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We interrupt our originally scheduled rant on wine aging (we’ll finish next time) to bring an important message…holy smokes it’s November!  Yeah, it kind of snuck up on us as we were scurrying around trying to find delicious deals and innovative new sources of fermented grape juice.  Sure, Thanksgiving is still a little over two […]

To all Wine Exchangers, For those of you who doubt the aging ability of white wines, we highly encourage you to look into German Rieslings. In fact, just conduct a quick score search on Wine Spectator for Schloss Schönborn, and you’ll be amazed at the results. Some of their top-scoring wines come from older vintages […]

To all Wine Exchangers, Latour, Le Pin, Figeac… Three of the greatest names in Bordeaux. If you took all three of these spectacular estates and put them together, would you get today’s offering? Okay, joking aside, La Tour du Pin Figeac is, as one of our long-term supplier and colleagues in the business states…”no joke […]

To all Wine Exchangers, James Suckling has come out with his Top 100 Bordeaux of 2016 and the list is littered with barrel samples from the remarkable 2015 vintage. A lot of folks are still wondering, “Should I buy futures?”. Well, if the recently released info from Liv-Ex (kind of the British-based version of a […]

To all Wine Exchangers, “This is a dense and layered red with plum, hints of chocolate and vanilla. Full body, velvety tannins and a juicy finish. Drink now. 92 points.” – James Suckling “A ripe and robust red that delivers a deep well of concentrated blackberry, dark plum and cappuccino flavors, supported by medium-grained tannins […]

To all Wine Exchangers, OK, stick with me on this one. The story is a great one but requires a bit of telling. Earlier this February Sebastiani Vineyards and Winery had a breakout performance in Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate ‘Sonoma’ report. In that report, Parker mentioned, “If you haven’t noticed the qualitative efforts by winemaker […]

To all Wine Exchangers, Man, Ojai is on fire right now. Assistant winemaker Fabien Castel recently brought in the latest round of new releases and they are really…something…else. As we touched on last year, Adam Tolmach started The Ojai Vineyard back in 1983, producing a range of Rhone-inspired reds. His style was always a little […]

So last time we did our best to describe to people what they should expect out of older wines.  There is no right or wrong answer as to preference.  The only problem comes when a person complains about an old wine because it tastes like an old wine.  Older wine is going to taste like […]

To all Wine Exchangers, We’ve been trying to tell you. South America is ‘blowing up’ and officially a ‘thing’. The wines we have been tasting, drinking and selling have been super-impressive and continue to shine, today’s offering being just the latest of what will be many more examples to come. You have to start paying […]

To all Wine Exchangers, Loving this. For fans of mature, drinkable Burgundy from great vintages at reasonable prices the scenario does not get much better than this. What folks have to understand is the rarity of this situation. It’s almost never that we see a top producer in Burgundy come up with a steady stream […]