Noirien, pronounced as in French, nwahr-ee-EHn, is an old French word for Pinot noir; noir means “black” in French, from Latin niger, “black” or “dark.” (The origins of the name Pinot are contested. Many believe it derives from the French pin, or “pine,” because it makes small, tight clusters that resemble a pine cone. It’s also possibly derived from Pignols, a village in the Auvergne where Pinot has been cultivated since at least the Middle Ages.)

The Noirien group includes Pinot noir and its color mutants (Pinot gris, Pinot blanc, and Pinot Meunier), Chardonnay, Gamay noir, Auxerrois, Melon, Troyen, and a handful of others that are no longer in wide production. Noirien’s zone extends from Champagne in the north through the Côte d’Or to Beaujolais in the south. Its western edge starts in the central Loire and runs east to Alsace and the Jura.

The vines in the Noirien group share both morphological and genetic traits and are well adapted to the zone’s climatic and geological conditions. Groups like these are called eco-geotypes or sorto-types by botanists and ampelographers. Today, according to Wine Grapes, the definitive guide to the world’s vine varieties, there are 16 eco-geotypes in France alone.

Noirien and the Rise of Eco-Geotypes

Before the 20th century, the practice of grapevine classification, or ampelography, was principally about diagramming a vine’s physical properties, then keying those metrics against known materials to arrive at a determination about grape type and provenance. The process, based as it was on extrinsic factors, often led to classification errors.

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Philosophers say such behavior in animals displays “propositional attitude,” suggesting a capacity to formulate internal states and ideas, a sign of consciousness and cognition. Well, duh. Anyone who’s lived with a domesticated mammal knows that not only can their companions develop thoughts about the future, they’re doing so all the time. And no one would call it propositional. They’d just call it thinking.

Anyway, as my husband heeded the call and began to lay the fire, Ella decamped to her fleecy bed next to the hearth and started making biscuits. Communication is message received.

The season has me thinking about autumnal foods

Stews, braises, savory pies, roasted squashes, root vegetables, everything dressed with butter and sage and cheese. Fall cuisine in northern New England is earthy, rich, spiced, hearty, filling, and warm. The flavors tend toward the dark end of the spectrum in contrast to summer’s brights.

Autumnal foods are, significantly, cooked foods—or cured or pickled, smoked or dried—but in any case transformed into something different and more complex than their original state. We invented such preservation techniques to fill our family’s larder in the fall so we could eat well all winter. Today, even if few people remain who process a year’s worth of produce at harvest, the flavors and textures of these foods still season our notion of what Fall tastes like.

Of course, there must be wine

Yes, pairing is far from a science, and it’s also deeply personal, not to mention culturally constructed. But disclaimers aside, a good wine and food pairing makes a third thing happen within the soul that neither element could conjure alone.

Below are a few styles I recommend with autumnal meals. It’s not a definitive list, but enough to whet the appetite:

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I found many wines to love. Favorite producers included Angelo Negro, Antica Cascina dei Conti di Roero, Benotti Rosavica, Deltetto, Filippo Gallino, Matteo Correggia, and Nino Costa.

Roero’s wines can be hard to find in the U.S., but at this writing, all of the wineries in my report have at least one U.S. importer. Even if I couldn’t find a price for a particular wine I listed it anyway, both to encourage the importer to bring it in and to prompt you to try the maker’s other offerings.

First, a bit about Roero’s grapes and landscape.

Roero Territorio

The Roero landscape is a patchwork of wild and cultivated terrain. There are forests and vines, nut trees, stone fruits, and olives, plus pastures for grazing and fields for cereals and vegetable crops. Its hills are dotted with ruins and castles and its stone villages nestle into the hollows where, eons ago, the Tanaro River carved passage through the sandstone layers en route to the mighty Po.

The effect is pastoral, not quite rustic but certainly agrarian. It’s a landscape quite unlike that of the more famous Barolo and Barbaresco to the south, which is carpeted wall to wall with vineyards to the point of monotony. Roero evokes a less polished era: rural, plain-spun, romantic without being twee, accessible without feeling too touristy. Its ecological mix, and its forests in particular, offer not only attractive biodiversity but also resilience in a warming climate.

The Cornerstone Grapes of Roero

Roero’s principal grapes, Nebbiolo and Arneis, are native to the region and in fact are rarely grown beyond Piedmont’s borders.

Nebbiolo was first mentioned in a manuscript from 1266 discovered near Torino, to the north. By 1300, texts show the grape was widely used for wine in the crescent of the Alpine range. Today there’s a smattering of Nebbiolo planted in other parts of the world, but 97% of its global vineyard area remains in Italy, specifically in Piedmont’s northern hills, indicating how well suited it is to this terrain (and how ill suited it is to producing expressive wines elsewhere).

Arneis, according to Italian vine geneticist Dr. Anna Schneider, is an offspring of Nebbiolo, although the other parent remains unknown. It, too, is an older grape, mentioned first in a Torino text from 1432. The name may derive from Renesio, a location near the town of Canale, or may have been adapted from the word arnèis, which in the local Piemontese dialect is used to describe a wily, mercurial trickster (the grape’s not easy to grow).

Like its progenitor, Arneis is hardly found outside of this region, and indeed was nearly extinct until two producers, Bruno Giacosa and Alfredo Curado, of Vietti, resurrected it in the 1970s. Today there’s actually more Arneis than Nebbiolo planted in Roero, nearly 1,000 ha versus about 360.

Roero’s Red and White Wines

Roero’s D.O.C.G. wines are monovarietal, made in both standard and riserva bottlings that have stricter yield and production requirements, including longer aging before release. There is also a Roero Arneis Spumante D.O.C.G. produced in minuscule quantities.

The white Arneis is no shrinking violet. Youthful versions are perfumed of peach and almond and pack a citrusy zing, but the wine can tolerate cellar and bottle aging, becoming, especially in the riserva offerings, both more substantial and more subtle.

Nebbiolo from Roero has freshness and levity, its tannins solid but not as robust as those of Barolo. Producers suggest that’s thanks to the difference in soils—sandy here versus clay-marl and sandstone there—but it may simply be cultural, a stylistic choice in a region that’s more about producing wines that are immediately pleasurable and that reward (but don’t demand) long aging.

Favorite Wines

During my visit, which was hosted by the Roero Consorzio, I formally tasted about 80 wines, and I’ve selected 31 favorites to highlight here. I suggest using Wine-Searcher to check current vintage availability and pricing.

Tasting notes are for paying subscribers, but through October 31st you can take 20% off the first year of an annual subscription.

Use the link harvest2026 to subscribe.

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Fall is a final call for outdoor projects: touching up house paint, dividing perennials, washing windows—all the tasks that seemed so small during the expansive days of summer. There is a deadline looming. Not a hard one, not one whose date can even be seen except in the rearview mirror. It pivots on the powering down of the sun’s engine, which makes the days not only colder but shorter, too, so even before I run my backups and quit my office for the kitchen, night pulls its curtain across the sky.

Soon the ground itself will lock up, turning pickaxe-hard below the trees’ black branches, the earth creaking slowly into solid state. We call November stick season, and no, Noah Kahan did not invent the phrase; he merely used it to evoke the lonely hole in the heart of his story. In winter I too struggle to remind myself that happiness lives in the world, and by late February I hit the lowest threshold of my emotional resilience. Mercifully, the light warms up in early March, and while that’s still two months before the trees get dressed again, it’s enough to rekindle hope.

Here’s what I’m reading this week

Please, not « du vin »

“You’ve found a terrace, the sun is out, and the server is coming,” writes French language coach Timothée Lesoin, of , and it’s your turn to order the wine. Lesoin comes to your rescue with his new indispensable guide for ordering, pouring, and discussing wine in la langue de Molière. “[N]o tasting notes. Just the phrases and unspoken rules you need to know to order wine in France the way the locals do, so the server can relax and you don’t end up with de la piquette in your glass.” If you like this one, he’s also penned a flawless companion guide to le bar. Merci, Timo!

No mere cupboard love

Writer and recipe developer just decamped to Paris for the winter, taking the keys to a sterile studio apartment in Montmartre then swiftly provisioning the larder for seasonal cooking. “To fill a pantry for fall is like filling a jar with pennies,” she writes. “Some weeks later, you’re rich in warm hues of red and copper, in ingredients that fill you with every bite. After all, everything in fall is better than the sum of its parts.” Keene lists the staples she always keeps on hand, plus ones especially tuned to her favorite autumnal meals. My own list overlaps; I think we’d like each other’s cooking.

Where will they stash the loot?

Last Saturday, thieves broke into the cellars of iconic Tuscan winery Marchesi Antinori and made off with 30,000 bottles of Solaia, Guado al Tasso, and Tignanello, all from the 2023 vintage. The heist was well organized; robbers disabled the security system before loading the wine onto two trucks—using the producer’s own forklifts. “The gang was very prepared,” said chief executive Renzo Cotarella. “A theft of this scale and value has never happened before in Italy.” The loss totals €5m ($5.6m), and the insurance is insufficient, but the company’s confident the wine will be recovered. Meanwhile, if anyone offers you a bottle of ’23 Tignanello at a price too good to be true, call the Carabinieri.

Decisions, decisions

Writer and Burgundy wine producer William Kelley ruminates on the eternal question: When to harvest. “Burgundians arguing the merits of picking early or late is nothing new,” he writes. Hundreds of years ago, producers picked a mix of under-ripe, ripe, and over-ripe (even rotten) grapes to create wines with energy and tension. Starting in the 19th century, they strove for later harvests to achieve riper, bigger wines that were both more age-worthy and more expressive of place. “I would argue that this is no mere coincidence but rather that the two concepts—maturity and identity—co-evolved,” he writes, noting that admixtures dilute that valuable site expression. On the other hand, those who favor late picking need a high tolerance for risk.

Burgundy on the brain

Wine importer is more blunt: “[M]aking Burgundy is a royal pain in the ass.” He cites Pinot’s thin skin, tight clusters, and susceptibility to disease—and that’s before you even start to make the wine. Lacking a Burgundy in his portfolio, he recently tasted with a new-ish producer and to his surprise found the wines “punchy, tannic… shaded with toasted oak… they felt enormous.” They did not align at all with his understanding of Burgundy, but to be fair, that understanding was formed years earlier and, given the price of the stuff, not kept current. So he set about tasting to try to zero in on the contemporary meaning of “Burgundian style,” and—well, just read what he discovers.

A wine to take us out

Château Fontanès Pic Saint-Loup Rouge 2020

14.2% ABV | About $22; imported by Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant
The last time I was in the Languedoc I fell hard for the wines of Pic Saint-Loup. These blends are spicy, fragrant, and zestier than many Languedoc reds thanks to the cooling night air of that Pic, a steep two-thousand-foot mountain that lies at the center of the appellation. This one’s a blend of 40 percent Syrah, 20 percent Grenache, 20 percent Mourvèdre, and 10 each of Cinsault and Carignan; farming is practicing biodynamic. Winemaker Cyriaque Rozier also manages Château La Roque, but Fontanès is his own hustle, 4.5 hectares of vines scratched into the rocky Jurassic limestone. The wine is fragrant of violets and leather, blackberries and their leaves, and its texture is pillowy—plenty of stuffing but not dense—with agreeable fruit and a smooth finish. I served it with braised chili-spiced pork as a dinner to herald fall. The wine and food met eye to eye.

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

After the first visit we’d head to lunch at a small restaurant where menus leaned hard on local dishes. We’d start with crispy appetizers, move to primo (always pasta), mercifully skip secondo (it was lunch, after all), and finish with dessert and restorative coffee.

Next we’d light out on a gastronomic micro adventure. We met a goatherd cheesemaker and his flock in a field. The goats mobbed us like Golden Retrievers as we stroked their ears and grasped their horns. A few of us tried our hand at a lactating teat, and we sampled the minute-old milk, warm and sweet.

We toured a 12th-century private castle that had been furnished over the centuries with contemporaneous bric-a-brac, giving the place a historic shabby-chic vibe: medieval ironworks, Renaissance frescos, Murano chandeliers, Victorian bedframes, Art Deco dressers, a velveteen settee that would have looked at home on the set of The Brady Bunch. We made gelato with a chef, visited a honey producer, tasted hazelnuts with a woman who’s revived her family’s grove, and ventured into the forest with a tartufaio and his truffle dog, Hedwig (yes, like Harry Potter’s owl), a German Shorthaired Pointer who scratched black truffles from the soil with the zeal of a starved wolverine.

After these excursions, around 5:00 p.m., we would visit a second wine producer for another tour and tasting. At 8:00 we’d move to dinner, joined by yet another winemaker and sometimes two. Despite fastidious planning by our host, dinners were curiously recapitulative of lunch, with only faint distinguishing flourishes. I believe I had vitello tonnato four times, agnolotti three, tajarìn three or four, mostly with ragù but once with shaved black truffle, plus lots and lots of cheese: tome-style Bra plus robiola and blu, in versions caprine and bovine. I’ve never had to consume so many lactase pills in a single day.

Finally, back to the hotel around 10:30 or 11:00 to shower, sleep, and get ready to do it all again.

Did I mention the wine? The Roero growing zone lies north of Alba across the Tanaro River, a roughly triangular, undulating region mottled with vineyards, hazelnuts, peach trees, olive groves, pastures, and woodland. Castles and other blocky ruins stitch the hills, creating a jagged horizon that evokes wilderness and habitation in equal measure.

Roero’s territorio is markedly different from that of the Langhe to its south, underlain not with marl but with sedimentary sandstone. This rock or rocche was carved into steep gulches a quarter of a million years ago when the Tanaro abruptly changed course.

The grapes of the D.O.C.G. are white Arneis and red Nebbiolo, and the vines speak a different dialect than in other parts of Piemonte. Roero Nebbiolo is approachable, its tannin more limber than that of its southern neighbors, the acid brighter, the fruit red and charming. Arneis here is peachy, floral, and saline, with streaks of acidity. These are gastronomy wines, amiable rather than petulant or showy at table, which makes sense given the strong food culture. And they’re affordable; on my return I’ve found prices in the U.S. ranging from $25 to $45 for the reds with whites rarely topping $25, and that only for the Riserva bottlings.

Producers in Roero actually grow far more Arneis than Nebbiolo, with a total of 1,000 planted hectares of white versus 360 of red. Arneis offers a key market advantage thanks to a fashionable thirst for white wine, in particular white D.O.C.G wine from Piemonte, something that Barolo and Barbaresco cannot boast. (There’s also an infinitesimally small quantity of Arneis spumante D.O.C.G.) Still, Roero isn’t exactly a household name, and some makers label their reds Langhe Nebbiolo or Nebbiolo d’Alba, which they’re legally permitted to do, to take advantage of laxer production rules and more recognizable trade names.

As for the winemaking culture, I sensed among producers more mutual support and admiration than frank competitiveness. Roero’s true competition lies to the south, in Barolo and Barbaresco, and the region gives the impression of an underdog vying for the world’s attention. To be sure, the Roero Consorzio summoned us Americans hoping we could give voice (in English) to the territory, to make our readers aware of its many fine qualities. What I saw and heard and tasted convinced me that Roero is indeed worth talking about and drinking. Stay tuned for much more.

Here’s what I’m reading this week

Simple is Boring

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: We wine writers are trying too hard to explain wine. Wine’s complexity isn’t a minus, it’s a plus, pleasurable especially when it leads to epiphany. But that only happens to people who stick with it beyond a bottle or two. “In wine, drinking and learning about the drink go hand in hand,” argues . “I think it’s generally true that the more you know, the better wine is. Understanding is part of the thrill.” The key, given the morass of wine “content” online, is to find a writer whose voice, cadence, pacing, and tastes fit yours. This is what I’m trying to do here at Maker’s Table: tell stories about food and wine culture in an authentic voice, inserting tidbits of information that, over time, add up to something like a meal.

Bros Taste Blind

“Like the Mets, wine is in a rut… The industry has not adapted to the social-media era,” echoes Arthur Holland Michel, in The New Yorker. Enter the SuperVinoBros, fraternal twins Ryan and Chris Goydos, who serve a steady pour of wine “content” to their hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram. Michel recently accompanied the twins to a Mets game, where they set up a blind tasting exercise in the parking lot after a predictable home-team loss. Ryan’s girlfriend, Carolina Mehedy, a former somm at Le Bernardin, took a sip off-camera. “This is Cabernet Franc,” she told Michel, sotto voce. She nailed it. The Bros did not. Put another chalk mark in the column of hard-won expertise.

Mother Malus, Hiding in Plain Sight

Geneticists have determined that an apple tree planted in Maine centuries ago—and still producing fruit—is a Drap d’Or de Bretagne, a variety first described in a French pomological text in 1628. French settlers evidently brought cuttings of this prized apple, whose name means “Brittany’s cloth of gold,” to the New World, propagating it locally before its promiscuous Malus genes crossed with others and spread across the continent. “The Maine team had found a living lost progenitor to hundreds of varieties—a tree that had been contributing its characteristics to American apples for hundreds of years,” writes , in Scientific American. These survivor trees, which have endured hundreds of years of harsh weather, may harbor genes valuable for creating new cultivars that can withstand climate chaos: “the identification of the Drap d’Or isn’t only about illuminating the past. It also represents the promise that the apple’s characteristics, only partially preserved in its many descendants but now recovered intact, may improve fruit yet to come.”

People Skills I

The wine commentariat is still fizzing over a £3,000 wine writing prize awarded to a piece evidently written, so-called, by A.I. (Full disclosure: I was longlisted in the competition’s short- and long-form writing categories this year, as I have been in years past.) Last week wine writer waded into the conversation with a stern warning for the profession. Yarrow’s no stranger to tech thanks to his decades leading creative digital agencies, and he’s separately described how he uses A.I. tools in his own work. But this episode feels a bridge too far. “I can’t shake the feeling that this isn’t just a story about a wine-writing contest fallen victim to the pitfalls of an A.I.-enabled world. It’s a symptom of a profession slowly being strangled,” he writes. That’s partly because “[t]here is almost no one left to pay anything resembling a living wage for those who want to write about wine professionally. Fewer and fewer people therefore will write about wine, and the quality of the writing that does get done will necessarily suffer.” It’s no wonder people turn to LLMs to create “content.” But it’s also galling considering that £3,000 is more than I make from this Substack in an entire year.

People Skills II

Bear with me: There’s a fun parlor game in which each person writes a famous quote on a piece of paper—“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” or “If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.”—then hands the paper to the person to their left. That person creates an illustration of the quote, then—this is key—folds the paper so only their illustration is visible, then hands it to the person to their own left. That person tries to suss the original quote and write it as a caption to the illustration, or at least write what they think the illustration is about. Then they fold the paper so only their quote is visible, hiding the illustration, and hand it along. This process continues, with each person trying to interpret either the quote or the illustration without benefit of seeing all the prior work. It’s essentially a visual game of telephone, and the reveals at the end, after everyone opens the accordioned pages, are gut-bustingly hilarious, showing wild deviations from the original passages. A team of researchers recently ran this exercise through an A.I. tool and discovered that, unlike the human results, runs eventually converged on the same twelve motifs. Giorgia Lupi, a designer and partner at Pentagram, one of the world’s top design agencies, thinks this makes a strong argument for our messy organic creativity. “Human experience is complex and particular. Creative work means contemplating and translating that complexity rather than flattening it into the simplest answer,” she writes. “This is true whether you are making a data visualization, a brand, or a story. The impulse to optimize for the obvious and to stop at the simplest answer is what I believe we have to resist.”

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker. I’m grateful to the Consorzio Tutela Roero, the E.U.’s “Sip and Savor: Pairing European Wines and Deli Meats” campaign, and Blancdenoir Communications. My travel, accommodation, and meals were paid for by the E.U. campaign and all wines and foods were samples for editorial review.

It’s a press trip, and I’m looking forward to it, but I’m also feeling a degree of trepidation, because as usual the itinerary’s so tight one couldn’t slip a silk thread between appointments. Our group of eight American journalists will pile into the van at 9:00 a.m. and not return to the hotel until 11:00 p.m., so at dinner I’ll still be wearing the clothes I donned for breakfast, the boots that carried me through the truffle woodland, the sweat-stained (with luck not wine-stained) shirt I wore for tastings at cantinas. There will be no opportunity to freshen up, catch up, call home, or, heaven forbid, jot notes and impressions throughout the day.

This is unquestionably not my favorite way to travel, but it has been the way I’ve traveled since about 2009, when I took my first press trip, a Riesling junket through Mosel, Pfalz, and Rheingau. I was utterly unqualified for that tour, a newbie joining a group of seasoned pros that included a Master of Wine, a pioneering winemaker, and journalists in late career. I tasted a lot, learned a lot, and broke a crown (not recommended, but not surprising given the amount of acid rinsing my teeth). I’ve not been back to Germany, but have since tasted all over Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Chile, Argentina, British Columbia, and the U.S., and attended wine events in Belgium and the U.K.

So this is how I’ve seen the world, carry-on stuffed with clothes that can be repeatedly wrinkled and smoothed and washed in the hotel sink to hang in the shower to dry in time for morning. Camera, notebook, chargers, cables, a hat and a special sunscreen that doesn’t smell. Some years, before covid, I would take six or eight tours like this. After covid and more recently the trips have been less frequent. I’ve declined many invitations, but there are also fewer overall, perhaps because organizers want a fresher voice but certainly because the wine industry is struggling with oversupply and under-consumption. On one hand this might drive producers to push for more media coverage to woo new consumers. On the other hand money is tight and press tours aren’t cheap.

The tours have curious commercial mechanics. Nominally, journalists are guests, wineries are hosts, and organizers act as facilitators. But scratch the surface and things get weird. Let’s take Europe as an example. Producers pay into a regional consortium that handles legal niceties, compliance, research, and other shared objectives. The consortium contracts with a marketing and P.R. agency to promote the wines. This agency maintains relationships with other publicists and marketers, both in country and in important export markets, and works with them to identify journalists to invite on a tour. Trip costs are often substantially offset by subsidies and grants from the European Union, which has an interest in boosting its countries’ economic prosperity. That means in practice, the P.R. firm is a client of the consortium, the consortium is a client of the E.U., and the journalists are the product, acquired toward the desired outcome: good press coverage.

On press trips, all travel, lodging, transport, and food are supplied gratis, but I always incur fees for airport transfer, meals en route, international roaming charges, sundries like water for the room, and, if I’m feeling particularly flush, a seat upgrade from Economy to Economy Comfort. It usually adds up to a few hundred bucks, and once upon a time I could make that back by selling a freelance story from the tour. Nowadays publishing on Substack is actually more lucrative. (Subscribe today!)

But hey, “free trip to Europe,” right? Sure, but it’s exhausting, plus a huge time commitment. I can do nothing else while traveling, so all other paid work grinds to a halt. And although I’m supposed to be the one doing the interviews, producers understandably like to pepper us journalists with questions about the U.S. wine market: trends, consumer preferences, how their wines fit in. Most awkward is when they ask directly for my impressions of the wines in the glasses before me. I prefer not to blurt my tasting notes when surrounded by fellow critics, so I tend to turn the questions around, further probing their stylistic aims or asking how they achieved, in the wine, a particular quality of X or Y or Z.

I return from a weeklong trip with a sheaf of notes on hundreds of wines, at which point I must try to make steak out of hamburger. This is especially challenging when I haven’t had time to pen contemporaneous reflections, to write down quotes I’ve overheard or sketch the details of the larger scene: the light on shiny grapes, the wasps who’ve bored into them, the sticky fruity smell of the crush pad and the tang of alcohol wafting from the fermenters, the fizz of the must as it gets underway, my boot print on the tile floor wet with washing down. And the less glamorous scenes, too: trash along the roadway en route to the fancy castello, a harvest picker peeing in the bushes, a scrawny dog loping around, hoping for a handout. Those are not the scenes the consortium brought me in for, but they’re part of the truth of the region, and it’s my job to record those, too.

The Salt will be off next week, for obvious reasons. I fly out Monday and will return Saturday. Then I’ll set about transforming the itinerary into a story worth reading.

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Here’s what I’m reading this week

Drinking the Old-Vine Kool-Aid

Sarah Marsh MW attended the Old Vine Conference in Napa and left concurring that, yes, old vines have many fine qualities and are worthy of preservation, but not at all costs. “It’s just too simplistic to say that all old vines are good and/or better than young vines. Many old vines have viruses,” she observes. “And if it’s not the scion that’s the problem, it can be the rootstock….Frankly, one can find as many examples for as against old vines in terms of virus, health, and resilience to climatic extremes.” It’s an argument I made recently in Renovating Wine, and I’m gratified to read her take.

Michelin Rates Bordeaux

In July, the Michelin Guide issued its first wine producer ratings, for Burgundy, and earlier this month released a second tranche, for Bordeaux. Master Sommelier has thoughts—or at least questions, including why this, why now, why them, and for whom? He ruminates thoughtfully about the situation, concluding that, at least at first, Michelin needs these regions more than they need Michelin. “To me, this reads more as a brand story that happens to be about wine, wrapped around an honor that at least some of the people receiving it seem to take very seriously. Once you hold both of those at once, the whole thing makes a lot more sense.”

Getting Closure

In The New York Times, looks at the K-shaped trend in wine retail, where larger stores with big-ticket bottles are doing well even as corner shops shutter. The latter just happened to a tiny local wine shop (pictured here) where I led tastings and where, last summer, Asimov stopped in for a visit. “[T]he bigger, wealthier businesses are getting richer, the smaller, less well financed are getting poorer and those in the middle are not quite sure where they are heading other than that they are hustling more than ever.” Asimov offers no solutions, but notes that the small shops that are surviving deliver more than liquid in bottles. They understand their neighborhood, their community, and they engage.

Real Feelings

The wine commentariat remains in a lather over an apparently machine-generated winner in a recent wine writing competition. (See last week’s edition of The Salt and more coverage here and here. You can also read the winning piece yourself.) Much commentary has focused on the facts of the case, but offered a more piercing cri de coeur. “[L]ast Friday morning when I woke to a tri-continental WhatsApp conversation among friends lamenting that the short-form winner of the 67 Pall Mall Wine Communicator Awards appeared to be A.I. slop, I had a violent reaction. Yes, as my mother would say, knife to the heart.” Feiring is one of the world’s most revered wine writers, and this episode caused real pain. Still, she says, “while the award hurt my heart because my own people are hastening the end of the written word, this debate, I hope, will do some good.” We wine writers are only human, after all.

See you week after next.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Substack writing is nonfiction writing. There are rare exceptions; a handful of writers work in serialized fiction, poetry, or short story. But for most publishers, the newsletter is not a fictive project but instead a vehicle for sharing truth: news, insights, advice, criticism, commentary, and more.

Nonfiction writing has many sub-genres, each with its own norms. Writers on Substack may use a mix of narrative techniques, switching from one piece to the next or applying a specific approach to one site section. And of course it’s possible to blend sub-genres artfully in a single piece.

Regardless of approach, it’s important to remain mindful that your choice of genre itself conveys something about how you position yourself relative to your material. Know also that your reader is making inferences based on those choices, and they’ll need cues to know when you’re writing, say, journalistically versus offering a piece of satire.

Below I’ve listed some of the most common nonfiction forms, ordered from most objective to most subjective (a sequence I call the continuum of truth). Within the broader categories of Journalism, Criticism, and Creative Nonfiction I’ve listed various sub-categories often used for newsletter writing, along with their specific implications and outcomes.

As you read through the list, reflect on what kind of truth-telling feels like a good fit for you. Which best suits your material? Which sounds most like your voice? Which suits your research, reporting, and editorial style? Which seems like the most fun, or the most interesting, way to work?

This upstream selection will guide your narrative and stylistic choices, and may also dictate a handful of ethical and structural procedures you won’t want to skip.

The rest of this post is for paid subscribers. Subscribe to read the list of nonfiction writing strategies and choose one that feels right for your Substack.

Nonfiction’s Sub-genres

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Yesterday, the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Awards were announced, then swiftly earned criticism for a winning piece that reads like it was made by machine. Several commentators questioned how the judges could have missed the machine’s flashing lights, while the organizers defended their selection. I haven’t seen that anyone’s interviewed the writer, which seems like an obvious next step.

This is an ongoing story, but whatever the outcome, it’s evident that a published policy about A.I. use, transparency about the evaluation rubric, and consent and disclosure by writers would have saved a lot of heartbreak.

This incident invites us to confront an essential truth of wine writing, which is its sensoriality. The writer experiences a wine’s sensory inputs, runs them through their own lived experience and memories, then uses language to craft insights for readers. This is equally true of tasting notes and of stories about people, regions, and styles. The reader relies on the writer’s eyes and ears and palate and mind to taste the world, as well as their ability to generate ideas about these impressions that are worth reading.

An LLM or an A.I. bot (let’s just call it the machine), being non-corporeal, lacks not only that human sensory apparatus but also that human mind and memory. It has none of the capabilities that enable a human to write persuasively about the aesthetic phenomena of material culture. To write, in other words, about wine.

Yet A.I.-generated wine writing is everywhere. The machine gamely spews text that mimics the cadence of the works on which it’s been trained. The results are an exhausting read. The pacing is staccato, each paragraph a single sentence. There are repeated not-this-but-that constructions. The text is rife with analogies that seem novel but don’t hold up to scrutiny. There are arguments that tilt at meaning without landing their point. The pieces end, invariably, in a non-sequiturial mic drop. The machine has ingested the motifs of good writing, but has used them like meat, not salt.

Worse, there’s nothing in the work to drink or eat, to see or feel. There’s no fingerprint on the stem or lipstick on the rim. There’s no light on the vines or smell of the moldering cave. And there’s certainly no maudlin revelation, three glasses in, that the boyfriend was right to leave after all. The text is a ghost, non-carnate, like its creator.

A wine writer who’s used the machine has forfeited the joys of a fiercely difficult, but deeply rewarding, exercise. Writing about wine invites me to confront my own messy humanity as well as that of my reader. That effort’s only worthwhile because we’re both alive.

Here’s what I’m reading this week

Guide to Le Guide

Hospitality writer interviews Chris Watson, a former inspector for the Michelin Guide in the UK and Europe, getting deep into the works of the review machine. Among the gems: “People assume Michelin hires for a refined palate, but that’s not it,” Watson says. “They’re actually looking for a neutral palate, one they can mould to match inspectors around the globe. The expectation is that after training, you rate a restaurant consistently with everyone else. A 1-star in Tokyo should be consistent with a 1-star in London.” Neutral palate; I cannot possibly imagine what that’s like.

I get too hungry for—

Spaniards are eating earlier. At least some Spaniards, those who’ve decided to prioritize sleep, digestion, and an earlier morning start over the tradition of dinner at 10:00 PM. Since the pandemic, dining has shifted a full hour earlier, according to restaurant booking data, and the curve continues to bend. Some people are concerned about losing their culture of socializing, even as others have rebooted the old tradition of tardeo, gathering with friends for a late afternoon snack and drink. Sometimes that’s all you need.

Slopping it up

finds a dispiriting lack of imaginative food writing about her local scene. Dubbing it “Boston restaurant slop,” she offers a primer on the most overused terms, including spritz, subterranean, speakeasy, swanky, lounge, moody, and maximalist, along with evergreen clichés like haute, exclusive, and elevated. The writing is bad, but worse is “the absence of a point of view,” she says. “Not a theme—these restaurants are positively bursting at the seams with theme—but an actual position, a hill on which to die.” If everything is maximalist, then nothing is maximalist.

Red sauce, white wine

Winemaker and pasta aficionado is back with another installment of A Year in Pasta, reporting this time on wine pairings for the summer pastas of Sicily, Tuscany, and Campania. Think tomatoes always need red wine? Think again. “We went into dinner asking whether regional wine belongs with regional cooking and food. We left with a less orderly question: what if belonging is not only a matter of address, but of behavior? The wines that belonged knew when to brighten tomato, when to absorb chile, when to accept eggplant, and when to bring enough tannin for meat. They did not need to be the greatest wines in the room. They needed to keep us eating.”

A wine to take us out

Colli di Lapio Clelia Romano Fiano d’Avellino 2023

About $25; imported by Skurnik
Pale gold, highly perfumed, wild-flowery, with a fragrance of honey and pear and grass. Texturally it’s almost viscous, broad and deep but not sprawling, with flavors of quince paste and green olive, peppercorn and brine. Pour it with fennel salumi, toast points with lardo, oysters or other oceanic things, maybe almonds or hazelnuts. Nothing too complicated, too saline or sharp; you want to let this light shine through.

See you next week.

River vineyard sketches ©2026 Meg Maker

Dystopian food media was a theme of the week.

It started with a cri du coeur from food writer : “I am completely in shock and REELING this week after seeing a food influencer I previously really respected being paid by an A.I. company to use their influence to push people towards using A.I. to host dinner parties.” Miari appended a screen grab from the person’s Instagram reel but did not name names (libel laws are different in Britain). Still, it wasn’t hard to find the original post with a quick (yep) Google search. In the action, the influencer uses Gemini to gin up ideas for a tablescape for her beach-themed dinner party. The results are inexplicably bizarre, really comically disorienting in their lack of cohesion and allure. It’s possibly a clever sleight of hand, a way for said influencer to subvert the narrative and still collect the fee. But let’s just say that next time Gemini tells you to put a whole peach on a scallop shell, run.

Still reeling…

…I read ’s piece in The New Yorker, “The Unique Horrors of A.I. Food Slop,” a critique of restaurants using A.I. to fabricate everything from menus to marketing. “Restaurants choosing to showcase computer-generated approximations of the dishes they serve inspire neither gluttony nor lust,” he writes. “A menu promising a glistening digital cheesesteak or an eerily geometrical turkey club evokes little more than horror in those who behold it. Why, then, are so many eateries and establishments relying on generative A.I. to create their promotional materials?” He makes a persuasive case that the application of hyper-gloss strips food of its raw visceral appeal, and that menu planning by A.I. risks serving diners whole peaches in lieu of seafood. The freakish kicker landed as the magazine’s ad network coughed up, at the end of the article, a promo for Domino’s pizza. It looks like slop to me; you be the judge. Only the revulsion is real.

The food influencer is dead. Long live the food influencer.

“Instagrammers have upended the British restaurant scene, and amassed followings in the millions. But has their moment already passed?” That’s the opener for a long narrative journalism piece in The Guardian by Stephen Buranyi, the paper’s deputy opinion editor. Buranyi catalogues the rise of the food influencer, their chummy partnerships with PR firms, and their efforts to spin free meals into thousands of Likes. Surprisingly, restaurant influencing isn’t a lucrative gig. Some people have landed brand partnerships of four or five figures, but they usually get far less, or nothing at all. (There’s also rampant speculation about payments under the dining table.) Hospitality businesses don’t demand a positive review, but no influencer bites the hand that’s fed them. That’s become a problem. “[E]very PR I spoke to off-record said that the heyday of the influencer was already over—even if the influencers themselves didn’t realise it,” Buranyi writes, adding that “influencers doing too much positive content and too many paid advertisements had damaged their perceived trustworthiness.” What’s the antidote? Criticism, naturally. “The only way back—the only way to win real trust,” one source told him, “was to rediscover the ideal of being a critic: expert… opinionated, and accountable to no one but the viewer.” Sound familiar?

The restaurant is the story is the restaurant

There’s something deliriously recursive about a hospitality consultancy publishing a Substack about hospitality companies publishing Substacks, but welcome to metamodernity, please make yourself at home. In ’s Hospitality Everywhere, looks at three case studies of properties that are spinning up media verticals not as advertising, per se, but as another way to articulate their aesthetics and values. (None of them are Crown’s clients, by the way. “We’re just fans,” , their brand strategist, told me via DM.) “A restaurant used to have one product: the meal. Everything else (the PR, the email marketing, the physical merch) existed to sell that product,” Landa writes. Now, with the launch of a newsletter, the restaurant has “two products that run in parallel. One is edible and happens in a room at a specific time. The other is readable and happens in your inbox whenever you open it.” That portion of the restaurant’s offerings can now be consumed asynchronously: with breakfast, on the train, whenever the curious customer has bandwidth, literal and figurative. It’s a way to give a restaurant a voice, to make it literally legible. Still, someone’s got to write the thing, which means hiring an editor or fingering a busy staffer who has that resonant voice. It’s harder than it sounds.

Speaking of taste

A while back my friend reached out to me and a handful of fellow wine writers to ask whether, and how, our palates had changed over time. He was interested in shifts both somatic and aesthetic, modulations not only to our physical sensorium but how we interpret its signals. His questions prompted me toward further reflections, which I published here in the essay Taste of Change. Terry’s own article recently appeared in print in The World of Fine Wine, and it’s just been put online. None of his other correspondents—Jon Bonné, , , , and —reported significant changes in their palates, a result I had not anticipated. My own experience has been one of continual reinvention, propelled by the co-evolution of my ability to articulate and frame those sensations in language. Terry feels similarly, concluding that “we can’t isolate the question of (capital-T) Taste from the language by which we receive and describe it.” Which pretty much sums up my current life’s work.

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Another useful category is method.

Method is about process, not product. It names the technique used to produce the wine, not what the wine looks or tastes like or how it’s meant to be served.

Method is about making.

On the other hand, a method is designed to ensure a predictable outcome. So method does offer many clues about the wine’s finished style.

We’ll explore more on that later, but first, here’s a short glossary of common method-based terms you’ll find on labels and in the literature.1

Glossary of winemaking methods

Traditional method

Sparkling; white, pink, rarely red
A dry base wine is bottled with sugar and yeast for a second fermentation to create trapped carbon dioxide gas. The wine is disgorged and topped with a mix of wine and sugar (dosage), then rested before release. Wines that receive no sugar are called brut nature or zero dosage. Traditional method wines are nutty and complex because of the bottle conditioning and aging protocols. Synonyms: méthode traditionnelle (France), metodo classico (Italy), and método tradicional or just Cava (Spain); often abbreviated MT.

Ancestral method

Sparkling; white, pink, rarely red
A wine is bottled before it’s dry, then completes its fermentation in that vessel. It is generally not disgorged and topped, so is fully dry, lightly cloudy, and savory from the retained lees. The method pre-dates complex traditional method winemaking and is often favored by producers who work naturally. Synonyms: méthode ancestrale (France), metodo ancestrale or col fondo (Italy), pétillant naturel (France), and pét-nat (many regions).

Tank method

Sparkling; white, pink
A dry base wine is moved into a pressurized tank (autoclave), and sugar and yeast are added for a second fermentation. The wine is bottled under pressure. Tank-method wines tend to be clean and direct thanks to surface-to-volume ratios that limit total lees contact. Also, winemakers use tank methods to produce a fresher style of wine to suit regional tradition and market demand. Synonyms: Charmat (France) and Martinotti (Italy).

Skin contact

Still, sparkling; gold to deep orange
White grapes macerate with their skins, seeds, and pulp for a portion (or even all) of primary fermentation, contributing color, tannin, and flavor and aroma compounds. A base skin-contact wine can also be turned into a sparkling wine via bottle conditioning. The tradition originated in the Caucasus but has been reinvigorated in the last two decades. Synonyms: skin fermented, macerated, orange, and amber; vin orange (France), vino macerato and in some cases ramato (Italy).

Passito

Still; red, white
Grapes are dried on straw mats (traditionally) to concentrate their sugars before pressing and fermentation. The result is a sweet wine. Passito is Italian; synonyms include straw wine, vin de paille (France), and Strohwein (Germany).

Botrytised

Still; white
Botrytis cinerea fungus infects grape clusters, thinning the grape skins. This shrivels the berries, concentrates sugars, and creates honeyed and lightly savory flavors. Synonyms: noble rot, pourriture noble (France); Trockenbeerenauslese (Germany), and Aszú (Hungary).

Sous voile

Still; white
Wine ages in cask under a layer of yeast, creating nutty tasting acetaldehyde. The casks are not topped, so the wines also tend to be oxidative. Sous voile is French; other terms include bajo velo or flor (Spain), biological aging, or aging under a veil.

Sur lie

Still, sparkling; white, pink (sparkling)
Wine ages in the bottle with its fine yeast lees, adding texture and bready flavors and protecting it from oxidation. Sur lie aging is used for still wines, but sparkling wines are often described as resting sur lie or sur lattes prior to disgorgement. Sur lie is French; synonyms include sui lieviti (Italy) or lees aging.

Fortified

Still; red, white, tawny
Grape spirit is added to wine during or after fermentation, raising the finished alcohol. Early spirit addition kills yeasts and preserves residual sugar. Late fortifications create a dry wine. The wine is bottle or cask aged to produce a range of styles. Port, Madeira, Marsala, Sherry, and Vermouth are ancient styles, but producers especially in North and South America and Australia experiment to create fresh iterations.

Aromatized

Still; red, white
Herbs, spices, barks, fruits, citrus peels, and other botanicals are infused in a base wine, along with grape spirit and sweetener. Aromatized wine is a class of fortified wine. Synonyms: vin aromatisé or vin tonique (France), vino aromatizzato or aperitivo (Italy), or sometimes just Vermouth.

Saignée

Still, sparkling; pink
Juice is drawn off from a tank of newly fermenting red wine, then vinified separately as a rosé. The process was traditionally followed to concentrate the red wine; the drawn juice was a byproduct. The base pink wine can also be used to make a sparkling wine. Saignée is French; synonyms include bled or bleeding.

Pressed

Still; white, pink
Red grapes are gently pressed and the pink juice is vinified into a rosé. Also used to describe white grapes that get gently pressed to avoid any skin contact. Pressed juice can be turned into still or sparkling wine. Pressed rosé is often contrasted with saignée rosé. Synonyms: direct-pressed, vin gris (France; rosé only).

Barrel-fermented or barrel-aged

All styles
Wine that experiences barrel at a given stage of production, exposing it to oxygen and contributing wood and toast flavors. Base wines for sparkling can be barrel-fermented; still wines of all colors may be barrel fermented or aged. Synonyms: élevé (or fermenté) en fût de chêne (France), affinato in legno (Italy), crianza en barrica (Spain).

Discussion

Even though method is about making, method does offer clues about what to expect in the finished wine.

That’s because method dictates outcome. Traditional method, ancestral method, and tank-method wines will always be sparkling. Skin-contact wines will be more textural than pressed whites. Botrytized, aromatized, and sous voile wines will have unique, specialized flavors. Sur lie wines will be rounded and savory. Passito wines will be sweet.

Once you start paying attention to method, you can explore these outcomes, compare and contrast them, to get a sense of what the makers intended.

Sparkling methods provide a good example of this phenomenon.

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Would we ever.

Substack’s category feature lets contributors specify their publication’s main thrust. This helps readers discover writers in that category’s Top Bestsellers and Rising leaderboards.

Most of us had set our main category to Food & Drink, a section dominated by people writing about cooking, recipes, and hospitality. That made it hard for wine-curious readers to find creators in the wine space, and nearly impossible for rising stars in wine to get noticed within the larger community. Malatras wrote that he is himself a wine and cocktail enthusiast and was frustrated by this lack of discoverability.

Our replies were swift and enthusiastic, and on Monday the new Wine & Spirits category went live. The leaderboards lit up with wine writing friends and colleagues, and the chatter has been uniformly positive. The upshot is you can now check out the current lists of Top Bestsellers and Rising in Wine & Spirits to find new wine creators to follow.

One caveat: The lists only show writers who offer a Paid tier, because Substack grants extra clout to those who can attract a paying subscriber base. So the lists lack wine experts who are on the platform but don’t use it commercially.

Still, monitoring these two new lists is a good way to find both established and rising wine writing talent.

Why this, why now?

Curious about Substack’s thought process, I reached back to John Malatras to understand what had inspired the change.

What prompted you add the new Wine & Spirits category?

I’ve been following WineStack as a wine hobbyist for a while and have felt it come into its own in 2026. Given that, I was disappointed to come across ’s note mentioning his struggles getting his publication treated as a legitimate press outlet by official wine boards. This, along with the growing subscriber base of WineStack (and all beverage creators), felt like a good catalyst to break out the category from Food & Drink.

How does this new category benefit the Substack community, especially readers and lurkers?

The dedicated Wine & Spirits category offers a new surface for curious readers to find creators they might be interested in. The umbrella Food & Drink category has a huge market on Substack which could often make it harder to discover creators within the niche of Wine & Spirits. Now that the category is split out, interested readers are more likely to find it in onboarding, the home feed, and via the leaderboard tag on Wine & Spirits creator profiles.

How will this new category benefit beverage writers?

The dedicated category will make it easier for interested readers to discover Wine & Spirits content. Hopefully, having a linkable home page for the category will also be helpful within the industry.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Thank you for sharing your work on Substack, and thank you for sharing your thoughts and feedback with our team. I (and many of us at Substack—we have an internal wine club!) really believe in wine and spirits as a community gatherer, a historical time capsule, and a unique story. The industry has its ups and downs, but I think the work you’re all doing is what will always bring it back up. We’re honored that this culture-making is happening on Substack. Cheers!

Cheers back, John. (And I want to know more about Substack’s wine club.)

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Here’s what I’m reading this week

The World Atlas of Wine, revised

I just received an advance copy of the 9th edition of The World Atlas of Wine, an indispensable professional reference first published in 1971. Authors Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson, and Julia Harding have throughly revised both text and cartography, adding 18 new maps plus fresh material about climate change, sustainability, wine labeling, and emerging regions. My print copy of the 7th edition sits on my bookshelf, but I always carry the eBook format on my mobile devices while traveling in wine country. More than once a fellow journalist has leaned over my shoulder with an astonished What are you looking at—and how can I get it? I’d skipped the 8th edition, but this one looks worth the wait. Both formats ship October 6th; the book retails for $75 but you can pre-order from Bookshop.org for $70. I was thrilled to have contributed a photo to this new edition, the image that won second place in the 2025 World Food Photography Awards. You can find it on p. 207, and above.

Margaritifesto

In ’s Hospitality Everywhere, sommelier and writer reminds us that authentic cocktails follow a recipe for pleasure; tinker at your peril. His new manifesto takes aim at the so-called skinny margarita, a newish fad that strips the sugar from the drink to make it seem more, I don’t know—virtuous? Does anyone truly drink a cocktail to improve their physical wellbeing? No. And anyway, that sweetness is not merely decorative, it’s required to balance the other two elements, spirit and citrus. A margarita made without sugar “is not a delicious cocktail,” Landa writes. “It is bitter acid and alcohol in a staring contest, with nothing around to break the tension.” He’s amenable to bending a drink toward the customer’s predilections, and offers a recipe using a touch of agave syrup and a tad less Cointreau to scratch that skinny itch. “The best bars are not necessarily the ones that give guests precisely what they ask for,” he says. “They are the ones that understand what the guest is actually trying to achieve, and can get them there without sacrificing the integrity of the thing they came to experience in the first place.”

Peak Hospitality

On Monday, a sudden hailstorm forced 180 cyclists in the Vuelta a España off the road and into the lobby of IGESA Village Club, a sleepy one-star hotel high in the French Pyrenees. The hotel staff sprang into action, handing out towels, passing around free hot drinks and refreshments, and offering hotel rooms for showering and the gym for spinning-down. Storms here in the peaks aren’t uncommon, but this one was fierce. “A hotel is also a place of refuge,” said manager Guillaume Villeneuve, who ordered his team to open the bar as the cyclists poured in and colonized every inch of the facility. After the weather cleared, riders, organizers, and Yelp reviewers expressed gratitude for the stellar service. Villeneuve was gracious. “What we experienced yesterday was simply incredible; we are moved and honored to have been able to be part of the race, even if only for a short time,” he reflected. “But we must remain humble and keep a cool head. We experienced an exceptional event, certainly, but we must always put things in context. They are the real heroes. We were simply doing our job.”

Carbon Sink

In 2020, Napa’s Glass Fire incinerated the forest surrounding Smith-Madrone’s 38-acre vineyard in the Spring Mountain District. Facing years of cleanup, the winery recruited researchers and an eco-consultancy to embark on an innovative Hügelkultur project to bury, rather than burn, the waste material. The crews dug deep trenches in the forest, then added logs, branches, and other debris, finishing with a layer of straw and soil. Over time, the material will decompose, sequestering the carbon and providing runoff capture on the steep site. “Our challenge was to get rid of the fuel load,” said winery founder Stu Smith, adding that the project “is a great example of how complex farming in the mountains in Napa Valley is,” given the need for wildfire mitigation, wildlife management, forest stewardship, site drainage, and more. Preliminary results have been encouraging. Read more and find images in this research report (PDF).

A Case for a Bottle

“It’s an American thing to be bottle-averse,” declares Abel. “We are a by-the-glass culture: open-to-better, efficient, hedging, optimized for individual preference and a clean exit.” Perhaps this is mainly true of the young and carefree, but she makes a strong case that splitting a bottle of wine two, three, or four ways is both cheaper and more convivial than à chacun son goût. “So pick one!” she implores. “Be the decider! Self-appoint. Commit without consensus, workshop, or back-up plan!” Then sit back, relax, and watch what happens.

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

I’d arrived with about $200 in my pocket expecting, with irrational optimism, that my scholarship funds would swiftly come through. Unlike my peers I had neither credit card nor foreign bank account, so I resorted to tucking my thin roll of bills in my nightstand.

Fees for housing, transportation, and museums were covered by the institution, but lunch and dinner were on us. I’d been told we’d be able to cook in the kitchen of the American Church, but this option was briskly taken off the table after Reagan bombed Libya and the Florentine streets erupted in anti-American rallies. So I’d have to skimp.

Fortunately, breakfast was provided by the pensione. Italians don’t lean hard on the meal. Signora Gennarini, the petite co-proprietor, bustled about the breakfast room with trays of cappuccino and baskets of white rolls, setting out cold milk, butter, and diminutive jars of jam. It was possible to request a pot of latte caldo, which I could pour over the muesli I stashed in my room. But essentially we all started our day with white starch and dairy and sugar, adequate to slake hunger but nutritionally nothing to bark about.

Lunch was often bought on the fly during our peregrinations throughout the city. Even in the mid-1980s, Florence was ablaze with storefronts selling pizza and focaccia by the slice. I remember my first order. My classmates had lined up, but I hung back to listen to the banter. I joined my friend T. in the line, scanning the labels on the different flavors, mouthing their pronunciations sotto voce. I whispered toward T., “How do you say funghi?”

“Fooon-ghee,” he said. “Peeet-zah fooon-ghee.”

Suddenly it was my turn. “Due pizze funghi, per favore,” I heard myself say to the man across the glass. He wrapped two slices in thin parchment and handed them back as I fiddled with the mysterious coins.

The line moved on. “Look at you!” T. said. “I thought you said you didn’t speak Italian.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I’m a good mimic.”

“And willing to try,” he said, gesturing to the students behind us. “They’re all ordering in English.”

I did not want to be that person. I wanted to try to speak the language of Italy, or rather not to speak the language of America, to be that tourist who assumed everyone was there to serve her. Our coursework was conducted in English, but we’d been required to take two terms of Italian before enrollment. I’d done prior classwork in three different Latinate languages but not Italian. I had promised to study on my own, which had apparently satisfied the Art History department chair, but I’d done no more than crack a slender Berlitz phrase book.

Back then it was less common for Italians to speak English, and I swiftly learned there is no quicker way for me to grasp a language than to fumble around and find out. Sometimes I would catch my interlocutor’s every other word and also miss the crucial “non” that turned the sentence inside out. But I quickly realized that as long as everyone stayed in a generous mood, we could make ourselves understood.

Fortunately for my wallet, I soon discovered a cafeteria a block from the pensione. It was a traditional tavola calda, a hot lunch counter that at midday buzzed with shopkeepers, construction workers, museum attendants, and other Florentines who weren’t afforded the luxury of time to return home properly for la pausa pranzo, the traditional midday break. Many of their neighbors still did so, closing their storefronts at noon to venture back to their home neighborhoods where their wives or mothers or grandmothers or all three would have spent the morning cooking the midday meal. Three hours later the proprietors would toddle back and reopen their shops, remaining open for a few more hours before closing for the day at 6:00 or 7:00 p.m. To a naïve American and blossoming second-wave feminist, the practice struck me as thoroughly retrograde. I hadn’t yet learned that human fulfillment is culturally contingent.

The cafeteria in my neighborhood was ringed by steam and cold counters and striped in the center with long communal tables. Put completely out of your mind the school cafeterias of youthful suffering. The mechanics were the same, even the equipment, but this was Italy, and this was lunch, which meant a vast deliciousness of first and second plates, side dishes hot and cold, and sweet things and fruit. One could order simply or lavishly, and the business-like attendants did not judge, because there was no incentive to upsell, cross-sell, or supersize. It was as civilized and convivial as any restaurant, just way cheaper.

It was also a way to meet others. Once, a woman in her thirties set her tray across from me, smiling with “Buon giorno.” I replied in kind, but something in her accent suggested she was not herself a native speaker.

“Di dove sei?” She asked where I was from.

“Stati Uniti,” I said, “Sono americana.” I hoped the conversation did not escalate, because I would soon run out of words. “Parla inglese?” I asked, hoping she might have at least a little English.

“Eh,” she hesitated. “Parlez-vous français?”

“Sì — or, oui,” I replied, with small relief at having discovered firmer, if not entirely solid, footing. We chatted as we ate, sometimes swapping Italian words for French, or gesturing our arms in animated pantomime. Before she left she asked for directions to a landmark I knew well. It was clear she was not one of the shopkeeping locals here for homeless lunch, but herself a visitor, like me. As we waved each other off into the bleached light of street, I suspected she spoke English after all.

A quick internet search suggests that several such cafeterias remain in central Florence, one not far from my old haunt, another near the famous Mercato Sant’Ambrogio. Apparently tourists have discovered these, but judging by the pictures the establishments retain a workaday feel: family-run not franchised, dishes arrayed with pride, tray-service not a quaint throw-back but a fully contemporary feature.

Why aren’t there more spots like this in America? For many reasons. The price of real estate in U.S. cities makes a ten-dollar plate of pasta and three-dollar salad an unreasonable business proposition. Americans value privacy, so communal tables are deployed only for gauzy, feast-in-field dinners or messy crab boils. We’ll eat a sandwich at our desk to telegraph “I’m working” even if our computer screen says otherwise. And of course we now each have a phone, that handheld distraction that lights up the instant we sit down. It used to be easier to catch another’s eye. Di dove sei?

It’s a pity. That Florentine cafeteria was a lifeline for me, and not only because I was broke. It was a way into the culture, the city, the vibe. Because sure, sometimes I want to be left alone. But sometimes it’s nice to linger over a simple plate of pasta and meet somebody new.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

I reckon I’d reduced my activity by about twenty percent. Not terrible, but in the long run the choice was self-defeating. Exercise lifts my mood, as does getting out of my teeny-tiny context to mingle with others, even strangers in a gym. My body started to go soft in new and startling places, which hardly helped my self-esteem. I’ve long suffered from one form or another of body dysmorphia, even though I’m probably what others would consider slender. Turns out I’m capable of feeling bad about my body no matter what it looks like.

But here it was spring, that time of beginnings. I figured if I could resume the hour of regular daily training, plus add an hour of walking, the unwanted soft spots would swiftly harden.

“I need take my carcass for a walk,” I declared that first day, slapping my hindquarters as I headed out the door. It was a brilliant morning, shiny, new leaves riffling and birds shouting good news about the territory. I wasn’t far from home before I realized I should soften my tone. I need to re-cast this, I thought, more from a sense of charitable self-obligation than professed self-love.

Let’s see. So, like, if I had a dog I’d happily commit to a daily walk. Maybe my body is the dog?

Ugh, terrible analogy.

Maybe I’m just taking myself for a walk. Just my body. Or, my well-being. That sounded more like something worth doing.

My household sits at one end of a two-mile stretch of rural dirt road. It’s extensively wooded except for a few big fields and about a dozen houses. It’s lonely, mostly. During covid I’d often venture out and not encounter another soul. At the time that was fine by me, for reasons both epidemiological and psychological. Those daily walks were a salvation. Maybe I could rediscover some of that feeling too.

The neighborhood backs up to hundreds of acres of hilly wilderness. I’ve seen bears on my walk, once or twice a bobcat, often deer, lately a mother and a fawn, its spots fading. Birds, of course, which I’ve learned to recognize by song, since they’re away so high in the treetops. Warblers of all colors: black-throated blue, black-throated green, yellow, chestnut, pine. Thrushes, flute-like, and the many busy woodpeckers. Vireos, tanagers, orioles, buntings and other colorful characters. Ravens and crows, hawks and falcons. A new family of five turkey vultures. Once or twice an eagle.

This summer I’ve been heading out after breakfast. Evidently my neighbors are morning people, so we cross paths, variously walking, running, or cycling. There’s always a handful of cars and pickups, all local traffic. No one uses this road as a thoroughfare.

I’ve gotten used to everyone’s rhythms. Neighbor Tom walks his golden-doodle Rosie, but sometimes his wife Sally has the dog, who, she says, gets more salon treatments than she does. John, tall and voluble, eighty-two but looks sixty, walks five miles a day, sometimes yammering into a cell phone. I asked him how he got coverage up here in the shadow of every worldly signal. “Mint Mobile!” he boomed. “Thirteen bucks a month. Unlimited minutes!” Neighbor Heidi walks with a rotating cast of friends and dogs, and it’s unclear who belongs to whom, but they’re good about holding them as I pass. I was attacked by a different dog four years ago, on another road nearby. They don’t know that, but I welcome their courtesy. Sometimes I greet my neighbor’s harlequin cat, who runs at me, tail-up, and flops herself onto my shoes for scrumbles. My own cat will notice this later.

I recently met Mike and Christy. We’d been passing each other all summer, but they’re joggers and I hadn’t wanted to interrupt. Meetings and greetings here follow a strange northern politesse. Speed is a factor. People in cars get a wave, a gesture of shared humanity when you’re the only two for miles. Ditto cyclists, and anyone with earbuds. Fellow walkers offer the best opportunity for interaction, but you don’t ask names on first encounter. You just smile and keep about your business, with limited eye contact. The next time you both say Hi and maybe mention the weather. After three to five encounters like this, you mention something you’re confident they’ve also experienced: the July 4th celebration or the overnight power outage or that big tree that finally fell by the turn. You might stop to chat for a minute. Then the next time you see them you say, “By the way, I’m Meg. What’s your name?” New England means the reticence of strangers, even friends.

So it’s been a full summer of daily walks. I’ve missed only two days thanks to foul weather, and I did also manage to add back my daily hour of training, weights and otherwise. My exercise minutes are off the charts, but I haven’t lost any weight. If anything I’m hungrier, and stronger. Maybe this is just my shape, now, larger in the world.

This week the songbirds have gone silent. They’re molting, changing out of breeding plumage into a sturdier suit of feathers to propel their fall migration. Molting makes them clumsy and vulnerable, so they hunker in the underbrush, keeping a low profile so as not to advertise their whereabouts. In a few weeks they’ll begin departing in waves, parents and young alike, to fly the improbable distances back to their wintering grounds, powered by the bugs and seeds and fruits of my territory, or rather our territory.

School starts next week. If I’m out in the afternoon I’ll pass my neighbor’s kids en route home. They take the bus in the morning because it’s a two-minute ride. But the route reverses at the end of the day so theirs is the last stop, 45 minutes. They can walk the two miles home in half the time, stooped under monumental backpacks I cannot believe actually hold books.

So here it is fall, that time of re-beginnings. The French call it La Rentrée, the return or re-entry. I like that construction, because it does feel like a re-set, a resumption of old routines. It also acknowledges that summery sense of suspended animation, the way time holds its breath in August, waiting to exhale. It’s a moment that invites us forward, but also invites us to consider what we’re leaving behind.

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Here’s what I’m reading this week

Seeing the Extra in Ordinary

In Ordinary Abundance, animator Jordan Dworkin asks us to consider how many of our everyday household objects, things we take for granted, would have felt miraculous even a generation ago. Electric lights, reading glasses, temperature control, plumbing. “All the items in this room were once out of reach; some not yet invented, others too rare or costly for the vast majority of people. Today, most of us lucky enough to live with them walk past without a second thought.” His animation suggests we should try to recapture “the old sense of awe at these wonders that have long since become commonplace.”

European Wine, Mapped

Belgian tech consultant Boris de Vloed recently launched a free interactive tool to explore European wine regions. To create Open Wine Map, de Vloed sourced published data from the INAO, French cahiers des charges, Italian disciplinare, and other appellation datasets, then used Claude to couple them with mapping data. (Read more on the process in this post by .) The map allows searching, sorting, and filtering by region, grape, and wine style. The precision is boggling and the visualization affords direct comparisons between and within regions. A cursory cruise across, say, northern Piemonte shows how tiny Barolo and Barbaresco are compared to the broader wine territory. Scroll over to the Côte de Nuits and the minuscule scale hits even harder. It’s a new, invaluable resource for students, scholars, writers, and sundry wine connoisseurs.

The Cellar as Biome

Winemaker-philosopher does not shy from certain cellar techniques to speed a wine on its way, but he’s also learned to work with, rather than against, busy, busy nature. The cellar is a microbial biome, he writes, and the wine needs a diversity of microorganisms to mature properly. Sterile filtration might prevent problems later, but it also prevents evolution, and can also allow a single stray microbe, Brett, for example, to run utterly wild. “Since sterile filtration is a 20th Century invention, French winemakers have been for hundreds of years making great wines that are unsterilized, so why should they start now?” He cautions winemakers to have “a bit more faith in their microbiome.”

West of Eden

Whenever I’ve visited Mt. Etna, the producers and their Consorzio have made clear that the only wine on Etna is grown in the reverse-C that rings the eastern slopes of the volcano. The west is nothing but nut trees and fruit orchards and olive groves, if you take their word for it. True, the Etna D.O.C. appellation is limited to that narrow crescent, but wine is absolutely produced on the western slope, and has been for centuries. In The Other Etna, shares why Grenache dominates the plantings thanks to a twisty history involving a French Duchy, Spanish enologists, and vines that survived phylloxera. Frega shares the work of a “small, combative community of Etna growers. All of them started making wine no more than ten years ago, and nearly all of them farm on the mountain’s lesser-known slopes.”

Guy on Guywear

I don’t know what it says about me that I’m more drawn to menswear than women’s. It’s something about the silhouettes but also the evident ease, wearability, fabrics, and tailoring that rides along with the category. Menswear writer recently joined Substack and is helping me unpack my preferences, as in this Note about building a coherent wardrobe. “[W]hen buying clothing, pay attention to which qualities you prefer and think about ‘emotional durability.’ Will you enjoy wearing this thing five or even ten years from now? As much as you enjoyed wearing it on the first day?” He offers a four-step process that seems simple enough. I’m definitely due for a re-set.

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Lexicon is also used casually to refer to a subset of words embraced by specialists in a particular domain, a professionalized vocabulary.

Wine has its own lexicons, not one but many. The language of wine includes terms in common vernacular use, like smooth, fruity, and bold. But there have also been concerted efforts to formalize wine terminology to aid learning, evaluation, marketing, and credentialing. The results have greatly influenced wine vocabulary over the last half century.

Modern antecedents

In the early part of the 20th century, commentary about wine focused principally on the wine’s provenance and typicity. The field was dominated by British writers who had deep familiarity with European wine history. They tended to highlight the wine’s enduring characteristics instead of its immediate flavor sensations. The writing was evaluative rather than strictly descriptive, the commentator rendering pronouncements about the wine’s quality, collectability, and adherence to norms. Personification was common, the texts blossoming with descriptors like muscular, robust, refined, masculine, feminine, gamine, lithe, or elegant.

By the mid-twentieth century, after Repeal and two World Wars and during an era of expanding globalization, Americans were re-exposed to the world’s cuisines and wines. Importers sprang up to put European wines onto U.S. tables, while the Judgment of Paris taught Americans their own wine was worth discovering. The newly wine-curious needed ways to understand and talk about wine that fit their own reference frames. Pronouncements about “typicity” were ineffective for those unfamiliar with classical regions, styles, and producers. It didn’t help that the language of wine was the language of territory, and the original foreign-sounding names and descriptions were freely used.

During the 1970s, publications like Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast launched to address consumers’ dawning vinous interest. The writing aimed to educate, enlighten, encourage exploration, stimulate thirst, and prompt a sale. It needed to be accessible and readable, friendly, warm, and engaging. And it needed to assume limited prior knowledge of or experience with wine. The writing was vernacular, lightly poetic, sometimes florid, and swiftly earned the nickname “winespeak.”

The new lexicons

A subset of the wine industry, frustrated by the imprecision of the modern wine discourse, set out to establish strict lexical rules for discussing wine. Significantly, the attention moved away from considerations of provenance and typicity and toward flavor attributes. It was a shift from origin to experience, from “What is this wine about?” to “What is this wine about to me?”

Three main approaches emerged:

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The Salt is returning from a brief hiatus as I cranked out other projects. Last week I finished a long essay I’d been developing over months, then pitched to a favorite editor. Fingers crossed for success, but if it doesn’t land there at least you’ll read it here. I also hosted a colleague and his wife for a tasting and dinner, logging 17,000 steps, mostly in my kitchen, before falling into bed at midnight. On Tuesday.

This week I presented a seminar for the Wine Scholar Guild which uses Pinot Noir as a lens to look at the evolution of wine writing. It’s a talk I’ve given before using material from a paper I published in The World of Fine Wine, but it still needed tweaking, because (proving my own point) wine isn’t fixed, it evolves.

Plus it’s August, a time of year it’s critical to step away from the screen and into the garden. Right now mine sorely needs me. This spring we added a large outbuilding near the vegetable plot, and by the time the landscapers trundled out it was too late to plant veg and too hot to establish lawn. Nonetheless the team spread a load of pricey loam and hydro-seed, which promptly produced a profusion of witch grass, crabgrass, purslane, pig’s ear, lamb’s quarters, and a handful of species I’ve never seen in four decades working dirt. The seeds were apparently lurking in the loam, and they swiftly overwhelmed the grass seed, which dried out and got eaten by birds.

Lawns are dumb but even dumber without grass, so my spouse and I have been ping-ponging between anger and despair, both especially acute at 3:00 a.m. The landscaper tells us the grass will overtake the weeds come fall, just you wait, but this notion strains credulity. So I have literally taken matters into my own hands, using a spading fork to lift the roots and a weeding hook to pull out the unwanted biomass. I’ve made progress over three or four sessions, and figure I’ve another ten or twelve to go, who knows. At least it’s restored a measure of calm to my psyche. I’m certainly sleeping better, maybe because I’m so damned tired.

So, not much time to write. But I have been reading:

Gourmayto, Gourmahto

Back in January, a group of five food writers acquired the lapsed trademark for Gourmet, the food magazine shuttered by Condé Nast in 2009. After a groovy wordmark update, they relaunched the brand as an upstart digital newsletter. Ruth Reichl, Gourmet’s last editor, gave them a verbal high-five but also told them, “You’re going to get sued.” And sued they got. A dead trademark registration does not a dead trademark make. Condé Nast has continued to use the Gourmet name in archives and on their Epicurious and Bon Appétit platforms, and continuity trumps a paperwork oversight. This week the newer publication announced on Instagram they’ve temporarily renamed themselves [Untitled Food Magazine] (they also declared they “have a beautiful new website,” but I couldn’t load it). The team will be rebranding, so of course suggestions have poured into the comments. My favorite so far was in a comment from : Gourmaybe.

Family meal

Some food writing is about food. Some food writing is about people. Some food writing, vanishingly rare, oscillates between food and people while opening space for feelings to swirl like the sea at ebb tide. The anonymous author of has just written one such piece, a review of a Fort Greene bistro with a whopper of an opening line: “Sailor is the perfect restaurant to discuss your divorce with your wife.” Their marriage had unraveled weeks earlier, but the pair kept their date because it’s just dinner and there was, after all, plenty to discuss. As he describes the parade of courses across the table and the feelings across the heart, he somehow strikes a tone that’s wistful but not maudlin while also providing a useful review. The piece is devastating and quiet and beautiful all at once, and proves, as if any of us needed convincing, that dinner is never “just dinner.”

Rhymes with natural

Back in April, interviewed political philosopher about his new book, Il Vino Post Naturale (“Post-Natural Wine;” published in Italian). In the interview, Frega discusses the growing cadre of winemakers whose viticultural practices produce fruit so superb it needs little cellar intervention, an approach either completely novel or utterly ancient, depending on how you hold it to the light. Frega recently joined Substack, and in his opening salvo, Hegel in the Vineyard, he considers the dogmas of “conventional” vs. “natural” winemaking and suggests that on inspection, these two ideas collapse in on one another, a false dichotomy. Instead, he suggests a more meaningful framework that breaks wine into a triad of “natural,” “classical,” and “post-natural.” His argument is elegant and genius and difficult to summarize, so you should just go read it. Maybe twice.

Absence and salience

We notice difference. In On Description, essayist Alfred Jung Lee invites us to consider what we choose to focus on when we describe things: ourselves or others, habits, habitats, histories. We do not always highlight the most obvious or common features, he observes, and what we decide to include or elide speaks volumes about what we value and what we believe others need to know. “The mind is trained to look for variation; noticing it is essential to survival,” he writes. “We have built a world that increasingly delivers us this variation—the new, the unusual, the remarkable. But this cycle hides shapes and structures that stay unspoken, and are talked around.” Lee’s essay also reminds us how hard it is to notice the unremarkable: to notice absence, the something-is-missing, the no-longer-here, even if the absence itself is the thing’s most salient characteristic.

Metaphorically speaking

Tea expert has been learning to write about wine for her new job with a wine club. She feels her wine lexicon is inadequate, but on the other hand, she’s not locked into the vocabularies of formal wine programs that, once fixed in the brain, are hard to dislodge. Those lexicons also tend to rely heavily on analogies—fruit, spice, herb, wood, etc.—which over-emphasize aromatics and limit considerations of wine’s broad strokes, its gestalt. Bove has more recently discovered the power of a well-landed metaphor. Now, when tasting with a colleague, she asks him to recast a wine as a song. “The answers are as eclectic as his taste,” she writes. “This delicate Burgundy white feels like a nocturne by Chopin. This dry orange wine from Portugal is closer to a minimalist rock song… This pleasant, comforting Beaujolais relaxes us the same way ‘End of Beginning’ by Djo does.” Ultimately it works because she’s not looking for a wine that tastes like X, Y, or Z: “I’m looking for things that make me gasp, or cry, or go suddenly silent. I’m looking for wines that hit me like a meteor.” Or a metaphor.

Wake up and smell the

“Hotels have chefs. Hotels have sommeliers. Why don’t hotels have coffee directors?” ’s proposition—that hotels should pay more attention to their coffee programs—is so shatteringly obvious it should immediately send hoteliers scrambling. Coffee in the room, coffee in the lobby, coffee in the bar-café and restaurant, all of it should be considered holistically, thoughtfully integrated into the guest’s experience in time and place. Nespresso in the room is table stakes, he says, but what if the hotel were to partner with a local roaster to make bespoke pods? What if a guest could request of a coffee concierge a personalized beverage to be delivered to the room at a specific time each morning? What if the hotel had dedicated staff who were trained and resourced to deliver the highest quality coffee at any moment of day or night? “Coffee doesn’t need another machine. It needs a champion,” he writes. “Hotels already know the value of chefs, bartenders, and sommeliers because they understand that great hospitality rarely happens by accident. Coffee deserves the same treatment.” Next, let’s do the tea.

See you next week.

Coffees I have known ©2026 Meg Maker

Etymology

The symbol K derives from the Neo-Latin word for potassium, kalium.

The word potassium derives from potash (literally “pot ash”), historically made by soaking wood ash in water to yield caustic lye. This solution reacted with carbon dioxide and was boiled dry to create potassium carbonate, the principal component of potash. This was used in production of soap, bleach, glass, gunpowder, and as a leavening agent.

Potassium in biology

Potassium is essential to cellular function in all plants and animals, allowing organisms to regulate the flow of water, nutrients, and electrical charge across cell membranes. The potassium cation, K⁺, is the main positively charged ion in most living cells. Together with the sodium cation, Na⁺, it facilitates the transport of sugars and amino acids through membranes.

Humans need potassium for neural, muscular, and cardiac processes; hormonal systems; electrolyte balance; renal function; and many more biological activities.

Plants need potassium for water transport, photosynthesis, respiration, ripening, maintaining turgor, and activating many enzymes. Signs of potassium deficiency include yellowing (chlorosis) at the leaf margins. In severe cases, the plant will shrivel and become more susceptible to disease.

Although potassium is the eighth-most abundant element in the earth’s crust, much of it is unavailable to plant roots, locked up instead in rock (granite, feldspar, mica) or clays. Weathering and cation exchange release potassium into moist soils, where plant roots can take it up. Dry soils inhibit uptake.

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The dry wine, Jurançon Sec, is crisp and aromatic, with flavors of ripe stone fruit and spice. The sweet wines, Jurançon and Jurançon Vendanges Tardives, or late harvest, are the main attraction, produced by a process called passerillage (pah-seh-ree-YAZH) in which bunches are dried on the vine, desiccating and concentrating sugars.

Jurançon’s history

Wine has been produced in Jurançon since the Roman times. By 1385, a regional census cites it by name, “juransoo,” and by 1562 a text in Occitan provides the first mention of the regional Manseng grape, “vinhe mansengue.”

Legend has it that at the 1553 baptism of Henry IV, the infant’s grandfather daubed a few drops of sweet Jurançon wine onto his lips, then rubbed them with fresh garlic for good measure, ostensibly to strengthen his body and mind (it’s anyone’s guess which substance did what).

By the mid-16th century, Jurançon wines were becoming famous across France, later catching fire in Holland and eventually enjoying robust export across the Atlantic. Phylloxera devastated the vineyards in the late 19th century (as elsewhere in Europe), and the region only began to recover during the interwar period.

The French writer Colette, née Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, gave it a boost in her essay Vins, published in Prisons et Paradis in 1932: “Je fis, adolescente, la rencontre d’un prince enflammé, impérieux, traître comme tous les grands séducteurs: le Jurançon” (“As a teenager I met a passionate prince, imperious, treacherous like all great seducers: Jurançon”). I’ll have what she’s having.

In 1936, the Jurançon sweet wine AOC was established, one of the earliest in France. Jurançon Sec followed in 1975 and Vendanges Tardives AOC in 1994. Today, according to the professional council Les Vignerons du Jurançon, the region has 65 independent producers farming 620 hectares (1,530 acres) of vineyard.

Jurançon terroir

The Jurançon region is warm but tempered by moist Atlantic air that also guarantees 1,200 mm of rainfall each year. The foehn (feun) wind that drops down from the mountains keeps grapes healthy and hastens the drying process. Harvest dates for the sweet wines are among the latest in France, starting in mid-October and stretching into December.

The vines are planted as high as 300 meters a.s.l. and are sometimes trellised in the local hautain (oh-TAHN) style, similar to espalier, which elevates the canopy to prevent damage from spring frosts.

The grapes of Jurançon

This is a territory where indigenous grapes dominate, principally Gros Manseng (gro mahn-SENGH) and Petit Manseng (peh-tee mahn-SENGH), along with minuscule quantities of the nearly extinct Courbu, Petit Courbu, Camaralet, and Lauzet; all are white varieties.

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Burgundy producer to Michelin Guide: “Get off my lawn!”

The Michelin Guide, which has long issued ratings for restaurants (using Stars) and hotels (using Keys), recently announced they would begin rating wine producers (using Grapes). They started with Burgundy, an approach about as sensible as setting an electrical apprentice to work on the track’s third rail. Burgundy’s tremendous complexity, history, and thin-sliced terroir, not to mention the money at stake for winners and losers in the ratings game, make it one of the most contested stretches of vignoble on earth.

Michelin announced the Burgundy ratings on July 7, prompting a firestorm of commentary, mostly unflattering. Among the many problems is their decision to focus on producers, not products. This elides wine’s existential considerations of both vintage and place, because a single Burgundy producer might make wine from various lieux-dits. It’s baffling why they chose this approach versus, say, focusing on the producer’s hospitality experiences, which is arguably something they know a bit about, having published guides for motor tourists for well over a century. Worse, Michelin’s announced criteria—agronomy, technical mastery, identity, balance, and consistency—are pretty arm-wavy, leading to speculation and distrust of the specifics.

Last week, producer Arnoux-Lachaux, in Vosne-Romanée, which had been awarded a single Grape, posted an Instagram story saying, politely, eff you. Florence Arnoux-Lachaux and Charles Lachaux, fifth and sixth generations, respectively, wrote: “We do not know how the Domaine’s rating, reportedly based on five criteria, could have been established, as we have not received Michelin or presented our wines to the press since the 2020 vintage.” It was a deliberate choice to opt out of professional reviews and ratings. “We have therefore asked Michelin to remove the Domaine from the selection, in keeping with this long-standing position.”

Perhaps the Michelin reviewers, whoever they are, simply bought and tasted the wines together (Michelin says the process is collaborative and non-anonymous). But given that Arnoux-Lachaux’s wines are all allocated and the top wines reach four figures, that idea strains credulity, especially given the vintage timeline.

One more thing: Michelin also owns Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, whose 100-point wine rating scale tacks pretty much opposite, assessing wines by the quality of the bottling in each vintage, not by the personality of the producer over time.

No word from Michelin about whether they’ll honor Arnoux-Lachaux’s request.

Living the sweet life at last

Since the mid aughts, wine impresario has been creating hit wine events, including Wine Riot, a 50-city festival with 150,000 attendees, and Rosé Mansion, which reached 375,000. Tyler’s work was featured in Wine Enthusiast, L.A. Times, Boston Globe, ABC News, and myriad other outlets. A huge majority of event-goers, especially for the rosé project, were female. At the time, Tyler was not. Assigned male at birth, she had launched her entrepreneurial wine career as a man, figuring the industry wouldn’t accept a trans woman. In 2023, she decided to begin hormone replacement therapy, and today, thanks also to laser hair removal and TikTok makeup tutorials, she has fully transitioned.

New you, new palate. “I thought I understood all the effects of H.R.T.,” she writes, in a new candid essay for Wine Enthusiast, “[b]ut 18 months into my transition, something changed that I didn’t expect; wine tasted very different. My sense of smell increased by about 40%, and my sensitivity to bitter flavors became far more intense. What’s more, my mood and the setting are now critical. If I’m tired or stressed, wine just tastes kind of flat. I can still identify the flavors and aromas, but the overall experience has shifted.”

As have her wine preferences. Bitterness is out, high aromatics are in, as are crunchy fresh reds. “Ultimately, it’s the experience of wine that changed the most,” she says. “The people, the vibes, and my mood play a much larger role in my overall enjoyment of wine.”

I recently wrote how my own palate has changed over the years, but Balliet’s essay adds necessary dimensions to the discussion about the evolution of personal taste. In 2025, she was nominated for a James Beard Media Award for her book, Rebel School of Wine. It didn’t win, but her new essay should.

Appetite for change

Speaking of life-changing medical care: Six months ago, food writer started taking a GLP-1, both to lose weight and to address high blood pressure. It’s been—destabilizing. DeVore has learned to handle the drug’s side effects: the gastric distress, the silencing of the food noise, the blank, non-urgency of forgetting to eat.

What happens to a food writer who cannot consume food? “I’m writing about GLP-1s now because they are the only food topic I’m qualified to write about,” he writes, in a wry self-appraisal in Taste. “Although, to be honest, I could probably crank out 800 words about the low-key charms of cottage cheese.”

But while he has lost weight, he’s also lost the pleasures and comforts of hunger. With his career, he had “found a way to monetize my appetite,” he writes, “I used to obsess over my culinary lusts all the time, and as a writer, I could pitch publications about meals and delicacies that piqued my interest—and made me hungry.”

So, yes, GLP-1s are torture, he says, but he sticks with the program because he’s seeing results. “I step on the scale and, for a brief, delicious moment, I’m as light as pink cotton candy.” A food metaphor, and a sweet glimmer of hope.

See you next week.

Photos of Burgundy ©2026 Meg Maker

The word stems from Old Latin indu, “within,” and gignere, “to beget,” “give birth,” or “bear.” These roots also give us genesis, genetics, and genre.

In wine, synonyms for indigenous include native and autochthonous. These terms refer to a grape variety that originated in a particular region and may still persist there, having become part of the area’s tradition, culture, and flavor.

How new grape varieties arise

To understand indigeneity, it’s useful to review how grapes reproduce. Vitis vinifera is highly heterozygous, meaning that the gene sequence differs on each of its 19 pairs of chromosomes. The result is that its seeds contain a mix of genetic traits that don’t exactly match those of the parents.

The offspring vines may have different berry size, growth schedule, or tolerance for drought, heat, or disease, and will almost certainly produce a wine with different chemical and organoleptic properties. This is why grapevines are propagated by cuttings rather than seeds.

Other familiar heterozygous plants include apple, avocado, walnut, and pecan, all of which must be grafted to ensure the new plants have the same genetics as the source material.

Indigeneity and fitness to place

Sometimes the new grape-from-seed has favorable traits. It thrives in local conditions better than the other available varieties and produces better wine. To preserve its genetics, the vine grower will take cuttings of the cane and, historically, layer them in the ground to encourage rooting. After Phylloxera, the cuttings are almost invariably grafted onto a resistant rootstock.

That new variety is said to be indigenous to the region where it was born.

The wandering vine

Many grape varieties have been continuously cultivated in their original territory, but that doesn’t mean they can’t thrive elsewhere. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay (from Burgundy), Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot (Bordeaux), and Riesling (Germany) remain in situ but are also widely planted throughout the northern and southern hemispheres.

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The Applegate Valley lies entirely within the bounds of southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley AVA. The fifty-mile stretch of the Applegate River readily ripens the sun-loving grapes of the Mediterranean in its alluvial soils and fans. The region’s high latitude brings long days in midsummer with ample light and heat, but temperatures plummet overnight thanks to downslope winds from the nearby Siskiyou Mountains.

Troon Vineyard, located at the western end of the valley, in Grant’s Pass, farms following certified biodynamic and regenerative organic principles. They rely only on ambient cultures for primary fermentation and malolactic and use minimal sulfite at bottling. They also eschew new oak, aging instead in neutral barrels, concrete, qvevri, stainless, or a mix. They don’t call themselves natural winemakers, but some might.

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