Bacco’s Wine Club April 2026
Back from the Brink:
Three Greek Grapes Rescued from Oblivion
The story of Greek wine in the twentieth century is mostly a story of forgetting. The industrial era arrived, and with it came pressure to plant varieties that yielded more, ripened faster, sold easier. The old grapes — the ones with names that didn't appear in any French textbook, the ones that had been growing on the same hillsides since antiquity — got pulled out. By the 1970s, a significant portion of Greece's indigenous viticultural heritage existed only in the memories of old farmers, or in a few neglected rows at the edges of vineyards that no one had gotten around to clearing yet.
This month's wine club is about three of those grapes. Not in a sentimental way. They're not in your bag because they survived — they're in your bag because, having survived, they turned out to be genuinely interesting.
Zafeirakis Malagousia "Microcosmos" 2024 — Thessaly, Greece
Malagousia almost didn't make it. By the 1970s, it had been effectively abandoned across Greece, surviving only in a handful of old plots, its identity uncertain, its future nonexistent. A professor at the University of Thessaloniki named Vassilis Logothetis found some. He passed cuttings to a young student named Evangelos Gerovassiliou, who planted them at his estate in the Halkidiki Peninsula and, over the next two decades, quietly proved that this forgotten white grape could produce some of the most aromatic, distinctive wine in the country.
Today Malagousia is planted on roughly 7,500 acres across Greece. That's the full arc of rescue: near extinction to widespread cultivation in the span of forty years. The comeback story has been told.
What hasn't changed is how Malagousia smells. It's expressive in the way that Viognier or Gewürztraminer are expressive — orchard blossom, stone fruit, a floral quality that announces itself — but this bottling from Christos Zafeirakis is more restrained than those comparisons imply.
The Microcosmos comes from a single vineyard called Palaiomylos, "the old mill," on the slopes of Mount Olympus in Tyrnavos. The vines are approaching twenty years old. The soils are clay with a high flint concentration. It's certified organic, harvested in three passes, fermented with native yeasts, and bottled with minimal sulfur. The result is a wine with Malagousia's characteristic aromatics reined in by a cooler site — white peach, citrus blossom, a saline mineral thread, nothing blowsy about it.
Zafeirakis himself is worth knowing. He's a third-generation winemaker from Tyrnavos working on land his grandfather farmed, and his focus on the indigenous Thessalian varieties — Malagousia and Limniona — has made him one of the more closely watched producers in contemporary Greek wine.
Pictured: Fattoria Moretto Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetro Secco
Zafeirakis Young Vines Limonia 2021 — Thessaly, Greece
If Malagousia's rescue was a gradual institutional effort, Limniona's is a more intimate story. This ancient red grape of Thessaly — possibly among the oldest cultivated varieties in Greece — had been reduced to a few elderly vines by the time a winemaker named Anastasios Ligas decided, in the 1990s, that it was worth saving. He located old plantings, propagated them, and eventually got Limniona back into commercial production. Without that single act of stubbornness, the grape almost certainly would have vanished.
What Ligas and, later, Zafeirakis proved is that Limniona is worth the effort. The grape produces a wine that gets compared to Pinot Noir in its structure and texture — medium-bodied, silky, perfumed, with red fruit, real acidity, and the kind of freshness that makes you reach for the glass again before you've quite registered doing it. The Zafeirakis Young Vineyards bottling comes from, as the name suggests, younger vines, and it has all the aromatic clarity and suppleness you'd expect from that — no rough edges, no austerity, just expressive, honest Thessalian red.
If the Malagousia is the approachable entry point into this club, the Limniona is the wine that makes you want to dig deeper.
Pictured: Claude-Emmanuel and Louis-Benoît Desvignes of Louis Claude Desvignes
Glinavos Bekari 2022 — Epirus, Greece
The Zitsa PDO sits at 600 to 700 meters in the Pindus mountain range in northwestern Greece, on limestone slopes where the climate runs cold enough that reaching 12.5% alcohol is considered an achievement. This is not the Greece most people picture when they picture Greece. It reads more like the Alps than the Aegean — high, austere, shaped by elevation and cold winters and the kind of terrain that makes farming genuinely difficult.
Lefteris Glinavos founded his estate here in 1978 with a specific purpose: to revive the indigenous red varieties of Epirus, Vlahiko and Bekari, which had been reduced to bit players — blending grapes in Zitsa's traditional sparkling wines — and were in danger of disappearing altogether as a standalone varietal expression. He brought them back. The domaine is now entering a new chapter under his son Thomas, and recently came under the winemaking supervision of Apostolos Thymiopoulos, one of the most respected names in contemporary Greek wine.
Lord Byron stopped in Zitsa in 1809, on his first journey through Greece. He praised the wine, which tells you the tradition here is older than the crisis that nearly ended it.
The Bekari is 100% Bekari grape — the rarer expression, vinified separately from the Vlahiko. It's de-stemmed, fermented in oak vats for twelve days, and bottled dry. The profile is lighter-bodied than the geography might suggest: plum, dark berries, bright acidity, lacy minerality. The limestone and cold nights give it structure without weight. It's a wine that rewards a moment of attention. People lean forward when you explain it, and the wine earns that interest.
Three grapes that almost didn't survive. Three winemakers, across two generations, who decided that was unacceptable.
Bacco’s Wine Club March 2026
Where the Mountains Remember:
Three Wines from the Edge of Italy
If you drive north through Piedmont long enough, the landscape begins to betray its own reputation. The manicured slopes of the Langhe—those photogenic, world-famous vineyards that bankroll the region’s mythology—fall away behind you. The hills steepen. The air sharpens. Stone walls appear along the roadsides, ancient and irregular, built by people who understood that farming here was not an investment but an argument with gravity.
This is Alto Piemonte and the Valle d’Aosta: the northernmost edge of Italian wine, where the Alps press down so close that vineyards grow in the literal shadows of Monte Bianco and Gran Paradiso. It is a place that most of the wine world forgot for the better part of a century, and where the people who stayed—or who chose to come back—did so out of something more stubborn than ambition. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of place we go looking for.
This month’s three wines come from this territory. They arrive through Rosenthal Wine Merchant, Neal Rosenthal’s four-decade-old importing house in New York, which has made a quiet career of finding exactly these producers—the ones who farm impossibly steep terrain, who work with grapes no one else bothers with, and who make wines that could not plausibly come from anywhere else on Earth. Rosenthal does all his work on a handshake. He has never signed a contract with a supplier. The Ferrando family, whose Erbaluce opens this month’s selection, was the very first estate he imported back in January of 1980, when Carema and Erbaluce were names unknown to virtually anyone who didn’t live within fifty kilometers of Turin.
Ferrando Erbaluce di Caluso “Etichetta Verde” (Cascina Cariola) 2023
The Ferrando family has been making wine since 1890, when the first Giuseppe Ferrando arrived in the town of Ivrea from Acqui with the intention of introducing Piedmontese wines to the Valle d’Aosta. Five generations later, Roberto Ferrando—who his father Luigi once said carries the whole weight of the operation on his shoulders—continues to farm Nebbiolo on the vertiginous terraces of Carema and Erbaluce on the morainic plains of Caluso, about forty-five minutes north of Turin.
The Erbaluce grape is an ancient white variety that exists only in this alpine corner of Piedmont. It cannot be successfully cultivated anywhere else—not for lack of trying, but because its particular genius is calibrated to a very specific set of conditions: sandy, calcium-poor, morainic soils descended from the crystalline massifs of Monte Rosa and Monte Bianco; the wide diurnal temperature swings of the Canavese; and the long, slow autumns that allow harvest to stretch into October without sacrificing the grape’s natural, almost architectural acidity.
Ferrando Erbaluce di Caluso “Etichetta Verde” (Cascina Cariola) 2023 comes from a single vineyard in the village of Piverone. Around six thousand bottles are produced each year, of which the American market sees fewer than half. Fermented in stainless steel at controlled temperatures, bottled nine to twelve months after harvest, then held further before release—the wine is an exercise in transparency. It is bright and floral, with a mineral spine that owes everything to those ancient glacial soils. You sense citrus peel, white stone fruit, something almost saline on the finish. It is the kind of wine that makes you reconsider what Italian white wine can be when it isn’t trying to be anything other than a perfect expression of where it was grown.
At the table: This is a wine that loves simplicity. A plate of burrata with good olive oil and flaky salt. Seared branzino with lemon and capers. Risotto with spring peas. The acidity is the engine here—it cuts through richness without overpowering delicate flavors, which makes it an unexpectedly versatile dinner wine. If you keep any of our Italian tinned fish on hand, this is its ideal companion.
The Nitty Gritty:
Country: Italy
Region: Piedmont
Subregion: Caluso, Canavese (Alto Piemonte)
Farming: Traditional, low-intervention
Soil: Morainic, sandy, calcium-poor — glacial deposits from the Monte Rosa, Monte Bianco, and Gran Paradiso massifs
Varietal: 100% Erbaluce
Elevation: Alpine foothills of the Canavese
Style: Bright, mineral, high-acid alpine white
Production: Single vineyard (Cascina Cariola, Piverone). ~6,000 bottles/year. Stainless steel fermentation, bottled 9–12 months after harvest. Fifth-generation family estate, founded 1890.
Pictured: Fattoria Moretto Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetro Secco
Grosjean Torrette Valle d’Aosta 2023
Cross the border into the Valle d’Aosta—Italy’s smallest wine region, a long, narrow valley carved by the extreme northwestern Alps—and the scale of everything contracts. The vineyards are smaller, steeper, more precarious. The grape varieties are ones that even serious wine people may never have encountered: Petit Rouge, Fumin, Cornalin, Vien de Nus, Premetta, Mayolet. They are indigenous to this valley and essentially nonexistent beyond it. The word used here is “heroic” viticulture, which is not a marketing term but a bureaucratic designation acknowledging the physical extremity of the farming. Everything is done by hand. There is no alternative.
The Grosjean family traces its roots to the village of Fornet, high in the mountain passes of the Valgrisenche—a village now buried under the waters of the Beauregard dam. They raised cattle. During the summers, they came down to lower altitudes to cultivate grapes and chestnuts, stocking up on wine to last the long winters. In 1969, Dauphin Grosjean—the patriarch, and yes, that is his real name—was persuaded by a friend to present his wine at a local exposition. The quality was immediately recognized, and it changed the direction of the family. His five sons—Vincent, Giorgio, Marco, Fernando, and Eraldo—each took on a role in the expanding estate. Today, the third generation—Hervé, Didier, Simon, and Marco—runs the operation from the hamlet of Ollignan, on the border of Quart and Saint Christophe.
They have been farming organically since 1975—a full thirty-six years before they received official certification in 2011, making them the first certified organic estate in the entire Valle d’Aosta. No pesticides, no herbicides, only organic fertilizers. Indigenous yeasts for fermentation. Neal Rosenthal, who has visited this valley for decades, once wrote of the region: “There’s nothing better in the world than these valleys.” The Grosjeans quote him on their own website, which tells you something about the nature of the relationship.
Grosjean Torrette Valle d’Aosta 2023 is a blend built around Petit Rouge—about eighty percent—with smaller portions of Vien de Nus, Fumin, Cornalin, and Mayolet: a coalition of indigenous grapes that, taken together, offer a miniature portrait of the valley itself. The vineyards sit between 550 and 650 meters above sea level, trained in the Guyot system and draped down the terraced hillside. The wine is aged in both stainless steel and oak casks. It is charming when young—snappy red fruit, a line of crushed-rock minerality, high acidity that keeps everything vibrant—but it deepens with time. The traditional pairing is Fontina cheese and cured meats, which is to say, the food that the people who make this wine actually eat
At the table: Think Alpine comfort food. Fontina melted over polenta. A board of our cured meats—bresaola, coppa, lardo—with rye crackers. It’s also a beautiful match for roasted chicken with herbs, or a hearty minestrone on a night when March is still acting like winter. Serve it with a slight chill—fifteen minutes in the fridge before opening—and the fruit lifts right off the glass.
The Nitty Gritty:
Country: Italy
Region: Valle d'Aosta
Subregion: Quart / Saint Christophe
Farming: Certified organic (Ecocert, 2011 — practicing since 1975)
Soil: Sandy, shallow depth, abundant stone residue
Varietal: Petit Rouge 80%, Vien de Nus, Fumin, Cornalin, Mayolet
Elevation: 550–650m, terraced hillside
Style: Alpine red, bright acidity, crushed-rock minerality
Production: Indigenous yeast fermentation. Aged in stainless steel and oak casks. First certified organic estate in the Valle d'Aosta. Third-generation family estate, founded 1969.
Pictured: Claude-Emmanuel and Louis-Benoît Desvignes of Louis Claude Desvignes
NOAH “Dellamesola” Coste della Sesia 2023
Andrea Mosca was an architect. He gave it up. About fifteen years ago, he and his wife, Giovanna Pepe Diaz, bought just under five hectares of vineyard in and around the village of Brusnengo, in the heart of the Bramaterra appellation, and named the project after their son, Francesco Noah. They are renovating a farmhouse there. They make wine. That is the story, and it is both simple and representative of something much larger happening across the Alto Piemonte.
Before the Second World War, the Alto Piemonte was one of the most important wine regions in Italy. Then the factories came—the industrial boom of the postwar years drew workers out of the hills and into the cities—and the vineyards were abandoned. For decades, the terraces crumbled and the vines went wild. Only recently has a younger generation begun returning, drawn by the realization that what was left behind was not a ruin but an inheritance. The word “Bramaterra” itself is believed to come from the Italian “bramare la terra”—to long for the land. It is a tiny appellation, roughly twenty-eight hectares spread across several communes, with no more than a handful of active producers. The soil is red volcanic porphyry, which gives the wines a mineral intensity that distinguishes them from the marine sands of neighboring Lessona.
Rosenthal has been with NOAH since the beginning, adding the estate in 2015 and importing every vintage since the debut 2011 bottling. Andrea’s approach is traditional and low-intervention: indigenous yeasts, aging in large neutral Slavonian oak, minimal sulfur. The oldest Croatina vines on the property are seventy years old and trained in the local maggiorina trellising system. Everything is harvested by hand between late September and late October.
NOAH “Dellamesola” Coste della Sesia 2023 takes its name from Andrea’s particular zone of Brusnengo. It is a blend of Nebbiolo—the majority—with Vespolina and Croatina, aged for a year in large Slavonian oak and bottled with minimal sulfur. If the Bramaterra is the estate’s serious, long-aging statement, the Dellamesola is its friendlier introduction: open-knit, built around a core of vivid dark red fruit and a subtle floral character, with the volcanic mineral thrust of Bramaterra delivered on a more immediately luscious frame. It is the kind of wine that makes you understand, in a single glass, why people are paying attention to the Alto Piemonte again—and why some of Piedmont’s most notable producers from the Langhe have begun investing in the area, sensing that the momentum is only beginning.
At the table: This is your Sunday red. Braised short ribs. A slow-cooked ragù over pappardelle. Aged hard cheeses—Piave, Parmigiano, pecorino. It has the tannic structure to stand up to rich, meaty dishes but enough freshness that it won’t flatten a simple bowl of pasta with tomato sauce. Decant it for twenty minutes if you can wait that long.
The Nitty Gritty:
Country: Italy
Region: Piedmont
Subregion: Brusnengo (Alto Piemonte, Bramaterra zone)
Farming: Organic-leaning, minimal intervention
Soil: Red volcanic porphyry
Varietal: Nebbiolo 80%, Vespolina 10%, Croatina 10%
Elevation: Rolling volcanic hills of the upper Piemonte
Style: Medium-bodied, volcanic mineral, floral, traditional Alto Piemonte
Production: Indigenous yeasts, aged 12 months in large neutral Slavonian oak botti. Minimal sulfur. Hand-harvested. Estate founded 2010
What connects these three wines is not a grape variety or a single appellation but a shared geography of extremity—altitude, slope, cold—and a shared insistence on specificity. The Ferrando Erbaluce could not come from anywhere but the morainic hills of Caluso. The Grosjean Torrette could not come from anywhere but the high terraces above Quart. The NOAH Dellamesola could not come from anywhere but the volcanic soils of Brusnengo. In a wine market increasingly organized around familiar names and interchangeable flavors, these are wines that resist abstraction. They taste like places. They taste like the decisions of particular families to stay, or to return, or to start over on land that most people had written off.
Neal Rosenthal once described his philosophy in a single line: “I want to know where these grapes came from.” That impulse—not for brand recognition or critical scores, but for origin, for the irreducible specificity of a place—is what brings wines like these into a shop like ours. The mountains of northern Italy have been making wine for over two thousand years. The pergola trellising in Carema dates to the Roman legions. The Grosjean family has been in the Valle d’Aosta for four centuries. What’s new is that you can drink the wines here, in Boston, this month, and that someone thought you’d want to.
We did. We do.
Bacco’s Wine Club February 2026
"Love Stories: A Valentine's Wine Club"
This February, we're celebrating love in all its forms: the love between partners who build dreams together, the love passed down through generations, and the love affair between winemaker and land.
These three bottles tell three love stories—from a secret Umbrian estate built by a couple who left everything behind, to alpine vineyards tended by husband and wife for seven generations, to a passionate Finger Lakes partnership proving that love conquers all (even difficult grapes).
Pour a glass. Share with someone you love. Toast to beginnings, partnerships, and the passion that makes great wine possible.
Pictured: Renardat-Fache Au Commencement
Renardat-Fache - Bugey-Cerdon ‘Au Commencement’ 2023
Au Commencement—"In the Beginning."
The name alone tells you what this wine is about: new starts, first loves, and the kind of leap that changes everything. For Elie and Christelle Renardat, that beginning happened generations ago, but they tend it every day.
The Renardat family has farmed the alpine foothills of Bugey, tucked between Lyon and Geneva, for seven generations. This is France's overlooked corner—too small for fame, too remote for trends, and too devoted to place to care. The Bugey region is wet, cool, and difficult, the kind of terroir that punishes shortcuts and rewards patience. The Renardats farm organically and biodynamically, not because it's fashionable, but because it's how their grandparents did it, and their grandparents before them.
Elie and Christelle work the vineyards together, husband and wife in constant conversation with the land. Their estate is tiny—just three hectares of old-vine Gamay, Poulsard, and Chardonnay—but what comes from it is something rare: wines that taste like the place they're from, made by people who love that place enough to never leave.
Au Commencement isn't made every year. Production is minuscule, released only in vintages deemed worthy. It's a drier, more structured wine than their famous Cerdon du Bugey rosé—a blend of Gamay and Poulsard fermented naturally using the méthode ancestrale. The 2023 vintage was a response to hardship: after difficult weather in 2024, the Renardats chose to bottle what they had with care rather than force what wasn't there. That restraint is love, too.
Chilled and poured into a glass, Au Commencement tastes like alpine mornings: bright, brisk, alive. It's the kind of wine that reminds you why people fall in love with this work in the first place.
The Nitty Gritty:
Country: France
Region: Bugey-Cerdon
Farming: Organic and Biodynamic (certified)
Soil: Alpine foothills, limestone-influenced
Varietal: 50% Gamay, 50% Poulsard
Method: Méthode ancestrale (natural sparkling)
Production: Not made every year; minuscule production
Style: Dry, structured, lightly sparkling
Pictured: Fattoria Moretto Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetro Secco
La Segreta - Pottarello Umbria Rosso 2021
Some love stories begin with a question: What if we left everything behind?
For Lorenzo de Monaco and Eileen Holland, that question became a reality in 2009. Lorenzo, born in Italy, had built a life in Boston running Italian bike tours. Eileen, a native Bostonian drawn to art history and the classical world, had already spent time at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice. But the pull of something deeper—a life rooted in land, tradition, and purpose—brought them to a hidden corner of Umbria, between Todi and Perugia.
They called it La Segreta—"the secret." And it was: a 70-acre nature preserve surrounded by the Tiber River Valley, untouched and overlooked, accessible only if you already knew it was there. No GPS could find it. That remoteness became the point. They purchased the land, moved their family, and began the slow work of building something together: restoring old farmhouses, planting vineyards in 2008, and learning to make wine from scratch.
The estate produces just a handful of wines, each named by the local dialect: Cinino ("little one"), Pottarello ("kid" or "rascal"), and Marmocchio ("rascal"). The Pottarello—their middle wine—comes from younger Sangiovese vines but loses nothing in seriousness. Hand-harvested, naturally fermented, and aged in French oak, it's a wine of grip and earth, built for the table and for patience.
What makes La Segreta remarkable isn't scale or fame—it's the love that built it. A couple who chose each other, chose this land, and chose to stay. The wine tastes like that choice: honest, grounded, and made for sharing.
The Nitty Gritty:
Country: Italy
Region: Umbria
Subregion: Todi DOC
Farming: Organic (certified)
Soil: Clay, mineral-rich
Elevation: 300 meters
Varietal: 80% Sangiovese, 10% Malvasia Nera, 10% Colorino
Aging: 12 months in French oak (mostly used tonneaux), 9 months in bottle
Production: Hand-harvested, natural fermentation
Pictured: Claude-Emmanuel and Louis-Benoît Desvignes of Louis Claude Desvignes
Love doesn't always look like romance. Sometimes it looks like belief—stubborn, singular, and willing to prove the world wrong.
Forge Cellars is a partnership born of that belief: the conviction that the Finger Lakes, carved by glaciers and shaped by deep, cold water, could produce Pinot Noir worthy of Burgundy's attention. Not imitation Burgundy. Not "New World" fruit bombs. But something real, rooted, and alive with place.
The partnership began with Rick Rainey and Louis Barruol, two winemakers who saw what others hadn't: that the steep slopes around Seneca Lake—with their shale, limestone, and glacial till—shared something fundamental with the great sites of Europe. The lakes themselves act as thermal regulators, cooling the vineyards in summer and moderating winter's bite. The result is a long, slow-growing season that gives Pinot Noir time to develop complexity without losing its spine.
Forge Cellars works with some of the Finger Lakes' most promising vineyards, farming sustainably and intervening minimally. The Classique Pinot Noir is their vision distilled: cool-climate elegance, mineral-driven structure, and a transparency that lets the vintage speak. There's red fruit here—cherry, cranberry, wild strawberry—but it's framed by stone, earth, and a fine-boned acidity that makes you reach for another glass.
This is a wine made by people in love with a place that most of the wine world still overlooks. That love is an act of defiance, and it tastes like the future.
The Nitty Gritty:
Country: United States
Region: Finger Lakes, New York
Subregion: Seneca Lake
Farming: Sustainable
Soil: Glacial till, shale, limestone
Varietal: 100% Pinot Noir
Elevation: Steep lakeside slopes
Style: Cool-climate, mineral-driven, Burgundian in spirit
Production: Small-lot, minimal intervention
TASTING NOTES & PAIRINGS:
AU COMMENCEMENT (Bugey)
Tasting: Bright red berries, cranberry, subtle alpine herbs, fine bubbles, dry finish. Lively, fresh, brisk.
Pairing: Oysters, charcuterie, grilled salmon, strawberries and cream.
POTTARELLO (Umbria)
Tasting: Dark cherry, wild herbs, tobacco, earthy grip. Structured but approachable, with a rustic Italian soul.
Pairing: Grilled ribeye, wild mushroom risotto, pasta with ragu, aged pecorino.
FORGE CLASSIQUE PINOT NOIR (Finger Lakes)
Tasting: Red cherry, cranberry, wild strawberry, wet stone, fine tannins, mineral finish. Elegant, transparent, cool-climate precision.
Pairing: Duck breast with cherry gastrique, roasted salmon with herbs, mushroom tart, soft cheeses.
Bacco’s Wine Club January 2026
Tenuta di Carleone - Il Randagio Toscana Rosso 2022
Pictured: Sean O’Callagan of Tenuta di Carleone
Sean O’Callaghan—who’ll describe himself, with a wink, as a “one-eyed rascal”—works in rarefied air in the Tuscan countryside, quite literally. Tenuta di Carleone sits in Radda, the highest subzone of Chianti Classico, where elevation brings cooler temperatures, longer growing seasons, and a natural sense of lift. It’s a place that tends to reward transparency over amplitude—wines with line, brightness, and detail rather than bulk.
O’Callaghan first made his name in Chianti at Riecine before building Tenuta di Carleone as a tightly focused, two-person project. His core wines—his Chianti offerings—lean fully into Sangiovese, and the point is not to modernize the grape but to let Radda speak clearly through it. We’ve had the pleasure of featuring his Chianti Classico in the club in the past, and this time around, we’re putting the spotlight on Il Randagio, or “the stray”, due to its focus on the two non-native varietals of the region, Cabernet Franc and Merlot.
In a warmer zone, that blend can easily drift into something plush, sweet-fruited, and oak-led. Here, at altitude, it lands differently. Il Randagio keeps the profile taut and savory: Cabernet Franc’s herbal lift and graphite-like edge, Merlot bringing shape and mid-palate without turning the wine soft. The result feels more “composed” than showy—Tuscan in its structure and dryness, but not trying to play the Chianti Classico game.
In other words, this isn’t your ordinary Super Tuscan.
The Nitty Gritty:
Country: Italy
Region: Tuscany
Subregion: Chianti
Farming: Organic, Biodynamic
Soil: Alberese Limestone and Galestro Sandstone
Blend: 50% Cabernet Franc 50% Merlot
Pictured: Tenuta di Carleone Il Randagio Toscana Rosso 2022
Fattoria Moretto - Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetro Secco 2024
Pictured: Fausto Altariva of Fattoria Moretto
“Moretto is to Lambrusco what Tempier and Terrebrune are to rosé. It reminds me of the best reds of Bandol and Tuscany, with herbs like thyme, and a sort of dusty mineral quality, like you find in some of the top Bordeaux and Tuscan wines.”
Lambrusco is used to being the butt of the joke—the also-ran to Prosecco, and more often derided than Franciacorta, Italy’s official answer to Champagne. But in the right hands, Lambrusco is something altogether different: a wine of real purpose and deep local identity, shaped by food, place, and tradition. Nowhere does that matter more than in Emilia-Romagna, the heartland of Italian cuisine, where Lambrusco has always been a table wine first and a sparkling curiosity second.
Fattoria Moretto began as a passion project for Domenico Altariva in the early 1970s, when he started planting vineyards dedicated to Lambrusco Grasparossa, one of the historic varieties of the region and indigenous to Castelvetro. Sitting just outside Modena, Castelvetro’s hills and clay-rich soils give Grasparossa its signature depth and structure—more intensity and grip than other Lambrusco styles, and a natural affinity for dry, food-driven wines.
What started as a modest husband-and-wife operation grew slowly, guided less by ambition than by continuity. The Altarriva family worked the land as their parents had before them, farming naturally, avoiding pesticides, and trusting the strength of their vineyard sites rather than chasing yield or polish. That commitment shows clearly in the wines today: Lambrusco that is dry, savory, and grounded, with dark fruit, gentle tannin, and a brisk, cleansing finish that makes immediate sense at the table.
Moretto’s Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetro Secco isn’t interested in rewriting the category—it’s interested in reminding you what it can be when treated seriously. Chilled, poured generously, and paired with food, it becomes less a novelty and more a necessity: a wine built for prosciutto, Parmigiano, rich pastas, and the everyday rhythms of a meal shared.
The Nitty Gritty:
Country: Italy
Region: Emilia-Romagna
Subregion: Castelvetro
Farming: Organic
Soil: Alberese Limestone and Galestro Sandstone
Varietal: 100% Grasparossa
Pictured: Fattoria Moretto Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetro Secco
Louis Claude Desvignes - Chateau Gaillard Morgon 2023
Pictured: Claude-Emmanuel and Louis-Benoît Desvignes of Louis Claude Desvignes
Louis-Claude Desvignes was a very particular kind of Beaujolais vigneron—restless, quick-witted, and seemingly incapable of standing still. Tastings in his cellar were as likely to include laughter and asides as they were bottles pulled from every corner of the domaine: experiments, comparisons, older vintages offered purely for context. The energy was light, almost playful. The seriousness of the wines never was.
Desvignes passed away in 2021, having already handed the estate over to his children, Claude-Emmanuelle and Louis-Benoît, the eighth generation of the family to work these vineyards in Morgon. Emmanuelle joined in 2001, and Benoît in 2004. While the core identity of the domaine has remained intact, their stewardship has quietly sharpened it. Today, all production is estate-bottled, the vineyards are certified organic, and the family has begun exploring small, focused bottlings that highlight individual lieux-dits within Morgon.
The Desvignes holdings have long centered on Morgon’s most serious ground. Much of the fruit for the estate’s wines comes from the Côte du Py, widely regarded as the beating heart of the appellation. If Morgon were formally classified, this hill would sit at the top. Its decomposed schist soils—and, in certain parcels, added clay—give the wines their depth, structure, and capacity to age, setting them apart from the lighter, more immediate expressions found elsewhere in Beaujolais.
That pedigree comes into particularly clear focus with Château Gaillard. Once blended into the estate’s broader Morgon cuvée, this 1.03-hectare plot of south-facing, old-vine Gamay proved distinctive enough to stand on its own beginning in 2020. Planted on sandy granite soils near the Fleurie border, the vines—now around 80 years old—deliver fruit with concentration, firmness, and a sense of gravity that feels unmistakably Morgon.
In the cellar, the approach is traditional and restrained: largely whole-cluster fermentation, gentle extraction, and élevage in concrete. The aim is not to soften Morgon’s edges, but to frame them. When young, Château Gaillard shows dark cherry, raspberry, and blackcurrant, carried by a structure that feels composed rather than heavy. With time, the wine begins to “pinotize,” taking on the savory, earthy notes—cocoa, coffee, forest floor—that have long made Morgon one of Beaujolais’ most age-worthy crus.
This is Gamay with intent and patience built in. For Wine Club members, it’s a reminder of why Morgon occupies such a singular place in the region: a wine that drinks beautifully now, but rewards those who give it a little air—or a little time—and one that bridges the space between Beaujolais and Burgundy with confidence rather than comparison.
The Nitty Gritty:
Country: France
Region: Burgundy
Subregion: Morgon
Farming: Organic
Soil: Sandy Granite
Varietal: 100% Gamay
Pictured: Louis Claude Desvignes Chateau Gaillard Morgon 2023