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To all Wine Exchangers, The search for value knows no boundaries.  Quality does not need translation.  The issue sometimes is simply getting people comfortable enough to ‘click’ when the name, appellation, or origin, is unfamiliar.  The wine, once in hand, will take care of itself if it’s good enough. The 2011 Mas Oller Pur, from […]

To all Wine Exchangers, I’m gonna be honest here. In over two decades of buying wine I’ve never found a Pecorino I dug…until now. No, not the cheese. The grape. Maybe it’s sub-conscious. Maybe I’m thinking cheese when I taste Pecorino wines. Something about the majority of them just hasn’t appealed to me. I don’t […]

To all Wine Exchangers, “Xavier Vignon, along with Philippe Cambie, are probably the two most highly renowned oenologists in Chateauneuf du Pape” – Robert Parker “… (Xavier’s) 2012s are certainly up with some of the top wines of the vintage as well. In addition, prices remain more than reasonable here. If you haven’t yet discovered […]

To all Wine Exchangers, It’s "another day, another accolade" for Melville these days. Last September we launched an offer entitled ‘More Melville Madness’ featuring the lead quote from Wine Advocate’s Jeb Dunnuck describing the Melville releases as ‘off the charts good’! Here we are a year later with pretty much the same story.  This time […]

To all Wine Exchangers, One of the marketing axioms is never to say a product is ‘cheap’.  ‘Popularly priced’, ‘value priced’, or ‘bargain priced’, yes, but never cheap!  The thing is, people who buy the kind of wines we sell aren’t necessarily ‘mainstream’ buyers.  They can see right through these charades, so this afternoon we’ll […]

To all Wine Exchangers, “This wine is truly profound Bordeaux. Everything is in place – remarkable concentration and a beautiful nose of cedar and ripe blackcurrant and blackberry with some kirsch and spice box in the background. Lavishly rich, with slightly more structure and delineation than the more Rabelaisian 2009, this wine does show some […]

To all Wine Exchangers, “These latest releases from Gilles Troullier show how much talent this guy has.” – Jeb Dunnuck, eRobertParker.com A couple decades of hard work in the cellars of southern France are paying off as we’re now being blessed with a shockingly fine array of wines from an area that was once known […]

To all Wine Exchangers,  “The 2006 Prado Enea is a phenomenal bottle of traditional Rioja at its best.” Now that’s a quote from the occasionally enigmatic and not particularly generous Luis Gutierrez, the current Spanish editor of Wine Advocate.  It’s a pretty strong statement, but we have uttered similar phrases many times in all of […]

To all Wine Exchangers, It appears as if the Varner boys can do no wrong. Did you see the latest Santa Cruz report from Antonio Galloni? Talk about your Varner love fests! The twins garnered some of the highest scores Galloni has ever given California Chardonnay in that report, 95’s, 96’s and 97’s abounded. But […]

To all Wine Exchangers, Hate to sound like a broken record, or some kind of vinous equivalent of Groundhog Day, but here goes... We've told this story before and it really doesn't get old. I was fortunate enough on my last trip to Spain to get an appointment to visit Vega Sicilia, considered by many […]