Newsletter No.1

Newsletter No.1

by Dan Reinisch

 

Hello there!

Thanks for signing up to hear a little more about what we have coming down the pipeline at Lutine! We appreciate you all hopping on in time to receive our inaugural newsletter.

Going forward, we hope to send one of these out every month, or so. More than anything, we want them to be colloquial and educational. Over time we hope you get to know our team and get to recognize our writing, sure that it’s Dan because of the SHEER VOLUME of commas, or Diego in his use of the perfect pop culture metaphor you haven’t thought about in too long.

We’re still waiting on an exact opening date, but get ready! It’s coming up soon - just before Thanksgiving! We’ll make sure you stay in the loop!

Before we get too deep into some impactful connections and memories we’ve made over the last few months, it feels appropriate to let you know a little bit more about who we are, and what we’re hoping Lutine can grow into.

Yes, Lutine is going to be a place where you can buy wine, but we aspire to be more. When it comes down to it, for us, pursuing good wine means pursing a life well-lived. We are incredibly passionate about pursuing a well-lived life for ourselves and sharing it with others through the use of a few central tenets:

Community - We think wine is best enjoyed in context, with friends and family. That might be on a beach, around a table with some really good food, or out of the bottle at Hamtramck’s Labor Day Fair. Beyond helping curate those moments for you outside our walls, we look forward to hosting tastings, events, and moderating forums to help us all do just that in-house.
Approachability - The way we talk about wine will always be full of empathy and free of judgement. Wine doesn’t need to be drunk using a tastevin and spoken about in Olde English to be better appreciated. No matter how much, or little, knowledge one has, we all have senses and memories. Celebrating what makes us and our palates unique is more interesting, anyways!
Education - As much as we want to celebrate approachability and inclusion, we think learning is critical to the intentional enjoyment of wine. Embracing stories from the places, the vigneron, the importers, the soil all help to give us a better understanding of and emotional connection to the bottles we consume. By continuing to learn together, we hope to constantly pursue new flavors and moments with you all.

While we’ve been hard at work building out our website with educational materials and curating our opening set of bottles, there are a few experiences lately that have had an outsize impact on the way we’re thinking. They might - or might not! - relate to some of the bottles you’ll find on our shelves.

 Marc Hochar of Chateau Musar

We were fortunate enough to have a formal tasting with Marc Hochar of Chateau Musar the other week. Current vintages of his family’s incredible wines were open in addition to a few cellared treasures. The wines always show incredibly well, regardless of where they are in their development. Fruit, earth, florals, spices, minerals all commingle - ebbing and flowing in prominence through the years. But, one line of thought really stopped us in our tracks, as Marc was recalling a trip to the Western US:

One of the Sommeliers he was tasting with referred to the Biodynamic calendar, noting that ‘Of course!’ the wines were showing well, it was a Flower Day. Marc, a thoughtful man whose family has farmed the sunny, arid Bekaa Valley of Lebanon for generations without the use of modern technology, decided that he was going to use the rest of the trip to study how his wines were drinking on any given day of the Biodynamic calendar. Over the course of 2 weeks, opening bottles across the country, Marc decided that the Biodynamic calendar had absolutely no bearing on how his wines tasted on a given day. However, he concluded that the weather had a huge impact on how his wines were drinking.
The Bekaa Valley has over 300 days of sun per year. Musar’s vines aren’t irrigated and rarely see even the most minimal of additions of fertilizers; the vines are alive and have adapted to their place in the world over decades. The wines receive similarly minimal treatment, retaining their liveliness. Marc believes that Chateau Musar’s wines show best on days that are sunny and warm, the juice inside the bottles recalling their place in the world, reaching out to all of us with some additional elegance.

Obviously this is more anecdotal than scientific. Regardless of what you think, wine is alive. Without life, it wouldn’t continue to change and evolve over time, bottles would never be faulty, they wouldn’t show us flavors that drive one to meditative silence - focusing only on what’s in your glass.

All that to say, we love this romance, this line of thought, surrounding wine. It makes us want to stuff cases of Musar into our cellars, so that on sunny days we can open a bottle and think of the place, the people, the year that made those bottles what they are.

Outward Wines

Admittedly, California is an area of growth for us at Lutine. With the warm climates and the attention paid to market trends, many of the wines we ran across felt over-extracted, adulterated, or hiding beneath a veneer of oak. We knew that searching for new California producers was going to be incredibly important for our clients up in Troy, but we wanted these vigneron to share our sensibilities and values for what a wine should be. After weeks poring over various restaurant wine lists from around the country, Outward stood out as a producer we should be paying attention to. 

Outward Wines is a project from Natalie Siddique and Ryan Pace that focuses on making tiny amounts of single-lot wines from California’s Central Coast. Together they manage 6 acres of vineyards in the cool rolling hills of California. Proximity to the Pacific is a must, its cooling influence allows the vines to rest at night, so the wines can retain freshness. Natalie and Ryan view themselves as translators, allowing the wines to speak for themselves. In our opinion, this deft hand and deference to the vine isn’t seen enough. Beyond confounding expectations stylistically, Outward clearly has a soft spot for lesser known grapes - Valdigue, Chenin Blanc, Gamay Noir, Vaccarese - all show up as single-varietal bottles.

A likeminded sucker for the punishment of celebrating hard-to-sell wines, our good friend Joel of Eagle Eye Brands (one of our many Distributors here in Michigan) got as excited as we were about Outward Wines and helped by getting some samples to us in a matter of weeks. The wines were bright and lively and confident. We were blown away. We had to have them. And then Joel had a lot of paperwork to do.

While we won’t be the only people in town with these wines - there are a number of other small shops and independent restaurants showcasing Outward Wines - we are proud and privileged to have them on our shelves. We hope you love them as much as we do. Since making this discovery, learning about the wines of California has continued to be a gratifying mission. We can’t wait to keep going.

<3 the Lutine Team<3