Very good to meet importer Savio Soares in San Francisco this week and taste through his range of (mostly) low sulfur wines. Savio is our source for the excellent Jura wines of Annie et Philippe Bornard as well as a few of our top selling traditional estates from the northern Rhône like Bernard Ange in Croze-Hermitage.

I'm not going to open that huge can of worms over sulfur levels and what's natural and what's not. Instead, I'll just say that at this tasting I found myself gravitating towards the producers that Savio deemed “more conventional” like Franck Balthazar in Cornas. 

Entire blogs are dedicated to defining natural wine and how much–or how little–sulfur belongs in them. That sort of ideology has never been a part of our selection process and we reject many of the zero to 10 grams of sulfur wines that come across our palate. 

That said, we have a great deal of enthusiasm for our Beaujolais selections where the producer has decided to work with zero or very little sulfur. A wine of ideas is of little use to us but a wine of terroir will always have our attention.  

 

Lincoln was so beautiful last week--warm rain, sunshine, and lush green fields--it almost makes you forget the subzero winters there. Almost. We killed some kolaches (apricot!) and picked up radishes and greens from the downtown Farmer's Market. Melissa Clark had an article about roasted radishes a couple of weeks ago so I tried that one night, which was really good. My favorite is just is a plain radish sandwich--paper thin slices with salt on buttered toast. My Auntie introduced us to kale...chips? It's simple, just kale leaves sprinkled with sea salt and olive oil, oven-dried until it's crispy. What else, what else. Our friends at Cultiva opened a new shop on 11th street--it's only seven days old! I brought back their single origin Amaro Gayo. Bin 105 is almost two months old--and it's already the best shop in town--super grand opening on June 10.