Of all the wines we tasted this month, none met our criteria for a great wine as well as this fastidiously crafted Chardonnay from the Russian River Valley.

It's also the most compelling cult-like bottling we've tried this year, and with good reason: Peter McCoy met John Kongsgaard at a Napa Barbeque in the mid-1990s when Peter's winery was still in the formative stages. After some conversation, he convinced John to write down the "recipe" for the famous Kongsgaard Chardonnay on the back of a cocktail napkin.

Didier Dagueneau is a visionary: For the last 12 years, he has sought to improve the reputation of authentic Pouilly-Fumé throughout the world by breaking the rules.

A staunch critic of overproduction, he cultivates only 11.5 hectares (about 1.5x the size of Central Park's Great Lawn) biodynamically and sparing no expense. One vintage he went so far as to publish photocopies of the invoices for the pickers who hand-harvested his vineyards.

We are proud to announce that the winner of the Crush War of the Rosés (by total number of customer votes) is from an estate that shares our beliefs that good wine begins with good soil and that great wine is a magnification of terroir.

Luckily, they also understand that simply owning good land is not enough, but an incredible amount of work is required to coax truly outstanding results out of the earth.

he story of Jules begins in the late '80s when Hugh and Jane Faulkner fell in love with the region and the wines of the Grand Cros estate. After some debate, the Canadian couple purchased the 60 acre Domaine.

Founded in the 17th century, Le Grand Cros has a long and storied tradition of winemaking. Raymond Guido, Grand Cros winemaker for 30 years, was a key contributor to the estate's history. Raymond continued to make the wine until 2000 when he retired, and Julian, the Faulkners' son, assumed the winemaking duties.

We recently came upon a collector with a large caché of well stored verticals in multiple formats. The first in our series are the notoriously long-lived Cabernets of Dunn Vineyards. These dense, chewy, huge wines are tops in California, for lovers of intense, full-bodied style.

California is best known for its blockbuster Cabernet, opulent Pinot Noir, and deep rich Chardonnay, not its pink wines ... unless you're talking about Cold Duck.

Unfortunately, it is this pungent and hangover-inducing 1970's brew of sweet red and sparkling white wine that most frequently comes to mind when most people think of California pink.

The latest generation of California winemakers is trying to change that by giving Cali rosé a sorely needed new identity.

2001 was one of the greatest German Riesling vintages in recent memory and put German Rieslings back in the forefront of many wine-lovers minds.

The absolutely perfect weather conditions (like the Bordeaux vintages of '82 and '00) caused collectors, many of whom had never bought Riesling before, to squirrel away cases at a time.

Unfortunately, this increased national spotlight and greater interest in Rieslings means that today it's difficult to find anything but loose bottles that haven't been standing up on a retail shelf for the last 3 years (I should know, I regularly scour the web and call retail stores around the nation to find older wine for my personal enjoyment).

If you can find bottles that have been well stored, they are often riper-style wines that are prohibitively expensive and still "in the tunnel" - a hibernation-like state of aging where their secondary flavors develop. They are very closed and backwards and need several years to re-emerge.

As you know, finding truly great Pinot under $30 a bottle can be quite difficult - there's simply not enough juice to satisfy worldwide cravings.

As the quality/price ratio decreases in traditional regions like California, Burgundy and even Oregon, we are finding some of our favorite value Pinots in unexpected places like the Jura, Austria, and today, Italy.

My previous experiences with Italian Pinot have been from Tuscany, and most have been lackluster. So when I heard about Pinot being grown in the mountainous region of Valle d'Aosta, better known for its skiing, I was a more than a bit skeptical.