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Clemens Busch is an iconoclastic producer making some of the most distinctive Rieslings from the Mosel. He has been committed to organic viticulture since 1984 and in recent years has been employing bio-dynamic methods.

These superb Rieslings are born of a remarkably terroir-driven approach; including a commitment to spontaneous fermentation with indigenous yeast, and the reclamation of individual sub-sites with distinctive soil-types (blue, grey and red slate) and micro-climates within their primary vineyard area, Pundricher Marienburg. Clemens harvests late and the wines see extensive lees contact and stirring which contribute to their ripeness, concentration and complexity.

Don�t miss the opportunity to sample these compelling dry and off-dry Rieslings with Clemens Busch himself! This is a free event on Wednesday, March 10, from 5 to 7 pm.

It almost doesn't get better than this: six German Rieslings in a side-by-side tasting of two magnificent estates, and a chance to meet the young, talented winemakers behind them. This weekend we will be featuring the wines of Weingut Reinhard and Beate Knebel from Winningen in the Lower Mosel, as well as the wines of Weingut Peter Lauer from Ayl in the Saar.

We are in love with the 2005s from Piedmont - finely focused wine with classic balance and finesse, at least if you choose from the best producers. As you may know we are HUGE Produttori fans, and even in these trying times their wines represent great value for quality. Each wine is distinctive - to taste across the range is a vivid lesson in Barbaresco terroirs.

The following are offered on a pre-arrival basis; we expect them late in the spring. Prices are net.

Over the last thirty years, the work of Marcel Lapierre has been an inspiration to those seeking more natural methods of winemaking. It was in 1981, under the influence of Jules Chauvet, that Marcel took the family estate back, or forward, to organic methods in the vineyard and vinifications with wild yeasts and without sulfur-dioxide. Lapierre's wines are remarkably elegant, with great aromatic complexity and a silky balance on the palate. In most vintages they age beautifully, becoming more Burgundian with time. "At the opposite of the technical wines, our philosophy is to offer to our customers wines which express their year and their origin" say the Lapierres on their web-site. 2007 was a somewhat difficult year for the vigneron in the Beaujolais, but a sunny, cool September enabled the best growers (such as Lapierre, Jean Foillard, Georges Descombes, Alain Coudert and others) to make great wines. The current offering is a special cuvee by the Lapierres which has rarely been available in the US and has been made only in the best vintages. From one-hundred year-old vines, mostly on the Cote de Py, the Cuvee Marcel Lapierre Morgon Vieilles Vignes is an extraordinary Beaujolais that belongs in the cellar of every serious wine-lover. We are offering it at a very low net price to encourage as many people as possible to try this unique wine - in fact, the best wines of the Beaujolais, made in this natural style, are among the most delicious and reasonably priced wines in the world!

Attention all Jura enthusiasts, we’re pleased to announce the return of Jacques Puffeney’s wines to our shelves. There’s been a drought over the past few months, but at long last our thirst for Poulsard and Trousseau can be quenched. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this man, Jacques Puffeney lives at the top of a small mountain in the tiny village of Montagny-les-Arsures, a five minute drive from the relative metropolis of Arbois. This is a Tolkein-esque landscape of misty green fields, hay bales, cows, and winding roads barely wide enough for a single car. Puffeney farms about seven hectares in the Arbois appellation… and is arguably the region’s preeminent vigneron.

This years' Louis/Dressner Selections tasting will be the biggest and best ever! We'll be at City Hall Restaurant on Duane Street in the spacious downstairs rooms and we'll be taking reservations to ensure the best possible, uncrowded tasting experience for all. We'll be emailing with the details soon but re-schedule that weekend with your mother-in-law and plan to be in town for this fabulous event! (Tentative list of estates participating; Montesecondo, Bera, Roagna, Occhipinti, Fonterenza, Chinati Vergano, Salvo Foti, Radikon, Tue-Boeuf, Puzelat/Bonhomme, Pépière, Terres Dorees, Pinon, Texier, Peillot, G. Descombes, Coquelet, Baudry, Manciat, Riviere, Moulin Pey-Labrie, de Moor, Roally/Bongran and Causses Marines)

With all the hype about the 2007 vintage in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, we forget that many estates made great, and more balanced wines in 2006. Principally among these was the Armenier sister's Domaine de Marcoux. We have been fortunate enough to obtain a good supply of the Marcoux CDP Rouge 2006 (and a little bit of their unique Blanc from 2007) at close-out prices from their importer, we're not sure why. This great estate has been in Biodynamie since 1991, the first in the appellation, and their style has never been forced or extracted, but has expressed their unique terroir and the lovely fruit of mature Grenache from old vines. The fermentations here are long and slow, at low temperatures, and withour pigeage, to give the wild yeasts time to work. Aging is in cement cuves and older barriques. These are among the finest traditional Chateuneuf du Papes and we urge you to try them at these low, discountable prices. Their style was nicely summed up by Philippe Barret in "le Rouge et le Blanc", the fine French wine quarterly. "They make wines in their image, naturally, with seeming simplicity hiding real profundity, combining the best of tradition and modernism."

Johannas "Josie" Leitz took over the Josef Leitz estate in the mid-80s and is now making some of the most exciting and affordable wines from the Rheingau. He farms three grand cru sites in Rudesheim, and draws wines of great depth and complexity from several sites with richer soils that lie on the hillside just above the great growths. The nobility of Rheingau terroir is unmistakable in all these wines - in fact, one of the remarkable feats of Josie's wines is the complexity, guts and finesse found even in the "entry-level" offerings.

Leitz's wines are never racked and stay on the lees in the fermentation cask until bottling which makes for a unique and aromatically profound style. It's next to impossible to find this kind of quality and value, but that's Josie's way: earnest hands-on farming, attentive artisanal winemaking and accessibility that gets people drinking and loving Riesling. We love his wines, and when it comes to everyday Riesling (and who wouldn’t want to drink Riesling everyday?) Josie Leitz makes wines that deliver great substance for the money.

Join us for a special in-store tasting with Josie Leitz - meet the man himself and taste several offerings from the 2008 vintage and some sneak previews of 2009. This coming Wednesday from 5 - 7.

Our annual pilgrimage to Nantes for Marc Ollivier's Muscadet-athon was particularly fabulous this year as the 2009 wines, tasted from the vats, showed great promise, and the parade of older vintages, going back to 1977, showed the amazing aging potential of these oustanding wines. One cuvée of 2009 Muscadet Sevre et Maine has already been bottled and shipped - it's at the store now and shows the round, lovely fruit typical of the vintage along with the citrus, herbal and mineral notes always present in this wine. 2009 is similar to 2005, says Marc, but with a bit more acidity to balance the ripe fruit. Later bottlings of Pepiere, by the way, will carry the "in conversion to organic agriculture" label, and Marc's entire estate will be organically tended within two years. New for 2009 is a parcel of old vines near the Clos des Briords which will be bottled as Granite de Chateau Thebaud after two years on the lees. Here the granite is veined with quartz and is slightly more porous than at Clisson. He feels it may give a more balanced wine, but it's hard to imagine a better Muscadet than the Granite de Clisson. Once again in 2009, Marc's Clisson is a big wine (at 13.3% alcohol) with creamy lemon, stone, herbal and white fruit notes on the palate - a worthy successor to the magnificent 2007. Marc's parcel of Gras Moutons also did well in 2009, with the gneiss subsoil giving a lighter, extremely elegant and aromatic wine. "I prefer the granitic soils" says Marc, "they give a more original wine, but one must like acidity..." Marc has been fortunate to obtain a variety of parcels on different soils and he's making great wine with all of them. He's a winemaker of great intelligence and integrity - if you haven't tried his wines this would be a good time to start....

These days we see a number of close-outs and other discounted offers from importers, but few are for wines we actually admire - the last one here that you may recall was the ridiculously low-priced Ducroux Cote Rotie; now we’ve found another: Trabucchi 2002 Amarone Cereolo. Trabucchi is an organic estate, and low yields (about half of what’s permitted) and natural yeast fermentations contribute to the depth and purity of their wines. The wine has plenty of classic Amarone character – rich, full-bodied, redolent of spice and dried fruit. The 2002 vintage may be a bit lighter than some, with the real advantage is that the wine is fresher and brighter than many heavy Amarones that are so tough to pair with food. We are certainly in high Amarone season – the wine will go beautifully with any number of winter dishes. This week we are partnering with our friends at Snooth.com to get the word out; as their resident wine expert Greg Dal Piaz writes: “Simply put, this is great Amarone, and a great deal”.

Thanks to the generosity of our customers and suppliers , our benefit last Saturday for earthquake victims in Haiti raised more than $7,500! And a special thanks to Joe Dressner of Louis/Dressner Selections for getting it started. If you'd like to donate, click on Stand With Haiti on the right side of the page - Partners in Health has been in Haiti for over 20 years and is one of the best providers of health care for the poor around the world.

We're still taking calls from Beaujolais fans hoping for more of the 2007 Charly Thevenet Grain et Granit, surely one of the most beautiful wines of the vintage. The 2008 has just arrived and it's a stunning wine in the same style as the 2007, perhaps with a little extra richness as the month of September featured sunshine and north winds which dried and concentrated the grapes. Limited quantity so don't delay. From Christian Ducroux in Regnie, we've just received his 2009 Beaujolais-Villages Nouveau Sans Souffre! Certified Bio since 1985, Ducroux has mastered the art of wine-making without sulfur, producing wines of great aromatic complexity, completely expressive of the granitic terroir. He is one of the most advanced practioners of Biodynamic wine-making and we are honored to have his unique Beaujolais at Chambers Street!

Charming, transparent, refined, pure and elegant. These words keep cropping up in the reports on the 2007 Red Burgundy vintage. Allen Meadows of burghound.com says, "They convey an underlying sense of terroir better than any vintage since 2001 and if one had to try to encapsulate the character of 2007 by comparing it to another vintage, a blend of 2000 & 2001 would accurately sum them up..." These wines have the soft fruit and ripe tannins of the 2000 vintage combined with the spine of acidity of 2001 - these factors combine to create a tension in the wines that gives them a certain lift and liveliness. From the Bourgogne Rouge up to the Grand Crus these wines are forward and pretty and show well in their youth and will age gracefully for years. We think that this is a classic vintage for mid-term drinking - not a "big" vintage, it is a refined vintage. It will not go into hibernation for years like the 2005s have. Burgundy in particular is a wine of delicacy and finesse, not of over extraction and density. In the 2007s there is a real sense of place, the Volnays smell and taste and act like Volnays, the Chambolles fairly scream Chambolle and Gevrey Chambertin has the oyster shell and limestone minerality that we associate with Chambertin.


Domaine Bachelet in Gevrey Chambertin - 3.83 hectares owned by the domaine. Clive Coates in his new book "The Wines of Burgundy" awards the Domaine Denis Bachelet three stars, the highest rating he awards any domaine, even though there is only one small parcel of Grand Cru. Bachelet is a tiny domaine and every year I am excited when we get our allocation of Denis Bachelet's wines - "...harmonious, pure and understated" says Coates - these are among our most favorite Burgundies.

Terroir in the AOC Muscadet Sevre et Maine is largely a story of granite, resulting from a billion-year-old upswelling of molten rock called the Massif Armoricain. Some of this granite remains near the surface where it has weathered to unique nutrient-rich clays, in other areas it has been changed into metamorphic schists and gneiss giving somewhat lighter soils. Since 1984, Marc Ollivier has been producing some of the finest wines in the Loire Valley, primarily from vineyards on the granitic soils around Maisdon-sur-Sevre and Clisson. The most complex and long-aging Muscadets are produced from granite terroirs, such as Michel Bregeon's "Cuvee Gorgeois", Guy Bossard's "Expression de Granite," Luneau-Papin's "L d'Or" - and Marc’s "Clos des Briords" (from old vines on Granite de Chateau Thebault, first produced in 1988). Growers around the town of Clisson who have vineyards on the unique, very dense stone of the area have petitioned the INAO for "Cru Communal" status, reflecting their unusual soils and involving stringent quality standards, and in 2005 Marc produced his first "Granite de Clisson" from a plot of 60 to 90 year-old vines in the Pepiere vineyard. Aged on the lees for 24 months, the wine possesses fantastic depth and aromatic complexity and will benefit from 10 to 15 years of aging. (Paradoxically, it cannot be labeled “Sur Lie” as it violates the current regulations which permit only nine months of aging) Marc has just released the 2007 Granite de Clisson, and although the vintage was more difficult, giving yields of only 20 hl/ha and a moderate 12.2 degrees alcohol, the elegance, balance and depth of this wine are simply astounding.

A little late, you say...?

We'd like to thank all of you for your continued support in this difficult year, Downtown, around the town and around the country. Your interest in delicious artisanal wines enables us to work with some of the nicest people and most passionate winemakers in the world and we thank you for making it possible. Have a great New Years Eve - here are a few of our favorite Champagnes and sparkling wines to help you celebrate!

Not only are we stocked with great party Champagne, but our selection currently boasts a great depth of specialty Champagnes that are small production and hard to find anywhere else.

Hard to pass up items include: the vintage-grape-site specific wines of Cedric Bouchard and Prevost; the Clouet cousins - Paul and Andre's prestige cuvees; the super-limited offering from the eccentric, organic operation of Georges Laval; several well-regarded 2002s - Margaine Special Club, Chartogne-Taillet, Goutorbe Special Club and Marguet; mags of 98 Vilmart and the singular Vouette et Sorbée from Kimmeridgian soil.

Many of these wines are ultra limited, so act now before they're gone!

Also, join us on Saturday from 4 – 7 for our annual holiday Champagne tasting – we will be opening nine wines, many from the esteemed Terry Theise Portfolio, and the first preview of 2007 Prevost!

At the lounges where I'm a regular, I prefer a seat at the bar that’s just left of center directly in front of the bartender’s main station – there I get to observe the successive creation of each cocktail: spirits queued up, measured pours, cracked eggs, mists, precise-stern shakes, and the long metered stir held in perfect time while conversing with a guest.