CURRENT OFFERS:
Piero Busso
Pier Busso has been quietly making some of Barbaresco's most beautiful wines over the past few years. That Busso’s wines are not more famous is puzzling, but represents an opportunity for those who love to drink world-class vino without paying hundreds of pounds.
Founded in the 1950s by Guido Busso, the winery is now headed by his grandson Pierguido ‘Pier’ Busso — a thoughtful, deftly skilled vigneron who knows exactly the kind of wine he wants to make. “Travelling and tasting wine was the best schooling I had,” says Pier, next to scores of empty bottles from top European domaines in his winery. “Nebbiolo is not an easy wine, so I try to make one that gently reflects where it’s grown.”
Made from younger Nebbiolo vines (10-to-25 years old) grown on richer soils in Neive, Pierguido’s excellent Langhe Nebbiolo encapsulates the estate's refined style. While the old-vine Barbera d'Alba 'Majano' combines juicy summer fruit and peppery freshness, the Barbera d'Alba ‘Stefanetto’ is richer and spicier in character and has serious ageing potential. Busso’s site-specific Barbarescos are the estate's icons: the intensely flavoured, yet polished Barbaresco 'Mondino' underscores exactly why these wines are among our favourites from the region.
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THOMAS-COLLARDOT
Micro-domaine Thomas-Collardot, located in the heart of Puligny-Montrachet, is one of the newest estates that Chardonnay lovers need to know.
In 2010, Jacqueline Collardot inherited Domaine Pierre Thomas from her father, producing her debut vintage five years later. Three years on, her son Matthieu began working alongside her, having studied winemaking in Beaune.
Unlike neighbouring Chassagne-Montrachet and Meursault, Puligny-Montrachet has a high water table, which makes building subterranean cellars impossible, and is the reason that many domaines have historically done relatively shortened élevage in cellars above ground. Not that that stops the Collardots letting their handmade gems spend a full two winters in oak before bottling in spring, giving them time to develop body and depth.
The portfolio starts with the exceptional-value Bourgogne and Hautes-Côtes de Beaune wines, moving up to five village-level cuvées, including 'Les Enseignères' (from a vineyard directly beneath Grand Cru Bienvenue-Bâtard-Montrachet made famous by Coche-Dury), and two 1er Crus – 'Hameau de Blagny', which hails from a lesser-known pocket of high-elevation vineyards surrounded by woodland straddling Meursault and Puligny, and ‘Folatières’.
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VINCENT PARIS
Shedding its historic reputation for producing ‘rustic’ or plain old ‘dirty’ wines, Cornas has gradually emerged from the shadows of Hermitage and Côte-Rôtie to be celebrated among the Northern Rhône’s most fashionable reds.
Among a generation of vignerons building on the legacies of two of the appellation’s greatest winemakers Auguste Clape and Thierry Allemand, Vincent Paris started out in 1997 after acquiring two of his legendary uncle Robert Michel’s old-vine parcels.
A self-confessed “maniac” when it comes to care in the vineyards and cleanliness in the cellar, Vincent single-handedly built his winery and gradually acquired 8ha of vines across Cornas and Saint-Joseph, which he now farms using minimal intervention techniques and without chemicals.
Compact and approachable in youth, they combine spicy perfumes with a salty edge and velvety tannins – the fruit density and structure dialled up in ‘Granit 60’ – but it is with a decade or more of age that all of Vincent’s wines come into their own. With autumn in full swing and game season underway, the time is now right for these 2011s.
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DiBaldo
Ex-Master Perfumier Baldo Baldinini is making the most delicious artisanal vermouths and gins that we’ve ever drunk.
Baldo has a form of achromatopsia – a rare medical condition that causes total colour blindness – as well as synaesthesia, giving him a heightened olfactory sense and the ability to link smells to musical notes. Realising there was little formal notation in his field while working as a perfumer and, later, as a consultant for some of Italy’s best chefs (including three-Michelin-starred Massimo Bottura), Baldo invented his own method of writing aromatic ‘recipes’ on musical staves.
At his home laboratory in Rimini on the Adriatic coast, Baldo draws from an ‘aroma library’ of more than 50,000 essences, which he has carefully extracted from raw ingredients sourced from around the world.
He adds a selection of these essences (along with a tiny amount of sugar and distillate) to base wines made by a winery in Emilia-Romagna to craft his amaros and vermouths, which are bottled without preservatives, colouring, or additives.
While our first love will always be wine, DiBaldo’s creations impressed us so much from the moment we saw their striking labels and tasted their dazzling flavour profiles, that we decided we had to import them to the UK ourselves.
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