2023 Chasselas Vieilles Vignes, Domaine Schoffit
Chasselas is the grape Alsace kind of forgot to love. It once filled a tenth of the region's vineyards; today it's a rounding error, elbowed aside by cousins with flashier names and better publicists. In the 1960s, Robert Schoffit refused to let it disappear on his watch, joining a small holdout group that fought to keep Chasselas in the region's official grape register at all — Alsace's version of saving an underdog from cancellation. His son Bernard and grandson Alexandre kept the faith, and somewhere along the way turned that stubborn habit into one of Alsace's most quietly serious estates: organic since 2019, biodynamic since 2021, farming eighteen hectares from Bergheim down to Thann. And they never touched the one parcel that started it all — Chasselas vines planted between 1939 and 1954, among the oldest in the region and, by most accounts, the largest surviving block of old-vine Chasselas anywhere in Alsace. Turns out loyalty pays off eighty years later.
The facts
100% Chasselas, from vines planted 1939–1954 on gravel and alluvial soils near Colmar
Hand-harvested and whole-cluster pressed; fermented and aged entirely in stainless steel
Certified organic and biodynamic
ABV 13%; cork closure
Best served well chilled
In the glass
Pale gold, and it doesn't waste time being subtle about the wax note up top — think a candle shop that also happens to sell orchard fruit, orange blossom, and a pinch of cardamom. The palate has actual grip, which is more than most "neutral" white grapes can claim, with lychee and a whisper of hay keeping things interesting instead of merely polite. It finishes long, clean, and just a little smug, like it knows something you don't. Pour it with a proper seafood tower, a plate of crab claws, or — because Alsace never really left Germany's kitchen behind — a big pot of sausage and sauerkraut. Proof that being unfashionable for sixty years can still end in a wine this good.
2022 "Le Logis," Anjou, Domaine des Baumard
The Baumards have farmed the same patch of Loire schist since 1634 — for context, that's before the guillotine, before Napoleon, before anyone had opinions about natural wine. Jean Baumard hauled the estate back from the brink in the mid-1950s, and his son Florent spent the next few decades turning it into one of the Loire's most respected addresses, mostly on the strength of a Chenin Blanc so good people practically write it love letters. Somewhere in all that pedigree sits Le Logis, the family's red, named — with admirable lack of imagination — after the house they still live in. If the whites are the estate's grand pronouncements, Le Logis is the pun you make at dinner: quicker, looser, and just as sincere.
The facts
Predominantly Cabernet Franc, with a small share of Cabernet Sauvignon interplanted in the same rows
Grown on Gréseaux schist, an old volcanic stone that lends a gentle smokiness
Fractional whole-cluster pressing; fermented in stainless steel, aged on fine lees for about nine months
ABV 13%; cork closure
Best served lightly chilled
In the glass
Bright ruby, and it smells like biting into a blackberry that's still mid-argument with a pencil — fruit up front, graphite right behind it. The palate doesn't try to impress you with structure; it's soft, savory, a little violet-scented, held together by acidity instead of tannin. It makes its point and gets out before the appetizer's finished. Serve it slightly cool with charcuterie, rillettes, or literally anything eaten standing up with a baguette in hand. This is a red for people who have somewhere to be.
2019 The Laughing Magpie, Shiraz Viognier, d'Arenberg
Chester Osborn's daughters once mistook the local kookaburras for magpies and started calling them "laughing magpies" — a birding error the family has been cheerfully monetizing ever since. The wine borrows its technique, not its name, from the northern Rhône: Shiraz and Viognier crushed and fermented together, the white grape sneaking its perfume into the red before either one gets a say in the matter, applied here to fruit from a vineyard the Osborn family has worked since 1912. This is what happens when a fourth-generation McLaren Vale winemaker — who also built a five-story glass cube in the middle of his vineyards — sets out to make something both exactingly traditional and slightly unhinged. Somehow, it works.
The facts
Shiraz co-fermented with approximately 5% Viognier, McLaren Vale
Grapes foot-trodden partway through fermentation, then basket-pressed
Aged roughly 10 months in a mix of French and American oak
Certified organic and biodynamically farmed
ABV around 14.5%; cork closure
In the glass
Inky, almost theatrical in the glass, this opens with black cherry, blackberry, and dark chocolate before a floral, violet-scented streak crashes the party courtesy of the Viognier. The palate is big — juicy, mouth-coating tannin, a savory hit of mocha and spice — but never lumbering, because that same white-grape lift keeps tugging it back toward something more graceful than a 14.5% Shiraz has any right to be. Decant it, then pour with grilled lamb, a peppered steak, or anything that just came off a charcoal grill. Even the bird on the label looks like it's in on the joke.