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Happy 2015, everyone! Today's blog post and travelogue entry on Alsace comes from Boulder Wine Merchant team member Christopher Davis.

Alsace: The Shimmering Jewel of Northeast France

by Christopher Davis

Across the United States, a new generation of sommeliers and restaurant professionals has begun abandoning the flute as the stemware of choice for sparkling wines.

In our parents' era, it was believed that the flute enhanced the sensorial experience of drinking sparkling wine by concentrating the wine's fizziness in the glass' narrow aperture.

Happy holidays from the Boulder Wine Merchant blog!

We really appreciate you being here, reading, and sharing.

We've got lots of great content lined up for next year, including guest contributors.

Stay tuned for next week's notes on sparkling wines for New Year's.

I met a lot of fantastic people at the Boulder Burgundy Festival this year: winemakers, wine tradespeople, collectors, and bon vivants.

But one of the most fun conversations I had was with George Berg (above, left), whose law firm Berg, Hill, Greenleaf & Ruscitti, underwrites the festival each year.

When I asked George, whose generous conviviality is rivaled only by his Texas charm, why he and his firm sponsor the gathering, his answer was a simple as it was brilliant.

Earlier this year, leading wine writer Elin McCoy called Robert Bohr (below right) one of “New York’s sommelier old guard.”

His list at Charlie Bird, which he co-authors with another one of the city’s celebrity sommeliers, Grant Reynolds, is “a window into the New York wine zeitgeist," she wrote.

The D'Angerville seminar on the Sunday of the festival weekend was a truly extraordinary experience — on many levels.

The title was "D'Angerville" but the focus was on the village of Volnay and its terroirs.

The wines were spectacular but the star was Guillaume d'Angerville, who speaks English impeccably and has a charming, engaging, and warm old-world gentleman's air about him. An excellent speaker, he offered remarkable insights into what makes his village's wines unique in the panorama of Burgundian winemaking.

Let's be honest: In the wake of the festival's Saturday night, everyone was a little bit — how can we put it? — "toasty" on Sunday morning.

But that didn't stop people from waking in time for the Chablis Brunch, definitely the festival's most casual event but no less impressive in the breadth and caliber of wines that were poured.

Here is the flight of wines that were poured for guests:

Please click here to continue reading.

It’s hard to explain the uniqueness of the Boulder Burgundy Festival Grand Tasting.

Yes, the bean counting is easy. There were twenty purveyors of fine wines who presented their wines. And by the official count, there were roughly 170 wines poured, although many distributors brought extra wines that were not listed in the official tasting book.

The data alone would be impressive for this tasting, which was held in the historic Boulderado Hotel’s event center.