On 12 August the Pierce’s Disease and Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter Board committed $820,000 of growers’ own reserves after the sharpshooter turned up on nursery grapevines sold at Costco and traced to a Fresno nursery. County officials are chasing nearly 10,000 vines across as many as 40 counties; the Board counted the insect on customer plants in 23 of them as of that date. There is no evidence it has reached a commercial vineyard. An industry in its worst economic stretch in a generation is paying to stop a threat that has not arrived.

On 14 August Angelo Radica, president of Città del Vino, wrote to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Piedmont’s Alberto Cirio demanding immediate action after a hailstorm tore through the Novarese the week before. His letter, carried by ANSA, puts the loss at roughly 90 percent of wine production across comuni including Ghemme, Sizzano and Fara Novarese. Andrea Fontana of the Consorzio Tutela Nebbioli Alto Piemonte says the vines need at least two years to produce again. This is Nebbiolo’s cool northern outpost, small enough that one storm takes a vintage out of the market for years.

Côte du Py is the lieu-dit that defines top-tier Morgon: a granite and blue-schist hill on the appellation’s eastern edge, its iron-rich soils threaded over the volcanic strata below. Morgon is one of ten Cru Beaujolais appellations, the tier that sits above Villages, and the Py is the site that earns it. Domaine Gaget farms there at family scale. What the hill does to Gamay is structural—darker fruit, firmer tannin, and none of the confection the region spent forty years living down.

Drink it with what a Lyonnais bouchon would send out: sausage, lentils, a hard cheese. It sits at the accessible end of the Cru Beaujolais band, which is the whole argument—a named single site in a classified cru, priced like the thing the Fine Wine 1000 will never track.

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