September 2026
The Month of
Harvest Nerves
September is the month the year’s biggest decision comes due. Across the Northern Hemisphere the fruit is ripe, the forecast is unreliable, and every grower is playing the same hand: pick now and keep the freshness, or wait for flavor and gamble against the rain. This month’s three wines were all made by people who held their nerve — a Stellenbosch Chenin Blanc from a house that calls picking season “nerve-racking” in its own words, a Naoussa Xinomavro brought in weeks ahead of schedule in the warmest year the region can remember, and an Uco Valley Malbec picked fast and precisely off one of the smallest crops Mendoza has recorded.
Selections from a past month — availability may have changed.
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01
WEEKDAY · UNDER $20
KEN FORRESTER OLD VINE RESERVE CHENIN BLANC
2025 · Stellenbosch WO, South Africa
Quince and yellow apple up front, then the deeper register old-vine Chenin finds in Stellenbosch: baked pear, a thread of honey, and a saline line that pulls the finish straight. This is South Africa’s signature white grape from one of the people who made it so — Ken Forrester took over a derelict 17th-century farm below the Helderberg in 1993 and staked the venture on Chenin when the smart money was elsewhere. The Old Vine Reserve is the estate’s calling card: dry, textured, built off older parcels rather than young commercial blocks, and it drinks a full shelf above its price. It has the weight for a proper dinner and the acidity for a Tuesday. At
9.97, it is that rare weekday bottle with an argument behind it: patience, held a beat longer than comfort allows.
Quince, yellow apple, honey, wet stone
Roast chicken with thyme, mild coconut curry
Chenin Blanc (100%)
2026–2029
Vintage Context
Stellenbosch harvests in the Southern summer, and Chenin is a mid-season pick — coming off, as the estate puts it, “from the second half of February.” The house has published its philosophy of the moment outright: picking time is “an exciting and nerve-racking time on the farm,” “a careful game of patience and waiting for the perfect moment to pick.” Forrester named the temptation to Decanter in 2015: “One might be inclined to bring in the grapes too hastily.” The wine in the glass is the sound of that inclination being resisted.
Build the Board
via Murray’s Cheese
A weeknight board for a patient Chenin
Aged Gouda · Prosciutto · Honeycomb · Marcona almonds · Seeded crackers
02
SATURDAY POUR · $20–$50
THYMIOPOULOS YOUNG VINES XINOMAVRO
2024 · Naoussa PDO, Macedonia, Greece
Pale garnet, and a nose that explains why Greeks compare this grape to Nebbiolo: sour cherry and strawberry over sun-dried tomato, black olive, and a dust of sweet spice. Xinomavro means, roughly, “sour-black,” and the name is honest — the acidity is electric, the tannin fine but persistent. Young Vines is the friendly door into a famously stern grape: fruit from higher parcels around the village of Fytia blended with warmer, lower vines near Trilofos, picked for brightness rather than brawn. It takes a slight chill and wants something salty beside it. At
2.97, it is the cheapest ticket to one of Europe’s great food wines.Sour cherry, sun-dried tomato, black olive, sweet spice
Lamb souvlaki, mushroom risotto
Xinomavro (100%)
2026–2030
Vintage Context
Naoussa’s norm is an October pick — Xinomavro ripens late, the last fruit on the hill when the weather turns. 2024 allowed no such luxury: the warmest year and hardest drought in memory pulled the whole region forward by weeks, and this bottling came in between 19 September and 10 October, its two sources ripening on two different clocks — cool Fytia high on the slope, warm Trilofos below. Stellios Boutaris of neighboring Ktima Kir-Yianni put the regional stakes in one line: “The weather conditions did not allow any margin for poor and/or high-risk calculations.” In a year like that, a bright, exuberant Xinomavro is not a small achievement.
Build the Board
via Murray’s Cheese
A Saturday board worth the trip to the good cheese counter
Aged Graviera · Soppressata · Kalamata olives · Dried figs · Grilled pita
03
SPLURGE · $50+
ZUCCARDI CONCRETO MALBEC
2023 · Paraje Altamira and Gualtallary, Uco Valley, Argentina
Black raspberry and plum, violets, and underneath it the crushed-stone austerity that high-altitude Malbec trades lushness for. Concreto is exactly what the label promises: fermented and raised entirely in concrete, no oak anywhere, so the wine tastes of fruit and rock and nothing in between. The grapes come from two of the Uco Valley’s defining places — Paraje Altamira at 1,100 meters and Gualtallary at 1,360 — and within them Zuccardi picks only what it calls the stoniest, most calcareous plots: river rock and granite gravel jacketed in lime, which is where the chalky grip in the tannin comes from. This is Malbec with its collar turned up: taut, savory, closer to structure than to jam. Decant it an hour, give it a serious piece of meat, and let it argue. At $52.99, this is the bottle that rewrites what you think Argentina does.
Black raspberry, violet, crushed stone, dried herbs
Grilled ribeye, portobello mushrooms with chimichurri
Malbec (100%)
2026–2034
Vintage Context
The 2023 season in Mendoza opened with a disaster: an exceptionally intense frost in the early morning of 1 November 2022 burned the spring growth and cut the province to what Zuccardi’s own harvest report calls the smallest crop in its history. The fruit that survived ripened through a warm, very dry summer, and Zuccardi’s harvest report records two clocks running at once — picking “very fast in Gualtallary, although slightly delayed in the Paraje Altamira area,” and both of those are this wine’s vineyards. The Concreto technical sheet frames the decision the way this whole month does: the dry year “allowed us to define the harvest time for each area very precisely,” always “avoiding overripeness.” Small crop, fast decisions, no margin — and the wine came out taut.
Build the Board
via Murray’s Cheese
A splurge board from the French and Italian end of the counter
Tomme de Savoie · Finocchiona · Quince paste · Cornichons · Walnut bread
Subscribers get a weekly pick that never hits the site — a fourth bottle, every Thursday, in The TERROIR Letter.
Producer Spotlight
Selbach-Oster
Zeltingen, Mosel — the house that refuses to sort
On the Mosel, the standard of care is to walk the same steep rows again and again, harvesting only the ripest berries each pass. At Selbach-Oster the creed runs the other way: wait as long as you dare, then take a top parcel whole in a single pass — ripe, middling, and under-ripe fruit together — because a father once bet his son that the vineyard makes a better blend than the sorting table. September’s featured bottle, the Zeltinger Schlossberg Riesling Kabinett 2023 at $33.99, comes from the vineyard that contains the very parcel where that wager was settled.
The TERROIR Letter
The Cellar, Delivered
Monthly selections and a weekly Subscriber’s Pick — curated bottles that never appear on the site.
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