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To all Wine Exchangers, According to most accounts, this time verbalized by Wine Advocate’s Monica Larner, “Giancarlo Pacenti is one of the most detailed-minded growers in the appellation.”  His old vines were largely planted between 1967 and 1972, and he has holdings in the cooler northern quadrant of the appellation.  This enables him to make […]

To all Wine Exchangers, “I struggle to think of another portfolio that encompasses anywhere close to this level of value, and the average quality to price (QPR) for these wines is just hard to believe.” – Jeb Dunnuck, RobertParker.com When it rains… I feel like we should start up some kind of Lafage-of-the-Month club the […]

To all Wine Exchangers, Are you kidding?  Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, it happens again. No we aren’t talking about the Presidential campaign.  We are talking about Argentina sending in another value producer that makes our home grown bargain brands look feeble.  This time, its Vaglio.   Fortunately for Brand California, with […]

To all Wine Exchangers, This is a difficult story to tell, though definitely worth it in the end.  It all starts with one of the lesser known cult classics of Rioja, Artadi.  If you were a hardcore fan of Spanish wines and followed the rise of a number of new labels that came to America […]

To all Wine Exchangers, We’ve told the story of Dave Corey before.  He is one of those wine-geek types that seems always intrigued by the next challenge and the opportunity to tinker with something new.  He works with a variety of terroirs in the Santa Barbara area for his wines and is also a consultant […]

From the time anyone starts to get interested in wine, the subject of aging is an adjunct.  From the poetic, to the practical, there is a certain romance to the variation on the phrase ‘fine old wine’.  References to aging wine abound throughout literature, verse, and of course among wine geeks.  The platitudes suggest that […]

To all Wine Exchangers, As we mentioned a month or so ago, our love affair with these distinctive whites began some time in the ’90s, but a few defining events happened since then. In 2002, this iconic estate was purchased by the Hwang family. The quality, however, remained consistent (or even ticked upwards a bit) […]

To all Wine Exchangers, Let me tell you about Petrolo. It’s one of Tuscany’s best estates. But it’s not a Chianti, and it’s not a Brunello and it’s not a Vino Nobile. It’s ‘just’ a Tuscan red. But that’s like saying LeBron James is ‘just’ a basketball player. Proprietor Luca Sanjust took a chance when […]

To all Wine Exchangers, Whoa… Our offer this morning on the 2000 Saint-Saturnin was an instant sell-out so… we got on the phone to Bordeaux to see if Adrien was stashing anymore of his 2000 in tank for us to purchase.  Luck has it, he still has some and we put the process in motion for him […]

To all Wine Exchangers, The turnaround that the Frey family has engineered at the legendary Paul Jaboulet estate has been nothing but remarkable. At the tail end of the Jaboulet family’s run of the property things were going awry. A combination of failing health, lean years, the death of Gerard Jaboulet in 1997 and, from […]