I can’t believe it's December. Should we just start and end there? Every year, I feel the same way. September seems to slip so quickly into December that I feel whiplashed. It isn’t until January that I have time to actually mourn the fallen scarlet foliage of the Japanese maple outside my house. December is everyone’s busy season, but it’s especially true in the wine industry. Welcome to the month of parties, get-togethers, and dinners galore. The days of presents and treating yourself; the nights of one more glass and another round. Frankly, December is the time for wine, and there is no better month to have a stockpile of bottles on hand.
With that in mind, we built this holiday wine club. I have such lovely visions of these bottles dancing around your holiday calendar: a bottle of true Champagne opened on a lazy holiday morning or saved for the minute the clock strikes 12; a cheeky Muscadet slurped with freshly shucked oysters; an obscure Spanish white pulled out for a cozy catch-up with your most esoteric friend; a roaring fire with a bottle of Cahors; an old-school Italian feast with Sicilian or Venetian Red; the possibilities are endless.
During this time of year, wine acts as punctuation, interspersed from one party to the next, dotting our winter activities with liquid merriment. It is a marker of memory: was that the holiday where we drank that killer bottle of bubbles? Wine has a way of tucking itself into the background of our most special moments. I’m tickled that Little Thing gets to be part of yours.
On a quick and final note, this is our last wine club of 2023! We announced our wine club just over six months ago, and your support has made it all possible. We have big and exciting things to look forward to in 2024—like an actual bar that you can sit and drink wine at—but the core of what we love to do is this wine club. Thank you so much for being part of it.
Cheers,
Dylan
NV Liébart-Régnier Les Sols Bruns Brut Champagne: I truly love drinking Champagne the most in December, January, and February. Winter is to Champagne as summer is to rosé—there is no better time to be drinking bubbles than when the cold sets in. So, in preparation for our holiday wine club, we went Champagne hunting.
There were just two rules for this hunt. First, we knew we wanted a true bottle of Champagne, which means traditional-method sparkling wine from the French region of Champagne. Second, it needed to be available at an accessible price point. Seemingly simple, but if you’ve purchased your fair share of Champagne before, you know this is a tall order. The price point of Champagne can be a barrier to entry. However, there is still tremendous value to be found if you’re willing to dig a little. Enter Liébart-Régnier.
Located in the Vallée de la Marne, Liébart-Régnier is a grower Champagne house, which means vigneron sisters Alexandra and Marion Liébart both grow the grapes and make the wine. They are the seventh generation in their family to farm this land, recently taking over their family’s eleven hectares outside of Baslieux-sous-Châtillon. This part of Champagne is known for its Pinot Meunier, which makes up 60% of the blend here. Rounded out with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, it makes for a balanced, dry bottle of bubbles that walks the line between opulent and approachable. The nose is all brioche, white fruit, and citrus; the bubbles both fine and fervent. The best Champagne tastes like a snow day and feels like one too.
2021 Domaine de la Bretonnière Muscadet: Winter means it’s oyster season, and there is no more eternal pairing than oysters and Muscadet. Why? Because Muscadet comes from the western edge of Europe, where French dirt meets the sea at the mouth of the mighty Loire River. It’s a region ripe with oysters, and the wine there was created to go with these briny beauties.
This particular bottle comes from Domaine de La Bretonnière, which has been run by the Charpentier family for four generations. Brothers Pierre-Yves and Patrice have been in charge of the estate since 1989. The winery is located in Le Landreau, which sits just east of the city of Nantes, in the heart of the wine region of Pays Nantais. They exclusively grow Melon de Bourgogne, the grape of Muscadet, planted in volcanic gneiss, ingenious rock, and clay soils. This bottle is aged on the lees in stainless steel, a winemaking technique that adds complexity and texture to great Muscadet. This is a perfect balance of salty, minerally, fruity, creamy—exactly what I want in my winter white wines. And that’s precisely what Muscadet is: not just a great oyster wine, but a knockout winter white in general. A firm lemon-drenched acid backbone and saline-minerality drive the palate, all awash in crystallized oyster shells and green apple. Pair it with shellfish, yes, but also lemon-butter pasta, creamy stew, savory pie, herb-roasted chicken—you name it.
2020 Alberto Orte Atlántida Blanco: A former boss once called me unflappable, and I’ve always taken that as my greatest compliment. But, truth be told, I was downright flummoxed by this wine when I first tried it. It's made from a grape I have never heard of, let alone tasted. It’s grown in southern Spain, in a region more known for sherry than anything else, in a coastal vineyard that’s almost as close to Marrakech as Madrid. It’s reminiscent of some of the world’s best wines—the intensity of Burgundy meets the petrol of old German Riesling meets the sun-soaked fruit of Italy—but unique. One sip, and I was hooked, and desperate to know more.
Atlántida is a project from Alberto Orte, a co-founder of Olé & Obrigado, one of our favorite Spanish importers. He is focused on reviving the forgotten grape varieties and ancient winemaking techniques of Jerez. This bottle is specifically focused on Cádiz, his homeland. The grape is Vijiriega Blanco, an indigenous grape of the region that hasn’t been seen for over a century. Almost all of the plantings in Andalusia were decimated due to phylloxera. Vijiriega Blanco is now almost exclusively grown on the Canary Islands, with a handful of small plantings in southern Spain.
The grapes are all grown in a single parcel called Pago Añina, which sits right on the Atlantic ocean. You can smell the saline influence in the wine—though subtly—as it mixes with citrus, petrol, honeysuckle, and white flowers. The nose is a total powerhouse, complex as can be, and better every second. The palate takes the nose and doubles down, infusing those same aromatics with intense minerality and acidity. It’s a chic, esoteric wine that manages to be universally appealing. I simultaneously want to share this wine with everyone I know and hoard it all for myself.
2021 Planeta Cerasuolo di Vittoria: As your Sicilian wine obsession grows, you'll start to notice the Planeta family more and more. They've been involved in Sicilian agriculture for seventeen generations, spanning over five centuries, and are widely considered one of the driving forces for the revitalization of Sicilian winemaking. They spent much of the 1980s matching indigenous varieties to the ideal soil type in several sites across the region. They now manage six individual estates, each different and focused on the special terroir of that particular slice of Sicily. Planeta is a benchmark producer for both quality and value—two things that rarely go hand in hand in the world of wine.
This bottle is a Cerasuolo di Vittoria, the only DOCG (highest quality designation in Italy) on the island. It sits in the southwest corner, in the commune of—yes, you guessed it—Vittoria. Cerasuolo means cherry-colored or cherry red in Italian. This blend is always two indigenous grapes: Nero d’Avola and Frappato. They work so well together because Nero d’Avola provides structure and backbone, while Frappato brings bright fruit and aromatics. The combination is what makes us absolutely gaga for Cerasuolo. The nose is unmistakable with big red fruit, orange peel, green woody herbs, white pepper, and iron. The palate concentrated yet lithe, focused and fun. There's a rusticity at play that's matched by undeniable charm—enter the ruggedly handsome small-town romantic interest in a Hallmark movie. Except in this one, he's sun-soaked and Sicilian at his core.
2022 Case Paolin Campo dei Morer: Veneto—the wine region most easily summed up as surrounding Venice—is perhaps best known for its bountiful production of prosecco, Italy’s most popular sparkling wine. Second, it may be recognized for Soave, one of the country’s great dry white wines, or Amarone, an unctuous red wine made from partially dried grapes. However, if you lift back the curtain, Veneto is a diverse growing region, representing a transition between high-elevation, cool-climate alpine Italy and the warmer, drier parcels to the south. It is sneakily home to some of the most pristine, crystalline red wines in Italy.
Case Paolin, similarly most famous for their prosecco production, has a lineup of truly excellent wines planted throughout Veneto's microclimates. Founded by Emilio Pozzobon in the 1970s, they were early adopters of organic viticulture. They began farming organically in the 1980s, years before it was popular, obtaining official certification in 2012. Printed on their bottles—vignaioli di natura—their commitment to nature is central to the wines they produce, including this cement-aged Cabernet Sauvignon.
This bottle simply thrilled me when we first tasted it. It’s wholly Cabernet Sauvignon, but nothing like its equally delicious New World counterparts. This is a mineral-laden, medium-bodied Cabernet with less than 13% alcohol. It feels influenced by all of Veneto: cool-climate, alpine herbs, and saturated red fruit moderated by glacial-carved lakes, grassy violet meadows, and minerality from stony, alluvial deposits. While it’s still fit for a steak dinner, I can imagine enjoying it just as much with a bounty of other foods. It’s bistro Cabernet.
2019 Domaine Cosse-Maisonneuve Le Combal Cahors: Cahors is Malbec. More accurately, Cahors is a region in southwest France that mostly grows Malbec, which they call Côt. For all intents and purposes, Cahors is synonymous with Malbec, and when you see a Cahors label, you know you’re drinking Malbec. It gets more interesting from here because Malbec has truly proven itself a chameleon grape, one that changes drastically based on terroir and winemaking practices. In much of Argentina, you’ll find textbook examples of opulent, rich Malbec, while some new wineries in higher elevation plantings along the Andes are perfecting lighter, mineral-drenched alpine Malbec. In Bordeaux, Malbec plays a supporting role, rounding out famous blends. In Cahors, Malbec strikes a balance between inky, purple epitomized, sanguine charm, and lean French sensibility. If you don’t think you like Malbec, I’m of the opinion that you just need to find the right one.
Domaine Cosse-Maisonneuve was founded in 1999 by Matthieu Cosse (winemaker) and Catherine Maisonneuve (oenologist). They replanted their 5-hectare estate in Prayssac with old vine Malbec and set out to make their own version of Cahors. Theirs is a little more elegant, a little less rustic in nature. They now farm just under 20 acres, certified organic and farmed biodynamically, planted on gravel and class terraces above the Lot River. I love how this bottle is still so decidedly Cahors—a nuanced expression of Malbec with depth to spare—but remains vibrant and pristine. It's a heavyweight for winter, though not overwhelmingly so. It's the kind of wine I'd savor après-anything, snug inside with a roaring fire, pushing back against the encroaching darkness.
Oyster Wine: You can’t grow up in the state of Maine without an affinity for shellfish. (I think they kick you out?) The holiday season around my house meant my sister chased me around the living room with live crustaceans; my mother taught me to remove lobster body parts with surgical precision, and my father tried to convince me to eat raw mollusks. All of my most cherished memories this time of year include shellfish because winter is the best time of the year to eat shelled creatures from the sea—especially oysters.
(While oysters have a refreshing quality that may feel most appropriate in the summer months, they are actually at their most plump and tasty in November and December when they’ve fattened themselves up for the cold, long winter.)
Now, I didn’t always love oysters. The turning point for me was when I discovered wine pairing. The textural differences between plush oysters and sparkling wine; a splash of saline brine washed down by an alpine white. The parallel ocean influence in an Atlantic oyster and a glass of Muscadet. The right glass of wine elevates an oyster into something heavenly. It always makes me think of Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast.
“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”
We all know the empty feeling—perhaps in abundance this time of year—and oysters and wine are my favorite seasonal cure. They are my personal hygge. So, you guessed it: the first three wines from this month’s club are absolutely perfect for oysters. And don’t worry, if you don’t like oysters, these three wines are generally just wonderful whites for the coming winter nights.