Philosophy

“Between opulence and grand finesse”
…wines that excite the senses!

If one spends any significant amount of time reading the talking cards below the bottles on your retail shelf, you might encounter words like fat, fleshy, ripe, powerful, opulent, concentrated, super-concentrated and full-bodied. These words all seem well-meaning and promising enough. After all, who wouldn’t want that the wine they bring home to possess any or all of these qualities? Opulence and power suggest a wine which packs a punch and thus represents terrific value, whatever its price.

If one is inclined toward power, strength, those wines exist in abundance. However, the winemakers you will find written about in these pages and those that compose the expanding Joli Vin portfolio are all exemplars of restraint and a more delicate hand in their winemaking practices. Mother Nature of course gives what it gives and the winemaker in response can only make a wine which speaks to some degree of the vintage to which it was born. Vintages will vary accordingly. And even though it has become fashionable to boast that great wines are made in the vineyard, through the meticulous and dedicated work tending each and every vine throughout the year, while undoubtedly fundamental, it should never obscure the fact that fantastic and pristine fruit, with the help of Mother Nature, is made in the vineyard. Great wine is still coaxed into becoming such while in the cellar, at the hands of a skilled and attentive winemaker, through the myriad of choices that are made at every step in the winemaking process to transform the raw materials into something remarkable and worthy of our attention.

Great wine, like any great expression of art, exists at the place of delicate tension, balancing counterposing colors, images, textures and flavors. The winemakers you will find on this website create wines which inspire and excite the senses, not dull them, and are artists who inherently understand this intriguing and delicate balance so as to craft ultimately, wines not of brute strength, but rather of exquisite balance and grand finesse.