Barcelona, May 2026.

I had just rolled into his restaurant Xemei, our meeting point, straight from the airport. The place wasn’t yet open—chairs still stacked, soaking in the quiet of the morning. A man with a thick head of brilliant white hair sat out on the terrace under a clear Mediterranean sky. He sipped exactly the drink I was salivating for: A coffee. ‘Best bread baker in Barcelona’, Stefano Colombo said to me, motioning to the coffee drinker.

I was here to interview Stefano on his past and how he and his twin brother Max, transplants from Venice, came to create one of the most well-known natural wine bars in the world—Bar Brutal.

Stefano snapped off a section from a bouquet of baguettes that the baker had just delivered. With the crack of the crust and the sour perfume of the crumb, the bread was more French than Catalan, but then Stefano is more Italian than Spanish.

Natural wine came late to Spain. The Colombos were part of the dynamite that ignited the scene. First came Xemei, where I stood, the little dive in the then-overlooked neighbourhood of Poble-sec.

Bar Brutal, initially a partnership with wine importer Joan Valencia and winemaker Joan Ramón (one of the original Brutal label group), opened in 2013. Within a quick year, they were a legend in the making. No self-respecting natural wine drinker could be within a hundred miles and not make a pilgrimage. The bar was a catalyst, a laboratory for natural wine icons and experiments. Finally, an explosion of local Catalans began working naturally, and that energy spread to almost every DO in the country.

The cult of Brutal was well known to me long before I ever walked through the bar’s door. Every damned time I’d been to Barcelona since 2013, the place had been closed. Whether it was a private event, a holiday, a hangover, there was always some cosmic joke at my expense. It took until the spring of 2026 to finally get Brutalised.

While vibrant, busy, and delicious, it wasn’t the frenzied, intense party scene of the bar in its youth—at least on the night I was there.

Stefano turned 50 this year. Bar Brutal: A Cookbook of Revelations is just out. The sum of these two parts indicates, he had told me, that the man and bar were in a different phase. It was time for another coffee nearby and for me to find out what exactly that meant.

Subscribe now

Read more

Temuri Ugulava died in the early hours of June 22 while undergoing treatment for lung cancer. He was 56.

I feel honored to have known him, to have written about him, to have seen and experienced his vision, especially in Udabno, what appears to be the largest regenerative farm on that side of the world. His dedication was mad genius and utterly sincere.

Having come of age during the difficult years of Soviet collapse and its aftermath, he went on to become one of the people who helped reshape modern Georgia. He did so with generosity, enthusiasm, and an abiding love for his country. He was an extremely lovable man whose impact reached far beyond wine.

He was deeply loved, and he made an enduring difference in the country he cared for so passionately.

I wrote the below story last year for Air Mail. It covered the way he came to natural wine and saw it as a change delivery system for Georgia.

My heart goes out to his children, his wife Nato, who was such a good sport about this particular article.

Under the Georgian Sun

Stamba Hotel, in Tbilisi, has made a business out of being a hive for hip locals and serving the best natural wines Georgia has to offer

By Alice Feiring

July 19, 2025

Opened in 2018, Stamba Hotel didn’t take long to achieve icon status in Tbilisi, Georgia. Extracted from the ribs of a 1960s modernist printing house and office, the hotel knits together Soviet industrial and Russian Revival architecture with hints of Frank Lloyd Wright and a Wes Anderson attitude.

But while many luxury hotels try to keep the locals out, Stamba, owned by the Georgian hotel chain Adjara Group, has made a business out of drawing them to the hotel’s co–working space D-Block, to take selfies with resident lobby dog Kimchee or to grab a bottle of wine and drink it in the jasmine-twined courtyard.

Along with well-known actors and musicians such as John Malkovich and Patti Smith, Adjara owner Temur Ugulava himself can be spotted on the floor in a T-shirt, with a tangle of keys and a couple of tools spilling from his pocket just in case something needs fixing. (Yet, the 57-year-old cleans up well, and the affectionate joke is that everyone wants to be his next ex.)

His latest love isn’t a woman, though. It is something ingrained in the cultural fabric of Georgia: wine. Specifically, natural wine—organic with nothing added or taken away.

Ugulava had been a mezcal drinker who grudgingly made room for Bordeaux and Puligny-Montrachet. But as he watched his country’s 8,000-year-old wine-making tradition come back to life, he felt the urge to learn more. The American expat wine-maker John Wurdeman, of Pheasant’s Tears in Sighnaghi, Georgia, advised him to visit Copenhagen, with its deep larder of older Georgian vintages. There, Ugulava would experience what a city on fire for natural wine looked like. With Wurdeman guiding, Ugulava drank and ate his way from high-end Noma to low-key Propaganda. “I found emotion in a drink that previously bored me,” Ugulava said.

It was at the Copenhagen wine importer Rosforth & Rosforth’s somewhat disorganized office and shop, Under the Bridge, that Ugulava found his inspiration. “I loved the chaos, the boxes, the unpretentious shelving, where customers grabbed bottles and drank them by the canal.”

Within a month, he had moved the former wine director of Noma, Mads Kleppe, to Tbilisi to oversee the new wine program, and soon after he converted his properties—the Rooms hotel chain, Stamba, and his various clubs—to all natural wine, all the time.

In a light-filled room with stadium seating hugging Stamba’s interior courtyard, he replicated Copenhagen’s controlled chaos with Warehouse. This wine bar and shop has morphed into a powerful magnet for the hotel, stocking the best of both Georgian and European natural wine, doing numbers any venue would envy and at prices any consumer would queue up for. The only question is, natural wine being a limited commodity: Can the hotel keep up with the demand?

This spring, the staff was busily restocking shelves with bottles, recouping from a pop-up event with Barcelona’s Bar Brutal. Over the weekend, the bar and the garden were packed to almost illegal capacity and sold an astounding 1,500 bottles. Those revelers were Ugulava’s dream: hotel guests mixing with a whole lot of locals and connecting over his country’s most beloved export—wine.

Alice Feiring is the author of To Fall in Love, Drink This, Natural Wine for the People, and other books. Her Substack is the Feiring Line

Subscribe now

Photos: Eric Martin/Figarophoto/Redux (lobby bar); Fabian Weiss/laif/Redux (industrial columns, Café Stamba); Courtesy of Stamba Hotel (all others)

Here’s the note I published on the old Feiring Line site.

This producer was all over the wine bars of Vienna. I just had to try it… and fell in love on the spot. Sylvain Jacquot works on 1.5 hectares and the Savagnin was raised oxidatively for four years. What a gorgeous wine. It has intensity, patience, maturity, wisdom, depth and the delicious energetic saltiness of a powerful wave on a beach when the weather is just perfect. Drink now or lay down.

Over the years, Sylvain’s were among the few bottles for which I would break my no checked baggage rule. I found them in Berlin or London but never in France. Every Jura fanatic I met—even in Japan, his biggest market—I asked: Know Sylvain Jacquot?

“Oh, Nicolas Jacob?”

“No. Jacquot, in Cramans.”

“Never heard of him.”

Subscribe now

Read more

Sixteen years later, this past January, I visited the proof that he was wrong: Domaine Métais-Nigata in the not known enough, Jasnières appellation in the Sarthe department.

The possibility of the visit came about when texting Francesca Hansen of Paris Wine Company that my winter trip to France was nigh. She wrote back, telling me about a Pineau D’Aunis she had tasted at the Paulée d’Anjou. “It blew my socks off at first whiff.” They also made some electric Chenins. She hadn’t been to visit yet. Did I want to join?

Hah. Of course.

Pascaline Lepeltier had been there earlier that same week of my arrival. Post visit, she excitedly texted me, “ An 1811. Insane.”

The day after I arrived in Paris in the winter of 2026, Francesca and I met at Montparnasse, took the train to Le Mans, then drove forty minutes into the rolling hills of Courdemanche.

Subscribe now

Read more

We headed up to the Ardéche village of Arlebosc, which houses Domaine Romaneaux-Destezet —the estate’s 16th-century cuverie and farmhouse where Béatrice’s parents reside. The village lies 30 minutes above Saint-Jean-de-Muzols. That’s where the Souhauts make their home, raised their family, the steep hill of Saint-Épine just behind them. But up at the cuverie, it’s true Ardechois, Vin de France country. This is where the Gamay vines for one of the Souhaut’s most celebrated cuvées, La Souteronne, take root. And the first task up? To taste the 2025s.

Souhaut was a Parisian kid who came to wine almost by accident, except are there accidents? He was twenty when he met Béatrice. That was 1987; they’ve been together ever since.

Subscribe now

Read more

“But we love the labels,” we said, almost in chorus.

Nevertheless, the new ones were beautiful, almost postage-stamp sized. And if memory serves it was hard to find the name Jouret on them.

“Really,” I said. “Your name needs to be more visible.”

Jérôme stammered, and then said, “I always thought that a name on the label was too narcissistic.” Then he backpedaled, it is fine for other people, it just made him feel uncomfortable.

No one who makes such beautiful wines or practices such thoughtful viticulture should feel that owning the work is egotistical. Perhaps that modesty is part of the Jouret terroir, and part of the reason the wines feel so completely of the man and the land.

Read more

Chanterêves of Savigny

Subscribe now

Read more

When the wine shop owner saw the bottle of Valentin Valles Syrah I was buying called "Pong," he laughed and said, "They really should have used this bottle in promotions for Marty Supreme." 

And then the staff went off and running about the just-released ping pong film that I had no interest in seeing. But being a big Valles fan, my focus was all about retasting a wine from a favorite producer whose wine I'd never seen on American shores. After some banter, I plunked down my $46—too much—and took my bottle home. By the weekend's end, I'd think that the name of the wine wasn't the only thing in common with Josh Safdie's current flick. 
 

So, I took it home. Whipped up a wild mushroom and leek pasta and removed the cork. 

Subscribe now

Read more

Read more

Who can blame him? As a scientist knowing there’s no way roots feast on rock and minerals… it all seems like marketing or pseudo science.

This collection of essays—mostly drawn from World of Fine Wine—attempts some structural logic: rock and minerality first. Maltman is a fine writer and most of the book, even the science part is highly digestible.

I particularly loved the delightful detour into James Busby, Australia's wine father. Busby was already connecting soil types to wine character back in the early 1800s: "Sandy soils will produce delicate wine, calcareous soil a spirited wine, decomposed granite a brisk wine."

Subscribe now

Read more

Brunello’s King Lear: Gianfranco Soldera Reflects on the Attack on His Wine

Any number of people could have committed the painful crime. “Let’s face it,” wrote Jeremy Parzen on his Italian-wine—centric blog, dobianchi.com, when the news broke, “many observers of the Italian wine world (myself included) couldn’t help but think, to borrow a phrase from Lennon, instant karma’s gonna get you.” He concisely summed up what is often unsaid about the man some have described as Montalcino’s most iconic and difficult producer.

For all of his bravado, Soldera’s home at Case Basse is no palazzo, but a humble, sweet stone house at the end of a long cypress-spiked and vine-bordered road. The gentleman himself walks briskly, with a slight stoop. He had a pleasantly jowly face, punctuated by a brushy mustache under his fleshy nose, his pants always fastened to suspenders. When I paid him a visit recently, it was clear that he’d rather be having a root canal than answering questions.

He spoke no English and so his daughter Monica, who works with him—often as the kinder, gentler face of the wines—began to interpret as he recalled the moment he realized what had happened. But then, she choked up and sobbed into her fists. Her father rushed to her side. Putting his arms around her, he kept on repeating, “It is over, Monica. We have to go on. It is over. We have to go on.”

When Monica was able to continue, she explained, “My husband was early into work that morning. He found my father in the kitchen and said to him, ‘It’s all gone. There is no more wine, no more wine.’ My father didn’t think it was possibly true, and he went to the winery. From the outside he could smell the truth.”

Winemakers are notoriously openhearted to a colleague in need, and, no matter what they personally felt towards Soldera, his neighbors all shouted for justice.

Fabrizio Bindocci, the head of the Consorzio del Vino Brunello di Montalcino, had never been a Soldera supporter, but he came to pay a condolence call. Fearful that a member and one of the most lauded Brunello producers was now in ruin, the group offered to donate some of their own wine for him to sell to offset the financial loss.

As extreme and high profile as the Soldera case might have been, wine crimes appear to be on an upswing. The vines of Domaine Romanée Conti were held for a million-euro ransom on the threat of being poisoned. A storage facility holding some of the best wines of Napa was torched, in a fire that claimed 4.5 million bottles and effectively erased the histories of several notable American producers. Rudy Kurniawan, the swashbuckling Los Angeles wine collector, was arrested for extensive wine forgery in March 2012 and is still awaiting trial. Then there was a heist of 300,000 Euros worth of Selosse champagne from the grower’s own cave. With the exception of the Soldera and Napa incidents, wine crime is mostly always staked on profit, not revenge. The execution-style wine hit at Soldera’s Case Basse appeared to be something that only the Italians could think of, especially here in the hills of Montalcino, a place one local wine writer has called “a viper’s nest of vintners, where rivalries among the competing labels rule.”

Looming over it all is the memory of Brunellogate. By law, Brunello must be made from 100 percent Sangiovese Grosso grapes. But, in 2008, some producers were accused—and subsequently convicted—of blending foreign grapes into their wines, mostly to increase production. An anonymous letter had been written to the wine authorities, snitching on various esteemed Brunello producers. Some of them blamed Soldera for the tip-off. The letter’s connection to Soldera was never proven, and he’s actually not the kind of man who does anything without his name on it. Those found guilty of the wine fraud were fined, but were allowed to remain part of the Consorzio. The Brunello di Montalcino honor war was escalating. Some wondered if the hit on Case Basse was revenge for Soldera’s perceived role in blowing the whistle.

Within a few days of the attack, a former Soldera employee and Rome native named Andrea di Gisi was nabbed and brought in for a mug shot. Damning evidence began to pile up: video coverage, wiretapped conversations, a pair of wine-soaked jeans, a confession. Di Gisi, 39, had worked at Case Basse on and off for about three years. It turned out he had been fired months before for mishandling barrels—a sin that Soldera, the prickly perfectionist, could not tolerate. The sacked employee had then spent months planning the vengeful act on his ex-boss. Di Gisi was quickly convicted and given four years under house arrest. (By contrast, the arsonist behind the Napa fire was given 27 years in prison last year.)

But in Montalcino, well enough is never let alone. When I arrived for my audience with Soldera, the story had segued from Macbeth to Characters in Search of an Author.

Soldera, ever eager to rattle the local viper’s brood into a hissing fury, withdrew from the Consorzio, the very group that tried to bail him out. Soldera denounced their offer of wine as “inadmissible and offensive, a fraud to the consumers.” The group said, ‘You can’t quit, you’re fired.’ And then it sued him. Soldera did himself no public relations favors when he initially let the press assume that all vintages were lost; it later turned out that there might be as many as 5,000 bottles per vintage salvaged. Upon hearing that Soldera had saved some wine from the attack, Bindocci, the head of the consortium, commented, “It’s like the wedding of Cana,” referring to Jesus’ famed miracle turning water into wine.

Soldera continued to keep tongues wagging when he announced an astronomical price hike for his 2006 Vintage, from $300 to $600. This would keep the bottles off of many wine lists, but they would fit quite nicely into the cellars of collectors, especially those who want a trophy with a story. In another twist, he decided to label the next shipments of 2006 as an IGT (Indicazione Geografica Tipica) instead of a DOCG Brunello, a good couple of clicks down the exclusivity scale. The price hike? That’s just arithmetic. Soldera lost half the vintage so he needed to double the price. The IGT? He doesn’t need the name Brunello. People who buy his wine buy Soldera first.

Soldera comes across like that uncle who, once affronted, crosses you off forever. But there are other facets to the man, like his generosity, as demonstrated by his Soldera Award for young researchers, and his nurturing side, as he has displayed with the Padovani twins, sisters at their up and coming Campi di Fonterenza winery.

When I visited, he refused to open the doors to the winery and the scene of the crime, but instead offered a walk through his wife’s magnificent rose garden, his meticulous vineyards, his pond, “Where all life begins,” he said. He enthusiastically showed off his pruning technique for me and lunch with him was required. We drove a short ways to his favorite restaurant, Il Leccio, in Sant’angelo in Colle. In the empty trattoria, he berated the waiter for bringing the wrong decanter and wine glasses. Soldera believes in a wide-mouthed vessel, just as he believes in wide-mouthed, lead-free stemware. With the decanter and glass situations peacefully resolved, the eating and drinking commenced and the Soldera paradoxes continued. The 2000 Case Basse riserva was silky with a hint of tannin and rust—warming, sensual, layered, with a near-perfect balance and not much eccentricity.

The 1985 Rosso from his Intistieti vineyard was more quirky: difficult at first, full of wet cement and a touch of high-tone volatility. The more the wine interacted with air, the wilder and more unbridled it turned. It was as if the wine had been blessed with the power of speech.

There are many loose ends surrounding the crime and the bickering, even though somewhat abated, will undoubtedly flare again. But to me, the biggest mystery is how a man accused of being so difficult and arrogant can make a wine—yes, extravagantly priced—of such complexity and humility. Who cares if he was difficult? So was Picasso. Though Monica’s husband has been working alongside with Soldera and is prepared to carry on, Soldera is in his late seventies. Who knows how much longer these wines will be made in exactly the same way. He might be a pain in the ass, but he is a master.

As he drained the last of the ‘85 from his glass he told me he has no patience for the small-town jealousies around him. They are the past. “The future is in the youth,” he said.

Subscribe now

(This is a version of my recent piece in Noble Rot)

On a sticky day in June, while repotting the mint on my fire escape, I had a revelation: I rarely use ‘terroir’ in tasting notes any more. How odd was that? After all, isn’t terroir the essence of what separates the fine from the plonk, the element that elevates a grape to the godly? And just like that, it was gone. To clarify, the concept wasn’t gone – as wiggly as that can be – but the word itself.

Wondering if I was a degenerate outlier, I conducted a highly unscientific, informal survey among friends. Wine educator and shop owner Christy Frank confessed, “I hadn’t thought about this but indeed, I have totally stopped using the word!” Deirdre Heekin of La Garagista in Vermont, a great winemaker and thinker, believes her soils directly affect her wines’ characteristics . But even there, she added, “Now that I think of it, it does seem that terroir has become a tired word that doesn’t carry the same energy it once did.” And, outsized Australian wine personality Mike Bennie told me, “I don’t hear it much, to be honest. Maybe by blue-chip winemakers and some sales reps of similar ilk. It’s a waning concept, or maybe trite.”

How did terroir segue from truth to trite? One possible answer is that wine-centric science minds took to the page to express their outrage at what they saw as its (and minerality’s) misuse.

Subscribe now

Read more

Read more

Studies dealing with sulfites in wine are rare. The last one seems to have been out of Torino in 2019 and it gave credence to the notion that zero sulfur wine is metabolized in the blood quite differently than those with added sulfites. That was the first scientific weight giving a little more oomph to the natural wine no hangover debate, or at least one can drink more before the inevitable hangover blooms.

While not specifically about wine, another study published this summer caught my attention: Reduced Sulfur Diet Reshapes the Microbiome and Metabolome in Mild–Moderate Ulcerative Colitis. I started to wonder if colitis sufferers should be advised by their doctors to choose natural—if they choose to drink.

Read more

co-authored by Alice Feiring & Christy Frank

Have you heard the one about natural wine as a form of self-care? That opinion piece caused quite the collective eye-roll across the interwebs. Read it and…

Read more

On night two, we headed out for an early dinner at Brawn.

I didn’t even look at the wine list. I was in the hands of Heidi and Doug, taking a happy break from decisions.

After the first two warmup bottles, Doug brought out his surprises from his cellar, and just for fun, here came blind tasting time.

The wine’s color was drifting to amber. There was no skin contact, the hue had some age or storage. I was confused by the wine’s fresh aroma and a taste that was at once oxidative and oxidized, both old and young at the same time—kind of like me.

Damn if it didn’t have the density of a Vin Jaune. There had to have been some flor action with all of that salt, dried and yet ripe sunny, peach-to-apricot, fruit. And it was silky. And the ripeness. Plenty.

Subscribe now

Read more

I was on assignment for Saveur and that’s a yay!

And wouldn't you know? Yeah, that's right. I got sick.

Initially, I thought I was hungover. It was Thursday morning, a few ho…

Read more

My first house wine was acquired while I was a graduate student in Boston: a 1978 Grenache-based Côte du Rhône, the now-defunct Domaine Peyrouse. Bought in 1980, it offered so much generosity at $36 per case. Even as a graduate student I could afford it and I knew that it punched above its weight.

A decade later, back home in New York City, I found a Corbières called Chateau Prat de Cest, which my best guess tells me was a mix of Grenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre. During the early 1990s no one wanted wines from the Languedoc, so it was dirt cheap at $3 a bottle. One of the reasons for its remarkability was that it had tremendous bottle variation. In a case of 12 there were as many different expressions, ranging from basic to thrilling.

When I started to sniff around, asking people whether they have house wines, I mostly got a no, at least not these days. Doug Wregg of Les Caves de Pyrene told me the 1990s was probably the last time and, “It was a wine from Provence, 100% Alicante Bouschet. I drank buckets of it, because it made me feel good about life.” Somehow house wines these days – when they exist – are likely to be plonk, repackaged bulk wine, and the only concern is cost. Take a cigar-smoking friend who admits to having no palate. (Honestly? He’s wrong, he just has more of a range than I do.)

Invariably he offers me something from the brown box in his fridge, then reconsiders.

“Don’t worry,” I regularly tell him, handing over one of the bottles of I brought with me. “Let’s open this.”

The first rule of house wines is that they make you proud, not embarrassed.

True HWs should be the vinous equivalent of a flannel shirt, snuggly slippers, the perfect white-T, the old love that you come back to. They have substance, backbone. They can be in any color or degree of fizz. And in every vintage they have something else to say. These are the wines that make it possible to drink every night without breaking the bank or boring the palate.

Affordability, however, is a squiggly concept. For me it’s under $20 a bottle and I’d argue that a drinker who boasts that their staple tipples include Selosse or Grand Cru Charles Lachaux is misguided. Those lofty bottles could never fit the bill because they require too much attention.

Okay, ask me for some contenders.

Bubbles? ‘3B’, the pink delight from Filipa Pato in Bairrada.

White, no skin? Muscadet from Jo Landron the perfect air conditioner in a bottle.

Skin? Pheasant’s Tears Rkatsiteli.

Oh, I could pick a lot from Georgia.

And red?

Last year on an extended stay in Paris it was the Joubert Fleurie and this year at a Provence residency in Menèrbes I could not get enough of Les Maoú. ‘Vaste Programme’, a mix of Carignan, Grenache and Aubun, and yes, it sure took me back to my first love, the Peyrouse.

Before the price soared, I was drinking Roberto Henriquez’s Pipeño. This quote from Raul Rivero’s 1950s poem Quilmo kind of sums up why: “I drank the wine in shadows. A wine from Chillán, Pipeño, clear, flavored nostalgia or oranges.”

Perhaps that is a house wine’s real purpose: flavored nostalgia. It’s the wine that isn’t just drunk at home, it takes us home.

I can’t say that my house wines are currently making me feel good about life (it’s too stressful these days), but they help.

My longest-running house wine has been the Domaine Guion Bourgueil; made from Cabernet France, we’ve been together almost ten years now. And while I drink upon average a bottle of it only once every other month these days, at $17 it’s irreplaceable, not just for emergency informal entertaining but for grounding. It is the wine I open when I return from my travels, like I did after six weeks abroad. It wasn’t simply about choosing something to delight me but also to remind me who and where I am.

As we tried to suss out which apartment was Lorenzo Accomasso’s, I noticed roosters doing a damned good imitation of a Chagall painting perched there on the roof of the coop’s hut. We then walked into an open door, into a disheveled receiving room and saw the baseball-capped, blue-eyed Barolo legend himself, waiting for us.

Lorenzo Accomasso of La Morra is an outsider as well as a holdout for tradition. The winemaker is now in his 70s, and only speaks Piemontese dialect. Which is why Giorgio, a Piemontese man who lives in and imports wine into Australia, and wants Lorenzo for his portfolio, convinced Marta Rinaldi (Giuseppe’s daughter) to come along and interpret.

Lorenzo talked slowly and poured even slower. He finally allowed us the dregs of two open bottles while he rattled on to Marta. I sipped. I scribbled. “These wines are my new heartthrobs.”

Lorenzo is an elderly bad boy who makes thrilling wines, or at least the two that I tasted that afternoon. I’d never had them before as they are currently not available in the United States. I imagine they still remain somewhere on some wine lists, purchased in the days when Winebow was their stateside importer. But Lorenzo stopped that relationship fifteen years back. He found the process too much hassle—the back label, the front label, the rules and the red tape. His is old-fashioned, traditional barolo, showing off all of that Baroloness that left me speechless before I had a wine vocabulary; road tar, roses, licorice, a fine translucent sun-bleached, Brook’s bicycle seat. His fermentation occurs in cement vats for about 25 days, maceration on the skins, then into old big botti. Done.

“Those barriquistas used to try to convince me to use barriques,” the sky blue-eyed winemaker said. Those barriquistas failed. It was obvious Lorenzo is a stubborn guy who can’t be convinced to do anything he doesn’t want to do.

Something had happened in the middle of the translations and Marta’s voice changed. I saw she had started to pick her fingers and blush.

“What is he telling her?” I asked Giorgio.

He could make out a little of the conversation and whispered to me, “He said he had lots of girlfriends and women friends he’d have loved to take to bed but he didn’t want to mess with the friendships.”

Ah, I thought, the roosters weren’t only on the roof. If Lorenzo was gunning for Marta, a clear 45 years his junior, then good luck to this fine winemaker with the missing teeth and sparkling violet eyes and mischievous grin.

He finally poured us one more wine, the Rocche. It had more color, with a needle mouth, rustic edges, a touch of Good & Plenty candy and fresh salty air. “They’re not polished,” he said of his wines. Thank goodness for that.

But if you want to drink them, you have to go to Germany or Japan, or better still, go knock on his door. His is brilliant stuff, but it’s over when Lorenzo is over. Seek him out. Bring cash. Or maybe just bring Marta instead.

“Justin Chearno has died.”

On the verge of a new and exciting chapter of his professional life, Justin was only 54.

Justin was a beloved figure in wine scene, in New York and beyond. He left behind his The Four Horsemen family, his extended international wine community, and most importantly, his beloved wife, Stacey, and son, Felix.

This interview took place just four weeks before his death. It proved a gift for me, enabling that one last conversation. The abridged version ran in the fall 2024 Noble Rot issue. Here it is a slightly fleshed out version.

Subscribe now

Read more