A Tribute to Clyde Beffa

I can safely assume that I speak for everyone at K&L when I say that there’s no proper tribute to encapsulate the magnitude of Clyde’s impact on K&L. Notwithstanding the fact that there would be no K&L without Clyde, there’d also be a much different company. The warmth and friendship that Clyde has brought echoes throughout. He practices what he preaches: we get to sell really cool, rare, aged, allocated, and special wines—but, thanks to Clyde, we’ve gotten to taste those too. Never has there been an event where Clyde is present without some exciting bottle he’d dug up from the cellar. He’s showed us the joy of collecting wine: it’s saving a bottle for the perfect moment, and then sharing it with people who will enjoy it too. In doing so, he brought us together, off of the sales floor and around a table over good food, good drink, good company. That is Clyde’s presence in a nutshell.

Beyond Yellow Tail: The New Australian Wine

This June, I got to experience the incredible diversity and quality of Australian wine firsthand. Spending two weeks in Australia, I managed to visit with 80 producers across Victoria and South Australia, tasting hundreds of wines and meeting the incredible people who craft them. Many of these producers have all the drive, attention to detail, and raw talent that you’d find anywhere in Burgundy, Napa, or Piedmont. So why does Australian wine make up less than 1% of the wines that we sell here at K&L?

Interested in Maximizing Your Wine Cellar’s Potential? Start Here.

K&L Auctions is one of the most user-friendly and dynamic places to sell, reshape, and add to your collection. We offer market-low fees, up-to-the-minute online inventory, motivated customers from around the world, and a team of passionate experts to assist you in achieving maximum success. While we have our teams at the ready to talk you through current trends ([email protected]), we also wanted to share a snapshot of where the auction market stands this summer.

Meet Chelsea, Our Newest Key Accounts Specialist

We’re pleased to welcome a new Key Accounts Specialist, Chelsea Herholdt, to our team. Chelsea, located in San Francisco, comes to us with years of experience in the biz, and can help guide you through the process of building your collection. If you’re curious about where to start with a collection, drop her a line.

La Montre est Bonne

My new French phrase for my first week in Champagne is “la montre est bonne,” an expression that means “everything looks good right now” for a good vintage in 2022. After the disastrously low yields of 2021, the generous set on the vines now is a site for sore eyes. The vineyards in Champagne are far ahead of schedule, with flowering happening as I type in many places, and the flowers are already here in Sacy, where I took the picture below. A big harvest would do a lot to stabilize Champagne, because currently stocks are low due to a big increase in global demand, the horribly short 2021 harvest, and the self-inflicted wound of tight yield limits in 2020.

A Big Difference: What’s the Price?

A few years back, I mused about the lingering question that Clyde would often ask of châteaux representatives, sometimes up front, sometimes after a sip—“so…what’s the price?” It is a good question, something that is perhaps more apropos than ever. But it feels more poignant now for a much different reason. My last trip with Clyde would have been back in 2019, when it looked like “up” was the only direction for a 2018 vintage that provided a lot of upside, but existed in a world that seems so far away from today. Now inflation, a pandemic, and supply chain issues put an immense amount of pressure on every part of the equation, and no one knows where prices will go.

K&L Wine Merchants

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