Articles

8/19/16 - Back in 2011, I traveled through France for the first time, visiting with winemakers and attending trade tastings around the country. It was an eye-opening trip, and one that led to the realization that I wanted to continue in my father’s path, championing the work of small growers throughout France and introducing them to our customers here at Chambers Street. Of the many...

8/17/16 - Please join us this Thursday night as CSW's Eben Lillie launches VdT (Verre de Terre) at Dirty Bird Chelsea, 204 West 14th Street. VdT will offer  an extensive list of natural wines by the glass, starting at $6, with bottles starting at $20, and many "pur jus" with no added sulfur. Small estates available only at VdT will be featured as well...

8/15/16 - Italians love sparkling wines. There are some great indigenous examples, and Italy is also a fantastic place to drink Champagne, particularly if you’re interested in the best grower Champagne. But Italy’s famous sparkling wine called Franciacorta has long been a mystery to me, so for a couple of years I’ve made an effort to seek knowledge through more tasting. After trying many...

8/12/16 - Ask any Oregon wine insider about great winemakers and the name John Paul Cameron comes up in hushed and reverent tones. His eponymous Cameron Winery has been around since 1984, but its legendary status often does not resonate outside Oregon because of the very limited distribution of these wines. Moreover, his fanatical attention to the farming and the winemaking leaves little time...

8/9/16 - Suddenly it’s boom-times for Cesanese, the most important red grape in Lazio (the region around Rome). Cesanese was the house wine in many Roman trattorias in the 1970s and 1980s; it could be pretty crude, but we have fond memories of lively wines that went perfectly with carbonara and saltimbocca. We’ve tasted many recent attempts to revive and "improve" Cesanese that were...

8/3/16 - Hofgut Falkenstein stands surrounded by verdant vineyards and gardens, high above the Konz valley, a tiny side valley off the Saar River. Its roof was just recently restored in a traditional German style, utilizing thin, slate tiles, reminiscent of inky-gray fish scales, or plates of stone armor gracefully curving upwards to frame the tiny windows jutting out from the upper level of the house. Upon arriving, as...

7/29/16 - A recent trip to Oregon demonstrated that there’s much more to the winemaking scene than Pinot Noir. There are some great Chardonnays (check out the 2014 vintage!), German, Alsatian, and Loire Valley varieties, and even experiments with Spanish grapes in the Columbia Gorge. (Mencia! Albarino!) Within the state, there's a collective of young, passionate winemakers embracing a natural, less-interventionist winemaking philosophy similar...

7/27/16 - I’ve always had the sensation of stability at Canonica – the calm and contented atmosphere of the old family house, the Canonicas’ positive outlook and gentle good humor, and the consistently very high quality of the wine. But things change, and a great boom is under way! The house is expanding to add some more rooms to the B&B, and the wine...

7/25/16 - The number of organic and biodynamic estates in Southern France has been increasing in recent years, and as the farming has improved and growers have started to turn from the prevalent co-op model towards making and bottling their own wine, we’ve been able to enjoy some fantastic blends and single-vineyard expressions from the region. Today, we’ll take a trip on paper to introduce...

7/23/16 - "Discovering" great wines today is a crapshoot. Simply put, there are not many producers out there who are both little known and fabulous. One must rely on luck and timing, above all, to be able to introduce wine-loving friends to something new and exciting. Many recent "discoveries" should be more aptly termed renaissances, as generational change pulls existing producers out of bad...

7/14/16 - In the village of Albares de la Ribera, high in the mountains of the Bierzo Alto in Northwestern Spain, winegrower Germán Blanco (familiar to Chambers Street regulars through his very popular Quinta Milú wines) recuperates and farms old-vine piezas (small family vineyards) planted by his great-grandmother and her neighbors. Feral and fragrant, planted on oak- and chestnut-covered slopes rising as high as 1000 meters above the valley of the beautiful...

7/12/16 -   You may remember a TV ad campaign featuring a handsome Franco Bolla telling Americans to drink more Soave. Thanks to successful marketing campaigns, mostly by larger wineries like Bolla, Soave surpassed Chianti in the 1970s as the largest-selling Italian DOC wine. By the mid-1990s Soave was producing six million cases a year, about 80% of which was being produced by the...

7/6/16 - Witnessing the growth of a vigneron is one of the great pleasures of working in wine. When a domain makes a jump in quality, from very good to excellent, it’s akin to a small epiphany, like discovering an extra layer of meaning in a one of your favorite books or watching ‘like’ turn to ‘love.’ One such grower is Fabrice Pouillon, whose...

7/1/16 - Although Napa Valley and Russian River Valley have gotten top billing in the wine press for the past two decades, Santa Cruz currently produces some of the most compelling wines in California. The region's wines have remarkable complexity and ageability without the overripeness and price sticker shock of their more trendy counterparts. Santa Cruz's recent prominence is not without historical precedent. In...

6/30/16 - Serge Hondet, Domaine Tinou, Jurançon After reading about the great wines of Domaine Tinou, a 3 hectare estate in Jurançon that has been organic since 1964, we were determined to visit. 50 years of organic farming! We called proprietor Serge Hondet, who said he would be glad to see us, but of course he couldn't sell us any wine. Perfect! In January of 2014,...