• Somebody make it stop: A private American buyer snapped up a 1945 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti for just under $125,000 — a new record for a single bottle of Burgundy at auction. [Decanter]
• Jay McInerney visits the Brothers Lafarge, who own the Clos des Ducs vineyard, and talks with them about their lives while drinking their delicate, “feminine” Burgundies. We wish we had McInerney’s gig. [WSJ]
• Northern California’s wine country may be making headway against the European grapevine moth, but there’s another more voracious pest on the horizon: the glassy-winged sharpshooter. They’re called that because they use “piercing mouth parts to feed on liquid within various plant species.” Sweet. [Napa Valley Register]
• As the wine industry of Campania, Italy, has grown over the last 25 years, so has the region’s revival of once-gone indigenous grapes like Greco, Falanghina, and Fiano. Eric Asimov calls the latter the most interesting and “stylistically versatile.” [NYT]
• Wine writer Craig Camp on the stupidity of wine criticism: “It seems to be a part of the American psyche that we take things that should engage our senses in relaxation and pleasure and turn them into a competition.” [Wine Camp]
• 35 years ago, on May 24, 1976, the legendary Judgment of Paris catapulted California wines onto the international stage when French judges chose several California wines over French counterparts in a blind tasting. Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, one of the winners that day, is celebrating by slapping a new sticker on their bottles of Cab. [Businesswire]
