The eponymous red 2021 Aalto has a lactic touch and is spicy, smoky and ripe, with notes of barbecued duck, soy sauce and a touch of truffle. It's heady, ripe (14.5% alcohol), has a luxurious mouthfeel and is glossy and juicy, with abundant but fine-grained tannins and low-ish acidity. For fans of the style. Quite consistent across vintages. 330,000 bottles. It was bottled in July 2023. (LG, 6/2024)

The Egon Müller Scharzhof QBA 2022 is a world-class wine crafted by one of Germany’s most respected winemakers. Sourced from the legendary slopes of the Mosel, this vintage captures the essence of what the Scharzhof vineyards have to offer. The grapes are meticulously harvested and transformed into a wine that balances finesse with intensity, highlighting the terroir-driven minerality for which the Mosel region is renowned.

Tasting Notes: This wine presents an elegant bouquet of fresh citrus and white flowers, with subtle hints of green apple and a delicate spicy minerality. It offers a finely tuned balance between acidity and sweetness, creating a light yet complex drinking experience. As it opens in the glass, it reveals more layers of flavor and a refined texture.

Wine Advocate

Chablis Vieilles Vignes is medium-bodied, fleshy and pure, with a delicately textural attack and a saline finish. There's no young vine cuvée this year.

Flowers are the first thing you notice before discovering all the spice, cloves, kirsch, and dark cherries on the nose. On the palate, the wine is silky, elegant, fresh, supple, and refined. The kirsch shows a beautiful purity and spicy character, along with its refined tannins and peppery strawberries that kick in at the end of the finish. The wine is a blend of 55% Grenache, 30% Mourvedre, and 10% Syrah with the remaining 5% consisting of various, allowable grape varieties. The grapes are as always 100% destemmed. The production is quite low this year at only 25 hectoliters per hectare. The wine is 15.2% ABV, but you do not sense any heat. Drink from 2024-2038. 98 Pts" - 98/100, Jeff Leve, The Wine Cellar Insider

Wine Advocate

Hints of leather and crushed stone appear on the nose, adding a pleasant nuance to the somewhat monolithic black-cherry fruit. It shows less nuance and complexity than the 2020 at this stage but shows plenty of promise, as its concentration is matched by freshness and a long, reasonably elegant, finish. This will likely need some time to come around. Like many of the producers I visited in late 2021, Paul-Vincent Avril seemed happy to receive a visitor after so many months of virtual isolation. "We've had a good summer—not too hot," he said. The estates parcels were, however, badly affected by frost in the spring. His team began picking on September 20, paused over the following weekend for rain, and he expected them to finish on October 2. "The phenolic maturity is there, the sugars are there," Avril said. "No, it won't be like 2019, but I think we will come in around 14.5–15 degrees [of alcohol]. I think, I don't like to say before the vintage is finished." (JC 5/2022)