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

Jurançon’s history

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

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

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

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

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

Jurançon terroir

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

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

The grapes of Jurançon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living the sweet life at last

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

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

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

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

Appetite for change

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

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

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

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

See you next week.

Photos of Burgundy ©2026 Meg Maker

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

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

How new grape varieties arise

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

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

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

Indigeneity and fitness to place

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

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

The wandering vine

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

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

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

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Please note: Our menu options have changed

The New York Public Library’s Buttolph archive catalogs a trove of menus collected between 1880 and 1920, America’s dawn of dining out. Writer Lurie reviewed thousands of these early menus to decipher what they signal about the evolution not only of food, flavor, and taste but also social status, entertainment, and access. His new interactive essay, A History of Menus is a Menu of History, is a “story in ten dishes,” fetchingly illustrated by Jenna Lechner, that helps us understand how menus “reflect the class, gender, political, technological, and environmental shifts of history.”

Rules hidden in plain sight

Fast-forward a hundred years. Sociologist Gillian Gualtieri of Vanderbilt University interviewed 120 chefs at top U.S. restaurants and analyzed 1,380 Michelin reviews to assess how our perception of an eatery’s genre—“classic,” “flexible,” or “ethnic”—affects our perceptions of quality, authenticity, and value. The full paper, Discriminating Palates: Evaluation and Ethnoracial Inequality in American Fine Dining (2022), is available for download on JSTOR (an account gets you 100 free articles per month). Unsurprisingly, so-called ethnic restaurants find themselves systematically de-valued in the American dining scene. “This differential process of evaluation produces a system of value predicated on racial hierarchy that affects how chefs and critics understand and engage with their critical and creative work,” Gualtieri writes. It’s a rich study and superbly argued, but if you just want the TL;DR, read this helpful summary on JSTOR by Laura Clawson: The Hidden Rules of Fine Dining.

Meanwhile at Le Bar

French language instructor Timothée Lesoin, of , offers a field guide to the bar, helping us Anglophones order drinks with confidence. “The good news: you don’t need perfect French. You need maybe six phrases and a basic sense of how French bars work.” He sketches the essential mechanics—entering, taking a table, ordering, asking for water—then adds cultural markers and other signals to negotiate. His inline audio clips help you practice your accent. Success essentially boils down to common courtesy. “Say bonjour when you walk in. Say au revoir when you leave. Say s’il vous plaît and merci in between. These four things—not your accent, not your vocabulary—are what determine whether you’ll be welcomed back.”

Build a better mousetrap

, the , has penned a great science explainer on mouse taint. It’s hardly a new fault, but it’s more prevalent now thanks to warmer vintages and a fashion for using less sulfite in the winery—so-called natural winemaking. For those unfamiliar with this fault (lucky you), it presents as a putrid retronasal smell often described “used rodent cage.” I also get a note of rancid butter, thanks to the role lactic acid bacteria play in its genesis. Crunia tackles the established and new science and derides those who embrace the fault as a marker of more authentic winemaking. “Oh, give over!” he writes. “It’s a bloody fault. It makes wines undrinkable. End of story.” I agree.

Wine in situ

diagrams lessons learned from building community-focused wine programs for her retail and restaurant clients. “Before a wine program can be created—after the food has been decided on, after a chef has been hired, after the space has been imagined into existence—a restaurant owner, shop owner, or chef has to ask one question: Who are my guests going to be?” That customer-centricity helps bring the establishment into alignment with the spirit and tastes of its community. “There is nothing wrong with region, variety, or price being the thing that guides a list,” she says. “But there is something special when the choices reflect what you truly believe in.” She ends with a bit of advice to us all: “The next time you open a wine list, I want you to read it a little differently. Not as a test to pass, but as a document. Ask yourself: Whose values are reflected here? Who was thought of when this was built?”

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker; I apologize for having zero photos of American restaurants

The Prats and Symington families had long enjoyed friendship through Primum Familiae Vini, an association of multi-generational family wine producers. In 1998, after Prats sold Cos d’Estournel, Bruno’s son, Jean-Guillaume, remained behind as winemaker, but Bruno became a free agent.

“My father”—James Symington—“had the idea of calling Bruno, and saying, ‘How about trying to make some great wine in the Douro?’ We had ambitions to see if we could make table wine, but we knew nothing about table wine,” Symington said, at the start of the virtual tasting. “Literally nothing.”

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Hospitality is the mutual exchange of generosity

We tend to think of hospitality as flowing principally from host to guest, but originally it referred to generous reciprocity between both parties.

The Greeks especially embraced a reciprocal view of hospitality. Their word, xenos, means both “stranger” and “friend,” suggesting the social and cultural imperative to honor all visitors, feed and shelter them, and provide both material and intangible goods. Ancient Greeks believed gods walked among them, so such treatment was partly a hedge against offending a disguised deity.

A cognate, xenia, means both “hospitality” and “friendship,” notes Emily Wilson, in the introduction to her 2018 translation of The Odyssey.1 Xenia encapsulates the formalized rituals of the interaction. In return for a warm welcome, the guest-stranger must be gracious and also, significantly, offer stories of their travels and the world beyond the host’s threshold.

Here’s Wilson imagining the return of our weary hero:

There is a stranger outside your house. He is old, ragged, and dirty. He is tired. He has been wandering, homeless, for a long time, perhaps many years. Invite him inside. You do not know his name. He may be a thief. He may be a murderer. He may be a god. He may remind you of your husband, your father, or yourself. Do not ask questions. Wait. Let him sit on a comfortable chair and warm himself beside your fire. Bring him some food, the best you have, and a cup of wine. Let him eat and drink until he is satisfied. Be patient. When he is finished, he will tell his story. Listen carefully. It may not be as you expect.

Modern hospitality

Today, private hospitality is not entirely one-sided, as guests to one’s home generally bring a token of appreciation. It may be modest (flowers from the garden, homemade jam) or grand (vintage champagne, luxury chocolates), but politesse suggests it should not outshine the host’s own offerings. Guests are also expected to pen a thank-you note afterward, again with a degree of formality matched to the occasion.

Guests may also offer to provide a dish or drink to share during the meal. At the logical extreme of this lies the potluck, in which socio-communal duties are more equalized, although the host bears the most responsibility, so earns more social capital.

Storytelling by guests today is optional, but engaged and lively guests unburden the host from having to carry the event’s entire dynamic. This is especially true for house guests, who are advised “to amuse yourself by day and your hosts by night.”

Hospitality as industry

We also use the term “hospitality” for the professional services offered by restaurants, hotels, and related enterprises. Such venues refer to their visitors as “guests” even though such services aren’t offered for free. In these spheres, guests don’t pay with politesse and a story, they pay with cash and credit.

Wine and the Beards

Geologist and vineyard consultant was a finalist for a James Beard Media Award this year for her wine-centric podcast, Roadside Terroir. But at the awards gala on June 13, she drank cocktails instead. Wine was conspicuously lacking on both the refreshments table and the medalist roster. Quigley observed that across categories, judges rewarded writing that considered food’s societal impacts, its intersectionality and cultural contingencies. Maybe, she ventures, we wine commentators are playing it too safe. “During an evening where people noted on multiple occasions that ‘food is political,’ I found myself wondering if wine is doing enough to stand up in these important conversations,” she writes. “Is it really possible that there were only a few pieces of media within the entire wine industry with enough purpose to earn a seat at this table?” Possibly, although wine’s role in the Beards has long been soft-focus and grows softer each year. When I attended the gala fifteen years ago, the wine served was undrinkable plonk that had been donated by a corporate wine conglomerate, even as a book by my winemaker friend won a medal. But the biggest problem with the Beard Media Awards—across categories, not just wine—is the high submission fees that make the competition inaccessible to independent authors and self-publishers. That means many of our most creative, experimental, and electric voices aren’t even in the room, much less in seats at the table.

Fluency’s many forms

“First, I will be talking a lot about wine. Second, I don’t know anything about it.” So begins ’s inaugural post for her new Substack, . After a career in the specialty tea industry and a stint concocting non-alcoholic libations, Bove finds herself sourcing small-production wines for a new and exclusive wine club. “I definitely don’t blend in,” she writes, of blind tasting sessions with colleagues, “and for a very simple reason: I don’t have the same vocabulary as my team and our winemaker friends. Not. At. All.” Bove’s fluent in the lexicon of tea, and also cherishes a personal trove of flavor memories reaching back to childhood. But she’s finding that her vocabulary does not neatly translate into wine, especially when she tastes with winemakers. The problem, naturally, isn’t her, it’s a philosophy that posits “correct” wine flavor terms. On the other hand, if she’s tasting with Italian and French winemakers, as I suspect from her examples, it’s no wonder she’s getting “roasted pineapple, but without the sugar,” and they’re getting “clean” and “well balanced.” That predicament isn’t lexical, it’s epistemic. Welcome to the wild world of wine.

Flipping the script

had always assumed that Opus One, the Napa Cab cult project founded in 1978 by Robert Mondavi and Baron Philippe de Rothschild, was a pretentious, stuffy fossil. That take got destabilized when they hired a friend of hers, Meghan Zobeck, as director of winemaking—a “cute, young, sassily redheaded” winemaker who seemed “a little… progressive for Opus One,” Stacionis writes. So she visited Zobeck and assistant winemaker Kimberlee Marinelli at the winery to understand what had attracted them to the brand. “It was a shocker to me,” she says. “I am here to tell you confidently that Opus One is absolutely one of the most forward-thinking, sustainability- and resiliency-minded wineries in all of Napa.” She details the estate’s multi-pronged effort to reduce inputs, limit impacts, farm regeneratively, foster inclusion, and use a light, or at least lighter, hand in the cellar—initiatives both remarkably progressive and obviously expensive. Surprisingly, Stacionis spent ninety minutes at the winery but was never offered a taste of the wine. That’s an unforced error, because the wine is a proof point: Is it good now? And once they implement all of that, is it better?

Let’s (not) do the numbers

I like wine technical sheets because I like data, which adds dimension to my understanding of what I’m tasting. But Y. R. Hughes of cautions us not to over-fixate on numbers, especially of metrics like volatile acidity (V.A.) which can trick us into believing a wine is faulty. You can’t make wine without making some acetic, its most abundant volatile acid (read about wine acidity in my earlier article). When acetic meets alcohol it produces ethyl acetate, a powerfully aromatic ester that smells like nail polish remover. The E.U., U.S., and other winemaking countries impose limits on these naturally occurring volatile compounds. But the metrics are meaningless without additional context, especially the details about the wine’s sweetness, tannin, and alcohol, which alter how we perceive volatility. The V.A. number “tells you how much acetic acid is in the glass, to a decimal place, with real precision,” says Hughes. “It does not tell you, has never told you, and cannot tell you whether the wine is any good. The genre keeps citing the number as if it were a verdict. It was only ever a measurement.”

Dive into la piscine

It’s hot, so hot. Make like the French and put ice in your wine. Or at least in your Bandol rosé, says Abel. She visits family in this steamy provençal beach town each summer, where locals toss ice cubes into their deep pink drink, a concoction they affectionately dub la piscine (swimming pool). The rosé from Bandol contains a healthy portion of black-skinned Mourvèdre, which contributes color, savoriness, and heft that let it tolerate getting slightly watered down. “The obvious argument against ice in wine is that it dilutes the flavor,” she writes. “And to that I say exaaaactly. It lowers the A.B.V., and keeps you hydrated because it’s 1 p.m. and you have a long day ahead!” No, I’m not envious.

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Our class also read about the Turing Test and Chinese Room problem, both of which say, essentially, that if a machine can convince you it’s thinking, then it’s thinking.

It feels like we’ve gotten there, doesn’t it? I pose a question to Gemini about my research, and it answers in complete and readable sentences with the information I need. Or it predicts it’s the information I need. It’s often incomplete, or downright erroneous. Formulating and then modulating queries are essential skills for the researcher. And I use other digital sources, including research indices and good old-fashioned Google, plus analog materials (books—remember them?). These other media are feeling increasingly clumsy and archaic, but they still manage to unearth otherwise undiscoverable nuggets.

I was an early adopter of search engine tech. After hand coding my first website, in 1992, I landed a job as an information architect and front-end designer at a tiny five-person startup putting stock-footage library catalogs online. The work involved ingesting millions of text-based, shot-level records aggregated by our clients, sources like ABC News, NBC, National Geographic, CNN, and The Image Bank, and feeding them into a vast textual database. We made this data searchable, for free, by film and television producers on the new magic lantern called the Internet. Soon we were also processing and indexing the footage itself and sending those results through the thread-thin straws of the early web.

The key to our success—and we were successful; the company was swiftly acquired by a larger entity—was our support for natural language querying. “Shark swimming in Cuban waters,” or “riot at Sing Sing Prison,” or “Nixon speeches.” Today such queries seem simplistic compared to the chatty badinage of Claude and ChatGPT. Back then it required us developers to parse synonyms, apply fuzzy logic, focus on weightings, and ignore stop words like the, and, at, and a. And we didn’t make users learn Boolean logic—this AND that NOT other—they could just type the query that made sense to them. If we’d done our job well, the search engine would figure it all out and spit back something useful. As always, data out was only as good as data in, but we could rely on the integrity of the source material from the footage archives, which had been cataloged and indexed by trained library scientists, viz., real humans with specialized knowledge and skills.

Fast forward to today. The quality of search chat is far more sophisticated, and the language seems so natural it readily lulls us into a belief the machine is thinking. But the source material is a mess, essentially everything that’s published to the Internet and even stuff that’s not, stolen from other sources. And it’s not indexed or curated or assigned weights by real humans. It’s too big. The scientists working on A.I. aren’t working on the corpus itself, as the library scientists had done to those footage archives. They’re training the machine to do that work, to parse the meaning inherent in the system.

It’s impressive, I admit. I’ve come to rely on it as a writer. Machine search, translation, and transcription have saved me limitless hours. Using this new tool feels like being handed a full meal instead of turning over rocks to forage for scraps.

But I’m mindful that I’m not only a writer. My expertise isn’t just “writing,” it’s writing about lived experience. To do that well, I have to tune into my own messy human wetware: tactile sensations, memories, the physiology of taste. I need to pass those signals through the rest of my nervous system, especially but not exclusively my brain, using judgment and creativity to formulate a novel idea. And then I have to put that idea into words using affective language another human might want to read. Writing about wine feels like a proof of the theory of embodied cognition: I can only know—hence write about—what my whole body can comprehend.

And, yes, if that writing then goes onto the internet, which most of it does these days, the machine will scrape it into its wide mechanical maw and store it as fat in its ever-expanding virtual corpus. But at least for now, if the writing is about taste, meaning both flavor and discernment, humans are the only ones who can do that thinking.

Images: “Convolutions” (left) and “Odors and Flavors,” from The Book of Life: The Spiritual and Physical Constitution of Man by Dr. Alesha Sivartha, 1898, courtesy of The Public Domain Review. An earlier version of this essay was published in The Circular.

“Accipite et bibite ex hoc omnes”

It’s not surprising that the Pope maintains a large estate in the countryside of Lazio, outside of Rome, where he can kick off his papal regalia and crack open a book not written in Latin. It’s not surprising that this 55-acre estate, dubbed Borgo Laudato Si (roughly, “Praise-be-to-you hamlet”), includes many acres of regeneratively grown vegetables, olive trees, and herbs. It’s not surprising, given Christian ethos, that the operation trains refugees and formerly incarcerated people in the skills of sustainable ag, livestock production, and hospitality. It’s even not surprising that the site has a small vineyard; this is Italy, after all. What is surprising is that they’re growing—wait for it—Cabernet Sauvignon. Yes, the grape of Bordeaux, made varietally, aged in oak barrels, to be sold exclusively within the Vatican or poured for visitors at the estate. Pope Leo XIV blessed the first release of 5,000 bottles, raising a glass in praise. No word on how it tastes.

Cult of personality territory

Belgian-turned-Sicilian winemaker Frank Cornelissen recounts lessons learned from two decades on Mt. Etna. Cornelissen moved to the volcano to chase the platonic ideal of Nerello Mascalese by way of Burgundy and Barolo. He always worked organically, and eventually became a scion of the natural wine movement, eschewing all interventions. Then the moldering 2015 vintage made him realize that a few parts per million of sulfite might save his tail. “Yes, I’ve changed. I needed to,” he writes, “In the first 10 years, my wines were very much Frank Cornelissen wines, and much less Etna wines. I made some great wines but also some that were off.” I’ve tasted this variability with his production over the years; sometimes the wines felt magical, ineffable, and sometimes they were so volatile that drinking them felt like biting red tinfoil. Cornelissen now produces 180,000 bottles per year and manages a team of thirty workers. A focus on territorio is hard, but not impossible, at such scale. “People say I’ve mellowed or become more conventional,” he writes. “but if you don’t evolve when you learn new things, you’re stupid—and I’m not stupid.”

Idle fancy

, in , takes stock of the excesses of the Hamptons leisure class and the new pall of ironic detachment that lingers over North and South Forks. Recreation is performed, documented, and re-cut into new stories about itself. “There is now a socially mandatory quantity of irony one is expected to bring to luxury. You can spend four hundred dollars on a melon, provided you acknowledge that four hundred dollars for a melon is objectively insane,” he writes. “There is no outside position from which to critique the Hamptons, because the Hamptons will film your critique, add a location tag, and sell it back to you as ambiance. The machine no longer needs beauty as raw material. It runs on its own exhaust.”

Lost in translation

Readers may be aware of my longtime interest in the language of wine, how we use words to make sense of it for ourselves and others. I’m especially interested in how our English word choices span cultural and social divides—or don’t—as they make leaps into translation. Allison Creed, a researcher in cognitive linguistics at the University of Melbourne, has just published a review paper of 77 recent publications about wine language. In The Conversation, she shares examples of English-language wine metaphors that don’t travel well, causing problems for understanding and economics. “This matters for the wine industry, because wine descriptions directly influence purchasing decisions and overall enjoyment,” she writes. “The solution is not to stop using metaphors to describe wine—that would be impossible. The question is how metaphors can work inclusively across cultures, rather than carrying cultural baggage that can lead to bias and market undervaluation.”

At a loss for words

Ivo Freeman (on Substack as ) is also thinking about the limitations of wine language. The handful of words we use to describe direct flavors—bitter, sour, salty, sweet, and savory—forces us toward metaphor and analogy to convey the qualities that make food worth talking about. Wine’s comparables consider the chemical signatures we can directly detect—flavors of sweetness, bitterness, and savoriness, yes, but also volatile acidity, Brett, TCA, and others often caused by flaws. Like Creed, Freeman thinks metaphors are here to stay—even the more contested terms, like mineral—because they do useful work by advancing wine education and sales. Still, language often fails us. “Describing wine is like trying to thread a needle with oven gloves on,” he says. “You can perceive the required specificity, but you simply don’t have the tools available to you to do it justice.”

Style and substance

The Wine and Spirits Education Trust (WSET), founded in the UK in 1969, gives many wine students their first brush with formal wine lexicons. WSET has striven in recent years to modernize and, crucially, globalize their credentialing programs, but as we’ve seen, the project is complex. The organization just announced a brand refresh or, as they put it in their press release, a “comprehensive brand evolution,” aimed to enhance their international appeal and reach younger audiences. The name is now just WSET, the tagline is “Global Drinks Education,” and the streamlined logotype erased an image of Greek goddess Ariadne. I’m picky about graphic design, and to me the new wordmark feels bland and generic. Is this a tennis club, a consulting firm, a pharmaceutical, or something else? Brand updates are hard. There are always too many stakeholders, too many voices, more cooks than the kitchen can hold, and some should have hung up their aprons long ago. But I wonder what might have happened had the designers embraced the Zillennial design aesthetic: goopy, organic, playful, hand-made. There are plenty of food and drinks examples already in the wild: Swurl, Full Pour, Noble Rot, Gourmet, Vittles, Caper, Juice. The brand would look different, feel different. It would be more than redesign; it would be revolution.

See you next week.

June Peonies ©2026 Meg Maker

Geneticists believe Gouais originated in the area that’s now northeastern France and southwestern Germany. It proliferated in France in the Middle Ages, planted principally by commoners who used it to make their own modest table wine. The vine was high-yielding, producing abundant pale green clusters. The wine was tart and featureless, but at least it was plentiful.

The monks and landed gentry were meanwhile cultivating Pinot noir, which they viewed as noble. As early as 1598 they began to encourage the removal of Gouais vines, an effort perhaps motivated more by classism than pragmatism. By the twentieth century, the grape had all but disappeared from cultivation.

Gouais blanc’s offspring

Grape vines are promiscuous, and given their proximity, Gouais and Pinot noir soon met across the fence. That union alone yielded 16 important new varieties, including white-fruited Chardonnay, Auxerrois, Aligoté, and Melon de Bourgogne, and black-fruited Gamay and Beaunoir.

Gouais also crossed with many other grapes, including Chenin blanc, Tressot, and Savagnin, to create myriad other new vines, like Colombard, Blaufränkisch, Muscadelle, and Jacquère. It has also contributed to the complex pedigree of modern interspecific hybrids like Regent, Prior, and Chardonel.

Gouais in the modern era

Today Gouais is grown in only a handful of sites, principally in Switzerland’s Haut-Valais (where it’s called Gwäss), having lingered there since the Middle Ages. It’s made its way into lone vineyards in Oregon and Australia. In France it survives in the heritage vine collection, dubbed “the Louvre of grapevines,” of the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, or INRA, and in a tiny private vineyard in the Haute-Savoie.

When held to low yields, Gouais can make a crisp white wine with flavors of green apple and lemon. Its natural acidity makes it a good candidate for sparkling wine.

Exploring the legacy of Gouais blanc

Given the grape’s extreme rarity, you’re unlikely to see it on shelves or wine lists, and even your favorite sommelier has probably never tasted one. But you can chase its legacy in the varietal wines of Gouais’s famous progeny: Gamay from Beaujolais, Aligoté from Burgundy, Melon de Bourgogne from Muscadet, and Chardonnay from just about anywhere.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Yves Cuilleron Lyseras Saint-Joseph Blanc 2023

13% ABV | About $36; imported by Skurnik | Cave Yves Cuilleron
An equal blend of Marsanne and Roussanne organically farmed in southeast facing vineyards in Chavanay, Cuilleron’s hometown. It’s an ambient fermentation, with malolactic in barrel and cask; the wine ages nine months with no lees stirring or racking before bottling. The results are golden hued with honey-floral aromas of wax and sunshine: yellow apple skin, sultana, dried hay. It smells like the apple Paris handed to Aphrodite. Texturally it’s expansive, waxy but not heavy, with honeydew freshness and flavors of green pear. The acidity is modest—common in Marsanne-Roussanne blends—but the wine also has that Roussannean tannic flourish. It’s a dimensional wine, spherical, or at least nonlinear.

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Fining removes protein, long-chain tannin, pigment, phenolics, and other soluble materials that could later cloud the wine. Most commercial white wines and many reds are fined one or more times.

Fining is not exclusive to the realm of winemaking; it’s also used in food processing, for example to make clear consommé. A chef stirs a slurry of egg white into cold stock, then gradually raises the temperature of the pot. Particles suspended in the stock stick to the egg white, forming a mass that can later be removed.

Fining agents

There are two main sources of fining agent, organic and inorganic. The organic substances are proteinaceous, historically made from animal products, but today non-animal substitutes are available. Inorganic substances include clay, carbon, and synthetics.

The following fining agents, listed with their source material, are broadly permitted:

• Albumen — animal (egg white)

• Casein, or potassium caseinate — animal (milk protein)

• Isinglass — animal (fish swim bladder)

• Gelatin — animal byproducts

• Chitosan — fungus (Aspergillus niger)

• Yeast protein extract — fungus (Saccharomyces)

• Alginate — algae (brown seaweed)

• Pea protein — plant

• Potato protein — plant

• Activated carbon — plant-derived charcoal (wood, coconut shell)

• Bentonite clay, or sodium bentonite — mineral

• Kaolin clay — mineral

• Silica gel, colloidal silicon dioxide — mineral-derived, synthesized

• Polyvinylpolypyrrolidone (PVPP) — synthesized polymer

Fining agents don’t remain in the wine and are therefore considered processing aids, not ingredients.

Fining pluses and minuses

Fining removes the precursors that can later cloud the wine. It is helpful for fixing the color in white wine, removing particles that can cause browning. It can similarly reduce color in a red.

Fining also removes some tannin, which smooths the texture of red wine. Even winemakers who forgo other manipulations may use a fining agent to create this silkiness.

Fining can compromise a wine’s delicate aromatics, so winemakers will often run trials to determine the absolute minimum fining agent to attain a balanced result.

Natural winemakers in particular regard the tactic as an unnecessary manipulation, as wine can be clarified simply by racking, or gently moving it off its sediment. This step may need to be repeated and can introduce oxidative faults if mishandled, but naturally clear wine is possible, if labor intensive.

Talking about Fining

You’ll rarely find a winery touting its fining process, since it may raise more questions than it answers. More often you’ll see a wine labeled un-fined, which signifies the wine was clarified and stabilized without a processing aid.

Animal-derived fining agents are a concern for vegetarians and vegans, so wineries that don’t fine, or that use only inorganic, plant, or fungal agents, may declare their wine “vegan friendly.”

Winemakers who avoid fining will likely also avoid filtration, a separate process in which the wine is passed through a membrane to remove additional particles and microbes. Such wines will be described as un-fined and unfiltered.

Further reading

Images of the Atelier des Découvertes in the Cité du Vin, Bordeaux ©2026 Meg Maker

The death of the photograph as proof

Art director reflects on what luxury image-making has become now that no one believes their eyes. Even as recently as a few years ago, a high quality photo proved its own authenticity thanks principally to the effort required to take it. “Even when the entire frame was a fiction, the photograph still held, somewhere in its grain, the quiet insistence that something had been there. Roland Barthes called this ça a été, that-has-been.” The receipts—the high cost of such image making—did the work of insisting the subject was not only genuine, it was worth the trouble. No more. Today a flawless image instantly earns suspicion: Is it real? Meaning specifically: Is it A.I.? Campaigns now double-back on themselves to hide their polish, to leave a trace (or add a trace), of quirk, kink, or imperfection—marks only humans can make. “The word I keep returning to is position,” she writes. “A visible point of view. A small, slightly awkward, decided thing.” Position has driven artistic production for as long as there has been art. I’d like to think that’s lasting.

Lights, camera—

In The New Yorker, Jay Caspian King reports on his efforts to get A.I. to write something, anything, we’d want to read. He asked Claude to churn out convincing prose in the style of George Elliot, Earnest Hemingway, Henry Fielding, and others. Although it proved a reasonably competent mimic of voice, tone, and style, it fell far short on drama. When confronting emotional or psychological obstacles, the characters went limp. “A.I. also had a weird habit of making its characters fidget constantly, always running a finger along the edge of a table or adjusting a collar. The most reliable marker, though, was something more abstract, and, I suppose, upon reflection, even a little spooky. The scenes generated by A.I. had characters, but, apart from fidgeting, they mostly did nothing.” They are ghosts lacking agency: no goal or through line, no way to decide next steps. The result is a story without action—which is effectively no story at all. In grad school I wrote a one-act play over the course of six weeks, itself a kind of Hero’s Journey. It was brutal, but it forced me to confront the sole element that propels all drama, and the reason they call it acting.

Caveat lector

I’m not the first to notice that Substack’s rife with A.I.-generated slop, but the apparent degree to which it has infected wine commentary is truly dispiriting. Lately I’ve been running copy that fails my sniff test through a raft of A.I. checkers. Some pieces are evidently human-made, some a mix of human and A.I., while others are confidently 100 percent spew. The checkers are imperfect, and I grasp the irony of using one machine to check another’s work, which is why I always try several tools before reaching a verdict. The experiments have taught me to be vigilant as I read here and elsewhere, and especially as I amplify others’ work. A.I. has become so adept at mimicking human cadences it readily lulls the reader into a false sense of authenticity. But it can’t say new things, and while a piece may look polished, scratch the surface and the thing turns to dust. I do use A.I. for research, translation, and transcription, but I cannot imagine using it to write about a product (wine) whose existence and worth are substantiated exclusively by human experience.

The global wine scene

The International Organisation of Vine and Wine (O.I.V.) has published its 2025 State of the World Wine Sector. The report considers data on vineyard surface area, wine production and consumption, and international trade by region, type, volume, and value. The data show declines or stagnancy in many of these categories, and overall a global sector struggling with myriad geopolitical and climatic pressures. But there are some signs of stabilization: “Across production, consumption, and trade, volumes remained under pressure, but overall market balances stayed broadly contained, supported by lower output, gradual stock adjustment, and the high level of internationalisation of wine markets,” the authors write. The twenty-six-page report is crammed with stats valuable to writers seeking defensible data for their reporting.

Wine-to-consumer

Another report out this week focuses exclusively on the U.S.: Silicon Valley Bank’s Direct-to-Consumer Report, a follow-on from their annual State of the U.S. Wine Industry Report. Four hundred fifty American wineries completed the survey, 61 percent of which make fewer than 5,000 cases annually. True, big-volume producers sell less wine direct and more through distribution, but the preponderance of tiny wineries in the report shows how invested they are in this high-margin channel. Rob McMillan, founder of S.V.B.’s wine division and the report’s longtime author, notes that today’s highest-performing D.T.C. programs are outwardly focused, mostly on client relationships and events. They also take their offerings on the road rather than rely solely on people showing up at the tasting room with wallets open. The report’s data are useful not only to wineries but also to retail shops that run wine clubs, events managers at private clubs, and regional consortiums seeking to grow wine tourism and consumer engagement. And of course to wine writers like me.

Marginalia

I love alliums in every form, but I’ve recently come to appreciate the special sweet-savory tang of the dried versions, which add dimension fresh can’t match. My current crush is the range of dried alliums from Burlap & Barrel, including onion, garlic, black garlic, and purple shallot. I’m especially enamored of their Toasted Onion powder, which contributes depth and sweetness to sauces, spreads, and marinades. I used to think dried was a lazy shortcut. I’m glad I’ve outgrown my bias.

See you next week.

Images of the Connecticut River in Lyme, N.H. ©2026 Meg Maker

Élevage refers to cellar maturation in vessel

In wine production, élevage is the period of cellar aging after primary alcoholic fermentation but before bottling. During this phase, the wine undergoes further biological and chemical conversion, plus integration, stabilization, and clarification.

Traditionally, wine was aged in wooden barrels or tanks, often made of oak, chestnut, or acacia, or in large terracotta vessels. These materials are still used alongside modern stainless steel and concrete.

The range of styles and materials now available offers creative latitude to the winemaker. One of the first considerations is about oxygen exposure:

• Porous materials like wood offer an oxidative élevage, which aids the development of desirable textural, aromatic, and flavor compounds, and also enhances stability.

• Impermeable materials like stainless steel offer a reductive élevage, limiting oxygen and preserving primary fruit flavors and aromas.

• Semi-permeable materials like concrete and terracotta split the difference, offering micro-oxygenation, to a greater or lesser degree depending on porosity. These environments preserve fruit while giving the wine modest experience with the oxygen it will encounter later in life.

Oxygen management during élevage is a delicate calculus involving grape, style, and target aesthetic expression. Too much oxygen can flatten a wine, muting its freshness and vibrancy and creating volatile acidity. Too little can hamper the wine’s evolution, creating off aromas, particularly sulfurous, and rendering the wine unstable.

Winemakers also need to consider whether the vessel itself imparts flavor to the wine:

• New oak contributes tannin, lactones, and, depending on species and barrel toast, flavors of caramel, chocolate, vanilla, and spice.

• Used oak loses its flavor over time until it’s considered neutral; large wood tanks, after years or decades of use, are always neutral.

• Concrete and terracotta are neutral, although sometimes the wine inherits a faint taste of clay or stone.

• Stainless steel is neutral.

The size of the vessel also matters. Smaller barrels have a high surface-to-volume ratio, exposing the wine to more oxygen and flavor. Winemakers often use a mix of vessels—large and small, reductive and oxidative, new and neutral—to yield a palette of options for producing the final blend.

Other transformations during élevage

Wine undergoes many chemical and biological transformations during cellar aging, and the winemaker may intervene to hasten, impede, or alter these aspects of the wine’s evolution:

• Malolactic conversion (ML): This bacterial process, which converts sharp malic acid into softer lactic acid, may occur spontaneously or the winemaker may inoculate. Nearly all red and amber wines go through ML; for white and rosé it’s a stylistic choice. ML must complete during élevage so it won’t create trapped gas and off flavors after bottling.

• Racking: Winemakers periodically decant the wine off its sediment into fresh vessels. This process clarifies the wine and introduces some oxygen, which can be beneficial during certain phases, especially for red wines.

• Topping up: Adding wine to porous vessels that have lost volume due to evaporation addresses excess oxygen exposure and prevents bacterial and other infections.

• Lees stirring, or bâtonnage: Winemakers may stir protein-rich spent yeast sediment, or lees, back into suspension to enhance the wine’s mouthfeel and flavor. Some vessels are designed to support this action without winemaker intervention; they’re usually ovoid or conical to encourage natural convective cycling.

Talking about élevage

We use the French élevage because it has no direct equivalent in English, although we also use aging, maturation, or just cellaring (although these terms can refer to storage of filled bottles before release). We also say a wine has been raised in oak or raised in a mix of vessels to identify the specifics.

Consumers are unlikely to need the term élevage when talking with a sommelier or shopkeeper, although they may encounter it in technical materials or on back labels. But it’s useful to become familiar with the variables in play during this period of the wine’s upbringing, given their decisive contributions to wine’s aroma, flavor, texture, structure, and longevity.

For example, if a Pinot noir made and aged in stainless steel tastes lightly spiced, that note originated in the fruit, not the vessel. The Pommard, Wädenswil, and 777 clones of Pinot are particularly spicy. Those spice flavors would be naturally amplified in a Pinot aged instead in toasty oak barrels.

On the other hand, if a Pinot grigio smells lightly sulfurous (like a struck match or cabbage), it was likely aged in steel, a reductive environment. This effect can be mitigated by swirling or decanting the wine, exposing it to the oxygen it didn’t get during élevage.

Further Reading

Photos ©2026 Meg Maker

Not that the wines, or even the geography, are much alike. Italian wine is vigorously territorial; a two-hour drive deposits one into an entirely different vinicultural context. Italian Risorgimento, even a century and a half later, remains notional.

Let’s start in Valdobbiadene, with three wines from Prosecco DOCG producer Andreola, founded in 1984 by professional cyclist Nazzareno Pola and now led by his son. Then we’ll head west to Nizza Monferrato to taste a white blend and three Barberas, including two from the newish Nizza DOCG, from Frasca La Guaragna.

Andreola

Pro cyclist Nazzareno Pola used some of his winnings to finance his hobby of growing and making wine in his hometown of Valdobbiadene. By 1984, the activities had turned into a vocation, and he gave his fledgling project his mother’s surname, Andreola. In 2010, his son Stefano took the reins, bringing on winemaker Mirco Balliana. They currently farm 110 HA of vines at 300–550m elevation. In the cantina, they use only free-run juice, selling the rest on the bulk market. This gives them clear liquid that needs no fining or filtration, preserving Glera’s delicate flavors. They make about 1 million bottles annually, all DOCG.

26° I° Rive di Col San Martino Extra Brut Valdobbiadene DOCG 2025

11.5% ABV | About $25
Dubbed 26° I° (or “Twenty-sixth First”) in a nod to the winery’s 26th anniversary, when Stefano took over from his father, and the first establishment of Conegliano-Valdobbiadene as a DOCG. It’s 100 percent Glera, a zero-sugar wine, lean, austere, with a quiet fragrance of green pear and powdery flowers. It feels saline, with firm acidity and a bitter back note that nonetheless yields more ripe green fruit. It’s my favorite of the three Andreola wines.

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I’d love to hear about some of your favorite wine books. Drop titles in the comments and let’s get reading.

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A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France

Steve Hoffman | New York: Crown, 2024 | Bookshop.org

When Hoffman and his family decamp for six months from Minnesota to the tiny village of Autignac in the Languedoc, he swiftly discovers the mismatch between his idea and the reality of la vie à la française. Wine to the rescue. Autignac is situated in the Faugères wine growing region, and Hoffman, and eventually the entire family, get swept into the rhythms of viticulture and production. It’s a book about wine, food, family, and the threads that bind community. Hoffman’s prose is deeply affecting, emotive but never sentimental. This memoir was one of my favorite books of 2024, and I’ve lost track of the number of copies I’ve given as gifts.

Wine Isn’t Rocket Science: A Quick and Easy Guide to Understanding, Buying, Tasting, and Pairing Every Type of Wine

Ophélie Neiman | New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2017 | reference | Bookshop.org (ebook)

I stumbled upon the first French edition, Le Vin C’est Pas Sorcier, at a winery in the Languedoc and bought it on the spot to tote home in my luggage. Then I bought the English edition, and they now sit adjacent, commes des cousins, on my bookshelf. Neiman is one of France’s most celebrated and popular modern wine commentators, and her book offers a friendly, even charming, introduction to all things wine. Sections consider viticulture, winemaking, tasting, service, and acquisition, with illustrations by Yiannis Varoutsikos, who has produced other books in the Rocket Science series. It’s a great introductory wine text for visual learners.

Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer’s Tour of France

Kermit Lynch | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988 | memoir | Bookshop.org

Naïve newly-minted American wine buyer Kermit Lynch lands in France in the mid-1970s with no language skills and even less grasp of French vinous culture and custom. But he’s game for the discovery, as are the vignerons who want their wines exported to the booming U.S. market. Lynch’s memoir of the era is a fast-paced, populous, and amusing, inviting us into cellars to grasp the winemakers’ lived reality. He’s a reliable narrator, clear-eyed, peppering his text with his own opinions without apology or remorse. Adventures is an evergreen memoir for readers who enjoy narrative tourism, French culture, and (recent) wine history.

Libation: A Bitter Alchemy

Deirdre Heekin | White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2009 | memoir | Thriftbooks.com

Around 2007, Heekin and her husband, Caleb Barber, planted hybrid grapevines in their cold homestead in Barnard, Vermont. Today their natural wines are internationally famous, but back in 2009, while Heekin was waiting for those vines to bear fruit, she was training her palate and exploring the realms of fragrance, spirits, and ancient libations. This memoir documents her process, ushering us through remote Italian hill villages, country cafés, vineyards tended by nuns, and a dusty bookstore in Naples where she discovers a recipe for rosolio. Heekin’s writing is lyrical and her anecdotes are enchanting, making this a great read for anyone curious about this winemaker’s learning process or approaches they might use to develop their own palate.

How to Love Wine: A Memoir and Manifesto

| New York: William Morrow, 2012 | memoir | Bookshop.org

Part memoir, part anti-instruction manual, each chapter is a short opinion piece about contemporary issues in wine and gastronomy: tasting notes, scores, markets, pleasure, food, culture. Asimov’s views are expansive and generous, anti-elitist, but he does not hide his own preferences and proclivities. The writing voice is direct, the language spare and journalistic, but the book still has a beating heart. Best for American readers new to wine who feel disillusioned with the way wine is often written about and taught.

Reading Between the Wines

Terry Theise | Berkeley, Calif.: UCPress, 2010 | memoir-ish | Bookshop.org

Not exactly a memoir, rather a series of essays tackling the more penetrating wine questions that vex Theise. Each chapter addresses a specific philosophical question, but all converge toward a singular vision: that wine matters, its beauty is transformative, and that opening oneself to wine is a way toward ecstasy. Theise illustrates his ideas with telling stories from his life as an importer for Skurnik, so most are situated in German, Austrian, and Champagne regions, although he takes side-trips to Burgundy, because Burgundy. Written well above a 12th-grade reading level, and best for readers with some existing familiarity with wine, but an important addition to the canon of philosophical writing about wine.

Amber Revolution: How the World Learned to Love Orange Wine

| Northampton, Mass.: Interlink Books, 2018; 2nd ed. 2021 | nonfiction | Bookshop.org

Woolf’s first, mind-bending encounter with orange wine, deep in a cellar carved into Trieste karst, propelled a years-long quest to understand its history and traditions. This book documents the style’s historical roots in Georgia, Friuli, and Slovenia, sharing stories of family producers who kept the orange flame burning through war and internationalization, or rekindled it after an interregnum of modern winemaking. Photographs by American wine educator Ryan Opaz bring Woolf’s stories to life, imagery that proves especially important given amber winemaking’s unique techniques, equipment, and cellars. It’s an essential book for anyone curious about amber wine, natural wine (different, but intersectional), and the rebirth of this ancient style.

See you next week.

Book cover photos: Meg Maker

Ripe grapes have abundant sugar, mostly fructose and glucose. During fermentation, yeasts eat the sugar and produce alcohol as a byproduct. Once these fermentable sugars run out, the yeasts die and fermentation stops. There remains a trace of residual sugar (RS), but not enough, and not of the right types, to support fermentation. The wine is now dry.

This is dryness as a laboratory metric, and it describes the vast majority of still wines on store shelves and wine lists. Think of technical dryness as the absence of sugar, much like cold is the absence of heat.

Dryness is also a perceived lack of sweetness

Wines with up to about 4 g/L RS taste dry. Above that, sugar starts to show itself to the palate, making the wine read as off-dry or sweet. High acidity can mask sweetness, even up to about 20 g/L RS, pulling the wine into balance. A handful of other confounding factors can make a technically dry wine seem sweet:

• Floral and fruit aromas. Wines made from highly perfumed grapes like Gewürztraminer or the Muscats trick the brain into anticipating sweetness.

• Vanilla, caramel, and warm spice aromas from oak aging. These feel extra prominent in white wines, but are also legible in reds treated to heavily toasted barrels.

• High alcohol. Our tongues read alcohol as sweet, so above 14% ABV a wine may seem sweet even if it’s technically dry.

Some classic wines and styles fall along a dry-sweet continuum

Even if you’ve had a dry one, you might also encounter a sweet one:

• Riesling can be bone dry or super sweet. The styles have legal names, but the alcohol percentage is a tell: dry Riesling is 12% to 14%, sweet is 7% to 9%.

• Sparkling wines have sugar to offset taut acidity. Sugarless wines are Brut Nature (literally “raw plain”). Wines with a bit of sweetness are Brut, and wines with more sugar, and readily perceived sweetness, are Sec (dry) to Doux (soft). Yes, Brut is dry and “dry” is sweet. It is what it is.

Talking about dryness in wine

Because some new wine drinkers start with sweeter wines, “dry” has come to signal sophistication. It’s a false hierarchy, but people often request a “dry wine” to telegraph authority in the category. This doesn’t give a retailer or sommelier much to go on, because most of their wines are technically dry.

If you want a wine you will perceive as dry, ask for any of the following:

• Crisp, refreshing white wines with good acidity;

• Savory, earthy red wines with firm tannins;

• Sparkling wines with low dosage, labeled Brut or Brut Nature;

• Wines lacking floral, fruity, vanilla, or oaky aromas and flavors;

• Lower alcohol wines.

Further reading

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Karl Marx was a lush. So was his friend Engels. has just put online ’s 2017 account of “the drinking lives of the original Champagne socialists.” Marx grew up surrounded by family vineyards in the Ruwer Valley, and his admiration for wine accelerated at university (alarmingly so), steadying (somewhat) as he matured. He met Engels in Paris and the pair became fast friends, bonding over a shared love of drink. When Marx move into exile in London, Engels obligingly kept the Marx household supplied with Port, Sherry, Bordeaux, and champagne. McCoy notes that “Today, it may seem a contradiction—or at least surprising—that these revolutionaries embraced what we now regard as a luxury product. But neither of them saw their love of wine that way. Instead, both believed the pleasures of life should be open to all classes. (That’s certainly my concept of social justice.)”

Wine writer has begun posting on Substack, after “17 debut months of deafening silence” (never fear, Andrew; my initial silence was twice as long). In Meaning: A Story, he recounts his visit to Beirut, in the early 1990s, to meet Serge Hochar of Chateau Musar. The region had just emerged from civil war, and Jefford discovered a culture where “[t]error, catastrophe, serenity and acceptance coexisted… mosaic-like, in a way that I found hard to understand.” He returned in 2016, meeting with more winemakers. After the events of April 2026, he reached out to some of them—“not as a journalist but as a human being”—to learn how they are grappling with the latest calamities and to reflect on wine as both signifier and signified.

fondly recalls a special birthday dinner he arranged for his then-girlfriend, now wife, in 1995, at The Clifton Inn in Charlottesville, Va. In advance of the meal, he’d purchased a bottle of Château Magdelaine Saint-Émilion Premier Grand Cru from the 1966 vintage, which a server at the Inn obligingly opened tableside. “I’ll admit that I felt some trepidation at the prospect of taking the first sniff and the first sip,” he writes. Sadly, “that feeling of apprehension was justified.” They set that wine aside and ordered a different bottle off the list. But wine being wine, that Bordeaux had other plans for them.

Recent fire seasons on the West Coast have demonstrated that vineyards can serve as effective firebreaks. Their relatively low fuel loads stifle blazes, halting their advance across the landscape and making it easier for authorities to gain control of the line. European viticultural regions have also learned this lesson the hard way, and the EU is now promoting landscape management tactics to mitigate wildfire risk. A new “Fire Wine” labeling scheme, currently being tested in Catalonia, allows producers of wine, truffle, and honey to use a special badge on their label after they’ve taken steps to limit excess vegetation, clear buffer zones, and grant water access for use during crises. “We are not only producing wine,” said Elena Górriz Mifsud, a senior researcher in forest science, “We are producing security.”

Speaking of scorchers, last weekend Europe and the UK were subjected to extreme high temperatures; London hit 34.8°C (about 95°F), fully two degrees above a record that had stood for eighty years. To beat the heat, brewery consultant , who lives in London, carried a cold pint out to his garden. As the liquid warmed in the glass, he got thinking about the ideal service temperature for various brews. “So I ran an experiment,” he writes. “I took two beers: an IPA and a Lager and tasted each at 4°C, 8°C, and 12°C. Same glass, same room, back to back… Testing both reveals something much more interesting than a single beer ever could: the relationship between style and serving temperature isn’t one-size-fits-all, and most of us are drinking at least one of them wrong.” His tasting notes tell all.

It should surprise no one that the world of fine cheese is just as complex as the world of fine wine. In , Ned Palmer shares notes on his recent stint judging blue cheeses for the Virtual Cheese Awards. I quote him at length because—well, doesn’t all of this ring a bell? “You have to taste mindfully, paying attention to appearance, aroma, texture, mouthfeel and flavour. We try not to use subjective judgements, like ‘I like this,’ and strive to be as clear and objective as possible. Here my more florid descriptions are inappropriate, and in fact useless. There is no point in saying that this cheese is like drinking from a cool mountain spring on a hot day, we just need to know if the salting is correct, if the flavours are complex but in balance, if there is a decent length of finish, if the texture is creamy, but not claggy. You have to resort to simile to describe flavours, but these need to be communicable; if I tell you this blue tastes of digestive biscuits, marmite and bubble gum I think you’ll get what I’m saying. If I say this reminds me of going for a walk in the Hindu Kush, or my granddad’s aftershave, probably not.”

See you next week.

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Images ©2026 Meg Maker

The word connoisseur derives from the French word connaître, earlier connoistre, meaning “to be familiar with” or “to know about.” A connoisseur is someone who uses their knowledge about a subject to guide decision making, especially but not exclusively in matters of taste.

Connoisseurship in art history

In the late 19th century, the term came to refer to a class of art historians and theorists focused on attribution, the technique of identifying the artist who made a piece of work. Art connoisseurship required extensive study of specific artists as well as their social and political contexts, plus a familiarity with the artifacts of material culture which find their way into portraits, altar pieces, history paintings, and other genres.

The art connoisseur used analytical, critical, and intuitive methods to render pronouncements about an artwork’s provenance. They also authored catalogues raisonnés of artists’ complete oeuvres, in part to share their knowledge and in part to justify their analyses. Their work was crucial to the secondary art market, especially to auction houses and museums whose reputations, and income, required trustworthy authentications.

Art connoisseurship demanded extensive expertise, persuasive reasoning, and earned trust in order to render reliable pronouncements about artifacts of visual culture.

Making the leap to gastronomy and wine

Art connoisseurship persists, but in the mid-twentieth century the term connoisseur leapt into new domains, particularly into gastronomy and wine. It came to refer to a passionate amateur whose knowledge granted them authority to make declarative statements about wine quality. Such pronouncements were not principally about provenance, as had been the case with the art connoisseurs, but were more about typicity, collectability, and value.

A general public skeptical about claims of authority in matters of taste eyed such pronouncements with suspicion, and wine connoisseurship became associated with snobbism, elitism, and condescension. The terms connoisseur and connoisseurship have, as a consequence, mostly disappeared from modern texts about wine, replaced with mentions of the “wine enthusiast” or “wine lover.”

Resurrecting wine connoisseurship

It is newly necessary to resuscitate wine connoisseurship, stripping the negative associations to restore original connotations of human expertise, faithful opinion, and reliability.

In this new construction, a wine connoisseur is a person who has educated themselves about the domain in general and certain sectors in particular. They may or may not possess formal credentials, but they are considered authorities whose judgments are viewed with respect rather than skepticism.

In this reading, wine connoisseurship is the practice of discernment, and the wine connoisseur is a practitioner who arises from the general populace to apply their expertise toward our collective understanding of taste.

In an era where taste is increasingly influenced, even litigated, by artificial intelligence and machine simulation, we need wine connoisseurs, people with physical palates and the skills to use them, to share insights forged by human experience.

Further reading

Image ©2026 Meg Maker