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Growers like Selosse and Egly-Ouriet now sell on their own names. Still, a lot of what makes Champagne mean celebration was built by the big houses' money and marketing.

Writing about Burgundy négociants, the hard part was the word itself. It covers big landowning houses, domaines with a second label and tiny buyers who own no vines.

Ten years ago I wouldn't have believed small growers in the Aube could draw this much attention. The spotlight was on the big houses and the grand cru villages. Bertrand Gautherot of Vouette et Sorbée is a big reason that changed.

Once you're offered a Burgundy allocation, you don't really get to say no. Turn it down once and it may never come back. A plain explainer on how the system works.

Every wine-fraud story opens with the same stat: 20% of the market is fake. Nobody can source it. Of 93 million fake bottles tracked between 2020 and 2022, under 5,000 were luxury wine. The dangerous forgeries are the rare ones. New piece 👇

For generations, Champagne treated Pinot Meunier as a filler grape. Never worth naming on the label. One former sculptor bet everything on it. A single 2.2-hectare plot. Restaurants now fight over every bottle. New portrait: Jérôme Prévost, La Closerie 👇

¥24,523 vs ¥23,655. For the first time, the everyday rice on Japan's dinner tables costs more than the finest rice grown to make sake. The premium ingredient just got outbid by lunch, and the small breweries feel it first.

White Burgundy now makes up 69.3% of all white wine traded on Liv-ex, up roughly 650% in value since 2010. The color that used to sit in DRC's shadow is now where the volume actually is.

In 2006 a Paris sommelier asked a sake brewer what glass he served his sake in. He had no answer, and decided sake needed to learn wine's vocabulary. He now owns a parcel in Morey-Saint-Denis and treats rice and Burgundy limestone as the same question.

Sake export value climbed 7.32% in Q1 while fine wine is still finding its feet. China overtook the US as the top market by value and pays about 60% more per liter for the same category. A market most Western buyers haven't discovered yet is quietly compounding.

Ten hectares in the Loire, farmed by one family since 1664, refusing pesticides since a grandfather came home from WWI trenches. The world eventually called it the best Cabernet Franc on earth. In 2017 the Bouygues brothers — owners of Château Montrose — bought it for €14 million.

Jikon sells out before it hits the shelf, rationed through thirty authorized shops nationwide. The brewer refuses to raise output even as demand keeps climbing. Sounds exactly like how a Burgundy allocation list works.

Sake almost never carries a vintage year — a quirk of a 130-year-old tax law, not tradition. Climate swings and a growing export market are starting to make that omission expensive.

Olivier Collin went to law school to break his family's Champagne contract, then built the only Champagne house that sells nothing but single-vineyard wine. Still one of my favorite origin stories in this whole newsletter.

He holds a pedology degree and apprenticed at four of Burgundy's most admired houses. Then he bought 2.1 hectares in a village with no grand cru at all. Turns out the plain village was the whole point.

Sake has no vintage — and the reason is a 130-year-old tax law. That's finally starting to crack. New piece on what happens when the year returns to the bottle.

Lucien Le Moine buys only premier and grand cru, across fifty-plus appellations, and still tops out at 100 barrels a year. No fining, no filtering, eighteen to twenty-four months on the lees. Entry point is an $86 Bourgogne Rouge; the Montrachet Grand Cru averages around $1,215.

Isojiman exports 40 percent of what it makes from a fishing town. It runs the whole brewery like a refrigerator and contracts its own Yamada Nishiki direct from Tōjō. That's Burgundy logic, built from scratch with none of Burgundy's advantages.

Champagne searches jumped 14% in the year to May — about two million more than the year before. Some of it is buyers front-running tariffs, some of it is small harvests tightening stock. After two years of decline, the demand looks real this time.