Holger Koch, "Ja Goutte!" 2021

Holger’s importer “Super Glou” put it this way: “Holger’s wines are grandpa chic.” We can’t think of a better way to frame these playful gems from Vogtsburg-im-Kaiserstuhl, a small town amidst the Kaisterstuhl mountain range of southern Germany’s wider Baden region, famous for housing the Black Forest (of Brothers Grimm lore). The wines produced by Holger & Gabriele Koch are both Burgundian & not – certainly the hyper-site-specificity paired with the literal massale cuttings they’ve cultivated from Puligyn-Montrachet, most notably, give you a conceptual and physical connection to (arguably) the French heart of wine. But perhaps more than anything rigorous or technical, it is the way the wines unfurl with personality, how they are both elegant and deep yet driven by site-specific acidity. Maybe most-so, the wines are made from grapes grown in an environment that has been widely acknowledged now as “New Burgundy” to use an odd-term, given climate change’s ever-encroaching tempera