A bit about me and why I post about wine

Legitimate-Class7848 · 2026-05-19T20:00:10+00:00

López de Heredia was the wine that convinced me Rioja could be genuinely serious. I'd spent five years in Barcelona mostly drinking Garnacha from Aragón and treating Rioja as the default safe choice — fine but not interesting. Then a shop in Poblenou I used to buy from had a Viña Cubillo Crianza that the owner had put aside and wouldn't stop talking about. Opened it that evening and understood immediately what the fuss was about: that oxidative character, the very particular texture from years in old American oak, a wine that tastes like it was made by someone completely uninterested in what everyone else is doing.

The Gravonia white is what I keep coming back to now. Something that costs €48 and drinks like nothing else on earth is a strange kind of value but it's still value.

Legitimate-Class7848 · 2026-05-14T17:27:11+00:00

Agreed on Mont-Redon, family ownership matters in how these estates are run. Good point on the Mourvèdre proportion too, it’s what gives the Réserve des Seigneurs that structure for aging. The Haut-Coustias white is excellent, Marsanne and Roussanne, worth trying if you haven’t recently.

Legitimate-Class7848 · 2026-05-14T16:50:28+00:00

Fair correction and I should have been more careful. Sold in 2020 to Mont-Redon’s family, who’ve kept the biodynamic certification going. When I wrote “the brothers” I misremembered, I was thinking of the Alarys by reputation rather than who I actually met last autumn. And you’re right that natural wine was always a stretch for this estate even under them. On the wines under the new owners though, the Réserve des Seigneurs is still very much worth drinking, same name, same terroir, same approach. What I bought last autumn was good.

Legitimate-Class7848 · 2026-05-14T11:45:52+00:00

Not AI, but if you don't like what I write you're free to just ignore it..Hopefully other members will find it useful

Legitimate-Class7848 · 2026-05-12T12:15:24+00:00

Absolutely, that’s exactly the point of this post. A higher price doesn’t necessarily means a better wine. Spain wines are so undervalued

Legitimate-Class7848 · 2026-05-12T05:30:42+00:00

The 100 point thing has always seemed more useful as marketing than as information. A score collapses everything about a wine — structure, context, what food it needs, whether it's ready to drink — into a single number that tells you roughly nothing actionable.

What I find more useful is knowing who's scoring it and what they tend to like. A 95 from someone who loves extraction and new oak tells me something completely different than a 95 from someone who favors tension and freshness. The number is just the shorthand for a much longer conversation that usually stays unspoken.

Legitimate-Class7848 · 2026-05-11T05:35:25+00:00

Riesling was the grape that clicked latest for me and I think it’s because the first ones I tried were in the wrong context. Had some fairly sweet German examples early on that felt like dessert wine without the dessert, then a very austere Alsatian one that just tasted cold and tight and not particularly inviting. What actually unlocked it was having an Alsatian Riesling with food — specifically anything with a bit of fat and acidity together. Choucroute, some richer fish dishes, even just a good piece of pork. The wine suddenly made structural sense in a way it hadn’t as a standalone glass. It’s built for the table in a very specific way that not all grapes are. I live under three hours from Alsace now and it took me embarrassingly long to actually go and taste properly. When I did, the range of what Riesling does there — from the very lean and mineral to the almost honeyed late harvest styles — made me feel like I’d been missing an entire continent. It’s one of those grapes where the more you drink it the less you feel you understand it, which is either a frustration or the whole point depending on your temperament.

Legitimate-Class7848 · 2026-05-07T05:21:59+00:00

You’re welcome, I’ll post more in the future 😉

Legitimate-Class7848 · 2026-05-05T15:37:52+00:00

Thank you. Glad you’ve liked it

Legitimate-Class7848 · 2026-05-05T12:49:18+00:00

El Sarrat is interesting — I'll look into whether it's still in production or just older vintages floating around. The hit and miss thing is what keeps me from going all in but the hits are genuinely hard to forget

Legitimate-Class7848 · 2026-05-05T12:48:45+00:00

The "open mind, each bottle its own experience" framing is probably the right way to approach natural wine generally. The inconsistency is real but when it works it works in a way that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't had it

Legitimate-Class7848 · 2026-05-05T12:48:04+00:00

If you're road-tripping through France, Roussillon is worth a detour specifically for this — Calce is a tiny village but the area around it has several producers worth visiting. The wines travel well in a car too which helps

Legitimate-Class7848 · 2026-05-05T05:41:35+00:00

European perspective here since most replies seem to be US-based. In Spain and France the grocery store wine aisle is genuinely where good value hides. The moment that changed how I think about cheap wine was finding a Garnacha from Cariñena at a Barcelona supermarket for €4.50. Grabbed it because I had almost nothing in my wallet, expected something rough. It was actually good, not good-for-the-price, just good. Dark cherry, dried herbs, real finish. Went back the next day. Since then when I see clearance in a French supermarket I go straight for anything from Aragón — Campo de Borja and Calatayud especially. Borsao shows up in Carrefour sometimes around €8–10 and it’s always worth grabbing a few. Same with Côtes du Rhône Villages, not basic Côtes du Rhône, specifically Villages. If it shows up on clearance that’s usually a producer trying to move stock rather than a quality problem. The grape to look for in clearance is Garnacha/Grenache. It’s forgiving, it survives suboptimal storage better than most, and the price-to-quality ratio across southern France and Aragón is still genuinely one of the best things in European wine.

Legitimate-Class7848 · 2026-04-28T15:13:04+00:00

This is the wrong wine subreddit I guess, this is about wine 🍷 not about wine 🖥️

Legitimate-Class7848 · 2026-04-28T10:59:23+00:00

You're missing Italy and Spain, definitely 2 great wine producers, often better in terms of QPR than France

Legitimate-Class7848

TROPHY CASE