I love to hyperbolize this time of year. On an especially rainy winter day in Seattle, it’s been raining for 100 years. It will never be dry again. On an unusually frigid evening, I’ll never know warmth. My bare skin will never feel the joy of a warm breeze; it will never drink in the bliss of sunlight. On a bright, clear February day, it’s practically March. Which means it’s spring, which means it’s almost summer. Wow, didn’t winter fly by?
Maybe it’s a coping mechanism—as a native New Englander, I’ve never quite gotten used to the darkness of the PNW. It could be my own flair for the dramatic, keeping things interesting during the season of human hibernation. This is all a long-winded way of saying: I’ll try to keep the hyperbole in check as I tell you about how much I love the wines in this February club.
It’s a given that I love these wines. I get to choose them, after all. What I love most about this month’s collection: it reads a lot like exploration. An exploration of places, from California to Italy, Austria to Lebanon; of people, including new-to-me producers and old stalwarts; and of styles, with everything from dry, brilliant bubbles to luscious, Middle-East-raised reds. We’ve got a new-world white blend from a low-intervention producer in Berkeley and a singular Gruner Veltliner from the oldest winery in Austria; Mencia grown on old terraces built by the ancient Romans and a culty winery from the highest elevation subregion in Piedmont. If winter is a time for staying at home and curling up under heavy blankets, at least let the wine we drink take us on an adventure.
NV Cantina di Carpi e Sorbara Lambrusco Omaggio a Gino Friedmann: Cantina di Carpi e Sorbara’s Lambrusco lineup feels like a well-kept secret: a reasonably priced embarrassment of riches ready to be paired with just about any food imaginable. In my humble opinion, this particular bottle—the Omaggio a Gino Friedmann—is the crown jewel. This is mood enhancement juice. It’s impossible not to be happier after having a glass.
Many people know Lambrusco as the crap exported to the United States in the late 20th century. Dark and sweetened into oblivion for the American Coca-Cola palate, it was a far cry from the Lambrusco Italians drink in Italy—and thankfully a far cry from the Lambrusco imported to the US these days. At its best, Lambrusco is dry, juicy, lightly sparkling, slightly bitter red (sometimes pink) wine. This bottle falls into the sometimes-pink category: a rosé-style Lambrusco. It pours from the glass a translucent, gemstone reddish-hue, an electric wine that rolls through fields of strawberries and wildflowers. It’s low in alcohol and completely dry, finishing with just a hint of brioche from the time spent on the lees. There’s way more intensity and complexity than we have any right to expect at this price.
It feels important to point out that many of the best-loved foods in the world come from Emilia-Romagna, the home of Lambrusco. I’m talking about Parmigiano-Reggiano, Prosciutto di Parma, mortadella, Balsamico di Modena, Bolognese, tortellini, tagliatelle…the list goes on. Lambrusco is a perfect pairing for each and every one of your favorite Italian treats. Enjoy.
2022 Broc Cellars Love White Blend: Broc Cellars embodies new wave California winemaking—the third or fourth, or whatever wave we’re on now. They don’t fit into the bucolic ideal of wine tasting in these parts, setting up shop in downtown Berkley over Napa or Sonoma. They don’t have grand views of endless vines, starting their winery in the aughts as a negociant—buying grapes from growers—and only purchasing their own vineyard last year. Broc Cellars makes electric, quaffable bottles that go against the grain of traditional California wine, while also harking back to California’s forgotten history, before prestige took over.
The Love Collection—there’s bubbles, rosé, and red, too—is a lineup of unsung varieties from unexpected vineyards. This white is a blend of Picpoul, Clairette, Orange Muscat, Marsanne, Roussanne, and Chardonnay. Sourced from across the Central Valley, from Sacramento to Fresno, these grapes are organically grown, spontaneously fermented with native yeast, foot-stomped, and aged in neutral oak and stainless steel. This is low-intervention wine done right.
I relish when domestic wines can be entirely their own. Few wines in the world taste quite like this one, and that uniqueness epitomizes California’s specialness. There's no single set of rules everyone must follow. This is a salty, citrus bomb—notably orange peel and Key lime—and honeysuckle meet cute. It seamlessly blends the bright acid of Picpoul with unapologetic winter citrus of Orange Muscat and textural oomph of Marsanne and Roussanne. It’s expertly blended, without one piece out of place, and that is what makes it so divine.
2021 Nikolaihof Grüner Veltliner Hefeabzug: There is simply no other white variety quite like Grüner, with its lemon-lime acidity and savory green edge. And when it comes to Grüner, Nikolaihof must be mentioned. The oldest winery in Austria, Nikolaihof predates modernity all the way back to Roman times. While most of the estate dates back to the fifteenth century, the foundations of the current house trace back to a Roman tower built in 63 BC. One of Nikolaihof’s vineyards, Im Weingebirge, was the first vineyard in Europe to be named in any living text—a document of ownership from 470AD. This is an ancient place with millennia of wine knowledge.
Situated on the eastern edge of the Wachau Valley, along the Danube River, Nikolaihof's vineyards thrive on steep terraces of volcanic and metamorphic rock. They are blanketed with ancient glacial dust and loess deposited by Ice Age winds. It is here that Nikolaihof cultivates its pristine biodynamic Grüner.
Hefeabzug means aged on the lees, as this wine was for six months before bottling. It’s an orchard fruit, oyster shell, wildflower bulb, diesel version of Grüner that's supercharged with spice and minerality. This is the type of white wine that sends shivers down my spine, a bottle that effortlessly mirrors the springtime greenness of the earth coming alive.
2019 Ronsel do Sil Vel'uveyra Mencia: Ronsel do Sil winemaker Maria José Yravedra is a visionary for the region, practicing organic and biodynamic viticulture while crafting singular wines with an entirely minimal approach. She operates in one of the most extreme grape-growing regions in the world: Ribeira Sacra in northwestern Spain. Here, vineyards cling to high-elevation, steep slopes, tracing ancient terraces constructed by the Romans. The slopes are so steep, in fact, that all pruning, maintenance, and harvesting has to be done by hand. Heroic viticulture at its finest.
"Vel’uveyra" originates from an old, local dialect. It means to look out at the vineyard during a colorful harvest. Mencia, an aromatic, juicy red grape native to northwest Spain and Portugal, is the star of Ribeira Sacra. It makes up most of the blend here, too, rounded out by Garnacha and Negreda. The grapes are grown in granitic soils, fermented with native yeast, and aged in concrete for just under a year. The results are thrilling: dark berry fruit intertwined with white pepper and gravel. I love the top notes of fresh flowers, orange peel, and pomegranate. The palate bounces between bright acidity and thoughtful texture; it’s a concentrated, medium-bodied delight ready for the table. Mencia has been making a comeback over the last decade, and once sip here will help you see why. This is an easy grape to love, crowd pleasing yet distinct.
2019 Le Piane Mimmo: One hundred miles north of Barolo, nestled in the foothills of the Italian Alps, lies Boca. It’s a melange of snow-capped peaks, dense forests, and sprawling vineyards; a special, high-elevation enclave of ancient volcanic soils in a larger region known as Alto Piemonte. Here, wild, mountain-grown Nebbiolo and Vespolina rein supreme. Boca is home to only a handful of wineries, and Le Piane is the undisputed star. To love Boca is to love Le Piane, and vice versa.
Le Piane’s most famous bottling—and consequently, most expensive—is their DOC Boca. (Italy’s denominazione di origine controllata [DOC] system is a wine classification system for production area, winemaking, and finished quality.) This bottle, Mimmo, is a special treat. Known as Le Piane’s “baby Boca”, it is still sourced entirely from vineyards within the Boca DOC boundaries. That is to say, it’s superior quality for the price, and a lovely gateway into the inherent beauty of Le Piane and Boca. Read: big bang for your buck.
Le Piane does bang-up job of showing off the crystalline, high-toned splendor of Nebbiolo, and Mimmo has it in spades. This blend is made up of 70% Nebbiolo, 25% Croatina, and 5% Vespolina, and shows off a deeply Italian nose of cherry, pepper, earth, leather, and iris. The palate is delicate yet sinewy, with lovely fruit surrounding a pulsing acid backbone and medium-grained tannins.
2021 Chateau Musar Jeune Rouge: For many, Lebanese wine is Chateau Musar. Musar has remained open since 1930, including throughout the Lebanese civil war, producing wine every vintage except 1976 and 1984. This was a time of uncertainty: shells hitting the vineyards and winery, winemaker Serge Hochar being smuggled in by boat to make wine during the 1983 vintage, Bedouin vineyard workers not being able to travel to the vines, the cellars doubling as bomb shelters. Musar’s importance is not based on the wars it has survived, but there’s no denying that this winery has been forced into making decisions that most businesses never have to consider.
It is these decisions that have shaped the winery. For example, the winery itself is in Ghazir with the vineyards 30 miles to the east. In 1930, Lebanon’s borders were not set, and Gaston Hochar didn’t want to chance his winery being drawn outside of the country. He chose Ghazir for the winery and trucked in grapes from further east in the Bekaa Valley. This helped shape Musar’s house style—rich, brooding reds and semi-oxidative whites—because the freshly picked grapes had a long journey without refrigeration. At the winery, Musar leaned into this, creating a definitive style that has made them a world-class wine estate.
All of Musar’s bottlings come from organic, non-irrigated vineyards, fermented with natural yeast and bottled with little sulfur. The Jeune label is made from the winery’s younger vines. It’s a dark fruited, medium-to-full-bodied bottle with vibrancy galore. Even as an everyday drinker, it’s deeply representative of Chateau Musar and the nearly 100 years they have been making wine in the Bekaa Valley.
Lebanon: An Ancient Winemaking History
Wine has been made in Lebanon for millenia. The history is ancient; the myths of Dionysus and Bacchus are thought to have originated from wine rituals in Canaan, part of present-day Lebanon. The Phoenicians—who lived in Canaan—were the first to propagate several ancestral varieties of Vitis vinifera, bringing them through trade routes to Italy, Greece, Spain, France, and Portugal. They domesticated wine grapes, and may have been the first to learn the ins and outs of viticulture, including vineyard planning and management based on climate and topography. There is no way to talk about the history of wine without talking about Lebanon—yet, Lebanese wine is wildly underrepresented and difficult to find.
Though the history is biblical, Lebanese winemaking saw a radical decline through medieval times and continued through the centuries of Ottoman rule. The 1800s began a period of revitalization for the wine industry, when French missionaries planted Cinsault just 30 miles east of Beirut. However, that growth was stagnant, and at the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, there were only six wineries in the entire region. That number has jumped since 2000, but the production still only equals about 10.5 million bottles annually. (That’s roughly how much wine is produced in Texas.) Even though 50% of all Lebanese wine is exported, that only makes up a teeny, tiny fraction of the wine sold in the US each year.
Due to the lack of product, there’s a lack of availability, and plenty of wine drinkers have never had the opportunity to try Lebanese wines. A lack of knowledge has led to a lack of understanding of this long-lived, beautiful region. The growing areas of Lebanon may not look the way many people picture them. What many people know about Lebanon is the strife: the civil war of the late twentieth century, the ongoing economic collapse, the tragic Beirut port explosion, and so on. Mixed with the instability of the greater region, Lebanon—and much of the Middle East—gets viewed through this crumbling, sepia-toned, barren-desert filter. That is not the actual landscape of Lebanon; that is not where grapes have been cultivated since antiquity.
Most of Lebanon's wine comes from the high-elevation Bekaa Valley, a fertile valley floor that sits 3,000 feet above sea level. The valley is long and narrow, running north-south, with towering mountains on either side. To the west, a staggering mountain range with its highest peak cresting 10,000 feet in elevation; to the east, the equally snow-capped mountainous border with Syria. Smack dab in the rain shadow of Mount Lebanon and protected from the eastern deserts, the Bekaa Valley sees 300 days of sunshine a year. It is an idyllic climate for vineyards.
While this is just a small dip into the story of Lebanese wine—this is a very small zine, after all—it is one well worth telling. The story of Lebanese wine is one of rebirth and resilience; of ancient knowledge and generations of boundary pushers; of high-elevation plantings and seemingly eternal sunshine. The story of Lebanese wines begins with the history of all wine, but at the same time, it’s only just beginning.