Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
The horse on the mountain.
— Federico García Lorca, Romance Sonámbulo
My father found this place in the 1960s. A plant nursery, abandoned. Overgrown. The last house before the jungle begins.
He saw something in it that most people would have walked past.
I grew up going back to it. Summers. The heat. Rain that seeps into everything. Barefoot on the lawn in a sun I do not find anywhere else. Birds I cannot name. The city of Kandy below, the lake through the trees, the mountains behind it.
A place that asks nothing of you except that you stay.
I brought Champagne once.
Sitting at the edge of everything, a glass in hand, the jungle just beyond the garden wall.
My daughter was four the last time I took her. She walked the garden ahead of me, pointing at things I had stopped seeing.
I saw it again through her.
Bottle of the Week
Pierre Gimonnet & Fils — Cuis Premier Cru Blanc de Blancs NV
Structure
100% Chardonnay
Base: 73% 2021, 27% reserve wines (2014–2020)
Dosage: 5.5 g/L
Vinification: stainless steel, malolactic fermentation
Origin: Cuis Premier Cru
Reserve wines held in bottle and magnum under crown seal, 1 to 6 years
Aged 24+ months on the lees
Last issue, the Fleuron 2019. A single year held intact.
This is different. Many years, held together. Reserve wines going back almost a decade, woven together. Not one year. A continuity.
Citrus, chalk, salinity. Light on its feet.
As Didier Gimonnet put it, “Cuis will never be extravagant. You can drink it by buckets.”
He means it as a compliment.
Give it time in the glass. And bring food. The acidity is the point. Oysters. Something briny. A simple fish. It settles at the table.
Where to Find It
K&L Wine Merchants — $49.99
Woodland Hills Wine Company — $44.95 (pre-arrival, September 2026)
Check Wine-Searcher.com for additional availability.
What to Notice
The salinity. It runs through the finish like a thread.
Come back to the glass. It gives more than it first suggests.
The Quiet Detail
Gimonnet has farmed Cuis for nearly a century. Fifteen hectares in a place defined by tension, not weight.
The reserve wines are kept in bottle under crown seal, year by year. Not a solera. Each year held separately, then brought together.
"At the beginning, it was an opportunity. Now it's an evidence for us."
— Didier Gimonnet
Every bottle carries that history quietly.
A Short Detour
A terroir, Didier says, is not only soil and climate. It is soil, climate, and people.
The people who stayed.
My father always wanted to return to that garden to live out his days.
Gimonnet is that.
A family that looked at a piece of chalk hillside in Cuis and decided, here.
What rootedness produces is not nostalgia. It is depth.
The garden in Kandy does not need me there. The jungle is still at the edge. The birds still come at dawn.
Some places keep going. Patient. Unhurried.
The wines that stay with me are like that. They don’t ask for attention. They hold it.
What I’m Curious About Next
Roots go deeper than family. Deeper than memory.
Next issue: the chalk, and what it was before it became Champagne.
A Small Dose
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
— Mary Oliver
Until the next bottle,
Manj
If you enjoy this, I also share short Champagne notes on Instagram:
@le_dosage