All that sparkles... Featuring Back vintage Les Capriades and tasty bubbles from all over the world!
3/26/2025
Moses Gadouche showing off the amount of sediment in a typical bottle before disgorgement.
Perhaps there is not much to celebrate these days, with plenty of uncertainty and anxiety in the wine trade and beyond. Still, we find ourselves with a plethora of delicious sparkling wines, headlined by some rare back-vintage releases from Les Capriades in the Loire Valley. Completely unrelated to potential tariffs, this is the last chance to purchase back vintages of these dynamic, Ancestral method sparkling wines from Les Capriades, so take the opportunity now! Grab some bottles and toast to the people you love and everything that you can be grateful for.
Of particular note besides the Capriades bottles would be some spare bottles from the 2020 release of Aurelien Suenens Champagnes, and the three delicious Lambruscos that we currently have in stock, and one of the recent "Best Bottles under $20" according to the NY Times, Sidonio Sousa Branco Brut Nature from Bairrada in Portugal!
A bit of history on Les Capriades
Pascal Potaire and Moses Gadouche came into the world of winemaking in drastically different ways. Pascal, a former caviste, began his own label in the early 2000s after working with two noted natural winemakers in the Loire Valley, Nöella Morantin and Nicolas Renard. Moses joined his friend in 2011 after a career as a logistician. Keeping this in mind, it makes sense that the two work well together, with Pascal handling all aspects of the meticulous winemaking process and Moses working on marketing and other business-related matters. Their cellar is in the small town of Faverolles-sur-Cher in the Touraine AOC, with their grapes coming from a combination of purchased fruit and fruit grown on the domaine, all planted in soils made up of clay and silex with a limestone base. Their own grapes are impeccably farmed, and those that are bought come from trusted growers around the town who all farm organically, with Pascal and Moses hand-harvesting the same rows of vines year after year.
Though the process of making a wine using the méthode ancestrale (lovingly known as pét nat) seems deceptively simple, it is incredibly hard to master. The process at Les Capriades starts with intensive sorting of the grapes in the vines, leaving only the best grapes to be brought back to the cellar. Fermentation occurs naturally in tank under Pascal’s watchful eye before being bottled under crown cap at the perfect moment, with just the right amount residual sugar (the level varies depending on the cuvée) so that the wine will finish its fermentation, yielding the soft, frothy bubbles we all know and love. All of the wines are riddled before disgorgement by hand, and as befits this ancient style of naturally fermented sparkling wine, no SO2 is ever added. In terms of the sheer deliciousness of their wines, and for consistency and stability in a category known for being the antithesis of those things, Pascal and Moses are the undeniable masters of this style of winemaking.
