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Delamotte is best known as the more affordable sister estate of Salon—the original luxury-collectible single vineyard Blanc de Blancs from Le Mesnil. They share viticultural, winemaking, and management teams, per Wine Searcher. While overlooking Delamotte in favor of its wildly more expensive sister is understandable, it ignores the fact that Delamotte is a Champagne House of note in its own right.
 
What makes these Champagnes so special? These represent some of the finest Blanc de Blancs (Chardonnay) terroirs in all of Champagne. These Champagnes define chalk: the precious fruit is grown on the slopes of the Grand Cru villages of Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, Avize, Oger, and Cramant. The wines are given just a small dosage to allow the Cote des Blancs terroir to shine.

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“Should we all buy more Merkelbach? Yes, of course!” – Mosel Fine Wines
 
We adore the wines of Weingut Alfred Merkelbach, irrationally and perhaps more than any other grower in the Mosel. They set the curve for the term “old-school,” having made their wines in similar style for almost 70 years. These wines capture the delicacy and etherealness of Riesling like few other wines we’ve tried. Terry Theise, when importing the wines for Skurnik, described their wines as “like VAPING Mosel Riesling.”
 
The estate is owned by two brothers, Alfred and Rolf. With no descendants to hand off the estate to, they quietly continued their work following decades of experience, practice and dedication to traditional methods of winemaking.

Top Burgundy & Champagne Winemakers Team Up in California
 
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When one of the preeminent names in Burgundy, Étienne de Montille of Domaine de Montille, sought out land on the West Coast of America to craft Pinot Noir and Chardonnay with a Burgundian sensibility, it was only natural that he focused on the Santa Rita Hills in Santa Barbara County. (It’s a region that seems to pull at French hearts, as it did with the late Philippe Cambie and his joint project with Adam Lee of Siduri, named Beau Marchais.)
 
And draw more Frenchmen, it did. Étienne shared the news with his friend Rodolphe Péters of Champagne’s top-class grower estate, Pierre Péters, who quickly signed on and became the sparkling wine consultant for the project.

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Fred Prinz originally started Weingut Prinz as a “garagiste” or hobbiest winemaker operation in 1991. The critics quickly became enamored, and an invitation to join the legendary VDP consortium followed in 2005. Their estate vineyards are farmed organically, with a house style that aims for “minerality, elegance, finesse and ageing ability” that expresses terroir.
 
With high-elevation holdings in the Rheingau, the winery produces a full range of Riesling’s including the ultra-rare Eiswein. Eiswein is among the hardest wines to make on the entire planet, and is becoming rarer as climate change advances. This is on account of the time the Riesling grapes must spend on the vine as decreed by German law. There’s an endless list of things that could go wrong for the selected clusters during this time.