines.

“What drew us to the Swartland, why we put our roots down here, are planting trees and vineyards, and investing in the people and the infrastructure here, is because it’s a very, very special place. When you drive into the Paardeberg area, it’s got a sense of humility and expanse, but the mountain has texture and slopes, you know those grapes can make interesting wines”.

The farm, photographed by Dee Lourens

The Badenhorst winery has over 76 hectares of vines, or “a shit load of vineyards to farm” as Adi puts it. Alongside the traditional Swartland varieties like Chenin, Shiraz, Cinsault and Grenache, he has also started to experiment with others; 25 different grapes, “most of them I can’t pronounce”. It will be six years before they make wine from these new plantings, but Adi is excited to discover a new generation of grapes that could perfectly suit the Swartland climate. He plans to also sell some fruit to young, up-and-coming winemakers who are equally excited by this potential, but lack the resources to plant their own farms.

“I’d like to do that. We love the farming aspect of it and understand what winemakers want and what needs to be done in the vineyards to get the right quality to make really nice wine”.

One that we have always particularly enjoyed is Raaigras - which Adi cheekily tells us is pronounced ‘like ‘Rye Grass’, which I suppose rhymes with ‘Rayas’. Raaigras is the oldest single vineyard Grenache in South Africa, planted in the early 1950’s.

“It was one of those vineyards where, when we bought the farm, we just looked at these amazing vines and thought ‘shit, these things are old’. We came through in winter when all the leaves were off and saw these massive trunks. I didn’t realise how old they were then.

“There’s something about the chemistry of this juice. When you taste these grapes on the vine, it’s so different to the newer stuff”.

More than any other site Adi has, this is the one that he feels is the best at telling you who it is and where it’s from. Aside from age, the key factor in this is the grape variety.

“The varietal that can best communicate where it’s from is Grenache. It listens”.

Jan the Percheron horse

Adi has been farming these picturesque vineyards for fourteen years, and with each year he gets to understand the vines more. His ethos is simple: The better you know your vines the less work is needed to get the best from them.

“We just look after the things. It’s common sense. We plant really good cover crops, we try and keep the under-row free of weeds, we do a lot of mulching. We try not to spray any systemic fungicides, if there is a problem vineyard with a lot of powdery mildew we might have to spray a section of it, we don’t want to lose the crop. And when it comes to harvesting we just taste, have a look at the conditions of the vines, and then fuck we try not to pick too much on a Friday. Because that means you’ve got to work over the weekend”!

The ‘spraying’ question is a thorny topic in the world of low-intervention and natural wine. People tend to associate any kind of chemical intervention with the ‘big bad wolf’; industrial sized wineries who care very little about their environmental impact. Yet the reality is more nuanced than that. A lot is said about sustainability, particularly in relation to the environment, but what about social and economic sustainability? A winery is much more than a place to make wine, it’s also part of society.

“South Africa is an amazing place to live and to work, but we do have a very complex society. We employ a lot of people and our first priority above everything else is to be financially sustainable. If we are financially sustainable then we can be socially sustainable; we can employ people. Once that’s all in place, then we can also be environmentally sustainable. So, if we need to spray something then we will spray, because we need to pick those grapes and we need to make the wine from that vineyard”.

Adi’s winery at AA Badenhorst

I have been a fan of Adi’s wines for many years. Not just because they’re delicious, but also because of how integral Adi has become to the fabric of the Swartland and its society. Alongside fellow, like-minded growers and producers, he has formed a group called the Swartland Independent Producers. People who are dedicated to encouraging the production of wines that are truly reflective of the area.

“It’s amazing to sit with these guys, taste through these wines, and really feel a connection with them. There are so many similarities in our approaches to winemaking and farming, and yet our wines are so different. That for me is a really beautiful part about it. There’s a genuine friendship”.

Just as there is more than one way to paint a picture, there is also more than one way to make wines that represent the Swartland. Adi Badenhorst is the epitome of what makes the Swartland one of South Africa’s most exciting wine regions. From the farming to the people and the wines, he cares about it all and wants to continue to see it thrive.

A version of this article was originally published for The Sourcing Table.

In 2024, I interviewed Ted Lemon for nearly three hours in the lounge of Restaurant St Barts in Shoreditch. In 2025, I visited him in Sebastapol, spending the morning wandering across his vineyards, exploring his biodynamic preparations and tasting extensively across the Littorai range. We ended up staying so long that we were woefully late to our appointment at Williams Selyem. They understood, though. How could anyone ever tear themselves away from Ted Lemon?

In 2026, Ted came to the UK, and we sat down again for coffee. He asked me why I wasn’t working as a journalist yet. For the last five years, I have been writing for others, publishing articles to suit the voice and aims of my employers, but so rarely for myself. My friends and family have often asked the same question as Ted, but I always felt that they may have just been being “nice”. I didn’t think I was actually good enough to share my own voice. It took Ted asking that question for the penny to drop.

Ted is the reason I started my Substack. It feels only right to share that 2024 interview again. The one that ultimately led me here.

Ted Lemon was among the first to discover the potential of Sonoma’s true North Coast, founding Littorai with his wife Heidi, and helping transform an unknown, rugged region into one of the world’s finest growing areas for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. He is also a leading practitioner of biodynamic farming, which has been a key part of Littorai’s philosophy since its founding.

Here I speak with Ted at length about his career, starting with his early introductions to winemaking in Burgundy through to the founding of Littorai and how taking a simple approach has led to some of the USA’s greatest wines. It is long, but it leaves no stone unturned in a career that has been such a lynch pin in modern Californian wine history.

How did you end up working for Domaine Dujac?

I had lived in France at the age of 15 for a year with a French family, nothing to do with wine, and I had loved it. So, I planned to go back for a year of university, and I just wanted to be in a place that was a wine region.

I was an East Coast American kid who had no family in wine. I took a wine appreciation class at the University of Dijon. It was taught by a wonderfully enthusiastic gentleman who was passionate about Burgundy, Jean Michel Lafond, who for many years was the director of the Office of Tourism in Dijon. He’s the one who said to me, “Look, you seem awfully interested. If you ever wanted to do a stagiaire or an apprenticeship, why don’t you let me know, and I’ll see if I can help you?”.

I thought, why not? Who would ever regret spending a year working in the vineyards of Burgundy?

However, François Mitterrand had just been elected as the first socialist president of France. The Right in France was freaking out, hiding money under the mattresses, and nobody wanted to hire foreigners, so the timing was awful. Jean Michel struck out with all his contacts. Finally, he scribbled the phone number for Dujac on a piece of paper and handed it to me across the desk, saying, “I don’t personally know these people, and so I can’t help you, but call Jacques; his wife is American so maybe he will have suggestions.”

It was a cold call to Domaine Dujac in August of 1980 that led me to work there!

How do you think attitudes have changed in the area since then, in relation to Americans and other foreigners coming to work there?

Burgundy is a profoundly different place now, on many different levels.

When I arrived, it was sort of the end of the patriarchal, traditional time of Burgundy. You had the likes of Christophe Roumier, Dominique Lafon, Patrick Bize and Etienne Grivot, who were just starting and began to change things. They had also come to the feeling that there was great value and privilege in being born into these families, because most of their fathers had made little money in the wine business for many years. It was not a profitable business, and there had been several decades which were really difficult. For instance, the 1970s in terms of quality had been extremely difficult. This was sort of the last moment in time when there was still a very clear connection to that past.

I’ll never forget that Fall, Jacques Seysses being on the phone one evening with Pierre Ramonet, who had called him because his harvesters had just gone on strike, and he didn’t know what to do. Pierre said, “I don’t understand it, Jacques, I’ve taken a cold shower outside in the courtyard every day of my life, and they want hot water in the shower.” It was 1980! So, there was that last glimpse of a very, very different world and a very different attitude. It was still visible.

Now of course, Burgundy is much more open to the outside; there are so many more foreigners who work there, and it’s just utterly different to when I first arrived there.

You were ahead of the curve!

Oh, there wasn’t a curve; it was just a dot [laughs]. The dot was just me for a very brief period of time and then Pascal Marchand from Canada. That was it! With merchants you had Becky Wasserman and Kermit Lynch, and James Halliday would come from Australia to taste, but in terms of winemakers there was next to nothing.

You worked with some other really amazing producers in Burgundy as well [notably Roumier and Roulot], what made you gravitate towards them?

Jacques was very much my mentor. When I arrived, he’d just had a very serious back operation which was going to take him quite a while to recover from. They were desperate. They had two vineyard guys who knew little about the cellar and were trying to figure out how to manage the harvest. When this lanky, string bean of an American showed up and said “yeah, I’ll help, just tell me what to do”, they were very happy to have me!

I spent eight months there, and then Jacques said: “Look, you really should see what else is going on. You don’t need to spend a year everywhere else, but you should spend a month or two and meet these people and talk to them”. It was really all thanks to Jacques that I worked with so many wonderful producers at that time, like Bruno Clair and Aubert de Villaine, and Christophe Roumier’s dad, Jean-Marie. It was an amazing opportunity to spend a few months with these people, getting a sense of their lives and how they work. The key then, particularly, was being fluent in French. Now you can get by without speaking a word of French in Burgundy, but that was not possible in the 80s.

Has your time in Burgundy continued to influence your winemaking today?

Yes, but one thing I am very careful about is this very New World, English term: benchmarking, which I think is a really horrible term. We [Littorai] don’t benchmark against Burgundy. My feeling is that if you spend too much time comparing yourself to another wine region, you are being unfaithful to ‘the person you have married’ who you have chosen to spend the rest of your life with: the wine region you work in. What matters to me is that the ‘Pivot’ wine tastes as much like the ‘Pivot’ vineyard as possible, which is an attitude shared in Burgundy. Where that falls on the spectrum of how people perceive Pinot Noir, that’s up to them to say.

Were any of those Burgundy producers making wine in such a way that you thought ‘that’s the right approach to take, that’s how I am going to work’?

No, I think it was actually the opposite. Not so much what not to do, but to see the contrast in approaches, and yet understand that many approaches make wonderful wine.

I think that was deeply meaningful to me. I mean, working in a place like the Domaine Dujac where they use 100% whole cluster, that was what I was originally exposed to. But then I had the opportunity to visit Henri Jayer and talk to Henri, who would say, “Ripe stems? I’ve never seen ripe stems in Burgundy”. Everything is in the eye of the beholder, and there isn’t a right or wrong way in my eyes.

The other interesting thing is that certain wine styles may do better in certain vintages. People can be passionate about it one way or another, but we’re not dogmatic at all at Littorai.

What was it about Sonoma that made you want to start Littorai?

Heidi and I had spent a great deal of 1992 travelling, literally, from the Mexican to the Canadian border, just looking at sites for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. I loved the wines of Santa Maria and the Santa Rita Hills, I’m a big fan of old Chalone and Calera wines, and I also loved the Willamette Valley. So, we thought very seriously about all of those places, probably most seriously about the Willamette Valley.

In the end, what attracted me to what we call the true North Coast (the coastal hills of Mendocino and Sonoma counties) were two things: the geologic diversity, which is almost unparalleled in the world of wine and the idea of being a pioneer. In the 1990s, you could stand on almost any hillside in western Sonoma County, less than 40 miles from the most famous wine region in the United States [Napa Valley], and you would be standing in a place which was absolutely unknown for wine. In 1990, we knew far more about the potential of the Willamette Valley than we possibly understood about the true North Coast, and that remains true to this day. It’s very difficult to understand this area. Yields are extremely low, and there’s very little plantable land.

When you found the site that you wanted to work with for Littorai, did you plant from scratch or work with existing vines?

It’s important to understand that when we started Littorai, we had no money. There are no investors, and there’s no family money. We started with nothing in the bank, and so it was 100% purchased grapes for seven years. We bought fruit from several sites to try and best understand the area. I don’t want that to sound scattershot though because it was very deliberate. There are still two wines we made in 1993 that we make today from the same sites: ‘Mays Canyon’ Chardonnay and ‘One Acre’ Pinot Noir. So, in 1999 and 2000, when we were ready to buy land, we had a good understanding of what we wanted. That’s when we purchased the site that now produces ‘The Haven’.

All of this was unfolding in the 1990s. There was suddenly this movement whereas before there was nothing. It was Americans discovering American wine regions too; it wasn’t done by the French. It wasn’t like how dramatically Drouhin affected Oregon, for example. This was all done entirely by professional American winemakers, which was really quite extraordinary.

When you started adopting biodynamics, what was it about the approach that made you decide to stick with it?

Think of biodynamics as a language. There are ways to learn a language, right? One is the “Monkey See Monkey Do” where the teacher starts talking to you in the language, and you have to start guessing what they’re saying. Another is a very pedantic sort of way, where the teacher starts writing “bonjour equals hello” and everything is linear. It’s Cartesian logic. You can learn the biodynamic language in all of those ways. But, for it to work for me, because I had a Western intellectual background, I went to an Ivy League college, I needed the Western intellectual understanding of what biodynamics was.

And so, we chose to work with an absolutely extraordinarily talented, temperamental, wonderful man named Andrew Lorand. He had a PhD in Agricultural education from Penn State, which is one of the major land-grant, N-P-K universities in the States. But Andrew was cut from a very different cloth and could give me a logical, rational understanding of biodynamics.

One of the great difficulties of this paradigm is that most of its practitioners struggle to understand the true logical basis upon which the system works. If you don’t understand the basis upon which it works, it’s hard to explain it to other people. You wander in the wilderness too easily, and Andrew, because of his degree in education, completely understood the logical foundational underpinning.

The key to understanding biodynamic farming is that the logical point of departure for the entire system, and all of Steiner’s anthroposophy, is that the spiritual world exists. He’s not saying it’s Hindu, or Buddhist or Christian or Jewish or anything else. He is simply stating that there is a spiritual world behind the world of our physical senses. All of how biodynamics functions flows from that point.

Something you hear sometimes in the world of biodynamics is people saying, “oh biodynamics is amazing, it really works, but the spiritual stuff I’m not so sure about”. Everyone is welcome to their opinion and deserves respect and honour for it, but the basic problem with that mentality is that biodynamics is nothing but a big, hot, steaming cow pat without this point of departure. It means nothing unless you understand how it all flows from that one single proposition. It’s a house of cards without it.

One can intellectually understand the point of departure and be agnostic or atheistic. That’s not a problem because that’s the beauty of logic. None of us has to start from this point, but we can still accept this point, whatever it might be. And from that flows a debate, or an argument. That is the key.

Why do you choose not to certify?

There are two sets of problems with certification. Every farm or winery is going to be different. My feeling is I want to do this because I think it’s the right thing to do, not because I get a Gold Star. I struggle with some of how the US Department of Agriculture has chosen to set out the organic rules. I’m not a huge fan of some of the ways in which the agrobusiness has influenced those rules. That’s one set of problems.

The other one, which is much more deeply philosophical in regard to Demeter certification, is that these were ideas given freely to the world. They weren’t charged for. Nobody had to pay anything to hear Steiner talk about it. No one should own this. These free gifts are incredibly important. In that sense, I don’t want to be part of a system in which someone claims to own the formula.

I don’t own the formula, and in fact, one of the most important lessons I’ve learned about it, in all our years of practising, is that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a truly biodynamic farm. I’ve seen farms on the path (and I feel like we are on the path), and I’ve seen farms that embody aspects of it extraordinarily well, but it’s such an enormous undertaking. Steiner was nothing if not ambitious, not for himself personally, but for humanity.

I think a mistake people often make is to think of biodynamic farming as a return to the past, and that is a profound misunderstanding. In fact, what Steiner was calling us towards was much more radical and different, and this is why I don’t think I’ve ever truly seen a biodynamic farm. The goal is to generate a completely new, modern relationship between the human being and the physical world in which we live. That can only be done with modern thinking.

Segueing from farming to the vineyards themselves, could you talk us through each of your vineyards and how you approach making their wines?

I think it’s important to remember that where we operate doesn’t have any of the beautiful logic of, say, Burgundy or the Rhône Valley does. With Burgundy, you have these limestone deposits that built up over millennia, as the sea retreated. It’s a very logical, Cartesian, understandable process.

Where we are, you can’t make those kinds of generalisations. We’re dealing with plate tectonics in the formation of the Sonoma Coast and the Mendocino Coast, and the folding and uplifting and volcanic vents that formed in this violent interaction. It’s helpful to think of each of our vineyard sites as an island unto itself, with different exposures, elevations and soil types, etc. These don’t relate in the same beautiful way as, for example, different vineyards in the same Burgundy appellation. Each has its own unique character.

We try to do as much as possible to keep the élevage similar, if not identical, on all the wines. We want them to taste like themselves. We keep it very simple.

You also work with vineyards owned by other people, for example the Hirsch vineyard. How do you go about choosing those?

Most of it is purely from intuition, meaning that, again, going back to the fact that this was an undiscovered wine region, you didn’t really have the technological basis upon which to make these decisions. You didn’t have precise weather or soil data, so you didn’t know which soils produced great wine on the coast. There was no basis for a technocratic approach. It was a combination of intuition and knowledge of local species. For example, I knew what grows where and that certain plants grew best in free-draining soil while others do better with clay-rich, boggy soils. From there I could take an intuitive approach.

This is also down to the value of having a great European viticulture education. Those who have travelled around Europe enough get to have a good idea of what makes a great vineyard, in terms of exposure and soil, etc. Having spent way too much time dragging around French vineyards, felt like I had developed that sort of sense, and that was the critical part. I’ve applied that intuition to all the sites we work with.

Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are your focus, but would you like to work with other varieties in future?

In my career I’ve made wine from around 35 different grape varieties, so I’ve definitely done a lot of that. The mission of Littorai, though, is more particular.

We aren’t an experimental winery. We have chosen a path, which is relatively traditionalist, dedicated to only a couple of things and if we suddenly went out and started making more wines from, say, seven different varieties, that wouldn’t be logical. Simplicity is very much the key, as with our winemaking. Which really, if you think about it, isn’t culturally very American! Americans are tinkerers. They like to mess with things, and the path we chose is almost the opposite of that.

It is important to me, though, that we don’t bury our heads in the sand about climate change. I think everybody needs to be really serious and thoughtful about that. So, we certainly pay attention to it and certainly think about those things, but what that would mean I have no idea. I can’t tell you. Because you’re dealing with a young wine region that’s barely begun to figure out Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. So, where you would go from here, I don’t know.

For us, the key is to be open and be thoughtful and just see where it goes.

A version of this article was first published for Liberty Wines.

The day I discovered the joy of the dregs of a posh bottle post-sommelier shift, and an exhausted 2 am McDonald’s, was the day I finally understood the art of wine and food pairing. I think it’s because of the simplicity of it all. A (once) 99p cheeseburger (with extra pickles, of course) and the last dregs of that fuck off expensive red burgundy a generous guest gifted you? Minimal thought process and maximum enjoyment.

Though behind said minimal thought process, there is logic to it, too. Fine wines tend to have higher acidity levels. It’s part of what’s needed to ensure they age well in the bottle and (theoretically) get better over time while (crucially) appreciating in value. As much as I’d love to convince you otherwise, the fine wine market largely functions like any other stock market. Buy low, sell high. Get in early and hang on, making a killing if you sell at the right time (though increasingly it’s a risk that isn’t paying dividends, but that’s a topic for another article). For ageability and, therefore, profitability, you need acid.

And filthy food? It’s all deep-fried and delicious fat and salt. You need acid to cut through it all and freshen up your palate. It also helps bring out more flavour in the food, even when said food has the nutritional value of plastic American cheese (which I still shamelessly love).

My love of this combination is in no way novel. Once upon a time, my favourite restaurant in London was Bubbledogs on Charlotte Street. Two-Michelin-starred restaurant in the back, champagne and hot dog party in the front. I was devastated when it eventually closed to pave the way for the two-star to gain a bar area, but thankfully, owner Sandia Chang has kept the concept alive with various pop-ups. The most recent was July 5th, 2026, at Sune on Broadway Market. Let me tell you, I don’t think there is any greater pleasure than washing down hot dog after hot dog with a disgustingly well-priced bottle of Bérèche champagne. I don’t know why more people aren’t embracing a restaurant concept of one delicious filthy thing and a wine list of your wildest dreams. There’s a reason why one of my favourite restaurants on planet earth is Sacre Burger in Reims.

Thankfully, a fine wine/filthy food, high/low pairing is very easy to achieve at home. English sparkling wine and fish and chips. Kebab and off-dry Riesling. Really dirty, greasy pizza and Chianti Classico. McDonald’s and Burgundy. Champagne and hot dogs. If you need inspiration, buy “Which Wine When” by Bert Blaize, “The Wine Dine Dictionary” by Victoria Moore, or “Big Macs and Burgundy” by Vanessa Price and Adam Laukhuf. Then load up Deliveroo.

For many years, a good friend of mine and I would trade our high/low pairings back and forth like Pokémon cards, sharing the spoils from our respective nights running around in various Michelin-starred restaurants. Chicken nuggets and German Riesling, Burgundy and burgers, Twiglets and 1er Cru Chambolle. We’ve both since left the floor, and mercifully, our late-night dining habits have become significantly healthier and less frequent. But the love of filthy food and fine wine persists. It’s a love to last a lifetime.

I chose our recent Airbnb in Beaujolais because it fit our budget and had a pool. Somehow I accidentally managed to book the guest house of the only winemakers working on the other side of the Saône river to all the famed Cru. They also happen to be the first people in the region to have embraced hybrid varieties.

Lilian Bauchet and his wife Sophie have been working with PIWI and other hybrid varieties since 2014, planting a vineyard next to their house on what was once an old grass tennis court. They'd previously bought vines in Fleurie that had been under contract with Duboeuf, though they promptly lost interest once Lilian and Sophie started organic conversion and the price of the fruit went up (a tale as old as time …). The amount of spraying that organics still required, combined with an ever-changing climate, led them to Germany, Switzerland and Belgium in search of solutions. They couldn't change the 'terroir' but they could change the grape. And so, they crossed the river and found a place to do just that.

A bit of context. PIWI (Pilzwiderstandsfähige) varieties were originally developed by crossing European Vitis vinifera with Asian or American vines, e.g. Vitis labrusca or Vitis amurensis, essentially grapes that are NOT traditionally used for fine wine winemaking but are extremely hardy. The result is a grape variety that can in theory make semi-decent wine whilst also being disease resistant, adaptable to extreme weather and pretty well set up to deal with climate change as it stands now. These varieties were originally developed for bulk winemaking in France and Germany, so many are fairly nondescript, but there are certainly several that have real potential. To make things confusing, all PIWI are hybrid varieties, but not all hybrid varieties are PIWI since you can cross breed any two vines (including in the same species) to create a hybrid. Lilian and Sophie work with examples of both.

Though using PIWI/hybrids means Lilian and Sophie don't classify for the Beaujolais AOP, it has meant they've been able to weather (pardon the pun) the literal storms of recent years. In 2021, when the region was washed out and plagued by disease, their vines chugged on unaffected. Seeing how their vines have fared in such challenging years has led several Beaujolais winemakers to start experimenting with PIWI/hybrids too. Lilian is currently working with Jules Métras, Pierre Cotton and Romain Zordan (Château de Grand Pre) on experimental hybrid vineyards, one of which you can see from Jules' father Yvon's house in Vauxrenard.

On our last night at Lilian and Sophie's guest house, my husband and I joined them for a drink on their terrace. We tasted their wines, which are fun and funky and very interesting. We taught Lilian the word ‘Smashable’ as a great descriptor for his light, chillable vin de soif! Yet I think what's most interesting is the influence they are starting to have in the region from a farming perspective.

In the last 10 days that we spent in France, Beaujolais alone had been hit by multiple heat waves and drought, while also being battered by hail which had destroyed entire crops of grapes for many producers. A year's worth of work, blood, sweat and tears, gone because of the whims of Mother Nature and the wrath of climate change. It's no wonder that several influential producers in Beaujolais are now keeping an open mind about the varieties that might help prevent this issue in the future. After all, French AOPs are a hotbed of bureaucracy. They require producers to farm vines and make wine according to rules determined long before global warming hit with full force, rules that worked then but don't now. I'm not suggesting that everyone needs to start regrafting to PIWI/Hybrid, but thinking and working differently surely must to be part of the solution?

What Lilian and Sophie do is a tiny drop in the ocean of global winemaking, but there is certainly something to be learned from their tenacity and open mindedness.

Indianapolis-born Brian Sieve has been the winemaker at Domaine de Montille in Volnay since 2010, drawn by a desire to work at an estate focused on organic and biodynamic farming. Founded in the mid-18th century, Domaine de Montille is one of the Côte d’Or’s most historic, family-operated estates and an early advocate of domaine-bottling. It is currently run by ninth-generation winemaker Etienne de Montille, who, alongside his father Hubert, has ensured the domaine’s reputation for quality endures today. Brian’s work with Etienne has led to some of Burgundy’s most sought-after wines.

During his trip to London in June 2026, I spoke with Brian about his work at this famed estate and the shape of Burgundy today.

De Montille’s parcel of Vosne Romanée (courtesy of the producer)

What first drew you to wine, and eventually to Burgundy?

My route into wine was not especially direct. I grew up in Italy and Germany, where wine was simply part of everyday life. It was always on the table and was never treated as something particularly mysterious. As I got older, I realised I was drawn to professions that combined physical work with intellectual challenge. Winemaking seemed to offer exactly that balance. Half the job is practical and hands-on, while the other half requires constant problem-solving, observation and decision-making.

My wife and I were living in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. We had the opportunity to work a harvest in California, and that experience completely changed our direction. I already had a background in chemistry and biology, so developing the technical side of wine was a natural progression. We quickly discovered that we loved both the work itself and the opportunities it created to travel and experience different wine regions. After California we completed another harvest in New Zealand before returning to California for full-time roles in the industry.

As our careers developed, we reached a point where we could either settle permanently in Northern California or take a leap and move to Europe. My wife, who grew up in Switzerland and Belgium, was the one who really pushed us towards the second option. We both felt that if we did not do it then, we probably never would. Looking back, there was never a rigid master plan. We have always been comfortable following opportunities rather than forcing them. At the time we had no children and very few constraints, so it felt like the right moment to see where the journey might take us. California was in danger of becoming “golden handcuffs”, good jobs, a great lifestyle and a clear career path that would eventually make it difficult to leave.

Burgundy seemed like the obvious destination. For anyone fascinated by Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, it’s the reference point. We originally intended to stay for only a few years and see where it led. Fifteen years later, we are still there!

Interestingly, we came for the Pinot Noir but stayed for the Chardonnay. Like many people, I was initially drawn by the mystique of Burgundy’s reds. I had worked for producers in California whose reputations were built around Pinot Noir, and that shaped my perspective. Burgundy reminds me a little of a ski town in that respect. People often arrive because of one attraction and then discover everything else. We came for the Pinot Noir, but once we experienced the Chardonnays and the wider rhythm of life in Burgundy, we stayed.

Once I arrived in Burgundy, I began to appreciate just how extraordinary the white wines could be. These days, if I go into my cellar, there is a very good chance I will come back with a bottle of white Burgundy rather than Pinot Noir.

Brian and Etienne de Montille in the winery

How did Domaine de Montille enter the picture?

I was specifically looking to work with organic and biodynamic producers in Burgundy. I wanted to work somewhere that viewed the vineyard as a living system and took farming seriously. Before I even received my visa, Étienne de Montille called me and asked about my situation. He simply said, “When you get your visa, give me a call.” It turned out to be a very soft landing into Burgundy and a remarkable opportunity.

What appealed to me then, and still appeals to me now, is the diversity of the vineyards. Domaine de Montille farms more than 36 hectares, which is substantial by Burgundy standards. The holdings stretch from Chassagne-Montrachet in the south all the way to Clos de Vougeot in the north. That means you are constantly dealing with different exposures, soil types, vine ages and farming challenges.

Some vineyards are more vulnerable to disease pressure in wet years and require careful management. Others, such as older parcels in Chevalier-Montrachet, are worked with horses because the vines are old and delicate. The aim is not simply to avoid soil compaction, although that is certainly a benefit. It is also about treating the vineyard more gently and reducing mechanical impact on both the soil and the vines themselves.

The benefits are broader than simply reducing compaction. Working with horses allows us to be much gentler around old vines and work with a degree of precision that is difficult to achieve mechanically. It is considerably more labour-intensive and expensive than tractor work, so it has to be justified. In certain vineyards, however, we have seen meaningful improvements surprisingly quickly.

De Montille’s parcel of Puligny Montrachet 1er Cru ‘Caillerets’ (courtesy of the producer)

Do you have a favourite vineyard to work with?

One of the joys of working at de Montille is the sheer diversity. Burgundy can often be discussed in very romantic terms, but the reality is that every site presents its own challenges. One parcel may require extremely careful disease management in a wet year, while another demands a completely different approach because of its age, training system or soil structure. There is no single solution. The constant need to adapt is what keeps the work fascinating.

I will say that the Côte de Beaune is an extraordinarily beautiful place to work. The valleys are more open, the slopes are dramatic, and in certain places you can look all the way towards Mont Blanc. There is a sense of tranquillity there that is quite different from parts of the Côte de Nuits. Yet at the same time, the Côte de Nuits carries its own weight of history and prestige. You are often surrounded by vineyards and domaines whose names have been written into the history of Burgundy for generations.

Has the domaine continued to evolve since you joined?

Absolutely. I do not think Étienne understands the concept of standing still. The domaine has constantly evolved, not only in terms of farming but also in terms of its vineyard holdings. The estate today looks quite different from the one I joined.

One thing he has done particularly well is acquire vineyard parcels that strengthen the overall coherence of the estate. Rather than accumulating tiny fragments scattered across Burgundy, he has focused on parcels that work operationally and stylistically within the domaine. Many acquisitions have been half a hectare to a hectare in size, allowing the team to farm them efficiently.

The result has been a gradual concentration around key vineyards. Certain peripheral holdings have been sold, while stronger positions have been built in vineyards that are central to the domaine’s identity. It is not simply about prestige. It is also about practicality. If your base is in Volnay, repeatedly transporting tractors and equipment long distances into the Côte de Nuits creates significant wear and tear. That reality has encouraged us to rethink how we farm and organise the estate.

Today some vineyards in the Côte de Nuits are horse-ploughed, and we even collaborate with neighbouring domaines on certain vineyard operations to improve efficiency and sustainability. Increasingly, we think about farming in a more collaborative way. It is a practical response to the realities of modern viticulture, while also reducing unnecessary movement of equipment and resources. It is a more holistic way of thinking about vineyard management.

(C) De Montille’s parcel of Volnay 1er Cru ‘Champans’ (courtesy of the producer)

How do you approach winemaking?

One subject that often comes up is whole-cluster fermentation. I think there are two broad camps in wine. There are people who love whole bunches and people who do not. Part of that comes down to personal sensitivity. Some tasters are much more sensitive to the herbal or pyrazine-derived characteristics that stems can contribute than others.

For me, whole clusters are simply another tool. When used well, they can bring complexity, lift and additional aromatic character. However, they are not appropriate in every vineyard or every vintage. A great deal depends on stem maturity, vine health, disease pressure and the specific characteristics of each parcel.

Experience is critical. The longer you work with a vineyard, the more you understand how stems behave in different years, on different soils and with different plant material. That knowledge allows you to fine-tune decisions parcel-by-parcel rather than applying a single recipe everywhere. Burgundy’s best practitioners of whole-cluster fermentation rarely follow ideology. They are drawing on decades of experience with individual sites.

In difficult years, whole-cluster fermentation can become much more of a gamble. Disease pressure, green stems or uneven ripening may force you to rethink plans entirely. Sorting becomes incredibly important. Whatever enters the fermenter must be pristine. The key is flexibility rather than ideology.

Even practical considerations can influence decisions. We work with traditional wooden fermenters that need to be filled properly. Sometimes fermentation choices are influenced not only by the vineyard but also by the realities of the cellar and the vessels available. Winemaking is rarely as simple as people imagine.

How do you view Burgundy today?

One challenge facing Burgundy is the changing economics of fruit and vineyard ownership. Burgundy has become a much more expensive and complex place to operate than it was twenty years ago. Vineyard prices have risen dramatically, equipment costs continue to increase, and growers face constant decisions about investment, labour and farming methods. For many smaller domaines, moving towards more labour-intensive farming can require significant changes to staffing, infrastructure and even their commercial model.

Over the past two decades, more and more growers have chosen to bottle their own wines rather than sell fruit. That has undoubtedly raised quality across the region, but it has also made fruit increasingly expensive and difficult to access for smaller négociant projects.

From the perspective of an estate that owns vineyards, it often makes more sense to focus resources on your own domaine wines. That is understandable, but it does mean that the traditional négociant model is becoming harder to sustain.

With thanks to Brian for his time and Domaine de Montille for the accompanying photos. A version of this article was originally published for Liberty Wines.

Far Mountain Label artwork by Tom Killion

Rodrigo Soto and Mai Errazuriz make distinctive Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon from lesser-known vineyards on the Sonoma side of the Mayacamas mountains. With Far Mountain, they are slowly but surely giving us a very good reason to pay attention to the Moon Mountain District AVA.

Rodrigo started his career at the only organic winery in his native Chile. From there, he came to America, befriended the late, great Alan York, fell in love with biodynamics and brought this, then unknown, agricultural method back to Chile.

The winery he worked for (Matetic) became the country’s first to be biodynamic certified. Rodrigo had quietly kick-started a farming revolution that continues to influence Chilean producers today. Not that he’d tell it like that. For him, it was just sensible farming. It still is. And when he hired a young Pedro Parra to dig soil pits and analyse their terroir (Pedro’s second ever client), that was just sensible too.

In 2003, Rodrigo and Mai met at a rave in New York on New Year’s Eve. Mai originally worked in Finance, but promptly fell in love with wine, carving out an excellent wine marketing career that included a stint with Errazuriz (no relation – particularly given the estate is owned by the Chadwicks). Eventually, they moved back to California, where Rodrigo worked as the Director of Quintessa while simultaneously managing the organic and biodynamic vineyards for Flowers in Sonoma.

It’s safe to say that between them, they have an impressive CV that would lend itself well to any winemaking project they’d put their minds to. So, why this project?

(L) Tasting overlooking “The Nunnery”, (C) Rodrigo, Mai and Linus the dog, (R) Bald Mountain

Decanter recently described the Moon Mountain District AVA as “Sonoma County’s best kept secret”, and this is certainly how Rodrigo and Mai seemed to feel when they first settled on the area for their project. Unlike in more established AVAs (the Moon Mountain District only achieved AVA status in 2013), here, finding organic practising, sensitively farmed old vines, planted on undulating terrain at varied elevations, was relatively easy. This is perhaps in no small part down to pioneering organic farmer Phil Coturris’ early interest in the area, dating back to the 1970s. His influence is felt across the district, and Rodrigo and Mai work with one of his sites, “The Nunnery”, in Nuns Canyon, which feels half vineyard and half organic garden.

Teetering on the Sonoma side of the Mayacamas Mountains, the Moon Mountain District AVA is home to a wealth of old, dry-farmed vineyards planted on distinctive red-volcanic soils. On a clear day, once the marine layer rolls away, you can look across from the vineyards to San Francisco. When I say old vines, I mean it. One of the vineyards Far Mountain works with is Monte Rosso, planted in the 1880s and still own-rooted today.

For Far Mountain, Rodrigo and Mai focus on Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon. There is undoubtedly a historic pedigree to this area. One of their vineyards, used for the ‘Myra’ Chardonnay, was previously leased by Home - Mayacamas Vineyards, while one of their Cabernet sites looks directly across to Kistler’s famed, synonymous vineyard. This just adds weight to how baffling it is that the AVA’s wines aren’t better known. Thankfully, Far Mountain is helping to change that.

These are wines that do justice to their marvellous sites. They have incredible tension that comes from the area’s volcanic soils and high elevations, combined with Rodrigo’s sensitive winemaking. They are unlike anything else I have ever tasted in California (and I have tasted a lot), and that is entirely down to the distinctive character of the Moon Mountain District AVA.

It’s not just me who feels this way, either. Recently, both wine writer Antonio Galloni and terroir specialist Brenna Quigely have been exploring the area with Rodrigo and Mai. Galloni has even commissioned comprehensive maps from Alessandro Masnaghetti to better illustrate the region. There is so much more to explore.

I implore you to seek out these wines and experience this exciting project and its remarkable mountain sites for yourself.

With special thanks to California Wines UK for their help in making this visit possible.

In my past life as a sommelier, I once had the great pleasure of tasting a vertical of 1995, 2005 and 2017 Harlan with their Founding Director, Don Weaver. Kind and charismatic, Don painted such a vivid picture of an idyllic estate where sloping vineyards punctuate a lush forest and undulating landscape. I found myself daydreaming about it in the years since, despite the wines themselves, though undoubtedly brilliant, not being to my personal taste (a hilarious notion given that I also absolutely cannot afford them, regardless!).

Visiting Harlan isn’t an easy task. They aren’t open to the public and only take the odd appointment. Over five years after that lunch with Don, it was a pleasure to finally experience the Harlan estate in person in June 2025, hosted by their then Director François Vignaud (now Director at Dalla Valle Vineyards in Oakville) and welcomed with a bottle of Krug.

Despite stretching over 70 hectares, just 13 hectares of Harlan are planted to vine. When Bill Harlan first founded the estate in the 1980s, he opted for the hillsides vs the valley floor, astutely understanding that in Burgundy the best sites were on the slopes – why couldn’t it be the same in Napa? The landscape here isn’t easy to work with, though, and in recent years it has become largely illegal to plant on slopes due to issues with erosion and landslides. So Harlan will never get any bigger than it is now. Not that they would want to.

Aside from one newer vineyard (planted thanks to a pre-existing historical permit on that one tiny plot of land), rather than expanding their holdings, they have instead focused on perfecting their farming. 13 hectares of vines take 16 vineyard managers to maintain, each with their own plot - vastly more people than in the winery itself. Which is quite telling, really. 95% of what it takes to make Harlan happens in the vineyard.

This is where the first big change has also been implemented: picking a lot earlier, placing focus on maintaining vibrant acidity vs opulent fruit. 2020 forced their hand with the impending threat of wildfires, but the results were so overwhelmingly positive that they have continued in every vintage since.

The second big change is in the ageing. When I last tasted these wines (in 2019, with 2017 being the current release), new oak was king. Now, it takes a back seat. From 100% new oak over ten years ago, it can now be as little as 20%. I’m not a seasoned Harlan drinker/taster (obviously), but tasting the 2020 release against 2015 at the estate, and then comparing it to the 1995, 2005 and 2017 in my memory, I was genuinely delighted.

There is an understated elegance to the new release that was never captured before. Francois kindly allowed us to taste the 2023 from a selection of barrels, from different cooperages and ages (predominantly 2^nd/3^rd fill … as I said, new oak isn’t prevalent anymore). Experiencing these jigsaw puzzle pieces, each distinctive of site but with a slightly differing interpretation, gave insight into how this wine comes together. I was so pleasantly surprised by this new phase for Harlan.

I guess I just need to start playing the lottery now so I can taste it again when 2023 is eventually released.

Until then, I’ll keep on daydreaming.

With special thanks to California Wines UK for their help in making this visit possible.

There is an article in Harpers this week, musing on the personalities of the wine world, making a case for people to engage more in the cult of personality that surrounds certain wines. My understanding is that, in a slightly loose, roundabout way, the article was trying to make a case for wine being more than what’s in the glass, the vineyard, the place; it’s also about the people who make it.

I mulled this over this morning while sipping my rapidly melting, diluted “iced coffee” during yet another 30+C day in a house without air conditioning (I live in England, we don’t have air conditioning, we have £20 Argos fans who are clinging on for dear life). Yesterday I was watching a video of a wildfire raging in Nuits-Saint-Georges. That wouldn’t have happened 15 years ago. I also wouldn’t have been melting at 9 am in my kitchen 15 years ago either. The human impact on the environment and, therefore, wine, has never been more obvious – for better and for worse. But that’s the top line, isn’t it? It’s either climate change (relevant) or big personalities (irrelevant?) that fly the flag for the human element in wine. The rest is lost in the noise of those shouting the loudest, and that doesn’t sit well with me.

Wine is woven into the fabric of so many communities, local histories and traditions; it sustains the economies of rural areas the world over, bringing tourism, jobs and opportunities to learn. In many places, it’s the reason why those communities exist to begin with.

In California, people came for the gold but stayed for the agricultural opportunities, and wine was a huge part of that. Immigrants from Italy, France, Croatia and beyond planted vineyards and began making wine, transforming Sonoma and Napa into what they are today.

In Italy, regions and small towns can trace their roots back to the early Renaissance or even the Roman era, following a paper trail of deeds and stories pertaining to rights to plant vines and whispers of beautiful wines.

In South America, some villages only exist at the highest possible points of various mountains because it is there that, hundreds of years ago, people decided to plant vines.

And this persists today, with the younger generations breathing new life into near-abandoned wine regions in Spain (Telmo Rodriguez, Javi Revert, Rafael Palacios, Alvar de Dios, Comando G…), South African producers building their businesses around and for their local communities to the point where Adi Badenhorst even has a school on his Swartland property.

New AVAs are being made all the time in California now, with people like Gina and Mikey Giugni and Rajat Parr catapulting the SLO Coast from an unknown spot near Big Sur into a must-list for sommeliers the world over. The Moon Mountain District in Sonoma was AVA certified in 2013 thanks in no small part to the tireless work of Phil Coturri and his organic revolution that kick-started in the 1970s and finally, finally pays dividends today with people like Rodrigo Soto and Mai Errazuriz (Far Mountain), who make wines that make me weep and have, alongside many other amazing producers in the area, instigated Antonio Galloni to fly the Moon Mountain District flag at Vinous events the world over.

When we talk about wine in the UK trade, though, we tend to focus on the vineyards, the natural topography of an area, and the tools for how it is made and bottled. Yet this is just half the story; the other half is the people. And not in the way that the Harpers article alluded to, suggesting that the cult of personality surrounding some wines should be engaged with more. I don’t agree with that. But I do agree with the fact that the human element of wine deserves more recognition, on par with the vineyards and topography of an area. “Terroir”, after all, accounts for the human element too, even if we often forget it.

For the last two years, I have been interviewing winemakers from around the world and publishing their interviews as part of a series for my job, giving them a voice to speak about what they do in their own words. I keep my questions quite open-ended, allowing them to take our conversation in any direction they choose. Yet, overwhelmingly, we always find ourselves coming back to people. I will leave you with this wonderful quote from Giovanni Manetti, owner and winemaker of Fontodi in Chianti and the current president of the Chianti Classico Consorzio. It pertains to the development of the 11 newly minted Chianti Classico UGAs and how they were identified.

“Natural, of course: elevation, soil, microclimate, the shape of the hills. But the human side matters just as much: the spirit of community, local traditions, and how the winegrowers talk to each other. That plays a huge role.

I’ll give you an example. When I started my first project in Lamole, Filetta di Lamole, in 2014, with my cousin Lorenzo, who works in that village, I asked him when we should start picking that year. He said, “We wait for Giuliano”. Who’s Giuliano? The oldest winemaker in Lamole, and until he starts, nobody starts. That’s the rule. I asked, “Don’t you do lab analysis of the grapes?” “No”, he said, “you just wait for Giuliano”. That’s local tradition. It’s the spirit of community and respect.

That’s just one example; it can’t be a model for the rest of the territory, but it gives you an idea. Think of one of my team having a coffee or a sandwich with a colleague from a neighbouring property: what are you doing at Fontodi? Oh, we’re doing this and that, and you compare notes.

Every UGA has its own local winegrowers’ association. Panzano’s was the first, and it really became the model for the rest of the territory: tasting together, talking, discussing, tasting wines not just from your own area but from other wine regions around the world. Staying close and keeping in touch, there’s always improvement.”

What could be more human than that?