February marks the 20th anniversary of our Champagne Buyer’s tenure at K&L, and over the years he’s built a remarkable Champagne program for us. The secret sauce: relationships with wonderful producers across the Champagne region, from small, family-run estates to infamous Grande Marques. In today’s newsletter, he and his team profile some of their favorites.
Read MoreHappy Lunar New Year! Today kicks off the year of the Metal Rat, and we’re celebrating with… what else?… wine!
Read MoreThis weekend was a decadent one for wine at chez Westby.
Read MoreThis weekend, Cinnamon treated us to local Dungeness crab from Half Moon Bay, and I brought home a bottle of the 2013 Franck Bonville "Millesime" Brut Blanc de Blancs Champagne to have with the noble crustacean.
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This coming February will mark twenty years for me here at K&L, and I feel truly blessed as I look back at a great 2019. It was very difficult for me to narrow this list down to just ten most memorable Champagnes, as I have been lucky enough to have had so many great bottles over the last twelve months. Most of the wines on this list I drank, not just tasted, and I am pleased to report that after all this time in the business, my enthusiasm for Champagne has not faded at all.
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It’s here—that time of year when Champagne gets the limelight it deserves: New Year’s Eve! Though you can definitely drink Champagne any time of the year (and should), you can’t drink anything but Champagne on New Year’s Eve. The gods demand it. You’re morally obliged. Hammurabi put it in his code.
Read MoreLast night, I opened a bottle of the Krug Grande Cuvée 168 Ème Édition Brut Champagne as the aperitif for Cinnamon and my father. We paired it with some excellent pistachio paté that Clyde had given us as well as the Jamon Iberico that Cinnamon gave me for my birthday. Krug Grande Cuvée is one of the world’s great wines, and unlike most of the other great wines of the world, it is a wine that is defined by time as much as it is by soil or grape varieties.
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This past week, I was treated to not just one, but two great 2012s from the great house Louis Roederer. This producer has been making great wines since 1776 but is never content to rest and is now pushing the envelope harder than any other major house in Champagne.
Read MoreAs we get ever closer to the holidays, life gets more hectic. But the best part of the season is the friends’ Christmas, or, as we call it, our Holiday Champagne Club meeting.
Read MoreI have to admit that I am always skeptical about co-branded products, especially when they have a super cool box. I should know better—the house of Bollinger has a commitment to quality that is second to none, and the 2011 Bollinger "James Bond 007" Brut Champagne exceeded my expectations in every regard.
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This spring, Champagne Buyer Gary Westby was lucky enough to be at Champagne Fallet-Dart in the little hamlet of Drachy, just as they were releasing their 2012 vintage. Our allocation of the 2012 Fallet-Dart Vintage Brut Champagne has now arrived, and he’s very excited about it.
Read MoreHere we have our heavy hitters, our high-scoring, critic-darling wines of 2019. The wines in this newsletter are worthy of cellaring, worthy of gifting, worthy of sipping with the greatest gusto and the greatest of friends. Scores might not be all there is to understanding a wine, but you can at least be assured that some very experienced palates highly endorse these bottles.
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