As 2025 comes to a close, I’m curious which new projects - from anywhere in the world - people are most excited about heading into 2026.
For me:
There’s a post for this that Mike grammer made
Fair on the WOTY part, so I will update this to be looking ahead to 2026 - since Mike’s post is on 2025 wine discoveries.
Perry Colin wines is a new Chardonnay project in Oregon; I reviewed the samples for these and they were very impressive.
New female winemaker at Jaffurs and from what I have tasted of hers so far have been fantastic. The Grenache Blanc from them is also making a comeback.
Perry Colin.
New producer out of Oregon. Chardonnays. I was lucky enough to be tapped for tasting them ahead of Berserker Day. Holy smokes, folks! You heard it here first.
What made you prefer Sown Estate’s 24 over 23?
They used a higher proportion of new oak in ’24, and the wine really benefits from it. The ’23 is still excellent, but personally I think ’24 is better.
As for the ’24 vintage overall, it’s arguably better than ’23 if you prefer a riper, more classic Napa style
Yeah they were really good
Nacra is definitely incredible. Excited for their release, hopefully in 2026.
I think they need significant time laying down, but - migosh! - there is some impressive future there. I do have concern about how easy they will be to buy, but that’s to be dealt with at a later time.
How easy they are to buy? Care to explain?
None have been released yet. Very low production. TBD if DTC will be happening, which means one might have to go on a wild goose chase to acquire. I’ve already put my name on the list, with the hope that DTC does come to fruition.
Thanks, Brian.
Barrel samples of 24 (full oak and no oak) were really approachable and delicious but I didn’t recall Andrew mentioned having more oak for that vintage.
My truck is tired of backing up 
put it in reverse
Thanks for the kudos Michael & Brian! I’m on vacation without great internet right now. When I got back to our accommodation and saw 25+ emails from our website inquiry form, I thought our website got hacked!
Thanks to everyone who reached out via our website. It’s always humbling to get emails from all over the world excited to try something we made. I think I managed to reply to everyone while our youngest was taking a nap today. If I didn’t get back to you, either check your spam or leave a reply here.
As Brian alluded above, we didn’t make a lot of wine. Only around 8,000 bottles of the 2024 spread over four different wines. About half of that is allocated for export to EU and Asia. So that’s only around 330 cases for all of the USA. We will do our very best to get wine into the hands of people who are most excited to drink it!
Agree on 24 being riper than 23, though my interpretation of “classic” means old-school, rather than the modern riper wines.
Does the gender of the winemaker matter?