Devenish Wines

Famille Laurent Saint Pourcain Rouge! This vintage is only 11.5% alcohol, but so packed with flavor and layred complexity; it’s so good!

available at Room For Improvment, Blue Hill Wine Shop, RSVP, Tops'l Farm, Liquor Locker, Rosemont Market, Kennebec Meat Co, Now You're Cooking, Vessel and Vine, Oak Hill, and Hunt and alpine

One of my favorite wines out of the Devenish portfolio is the Famille Laurent Saint Pourcain Rouge.  It’s a blend of Pinot Noir and Gamay from up in the massif central: the highlands of central France where the Loire river has it’s head waters.  This wine always has the suppleness and refinement of Pinot Noir with the extroverted fruit of Gamay. The granitic soils here are warm, but the vineyards are exposed and windy. It can be a hard place to farm, but this is a lovely, rich, outgoing wine with lots of flavor, but without being too heavy handed. This is exactly the kind of fun, unusual, affordable, terroir expressing wine that inspires me.

Conestabile della Staffa 'Case Sparse' Rosso 2023!

Available at Bowdoinham Country Store, Circumstance, Saint George Pizza, House Wine, New Morning, Vessel and Vine, Vinolio, La Laiterie, and Sissle and Daughters

This time around Case Sparse Red is 50/50 Sangiovese and Ciliegiolo. It’s great! The Sangiovese contributes bright fruit, acidity, and minerality, while the Ciliegiolo gives it some more powerful candied cherry aromas and flavors that round it out. The juice all rested in neutral resin tanks to preserve the fresh vibrant fruit. Fermentation was spontaneous and there is no sulfur, filtration, or fining. Nothing added at all.

Roberto Henriquez Santa Cruz de Coya 2024

Available at Harbor Table, Round Pond Cheese, Sissle and Daughters, Circumstance, Lois's, Ocotillo, John Edward's, Riverside Butcher, Treats, Salsbury Organics, Crooked Face Creamery, La Laiterie, Table Bar, and Maine and Loire

Santa Cruz de Coya comes from several different parcels isolated in the woods out in the hills of Bio Bio that all have red granite sandy soil. The vines are all around 200 years old. Most all of the vines had been abandoned and started to grow up trees and over the ground. Roberto has put in years of work to prune them back to their bases so that they’ll properly ripen grapes and not over produce. This is destemmed and then ferments in a mix of concrete tanks and neutral barrels.

Billecart Salmon '250th Anniversary' Vintage 2018 Extra Brut

Billecart Salmon has created a special one off bottling to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and I am here to tell you that it is a fantastically delicious Champagne with a gorgeous label.  You may be asking what Billecart Salmon has to do with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence… I did.  Really, it’s a coincidence, but a very happy and good coincidence nonetheless. This wine is a vintage Champagne from 2018.  2018 happened to be the 200th anniversary of Billecart’s founding and also is the best Champagne vintage since 2002.  Billecart holds their vintage Champagnes for quite a while and it just so happened that they felt the 2018 was finally ready to drink this year: 2026. Billecart couldn’t ignore this overlap of anniversaries so they created a special label and enclosure for this 2018 vintage. I’ve tasted it (notes below) and it is super impressive and powerful, it definitely tastes like a Champagne that could handles extended aging.  This is made from 100% Grand Cru and Premier Cru fruit, with a blend of 65% Pinot Noir from the Montagne de Reims and 35% Chardonnay from the Côte des Blancs. Just 3% of the cuvée was vinified in oak, with the balance aged in stainless steel, then the wine spent 63 months sur latte before being finished as an Extra Brut with 4.9 g/L dosage.

Artizani 'Forest of Wild Blueberries' Saperavi 2024

Available at

Friends Salome, Irakli, and David took ‘Artizani’- from French- to describe a craftsman who works with his hands as the name of their winery because they do all the work by hand!  Located in the village of Kashmi in the far west of the Kakheti region in a small river valley they have fertile soil at very high elevation. This is destemmed and then ferments with wild yeast in stainless steel tanks for 8 days. Instead of punch downs the the wine makers use more gentle pour overs every 4-5 hours. After malolactic fermentation finishes they let the wine rest and stabilize over the winter before bottling and spending a further 3 months in bottle.

2025 Saint Pourcain Rose is here!

Roberto Henriquez Molino del Ciego Semillon 2024

Available at Vessel and Vine, Ocotillo, Round Pond Cheese Co, John Edward's, Oak Hill Beverage, Table Bar, Maine and Loire, and The Abbey

Molino del Ciego comes from a vineyard of old vine Semillon up in Itata about 1/2 an our from Roberto. It’s a bit cooler and more humid here because it’s so close to the Atlantic. The grapes are destemmed and then ferment with native yeast on the skins for 14 days. The wine is aged in barrel for one year, but Roberto uses old barrels that he cleans and doesn’t toast at all so there’s no discernable wood taste added to the wine.

Marmenio Saperavi 2024

Available at Wind and Wine, St George Pizza, Golden Harvest, Bow St Beverage, Blue Hill Wine Shop, and the Wine Seller

Matthew Herfort actually moved to Georgia to become a wine maker! He loved the traditional culture of natural wine making and that’s what drew him to move to Vardisubani, in the Telavi region of Kakheti, but he’s not dogmatic and has experimented with different techniques and even makes some sparkling wine! This ferments on the skins in qvevri for three weeks with air, then the qvevri are sealed and the juice spends another 6 months in them. Hand tools are used whenever possible. Whole cluster fermentation is used in some wines, ranging from 5-50% whole cluster additions directly to the qvevri. After aging in qvevri, the wines are transferred to stainless steel tanks and racking is used to achieve clarity, as they do not use filtration. Starting in 2020 Marmenio eliminated the use of added yeasts, and now the only addition to the wines is low levels of sulfites.