Buy The Front Label
Last Saturday i drank a bottle of wine. i drink lots of bottles of wine, some good, some bad. Some i sell, most i don’t. The good ones are invariably made by someone. This isn’t to say that wine isn’t always made by someone, it’s to say that it is made by someone.
This bottle was made by a gentleman named Marius Gentaz. Marius made wine in the Cote Rotie, which is a rather expensive appellation (well it is now). The Cote Rotie isn’t the important part, the important part is the Gentaz part.
You see there are wines that get by on the strength of something else. There are plenty of wines from Napa for instance that i wouldn’t drink at gunpoint (slight exaggeration, maybe a BB gun) but there is only one Cathy Corison, for instance, whose wines i will drink in a heartbeat.
People always tell me “buy the back label” as in the importers label, but i think we would all be better to actually buy the front label. There’s someone behind that label with their hands in the dirt, that was up until 3am for 3 weeks in a rainy harvest. Someone who was freezing their ass off in January to do the work. Find those people, the ones you like, get to know them. They put a lot of themselves into the wine behind that label. These things are important.
Happy Holidays from all of us at Saignee (well it’s just me).
saignée 
Could not agree more. Happy Holiday to you.
That makes perfect sense when it’s a producer that one is familiar with. However, when it’s one that’s new to me, what’s on the back label does make a difference. Your operation is a prime example of that. Everyone that you’ve brought in has been new. If one of the many that I liked did go to a different importer, I would now know to buy by producer.