While the name “shoulder season” doesn’t necessarily evoke romantic getaways and grand adventures, I have always loved autumn best. Perhaps it’s because I hail from Maine, where fall is a postcard-induced fever dream. It’s a shining star between percentages of humidity and feet of snow. Or perhaps it’s because change is an infectious feeling—fall is a marked time of adjustment with leaves falling and the world slowing down. It’s the time of year for new clothes and haircuts; it’s the time of year to change your location. The minute the first leaf starts to redden, I begin picturing the places I could go.
Alas, the reality of autumn is that there is usually no time to travel. Sometimes, life gets in the way of living. In the wake of summer vacations and the looming holidays, the trip doesn’t get planned. Suddenly, you’ve never been truffle hunting in northern Piemonte. Or driven through Rioja. Or taken Highway 12 from Sebastapool to the coast. That is one of the things wine provides us: a little getaway. Wine lets us into places that we’ve never been, introduces us to people we’ve never met, and lets us escape, if even just for a glass.
Katie and I hope this six pack feels like a little getaway—imagining yourself in some of the most beautiful autumnal locales on the planet. The mountainous borderlands of France, Germany, and Italy are in full force here. The high-elevation plantings of Beaujolais and Sierra de Gredos can’t be missed. You could spend a whole evening on the storybook banks of the Loire River. And if visualization isn’t really your brand of self help, you’ll still enjoy sipping all of these bottles with whatever shoulder season food you gravitate toward the most. I’m manifesting something braised for you.
Cheers,
Dylan
NV Domaine l’Idylle Pimprenelle Pét-Nat : Maybe it’s the ethereal alpine location or the centuries-old castles that speckle the mountainsides—or the regional affinity for ooey-gooey cheese—but there’s just something downright magical about Savoie. Nestled on the border of Switzerland, this little French region is producing outrageous value wines. We find that many alpine borderlands equate big bang for your buck, but Savoie especially feels like a diamond in the rough with drastically underpriced options.
Domaine de L’Idylle is a fabulous example, managed by the Tiollier family since 1840. A traditional house with a splash of modernity to it, they make this sparkling wine using the ancestral method, more popularly known as pétillant naturel or pét-nat. Different from the champenoise method—and centuries older—pét-nat is made by taking a base wine that hasn’t finished fermenting, bottling it, and letting the unfermented yeasts take off and turn into alcohol and CO2. Most pét-nats on the market are sold as is, with all that funky, cloudy, yeasty business in the bottle. This one gets disgorged, the process of removing sediment from sparkling wine, which makes for cleaner bottles of immense purity. That’s exactly what this bottle is: a pure sparkler with a sense of place. A blend of Gamay and Mondeuse, it’s perfectly pink with roadside berry fruit, wild herbs, and alpine minerals. We don’t play favorites here at Little Thing, but this is one of the more delightful bottles of sparkling wine available in Seattle.
2022 Domaine Couet Coteaux de Giennois: The world of Loire Valley Sauvignon Blanc tends to get truncated into two regions: Sancerre and Pouilly-Fume. And, as happens with name-brand locales, the price of entry to these regions has gone sky high over the last twenty years. Bottles that used to feel expensive at $20 are now double the price. The secret is that there are a number of small, lesser-known neighboring terroirs producing SB of similar caliber for a fraction of the cost. One of them is Coteaux du Giennois, the river-adjacent destination where Domaine Couet makes this twinkly white wine stunner.
The history of Coteaux du Giennois covers nearly two millennia. Grape seeds have been found during archaeological digs that date to the 2nd century. The vines here are special; they are planted on siliceous and limestone slopes that line the Loire river, extensions of the Sancerre geological formation. There are deposits of flint here that date back to the Tertiary Period, somewhere between 2.6 and 66 million years ago. This is hallowed ground, and Domaine Couet is using it to make wines that are decidedly old school.
It’s the blend of energy and depth that makes classic Sauvignon Blanc so outstanding, and this bottle has it to spare. The nose is a vibrant twist of floral (lily, apple blossom), fruit (Meyer lemon, Grannysmith), and herbs (chervil, parsley). The palate is laminated: layers of fruit, herbs, citrus, and minerals, piled one after the other, over and over again, together create something long lasting. This is a Sancerre ringer, for sure, and an excellent dinner companion as we enter the season of hearty foods. All that citrus acidity can cut through just about anything.
2021 Terlano Pinot Bianco: The first time I ever tried Cantina Terlano’s world-class wines from northernmost Italy, I was dumbfounded. The crowned jewel of Alto Adige—a special region along the Austrian border that sits below the towering Dolomites—Terlano makes the type of wine that could inspire bursting into song or writing poetry. Antonio Galloni, famed wine critic, once wrote that these are emotional wines. I love that phrase: emotional wines. Back in the day—before I started drinking wine for more intellectual reasons than the enjoyment of a good buzz—emotional wines may have been one of those phrases that I’d scoff at. How can wine be emotional? But then, you begin to understand that wine is so much more than just juice. It’s art, science, history, geography, the past, the future, the present. Suddenly, emotional makes sense. Cantina Terlano is arguably the best white wine producer in Italy, and Pinot Bianco is their signature grape.
This is Terlano’s entry-level bottling, but don’t let that term fool you, it’s anything but beginner. The grapes are grown in small, ultra-steep volcanic vineyard plots on the slopes of Monte Tschöggl, 1,500-3,000 feet above sea level. They are entirely tended to by hand. I always love the salty line that runs through this bottle, from the saline minerals on the nose to the maldon-citrus twinge of the palate. This is a serious bottle with an underlying textural oomph to it that feels almost celebratory, but the brightness of the fruit profile and rippin’ acidity keeps things crisp and snappy. Pair it with everything from tuna crudo to braised pork shoulder with apples. Whatever your fall culinary dreams call for.
2021 Weingut Leiner Handwerk Spätburgunder Trocken: First things first: decoding the label. Weingut Leiner is the winemaker, located in Germany, in the southern Pfalz, just north of the Alsatian border. The Pfalz is one of Germany’s most exciting wine regions, a 45-mile long stretch of vineyards tucked into the rain shadow of the Haardt Mountains where young winemakers can still afford to purchase land. Handwerk is the name of this particular bottle, a reference to the biodynamic farming and hand-picked grapes at play here. Spätburgunder is etheral German-grown Pinot Noir and trocken means dry.
Germany may not be the first place you think of when dreaming of a pristine, pure Pinot Noir, but it’s actually the third-biggest producer of the variety. Though a notoriously finicky grape, it grows in all of Germany’s 13 wine regions, across four degrees of latitude, in a multitude of soils. Jürgen Leiner’s version thrives in a mix of bundsandstein (colored sandstone) and alluvial soils. It’s a wildly aromatic version of Pinot with a gemstone-red look to it. The nose is a blend of flower, fruit, and smoke; the palate a lithe cran-razz wonder. Ultra-light bodied, it doesn’t lack in intensity. It’s a crystalline, energetic Pinot that feels like a near-perfect autumnal red. It would be wickedly good with Peking duck, brought as corkage to your favorite ID spot.
2022 Chateau Thivin Cote de Brouilly: It’s hard not to be poetic about Beaujolais in the fall. Much like Pinot Noir, it is a quintessential autumnal bottle, pairing well with the bounty of the season and mimicking the weather’s delightfully inbetween nature. (Beaujolais scratches the red wine itch while still remaining lively and bright.) Pop a cork on a bottle of Beaujolais this time of year, pour me a glass, and I’ll start quoting George Eliot:
“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird
I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”
When it comes to Beaujolais, there may be no greater domaine than Thivin. On the hillsides of Mont Brouilly—in the aptly named cru Cote de Brouilly—Thivin has been the reigning benchmark since 1383. They are decidedly old school, making wines of supreme consistency and quality year in and year out. There is nothing like Thivin, no competition when it comes to point of view and downright enjoyability.
After selling these wines for years, I was finally able to visit the winery in March of 2023. There’s a dignified winery dog upon arrival, and a similarly appointed tasting room cat on duty inside. It’s a beautiful spot, unexpectedly humble and pastoral in appearance. The Geoffray family, who purchased Thivin in 1877, are still farmers at their core, stewarding a small, pristine parcel at their home on an extinct volcano in east-central France. You can feel that in the wine; the eternal blend of fruit and the earth it was grown in. Thivin forever.
2017 Agricola de Cadalso Garnacha: Grenache is a chameleon grape. It expresses itself differently across the globe: a favorite variety in dreamy Provençal rosé; mineral-laden and sun-soaked from Chateauneuf du Pape; robust and full-bodied from some new world sites; almost Pinot Noir-adjacent when farmed thoughtfully; the list goes on. However popular globally, Grenache’s ancestral home is Spain, where it is called Garnacha.
This bottle of Garnacha comes from Sierra de Gredos, a mountainous region west of Madrid with a rich winemaking history that’s flown mostly under the radar until now. Young winemakers are flocking to this part of Spain to restore ancient, high-elevation vineyards. Agricola de Cadalso is a 70-year-old cooperative made up of 400 local growers, and in 2015, they partnered with winemaking duo Dani Landi and Fernando Garcia on this project. The goal, preserve these old bush vines and elevate the quality and awareness of this special region. The results are pretty tremendous, a complex, balanced Garnacha from 80-year-old vines that showcase all the gravelly, anise-tinged, berry beauty that the grape can possess. This is an elegant bottle that shows off all the rustic charm that Spain is famous for. Agricola de Cadalso is one of our favorite new discoveries this autumn.
When thinking about what to eat, there’s nothing better than the old adage: what grows together goes together. That is, eat things from the same country or region as the wine. With Spanish Garnacha, I like to imagine what I’d be eating in Madrid and go from there. So, plenty of pork, cured, roasted, or braised; potatoes, fried or layered in tortilla; cheesy, savory croquetas; or just about any tapas you can imagine.