WOW!! This is the real deal Beaujolais! If, like me, you’ve had your share of so-so, not exactly mediocre, but just not very jazzy Beaujolais, then you‘ve got to try this – you’d think you were drinking a higher end Cru or at the least a Beaujolais-Villages with a significantly higher price tag. Back in the early 80s, my wife & two eldest drove from Chamonix, Mount Blanc to Paris (about 275 miles) & naturally, I persuaded “la famille” to stop @ a few wine places along the way. We stopped in Romanèche-Thorins, the home of Georges Duboeuf (aka the King of Beaujolais), but how I wish we had stopped to see the three Dupeuble brothers who run a quality-conscious organic winery committed to making the finest Gamay possible. It is certainly no surprise that the family knows its craft so well; the Dupeubles have owned these vineyards since 1512.

This 2009 vintage from Beaujolais is all the rage; anyone & everyone is talking about it, and for good reason. It is clearly the best in a long time from this region.

Robert Parker's Wine Advocate raves about the 2009 Beaujolais Vintage, "Beaujolais: Remarkable Riches and 2009 Richness." "The 2009 Beaujolais are gloriously generous and genuinely complex, as fine as any wines from this region in recent memory."  - "the opportunity exists for what are routinely among the world's preeminent red wine values to become positively SENSATIONAL bargains in this great vintage!"

Once upon a time, there was a crazy man in Argentina who believed that his country could make world-class wines: Nicolas Catena. In the early 1990s (I cannot recall the exact year), Catena introduced his Chardonnay to select wine accounts. The wine accounts had to be “select” because the audacious Argentine priced his Chardonnay to sell for—GASP!—almost $15!  Well, upon tasting this upstart Argentinean wine, my peers and I agreed that this easily rivaled fine $20 Chardonnays! I immediately embraced the Catena wines. Customers, however, tended to be more skeptical—until I pestered them enough to try it. Catena gradually became one of our most beloved and popular Chardonnays. Today, Nicolas Catena is a world-renowned figure in the wine trade.

Almost two decades later, Catena Chardonnay remains my favorite new world Chardonnay to recommend in its price range (which has barely changed in that time). And, yes, it still beats many a $20 Chardonnay!