There are times when you put a question to a winemaker and he puffs out his cheeks and rubs his chin and you know he’s thinking, ‘Journalists.’ When I ask Promontory’s David Cilli what exactly is meant by ‘interpretation of terroir’, he courteously describes the process of trying to get the wine to reflect the character of the land. But he gives the impression my question was like quizzing Monet on how he got his effects. If you don’t get it, you probably won’t. The character of Promontory, on the day I visit, is quite something. It’s early May and the rain, which has been falling steadily all night, has turned to a lashing downpour that has raindrops bouncing six inches off the windscreen. We’re in a jeep piloted by winegrowing director Cory Empting and since turning off the main road we’ve been climbing steadily through dripping stands of oak with pocket-handkerchief vineyards between them. ‘Shall we stay in the car?’ asks Empting. ‘If we could,’ Will Harlan suggests from the back seat. I’m here with Empting, Cilli and Harlan. Bill Harlan has appeared briefly but I don’t see him again until we sit down to taste. He formally handed over control of Harlan Estate, Promontory, Bond and The Mascot in 2021, appointing 37-year-old Will managing director. Cilli (44) arrived in 2012 and is in charge of vineyard and winemaking at Promontory. Promontory is an 840-acre fastness, a deep valley folded into the foothills of Mount Veeder, on the west side of the Napa Valley. From the highway, you think the looming ridge you’re looking at is the edge of Sonoma. But there’s another ridge beyond and between them this interesting domain. It’s remote, even by Napa standards (contrary to opinion, there are plenty of wild spaces in the county). The ultra-refined French Laundry is a couple of miles away but it might be in Wisconsin for all the relevance it has up here. Bill Harlan had come upon it hiking in the 1980s. ‘I used the Carmelite monastery [we’d passed it on the way up] as a base and just started climbing’. There were no vines but he was intrigued by its seclusion. It might be possible vineland for the Napa project he had in mind. In the end, Harlan Estate was founded less than a mile to the north but for 25 years Harlan kept the idea of that parcel tucked under his hat (he never mentioned it, Will says) before it came on the market in 2007 and he snapped it up. "Vineyards, some a mere half-acre, are etched into towering, wooded hillsides and drop down into cavernous combes dense with oak and fir" The owner – the Harlans don’t reveal who that is – had planted 80-odd acres of Cabernet Sauvignon. It was neglected, the vines overgrown. Trees had been felled and never collected. ‘It was a mess,’ Will says. ‘It looked like a logging operation.’ But it is magnificent. Vineyards, some a mere half-acre, are etched into towering, wooded hillsides and drop down into cavernous combes dense with oak and fir. The whole estate is thickly forested, the vines often shaded on three sides. An old drovers’ road, running through the woods, will suddenly open out on a wide vista of vineyard and scree. Everything is deeply, lushly green in the steadily falling spring rain. The geology of the land is unusual, in that it rests on two distinct fault lines and consists of all three soil types that are found in Napa: volcanic, sedimentary and metamorphic. ‘You get all three in the same soil pit,’ Cilli notes. This, combined with the wild variation in aspect and the microclimate of the valley-within-a-valley, gives credence to Harlan’s claims that this part of Napa is like nowhere else in California. When the celebrated soil scientists Claude and Lydia Bourguignon came, they found the experience ‘novel’. Cilli said he fell in love with Promontory at first sight. It reminded him, in part, of his native Tuscany, but it was the wildness that captivated him, ‘I love that character that you can see in the wines.’ He said it was probably ‘the only project that could keep me in the valley.’ You get the impression none of them can quite believe their luck. ‘It somehow redefined what looks beautiful,’ Will says. It also redefined their ideas of winemaking. He goes on: ‘We were used to control. Harlan in the 1990s was obsessed with organisation and uniformity but Promontory was wild.’ The theme of wildness recurs. Harvest times are key to ‘find a way for it to come through,’ Will says. Empting: ‘Pick too late and you lose the ruggedness.’ Ageing, in the magnificent Howard Backen-designed chai, is all in Stockinger Austrian oak barrels ranging in size from 10,000 to 46,000 litres, for up to 36 months. ‘The fine-yet-tight tannins required longer barrel-ageing but [we] didn’t want the wine to be overpowered by new oak’. It’s a constant process of refinement and improvement – ‘we learn something new each season’. Empting: ‘It has blown every expectation out of the water. We were excited and we were scared. We didn’t know what this beast would be. Our learning curve has been very steep, it remains very steep. At least now we’re starting to get our arms around it but at the beginning, it was like: God, we cannot figure this thing out.” "I found in the 2016 a moment where the various elements come together: the savoury nose, the fine tannins, the weight without heaviness" You have to remember we’re talking about winemaking here, not Wittgenstein. But ‘interpretation of terroir’, if it’s to mean anything at all, should be taken seriously. I’ve seen vineland all over the world – rock-strewn fields in the Andean foothills, rainless Spanish deserts – but I’ve never seen anything like Promontory. Were I to be tasked with bottling the soul of that vineyard, I’d reach for metaphor as well. And so we come to the missing shade of blue. This is the concept propounded by the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, that an idea can be formulated without a previous sensory impression to give rise to it. He asked, Could a shade of blue missing from a spectrum be imagined by an observer? Harlan says (with a smile – he does have a degree in philosophy) that Promontory is the missing shade of red. ‘Until you’ve seen and experienced it, you don’t know that it’s missing. And so for us this was that final piece. The piece that wasn’t there that we had the opportunity to understand and try to translate into the wine.’ The next morning, in gorgeous May sunshine, we gather to taste. It’s almost the same group, though smaller, that did the mighty vertical of Harlan estate from magnum in 2020. Bill Harlan is there (he sweetly thanks the team for allowing him to taste, saying it’s the first full vertical of Promontory he’s ever done), Will, Empting, Cilli and the journalist Elaine Brown. We wonder, at the end, if there is thread that runs through the wines. In my notes the words ‘deceptively light’ recur, as do ‘structure’ and ‘stone’. Reaching for metaphor again, Will Harlan compares the structure of the 2016 to cathedral stone, which has ‘both weight and lightness. It’s intricately carved and light filters through the windows.’ I found in the 2016 a moment where the various elements come together: the savoury nose, the fine tannins, the weight without heaviness. Will Harlan calls this vintage an ‘inflection point’ and notes how the tannins are the ‘main differentiators’. Yes, agrees Cilli, ‘and because of the character of levity and lift, we have to be precise with the tannins.’ The younger vintages have an astonishing latent energy, tannins under tight rein, aromas bursting, the fruit compacted. Brown and I were struck not by the sophistication of these wines but by their honesty. Brown WhatsApped me later. ‘Promontory is the most transparent to place. The wines are impressively well crafted and elegant while still offering an almost wild or primal complex of flavours.’ "The wines are unmistakeably Californian but they are also unlike anything I’ve tasted in Napa" ‘How do we take wine from a wilderness and have sophistication?’ Will asked. It’s a great question – with their resources, the Harlans could do anything they liked with Promontory. After all, they have to make a wine that will please their audience. But this was so unexpected. The tasting revealed a keen focus on the land and the vintage. The difference between the years was often marked – the challenge of 2015 for example showed in the wine – yet we could see that common thread running through, even as the wines increased in elegance. And what of Will’s quest for the missing shade of red? The wines are unmistakeably Californian – that splendid 2017 could come from nowhere else – but they are also unlike anything I’ve tasted in Napa, which is quite a claim, in the world’s most cultivated wine region. Perhaps the last word should go to Bill Harlan, who started the whole thing. He speaks hardly at all during the tasting, his Old Testament face giving little away. At the end of the morning, he talks of his fascination with the ‘ongoing discovery’ of the project. The wines have character, layers and depth, he says, and – by way of praising their authenticity – he notes, ‘You never know what’s coming next.’

Written for Club Oenologique, contributor Adam Lechmere visits California to trace the evolution of Promontory, one of Napa’s most magnificent sites, with a vertical tasting of 14 vintages revealing the wild beauty, elegance and remarkable evolution of its wines.

Written for Club Oenologique, contributor Adam Lechmere visits California to trace the evolution of Promontory, one of Napa’s most magnificent sites.

Wildness captured: tasting 14 vintages of Promontory

Xiao-Li Meng, Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics at Harvard and Founding Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Data Science Review, was inspired by a student to combine wine and statistics—leading to insights far beyond what they ever expected.

From wine tastings to data science, Xiao-Li Meng explores how statistics reveals simplicity in complexity – one glass, experiment, and insight at a time.

Wine, statistics & serendipity: A Harvard journey

Seeking simplicity in statistics, complexity in wine, and everything else in fortune cookies 

I. Distractions In 1987, when I was 18 and a dollar was worth more than twice as much as it is today, I started reading magazines: M, Esquire, GQ. Nearby, in our somewhat cultured Texas town, a new bookstore opened in a cavernous space that had formerly housed the shag-carpeted roller skating rink of our childhood. Through the front windows, which had before been darkly tinted to give the place an alluring den-of-prepubescent-iniquity vibe, now streamed bright, clean light, showcasing a look and layout that would become the interior design gestalt of today’s national-chain, big-box book superstore. The rows upon rows of open, dustless shelving bearing a veritable warehouse of volumes; the ceiling hung with its industrial innards on display; the enfilade of check-out cubicles; and the wall – the great wall – that displayed a preposterous-to-behold assortment of glossies, quarterlies, journals, newsweeklies, fanzines, tabloids, almanacs, and all other flora and fauna of magazines arrayed upon a rack perhaps 50 feet long.  I went in there to look for a book. I liked books, and, one day, I was sure I wanted to write one. But I got distracted and bought a magazine instead – that August’s issue of GQ, which still stands out in my mind as a thing of formative significance. At that time, the zeitgeist was defined by a Walkman-wearing version of the American Renaissance Man – the highly-ambitious, status-obsessed, money-motivated, health-nut known as a Yuppie. No magazine positioned itself more authoritatively in defining this new sociological creature’s lifestyle than GQ, and it did it with whiter teeth, snappier suspenders, better accessories, bigger polka dots and more caffeine in the ink of its display copy.  I remember that issue less for the photos by Richard Avedon or Steven Meisel, the words of Martin Amis or Frederick Exley, than for this: Erzeugerabfüllung. It was one of the longest, strangest strings of letters from the Roman alphabet I had ever seen. Neither did it seem designed to come out of someone’s mouth. But there it was in Alan Richman’s Wine & Spirits column, accompanied by a lovely still-life photograph of his topic: two bottles of Riesling Kabinetts on a white, sun-dappled tablecloth. Richman’s main point – made almost 35 years ago – still holds true: estate-bottled, table-quality German wines remain some of the least expensive, most delicious wines in the world, chiefly because – then as now – the labels, as he wrote, “cannot be understood by anyone who is not a part-time oenophile, linguist and cartographer”. One US dollar in Richman’s pocket, as I have already said, bought what roughly two-dollars-and-fifty-cents does today; what he was on the hunt for was a good dry white in a range that would now cost somewhere between 12 and 30 bucks, and he easily accomplished that by finding a dealer in New York City who carried a good selection of wines from the Mosel and Rheingau. At the time, I didn’t know the meaning or significance of any of this, but it staked a claim in my brain. The only wine I had ever tasted was the one served at our Episcopal church during Eucharist on Sundays. The flavour it had was of a strange, super-concentrated jam that somehow warmed your upper body. Even as a young kid, I liked it. But the adjectives these German bottles were squeezing out of Richman – “citrus-like”, “honeyed”, “tart-sweet” – weren’t close to describing what was in that chalice, even if you believed in transubstantiation. Was it because Richman’s wine was white, and the parish’s was red? Perhaps, but both colours of grape juice bottled by Welch’s tasted pretty much the same to me. No, I sensed there was something – a lot – I had to learn, and, along with the romance and beauty of the labels, and the contextual air of well-bred taste and cultural with-it-ness featured on the other pages, this, I feel sure, was the decisive moment, the true origin point, when I came to believe that among the many extraordinary things that make life worth living, not just words but wine reigns at the top.  I warned you about distractions, didn’t I? Because that would be my excuse for now informing you, as a quite apropos footnote, that, yes, there was something unusual about our church’s Communion wine. It was, as I have confirmed with the church, actually port (Taylor’s Tawny, to be more accurate), cut, according to tradition, with water. There is a good and fascinating reason for this. In 1701, when the War of the Spanish Succession kicked off, France also became an enemy of England, and its wines, as a result, were no longer made available for import. The Anglican Church searched for and found a replacement, the fortified wines of its new ally, Portugal, and port continues to be an acceptable option to pair with the Host.  II. Distillations A satisfying story, not unlike a satisfying life, is one that surprises you with the mystery of its unfolding. A thing pulls in a certain direction long enough to reach the proximity of something else which then turns toward a new destination. I had actually gone into that bookstore, as I said, to look at books. But I came out, even though I didn’t yet know it, with a different compass point. Within a few years, shortly after graduating from college, in 1992, I got hired by The New Yorker, where I stayed for almost nine years. I then met my future wife, who wisely laughed at the thought we might be able to survive in New York City on my meagre salary, so I went to Vogue, and soon after became the founding editor of Men’s Vogue. After 23 issues, and four years, the financial crisis laid an axe to many magazines, including that one. Eventually, I took on the editorship of Town & Country. Then, finally, in 2016, I moved up to Esquire, the magazine, as it happens, that didn’t offer me a job when The New Yorker did, and became that storied magazine’s editor in chief, until – well, you best read about that in The New York Times.  As far as distractions go, magazines were a good one. They made me who I am, gave me a tremendously worldly education, honed my taste, introduced me to all manner of accomplished people, required me to build quite a wardrobe, and paid me pretty well to do all of this, often with a glass of wine not far out of the picture. There was really no other way I would have ever got to taste all the bottles I have (a lot of the big names people whisper about from Burgundy and Bordeaux, Champagne and also Piedmont, Tuscany and Napa). I built a modest cave à vin of my own by buying the Smith Haut Lafittes of the world way before hedge-fund hoi polloi ran up the prices, and by having access to rare offerings, like 12 bottles of Fiorano, the legendary white wine Alberico Boncompagni Ludovisi, prince of Venosa, made before ripping out all his vines. I smelled the musty perfume of Margaux in the cellar as I watched the workers rack the wine by candlelight. I lured Jay McInerney away from the Wall Street Journal to become my wine columnist; and I once stood in Bordeaux’s town square, tight on 2002 Pétrus, trying with great focus to commune with the statue of Michel de Montaigne while my French friend, a true oenophile, extolled the majesty of the Big Mac’s special sauce.  As the editor of a magazine, curiosity is your profession, even to the point of distraction. Editors – writers, too – are prone to it. It’s a hazard of the gift, and having a jumble of ideas, if you’re any good, is key to making a magazine of any real intellectual or creative daring. Now as a husband and father of three, working from home and trying to be ‘present’, and a still youngish former editor and occasional micro-influencer trying to stave off the solitude to fathom and plot the next phase of a fruitful future, this skill of mine, the strength of which became even more magnified over two decades, is something of a family project.  The way I most often hear the word ‘distraction’ now, for instance, is when it’s being hurled at me in verb form by my wife or daughters accusing me of being more of a phone-enslaved screen vegetable than they are. (I respectfully disagree.) But it’s a sore point for two reasons. One, what I did as an editor is, in a nutshell, now what a smartphone essentially does. Not very imaginatively, of course, and not with taste or charm or originality, but with a bloody, money-grubbing ruthlessness that stalks every step of our digital peregrinations and doesn’t give a twist if the algorithms that are its brain make us its slave by retrofitting our attention spans for kindergarten.  The smartphone – not the former me or any of my fellow kind still in the media biz – is now the true croupier of culture, dealing out a targeted shuffle of Pavlovian temptations to the point of daily mental exhaustion. And, though this thing is in many ways my personal nemesis, I am, against every fibre of my being, too often its obedient servant. Aiming not to live according to the famous line by T.S. Eliot – “distracted from distraction by distraction” – I recently decided to at least take a serious inventory of my favourite ones, both those of the pre-digital sort (tennis, The Walking Dead, checking the mailbox, my sock collection) and those of the post-digital sort (the any and everything I do because my phone wants me to). Then I caught myself watching tennis on my phone and realised this might be harder than I thought. It’s enough to drive a person to drink, thank god! With that in mind, I like to keep a special something for the occasion around, in this case – what else? – two bottles of Riesling Kabinett, for it had struck me as more than a little weird that I’ve probably tasted fewer than a handful of German wines in my entire life. Part of the reason is that those I had were bad, and, like a lot of other simpletons about this great wine region of the world, I’d come to think of Riesling as a cloying elixir equal parts green Jolly Rancher, apple cider vinegar, and hairspray. This, I knew, was wrong, not true and, in terms of wine equity and inclusion, on the wrong side of history. But, if you happen to live in a place like I do – a bourgie swathe of Connecticut bordering New York City where the shops cater heavily to Cali-Fran-Taly banker’s tastes – it might take you a few stops to find what Richman recommended, an erzeugerabfüllung (estate-bottled) Kabinett (wine made from grapes with a minimum must weight/sugar content) Riesling, and when you do it will probably be coated in a fine sift of years-old dust. I bought a green (Mosel) bottle for US$16 and a brown (Rhine) bottle for US$20, both handsomely labelled. I opened them a few minutes ago and took several investigative swigs. The words bright, invigorating and snappy came to mind. One is indeed sweeter, and, though not my usual jam, it is tamped by a pleasing peachy tartness, and the classic overtone of honey isn’t making my palate feel doused with syrup. The other example is, as Richman said so long ago, a very finely layered creature with mineral clarity and an echo of baked bread, something a gluten-free person like me finds particularly appealing. A rather obvious thought: why haven’t I been buying this instead of throwing a ton of endless money at affordably bad white Burgundy, which is mostly a product aimed at fulfilling a desired outcome, like White Claw hard seltzer? III. Words But don’t let me get distracted, again. A writer really has to be careful about such things. Just think about it. Unlike, say, a painter or musician or actor or photographer, the process of writing requires zero physical exertion, no chance to score an endorphin release while sitting staring anxiously at a blank page. Of the many things in life that vie against the counter intuitive impulse to be glued to a desk, Cyril Connolly, in Enemies of Promise, his classic study of the things that distracted him (and others) from becoming a great writer, names the temptations but does not say much about why they’re so deeply tempting to someone who would otherwise be sitting alone in an empty room. Praise, money, fame, social prominence, affairs and journalism are the most common boltholes, according to Connolly, who, as a famously late sleeper that married three times, might have also added the bliss of unconsciousness and excessive alimony. In 1938, the year the book was published, he would never have imagined how hard the task might get without a cigarette. Smoking is a death wish, I know, but when you want to off yourself for still having a hundred pages to go, being able to snap open a nice lighter, flick some ash, stub a butt and inhale some lungfuls of focus-enhancing nicotine must have been kind of helpful. Connolly also doesn’t have much to say about drink except that artists who drink to excess do so “out of the consciousness of wasted ability”. According to that, the 20th century’s most famous literary alcoholics – Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Styron, Elizabeth Bishop, James Joyce, Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner – might have left behind even greater treasures than they did. Because Ernest Hemingway did almost everything with more gusto than any of his peers, including running up his bar tab, as a drinker he belongs in his own sentence. He is the novelist who most romanced a good drink or nice bottle of wine as one of life’s great pleasures. Who didn’t want to have a vermouth with Jake when reading The Sun Also Rises? (Don’t, it’s gross, at least if you order it at one of those kiosks in Montmartre where the bottles are hung upside down with spring-loaded dispensers.) Or, track down a bottle of Valdepeñas, Hemingway’s favourite variety of Spanish wine. Or, get a drink at the bar named after him at the Ritz, in Paris, and then go somewhere on the Left Bank to order “a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of the dry white wine”.  In the early work, he is not boastful about drinking so much as he is the possessor of an unusual appetite for a good buzz. He is also, like Connolly, aware of the need to keep writing separate from drinking, and drinking within his control. It is hard to read the first paragraph of A Moveable Feast, in which he describes an “evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness”, except as a kind of terrifying admonition to himself. It is tragic that he didn’t heed his own advice. Late in his life, Hemingway became fond of rum daiquiris at the Floridita, his favourite bar in Havana, which might explain his taste for a prose style that soon became too often cloying self-parody. In one of the most extraordinary drinking sessions ever committed to words, in the roman à clef Across the River and Into the Trees, a 50-year-old Hemingway, who was smitten with a teenage Italian countess from Venice, fictionalises his infatuation with a last muse. In one stretch (that covers an evening-to-dawn crawl from Harry’s Bar, the grill at the Gritti Palace, a gondola and a hotel room), one half or another of the couple imbibes: one scotch whisky and soda; six Montgomery Martinis (15 parts gin; 1 part vermouth), two of which are described in size as ‘super’; a bottle of Capri Bianco; two bottles of Valpolicella; two bottles of Roederer Brut ’42; and two bottles of Perrier-Jouët. That is, I suppose, one extreme, and, clearly, not one to be tried at home.  The other might have been espoused by Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great critic and lexicographer. As a young man, he’d drained “many a bottle of wine” but loved port especially. (Perhaps Johnson, a devout Anglican who was born in 1709, in the midst of England’s 14-year war with Spain, also first encountered port as a boy at the Communion altar.) He describes himself to friend and biographer James Boswell as having been “apt to go to excess in it”, adding that, “therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it”.  Boswell, who worried about his own dependence on alcohol, even keeping a journal of his intake in an attempt to enforce moderation, argued for a third way, which some of the Romantics later adopted. Wine, he claimed, “produces truth; in vino veritas”. Hoping to persuade Johnson of his point, Boswell once convinced the critic to come down off the wagon for just one glass of claret, so Johnson “might judge, not from recollection, which might be dim, but from immediate sensation”. Boswell reports what happened after the glass was emptied: “Johnson shook his head, and said, ‘Poor stuff! No, Sir, claret is the liquor for boys; port, for men,’” adding, “‘A man would be drowned by it before it made him drunk.’”  That actually reminds me of something I think I forgot to mention about Riesling Kabinetts – they’re also highly admired for their low percentage of alcohol. On that note, I think I’ll have another glass.  This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue Two.

Jay Fielden, former editor of Men’s Vogue, Town & Country and Esquire, recalls how a magazine column on wine, read in a Texas bookstore, shifted his ambitions beyond journalism and set him on the path to becoming a writer of books.

Former Esquire editor-in-chief Jay Fielden reflects on magazines, writing, Riesling Kabinett and the distractions that shaped a life in words and wine.

Jay Fielden on Wine, Words and Distraction

How one became another  

Group CEO Patrick O’Connor reflects on Bordeaux 2025: a hot, dry and early vintage defined by small yields, precise viticulture, restrained winemaking and a new wave of estates delivering wines of real distinction.

Patrick O’Connor, Group CEO, explores Bordeaux 2025: a hot, dry, early vintage shaped by precision, small yields and standout wines.

Bordeaux 2025 en primeur: vintage overview      

Bordeaux 2025: vintage overview               

Every now and then, the word ‘singularity’ is used to describe a particular wine that stands apart, for whatever reason, from other wines of its type. But just what is singularity, and how can wine express it? Wine writer Tamlyn Currin investigates.

What makes a wine truly singular? Tamlyn Currin explores the rare bottles that defy convention and challenge the rules of the wine world.

Searching for Singularity in wine

Searching for Singularity

Sitting plum in the middle of the Côte d’Or, the hill of Corton is hard to miss. Its wines, especially the whites, however, are all too often overlooked. We sat down with some of the region’s leading producers to explore the pedigree and potential of this site and its powerful, long-lasting wines

Discover the pedigree and potential of the hill of Corton’s whites – the fine Chardonnay from Corton-Charlemagne, Charlemagne and Corton Blanc 

Exploring Corton-Charlemagne, Charlemagne and Corton Blanc 

Corton-Charlemagne: the Grand Cru of the future?  

Some of Nicolas Champagneux’s earliest memories are of life in the vines – of the hubbub of harvest with his grandparents. It’s not the hard work that he recalls, it’s “des bons moments de famille” he tells me – the convivial spirit that infused the air. He grew up in the heart of Côte-Rôtie, spending weekends and holidays in his family’s vineyard – a swathe of Les Grandes Places, a prized site in the commune of Verenay, where his great-grandfather planted vines at the start of the 20th century.  Les Grandes Places is an extraordinary site – with the most famous producer arguably Jean-Michel Gérin. In the north of the Côte Brune, in a southwest-facing amphitheatre, this steep site has crumbly mica schist soils, which allow the vines’ roots to drive deep into the bedrock. It’s home to some very old vines – such as the centenarian plantings that Champagneux farms – and produces wines that are beautifully elegant yet with dark, fleshy power. Champagneux has almost two hectares here, having the largest holdings. Nicolas’s uncle André took over running the vineyard after his grandparents, while his father Gérard went to work in a factory. There wasn’t enough money for both brothers to join the family business back then, with Côte-Rôtie not nearly as sought-after as it is today. Other than a couple of barrels for personal consumption, the family didn’t make wine, farming the site and selling almost all the fruit to Guigal, one of the Northern Rhône’s most famous names.  Indeed, beyond the family vineyard, Nicolas spent a lot of time at Guigal – after his father Gérard left life on the factory floor to head up their viticulture team. From 16, Nicolas would work there in his holidays to earn some money. When Champagneux turned 18, he needed to find a job: he was determined not to work in an office and loved being outside, so he ended up becoming a high-wire electrician – working with huge currents of 20,000 volts. “You were never in the same place, each day was different, each task was different – so there was no monotony,” he says. He often finished his day early, and – a farmer born and bred, unaccustomed to the concept of relaxing – would go help in the family vineyard.  When his uncle passed away, there was no one else to take over the domaine – so he stepped up to the plate, keen to ensure his family’s heritage was preserved. He decided to start keeping the fruit and making wine under the family name, wanting to see the year’s efforts captured. He knew how to work the vines but had never dreamt of being a winemaker – but, never one to be put off by a challenge, he learnt on the job. That was 2014, and the wines have rapidly earned him a reputation in the region. The family cellar had the essentials, but the first few vintages were made with the bare minimum – with a new cellar built in 2016 (Yves Cuilleron advised on the project).  Almost a decade after he left the world of pylons, transformers and conductors behind, life might follow an annual cycle, but it’s as un-monotonous as it was before. Nicolas works as a one-man band and values the independence that brings – managing his own time and being his own boss. “There is still a lot to do and each year is different,” he tells me. He hopes his son will join him at some point – he was born in 2009, and his uncle put away a stash of wine from the vintage, some of which is set to be released for its 20th anniversary in 2029.   Climate change is at the forefront of his mind, with harvests now early September and even August versus October under his uncle. Where they used to struggle to get 13% potential alcohol, his wines often sit at 14-14.5%. He’s now working with grass cover, deleafing less and using a little whole bunch in warmer years to preserve freshness in the wines. Otherwise, little has changed in the decade since he started – he continues to work as simply as possible, looking to translate the vines he grew up amongst into wine. And that’s just what he does: the wines are elegant expressions of Les Grandes Places, perfumed and suave, with a fine grip of tannins and an underlying savoury salinity, ageing beautifully – as a mini-vertical of the 2015, 2016 and 2017 vintages showed recently.   The Nicolas Champagneux wines  From his four hectares of vines, Nicolas Champagneux makes three wines: an IGP Vin de Pays des Collines Rhodaniennes La Rémise and two Côte-Rôties, Les Grandes Places and La Dédicace, all made with 100% Syrah.   La Dédicace comes from the younger vines in Les Grandes Places, with a “mere” 40-60 years behind them on average. Around 6,000-7,000 bottles are produced of this “baby” Grandes Places.   Les Grandes Places comes from his oldest vines, averaging a little over 100 years in age, with some planted in 1910. Just 1,500 bottles or so are made of this wine each vintage.  Both the Côte-Rôtie wines are made in exactly the same way, mostly de-stemmed with  little whole-bunch added in warmer vintages and fermented with indigenous yeast, reaching a maximum 28-30°C, and spending around three weeks on skins. The wine then spends 20-24 months in old oak before bottling.  Nicolas Champagneux Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places: a vertical tasting  2022 Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places: This is packed with spicy intensity – clove and cardamom along with a hit of Szechuan pepper. The palate offers a juicy lushness, layered with deep, concentrated dark cherry fruit and a twist of black tapenade, with mouth-coating tannins and all refreshed by a line of vibrant acidity. A baby now, best approached from 2030.  2021 Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places: A really impressive 2021, poised and powerful, Champagneux’s Les Grandes Places needs air but gradually reveals pepper spice and more delicate, lifted, violet florals. There is, however, power and weight to the palate – more than you might expect from the pretty nose, with a savoury firmness, supple but structured tannins and juicy acidity. It’s dark and brooding, gothic with its haunting florals, with a long, mouth-watering, saline finish. Approach from 2027.  2017 Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places: The 2017 Les Grandes Places combines delicate florals with a bloody, iron note on the nose, leading on to a palate layered with bramble fruit. The tannins are round, supple and soft-textured, with tangy acidity that cuts through the concentrated fruit, while the long finish is scented with white pepper and parma violets.  2016 Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places: This 2016 is in a gorgeous place. Heady incense combines with sweet cherry fruit and a touch of smoke on the nose, leading onto a palate that you sink into – the wine soft and supple, with waves of sweet fruit, yet all cut by an intensely saline, savoury edge. Fresh and flawlessly balanced, decant and enjoy now and over a good decade to come.   2015 Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places: The sternest of the trio of 2015, 2016 and 2017, this is a powerful and impressive vintage of Les Grandes Places – with all the best characteristics of the year. The wine is dark and broody, compact and amazingly primary still, with black cherry fruit and blackberry filling the nose. On the palate, however, it has amazing purity and intensity, with a crystalline quality to the fruit, plenty of acidity to complement its concentration and the firm tannins. Smoky, saline notes linger in the mouth, with a dusting of petal florals on the finish. Decant if opening now, but this will be even better if you can resist for another few years.  Explore all current listings from Nicolas Champagneux including a range of back-vintages or read more about the Rhône 

It’s almost a decade since Nicolas Champagneux took over his family’s vines and started making wine under his own name – the first generation to do so. We sat down with the vigneron to find out more about his heritage and the journey so far 

How the talented young vigneron in Cote-Rotie has taken his family’s legacy and created a new domaine that is one of the Rhone’s most exciting 

Nicolas Champagneux – building on his birthright 

Nicolas Champagneux: building on his birthright 

For Marelise Niemann, the lure of wine is the very thing that might frustrate less intuitive winegrowers. “You’re never in control: you’re always humbled,” she says – by the weather, by the baboons that eat your grapes, by nature. Humbling though it may be, Niemann has made Grenache her mission – crafting South Africa’s finest, most elegant expressions of this grape under her Momento label.  It's perhaps not surprising, given the style of her wines, that it was a vintage in Burgundy that provided her lightbulb moment. At the time, in the late noughties, South Africa was still focused on producing big wines: bold reds, extracted and heavily oaked, were seen as the best. Parker’s influence was lingering, and South Africa was still bouncing back from apartheid and the stifling monopoly of the KWV. But a stint working with Pinot Noir made Niemann realise the surprising and sometimes incongruous power of delicacy – in short, that bigger wasn’t always better.  And she was one of many on a similar journey. South Africa’s New Wave movement was gathering pace. Led by the likes of Eben Sadie, Adi Badenhorst, and Chris and Andrea Mullineux, these producers were crafting fresh and fine wines, reinventing South Africa’s vinous identity. What started in the Swartland soon swept across the nation, and Niemann was part of this groundswell.  It was farming that first drew her to wine, having spent time as a child on her grandparents’ farm in Stanford, a small village in the Overberg, getting up at the crack of dawn to help milk the cows or do whatever else needed doing. Although her parents both left agriculture behind, she wanted to work the land. Growing up in Elgin, dominated by apples but with a nascent grape industry, she decided to try viticulture. Late nights with many bottles at university in Stellenbosch convinced her that growing grapes wasn’t enough, and soon her degree had broadened to include winemaking.  After travelling the world and doing vintages in the Rhône and California, she got a job working alongside Sebastian Beaumont – who had just taken over his family’s estate, Beaumont Family Wines. It was here, she explains, that she could unlearn everything in the books. While there, she continued to travel and do vintages in the Northern Hemisphere – including the aforementioned stint in Burgundy.   Although Pinot Noir was her inspiration, it was the freshness and vibrancy that she was chasing, rather than Pinot itself – well aware that much of South Africa is simply too hot and dry for the variety. A trip to Terroir al Limit (the Priorat project created by Dominik Huber and Eben Sadie in 2001) in 2010 was pivotal. She fell instantly for the region’s beautiful old Garnacha vines, and the lighter styles that Huber and Sadie were producing.   She immediately returned and sought out a parcel of Grenache in the Western Cape. She bought two tonnes from a 50-year-old vineyard in the Swartland with Donovan Rall (of Rall Wines); he picked the fruit and trucked it down to Stellenbosch, where they stashed it illicitly in a university cold room overnight courtesy of a friend, and she then drove it down to Beaumont. The winemaking was minimal, in part because she was busy making the Beaumont wines, and she didn’t have any equipment – but also because it was what the vineyard gave her, leaning towards a lighter, more fragrant style. The first vintage of Momento Grenache was born. That was 2011, and before she’d even decided on a name or considered designing a label for the bottled product, it was chosen for the famous Young Guns tasting. (Her husband – an artist – sketched the vine you’ll see on the label today, with faces in the trunk, because for Niemann wine isn’t just the geeky stuff, but the people – both those who make it and those who enjoy it.)  Fast forward a decade, and Momento has earned quite the reputation. Niemann was named Tim Atkin MW’s Young Winemaker of the Year in his 2023 South Africa Report, and critics gush over the wines from this “Grenache-whisperer” (as dubbed by Malu Lambert, Decanter).  Although Niemann makes a Chenin Blanc/Verdelho blend and Tinta Barocca, Grenache is very much the core of the Momento range – with Grenache Gris and Blanc, as well as several different bottlings of Grenache Noir. It’s unsurprising given the beautifully fragrant, fine and fresh style of her wines that those she looks to for inspiration are Rayas (of course), but also those of Sierra de Gredos (such as Comando G), and finer, new-wave examples from Australia too – like Yangarra or S.C. Pannell. With the 2022 vintage, she introduced three additional single-site expressions of Grenache Noir, adding a bottling from Botrivier shale, Piekenierskloof sandstone and Riebeekberg schist, alongside her Paardeberg wine (previously labelled as Swartland, or Western Cape, all on granite). The idea is to show what Grenache can do in South Africa, speaking of their different soils, yet all retaining her trademark vibrancy and delicacy.  For Niemann, Grenache and the other varieties she works with aren’t an arbitrary choice, but those that are sustainable in the South African climate. Almost all the vineyards she works with are dry-farmed (with one that she’s weaning off its water-dependency). She points to the drought of 2015-2018 with its threat of Day Zero, when no one could irrigate their vines: she recalls how the Cabernet and Merlot in a neighbouring vineyard gave up, offering little to no crop, but it wasn’t the case with her Grenache, which “just carried on with life”. As she says, “There will be another day zero in South Africa. It will become hotter and drier. We need to farm varietals that don’t need to be irrigated.” Grapes like Grenache, Chenin and Verdelho, alongside Cinsault and Carignan are – for her – the answer. “It’s what our climate wants us to plant,” she says.  One thing’s for sure: if this is the future for South African wine, it’s incredibly exciting. Forget high-alcohol, soupy sweet Grenache; Niemann’s wines are fine-boned, fresh, textured, perfumed and pure – wines that speak of place. Allocations of her single-site bottlings vanished almost instantly on release – and I’m in no doubt that her star will only continue to rise. Snap these wines up while you can.  Explore the Momento range or read more about South Africa 

Named Tim Atkin MW’s Young Winemaker of the Year in 2023, Marelise Niemann is crafting some of South Africa’s most exciting wines. We sat down with the Momento winemaker to talk about her journey into wine, falling head-over-heels for Burgundy and why Grenache is the future for the Western Cape

Sitting down with Marlise Niemann, the winemaker behind Momento wines in Bot River, South Africa – Tim Atkin’s Young Winemaker of the Year 2023

Redefining Grenache: Marelise Niemann’s Momento wines

Redefining Grenache: Momento 

Elke Vineyards

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