Classics Reborn V Unusual Suspects
LA FROMAGERIE FESTIVE FINE WINES 2026
selected by Patricia Michelson & Max Melvin
Each winter, Patricia, chooses a selection of fine wines for the festive season. It’s a rigorous selection process of research and tasting but for the past few years I have dutifully volunteered to help…
We set ourselves strict criteria. All the wines had to pair with many of the dishes and snacks eaten over this period; serve as spectacular aperitifs and digestifs; act as exemplars of their region and style; please any epicurean drinker with an open mind; reward contemplative sessions where the passionate oenophile can witness the grape, winemaker, terroir and the vintage reveal themselves over the course of a couple of quiet glorious hours; and, most importantly, of course, pair immaculately with our best cheese.
Perhaps the ultimate test: on tasting each of them we simply had to be silenced by pure pleasure. And we were.
Amongst our selection are some of Patricia’s greatest finds from over the decades that show increasing relevance with every year, as well as some wines that have challenged both our preconceptions. We also wanted to highlight criminally underrated, and therefore extraordinary value, grapes, styles and regions from a Grand Cru dry Gewürztraminers from Alsace to a Listán Blanco from Tenerife.
The job was made more difficult but exciting by the civil war going on in ‘fine wine’ across the Old World and New.
On one side, the establishment crus, first growths and the more commercial winemaking industry at large, with their insistence on clarity, consistency, the notion that each sub region’s wines of the same style must be immediately recognisable to the experienced drinker no matter the producer, and most importantly, the unbreakable rule that they must display the total absence of ‘faults’. To their detractors these confections are commercial and dead, resembling industrial perfume production, whilst permanently obscuring each region’s unique terroir.
On the other side we have the ‘Garagistes’, the punk ‘natural’ and ‘low intervention’ wine movement seemingly intent on destroying the old to create the new. These winemakers proudly thumb their noses at convention with names and labels apparently designed to provoke a spate of pearl-clutching across the wine aristocracy. They seek to re-establish pre-industrial viticulture and winemaking with local naturally occurring yeasts, low or no sulphur addition, little clarification, and vineyards that are designed to respond to the movements of the moon rather than to chemical intervention. Wines of the same style and region must be maximally even unrecognisably different from one another to prove they have terroir. They must vibrate, sometimes literally, with mystical and astrological meaning. To their detractors, their ‘unusual flavours’ are simply different combinations of generic wine faults, the result of uncontrolled fermentation: the unholy trinity of kombucha, cider vinegar and the wrong end of a sheep. The hipster Neo-Rural’s version of the Emperor’s new clothes, the Goop-ification of wine…
Each side’s ideologues are guilty of Orwell’s charge to the Catholics and the Communists, that neither would believe that the other could be ‘both intelligent and sincere’.
As in most conflicts, both sides here are largely right, but each miss the achievements of the best winemakers who open-mindedly use any process and tool at their disposal to craft wines with personality, beauty and meaning. The ‘reasoned struggle’.
We sought to overturn these easy tribal biases by splitting our selection in two:
The first, Classics Reborn, shows that even the most dust covered names like Volnay and St. Emilion can be made in the most exciting and artisan ways, giving all the recognisable pleasure of their more conventional neighbours whilst adding, or maybe just revealing, truly delicious but unexpected qualities of grape and place. They will introduce a whole new generation to the realisation that these terroirs have been valued above all others for centuries for good reason! Winemakers like Chateau Le Puy of Bordeaux, E. Molino of Piedmont, and Domaine Lucien Boillout et Fils of Burgundy have both the establishment credentials and the contemporary wine making values to unite or, at least, silence both sides.
The second, Unusual Suspects, are wines that are considered ‘natural’ and from regions completely unknown to the average international hedge fund manager. They will convert even the most ardent claret drinking terracotta chino wearers to the mysteries of low intervention but hyper-skilled viticulture and winemaking. Their pleasures are easily accessible and their faults, non-existent. Wine makers like Domaine Ugo of Jurançon, Boris and Sandi Skerk of Friuli and Thomas Batardière of the Centre-Loire show that whilst natural wine is undoubtedly harder to make well, when done so, the drinker can experience something that can be achieved in no other way.
By MAX MELVIN
Oh Holy and Silent Night --- how could I add to such eloquence save except that lining up the 20 foot table in our Marylebone shop one afternoon with a row of bottles that were both saintly and sinners would result in such revelations and wonder. Max and I diligently tasted through the line, often pausing and going back and forth. The final line up resembles both our palates but more importantly opens up the whole attitude towards wine and food because we work all the time with wine and cheese partnering and I think we understand how it all works especially with cheese but also with food as we are both passionately inquisitive. We decided that this year our festive wines would take centre stage with the cheese; we really want to show you just how extraordinary the wine world is, and how it is a marriage made in heaven with our cheese. The only other point I would make is, get yourself a decent wine glass …. It really does make all the difference PATRICIA MICHELSON
