TERROIR
THE FEATURE
The Judgment Of Paris, 50 Years On: Who Won The Redo
Two bottles sit behind glass at the Smithsonian, a 1973 Stag’s Leap Cabernet and a 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay, because a panel of French judges preferred them in a Paris hotel on May 24, 1976. Fifty years on, American wine staged the rematch. Nine judges spent 2024 blind-tasting more than 1,000 American entries down to 20 finalists; last March, 12 judges in New York put those against 20 French counterparts across four grapes.
Nobody in the original script won. Best Chardonnay went to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, best Chenin Blanc to a Mendocino bottling that beat two wines from Saumur, and best Cabernet, the grape California’s whole legend rests on, went to Château Latour. The American argument has moved north and out to the coast. The category that started it went home to Bordeaux.
THE DISPATCH
Latest from this week
Tuscany. Photo: Francesco Sgroi, CC BY 2.0
Vittorio Frescobaldi Dies at 97
The Marchese died on August 26, aged 97. Born in Florence in 1928 into a family whose house dates its winemaking to 1300, he ran Marchesi de’ Frescobaldi for decades and pushed it outward: Castelgiocondo in Montalcino in 1989, Ornellaia in Bolgheri with the Mondavi family in 2002. Piero Antinori told Wine Spectator that “Vittorio’s passing is a big loss not only for his family but for the industry in general.” It closes the generation that decided Tuscan wine should be sold to the world.
Corvina in Valpolicella. Photo: Jonathanischoice, CC BY-SA 4.0
Valpolicella Picks Two Weeks Early and Locks Away a Fifth of the Crop
Picking began on August 26 across the denomination’s 19 comuni, about two weeks ahead of the historical average, with heat and drought pulling the calendar roughly seven days earlier than last year. The Consorzio estimates a crop of 861,000 quintals, in line with 2025, but a storage measure deliberated on April 2 holds back 172,280 quintals, 20 percent of production, cutting the yield growers can actually sell from 100 to 80 quintals a hectare. A region choosing to make less wine than it can grow, and its president still reports grape prices falling.
THE PICK
DOMAINE DES BAUMARD SAVENNIÈRES 2020
The Baumards were growing vines around Rochefort-sur-Loire in 1634. Phylloxera ended that: the family stopped making wine and became nurserymen, selling the rootstock everyone else needed to replant. Jean Baumard relaunched the estate in 1955 and spent fifteen years teaching viticulture in Angers while rebuilding its holdings in Savennières and Quarts de Chaume. Savennières is dry Chenin built for the long haul, quince and chamomile over a wet-stone core, with acid that takes years to unwind.
In 2005 the estate put everything but its Crémant under screwcap, among the earliest in France to go that far, in an appellation whose whole case rests on Chenin that repays twenty years in bottle. A house that survived the last replanting crisis by selling vines, betting against cork in the one place where aging is the argument. It sits at the accessible end of Savennières, which is not where a wine with this much time in front of it usually sits.
Until next Thursday,
Adrian, TERROIR