The Allocation
A newsletter about the bottles, trips, and tastings worth chasing. No allocation required.
© 2026 The Allocation.
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An allocation is the handful of bottles a producer permits you to buy. The best lists are closed, inherited, or twenty years long. This one is open. Admission is by reading.
A weekly letter about wine, for people who want to know what things cost.
Most wine writing tells you what a bottle tastes like. This one also asks what it costs, who set that price, and whether the number holds up. Those turn out to be more interesting questions than they sound, and remarkably few people ask them out loud.
A first growth and a bottle from the plot next door can differ by a factor of forty. Some of that gap is quality. Much of it is the register, the broker, and a classification written in 1855 that nobody has since managed to change. That gap is the subject.
Thursday mornings at seven, Central. Six to ten things worth knowing, three bottles worth buying, and an argument about one of them.
The long stuff. Reported pieces on how the trade actually works — who sets a price, who moves a case, and what happens between the two.
Four commitments, and they are the whole method.
01 Prices, never scores. A score compresses a bottle into a number that tells you nothing about whether to buy it. A price tells you what you are actually being asked to do. Every wine here carries one, in the currency you would actually pay.
02 Every wine was tasted — or the letter says plainly that it was not. There is no third option and no soft language for the second.
03 The reasoning is shown. When a bottle is worth the money, the letter says what it is being compared against and why the comparison holds. Assertion without arithmetic is a press release.
04 Nothing is recommended because somebody asked. Not because a sample arrived, not because lunch was bought, not because an importer was pleasant on the telephone.
An unsigned publication asking to be trusted about money is a harder sell than a named one. It works only if the reasoning is visible in every issue. That is the deal.