Thank you to importer Louis/Dressner for this profile of De Moor:

(Click here for more on De Moor on Louis/Dressner's website)

Alice and Olivier de Moor live and work in Courgis, a small village 7km southwest of Chablis. It is where Olivier grew up, and his “old” cellar, the part where he ages his Chablis in oak barrels, is underneath his grandparents’ house. From the hill where Courgis sits, the view is of vineyards over hills all the way to the Chablis  Grands Crus.

Olivier says the landscape has changed a lot in his lifetime, that all the woods, bushes and fallow land that dotted the hills have disappeared in favor of vines.

Alice is from the Jura, and the two met at a large Chablis estate where Olivier was in charge of the vineyards. Both are enologists, graduates of the Dijon enological school, with enough knowledge to take a radically different direction for their vines and wines than their neighbors. While the division of labor principally consists of Olivier in the vines and Alice in the cellar and office, both are equally omnipresent in every role and all decisions are made together.

They began their estate by planting three plots of Chablis-Bel-Air, Clardy and Rosette-in 1989. Of their first harvest in 1994, they kept only 15HL and sold off the rest. They were still employed elsewhere, but quit that fall after leasing their Saint-Bris vines: 0.55HA of planted in 1902 and 0.40HA of Sauvignon Blanc planted in 1950. For the next three years, they worked their four hectares of vines while tending the vines of other winemakers to make a living. In 1996, they planted a large plot in Chitry (the parcel is called "Champagne") with Aligoté and Chardonnay.

The whole Chablis area is highly calcareous, with soils formed millions of years ago in a warm, shallow sea. The limestone here is rich in shellfish fossils, including oysters (exogyra virgula), urchins, bivalves and ammonites. There are three estate bottlings of Chablis: "L'Humeur du Temps", "Rosette" and "Bel-Air & Clardy", the last a blend of the two plots.

"L'Humeur du Temps" roughly translates to "The Mood of the Times" but is a double entrendre that also could mean "The Mood of the Weather". The idea with this is to capture a global snapshot of the vintage versus the nuance of single vineyard bottlings. In such, the wine comes from four parcels that are vinified separately then blended: Côte de l' Etang, Les Envers de Côte Chétif, Les Goulots de Jouan.

The Bel-Air and Clardy parcels both have a shallow topsoil over layers of harder limestone with fossils, a mix of clay and limestone that is highly draining, even more so in Clardy, which has whiter clay.

"Rosette" has a more complex soil, and is much harder to work. The plot slopes up to a 40% incline, and the vineyard can roughly be separated in three distinct parts: the very top is eroded materials over hard Portlandian rock; the mid-slope is directly over Kimmeridgian marl, which can quickly suffer from drought. Finally, the bottom part is rich in dense clay with some limestone, resulting in later ripening. They usually do two harvests there, sometimes two weeks apart. They consider it their best plot.

These have none of the “normal” under-ripeness of Chablis, nor are they marked by the gunpowder aromas created by an excess of sulfur. Olivier believes that in another era, Chablis had a buttery and nutty character similar to any Chardonnay from low yields and reasonable ripeness.

He follows the same reasoning for his Sauvignon from St-Bris, which is ripe and rich, so much so that they eventually had to declassify it to Vin de France. The St-Bris terroir is eroded debris over Portlandian rock. The clay is brown, the soil draining. The Sauvignon Blanc plot has a north-west exposure, which lets it ripen slowly and get to optimal aromatic expression. This vineyard originally had 30% of its vines missing, and replacements were planted over eight years with local massale selections and cuttings of Sauvignon Gris from the Loire valley.

The other cuvées an old vine Bourgogne Aligoté called "1902" (not produced each vintage and only in small quantities), a regular Bourgogne Aligoté and a Bourgogne Chitry. A late harvested Aligoté called "D'Autres Vallées" has also been produced a handful of vintages. The Bourgogne Chitry and Bougogne Aligoté both come from the Champagne parcel, where clay sits atop Kimmeridgian marls and some silex stones are present.

Some other wines also join the fold through the De Moor's négociant project Les Vendangeurs Masqués ("The Masked Harvester").  A Bourgogne Blanc is produced from sourced organic fruit that varies every vintage and is not produced each year. A Chablis from organic fruit is produced annually. A suprisingly charming Viogner called "Caravan" has made numerous appearances, this time sourced from Gérald Oustric in the the Ardèche. And in very bad years (the reason they began buying fruit in the first place), they have sourced grapes from friends all over the South of France; a truly all-star list including Eric Pfifferling, Domaine Gramenon, Eric Texier and Émile Hérédia.

The final and most recent additions come from the 2017 purchase of two plots of 1er Cru vineyards. Vau de Vey represents 0.92 hectares of vines planted in 1953 on heavy marl that remind Olivier of the Rosette vineyard. The name is local dialect for "little valley". Their other plot of Mont de Milieu is 0.82 hectares; it is extremely steep and has to be worked by horse as it is too dangerous to use a tractor (hence why everyone else uses herbicide). The site gets its name ("Mount of Middle") because it's on the border of Champagne. The vines at the bottom of the hill were planted in the 1980's and the middle and the top in the 1930's. Yields in the old vines are very low and concentrated due to Court Noué.

The De Moors have worked their vines organically since 2005, a rarity in their area. In 2002, they stopped using large harvest bins and replaced them with small boxes where the grapes are not crushed by their own weight. In 2007, they built a large and high-ceilinged winery, allowing them to do all their cellar work by gravity. In 2008, they purchased a second-hand pneumatic press to treat the grapes in the gentlest way possible. There is no SO2 used at harvest or during the vinification. Aging has traditionally been in Burgundian barrels of different ages for the Chablis wines, the Bourgogne Chitry and the old vine Aligoté, with young vine wines and Sauvignon aged in cement and stainless steel tanks. Over the years this has evolved: 228 liter Burgundian barrels are still the most common vessel, though demi-muids and foudres of various sizes have joined the fray along with enamel-lined stainless steel tanks and even a few anforas.

Del Que Toma el Cardenal—was born in 2014 in response to the industrialization of mezcal.  With mezcal’s rise in popularity, more and more of this spirit is being produced using less-traditional methods. Major brands are buying up the agave farms that had serviced the small producers, putting the future of independent Mexican spirits producers at risk.

A small group of these producers, in partnership with entrepreneurs from the city of Oaxaca de Juárez, founded Del Que Toma el Cardenal in an effort to preserve the ancestral legacy of their families and to safeguard the multi-generational wisdom that has fueled international interest in agave spirits. The producers who participate in Del Que Toma el Cardenal are from the municipality of Santo Domingo Albarradas, a Zapotec community located Oaxaca's Valles Centrales region, in the Tlacolula district.  They follow a set of rules that is more rigorous than the criteria established to certify mezcal.

The Fundamentals of Del Que Toma el Cardenal are as follows:

• The cultivation of agaves is done by the same producers of Santo Domingo Albarradas and when more agave is required, it is paid at a value equal to or greater than the market to the agaveros of the region
• Only mature agave are used for production. 
• The Piñas are cooked in wood ovens with stones from the nearby rivers in holes dug in the ground.
• The piñas are ground in a tahona pulled by a mule with a stone wheel.
• It is fermented in oak tubs and no chemicals are added to the process, the fermentation takes place naturally, so it takes from twenty to thirty days in its fermentation
• The distillation is carried out in a copper pot still, two distillations are carried out both for espadín and for the tobalá
• The distilled agave spirit cannot be cut with water, but it may be adjusted using the puntas and colas (heads and tails) from the same distillation
• As a rule we have to charge a fair price to our customers, we are below the price of other products even though our distillate is of higher quality than the vast majority of other brands

The resident expert overseeing Del Que Toma el Cardenal is Don Fortunato Santiago Pérez, a third generation maestro from a family of producers native to this region. It is families such as Don Fortunato's who have passed down and preserved traditional practices, including organic farming, communal work, and the search for purity, quality, taste, and texture in the final spirit.

Much like wine, these heirloom spirits reflect the place they were made (terroir), the agave they were made from (many are allowed), the source of water they were made with, and the 400 decisions that the producer made in the process. The agaves are grown in the basin of the Rio Grande, surrounded by high mountains where the temperate climate provides ideal conditions for long-growth, sugar-rich agaves. The abundance of mineral-rich water from the Santo Domingo, Santa Catarina, and La Calavera rivers plays a pivotal role in the flavor and aromas of the agaves.

The result? Spirits that reflect their terroir as clearly as they represent the culture from which they come. We are proud to welcome this cooperative agave-spirits project to our portfolio.

Thank you to importer Louis/Dressner for this Desvignes profile:

(Click here for more on Desvignes on the LDM website and here for the Desvignes website)

Louis-Claude Desvignes was of the sparrow-type Beaujolais vigneron: raven-black hair that was, more often than not, standing in various directions, bright eyes and prominent nose, and a well-pitched, humorous cackle. His energy level was also twittery, barely standing still for a minute during a tasting in his cellars, offering a bottle of this and a bottle of that: various experimentations, filtrations, perhaps an older vintage of something educational. The seriousness of his winemaking, however, was never in doubt.

Louis-Claude passed away in 2021; at that point he'd been long retired, having  passed the estate to his children Claude-Emmanuelle and Louis-Benoît, the eight generation to work this land. Emmanuelle joined in 2001 and Benoît in 2004; while little has changed stylistically, their their arrival has brought some major shifts. 100% of the production is now estate-bottled (Louis-Claude sold about 50% of his production to négociants), the estate is now certified organic and the two have started a small négociant largely but not exclusively focused on producing single-vineyard expressions within Morgon.

The family's historic vineyards have been within the Morgon cru for generations. Their first cuvée comes from multiple, complimentary plots blended together to produce "La Voûte Saint-Vincent" The majority of the vines are on the Côte du Py in the center of Morgon, the fruit of which is of far superior quality to that produced in the outlying areas of the appellation. If there were a classification of vineyards in Morgon, Côte du Py would be a premier cru and Javernières a grand cru. They are located on the best exposition of the hill, with soil of decomposed schist, and Javernières is a plot within the Côte du Py with a little more clay.

Throughout the 1990's and 2000's Louis-Claude began picking fruit later than the other vignerons in the area with a mind to get fruit at optimal ripeness. As the planet continues to grow hotter, his children have re-evaluated these methods without sacrificing the grapes' full potential. The wines are vinified by the traditional cru Beaujolais method with a grille to keep the cap submerged. Recently, the fermentation has been longer and more controlled than in the past in order to extract the color and material that are the most obvious virtues of this wine.

Morgon is, along with Moulin-à-Vent, the most age worthy of the Cru Beaujolais and Desvignes wines are fine examples. The wines age terrifically and take on the character of Pinot Noir, or pinotize (the term used in Beaujolais). When young, the character is of dark cherry, raspberry and blackcurrant. With age, the wines become more earthy, velvety with cocoa and coffee tones.

While co-ops still play a vital role in producing and selling wine across France, they are generally not known for innovation, let alone garnering attention as the quality leader in an appellation.  While most cooperatives operate by paying growers by volume, relatively few pay for quality. Almost none are largely organically farmed, segregate their fermentations by parcel and soil type, rely solely on indigenous yeasts, and resolutely avoid enzymes, winemaking tricks, and excessive SO2. If you were aware of such a cooperative, wouldn’t you be intrigued?

These practices were not initially what drew Eric Solomon to visit Les Vignerons d’Estezargues in the mid-1990s but rumors of some soulful Syrah that was being bulked out to larger negociants. So curious to see for himself, Eric visited Estezargues and tasted what would become Domaine d’Andezon Syrah, one of the most dependable and affordable Côtes-du-Rhônes in our portfolio.

Les Vignerons d’Estézagues was only founded a few years before Eric’s fateful visit. Ten local families with small estates banded together to form an association to pool their resources and vinify their own wines. Rather than make generic bulk wine, from the start, they vinified their sites separately. Soon they discovered their best plots and cuvées from their varied terroirs and varieties. As chance would have it, Domaine d’Andezon is a member/estate of the cooperative, and they grow some rather remarkable Syrah. Since that time, we’ve added La Granacha, a cuvée of Grenache grown on a soil covered by nearly a meter of galets – a dead ringer for a mini-Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

This profile, including all tasting notes and photos, was edited from the European Cellars website. For more information please visit: European Cellars.