Welcome to Maker’s Table.

I’m curious about nature, culture, food, wine, and place, and those topics permeate my work. But I’m equally curious about writing itself.

Maker’s Table is a commingling of these interests. It features essays, profiles, and criticism, largely but not exclusively about wine and food, illustrated with my own artwork and photography. It also includes reflections and insights about the creative process, the art and craft of visual and narrative storytelling.

Maker’s Table launched in February 2008, originally focused on wine criticism and producer profiles. The site grew rapidly to become a respected voice in independent wine journalism, with the feature writing collecting a handful of awards and accolades. In 2025 I migrated the site to Substack (read more in this post). Today, the Maker’s Table archives contain seventeen years of feature writing on wine, regions, and producers along with reflective essays on the nature of wine, writing, and wine writing.

I have formal training in the arts (literary and visual) and the biological sciences, which together provide a foundation for evaluating contemporary topics in wine and food. I travel often to conduct research in wine regions and understand how producers are grappling with cultural, environmental, and economic pressures. I’m Chair of the international Circle of Wine Writers, supporting, and learning from, a diverse global membership of professional wine and spirits communicators. I also contribute freelance writing to other outlets.

My current research interests include considerations of the lexicons and narrative motifs we use to describe wine, how those words shape our view of wine and vice versa. I also pursue questions of wine through the lenses of traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism, and how and the current re-thinking of wine’s aesthetics, as evinced in party through natural wine ideology, gestures toward metamodernism.

Learn more about me at megmaker.com.

Enjoy,
Meg Maker