Drones in the vineyard!

visited Jerez to watch organic producer Raúl Moreno using his drone to spray vine treatments. Moreno has found drones offer myriad advantages over tractors, including speed, water efficiency, and zero soil compaction. There are some downsides. Operators must pass rigorous exams before flying. “The training is pretty much identical to what you need to do to become a helicopter pilot,” Moreno told Woolf. Spraying in windy conditions can be problematic, as seen in Woolf’s Instagram video. And the European Union forbids aerial spraying at high concentrations. Still, “Might they be a better solution than driving heavy, polluting tractors through the vines?” Woolf asks. “Could they sit side-by-side with the ethics of artisanal organic, biodynamic, and natural growers?” Steiner, in his lectures, actively encouraged farmers to go forth and experiment; I think he’d approve.

Sweet success

Maple sugaring season has ended in northern New England. Mud season was brutal, truly interminable, and we endured long stretches of sniveling cold punctuated by false springs that teased us with mild sunshine before shoving us back into winter’s bitter embrace. This did not get my juices flowing, but it did wonders for maple sap, which requires cold nights and mild days to start running. In Vermont, many producers reported a strong season, with a total production estimate of three million gallons. According to Anson Tebbetts, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets, that’s over half of the production of the entire United States. Vermont: small but mighty.

A new AVA

Speaking of Vermont, last week I attended the annual meeting of the Vermont Grape and Wine Council (on which more later) just as news broke that the federal government is on the verge of approving the state’s first sub-AVA, Champlain Valley of Vermont. Local indy news site VTDigger wrote about the proposed rule, which is currently in a comment period. If approved, the valley’s wine producers will at last be able to list their vineyard and locale on the label, which is forbidden for state-appellated wines. Vermont wine pioneer Kenneth Albert, founder of Shelburne Vineyard and a former president of the VGWC, submitted the original petition in 2022. “It gives us validity,” he told VTDigger. “We’ll finally get some respect.”

Brace yourself, Vermont

Regional regulations bring pluses and minuses. On the one hand, they offer assurances a wine is authentically produced, sourced from the defined area and made within certain strictures. But they also stifle creativity and hamstring innovations that may be sorely needed, especially under rapidly changing climactic and economic conditions. lays out the issues and highlights many examples of makers purposely going off-piste, especially in natural wine. He thinks it’s time to break the rules.

The art of the blend

Jason Haas, general manager of Tablas Creek Vineyard, in Paso Robles, reports on last week’s blending sessions for the 2025 white wines. He’s encouraged by the quantity and quality of the vintage, and this year they’ll be able to make varietal bottlings of Picardin, Clairette blanche, and Bourboulenc—grapes that never get bottled varietally in their native Rhône—along with good quantities of their flagship white blends. Haas’s text is long and wine-geeky, but if you have ever wanted a peek inside the vinous sausage factory, or pored over a tech sheet wondering how two percent in a blend could possibly make a difference, this post’s for you.

Wine’s structural economics

has spent nearly two decades building and scaling national wine brands, riding the industry’s ups and downs. But last week, after conducting a deep dive into wine retail trend data, he confessed his shock at the degree of the recent decline. In his latest post, he deconstructs the three-tier system, taking it apart like a machine to find the sand and broken cogs. His piece is required reading for anyone managing flow at almost any scale. “What the industry needs is not perfection,” he concludes. “It needs to work well enough to direct capital to the right places, give genuine ideas enough runway to prove themselves, and preserve what drew most of us here and keeps us here still.”

Natural language query

Importer digs into the semantics and semiotics of the term natural wine, what it means and what it signals, and how its use and interpretation (unremarkably) say more about the speaker than the style. “Over the course of some years, the term has been stretched and strained, but that does not detract from its essential usefulness nor practicality,” he writes. Graf cautions us to evaluate process and product independently, separating makers’ stylistic and philosophical intentions from their specific outcomes, which are highly contingent. (It is wine, after all.)

“If you don’t want the chicken, don’t get it”

In early April, New York City councilman Chi Ossé took to Instagram to rant about a wine bar’s $40 price tag for a roasted half-chicken with potatoes. Said wine bar, Gigi’s, in Greenpoint, is not even in his district. Commenters showed up with pitchforks and torches, and the brouhaha spilled into the streets of mainstream media, picked up by The New York Times, Bon Appétit, and Today. Abel of Pour Things thinks everyone’s missed the point. “I get it. I really do. New York pricing fatigue is real,” she writes. “But here’s what nobody is saying: Yes, the half chicken is $40. But you can also get a whole bottle of wine for $40. Or choose any of 300 bottles for under $100.” In other words, the wine bar part of the machine is functioning as intended, encouraging exploration and discovery. She confirmed this when she sat down with the bar’s manager and wine director to talk about their strategy. “Within about thirty seconds it’s clear: the place is designed to make you curious.” And thirsty.

See you next week.

Paintings ©2026 Meg Maker

The region is washed by Pacific fog, and the breezes are constant and cooling. Pisoni’s vineyards are east-facing, catching morning light but protected by the highland ridges from late afternoon heat. Grapes ripen slowly so hang times are long.

After enjoying success with his first five acres, Pisoni added another seventeen and began selling fruit to local vintners. In 2000, he and his sons, Mark and Jeff, started bottling their own wine under the Lucia label. Today they produce Pinot noir, Chardonnay, and Syrah from three vineyard sites.

The Lucy Wines are meant as an approachable, affordable entrée to the estate’s production. Below are my notes on the Lucy Pico Blanco, Pinot noir Rosé, and Gamay noir, all from the 2025 vintage. They are delicious, and as a bonus the family donates $1 from the sale of each wine to a designated charity. I’ve also paired each wine with one of my original paintings that matches its sensibilities.

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Tastefully yours

Taste is a slippery fish, one I’ve never quite landed. I have formal education in art history and literary criticism and have spent the last two decades as a critic of material culture, but the nature of taste has long eluded me. Perhaps that’s because academia views taste as vulgar and populist so leans instead into so-called eternal truths. (Which, underneath, are just cultural preferences; circular.) Recently I’ve been reaching out to writers I admire to get their take on taste: what it is, how it forms, whether it can be taught. emailed me a brilliant gloss, then took to his own Substack to meditate on how taste gets enacted within spheres of cultural production, including but not limited to wine, and whether AI machines could ever rise to the task. In Landa’s definition, taste is not merely selection, it is “articulation,” and the job of a sommelier (or DJ or designer or name-your-taste-mediator) is not simply to locate value but to translate it meaningfully to others. That talent is hard-earned, messy, frictive, but that’s the point: “This is the part of taste that resists automation—not the identification of the thing, but the negotiation around it. The small, human adjustments that turn a preference into a moment, and a moment into something that feels, however briefly, like meaning.”

Randall ruminates

I worked for Randall Grahm at Bonny Doon Vineyard for a few years, nominally directing the wine club and e-commerce but mostly executing Other Duties As Assigned, including staff training, staff management, media relations, marketing, product design, trade events, and editing reams of copy written by the man himself. This week he’s on Wine Searcher with characteristically rangy reflections on the state of play of the U.S. wine industry. It’s transparently obvious to his former editor (me) that the publication refused to footnote his text, à la David Foster Wallace, instead executing them as long parentheticals in the running copy. No matter. Among his best observations is his theory that visual culture has muted the impact of wine communications and that text remains the more imaginatively evocative medium. “Language has the agility to at least hint at the give and take that occurs in the tasting experience, attempting to convey something that is intensely subjective to an intelligence beyond one’s own,” he writes. “Watching a video, an Instagram moment of someone tasting something, somewhere (that you presently are not!) creates a vast chasm between two subjectivities and thus leads inevitably to alienation.” Lots more at the link.

Who snebbed my cheese?

British cheese monger and author Ned Palmer cautions us to avoid becoming a “snebber”—that person who nips the tasty nose from a wedge of cheese, leaving others to fumble with awkward offcuts. On , he shares the correct way to cut various types of cheese so that each piece winds up with bit of paste and a bit of rind and no one’s left holding the hard moldy bits. “[C]utting cheese properly ensures that everyone’s piece is of equal and optimal quality, and we want to be nice and fair, don’t we.” Yes, we do.

Snack/bar

Speaking of cheese, ’s answer to her spring doldrums has been to lean into apéro, “the hour-plus during which we force our guests to talk with us over martinis, wine, and snacks before dinner.” She revisits a few favorite spreads to demonstrate styles and modes, which range from spartan (Brillat-Savarin, baguette) to rococo (tea sandwiches, shrimp cocktail, baked brie, dressy bites), paired sometimes with martinis, sometimes with wine, often with negronis, made once, but never again, with mezcal. The approach is agreeably low-stress, limitlessly diverse, convivial, “and no one is worried about dinner, since we’re all going out together, or maybe going our separate ways. The night is a journey.” Chez Maker, the journey often starts and ends with snacks. Same reasons. Same pleasure.

Organized labor

“Spring cleaning, for most people, means squeegeeing windows, packing up the winter coats, and, just maybe, washing that rug you bought because it’s washable but have literally never washed. For me, it starts in the pantry,” writes chef and recipe developer . In Your Pantry Is a Cry for Help, she shares advice and step-by-step instructions for a spring kitchen re-set, from cleaning and sorting to storage and organizing the spice rack. The goal is not only a tidy pantry but one from which you want to cook, a place “where great meals are hiding.”

Forbes adds voice to chorus

The last 18 months have seen an inflorescence of food media startups, including Best Food Blog, the Gourmet reboot, Caper Media, and, just last week, Ravenous. All of these projects evince a bootstrappy, leftist, alt-media vibe, and more power to them. This week business juggernaut Forbes waded into the wine media space with the announcement of Forbes Wine, an editorial-cum-commerce play with a more expressly capitalistic sensibility. Clive Pursehouse, recently of Decanter, will serve as executive editor, and sommelier will curate the project’s wine club. The effort aims to reach a broad spectrum of the wine-curious, from collectors to tire-kickers, and the team plans to spin content across multiple channels, “meeting our audience on the platforms that they’re already consuming content,” said Emily Jackson, senior vice president of consumer growth. Editors plan to recruit a mix of experienced stringers and new voices, and to introduce formal reviews and 100-point scoring. What’s old is new again.

See you next week.

Cheese boards I have known ©2026 Meg Maker

Domaine des Sanzay Beauregard Saumur Champigny 2018

13.5% ABV | $25; imported by Ansonia Wines
Seventh-generation winegrower Antoine Sanzay transformed his family’s company in 1999 when he stopped selling fruit to the cooperative and started bottling wine. Today the 11-hectare estate is certified organic, and winemaking is old-school, with ambient fermentations and aging in a mix of wooden foudres and barriques. This wine shows the true character of Loire Cabernet Franc: fragrant of green herbs and candied cherries, bright with juicy acidity but animated by rustic tannins. Its senses of sweet and tart and herbal and bitter conspire to create dark red refreshment. It’s not highly polished, not overconfident, just a drinkable, food-loving reminder of spring days in the Loire.

Benoît Cantin La Grande Côte Irancy 2022

13% ABV | $35; imported by Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant
Irancy is a red-only appellation south-west of Chablis, near Auxerre, with soils that are likewise Kimmeridgian limestone. Pinot noir is the anchor grape, but the wines may contain up to 10 percent César, an ancient hyper-local variety first mentioned in literature in 1783 but farmed there for much longer.

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It’s not you, it’s me

When no Boston chef, restaurant, or culinary professional was named Finalist in this year’s James Beard Awards, the Boston food commentariat erupted in a fit of pique. Boston-area food writer unpacks the reasons her region’s talent often goes unsung. For starters, the Awards’ focus has shifted, so winning projects tend to be, “small, idiosyncratic, and built around a chef/owner’s interests, not a market analysis,” she writes. Given the metro region’s high costs, “Boston makes that restaurant almost impossible to keep alive long enough to build a reputation.” But it’s not merely a matter of economics. “There is also something harder to quantify but impossible to ignore, which is the question of (I’m really sorry to say it)… taste.” In Boston, the classics are rewarded while innovations falter. She partly blames a food media that celebrates sameness and safety. “What’s missing is sharp, honest, independent criticism. Not meanness, but standards.” Her piece is a good example.

Paydirt

It’s not a secret that American farms are failing. According to the USDA, in 2022 fully 57% of farms ended their fiscal year in the red. But that statistic is too coarse to tell the full story, says farmer, illustrator, and former investment analyst . It lumps the Vermonter’s pumpkin patch with the Nebraskan’s six-thousand acres of corn. Gold follows the money to show how taxpayer subsidies have effectively created a new financial instrument, “a long-duration, low-correlation, inflation-hedged asset class for institutional investors whose connection to the ground is a spreadsheet.” One perverse outcome is that Bill Gates is currently America’s largest individual private farmland owner; “When asked why, he’s said it’s a diversified long-term investment,” writes Gold, adding, “He’s not wrong.” The article is a long, clear-eyed, eye-opening read even for this lifelong rural dweller. Bonus touching graphic comic at the top about the death of a Vermont farm.

Right on the money

Speaking of economics, digs into financial and demographic data to pinpoint the reasons younger American’s aren’t choosing wine. He concludes that the issues are structural and macro-economic and not easily fixed by better storytelling. “[T]he wine industry’s ‘young consumer problem’ is not primarily a marketing problem. It’s a purchasing power problem,” he writes. Student debt, housing costs, stagflation, and myriad systemic factors conspire to limit Gen Z’s discretionary spending power. “We say young people prefer RTDs and spirits. A $3 seltzer requires less financial commitment than a $20 bottle of wine. We say they’re health-conscious and sober-curious. But ‘I’m not drinking tonight’ is easier to say than ‘I can’t afford to drink tonight.’” Yingst thinks the solutions fall outside the industry’s control. “The industry keeps asking how to change the consumer’s mind. The better question is what would have to change about the consumer’s economic position before wine becomes a realistic option.”

“Best” “Sellers”

Chef and recipe developer released a new cookbook that swiftly hit No. 1 in the Cooking category of the USA Today Best-seller Booklist. Even so, it did not appear on New York Times Best Sellers, a list that’s arguably more persuasive to readers and markets. Ham’s wife, , also a chef and cookbook author, took to her Substack to, yes, vent, but also to explain the mechanics and rationale behind the Times’s list, which relies on an unseen cadre of editors who handpick books according to undisclosed criteria. Making the list “is opaque and mysterious,” she writes, adding that the roster is “not a record of what sold. It’s a record of what they decided should be seen as having sold. Not technically a lie. Just a system that benefits from no one knowing how it works.” In a sanguine flourish, Sohla finishes her post with her own list of favorite new cookbooks.

Succession plan

Paul Jaboulet-Aîné’s Domaine de la Chapelle has appointed Chiara de Iulis Pepe as head of viticulture and winemaking. Pepe will also continue to lead production at her family’s estate, Emidio Pepe, in Abruzzo. In Wine Spectator, Kristen Bieler calls the appointment of the thirty-two-year-old winemaker bold and unexpected. For herself, Pepe is circumspect. “I’m arriving with a learning attitude and asking lots of questions,” she said. “Aside from a harvest in Patagonia and one in Burgundy, I’ve spent my whole life in Abruzzo.” Her first focus is to improve vineyard health and introduce ambient fermentations. Northern Rhône vignerons have welcomed the news with warm sangfroid. Michel Chapoutier thinks her “Italian sensibility” will be a plus, because “Italy is among the countries that understands how to let the land speak” (he also cited the Iberian peninsula and, of course, France). Jean-Louis Chave confessed, “We were not expecting this… The Italian touch in Hermitage?” Still: “I wish Chiara all the best and I really hope she will succeed, even if it won’t be easy.” Nothing worth doing ever is.

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

The post-war economy and industrialization brought innovations. Winemakers began tinkering in the field and cellar, applying new techniques to create wines of ripeness, extraction, and polish. Producers like Rolland were no longer protectors of tradition, they were makers of taste.1

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Design for success

salutes leading women in wine while observing that the industry isn’t reaching those on the receiving end—the female consumers who buy the stuff. It’s essentially a problem from design thinking; wine industry product management has historically been led by men who have focused on the proclivities of male consumers. That might have worked historically, but it’s not working under newer demographic and psychographic realities. “The women who never became fine wine customers were not born indifferent to it. They were never given a compelling reason to care,” he writes. “The premium tier isn’t female-proof. It’s simply that until recently it’s been mostly female-neglected.” Vankoski concludes by admitting that as a male industry veteran he was nervous about sharing these insights, but “I would be doing both myself and this industry a disservice by staying quiet.”

Getting spicy

Spice importer Burlap & Barrel has sued the Trump Administration over new sweeping global tariffs. The company direct-imports from spice farmers in over twenty countries, and since its founding, ten years ago, $2 million has gone to these small and family businesses. The products are highly regional with few or no substitutions: onion from Vietnam, dried tomato from Turkey, cacao from Tanzania, herbes de Provence from, you know, Provence. The suit has been filed by Liberty Justice Center, which writes, “For small businesses like Burlap & Barrel… the stakes are immediate and practical: unlawful tariffs can disrupt supply chains, force price increases for American consumers, and threaten jobs and investment.” In their own statement, Burlap & Barrel noted, “When these tariffs were first announced last April, we made two promises: we would not raise our prices, and we would not ask our partner farmers to absorb the costs. A year later, we’re proud to say we’ve kept those promises. This lawsuit is about protecting our ability to continue doing that.” Please consider supporting them by spreading news about the suit and by purchasing their excellent wares.

Growth of a Gourmet

As a young man, , former editor of Epicurious, now with King Arthur Flour, fell in love with Gourmet magazine with an ardor bordering on obsession. One story in particular fingered his psyche so stubbornly it set him on the path to become a food writer. When at last he landed his first byline in Gourmet, his boyfriend had the print piece framed (he’s always been too embarrassed to hang it). In 2009, when the magazine shuttered, “I felt I’d lost not just an outlet but the source of all my ambitions,” he writes, in his new essay, Gourmet is a Sickness. The magazine has recently been relaunched with an altogether different editorial mindset, and Tamarkin contemplates what the original might have become had it slid into a digital publishing age rife with listicles and slideshows and SEO gimmickry. “It’s a luxury that we never had to see Gourmet navigate the last 17 years of the internet. And yet we can’t help wondering what it would look like now if it were still alive.”

To taste is human

In the New York Times, culture journalist Joseph Bernstein asks, Is Taste the One Thing AI Can’t Replicate? The piece is less about the software mechanics of programming taste into an AI machine and more about the social mechanics of cultivating taste in the programmers themselves. Not, Can taste be taught to a bot? but, Can taste be taught to a human? I argue it cannot. Taste is not a skill, it’s a tactic. Its input is lived experience and its output is a rainbow of personal predilections: thirst and desire, aversion and displeasure. Taste is contingent and conditional, aesthetically elastic, a continuous dialogue between our ideas about excellence and our need for something better (which makes it inherently optimistic). Taste is a muscle that strengthens as we mature, which makes it hard to teach but easy to learn. For a human. For now.

“You are being given a free recipe”

In , Kristen Hartke reminds us that food writing is never only about food: it’s about memory, family, trauma, politics, sadness, joy, and more. Even recipes—or maybe especially recipes—are about more than food now that so many are created by self-publishers. “When food blogging began its dizzying rise in the 1990s, it became populated with a lot of people who loved food and cooking but, to be honest, didn’t have the first clue how to write and desperately needed editors,” she says. “This led to a genre of writing that I like to call The Ramble, and it’s had an impact on all food writers, no matter how accomplished they are.” So next time you google a recipe and run into a wall of text at the top, be generous. “There is always some jerk in the comments… who has to complain about having to read about my food memory before they got to my recipe. Seriously? Have these people never heard of scrolling?”

Marginalia: all nature in motion

In the Northern Hemisphere, the northward bird migration has begun. Bird movements can be tracked—this feels nearly miraculous—by the same radar system used to monitor the weather. BirdCast, a project of Cornell Lab and other researchers, publishes a live migration map during both spring and fall movements. The main heatmap shows nightly traffic across the lower forty-eight states, from sundown to sunup, when birds are on the wing. The Mississippi and Eastern Flyways are especially hot right now. They also offer a dashboard that you can configure for your specific location. On March 29th, 367,800 birds flew over Grafton County, where I live. The current total count this season—again, for my county alone—is nearing 1 million, and we’re just getting started. Because they fly at night, birds can get disoriented by bright lights. We can support them by keeping our properties dark during these critical periods—as we say, Lights out for the birds!

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Today’s wines are coincidentally all Californian. We start with two new releases from Mayacamas, a Chardonnay and a Merlot. Next are a Pinot noir rosé and a Chardonnay from Alma de Cattleya, the second label of winemaker Bibiana González Rave. To finish we have four crisp whites from Cadre Wines in the Saint Luis Obispo Coast.

Mayacamas

Mayacamas sprawls across 475 acres of Mt. Veeder, the appellation on the western blade of Napa Valley. The estate’s been farmed since 1889, when John Henry Fisher purchased land and built the original stone winery that still stands today. Jack and Mary Taylor bought the property in 1941, renaming it Mayacamas and introducing improvements to the winemaking. They also planted the site’s first Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon vines.

In 1968 Bob Travers began his long tenure at Mayacamas, making wine until 2013, when apparel entrepreneur Jay Schottenstein bought the estate. Schottenstein launched a vineyard refresh overseen by veteran viticulturist Phil Coturri. He also hired twenty-six-year-old winemaker Braiden Albrecht, plus a consulting winemaker and consulting viticulturist.

The literal fruits of this reboot were just coming ripe in 2023 and 2024 when the two wines below were produced. Farming of the estate’s 50 acres of vines follows organic and biodynamic practices. The winemaking is classical, relying on neutral wooden vessels ranging from large foudre to barrique.

Mayacamas Chardonnay Mt. Veeder Napa Valley 2024

13.5% ABV | $65
Made from Chardonnay grown in various estate plots, hand-harvested and pressed whole cluster block by block. It was fermented and aged in wood, and malolactic was suppressed. It’s a quiet wine at first, unfurling slowly in a sense of citrus and spring flowers. The texture is utterly bewitching, satiny and dimensional, and the acid floats. Restrained and elegant, serious but not without levity. Lovely.

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Sietsema has lunch so you don’t have to

Food critic Tom Sietsema reviews the pop-up by famous/now-infamous chef René Redzepi in My Lunch at the Disgraced Noma L.A. Months ago, Sietsema bought two tickets at $1,500 apiece; “the most I’ve ever spent on a meal,” he says. While he was en route to L.A. for the lunch, Julia Moskin broke the story of Redzepi’s alleged abuse of staff at his Copenhagen flagship. “I knew I’d take heat for keeping my Friday lunch date,” writes Sietsema. But journalistic curiosity got the better of him (plus, most tickets were nonrefundable). “While I abhor the chef’s past behavior… now that he has distanced himself from the project, why punish his entire team?” Sietsema found a lot to love in the seventeen ultra-locavore courses, paired with a half-dozen or so California natural wines, which unfurled over the course of three hours. Was it worth it? He leans toward Yes, for a complex of reasons.

Vitis non interrupta

A new study of ancient French grape DNA has shown that for at least 4000 years, humans have been cultivating grapes via clonal selection to preserve the qualities they value. “Vegetative propagation, evidenced by genetically identical clones across sites and centuries, emerged by the mid-Iron Age and became a pillar of viticultural practice,” the authors write. “Remarkably, one Medieval sample from Valenciennes is genetically identical to modern ‘Pinot Noir,’ demonstrating clonal continuity over nearly 600 years.” In The New York Times, science journalist Rebecca Dzombak explores the implications, noting that such genetic continuity separates grapes from other food crops, like corn, which have been far more heavily manipulated. But unlike corn, which is an annual grass, the woody perennial vine is readily propagated by cuttings, which are also easily transported, preserving the recipe for vinous success.

Wine and Desire

Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit (c. 1593), considered the first painting in which the artist found his voice, is currently on loan to the The Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. Regrettably I have not seen it, but you can, through April 19. The model was sixteen-year-old Sicilian painter Mario Minniti, who worked alongside Caravaggio and modeled for many of his other works, including The Calling of Saint Matthew, and Bacchus. (So, vaguely wine-adjacent.) The painting is sensual, lavish, but the fruit is spotted, overripe, the leaves curled. These vanitas motifs contrast with the youth’s petulant come-hither gaze, as if to say, “I am alive, you are alive, we are both mortal, let’s eat the fruit.” I thought about this painting as I read ’s recent essay Wine and Desire and Death, which considers these same themes as explored by the Dutch painters of domestic still life, with their tables strewn with fruit and meat, fish and nut, bread and wine. The displays are lavish, yet the message is simple: Eat up, drink up. “[W]ine, as gratifying as it can be in its myriad dimensions, is as ephemeral as any human endeavor,” Koeppel writes. “We value most what vanishes before our grasp.”

Two men and a market

The news that sent me on my longest reading jag was the death last Friday of wine consultant and “flying winemaker” Michel Rolland, at age 78. Rolland was born to a wine growing family in Pomerol, studied with Émile Peynaud, at the University of Bordeaux, and, with his wife, the enologist Dany Bleynie, founded a wine consultancy that counted among clients not only top Bordeaux estates but also now-famous wineries in the U.S., Argentina, Chile, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere.

Jane Anson was among the first to publish an obituary of Rolland; also shared a long profile. There have been more, and every one I’ve read also mentions American critic Robert M. Parker Jr. The two men shared a sensibility, a taste for wine that prioritized shiny technicolor flavors over the sepia-toned sensibilities of the past. Their work was always in dialogue, the critic rewarding the maker’s style, the maker advising his clients on how to get top scores. The result has been labeled “Parkerization,” but Rolland was the one with his hands on the dials. The feedback loop bent the world wine market in ways that still reverberate.

The men’s influence on Bordeaux, in particular, cannot be overstated. In his essay Michel Rolland and the Fall of Bordeaux, sketches how the region’s fortunes have swelled and ebbed, highlighting the roles each man played in the drama. In the late seventies Bordeaux had been suffering from bad vintages and global economic contractions. This is precisely when Parker launched The Wine Advocate and just as Rolland was gaining traction with his consultancy. “Bordeaux’s salvation came in the shape of climate change and more reliable ripening; better winemaking; and a Baltimore lawyer and amateur wine writer, Robert Parker,” writes Neather, noting that Rolland’s “style was also, fortuitously, precisely Parker’s taste in reds.” Today, Bordeaux is once again in extremis, and Neather doesn’t view the newly introduced, light red claret as a quick fix. “In the post-Rolland era, it will take a lot more than that to rescue the fortunes of France’s greatest red wine region.”

Following threads of these men’s biographies, I unearthed a lengthy portrait of Parker in The Atlantic by the excellent narrative journalist William Langewiesche. It runs to nearly eighteen-thousand words, but I wish I’d read it sooner. Published just over twenty-five years ago, in December 2000, the piece introduces us to a Parker at peak influence, right before he started hiring additional critics for The Wine Advocate. It was a period of wine oversupply in Bordeaux (not unlike today), and producers needed his help even while privately whingeing about the influence and tastes of this powerful critique américain. “When Parker criticizes their wines, they see their prices tumble. When he compliments their wines, they can’t resist using this to their advantage and proclaiming their scores,” writes Langewiesche. There’s much more in the piece to flesh out the man who retired from writing in 2019 yet whose influence lingers. Required reading for anyone who’s ever complained about Parker, or praised him, or both.

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

St. Lawrence, the man, was born in Valencia, Spain, sometime around 225 CE. He moved to Rome to work with Pope Sixtus II, became a deacon, and earned a reputation as a champion of the poor. On August 10, 258, Roman Emperor Valerian sentenced him to die by being lashed to a bed of hot coals. So great was his devotion to god, the legend goes, that he resisted the flames, demanding that his tormentors flip him like a steak.

St. Laurent, the grape, is thought to have originated in what is now eastern Austria sometime after 1240 CE. Cistercian monks who’d settled there from Burgundy brought along their Pinot vines, both noir and gris. Vines are notoriously promiscuous, so even though they were better suited to the cold, calcareous terroir of their homeland than the warmer, drier, Danube plain, they evolved, coaxed and crossed into new, adapted forms.

One, more tolerant of heat, inherited the dark color, flimsy skin, and proclivity to rot of its swarthy French progenitor. The fruit made an earthy red wine with flavors of cherries wreathed in greenery. Its clusters entered veraison around August 10, the Christian feast day of Saint Lawrence (who was also famously heat tolerant). The new variety was christened “Sankt Laurent.”

These stories, like all old stories and nearly every good one, mingle truth and fiction. Some parts are filigree, some parts fact. But even those seemingly verifiable elements of St. Laurent’s story have, until recently, been subject to debate.

Take St. Laurent’s parentage. Does Pinot really play a part? I turned first to Wine Grapes, the authoritative 1,200-page reference tome by Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding, and José Vouillamoz, published in 2012, that can double as a flower press. The entry for Sankt Laurent, on page 946, supports the narrative that the vine first arose in Austria before migrating to Germany and a handful of Eastern European countries. Under Origins and Parentage, it cites the work of Austrian grape geneticist Dr. Ferdinand Regner which affirmed the Pinot lineage. But the entry goes on to question this, citing Dr. Vouillamoz and suggesting that perhaps Dr. Regner had confused his sample with another grape, the far more obscure, and genetically unrelated, Pinot Saint-Laurent.

I kept digging.

Wines of Austria’s website entry for Sankt Laurent declares it not only a seedling of Pinot noir but also a synonym for Pinot Saint-Laurent. Wines of Germany tacks opposite, acknowledging that while it was once considered part of the sprawling Pinot family, it’s now thought to be distinct. On Jancisrobinson.com—Robinson is, you recall, first author of Wine Grapes—the entry says it’s possibly a cross between Pinot noir and Savagnin.

I asked two well-regarded Austrian winemakers. Both are Team Pinot. Walter Glatzer, who makes wine under his own label in Carnuntum, Austria, told me, “St. Laurent, we think, is a mutation from the Pinot noir grape. The mother grape is Pinot noir, and the father grape is unknown.”

Josef Umathum of Burgenland echoed this idea. “St. Laurent is a daughter of Pinot noir,” he said. “The mother is Pinot noir, and the father got lost—as in normal life it may happen!” When I floated to Umathum that the Pinot parentage had been called into question, he referred me to his compatriot—none other than Dr. Ferdinand Regner.

Dr. Regner heads the viticulture institute and grapevine breeding department at Klosterneuburg, near Vienna, and was one of the first to conduct genetic research on St. Laurent. By using contemporary techniques of gene research, scientists have compared genetic markers of Pinot noir and St. Laurent. According to Dr. Regner, St. Laurent “shows at all investigated loci one allele in common with Pinot noir,” he wrote, by email. Put more simply: “That means it has to be a parent or an offspring from Pinot noir.”

And given that scientists know quite a bit about Pinot’s ancestry—its history, origins, and other genetics—it’s evident that St. Laurent couldn’t be Pinot’s parent, it could only be Pinot’s offspring. Dr. Regner concedes that we don’t, however, know the identity of St. Laurent’s other parent.

And as for Dr. Vouillamoz’s skepticism? “I have observed that not all collections have true-to-type St. Laurent available,” Dr. Regner said. Incorrect source material would easily throw off analysis. He concluded decisively: “St. Laurent belongs to the Pinot family.”

It does make sense. While chasing the grape’s ancestry on the page, I was simultaneously chasing flavors in the glass, tasting samples mostly from Austria but also from Germany’s Pfalz, where the grape plays a minor but growing role. St. Laurent, the wine, seems to have inherited Pinot’s bone structure, but its flesh and countenance are unique. The perfume mingles black cherries and black bramble fruits with a kind of leafiness, both fresh and dried herbs plus a woodsy sous bois. Its core is likewise cherry-steeped and ablaze with acidity. Texturally substantial with tannins that play the long game, it finishes with a pleasing back-palate bite. The overall effect is a substantial but refreshing red wine whose savor ties it readily to cuisine.

In short, it’s a little bit like Pinot noir, and a little bit not like Pinot noir.

“The color is deeper than Pinot noir, a dark red, and the smell always reminds a little of blackberries,” Umathum said. “Also, the fruit is deeper and blacker than Pinot noir. On the palate, we find the same fruits: blackberries and cherries, and in the finish we have a freshness, always.” He agrees about the forest notes: “It sometimes reminds me of when you go to the woods in autumn, when the leaves are lying down on the earth and the smell is a little bit dark.”

The wine’s acidity and savoriness make it an exceptionally food friendly choice. “I recommend heavy meat—deer or lamb,” said Umathum. “Everything with mushrooms, and maybe cheese, would work very well.”

Like its parent, Pinot noir, St. Laurent is somewhat finicky to grow, partly because of its thin skin. “If you have rain during the harvest, or before harvest, you can get botrytis,” Glatzer said. Rot is an especially big threat to the vineyards like his that flank Lake Neusiedl. Working biodynamically, Glatzer must apply sulfur every five days during flowering, and make multiple passes throughout the season to guard against oidium and botrytis. It’s labor intensive. “The main thing is you have to use only healthy grapes when making St. Laurent,” Glatzer said. “If you have botrytis… there is no aging potential. The color is brown, and it’s not really clear, and also the aromatics are dead. St. Laurent has zero tolerance of botrytis.”

Although equally sensitive to moisture, St. Laurent shrugs off warm spells better than Pinot noir. Whereas heat spikes at harvest cause Pinot’s sugars to go through the roof, St. Laurent keeps its cool, attaining physiological ripeness without building abundant sugar, and retaining its acidity, too. Pinots from this region often finish at 14% alcohol, but St. Laurent routinely clocks in at a more moderate 12.5% to 13.5%.

As is true everywhere, our climate emergency has growers worried. A vine’s growth timetable is more or less baked into its genetics, and St. Laurent’s runs 100 days between flowering and harvest. That entire cycle has been shifting earlier in recent decades. Flowering starts sooner, and the vines are susceptible to frosts that can cause millerandage, which limits yields. Hotter summers overall speed the ripening process, shaving a bit of time off that predicted 100 days. Harvest is sooner, too.

“Compared to the 1980s, when we usually had the main harvest in the first or second week of October, now we pick three, four weeks earlier, sometimes even five weeks,” Umathum said. In response, he’s used selection massale to identify six types of St. Laurent capable of meeting the demands of a hotter climate.

All of which means St. Laurent no longer enters veraison on August 10, the date for which it’s named, but rather three weeks sooner. Scanning the Christian calendar, I find there is a second St. Lawrence, this one “of Brindisi,” a 16^th century priest and scholar who, among other accomplishments, helped establish monasteries in what is now Austria and Germany.

His holy day? July 21. So the name “Sankt Laurent” can stick—at least for now.

©2026 Meg Maker. A version of this article first appeared in TRINK magazine with the title Once and Future St. Laurent.

Read Terry Theise’s excellent tasting report on the recent Glatzer releases in The World of Fine Wine.

Champagne problems

A few weeks ago, stumbled into a tasting of Pol-Roger, an experience that sent him careening backward through history. For producers, champagne is less a metaphor for life than the actual stuff it’s made of, especially for houses that endured the trials of two World Wars and subsequent shifts in fate and fashion. In an artful braided narrative, Vankoski interleaves his day’s tasting notes with the history of this house, their relationship with Winston Churchill, and the cuvée that bears that prime minister’s name. “Champagne is neither mere celebratory frivolity,” he writes, “nor the exclusive province of the endlessly discriminating connoisseur. It is both, and everything in between, and perhaps that is why it seizes the imagination and becomes, like some ancient myth, an object of timeless fascination.”

Ideal is just an idea

In the March 6th edition of The Salt, I recommended ’s year-long project to diagram dozens of pastas most emblematic of Italian culture. Now he’s back to share results of the first experiment, pairing regional wines with three traditional filled pastas: ravioli with walnut pesto (Liguria), tortellini in brodo (Emilia-Romagna), and agnolotti del plin (Piemonte). The pairing results surprised everyone present, because the most felicitous wine match wasn’t always technically the most obvious. “Ultimately, our evening proved that while regional tradition may provide the map, only the act of sitting at the table provides the direction,” Petroski writes. “It is a humbling reminder that wine pairing is not a math problem to be solved, but a living dialogue between Mother Nature, the producer’s style, the chef’s hand, and the taster’s palate.”

Effing the ineffable

deftly limns the issues confronting wine experts as they try to put flavor into words. Neather rummages through decades of British and American wine commentary to understand how we arrived at today’s favored approaches, which lean hard on olfactory metaphor, lively personification, and colorful analogy. Some commentators have begun to favor descriptions of weight, length, and structure, and while I tend to agree that texture is the new flavor, I’m not sure it alone drives a novice toward understanding. A mix of strategies is often best, and Neather relates how he tries to blend textural notes with a gloss on flavor and candid impressions of the wine’s character. But he acknowledges that his approach remains a work in process, one that compels him (as the rest of us), to “continue to muddle along.”

The shipping will kill you

It costs Tablas Creek Vineyards $1 million annually to ship $5.5 million worth of wine to club members and online buyers, a figure that eats up 10 percent of the winery’s total revenue. Shipping fees have lately rocketed skyward, fueled by gas surcharges and freighted by add-ons to collect adult signatures on delivery. Plus, wine is heavy. Shipping a case ground to the East Coast costs $75. Second-day air, necessary during some weather periods, costs $165. On the winery’s blog, general manager Jason Haas wrestles with the key question about shipping: Who should pay? The winery? Consumers? A mix? Now that Amazon and their ilk have trained loyal customers to expect free shipping on everything, the answers are complicated, and Haas explores them with transparency and a pragmatist’s eye. The comments section is also alive with good ideas.

An Austrian in Paris

Three years ago, dispirited by the weak showing of Austrian wine in France, winemaker decided to bootstrap a month-long Parisian pop-up to introduce his country’s wines to the City of Light. The first event, held in February 2025, took place during evening hours at a specialty coffee shop in the Marais. It was timed to coincide with Raw Wine and Wine Paris, but unlike those big fairs, did not require patrons to schlep to a soulless expo center in the ’burbs. Pop-up Part Deux just wrapped, featuring more wines, more producers, and bottles for sale as well as tasting. The footprint is nimble, lightweight, and sustainable, a model for other groups seeking to promote wines without the expense of a formal campaign. “[A]s an industry, we have to get out of our own way,” says Sciacca, by making the tasting experience enjoyable and unpretentious. “The pop-up also worked in part because we came to our guests and we didn’t make them come to us.” Sciacca and colleagues ran a similar event in Vienna and have set their sights on Copenhagen. They’ll be back in Paris in 2027. He encourages anyone who wants a pop-up in their European city to get in touch.

Kingdom come

In The New Yorker, reports on her visit to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, “a region so remote and bucolic that you might struggle to find a single bar of cell service.” The N.E.K., as we call it here, comprises three Vermont counties, Caledonia, Essex, and Orleans, and lies about hour north of my own small hamlet. I’ve often traveled there both to recreate and to report on its food and beverage culture. The character of the region is hardscrabble, poor, and its limited job prospects drive away many young people, leaving an aging population to its own devices. But over decades, affordable land has attracted a mix of free spirits and optimists who have launched food and beverage brands and kept agriculture, always a tenuous proposition in this climate, from becoming an anachronism. Goldfield admirably avoids caricature as she visits a sugar bush, cheese maker, general store, potluck, and bar, meeting the cast of characters who keep the scene rolling. “Listening to the group banter and commiserate, you got the sense that the region’s organizing principle is not just artisanal food but also a distinctly, defiantly Vermont way of living.” One that carries on, at least for now.

Marginalia

I like to make poetry by processing well-known poems through Google Translate, running the original through repeated translation excursions until I have a satisfying result. I call the series “Found in Translation.” Here’s one to take us out, using as base text “The Red Wheelbarrow,” by William Carlos Williams:

Red train

big
listen to me

red boots
visible genes

it’s winter again
I went for water

I’m six months old
baby

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

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I have two Italian wines, a Barolo from Vajra and a Dogliani Dolcetto from Pecchinino. Most of the rest are French, including a crackling crémant d’Alsace rosé from Lucien Albrecht, a red Hautes-Côtes de Beaune from Philippe & Arnaud Dubreuil, and a creamy Montagny from Château de la Crée. There are also two wines from the southern Rhône, from Château du Trignon and Arnoux et Fils. Over the last few decades, southern Rhône reds have become more ripe and powerful, and the influence of critics who favor the blockbuster style has been easily felt in the glass and the morning after. So I was pleased to taste two examples that feel both ripe and fresh.

But to start I have a single American wine, an outstanding Cabernet Franc from Napa producer Ashes & Diamonds, made by one of my favorite California winemakers, Steve Matthiasson.

American idyll

Ashes & Diamonds Cabernet Franc No. 3 Napa Valley 2016

13.4% ABV | $80 | Ashes & Diamonds
Varietal Cabernet Franc is unusual in Napa Valley. John Skupny of Lang & Reed has used this red Loire grape for decades (along with its white counterpart, Chenin blanc), and I’ve tasted other examples from Corison, Gallica, and Ehlers. But the grape remains largely unexplored here despite its great potential, likely because it costs just as much to farm as Cabernet Sauvignon but cannot fetch that grape’s high prices. Ashes & Diamonds is a relatively young project near Yountville, and their expert team of consulting winemakers, including Diana Snowden Seysses and Steve Matthiasson, makes a slender roster of wines. For this bottling, Matthiasson used fruit grown in Los Carneros, Oak Knoll, and Yountville, fermenting in steel and aging the wine for twenty months in barrel, partially new. The results are silky, sluicy, fluid, a flexible matrix of acid and tannin carrying ripe and succulent fruits. It is a seamless experience from start to close; in my notes I wrote “beautiful liquidity,” which isn’t as absurd as it sounds once you’ve had it on your tongue. More Napa Cab Franc, please.

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Required reckoning

The week’s top food news was an inedible chew. Julia Moskin of The New York Times broke a story about alleged physical and psychological abuse of staff by chef René Redzepi of the Michelin-starred Noma, in Copenhagen. In the aftermath, Redzepi issued an apology for his past behavior, then resigned from his leadership role, naming no successor. Food media has been crackling with commentary about these incidents and the monstrosities that haunt a dispiriting number of restaurants. Having years ago worked in service, I find these accounts ugly but unsurprising. Two follow-up pieces this week stood out. The first is by Lauren Saria, food editor of the San Francisco Standard, who wonders about the true costs of fine dining, in Maybe We Don’t Need Restaurants Like Noma. The second, written from a diner’s perspective, is ’s gutting essay, I Left Noma Mid-Meal. I Wish I’d Left Sooner.

Esther Mobley heads East

After a decade as wine writer and critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Esther Mobley bids adieu. Mobley had been a 24-year-old assistant editor at Wine Spectator when she landed the gig, prompting wine commentariat’s old guard to erupt in agist, sexist mishegoss. Well, she showed them. “Once the initial jitters wore off,” she writes, “I was able to embrace that I had the best job in the world.” Her journalism brought us stories of a changing industry and emphasized wine’s economic, cultural, social, and aesthetic impact not only on California but on all of America. Wine coverage became so important to the paper that in 2021 it took on a second wine journalist, Jess Lander. Mobley will return to her hometown to become the food editor of another local paper, the Boston Globe.

SLO Wine

visits the cool, maritime region of San Luis Obispo Coast, meeting makers from Scar of the Sea, Outward, Lady of the Sunshine, Phelan Farm, Dunites, and more. SLO Coast earned appellation status only in 2022 and there’s still a wild-west, we’re-all-in-this-together spirit among producers, many of whom buy fruit from the same sources while supporting each other’s fledgling efforts. “What links the winemakers working on the coast, beyond tight friendships and a certain outsider mentality, is a conviction that regenerative organic farming is best for the wine and the planet, and that wines ought to be made with minimal intervention.” Asimov discovers the results are wines that feel racy, savory, saline, and “alive in the glass.”

Plugging hybrids

interviews winegrower-maker Matt Niess, who works exclusively with interspecific hybrids and grapes indigenous to California. That puts him in a class by himself, learning as he goes. “It does take a mindful presence in the vineyard,” he says, because “Every book that has ever been written on wine, every class—the trellising, the farming, the spacing—every little detail… is based on the assumption that you’re working with vinifera. If you change that assumption… everything is different.” He’s discovered that hybrids and natives are far less demanding than finicky European grapes, requiring fewer inputs and potentially lowering overall costs. But like any wine, it still needs a market.

What’s velho is new again

Forty years ago, in an effort to revitalize production, Port producers grubbed up traditional field-blend plots and replaced them with monovarietal plantations of just five grapes: Touriga Nacional, Tinta Roriz, Touriga Francesa, Tinta Barroca, and Tinta Cão. Today, many producers are rediscovering the wisdom of older methods as they strive to address threats caused by climate, culture, and commerce. In The World of Fine Wine, Margaret Rand interviews David Guimaraens of Fladgate Partnership and Charles Symington of Symington Family Estates about their latest experiments. Having visited various properties of both houses, I found this a geeky but essential deep-dive into Port viticulture’s present and uncertain future.

Wine School

authors the excellent Substack Thirst Behavior, an engaging mix of commentary and reportage about wine, service, and the nature and culture of taste. The Section called Wine School is a mini-course for the wine curious which Landa describes as “structured micro-learning for those who want to develop foundational knowledge in wine.” Weekly lessons focus on a region or style, “the same way a professional sommelier course would,” swiftly bringing students up to speed. The content is accurate, transparent, and contemporary, and each dispatch feels not too much, not too little, just right. Paying subscribers have access to the full archive, so school is always in session.

Marginalia: another favorite condiment

Our local CSA farm stand closes for the winter just before Christmas, discounting pantry items they don’t want to store until spring. That’s when I stumbled onto the fermented garlic pickle from Pure Indian Foods, adding two jars to my shopping basket, figuring if I loved it I’d want more. I was right. I’d been buying Patak’s for decades, which is widely available but in comparison mild, sweet, and bland. This one packs a wallop: Garlicky, savory, spicy, pungent. A little goes a long way.

Bookmarking…

went viral on Threads last month for suggesting there are better champagnes than that one with the yellow label. On her Substack, Métier, she offers twenty-one better options in her Champagne Starter List. The roster is short, sweet, and all you need to get started drinking much better fizz.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Two young men named Nathaniel and Johnathan are building us a garden shed. They got started last week in bitter cold. Their first task was to clear the concrete slab foundation, which was poured last fall and has lain encased in snow and ice. They got it swiftly shoveled but the ice proved recalcitrant. One of them drove off in his pickup and soon returned with two gas-fired heaters. They improvised a tent over the slab with a black tarp and two sawhorses, then angled the heaters toward the center and fired them up. I was certain this would end in a call to 9-1-1, but the men carried out their task with the breezy nonchalance of youth. They were right. Within a few hours the slab was clear and drying in the wan March sun.

The next day dawned at zero degrees Fahrenheit and temperatures never rose above five, so the pair worked with the heaters pointed at their workstations, warming themselves and all of Lyme, New Hampshire. And who could blame them. Today, not even a week later, it was sixty-eight degrees and sunny and they both wore t-shirts. By now they’ve framed the four main walls, leaving the roof open to a blue and yellow sky. I checked in with Nathaniel, the more senior member, as they were picking up for the day. “Looks great,” I said. “What’s next?”

“Tomorrow we might get started on the back part.” He meant the additional open section where I’ll store my wheelbarrow and bulky garden paraphernalia. There is rain in the forecast, and I pointed to the roof, or rather the opening where the roof will be. “What about the—” and here I hesitated a millisecond as my brain cast about for the right word. Was it truss, joist, stringer, transom or—“beams?” I asked.

“Yep, rafters after that,” Nathaniel said, without missing a beat. “I already have all the rafter stock on site.” He gestured to the longest stack of lumber near the carport.

“Rafters,” I said, “right.” And so I learned the definitive name of the long piece of wood that supports a roof: rafter. It is not a new word to me, and is in fact so common I must have heard and read it hundreds of times. But knowing the meaning of a word in context is different from conjuring it contemporaneously in conversation with an expert. And not just any expert, the one who will install said rafters.

He was gracious not to make a big deal out of the correction, and probably doesn’t expect the homeowner to know all of his trade’s terms of art. I didn’t feel embarrassed, and anyway there’s no quicker way to learn something new than to hazard a guess and get swiftly—kindly, politely—corrected.

It’s not so different with wine. Like construction, wine is a complicated domain that bristles with specialized terminology. It begins with the essentials of grape and territory: red Burgundy means Pinot noir and white Burgundy means Chardonnay, but also maybe Gamay (in the 14th century) and Aligoté (in a trendy wine bar). Layer on pronunciation; long ago I asked a somm for a wine from Veneto, pronouncing it “ven-EH-toe” instead of “VEN-eh-toe.” I still burn with shame.

Then add terms like varietal and variety, unfiltered and unoaked, native, typical, balanced, Old World, New World, medium-plus. Finally, top it all with the neologisms that gush from fertile descriptivist minds: natty, glou-glou, minerality, crunchy, zero-zero, raw.

Wine’s vocabulary can serve as a scaffolding that supports understanding and insight. Fluency is freeing, stimulating deeper conversation among peers. Professionals like to talk about wine, and in fact need to talk about wine in order to make progress.

But language can also seem exclusionary, and fluency can feel like a badge. The words are shibboleths that grant access to the temple. Those who are only partially fluent have it hardest because they know what they don’t yet know. I feel this way whenever I travel in Italy and France, where my limited command of these languages risks nerve-wracking self embarrassment. The partially wine-fluent know they cannot yet summon the mot juste for every context, and their anxiety is especially electric in highly charged social contexts: a date, a business dinner, a potent family gathering.

So for those who seek to earn wine fluency: Go easy on yourself. It takes a while to become au fait with any domain, but especially one as ancient and professionalized as wine. Take comfort knowing that this strange discourse of wine is evocative and evolving. It loves new ideas and neologisms, and everyone will want to hear yours.

For those who have already earned this fluency: Go easy on others. Remember that time before wine felt effortless for you. Be generous and gentle. Be like my builder Nathaniel. Smile warmly and say, “Yep, rafters.” Then go right back to work.

Build it up ©2026 Meg Maker

My goal is to send The Salt weekly, and I’m keeping it free for now. Because it’s a Section, you can subscribe to it separately from the rest of my content (by default I opted everyone in). I’m mostly planning to feel my way forward and see what connects, so, as always, I welcome your feedback. Happy reading.

Burgundy, top of mind

takes us on an enchanting twenty-four-hour side trip, post Wine Paris, to visit his friend Damien Gachot, fifth-generation winemaker of Domaine Gachot-Monot, in the Côte de Nuits. “In Paris I had encountered dozens of friends and colleagues from across the world. But not Damien. Burgundians generally don’t bother with the big wine shows. They never seem to have anything to sell.” Vankoski’s evocative writing sweeps from the Romans to the present day and offers a glimpse into the daily life of one family coaxing elixirs from Burgundy’s famous dirt.

Man buys bottle of wine, opens to share with guests. It’s only news when you learn the bottle in question was 1899 Romanée-Conti. Soo Hoo Khoon Peng, a businessman from Singapore, bought it last year to celebrate his 50th birthday—but not as a collector’s item: to taste. “Too many great bottles are never opened,” Soo Hoo said, adding that to pour it for others “isn’t about status, it’s about learning and human connection.” Guests at the tasting included Aubert de Villaine, co-director of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and William Kelley, editor-in-chief of The Wine Advocate and himself a producer of Burgundy wine. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the only great wine on the table.

A natural progression

says natural wine is growing up—and there is palpable relief as the category moves out of its adolescence. “Natural wine made the wine world less stiff,” he writes; an altogether good thing. But, “It also, inevitably, became its own kind of snobbery,” squeezing classical forms out of the discourse. “This is not unique to wine. This is what happens to everything with an identity attached to it.” Landa thinks the term itself, “natural wine,” is past its sell-by date and invites us to consider other terms that welcome both revolutionaries and classicists to the party.

The advice columnists

Come for ’s essay about rescuing an American couple in a Paris wine bar, stay for her tips about how to read a wine list. “[T]here are certain things, I’m finding, that are crucial for helping me to navigate wine—its vocabulary, its immensity—with increased ease. Life rafts, if you will.” She provides not too much, not too little, just enough information for someone new to wine who aspires to order with confidence.

As entered midlife, wine started to wreck havoc on her sleep, mood, and sense of wellbeing. “[M]any women in their forties who’ve kept up a wine habit feel something change… The question creeps in: Why can’t I handle it like I used to? The answer isn’t about weakness, it’s biology and it has a name: Perimenopause.” Nicklin sought advice from experts and reports here on strategies that seem to work best. Hers is a refreshingly non-hysterical take that does not advocate absolute abstinence but instead seeks a middle ground in which wine can remain comfortably part of one’s life.

Pain and Pasta

The annual Grand Prix de la Baguette de Tradition Française de la Ville de Paris took place in Paris last week. For the competition, bakers from around the city submit two baguettes for judging. The winning baker is handed a prize of €4,000 plus a contract to supply baguettes to the Élysée, the president’s residence, for a year. Sithamparappillai Jegatheepan, of Fournil Didot, in the 14th Arrondissement, was the winning baker on his first try. In her summary, of Paris by Mouth shares behind-the-scenes photos from her time as judge in 2013. Note: They don’t just taste, they swallow.

Winemaker and Italophile has embarked on a year-long project to diagram dozens of pastas most emblematic of Italian culture. In his introduction to the series, he notes his aim is to understand “how these pastas actually behave on the plate: the time, the place, the texture, the sauce and wine affinity, and more,” adding, “this isn’t about mastery. It’s about paying attention.” His first dispatch considers the Winter filled pastas (agnolotti, cappelletti, ravioli, and tortellini), whetting the appetite for comfort food even while most of North America tilts toward spring. (Bonus charming drawings by .)

The form isn’t even that old

In The New Yorker, Hannah Goldfield wonders Why We Can’t Stop Reading—And Writing—Food Diaries. Three decades ago, Ruth Reichl stymied booksellers with Tender at the Bone, a memoir with recipes. Was it an autobiography? A cookbook? Something else? Yes. Today, the genre is fully mature and has spawned myriad alternative narrative forms, short to long, visual, cinematic, and a mix. “If the food diary pushes its practitioners toward solipsism, or toward showing off, its popularity also evinces something encouraging: a curiosity about how other people live, the texture of their days.” Goldfield’s piece is essential reading for people (hello!) who write about food and wine and wonder if, and why, anyone cares.

Marginalia: a favorite condiment

Sun-Dried Tomato Powder is my new superpower. I like the one from Burlap & Barrel, made from tomatoes grown on Turkey’s Aegean coastline. Glutamate in powdered form but make it natural. Sprinkle it on sandwiches (mash it into the mayo), spike fish, dust pasta, dry-rub meat. It’s good on everything, maybe even breakfast cereal.

Two poems (circling back to Burgundy)

Judy O’Kane is a wine writer, educator, academic, lawyer, poet; I’ve probably missed a few. She regularly contributes to The World of Fine Wine, most recently in Two Poems by Judy O’Kane: The Table, and La Route des Grands Crus, which concludes:

You open an app: each parcel of land
appears on-screen in pale pink
and purple: the climats and lieux-dits

of the Côte de Nuits subdivide
and kaleidoscope; the phone waves
like a magic wand, a divining rod.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

April 2017. I was midway through a weeklong French wine media trip hosted by a U.S. wine importer. The tour started in Cognac and swept clockwise around l’hexagone français to Paris, Champagne, Burgundy, Beaujolais, the Southern Rhône, and Provence. On Day Four our group of five journalists and two company reps had sat for a tasting and lunch at Domaine Leflaive, in Puligny-Montrachet. Then we’d piled back into the van for our next appointment.

I was in the front seat thanks to a weak stomach further weakened by travel. At the wheel was our host, Alban de Brosses, the company’s French portfolio specialist. He is a compact man, muscular, impeccable in that casual French way. He speaks flawless, lightly accented English.

“Okay, everyone,” he announced. “A few things to know. First, don’t call it DRC. They don’t like that. Use the full name or just say Le Domaine.”

Good to know. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti was a client of theirs, but they weren’t on our agenda. I figured de Brosses was merely advocating for his client’s, and his culture’s, patrimony.

“Bertrand de Villaine is the co-director with, of course, his uncle Aubert,” he added.

Duly noted.

“And you can spit, just be discreet.”

“Wait—what?”

He shrugged. “We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

I looked back at my bemused colleagues. “When did you guys know?”

“Yesterday!” they said, in chorus. “Where were you?”

Probably in les toilettes. De Brosses must have told the group during a rest stop. I pulled out my printed copy of the itinerary and noticed this small note at the bottom of the page, after the day’s lunch:

Depart for ‘surprise’ Winery in Burgundy
more details to be provided accordingly

Perhaps I’d read this when I’d first received the trip details. Perhaps it had been added later. I felt like a kid whose parents had just told her, Pack for Disney World, we’re leaving tonight. At least there was no time to get nervous. There was also no time for research. I’d never tasted their wines, which are some of the most respected, and most expensive, in all of Burgundy. In all the world.

The van disgorged us onto a corner of Place de l’Eglise, in Vosne-Romanée, No. 1 Rue du Temps Perdu. The domaine lay across a courtyard behind iron gates. A child’s orange ball languished near the front door. An older man shuffled out carrying a 3-pack of wine. The gates swung open and our boots crunched cobble as de Brosses ushered us forward. A bronze angel guarded the square. Beyond lay the vineyards of Vosne-Romanée, fenced by a low wall with seven stone steps leading up to famous dirt.

Bertrand de Villaine emerged carrying a wine glass and thief. A stocky man, ruddy, friendly, he wore a brown zip fleece and black jeans. We shook hands all around. De Brosses kept us in formation as de Villaine led us into the chai, waving at the vinification area, a small room crowded with wooden vats. It’s not easy to produce wine in diminutive Vosne-Romanée, or really anywhere in Burgundy’s tiny communes and villages. “The big problem in the area is space,” de Villaine said. “Every time you want to build something, you have trouble with space.”

He led us downstairs into one of their aging rooms, a modest vaulted chamber with four rows of barrels in a single layer, perhaps sixty in all, separated by two narrow aisles. “You have to imagine we’re in a nursery. Each one is a baby,” said de Villaine. A baby in a special cradle. They buy barrels from François Frères, he said, specifying source material from the forests of Tronçais, Jupilles, and Bertranges. “Wood is one of the most important fixed assets we have. We are not buying barrels. We’re buying trees.”

We were beckoned into the aisle as de Villaine pulled the first sample, the 2016 Corton. Only eight months old, it was just beginning its malolactic conversion. The acids felt sharp and stinging, but the wine had a lively sense of violets and red fruit. De Villaine told us it was aging in a mix of new and one-year barrels, but the oak was barely legible.

We moved to the 2016 Échezeaux. Seventy percent of that vintage had been lost to frost in April. In a prior year, 2013, the yield was 13 hectoliters per hectare, but in 2016 they’d gotten just seven. This young wine was also going through malolactic, but it still showed gentle red fruit touched with stone and herbs. “Échezeaux is my baby,” said de Villaine, continuing the nursery theme. “It has the finesse to be a polite wine, accessible. A little complexity without being complicated.”

Next we tasted the 2016 Grand Échezeaux. Here was a bigger wine, more expansive and yet also spicier, with a peppery kick. The site always produces wine for long aging thanks to richer soil: more profound, literally and figuratively.

Domaine de la Romanée-Conti has long farmed organically. “It was the blood of the domaine for years,” our host told us. “First, the [lutte] raisonnée, then the biology (organics), then in 2007 we moved to biodynamics using horses, dynamized water, making our own compost.” They also follow biodynamic practices in the cellar, paying attention to flower and root days, to the phases of the moon and atmospheric pressure, especially for racking and bottling. But “It’s not an obsession,” said de Villaine. Although they use horses on six hectares, it’s “technically it’s not possible” to use them everywhere, even though they’re the best way to plow without compacting soil. Instead, they bought a few tractors weighing 800 kilos—the same as a horse.

The winemaking ethos is hands-off. “The work is ‘making wine,’ but we’re trying not to make wine. We’re trying not to act,” he continued. For example, “The first objective is not to rack the wine. Normally they don’t move. They don’t need to.” But they did have to do so in 2015, which he called an extreme outlier. They make the wine, in other words, classically, eliding some of the anthroposophical mumbo-jumbo of Steiner’s biodynamics and following the traditionalist approaches on which those had been loosely based, plus yielding to practical, not to mention economic, realities.

We moved next to the 2016 Romanée-Saint-Vivant. Here at last was a stinky wine that truly read as a work in progress. But it sorted itself out quickly in the glass, standing up in smart red fruit and spice. Then we tasted the 2015 Richebourg, which felt enormous, muscular, weighty. “The fame (reputation) is to be more firm, more savage, un peu dur,” de Villaine said of this wine. The next one could not have been more different: 2015 La Tâche. The wine floated, washing the senses in spring flowers, anise, violets, and cherries. The tannins were smooth like clay after rain.

De Villaine had called these wines babies, but they seemed more like teenagers, youths still earning voice and flesh, height, personality. They had charisma and charm, but weren’t yet fully who they would become.

We arrived at the end of the cellar. In a chapel-like niche lay a half-dozen barrels de Villaine called The Queen: 2016 Romanée-Conti. This wine always ages in this spot, the coolest in the cellar, which offers the slowest evolution. He stepped into the alcove to dip his thief into a barrel. While his back was turned, de Brosses intoned to us, sotto voce, “Don’t spit this wine. To show respect.”

De Villaine returned, beaming with a father’s affection. “I’m proud of the Echezeaux. I’m touched by the Saint-Vivant. I’m lost with the Romanée-Conti,” he said, dripping two fingers of wine into each glass. It seemed a recitation, not the first time he’d uttered this and likely not the last. I tasted spiced cherries steeped with rose petals, white pepper, anise. The texture was gentle, quiet, the tannins tea-like, but malolactic was popping. A skein of something darker threaded through the middle.

“The wine is something very simple,” de Villaine said, “It turns into a luxury product, but it’s not produced by being (to be) that.” Perhaps he meant only this wine, but I suspect he was referring to all of the wines in his petite crèche. Finally he collected our glasses and poured what remained back into the barrel. Apparently, the DNA of everyone who has ever tasted Romanée-Conti becomes part of the wine’s genetic signature.

The tasting wrapped. We said merci, goodbye, merci again. De Brosses suggested we walk west on Rue du Temps Perdu to see their vineyards and the tall stone cross that signifies their holdings. It was after 6 p.m. and the April sun was slanting gold into my eyes. The soil was newly plowed, red-orange in the evening light. I took a selfie, smiling with purple teeth.

—

I once had an elderly friend, a lifelong New Yorker. In the 1930s and ’40s he liked to visit the jazz clubs to hear the newest singers. One night he saw a striking young woman with a voice like liquid sunshine. After her set, he politely asked her to dance. As they swayed around the floor, he leaned forward and said, “You just keep singing, Ella. You’ll go far.”

Those barrel samples remind me of that young singer. Prodigiously talented but not yet famous. Supremely competent but not yet who she would become. Ella Fitzgerald, but not yet Ella Fitzgerald.

These wines were Burgundy, but not yet Burgundy. But also not sui generis. They were instead just the latest progeny of a centuries-old lineage that had started with the Romans, grown up with the monks, and matured with new generations of farmers and makers.

I still can’t claim to have tasted the wines of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. But I can say I met them in their youth.

Image ©2026 Meg Maker. Travel and accommodations were provided by Wilson Daniels. Wine barrel samples were provided by Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. I’m grateful to Bertrand de Villaine for sharing his time and expertise.

Welcome back to Notable, where twice a month I share the best wines from recent tasting.

Our focus today is on Rhône varieties, vinified both in their native territory and abroad. There is a gorgeous Saint-Joseph Rouge from Faury, in the northern Rhône, and a Ventoux from organic Château Pesquié in the south, plus four wines from Troon, a regenerative organic producer in southern Oregon: Amphora Amber Vermentino, Amphora Grenache, Amphora Mourvèdre, and a Rhône-style blend called Druid’s Red.

A note about Notable: with this edition it has become a Section, which in Substack parlance means it is now its own sub-newsletter, allowing readers to subscribe specifically to this content. (By default I’ve opted everyone in.) And if you like what you read here, please comment, like, share—and subscribe! Paying subscribers help keep this independent wine commentary flowing. Thank you.

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Lionel Faury Saint-Joseph Rouge 2019

14% ABV | About $37; we purchased this bottle in 2022 for $32. Faury is imported by Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant.

Saint-Joseph is a rangy terroir stretching for fifty kilometers along the northern Rhône’s right bank. The vines cling to steep hillsides on the eastern flank of the Massif Centrale, and soils are granite in various stages of disrepair.

Jean Faury began farming in Chavanay, at the northern end of the Saint-Joseph appellation, in 1950. He raised livestock and planted tree fruits and grapes, selling some wine in bulk (en vrac) to local bistros. His son, Philippe, who succeeded him in 1979, gradually phased out the fruit trees and invested in higher quality viticulture and winemaking. Philippe’s son, Lionel, took over the estate in 2006 at the tender age of 23.

Today Lionel farms in Saint-Joseph, Condrieu, and Côte-Rôtie, following lutte raisonnée. Syrah is his cornerstone, and he bottles two different Côte-Rôtie, two Saint-Joseph Rouge, and two Syrah Collines Rhodaniennes IGP. He also produces Condrieu and Saint-Joseph Blanc, the latter a blend of Marsanne and Roussanne. Case production is about 7,000 annually.

Lionel Faury’s wines are serious, self-assured, confidently old-school but never rustic. The higher-tier Saint-Joseph, “La Gloriette,” comes from three vineyards planted in the 1950s. This wine, the basic Saint-Joseph, is grown on younger Syrah, planted between 1979 and 2007. It spends about a year in a mix of wooden vessels, from foudre to barrique, only 10 percent new. Faury is not a fan of young wood.

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To write is to move meaning from writer to reader. Text is the way that happens. It is the only way that happens. The text is everything the writer has said and it is all the reader can know.

This primacy of text lies at the heart of a standard workshopping exercise. Writers pair up and read each other’s pieces, then answer three questions: What’s this about? What’s working? And what might change to make it more fully itself? A writer dilates as a reader’s testimony unspools. That’s what you think my story is about?1

This technique is useful for writers of all genres, but it’s especially helpful for wine writers. Wine is factually dense, so it’s easy to get caught up in a piece’s details, forgetting it must also be about something. Something more than just the reportage, more than what we know. Something we believe.

Wine writing is nonfiction writing. Most lands at the journalistic end of the spectrum, but it should not feel artless. Wine writing is creative nonfiction. It drives truth toward daylight using the gestures and motifs of imaginative storytelling. The results vibrate with pleasure, heartbreak, tension, obstacle, disappointment, triumph, and deliciousness.

Below are several short sentences about wine writing2 offered as nourishment for the creative process. Some are directive, some reflective. They’re things I’ve come to know over the years, or rather come to believe.

Creative nonfiction has been called “true stories well told.” A true wine story contains verifiable facts about place and making. A true wine story also contains honest impressions about those facts. The first is journalistically true, the latter memoiristically true. Both are equally true.

A corollary: Be honest but not cruel. Per Dickenson, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”3 Good criticism aims to build, not demolish. Wine is just a beverage, but it’s also people’s livelihoods. When a wine, producer, region, or experience merits criticism, be constructive and circumspect. Ask yourself, Who needs to hear this, and why? Know how your critique will land and aim for that spot, but not one any larger.

At the same time, don’t pander. Don’t write to please producers, importers, hosts, restaurateurs, beverage buyers, or colleagues. Write to please your reader. Or rather, to serve your reader. Build readers’ trust by disclosing your sponsors, samples, seats at the table. Be transparent.

Every piece has a surface narrative. These are the details about the winemaker, region, where you went, what you saw. This is what the piece is about at the level of topic. Every piece also has something below the surface narrative. This is what the piece is about at the level of meaning. An active subnarrative shows that as a writer you are thinking, not merely recording sensations. In other words: Story, story, story. Find it.

A faithful source will tell you things they believe to be true. But these so-called facts are not necessarily true, so you must check. This is also why you shouldn’t ask a source for data (facts). You should ask a source for opinions (beliefs). So not, How many acres of Grenache ring the winery, but, What’s the hardest thing about growing Grenache around the winery?

Don’t feel beholden to the dominant narratives (for example, at present, The sky is falling). Don’t recapitulate clichés du jour. Reflect expansively on what you’ve seen, heard, tasted, read, learned, know, and feel. Then, synthesize these into something new for readers to ponder. This may take a while.

Pro tip: Turn a piece into a story using a narrative arc. This trick came before reading and writing and will probably last after it. The story started in one place and ended in another. There were obstacles, complications, bad things happening to good people, some mysteries, a revelation. Something changed along the way. What changed? Why does that matter?

Another trick: Switch on your reader, wake up their sensorium, using words with palate texture. Make them salivate, or at least imagine it. Use words like sip, clink, spit, lick, liquid, delectable, loquacious, picket, ticket, rattle. Slurp.

Be mindful of textual texture. Use a mix of stylistic tactics to animate your piece. Be mindful of pacing: Crisp evidence moves swiftly and also lends authority. Quotations snap readers to attention. Lyric passages invite them to sit back and relax. And while you don’t have to do all of their work for them, you can punctuate your piece with pithy observations. It’s your piece, after all.

Readers won’t get all of your metaphors and allusions. That’s okay. You wouldn’t get all of theirs, either. Just explain yourself. If you got cherry Twizzler, say so but say why: that rubbery texture, the fruit’s artificiality, your nostalgia for third grade.

It’s okay to write about things you don’t understand, but only if you don’t pretend you do. Confess your ignorance and invite readers to join you. Show them why you care and what you’re doing to learn. You’re human. You can ask questions.

Write from your heart, meaning from yourself: your culture, your values, your status, your identity, your beliefs, your language. Ignore other people’s biases and lexicons. Ignore their topics and takes. Ignore their successes and failures, viral and otherwise. Focus on you, on your own voice, your own ideas and beliefs. Develop them. And keep moving.

Before you write, ask yourself, What sound am I trying to make in the noise of the world? And, Is this the sound it most needs now?

Welcome back to Notable, where twice a month I reflect on the best wines of recent tasting.

Last week New York Times Cooking ran an article titled “I Need Herbs and I Need Citrus.” Girl, I feel you. Temperatures in Northern New England were hovering in the single digits and I was suffering a head cold, medicating myself with lemongrass ginger tea and balms of menthol-eucalyptus. That’s perhaps an unwise admission at the top of a tasting roundup, but my cold was mild and the sinus distress paradoxically only heightened my olfactory powers. Sometimes it pays to be sensitive.

But winter’s clench is easing. The sky’s become less gray, more blue and yellow, and there’s fresh energy in the sunlight now that we’ve passed Imbolc, which Christians call Candlemas and Americans call Groundhog Day. It’s that moment midway between Solstice and Equinox when the house plants reawaken, my Mediterranean Bay unfurling delicate new leaves, bronze and shiny, my 40-plus-year-old Philodendron, purchased for my freshman dorm room, reaching windoward with tender shoots.

My cat’s been chasing sunbeams around the house. I’ve been growing grass for her in batches, soaking soft winter wheat berries for a day, then covering the container with cheesecloth and rinsing regularly to encourage sprouting. By the third or fourth day roots appear, then shoots, at which point I collapse the cheesecloth onto the berries to make a kind of sterile medium, then move it to the windowsill.

I’ve tried using soil and metal mesh and other substrates, but none allow a small carnivore unaccustomed to herbivory to snack on grass without mayhem. So twice a day, usually at her command, I sit with her on the floor, picking off individual blades to feed her, one at a time. Most make their way down her gullet, but some get mauled and spat sideways onto the rug. No matter. Mom’s always ready with another.

The things we do for vitamins and sunshine and love.

Notable Wines

Below are my notes on a handful of wines that recently stood apart from the pack. There’s a Ferrari Brut Trentodoc, a traditional method sparkler from the Dolomites opened in honor of the Winter Olympics; a 2017 Barboursville Octagon, a red-bend winner in the 2025 Virginia Governor’s Cup; a 1995 Chateau Montelena Estate Napa Cabernet, perfectly aged; a 2000 Château d’Armailhac Pauillac, opened alongside the Montelena just because; and a 1990 Domaine Touchais Coteaux du Layon, a sweet botrytised Chenin for the ages. Enjoy.

Ferrari Brut Trento DOC NV

12.5% ABV | About $20

In 1902, Bruno Ferrari launched a sparkling wine project in Trentino, in Italy’s Dolomites, to make wines to rival French champagne. Ferrari had studied winemaking at the Imperial School of Viticulture in Montpellier and believed his native region, with its cool climate and limestone soils, was perfect for sparklers made from Chardonnay. In 1906 his wine won a gold medal at the International Exhibition in Milan, and over the next few decades his success grew. But he remained small, releasing no more than 10,000 bottles per year.

By the early 1950s, Ferrari was approaching retirement with no heir or obvious successor. Scanning his territory, he tapped Bruno Lunelli, a wine shop owner in neighboring Trento, to take over. He admired Lunelli’s work ethic and commitment to his native region, and while the shop keeper had to take loans to make it work, Ferrari committed to staying on during the transition. Eventually, Lunelli enjoyed success, and was able to expand production and introduce new cuvées from Chardonnay and Pinot nero.

Today, the third generation of the Lunelli family heads Ferrari Trento. They source fruit from their own extensive vineyard holdings and work with 500 regional growers to produce both nonvintage and vintage wines. They release about seven million bottles annually, but their cellars hold about twenty-four million at any given moment. It sounds like a lot, but this quantity pales in comparison to that of many French champagne houses.

I visited the estate in the fall of 2013 to see the vineyards and winemaking and taste the wines, sitting also for a tasting of their vintage bubbles against peers’ prestige cuvées (read my report in Divining Ferrari’s Substance and Style: A Comparative Tasting of Twenty-four Traditional Method Sparkling Wines).

The Brut, their entry-level wine, is 100 percent Chardonnay and spends twenty months on lees; this particular bottle was disgorged in 2024. I’ve discovered over the years that the Brut ages beautifully, growing more nutty and enchanting with even a decade of storage. When it’s fresh like this it’s crunchy, cooling, Dolomitic; it reads like mountain air. The flavor is citrusy, limey, both rind and pith, with a sense also of fresh sourdough bread. The bead is active, the texture creamy and mouth filling. It’s a happy expression of Chardonnay on limestone.

Barboursville Octagon Monticello 2017

13.5% ABV | $135.00 (current release $75.00); sample

In 1814, Thomas Barbour, former Governor of Virginia and U.S. Senator, began construction of a manor house, recruiting design help from his friend, Thomas Jefferson. The house burned on Christmas Day in 1884, but today its bones remain standing on the 900-acre estate.

In 1976, Gianni Zonin, a sixth-generation viticulturist from the Veneto, Italy, purchased Barboursville. Working with winemaker Gabriele Rausse, he planted Vitis vinifera grapes at scale, eventually proving these European vines could succeed in Virginia’s climate. In 1990, Luca Paschina, originally from Piemonte, Italy, replaced Rausse. In 1996, he created the first vintage of this wine, Octagon, named for the octagonal drawing room from the original manor house.

This vintage, 2017, was among the winners of the 2025 Virginia Governor’s Cup. It’s a blend of Bordeaux varieties Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Petit Verdot. It was a gutsy move to submit a slightly older wine to the competition, or perhaps it was a flex to show what this wine can do with age. The oxidation was evident in its brickish cast and aromas that skewed toward tea, dried fruits, and dried flowers. The flavors were likewise more dried than fresh (prune, raisin, dried fig) and it had a woodsy bass note. Its concentrated, chewy tannins got a lift from the wine’s acidity. Certainly this was a mature wine, offering interest and refreshment.

Chateau Montelena Estate Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 1995

14.1% ABV | About $170 (current release $200)

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Judgment of Paris, when a 1973 Chateau Montelena beat a 1973 Domaine Roulot Meursault. Those wines were both Chardonnay, of course, but here is Montelena’s Estate Cabernet, opened as a tip of the hat to the anniversary. The bottle was bought by a friend on release and cellared in cold and stable conditions.

Bo Barrett made the wine. Son of founder Jim Barrett, he became winemaker in 1982, then transitioned in 2013 into the role of CEO, handing the reins to new talent, Matt Crafton. The 1995 California vintage saw a cold, wet winter and spring, with higher than average rainfall and hail in some locations. Bloom was late, as was veraison. Then it warmed, delivering a hot July followed by steady ripening weather for harvest. Napa Valley wineries fared especially well that year, and Wine-Searcher lists Chateau Montelena among their top producers of the vintage.

The Montelena Estate Cabernet Sauvignon uses fruit grown on vines that ring their stone building in Calistoga. (It is distinguished from their Napa Valley Cabernet, which uses some purchased fruit and often has a large proportion of Merlot.) The Estate Cab is usually 98 or 99 percent Cabernet Sauvignon with a touch of Cabernet Franc and sometimes a dash of Petit Verdot.

Red with clear rim and hardly any bricking, the wine seemed spirituous at first, but with a bit of air the genie was released. There was a sense of dark nut, black fruit, tea, tobacco, and greenery wreathing its solid fruit core, plummy with a minty lift and lingering senses of herbs and forest. Gorgeous acidity lit up the fruit. In the distant finish the wine grew sweet, even charming. You can taste the California sunshine.

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Château d’Armailhac Baronne Philippine de Rothschild Pauillac 2000

12.5% ABV | About $125

We opened the Pauillac alongside the Montelena as a fun A/B of Napa and the Médoc. This bottle was originally purchased at retail on release, probably from MacArthur Beverage, which direct imports. The bottle’s front label had been destroyed, but the back label and cork were intact.

In 1600, the d’Armailhacq family acquired land in the Médoc that had been in vine since at least the 1300s. In the Bordeaux Classification of 1855, the estate was designated a 5eme Grand Cru Classé. In 1933, neighboring Baron Philippe de Rothschild acquired the estate and its holdings, and the wine was subsequently re-labeled until 1989, when Baroness Philippine decided to restore its original name.

The estate’s 70 hectares lie adjacent to Mouton Rothschild and not far from Pontet-Canet. The wines always have a high proportion of Cabernet Franc; this vintage the blend was 52 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 36 percent Merlot, 10 percent Cabernet Franc, and 2 percent Petit Verdot. It spent 18 months in barrel, half new.

Solid red with a clear rim, its fragrance offered fruit and flowers, anise, violets, tobacco, and cedar. It smelled, well, Bordelaise. With more air I sensed earthy mushroom, perhaps a touch of Brett. The tannins had fully dissolved into the wine, powdery with a chalky after-effect. Fruit there was, but not as much as its aromas promised; instead it felt woodsy, stern, firm edged. Drinkable now, but cresting the hill. Don’t wait!

Domaine Touchais Réserve de nos Vignobles Coteaux du Layon 1990

13% ABV | About $50-85

Coteaux du Layon is a tiny appellation in the Loire’s Anjou district producing only sweet wines made from 100 percent Chenin blanc. Grapes may be simply harvested past maturity, sun-dried and sugar-ripe, but many producers prefer their clusters infected with Botrytis cinerea, or noble rot. This fungus makes grape skins lightly permeable, allowing moisture to evaporate while concentrating the sugar inside the berries and also (ironically) protecting them from other pathogens. Conditions for Botrytis are finicky, requiring cool, moist mornings and warm, dry afternoons. This spot of the Loire Valley delivers.

Domaine Touchais is one of the oldest producers here, dating to 1787. They favor the botrytised style, making multiple passes to select affected clusters. The wine ages for at least ten years before release, and can last years longer; Touchais is sitting on four decades’ worth in their cellars in the medieval town of Doué-la-Fontaine, southwest of Saumur.

Deep golden hued, it had a honeyed, floral fragrance, perfumed with jasmine and citrus but punctuated by an earthy hit of fresh button mushroom (from the Botrytis). Sweet and sumptuous, it was rescued by salivating acidity and fey, sunny flavors of chamomile, apricot, sultana, and Tahitian vanilla. Let the sun shine in.

All images ©2026 Meg Maker. The Barboursville Octagon was a sample for review.

Wine is a contemporary cultural artifact, alive and vivid. Yet many of our ideas about what makes a wine good or bad are based on old beliefs—about prestige, purity, scarcity, measurability, traditionality.

As culture advances, many of these ideas have started looking stale. We owe it to wine (and to ourselves) to reappraise them periodically, embracing what still works while making adjustments that keep wine current.

Below are five examples I’m thinking about now.

Old idea: Assess wine using standardized methods

New idea: Enlarge the information space

Professional tasters attend to wine’s constituent parts: color, aroma, texture, savor, finish. These are subjective factors, but the assessment routine’s been so standardized as to make the exercise feel reasonably defensible. Tasters can also consider truly measurable factors like appellation, cépage, alcohol, acid, tannin, and price.

But wine’s complexities invite us to consider values that don’t inhere in the standard matrix, and may in fact stand completely apart. Often these arise from process and making, like how the vineyard workers are treated, whether the winegrowing is environmentally thoughtful, how the owners set corporate priorities. These factors aren’t always neatly discoverable, so sometimes we have to dig for answers and make a judgment call.

Consider a naturally made, delicious wine, but one that’s produced by an environmental monster. Now consider a nearly identical wine—same region, same grape, thoughtfully made, tasty, passes all the tests—made by an ethical producer that follows socially and environmentally regenerative principles. Which is the better wine? I think that’s easily answered.

Old idea: Honor established hierarchies

New idea: Add humanism

Hierarchy seems an immutable feature of wine: the Bordeaux Classification, quality pyramids, the one-hundred-point scale. Some hierarchies are metrical, based on zone, grape, must weight, finished sugar. (I’m looking at you, German Wine Law.) The definitions get updated over time, but usually by adjusting the target metric rather than rethinking the hierarchy as a whole.

Other hierarchies are looser, or are based on a mix of objective and subjective factors. A key metric for the Bordeaux Classification was meant to feel objective—the historical trading price—but this was actually a perceived value, viz., the price the market would pay. That the Classification has been vigorously contested for nearly two centuries proves the original assumptions were neither comprehensive nor ironclad.

But contestation is good, because it opens space for dialogue. It lets us add new factors or entire tiers that reflect current values—as in the example above, where we brought environmental and humanistic concerns into consideration.

More critical to the discussion of hierarchies is the fact that “best” is contextual. It doesn’t arise solely from exogenous factors like territory or making. A First Growth is absolutely an admirable wine, and it’s delicious in many contexts. But it’s not necessarily the wine I want tonight.

Old idea: Valorize Vitis vinifera

New idea: Celebrate Vitis diversity

Vitis vinifera means “the vine that makes the wine.” It literally means “wine grape.” The name was coined by Linnaeus in the mid-18th-century, but it captures an ancient idea about vinifera’s role in wine production.

Today vinifera has wandered the globe (albeit on North American rootstock). We love vinifera because it makes delicious wine. Or we could say we love vinifera because we’ve made it make delicious wine. Over centuries we’ve selected and crossed vinifera x vinifera to create new grapes with properties we value.

More recently we’ve also crossed vinifera with other Vitis species, often North American, to create interspecific hybrids that tolerate disease, fungus, temperature extremes, and more.[1] In the US, breeders focused first on cold hardiness, but newer projects considered factors like grape chemistry, resistance, vine architecture, and flavor.

The earliest hybrids failed to meet the expectations of a public used to the flavor and texture of vinifera, but progress has been made. In Europe, researchers created a class of fungal-resistant hybrids called PiWis[2] that have a recognizable flavor profiles thanks to a preponderance of vinifera genetics.

On the other hand, interspecific hybrids are never going to taste exactly like vinifera and we shouldn’t expect them to. Instead, they invite us pay attention to what they themselves taste and feel like, and, again, to expand our evaluative matrix.

Because planting hybrids can help new regions produce wine, keeping farmland agrarian and farming families intact. Hybrid grape wines can be made with less chemical input in field and cellar. Fewer inputs mean less expense, which could lower prices and expand access to more people. Hybrids can save resources in a resource-imperiled planet. I call that better wine.

Old idea: Revere historic forms

New idea: Renovate when needed

We venerate old vines. We personify them, call them crones or wise elders. Recently we’ve seen the launch of an old-vine registry, an old-vine conference, an old-vine research project, and other initiatives to preserve old vineyards worldwide. It’s strange, isn’t it, given our culture’s obsession with youth? Is our veneration about nostalgia and romanticism, or historicity and culture, or something else?

The definition of “old vine” is continually litigated. Is it a vineyard past its most productive period? One that’s 50 years old, or over 100? How does own-rootedness factor into the definition? The OIV, the international organization of vine and wine, has set the cutoff at 35 years, but hundreds of thousands of acres fall under that umbrella.

Old vines aren’t frozen in amber, they’re living organisms. Over decades they’ve made phenotypic adjustments to adapt to their context. They are stumpy, gnarled, and twisted; they are sprawling, rangy, and feral. Some have outlived their original keepers by decades. But many still produce, decorating themselves with ripe clusters at harvest, proving they’re not, in fact, crones. Old vines, like old forests, are carbon sinks. Plus their genetics hold valuable information about durability, adaptability, resilience, and deliciousness. We have ample reason to venerate and preserve them.

But old vines do fail, not only single plants but entire plots. This can bring opportunity, especially if the original vines were mismatched to site, or the soil health is failing, over-sprayed and under-fed. Replanting is a judgment call. But a fresh plantation may set up a site for the next hundred years.

Old idea: Follow the ritual

New idea: Follow the pleasure

Wine is bound up in ritual. The right glass, the right occasion, the right wine with fish. For millennia we’ve used wine in ceremonies honoring gods and kings, births and deaths, harvests, rites of passage. Wine’s been a sacral object for so long it has transmogrified, become itself the center of ritual attention.

Most of wine’s ceremonial routines are designed around enjoyment. A somm enacts an elaborate tableside choreography, but it’s supposed to help the diner relax into their anticipation. A wedding guest sabers the champagne not to alter the wine but to alter the color of the occasion. Wine professionals have their own rituals and routines; a seated tasting hall feels as ceremonial as a church. A blind tasting exercise literally looks cultish.

To the uninitiated the practices are mystifying, quasi-religious, the rules opaque, even actively hidden. Breaking them might have consequences; Maybe I should just have a beer. Wine’s elasticity, its somatic and emotional entry point, becomes stiff and brittle. The drinker is bridled by doubt. Am I doing this right? isn’t a happy question when you and your companion are in the active pursuit of sensual gratification.

So, bluntly: Screw the rules that don’t serve pleasure. Open the doors of the temple. Wine isn’t the point, we are.

An unexamined wine is not worth drinking.

[1] The results of these crossings are not genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Traditional plant breeding uses only genetic material from parent vines, and the result is a plant with exclusively vine-native DNA. Genetic modification inserts foreign DNA into a plant’s gene sequence, creating an organism that has both its own and foreign genetic material.

[2] PiWi comes from the German Pilzwiderstandsfähige Traubensorte, meaning “fungal resistant grape variety.”

Photos ©2026 Meg Maker. Iapetus is a Vermont producer of natural wines made from hybrid grapes. Maine Wild Wine Fest is a natural wine tasting held annually in the spring in Freeport, Maine.