Les Blog

Sadly, Les Garagistes is dead.

News that the group had purchased the pine condo came in a somewhat roundabout way, via the latest issue of Decanter:

Critics, winemakers and merchants alike are sounding the death knell for garagiste wines.

Les Garagistes, perhaps out of town on a tour of the undiscovered country, did not return repeated calls for comment. But the group did send this message from its suite at the Horizontal Hilton:

We are not going to dignify that with a response, we were never there, and it was broken when we found it. But if we are in fact basting the formaldehyde turkey, we must caution Wall Street that this could significantly impact our second quarter wine consumption.

News that the group had gone into the fertilizer business came within moments of another shocking revelation: Bacchus is not its natural birth father. That dubious honor, Decanter reported, in fact falls on Jean-Luc Thunevin, the grand fromage behind Parker-favorite Château Valandraud and one of the “founding fathers of the garagiste movement.”

Dodging questions about his culpability in siring and then leaving the cuddly southeast Portland winemaking collective for dead (“c’était une armée des laitiers, pas moi!”), Thunevin sought to distance himself from his newly revealed progeny:

“…garage wines are made by winemakers who try to compensate for a lack of means and poor terroir by applying modern techniques and efficiencies.”

It proved to be a traumatic 15 minutes of flame for the metabolically-challenged group of winemakers, but a Les Garagistes spokesperson — himself a dead ringer for a doornail — pounced on Thunevin’s statement as proof the fat lady was simply clearing her throat:

The winemakers described by this Thunevin are clearly not us. First of all, we’ve got plenty of means — so many, in fact, we live quite beyond them. And modern techniques? Okay, about a year ago we started using a wine glass instead of a jug, but that’s as New York City as we’re prepared to go. As for these “efficiencies” you speak of — if we had the first idea of what that word meant, I’m confident we would have no part in them, either.

Les Garagistes is survived by uncounted cases of wine, a corker, and a bag of potassium metabisulfite. In lieu of flowers, unmarked 10s and 20s are requested.

[Beret-tip to Alder at Vinography for uncovering this tragic news.]