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Part of our job is to educate.  We don’t mean that in the sense of teaching the difference between red wine and white.  We start by making the presumption that you are a wine drinker interested enough to have found our little road-less-travelled operation and are interested in learning about wines outside the usual commercial […]

To all Wine Exchangers, We LOVE Savoie! Talk about your perfect French porch-pounder. Savoie is refreshing, fresh, crisp and fresh, with real freshness… (Did we mention it was FRESH?) Seriously though, these wines deliver a mountain spring type vibe but also with a layer of complexity and flavor interest not seen in many wines in […]

To all Wine Exchangers, Mags are cool. There’s no getting around it. If you like something in a 750ml size, you’ll love it more from a Mag. But in Bordeaux we have a problem. Most Magnums are bottled per specific customer request at the time of bottling. What does that mean? There aren’t a ton […]

To all Wine Exchangers, Ahh…tradition. Another year, another potentially perfect Insignia. Their track record is enviable. Since 1991, Joseph Phelps Insignia has produced at least 7 wines that have racked up scores north of 98 points, including three 100 pointers and a Wine Spectator Wine of the Year. The 2012 picked up 96 points last […]

To all Wine Exchangers, Usually if we hear an opening line like, “Viña González Bastías is dedicated to the elaboration of Natural Wines”, we become immediately wary.  After tasting a legion of wines of that ‘natural wine’ category that ranged from ‘a little funky’ to ‘car wreck’, the terms ‘natural’ and/or ‘organic’ announced early in […]

To all Wine Exchangers, Podernuovo a Palazzone is the Tuscan home base for Paolo and Giovanni Bulgari. Yes, that Bulgari. The good news? If you don’t have $10,000 lying around for a watch or $20,000 for a necklace, you can grab a bit of the Bulgari vibe, at the same insane quality level as their […]

To all Wine Exchangers, There are certain currents in the wine industry that, in their ebb and flow, can create opportunities.  One that has been very fruitful over the years is the big distributor pool.  Think of the distributor as a fish tank and the various entities that the distributor represents as the ‘fish’.  Just […]

To the casual observer, the life of a symphony conductor must look pretty ideal, and pretty easy.  All you have to do is get up in front of a well-trained symphony orchestra and wave your arms and beautiful music happens. The circles you move in are the upper crust of both music and society, and it […]

To all Wine Exchangers, With the recent frost and hail this year, Burgundy has once again suffered a bit of Nature’s nastiness.  With reduced crops over the last few vintages, finding value in Burgundy is going to get that much harder as we move into these lower-quantity vintages with higher prices.  As we have said […]

To all Wine Exchangers, In the course of what we do there are disappointments and surprises.  But if someone had said the most interesting things we were going to find at a particular tasting are older than we are, we would have laughed. But on the rare occasions we have come across a fine old […]