Devenish Wines

Wishing everyone a great 4th of July and a good holiday weekend

Domaine Chardon 'Les Chardons' Touraine Sauvignon Blanc 2025! Excellent vibrant citrusy ripe and delicious Sauv Blanc!

Available at Monte's Fine Foods, Night Moves, Rosemont Market, and The Well

Sophie and Thierry use a basket press to press their Sauvignon Blanc grapes because they feel a little oxygen can be beneficial to start the fermentation off.  They’ve also started giving the wines several hours of skin contact in some vintages. The goal isn’t to add flavor, but the added imperceptible touch of tannin can help protect the wine from oxidizing later on. The grapes are fully ripe so there are some richer flavors and the wine also gets a bit of lees aging to add more depth and rich texture. This has been a Devenish favorite for over 10 years!

Frank Cornelissen Susucaru 2024! Yes, Susucaru 2024 has arrived! 3 weeks ago I was actually on Mount Etna and I tasted a bottle in the Barbabecchi vineyard: the famed terraced vineyard that Frank makes the Magma from

You can maybe score one of the 120 bottles Maine at Maine & Vine, Solo Italiano, Sawyer's Specielties, Leeward, Fog Wine, The Clown, Porcelli's, Crispy G*i, Sissle and Daughters, Vessel and Vine, Broad Arrow, Maine & Loire, First Fig, The Wine Seller, Riverside Butcher, Alna Store, Double Grazie, Pulling Corks, and Vinolio

I fell in love with Mount Etna; it’s a unique place with diverse terroirs and a very complicated environment. It’s on a very active volcano! Frank is also a complicated person. On the one hand he can be extremely determined and driven, but he constantly learns and changes what he does as well.  He still is utterly driven to make wines that taste like the volcanic rock of the mountain. But he started to ask: which volcanic rock? In the beginning he didn’t really understand the difference between various vineyards, but as he’s learned through experience he’s created all the various Munjebel single vineyard wines to highlight the differences between all the contradas (named particular vineyards analogous to Burgundian crus).

Famille Laurent Saint Pourcain Rouge! This vintage is only 11.5% alcohol, but so packed with flavor and layred complexity; it’s so good!

available at Room For Improvment, Blue Hill Wine Shop, RSVP, Tops'l Farm, Liquor Locker, Rosemont Market, Kennebec Meat Co, Now You're Cooking, Vessel and Vine, Oak Hill, and Hunt and alpine

One of my favorite wines out of the Devenish portfolio is the Famille Laurent Saint Pourcain Rouge.  It’s a blend of Pinot Noir and Gamay from up in the massif central: the highlands of central France where the Loire river has it’s head waters.  This wine always has the suppleness and refinement of Pinot Noir with the extroverted fruit of Gamay. The granitic soils here are warm, but the vineyards are exposed and windy. It can be a hard place to farm, but this is a lovely, rich, outgoing wine with lots of flavor, but without being too heavy handed. This is exactly the kind of fun, unusual, affordable, terroir expressing wine that inspires me.