Devenish Wines

01/15/2026

O**m 'EZY TGR' Willamette Chardonnay 2023!

Available at Bleecker and Greer, Now You're Cooking, Sissle and Daughters, Blue Hill Wine Shop, Vessel and Vine, Oak Hill Beverage, and Bow St Beverage Wells

Wow, look at this: I’m excited about a domestic Chardonnay!!! A nice bright tropical Chardonnay from the Willamette Valley. O**m sent me a tank sample months ago and I wasn’t even going to open it, but then I did and I was so impressed!

It turns out that this is juice from vines planted in 1979 in the Walter Scot Hyland vineyard, one of the oldest vineyards in the Willamette. Somehow John House got his hands on some of the juice and used it to make this Chardonnay. It is barrel fermented and aged on the fine lees for about 16 months; almost none of that was new oak.

01/13/2026

01/10/2026

Sanguineto Rosso di Montepulciano 2023

Available Crooked Face Creamery, Monte's Fine Foods, Sissle and Daughters, Leeward, Red Pony, Bow St Beverage, First Fig, Now You're Cooking, Stompers, Golden Harvest, Maine and Loire, Sawyers Specialties, Vinolio, and Pomelia

Honestly, I’m looking at this and seeing we’re already down to 98 bottles are wondering why I didn’t order more!? What was I thinking? I don’t know, shipping from Italy takes so long that I placed the order for this pallet back in late September. This is old vine Sangiovese with a bit of Mammolo and Colorino. It spends at least a year in large old casks and then rests in concrete before bottling. 2023 was a difficult vintage yields were down because of the non stop rain early in the season, but then it dried out and got hot and the grapes there were were high quality. I like this wine very much!

12/30/2025

Kobal Bajta Pet Nat Rose 2024!

Available at Bow St Beverage, 2 Fat Cats, The Abbey, Treats, Cong Tu Bot, Friends and Family, Barber Brothers, and Sissle and Daughter’s

This petnat rose is so so good! This is 100% Blaufrankisch from Bojan’s little family vineyards in Štajerska Slovenia, close to the borders with Austria and Hungary. Bojan hand harvests, lets the grapes sit for four hours to leak juice and sort of start fermentation. Bojan watches the fermentation intensely and when the baby wine has the right amount of sugar left he bottles it. No sulfur, filtration, fining, etc because this is real petnat and you can’t add anything in that process. Bojan only makes about 450 cases of this. It’s really delicious and fresh and tastes so alive!

12/29/2025

Champagne Tarlant Champagne 'Zero' Brut NV! One of my favorite Champagnes and an iconic producer. It's always nice when icons live up to their reputation...

Available at Round Pond Cheese Co, Vessel & Vine, Maine & Loire, Lady of the Vine, Kanu, Fog, Folk, Hops and Vine, 44 North, Browne Trading, and Lois’s Natural Market Place

Champagne Tarlant is a legend and rightfully so. We just received a whole pallet of Champagne from direct from France because this is just so darn good! And it was a way to keep the price down. Louis Tarlant was mayor of Oeulliy back in the 1920s and was a leader of the Champagne rebellion in which local farmers blocked the large houses from bringing in grapes and wines from other regions, bottling it, and then passing it off as Champagne. This was the start of the appellation system and the rules defining Champagne. Louis swore he would never sell his grapes to the big houses again and had to start making Champagne himself.

Tarlant farms 14 hectares broken up into 57 SEPARATE PARCELS of vines that are all farmed and harvested separately! That’s crazy! 57 different wines to taste and blend and manage each vintage. Fermentations are 2/3 in barrel and 1/3 in tank. Usually fruit from young vines ferments in tank and the fruit with more character from older vines ferments in barrel. Almost all the barrels are old. Benoit tries to replace 3-5% of the barrels in a given year, but still is usually buying barrels that have already been used for 1 or 2 vintages. Fermentation is long and slow in their cold underground cellar. They do very little, usually just a few stirs of the lees at the end of fermentation to help the yeasts finish off the final little amount of sugar and make sure the wine is totally dry. He generally tries to avoid malolactic fermentation happening, preferring to keep the wines brighter and fresher.

12/28/2025

Francois Pinon Vouvray Brut 2022! Beautiful elegant gentle sparkling Chenin!

Available at Night Mares, Maine and Loire, Now You're Cooking, Round Pond Cheese Co, Bow Beverage, Folk, Bread and Friends, Sissle and Daughters, Saint George Pizza, Flight Deck Brewing, Tess Market, and Carousel

Julien Pinon makes this Methode Traditionelle sparkling Vouvray from slightly earlier harvested grapes across their holdings. These grapes with slightly higher acidity are hand harvested and then ferment for 4-6 weeks with native yeast in neutral barrels and then gets racked and spends 2-3 months on the fine lees. It gets a light filtration and is then bottled to go through a secondary fermentation in the bottle. It spends about 2 years aging in the bottles before getting disgorged and has a dosage of 6 grams. In some vintages it has a bit of residual sweetness but I don’t notice any in this bottling of the wine.

12/24/2025

Champagne Chavost Blanc d'Assemblage Brut Nature! Delicious and elegant natural fermentation zero dosage and no sulfur added Champagne! It's great for breakfast!

Available at Maine and Loire as well as First Fig

Champagne Chavost is a smallish coop of farmers with 5.5 hectares that are certified organic. Current chef de cave Fabian took over management in 2019 and somehow managed to convince all the various (approx 70) small land owners to let him create a new line of Champagnes that were native fermentation, zero dosage, and without additives. That Fabian could pull that off makes me think you should run for parliament! But then maybe we'd be deprived of this lovely and surprisingly affordable Champagne

12/23/2025

Conestabile della Staffa Pino! Yes, Pinot Noir from Umbria and it rocks! Available at Monte's Fine Foods, Crooked Face Creamery, Black Birch, Golden Harvest, Lady of the Vine, Vinolio, and the Abbey

Back in the 1950s there was a push to plant Pinot Noir in Umbria. So clones were brought in from Burgundy and vineyards were planted… but the world moved on and most vineyards were replanted. Danilo read about this and started looking for some of these old vines. The clones that had been planted have since been mostly abandoned in Burgundy so Danilo was particularly interested. About 5 years ago he found and old farmer who had some of these old vines! The farmer swore up and down that it was “Nero Buono” (good dark grapes). Danilo said ok sir, but may I have some cuttings the next time you prune? Danilo got the cuttings, grafted them at Conestabile della Staffa, and now 5 years later the vines are finally producing enough grapes that he bottled it for the first time! So this is the first ever Pinot Noir from Conestabile della Staffa. 10 cases came into the country! I bought all that was left (81 bottles) as I was tasting it with him because this is delicious!

Aroma: deep red concentrated cherry with a touch of cooked cranberry, a little whiff of spruce tips in the spring, and a bit of concentrated raspberry. This has an attractive and concentrated fruit driven aroma but it's not just a one-trick pony; there are some subtle background heady aromatic herbal aromas too, particularly fresh thyme. The precision and poise of the fruit flavors makes me think of Pinot Noir but some of the actual flavors are very much Central Italy

Taste: vibrant concentrated raspberry, some strawberry, then strawberry candy; the fruit is supple and lovely and Pinot Noir but then there's an underlying structure to the wine that is more focused and rocky than I associate with Pinot. It has a stiffer more mineraly backbone. The finish of the wine has a heady hibiscus pomegranate kind of flavor to it. High toned and ethereal seeming thanks to subtle lingering tannin this is a lovely and expressive wine!

12/23/2025

Zlatan Otok 'Bilo Idro' Plavac 2022

Available at Vinolio, The Crooked Spoon, Now You're Cooking, New Morning, Zu Bakery, The Clown, Golden Harvest, Great Cranberry General, Regards, Vessel and Vine, and the Blue Hill Wine Shop

100% Plavac Mali from vines in Sibenik. The vineyards are on steep slopes with thin red clay soil over limestone rock like on Hvar. The grapes are organically farmed with virtually no intervention in the vineyard. They’re hand harvested and ferment with native yeast for 8 days on the skins in stainless steel. The wine is racked off and then ages 18 months resting in stainless steel.

The soil is all rocky limestone both on the island and over on the mainland and all the vineyards face south. Nikola said that they spray with powdered natural sulfate in the vineyards maybe once or twice a year. It’s so hot and dry and rocky that there’s just no moisture and therefore no mildew or peronospera. The slopes on the mainland are steep and quite rocky, but they don’t compare to Hvar. The vineyards are as steep as 60 degrees and it is so rocky and dry that after 50 years of life half of the vines will be dead. They vines are so stressed that they only produce 1/2 a kilo of grapes per vine.