Every time you open a good bottle of wine it's an opportunity to travel, usually to that special place where the grapes were grown and the wine was made.
Every time you open a good bottle of wine it's an opportunity to travel, usually to that special place where the grapes were grown and the wine was made.
But sometimes the wine will take you on a trip through time. There are a few estates that haven't changed for decades. But not many—López de Heredia comes to mind, and Lafarge in Volnay. When you taste their wines, you experience something ancient and beautiful. Time travel.
In the case of the Merkelbachs, that time is the 1950s. Nothing has changed since then: for all those decades the same two brothers have made wines from the same terroirs, over and over again, using the same ancient methods on their beautiful, old, ungrafted vines. They started young and are both around 80 years old today.
Like López and Lafarge, the wines are extraordinarily good. They have to be for the project to survive so long, working this way.
