KERMIT LYNCH WINE MERCHANT

Nicole Chanrion

When Nicole Chanrion began her career in the 1970s, convention relegated women to the enology labs and kept them out of the cellars—even her mother thought winemaking was man’s work—but she would not be deterred from her dream of becoming a vigneronne. With six generations of family tradition preceding her, she grew up helping her father in both the vineyards and the cellar in the Côte-de-Brouilly, one of the southernmost crus of the northern Beaujolais. Though she is mild-mannered and slight of build, her determination and conviction have consistently defied all doubts. Ever since taking over the family domaine in 1988, she works all 6.5 hectares entirely by herself, from pruning the vineyards and driving the tractors to winemaking and bottling, all without bravado or fanfare. In 2000 she became president of the Côte-de-Brouilly appellation, a position of respect and importance among peers. It’s small wonder then that she is affectionately referred to as “La Patronne de la Côte,” or the Boss of la Côte.

The Côte-de-Brouilly appellation sits on the hillsides of Mont Brouilly, a prehistoric volcano that left blue schist stones and volcanic rock along its slopes. These stones yield structured wines with pronounced minerality and great aging potential. After her formal training at the viticultural school in Beaune Nicole began working at a her family’s domaine and gained a deeper appreciation of the traditional winemaking techniques of the Beaujolais: hand harvesting, whole cluster fermentation, aging the wines in large oak foudres for at least nine months, and bottling unfiltered. The resulting wines are powerful, with loads of pure fruit character and floral aromas.

Domaine Savary

In Maligny, a village well-poised between Paris and Dijon, just north of Chablis, Olivier Savary and his wife, Francine, have been vignerons since 1984. Though many of Olivier’s family members were vignerons, an unfortunate series of challenging harvests discouraged his parents from joining the family business. Chardonnay runs strongly through his veins, however, and Olivier pursued wine school in Dijon regardless of the fact that he would have no vines of his own. Olivier and Francine arranged to farm some vineyard land en métayage (share cropping) in the Chablis and Petit Chablis appellations. With his father at his side to farm the complex network of vineyards, Olivier initially sold off the majority of his production in bulk to a négociant. Emboldened by their years of combined experience and family history of winemaking, Francine and Olivier finally found their wings and began bottling under their own label. In 1990, Olivier's longtime friend and Chablis legend Jean-Marie Raveneau introduced Olivier to Kermit. Today, Francine and Olivier are joined by their sons, Maxime and Mathieu, whose ambition and young energy ensures a bright future for the domaine.

The Savarys have finally earned the recognition for their hard work, and are highly regarded in the appellation. The clay-limestone hillsides of the Kimmeridgian chain are excellent for growing dazzling, complex Chardonnay, also known here as “Beaunois.” However ideal the soil, Olivier brings his own brilliance to the table. The grapes from his vineyards throughout the Chablis appellation are blended into one fabulously complex village wine cuvée.  He also bottles an extraordinary premier cru from Fourchaume, as well as a separate cuvée of old-vine fruit in heavy, wax-sealed bottles after élévage in demi-muids.  These exquisite wines are quintessential Chablis, with unmistakable aromas of ancient crushed shells and a pronounced, racy mineral structure.

Podere Campriano

Almost all of the growers with whom we work manage “small family farms.” Then there is Podere Campriano in Greve-in-Chianti, who proves the statement more literally than just about anyone. This tight-knit Tuscan family lives in a humble farmhouse atop a small hillside of 2 hectares of Sangiovese vines. This is their little organically pampered backyard from which they craft a delicious range of Chianti Classicos in the tiny stone cellars beneath their home. It is all family, all artisanal, all natural, and all good. The only hard part is figuring out which is better: the wines, or the heaping platters of house cured salamis and prosciuttos and the local, aged pecorino cheese drizzled with their own homemade red wine must balsamico, all of which are permanent place holders at their table every single day. Thankfully one doesn’t have to choose. Unfortunately we can only import the wine.

The three Campriano red wines are traditionally made and reflective of the unique terroir of the Alta Greve—dark, galestro schist infused wines with bold fruit and serious depth. All are 100% Sangiovese from three different micro terroirs (the upper and lower slope below their home, and a third hectare across the valley with a different exposition and more limestone). Their “IGT,” the way we like our “Super Tuscans,” is a de-classified Chianti Classico from their oldest, highest altitude vines, just to diversify their range. The extreme care and focus of the Lapini family and their dedication to organic agriculture impart a unique character and spirit upon their wines. These soulful wines are, much like the family, instantly likeable. Above all, and most importantly, they are delicious to drink at table, and we can't wait to make them a part of our daily life.

Château La Roque

The picturesque landscape surrounding the historic Château La Roque appears largely unchanged from how it must have been two thousand years ago. Ownership has changed hands many times since the Romans were first here, yet the soul of this special place remains in tact. Romans were said to have planted the first vines, and Benedictine Monks created the sturdy vaulted-ceiling cellars that still house the bottles today. Winegrowing resumed in the thirteenth century when the de la Roque brothers planted new vines. By the 15th century, another branch of the de la Roque family added glass blowing to the farm’s production. Today, Château La Roque is in the capable hands of Cyriaque Rozier, who converted the domaine to organic (certified in 2004) and now biodynamic (certified in 2011) viticulture, as planned by his mentor, previous owner, and Languedoc legend, Jack Boutin. Cyriaque makes the wine both here and at Château Fontanès. Though the property has responded to circumstance, its destiny seems irrevocably intertwined with its vines.
Thirty-two of the Château’s eighty hectares are consecrated to terraced vineyard land with south-southeast sun exposure, on clay and limestone soils. This is unique terroir. Garrigue, the aromatic scrub brush that dominates the landscapes of the South, asserts its presence among these vines. Syrah, Grenache, and Mourvèdre, the noble varietals that Jack Boutin planted here years ago, make up the reds. The whites include Viognier, Rolle, Grenache Blanc, Roussane and Marsanne. In the wise words of KLWM salesperson and legend, Michael Butler, “Lay down a few cases of history.”

Domaine Antoine Jobard

François Jobard was one of the first vignerons Kermit imported when he began prospecting for wines in France in the 1970s. The relationship has endured into the next generation, and François’ son Antoine now runs the domaine. This is as classy and as consistent a property as you’ll find in Burgundy, and theirs are generally counted among the best Meursaults. Other respected vignerons like Coche and Raveneau hold these wines in the highest esteem and are generous with their praise when Jobard comes up in conversation. Among the highlights from the domaine is Jobard’s stunning Bourgogne Blanc, which is routinely one of the best to carry that appellation. Their Meursault En la Barre is an outstanding value from an assiduously tended vineyard plot located just behind their home, and their enviable line-up of premier cru white Burgundies includes Meursault Poruzots, Blagny, Genevrières, and Charmes, each with its inimitable charms. Recently, they added Tillets to their list, the excellent vineyard that Roulot fans know and love – a high-elevation, very stony lieu-dit. Finally, their Puligny-Montrachet Le Trézin comes from another steep hillside parcel above the Hameau de Blagny and is always textbook Puligny, chiseled and fine-grained.
All the Jobard wines are aged in barrel and spend a lengthy period of time sur lie in their cellars in Meursault. They are the last of our white Burgundies to come to the market every year due to their unhurried approach to vinification and typically slow malolactic fermentations. In their youth, these wines are often tightly wound with an intense mineral structure that only begins to soften with extended bottle aging. Though François and Antoine work side by side, Antoine has brought his own signature to the domaine: a more sensuous approachability to the wines, all delicious and ready to drink immediately. That said, the Jobard legacy lives on, and the wines will still explode with intense aromas of honeycomb and stone later in life. If you just can’t wait, there’s no reason not to uncork.

Château Feuillet

Maurizio Fiorano grew up outside Turin and moved to Milan for his studies, but his life took an unexpected turn when he married and moved with his wife to her hometown of Saint Pierre in the Valle d’Aosta. Fiorano continued his work as a surveyor, but his long commute became burdensome when the two of them started a family. By the time their second child came along, Maurizio had had enough and left his old job for good. He didn’t have any definite plans and he knew that his wife’s business of running a small inn was not for him. But she had inherited vineyards from her family, so why not make wine to serve in her restaurant? The idea suited him perfectly, and he went to work in the vines. In the beginning his production was tiny: he signed up to show his first vintage at VinItaly but arrived at the gargantuan expo with just four bottles! Today his production remains small, but he is careful to export to many different markets. He may not be born and bred, but Maurizio says he feels like a Valdostano, and this is his way of showing off the local products all over the world.

If Maurizio became a vineyard owner by chance, he was exceedingly lucky in the placement of his plots—he will humbly tell you that it’s not hard to make good wine here. The vines sit in a very shallow sandy soil, but their feet wriggle into crevices in the solid granite bedrock. Any rain is quickly dried out by cleansing winds. And the vineyards are planted on an ancient riverbed, where over the millennia the Dora Baltea River has cut through the mountain, creating the current river valley and leaving behind mineral deposits that the wines happily lap up. The trump card, however, may be the exposition of the vineyards, which in combination with the chilly climate, high altitude, and drastic diurnal temperature shifts provides the magic charm sought by vignerons everywhere: extremely long hours of gentle sunlight. In fact, the vineyards here capture the sun so perfectly that the almond trees scattered over the slope blossom at the same time as those in Sicily, over 550 miles farther south! This gives the grapes an exceptionally long, slow ripening season that in turn offers very unusual red wines with the heft of a sunny climate that are still refreshing and light on their feet, as you might expect of a northern wine.

La Marca di San Michele

The La Marca di San Michele estate in Cupramontana is run by the sibling team of Alessandro Bonci, Beatrice Bonci, and Daniela Quaresima. They are light years ahead of most of their neighbors in growing their six hectares of Verdicchio vines entirely organically, vinifying with minimal SO2, aging some cuvées in large botte, and bottling unfiltered. Cupramontana is the historical birthplace of Verdicchio production in Le Marche–the region’s first vineyards were registered in the land office here in 1471. Camaldolite monks began viticulture here many centuries earlier in 1186, in the area of San Michele, a rural frazione bordering Cupramontana. La Marca refers to a “border district.” All of these rural territories were united to form the region of “Le Marche,” the only Italian region that takes the plural.

This estate represents a real diamond in the rough in this immense and beautiful region of largely untapped potential. In the family’s capable hands, the Verdicchio grape shows its potential to make one of the most exciting white wines of Italy. La Marca produces two main white wines, a DOC Verdicchio di Castelli di Jesi Classico Superiore called “Capovolto” that is tank-aged and a DOCG Verdicchio di Castelli di Jesi Riserva called “Passolento” that is botte-aged with full malolactic fermentation. Their vineyards are planted on a 12 million year old former limestone seabed, on slopes climbing the foothills of the Apennine mountains facing east towards the Adriatic sea. The dynamic young leadership of La Marca is producing wines from this bountiful land of green rolling hills that will inspire your senses and transport you to this breathtaking land.

Quentin Harel

Exciting things are happening in the Beaujolais: following the outbreak of terroir-driven natural winemaking inspired by Jules Chauvet and spearheaded by the likes of Marcel Lapierre and Jean Foillard in the 1980s, a new generation is now following in the footsteps of these early pioneers to make the region one of France’s most dynamic. Quentin Harel perfectly epitomizes this explosion of young talent, having recently taken over the family domaine in the town of Saint-Étienne-des-Oullières, just south of the Côte de Brouilly. Raised in a vigneron household, Quentin sought further experience away from home early on, taking jobs with growers elsewhere in the Beaujolais as well as in Burgundy. He received the bulk of his formative training in the Diois (home to the sparkling Clairette de Die), in addition to studying soil microbiology and brewing his own beer. The 2012 harvest marked his first solo vinification at the helm of Domaine de Buis-Rond, an estate owned by Quentin’s family since 1768.

The majority of Quentin’s holdings lie around Buis-Rond, and are classified as Beaujolais AOC. Situated just outside the primarily granitic zone that makes up the ten crus, the soils here consist mainly of clay, sand, and flint—an unusual terroir for the region that yields bright, fresh, aromatic wines full of early-drinking charm. Eager for a new challenge, Quentin purchased one hectare of Morgon in 2011. This parcel of 80 year-old vines lies in the lieu-dit Charmes, a higher-altitude site prone to giving lively, elegant, and mineral wines—an ideal fit for his style.

Like his parents did, Quentin farms all his vineyards organically. The parcels around the domaine were certified in 1998, while the “Charmes” plot has been worked this way since 1980. In the cellar, he favors a light style with low intervention: vinification is traditional, via whole-cluster fermentation using indigenous yeasts before élevage in neutral vessels (tank for the Beaujolais, and used 400-liter barrels for the Morgon). He bottles unfiltered with low sulfur additions, giving quintessential Beaujolais quaffers with low alcohol, delicious high-toned Gamay fruit, and lovely floral aromatics. One of the region’s rising stars, Quentin has already proven himself in his short career and we look forward to great things to come from this talented young vigneron.

Domaine Jamet

Jean-Paul Jamet began his career in the vineyards of Côte Rôtie in 1976 at the age of 16, working with his father, Joseph, who bottled his first wine that year. Jean-Paul told us that he often found himself working alongside one of our former growers Marius Gentaz, whose vines in Côte Brune bordered his own. With the 2016 vintage, Jean-Paul celebrated his 40th year growing and vinifying Côte Rôtie. His experience with his enviable collection of sixteen (soon to be nineteen) lieux-dits spread across the best sites of the appellation has given him deep knowledge of how to unlock the greatest expression of Côte Rôtie from its wide spectrum of terroirs. This savoir-faire makes Jamet the modern day master of the appellation.

The Jamet path has been one that has stayed true to tradition as the appellation has modernized around him. Despite its popularity, Jamet always eschewed the use of excessive new oak but instead chose to maintain a cellar full of the traditional aging vessel of Côte Rôtie: the demi-muid. As the fashion to de-stem Syrah accelerated, Jamet remained firmly opposed, continuing to vinify his Syrah whole-cluster. Perhaps most importantly, Jamet remained committed to his extreme, impossibly steep and rocky, treacherously terraced parcels that could only be worked painstakingly by hand. Planting Côte Rôtie on the plateau or leveling his vineyards to be able to plant on flatter sites and work them more easily were not part of his repertoire. The Jamets have been avid planters over the past four decades, giving them an incredibly diverse collection of raw material that leaves them poised to continue making great wine uninterrupted for generations to come. Jamet also resisted the urge to produce a series of limited single vineyard cuvées, despite the ease and price at which he knew they could be sold, preferring instead to produce a representative blend of the entire appellation. The sole exception is that part of his Côte Brune vineyard is bottled apart, as he esteems this vineyard capable of providing, on its own, the synthesis of his entire cellar. His complex, balanced, age-worthy, classic Côte Rôtie bottling is the beneficiary of this philosophy.

As all of the various trends of modernization and experimentation have run their course in the appellation, Jamet’s wines are justly recognized as the pinnacle of traditional Côte Rôtie being produced today. His strategy to follow the path laid out by his ancestors before him kept him closest to what is most important: his land and its purest and most authentic expression. Jean-Paul Jamet is joined today at the domaine by both his wife, Corinne, and his son, Loïc. As he completes his 42nd harvest in 2018, we are proud to welcome him and his family into the KLWM family of vigneron artisans.

Domaine de la Chanteleuserie

Just outside of the village of Benais, in the heart of the Touraine, sits the lovely Domaine de la Chanteleuserie. This “place where the larks sing,” as the name means, is perched on a limestone plateau in an idyllic landscape. Moïse Boucard, a respected vigneron whom Kermit discovered in 1976, has not only given his good sense of humor and modesty to his son, Thierry, but his winemaking skills, too. The seventh generation of winegrowers at Chanteleuserie and the second generation to be working with KLWM, Thierry now shares the domaine with his wife, Christine.
This is the land of Cabernet Franc, better known locally as “Breton.” While some vignerons in the area add up to 10% Cabernet Sauvignon, the Boucards make pure varietal wines. Bourgueil is among the most age-worthy of the Loire Valley’s reds, and the wines from Domaine de la Chanteleuserie are no exception: their 1976 still drinks well today! Despite their structure, these wines have a suppleness and generosity of fruit that set them apart from most wines produced in the area today.
The Chanteleuserie vineyards enjoy full southern exposure on limestone and clay, with a subsoil of porous, chalky tuffeau that also provides cellars with naturally ideal aging conditions. Thierry keeps yields low and protects his harvest by bringing the grapes in quickly and keeping them cool during destemming. Temperature control continues during fermentation to preserve freshness and acidity, thereby avoiding the rude tannic bite found in some Bourgueils. The wines are later racked into foudres for additional roundness of texture and depth. The “Cuvée Alouettes,” alluding to the name of the domaine, is fresh, supple, fruity, and ready to be drunk young. The Bourgueil “Vieilles Vignes” hails from vines 40-80 years old, and the “Cuvée Beauvais,” from one of Bourgueil’s greatest sites, originates from the tuffeau hillsides near the domaine. Both are delicious young and outstanding when aged.