Let’s start with the good news, as you might have heard, last Friday was a good day as we heard the cancellation of the tariffs on French wines, at least for a period of four months, hopefully forever. That truly felt like a new beginning and something to celebrate!

We are looking into how this will impact our prices forward, but surely, it will ease up and speed up the arrival of new wines. All new wines priorly affected by the tariffs and having not crossed the border yet will see their prices go down, and we’ll see how to balance this with the existing inventory. Stay tuned for more info. In general, we’ll keep our ways of doing business, which has never been about maximizing margins.

Now, the other great news is that we finally received our last shipment from GraWü. It feels like we’ve been waiting for it forever! Due to global pandemic, software hackers, snowstorms and many other reasons, this one kept being delayed but finally, three months after being picked at the winery, the wines are here in NYC. 

If you don’t know GraWu, they are a small winery located in Alto Adige, Italy, close to Merano. They are artisan winemakers producing very small quantities of high quality wines using very little interventions both in the vineyard and in the cellar. Whites are all skin macerated, at different levels, and all wines are unfined and unfiltered using no additives besides a tiny dose of SO2 at bottling. Read here to know more about them. 

This shipment was focused on two new wines available in NYC as of Today:

GraWü Pinot Grigio 2019

A Pinot Grigio made the old way, with skin maceration, “Ramato” as they say in Italy due to the copper color of the wine. GraWu didn’t produce a Pinot Grigio in 2018 as the harvest did not deliver, but did in 2017, their first Pinot Grigio vintage, which received a lot of positive feedback. Our customers really loved it here in the US and we were out of stock very quickly. The 2019 is fairly different, lighter and may be brighter, vinification did not use oak barrels but only acacia, hence the wine is less marked by the aging process. A fantastic expression of Pinot Grigio at the opposite of many of the stereotypes the variety still carry, unfortunately.

GraWü Pinot Nero 2018

And finally the Pinot Nero that we’ve been waiting for quite some time now, after tasting it from the barrels at a few occasions. This wine took time to shape into a beautiful alpine Pinot Noir. It truly is a fantastic wine, with depth and layers, complexity and precision. It is definitely a Pinot Noir first about fruit and terroir and not about the art and science in the cellar… recalling the best expression of Pinot we can get at different places, of course Burgundy, but even may be more Oregon, Willamette Valley. I find some smokey wild notes that I typically get in a few great Pinot from Oregon or West Sonoma coast. No doubt the alpine slopes of Alto Adige are equally to count on when it comes to producing high quality Pinot Noir!

With this new release, Dominic, the winemaker, continues to raise the bar and demonstrate GraWu is a domain with a bright future ahead, to follow for the years forward. The signature: natural wines with extreme precision and finesse. Clean and balanced, never extrovert, some of the wines need time both in the cellar and in the glass, to truly reveal their potential, but isn’t it a great quality?

Reach out if interested! These wines are allocated and in small quantities only, especially the Pinot Nero which we only have a bit more of 100 bottles and a few magnums!