Wine Journal

It's about time that you think of the best wines as liquid yet hard assets.  Extraordinary times call for extraordinary insights.  2022 has been a tough year for investors.  Bonds and stocks have sold off in tandem.  Real estate is also starting to wobble.  Have you got wine in your portfolio?

Last weekend (August 6 & 7), the Financial Times published an article on the front page highlighting that fine wine is passing the test as hedge against inflation.  If you wonder how fine wine has performed over the past 20 years, here’s a chart by Liv-ex showing two indices: one is a basket of the top 100 wines, the other is a basket of the top 1000 wines.  Both have performed positively.

Winemakers, by default, are in love with their land, and, by extension, everything that grows on it.  We mean everything, even weeds, which is a byproduct and feature of the soil the biodynamic farming movement has come to embrace.  But we can think of only one winemaker who loves his trees so much that he names every wine he makes after trees.  Yes, we are talking about Jacques Thienpont, the legendary winemaker of Le Pin (“Pine”), L’If (“Yew”), and L’Hêtre (“Beech”).

You may have heard of Le Pin, one of the most coveted (ahem, expensive) wines from Bordeaux, and any wine-producing region in the world, for that matter.  Le Pin is proof that sometimes the

Heat wave seems to be everywhere, the dog days of summer are upon us.  There is always a good glass of wine to help you get through the season.  Our first choice is Henri de Villamont's Auxey-Duresses La Canée 2015 - a crisp, un-oaky chardonnay from Côte de Beaune, Burgundy.

We also present Château La Lagune 2017, a softer and more expressive wine from Haut-Médoc, produced by the talented winemaker Caroline Frey, whose family also owns the legendary Jaboulet wines in the Rhône Valley.  Its soft and feminine profile can sometimes lead consumers to mistaken La Lagune for wines from Margaux, not Haut Médoc – some even consider them “Burgundian.”

Our feature selection for the month of August 2022 is Château

Here's the latest release from LVMH, the holding company that brings us such amazing wines like Château d'Yquem and Château Cheval Blanc: Ao Yun, a wine produced at the foothills of the Himalayas by the team from Moët Hennessy (the MH in LVMH).

Ao Yun is an ambitious project by LVMH to create a unique, world-class wine estate in an ideal but new environment.  The famed Australian winemaker, Dr. Tony Jordan, was commissioned to find such a place.  He found his way to the foothills of the Himalayas in Yunnan, near the legendary and remote villages of Shangri-La.  There he found not only conditions that reminded him of Bordeaux but also the remnants of a wholly forgotten series of vineyards planted with Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc which had been introduced by French missionaries in

This morning, we woke up to the jaw-dropping news that Château Angélus just announced it had withdrawn from the Saint-Emilion classification, to save itself from the unjust legal attacks for over a decade.

The legal case culminated in a recent court ruling against the former head of Angélus, Hubert de Bôuard.  He was found guilty of "undue influence" while serving on the government appointed body which set the rules on promoting Saint-Emilion producers to various ranks.  Under these rules, Château Angélus was promoted into the top rank - Premier Grand Cru Classé A of Saint-Emilion.

Until Château Angélus and Château Pavie were promoted in 2012, only Château Ausone and Château Cheval Blanc were recognized as Premier Grand Cru Classé A of Saint-Emilion.  Unlike the Left Bank that has stuck with the original 1855 Classif

We have carried Château Siran year after year, believing our customers will be won over once they taste this unpretentious but well-made wine.  It took a #1 ranking by a popular magazine to convince the buyers we haven't served before to clean out our cellar.  By popular demand, we have restocked this wine in Bordeaux and will be shipping it into the states next spring.  Pre-order yours now if you are curious what kind of top-ranked Bordeaux $45 can buy.

To the insiders, Château Siran has been a hidden gem for quite some time.  As Bloomberg wine columnist Erin McCoy and Decanter Magazine previously reported, the 1955 vintage of Château Siran was used by convicted wine counterfeiter Rudy Kurniawan as a primary ingredient in the blend to fake old vintages of Château Lafite and Château Margaux.  Even some of the auction house critics were fooled.  Is that reason enough to cellar some Siran 2018 to taste

• Champagne Barons de Rothschild 2010, Champagne, Rated 94 (James Suckling) - It was in 2005 that five members of the Rothschild family, from Châteaux Mouton Rothschild, Clarke and Lafite Rothschild, started a project in Champagne. They purchased an established Champagne house, Maison Prieur in Vertus, and had their first harvest that year. They made their first Blanc de Blancs vintage in 2006 and set up shop in Reims in 2007. Their aim? To make an “exceptional Champagne bearing the hallmark of a great vintage, on a par with the wines produced by the family in its celebrated châteaux.”  Frédéric Mairesse, the family’s representative in Reims, says: “This project is a kind of magical idea from the Rothschild family. It’s the first time that the three branches of the family come together and associate their know-how to g