Text by Greg Somm
Winemaking is the lot of kind and passionate people—at least, that is what I have always wanted to believe, despite the fact that I have already encountered quite ambiguous people on my path of discovering wine. Mauro Mascarello and Roberto Conterno are very extraordinary people who made the impression of being cranky, closed, and very uncommunicative. Yet, they make fantastic wine, and I have no explanation for how the kind of people they are is connected to, and how it influences, the wine. But a connection, in my opinion, should exist, and I kept waiting for the moment when it would manifest itself. And finally, I had that experience.
In 2023, a new name appears on the horizon that was previously unknown to anyone. Some German named Tino Kuban explodes the wine Instagrams, and he is suddenly promoted by seemingly savvy people. We do not stand aside, and also decide to take and try what the essence is. I buy, and thanks to luck with the first bottle, I become enchanted by his Pinot Noir L’Ouverture 2020. But later, with each new time, I began to realize that the expectations were higher than the reality. Everything seemed to be done competently, but the wine did not grab me at all. And I started to wonder what else I did not understand that was making everyone so excited about his wines.
And then this summer, I end up in a super cool place in Barca (Barcelona), where we blind-tasted a whole 'accordion' (a large, long line) of cool bottles with the team of another iconic wine venue in Barca, Gresca Bar. That is when we met Iago Bizarro, who was the sommelier at Gresca. Blindly, he poured, as we later saw, the white wine Les Magnies 2020 from Les Jardins Vivants. I placed it in the Jura and compared it to wines from Ganevat. I say this because the originality was not there, and as it turned out later, I was right.
The final collapse of this freak was his stupid comment to me, addressed to his faceless Gamay La Leux 2021. This was genuinely the most expensive Gamay of my life, as they say, literally and figuratively. And he could not resist and threw a tantrum in the comment. Well, to hell with him. But this only confirmed my suspicions of how stupid he is.
The devil is always in the details, and this lunatic revealed himself in them like no other. His story of pure PR and hype on the subject of Van Berg wines (likely a typo/reference to a specific style or location, possibly based on a misunderstanding of a German or local name) was revealed to me in comments from the Burgundians themselves and colleagues...
