Comte Armand

Beaune, Cote d’Or, Burgundy, France
Comte Armand

My wife Susan and I were celebrating a delayed wedding anniversary last week at Round Hill in Jamaica. One night we had the best fried chicken either of us has ever eaten paired with a 2015 Volnay Fremiets from Comte Armand I brought with us. The chicken was burnished and crisp. The wine was delicate, with red fruit and mineral tension that cut through the salt and richness. We drank what we wanted because we were hungry. Because we were sitting together.

I first tasted the wines of Comte Armand at a tasting in the early 2000’s when someone poured the 1985 and 1989 Clos des Epeneaux. I had not had a lot of Comte Armand previous to that, but I knew both vintages were strong and had read enough about Comte Armand to know that these were two very special bottles. The wines were incredible and I have bought, sold and drunk as much as possible over the years.

Comte Armand is not easy to find. The domaine is small and their production is even smaller. The reputation has grown quietly, the way reputations grow when people who know Burgundy keep finding something exceptional and keep their mouths shut about it. The wines are allocated, they arrive sporadically and when they do, they disappear. What makes this producer worth the pursuit is not just the wine and their incredible fruit; it is the hands that have held the domaine and the team responsible for the production in the vineyards and winery.

Pascal Marchande built Comte Armand into something extraordinary and he passed the baton to Benjamin Leroux in 1999 who was all of 24. He left in 2014 to build Maison Benjamin Leroux. Paul Zinetti followed and made the Volnay we drank in Jamaica. Jane Eyre was appointed earlier this year and with her passion for fragrance and delicacy over artifact and ripeness, I’m excited for the future of this Domaine.

The recent Michelin Guide to Burgundy named Pascal Marchande and Benjamin Leroux among the region's top producers. This was not news to anyone who has been paying attention, but a confirmation of what Burgundy nuts already knew. However, it does say something remarkable about Comte Armand as a crucible. This is a domaine that has trained and released the people who went on to define the modern era in Burgundy.

The relationship is not about the wine. The wine is evidence of what happens when you give gifted people land and time and the permission to work without compromise. Marchande understood this. Leroux understood this. Zinetti understood it when he made that 2015. Eyre, working with the likes of Ernie Loosen, Christopher Newman and Dominique Lafon understands it.

I sat with Susan on that island and that special place overlooking the sea. The chicken. The wine. The incredibly beautiful night. Nobody said a word about whether the pairing made sense; it just did.

From The Cellar

2015 Volnay Fremiets, Comte Armand
Medium ruby. Red cherry and dark plum. Mineral tension on the entry that opens into a sustained mid-palate. The finish is clean, the structure is present but not aggressive. This is a wine that does not announce itself. It works because it listens to what is in front of it.

Azienda Agricola Demarie

Roero, Piedmont, Italy
Azienda Agricola Demarie

Paolo had a glass of his own Arneis in his hand when he pulled out the photograph last summer. Susan and I were sitting with him years into a relationship with the family that started over wine and stopped being just business a long time ago. The photograph was black and white, eleven people arranged in front of the family house in Roero, taken before anyone in the frame knew what was coming. He pointed to a boy in the front row; his father.

He told the story slowly, the way people do when they've told it before but never gotten used to telling it. Who left. Who nobody knew would come back. Susan and I both watched something move across his face that I can only describe as pride sitting directly on top of grief, the two of them not canceling each other out, just occupying the same space at once. Ten years of knowing Paolo, and I had never seen that particular expression before.

It didn't stay contained to the table. He walked us through the winery afterward, past the tanks and the barrel room, out to where the property opens up behind the facility. There's a soccer goal back there. His son was in it, playing keeper, some ordinary summer afternoon game that had nothing to do with us or the tour. Paolo didn't say anything about it. He didn't have to. Susan and I understood, standing there, that everything he'd just described, the land lost, the land bought back one parcel at a time over decades, wasn't for him. He'd already told us as much without using the words. It was for the kid in the goal, and for whoever comes after him.

Producer and Estate History

The Demarie name in Roero goes back to Bartolomeo, Paolo's grandfather, who worked this land in the early decades of the twentieth century on a bet that wine, not just grapes sold off to others, was where the future sat. His son Giovanni formalized the estate as a company in 1957 and kept building on the foundation his father laid. Paolo and his brother Aldo are the third generation, running the vineyards and cellar today with Monica alongside them.

The war years broke the estate apart. When Paolo's father and uncle came home, the closest vineyard to the property, the oldest one the family had, was what remained intact. They replanted it immediately. It is still there, still producing, a physical marker of what survived. Everything else scattered over the following decades, sold off in pieces the way land does when a family is rebuilding rather than expanding.

Paolo spent the better part of his adult life buying it back, across Roero where the winery sits, and further south into the Langhe, where Barbaresco and Barolo are made. The family now farms 30 hectares across both zones, a footprint that took decades of patient, deliberate repurchasing to rebuild. Italian law does not allow him to make Barbaresco or Barolo in his Roero cellar. Barbaresco has to be vinified in Barbaresco. Barolo has to be vinified in Barolo. The reunification is real on paper, in ownership, but the winemaking itself still has to respect zones the law drew long before Paolo was reassembling what his family lost.

In 2013 the family built a new winery into that same commitment to the land, solar powered, cooled by wall and roof thickness instead of air conditioning, filtering its own water through a constructed wetland in front of the building. The estate's vineyards had already been farmed organically for over a decade before formal certification arrived in 2019. None of it reads as marketing when you've watched Paolo walk the vineyard rows explaining soil composition the way other people talk about their kids, because with Paolo, it turns out, that's exactly what he's doing.

What a Private Visit Is

A visit to Demarie means walking those replanted rows with Paolo, hearing the war story standing in the actual vineyard where it happened rather than reading it on a label, and tasting through Roero, Barbaresco, and Barolo side by side in a family's own cellar rather than a tasting room built for tour buses. This is not the appointment a hotel concierge can arrange. It is a glass of Arneis in hand while Paolo tells you what his family survived, and the rare experience of watching a family's postwar reconstruction sit finished in the glass.

From the Cellar

2023 Roero Arneis DOCG, Demarie, Arneis. This is the wine that was in my hand when Paolo showed me the photograph, and it's the wine I understood the Roero through before I understood anything else about it. Sandy, fossil-rich soil gives it a saline edge under the stone fruit that most Arneis never shows. I bought it in kegs for a restaurant program years ago and poured it all summer against Georgia heat that punishes soft whites. It never buckled. Built for shellfish, built for humidity, built to disappear a case at a time on a hot night.

2021 Barbera d'Alba Superiore, Demarie, Barbera. The wine that shows what this family does with the grape most Piedmontese actually drink at home. Barbera doesn't get the reverence Nebbiolo does, and Demarie doesn't try to force it into that role. What comes through instead is dark fruit, real acid, and a savory edge that makes it as comfortable at a Tuesday dinner as it is at a formal tasting. This is the wine that tells you Paolo hasn't lost the thread between the estate's history and the table it was always meant to serve.

2021 Roero Riserva DOCG, Demarie, Nebbiolo. The wine that makes the case for Roero as more than Barbaresco's quiet neighbor. Same grape, same family hands, the same attention in the cellar that goes into the Barbaresco a few miles south, but Roero has never carried Barbaresco's name recognition, and the wines show it. What that means for the people who actually taste both: a Nebbiolo built to drink years before its Barbaresco counterpart is ready, from a producer who isn't cutting any corners to get there. The sandy soil here gives it a lift and perfume the heavier Langhe clay doesn't produce. It drinks like a wine that knows exactly what it is and has stopped needing to prove it against its more famous neighbors.

2021 Barbaresco DOCG, Demarie, Nebbiolo. The wine at the end of the reunification story. Sourced from two carefully maintained parcels around the town of Neive, made in its own zone because the law requires it, from land Paolo spent decades buying back one piece at a time. Structured, precise, the clearest expression of what patience and stubbornness look like when they're poured into a glass. Delicate rose petals and red cherries with hints of warm spice and layers of red fruits.

If Piedmont is part of your itinerary, contact us.

Nicolas Jay Winery

Yamhill-Carlton, Willamette Valley, Oregon
Nicolas-Jay Winery

I met Jean-Nicolas Méo for the first time at a pre-sale tasting at Christie's. Anthony Hanson MW, my boss, made the introduction. I knew from working with the wine his extraordinary training with his family including his uncle, the legendary Henri Jayer, whose wine has the purity and expression that few have ever repeated.

Two years later I was alone with him, setting up a private tasting as the senior specialist. No Anthony in the room. Just me, the bottles, and Jean-Nicolas watching me work opening and make sure the bottles were correct. There were four bottles of his 1996 Vosne-Romanée Aux Brûlées, and one was slightly off from the other three, not dramatically, but enough that I knew it was there. I sat with that for a moment and then I told him.

The second before I said it was pure panic. The second after, when he nodded and reached for a bucket, was relief of a kind I have rarely felt in a professional setting. He decanted all four bottles into it, waited, then poured the wine back evenly and we retasted. They were the same. Jean-Nicolas did not explain himself or offer a theory. He simply solved the problem and we continued. I have spent my entire career in rooms with serious winemakers. I have never seen anyone else think to do that. It is the instinct of someone who trusts the wine completely and has no interest in being right about the vessel.

That moment is the foundation of everything that follows.

When I later learned that Jean-Nicolas had partnered with Jay Boberg to make wine in Oregon, I did not need a critic to tell me to pay attention. I began championing Nicolas-Jay in my beverage programs before most people in America knew the label. The reasoning was not complicated. You either understood what Jean-Nicolas brought to a vineyard and a wine or you did not.

Jay Boberg is not a peripheral figure in American music. He co-founded IRS Records, later became President of MCA Universal, and signed REM, The Go-Go's, Blink-182, Mary J. Blige, Sublime, The Roots, and B.B. King among others. His path to Jean-Nicolas was characteristic of how he operates. As a frequent visitor to Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Jay became friends with Kermit Lynch, whose wine shop around the corner introduced American audiences to the great domaines of Burgundy. Those visits led Jay to Burgundy, and those visits to Burgundy led him to Jean-Nicolas. By the time they decided to make wine together in Oregon, the friendship was already decades old and the shared understanding of what serious Pinot Noir required was not a conversation they needed to have.

A few years ago Jay invited me to Oregon Pinot Camp. I stayed at his home in the Willamette Valley alongside Jon Leopold, Wine Director of The Alinea Group in Chicago. We spent our days at wineries all over the valley as well as our evenings at the house. Jean-Nicolas was not there. But his presence was in every glass Jay opened.

One evening Jay told us how the partnership began. The Chez Panisse visits, Kermit Lynch, the first trips to Burgundy, the friendship that grew from those visits into something that eventually found its way to a hillside in Yamhill-Carlton. He told the story the way people tell stories about things that changed the direction of their lives, unhurried and specific. Outside the valley was dark and the wine was exceptional and nobody was in any hurry to be anywhere else.

Jean-Nicolas and Jay spent 2012 and 2013 visiting over two hundred vineyard sites before settling on Bishop Creek in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA, an ungrafted vineyard planted in the late 1980s that produced something neither of them had encountered anywhere else in the valley. They built the winery into the hillside for gravity flow. The first vintage released in 2014. What Jean-Nicolas brought to Oregon was not a style. It was a standard. The same precision that shapes every decision at Méo-Camuzet now governs Nicolas-Jay from sorting to elevage. The wines are not Burgundy. They are not trying to be. They are Oregon Pinot Noir made by someone who knows precisely what restraint and site expression require, and who has spent thirty years proving it.

From the Cellar

The Nicolas-Jay L'Ensemble is drawn from ten vineyard sites across the Willamette Valley and hand-selected by Jean-Nicolas from barrel each vintage. It is a blend in the true Burgundian sense, a synthesis of the best of what the valley produced that year rather than a compromise between sites. Red fruit, fine-grained tannins, a mineral spine that keeps everything honest. It is the wine to start with if you want to understand what this project is.

The Nicolas-Jay Bishop Creek is the estate wine from that original ungrafted Yamhill-Carlton site. Tighter and more structured than the L'Ensemble, with a savory depth that comes from older vines and a specific piece of ground that stopped two very experienced people in their tracks in 2013. It needs time and rewards it considerably.

The 1996 Méo-Camuzet Vosne-Romanée Aux Brûlées is the bottle from that Christie's tasting room. A Premier Cru from the northern end of Vosne-Romanée, sitting just above Richebourg on a slope that produces wines of generous texture and complex Vosne spice. The 1996 vintage was one of the most structured of the decade in Burgundy, and those four bottles, redistributed through a bucket by the man who made them, remain among the most instructive things I have ever tasted. Understanding that wine, and the decision Jean-Nicolas made in that room, is the key to understanding everything Nicolas-Jay is trying to do three thousand miles away in Oregon.

If Oregon is part of your itinerary, contact us.

Bethel Heights Vineyard

Willamette Valley, Enola-Amity Hills, Oregon
Bethel Heights Vineyard

Stand at the top of the west block at Bethel Heights on a summer afternoon and you feel the Van Duzer Corridor before you see what it does. The Pacific air comes through the gap in the Coast Range every day at the same hour, dropping temperatures across the Eola-Amity Hills ridge at the moment most other Oregon vineyards are holding heat. It is the reason this particular piece of ground produces wines with a structural precision that the warmer valley floor simply cannot replicate. The Casteel family understood this in 1977, when the property was still an abandoned walnut grove and the land was officially deemed not suitable for farming.

I have known Ben Casteel for fifteen years. I have been to Bethel Heights, walked those vines with him, and eaten at that table. Ben grew up on this property, left to study English Literature with plans to become a professor, spent a harvest season in Burgundy in 1999 that changed the direction entirely, then came back to Oregon and spent five years working under Lynn Penner-Ash at Rex Hill before returning home when his father Terry's Parkinson's disease required a transition. He has been the winemaker here since 2006. What he inherited was already exceptional. What he has done since is refine it with the precision of someone who knows every block of this vineyard from childhood and understands what it requires rather than what he prefers.

The founding context matters here. Twin brothers Ted and Terry Casteel and their wives Pat Dudley and Marilyn Webb left careers in academia in 1977 to clear that walnut orchard and plant 50 acres of Pinot Noir on a south-facing slope at elevations between 480 and 620 feet. Ted co-founded the LIVE certification program that became the sustainability standard for the entire Oregon industry. The first vines are still in the ground, own-rooted and un-grafted, among the last remaining blocks of that kind in the Willamette Valley. Those roots have been exploring the same ancient volcanic soil for nearly half a century.

The wines from those original blocks carry that depth plainly. The 2021 Pinot Noir Casteel received 99 points from Wine Advocate. The 2021 Chardonnay Casteel received 97 from Decanter. Neither score is a surprise to anyone who has tasted through the Bethel Heights lineup with Ben explaining where each block sits on that ridge and why.

A private visit to Bethel Heights through Vineyard Confidential puts you on that land with the second generation of a founding family, in a place that shaped the identity of the Eola-Amity Hills AVA before it had a name. Ben is there. The old vines are there. That experience is not assembled from a database. It is the product of fifteen years of conversation at that table.

From the Cellar

The 2024 Bethel Heights Pinot Blanc earns attention precisely because it is not what this region is known for. Ben brings the same rigor to this variety that he applies to the estate Pinot Noir, and it shows. Pear and white flower cut by real acidity, with none of the residual sugar that makes most examples forgettable. It is a wine that makes sense once you understand the Van Duzer wind and what it does to hang time on that ridge.

The 2024 Bethel Heights Pinot Noir Rose is made by direct press from those original estate blocks, which keeps the fruit precise rather than borrowed from a red wine in progress. Strawberry and citrus pith over a faint mineral edge that comes directly from the volcanic soil beneath those own-rooted vines. This is not a seasonal wine. It is a serious one that happens to be pink.

The 2023 Bethel Heights Pinot Noir comes off the same ground the Casteel family planted as one of the first estates in the Eola-Amity Hills, and that history is present in every glass. Red cherry and dried herb over a firm savory backbone, built to open over an hour rather than surrender immediately. Ben refined his father's approach without dismantling it, adjusting cap management and adding measured whole-cluster fermentation, and the result is a wine with more textural complexity than the previous generation while remaining unmistakably Bethel Heights.

If Oregon is part of your itinerary, contact us.

Adelsheim Vineyard

Willamette Valley, Chehalem Mountains, Oregon
Adelsheim Vineyard

The first time I sat across a table from David Adelsheim, we were somewhere between the second and third bottle, and he was explaining why the Willamette Valley had no choice but to become what it became. Not modestly. Not boastfully. With the particular calm of someone who watched a thing happen because he had spent thirty years making sure it would.

I have known David for twenty years. I have been to the estate, walked the Chehalem Mountains with him, and shared enough meals that the conversation long ago moved past wine and into the more interesting territory beneath it. What I can tell you, from those conversations, is that what David built in Oregon has no real parallel in American wine history.

He and his wife Ginny bought 19 acres outside Newberg in 1971. There was no Willamette Valley AVA. There was no market for Oregon Pinot Noir. There was volcanic hillside, a handful of families making bets on the same ridge, and a man who had worked harvest at the Lycee Viticole in Beaune and come home convinced that this cool, rain-shadowed valley could do what Burgundy did. Between 1972 and 1977, while farming his own land, he authored the petition that became the Willamette Valley AVA in 1983, lobbied the Oregon Liquor Control Commission for the strictest wine labeling regulations in America, helped source the Burgundian clones that would define the valley's character for the next half century, assisted Maison Joseph Drouhin in establishing their Oregon foothold, founded Oregon Pinot Camp in 2000, and was instrumental in creating the Oregon Wine Board in 2005. The sub-appellation system that now defines the valley's most valuable addresses, including the Chehalem Mountains where Adelsheim planted first, exists because David argued for it in rooms where most people did not yet believe Oregon wine was serious.

The wines reflect all of it. The Chardonnay carries a mineral tension that comes from elevation and restraint, closer in character to a village Burgundy than anything grown further south. The Pinot Noir is built on five decades of understanding one piece of volcanic ground, and it shows.

A private visit to Adelsheim through Vineyard Confidential is not a tasting room experience with a poured flight and a purchase table at the end. It is time with the man who wrote the architecture that the rest of the valley operates inside. That conversation is not available on any standard itinerary.

From the Cellar

The 2021 Adelsheim Chardonnay is the clearest argument for why clone selection matters. David spent years sourcing the Burgundian material that gave Willamette Valley Chardonnay its current character, and this bottle is the direct result of that work. Citrus and orchard fruit pulled tight by genuine mineral tension, closer in structure to a village Chablis than anything grown in warmer American appellations. It is not a showy wine. It is a precise one, and precision is what you taste when the right variety meets the right ground.

The 2022 Adelsheim Pinot Noir carries fifty years of site knowledge in a single bottle. Bright red fruit, a savory earthy undertone, tannin structure that rewards patience but does not demand it. What you are tasting is not a winemaker's intervention. It is the accumulated understanding of one volcanic hillside in the Chehalem Mountains, refined across five decades by the person who first planted it.

If Oregon is part of your itinerary, contact us.