There's a little slice of Luxembourg that's very close to my heart.

I lived not too far from the Mosel river for 2 really transformative years of my life. I met a lot of remarkable people all over Europe, but Corinne Kox is and was unique, and a big reason I'm in the position I'm in today. Corinne comes from a massive family with a lot of tradition, in particular a tradition for grape growing, winemaking and innovation. Corinne's father, Laurent, took the family farm from grape growers for the government Co-op, to private winemakers. The Luxembourgish government still owns and operates half of the vineyards in the country. Laurent learned to make sparkling wine in Champagne, and produces to this day wines of comparable quality, and (in my humble if biased opinion) helped raise the game in the region to a contender for the very best for sparkling wine in the world. Laurent stopped using herbicides and pesticides in his vineyard in the 70s, decades before his contemporaries were willing to do so, still in a far more progressive position than the vast majority of his neighbors today.

Corinne stepped into this legacy with zero hesitancy, only pure and electric curiosity. She has no interest in trends or fashionable techniques. She eschews the phrase "natural wine" as obfuscation (the way we all should). Corinne is a doctor of microbiology, and she experiments as an honest empiricist, vintage after vintage, making small experiments and capitalizing on the results. I think it's easy to look at her wines as standard-bearers for the region: somehow simple, conventionally made german varieties with austere labels. This is miles away from the truth. If anyone represents the vanguard of winemaking today, it is for me Corinne Kox. Yes, she's taken her family's domain into a new era of non-intervention with the introduction of spontaneous fermentations, the limiting and complete elimination of sulphur, less fining and filtering, and yes even experiments with anfora and macerated whites. But this is a small slice of what Corinne has accomplished in just a few years as head winemaker.

This family makes around 60 cuvees a year. The level of curiosity and experimentation is Herculean. She has left monoculture, planting trees in bushes in her vineyards. She does her very modest, natural treatments with drones. She is not afraid of experimenting with taboo subjects like temperature control at fermentation, aging riesling in new oak, and even capitalization when necessary. Each and every wine from her cellar is a work of precision, innovation and the wisdom of tradition. I hope to be able to bring many more of her incredible wines, but we've started with two tiers of wine. The first are a marvel of modern agriculture and even more Corinne's insistence that anyone should be able to buy and drink wines of quality. She makes no concessions with these liter bottles. They are criminally underpriced. The second tier are the best of what Corinne's spirit of curiosity has yielded. Truly wines that ought not to be missed.