Dystopian food media was a theme of the week.

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

Still reeling…

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

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

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

The restaurant is the story is the restaurant

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

Speaking of taste

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

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Another useful category is method.

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

Method is about making.

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

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

Glossary of winemaking methods

Traditional method

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

Ancestral method

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

Tank method

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

Skin contact

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

Passito

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

Botrytised

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

Sous voile

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

Sur lie

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

Fortified

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

Aromatized

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

Saignée

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

Pressed

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

Barrel-fermented or barrel-aged

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

Discussion

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

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

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

Sparkling methods provide a good example of this phenomenon.

Read more

Would we ever.

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

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

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

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

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

Why this, why now?

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

What prompted you add the new Wine & Spirits category?

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

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

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

How will this new category benefit beverage writers?

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

Anything else you’d like to add?

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

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

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Here’s what I’m reading this week

The World Atlas of Wine, revised

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

Margaritifesto

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

Peak Hospitality

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

Carbon Sink

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

A Case for a Bottle

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

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

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

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

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

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

Ugh, terrible analogy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Here’s what I’m reading this week

Seeing the Extra in Ordinary

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

European Wine, Mapped

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

The Cellar as Biome

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

West of Eden

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

Guy on Guywear

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

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

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

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

Modern antecedents

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

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

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

The new lexicons

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

Three main approaches emerged:

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

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

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

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

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

Gourmayto, Gourmahto

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

Family meal

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

Rhymes with natural

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

Absence and salience

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

Metaphorically speaking

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

Wake up and smell the

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

See you next week.

Coffees I have known ©2026 Meg Maker

Etymology

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

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

Potassium in biology

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

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

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

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

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

Jurançon’s history

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

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

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

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

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

Jurançon terroir

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

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

The grapes of Jurançon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living the sweet life at last

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

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

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

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

Appetite for change

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

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

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

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

See you next week.

Photos of Burgundy ©2026 Meg Maker

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

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

How new grape varieties arise

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

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

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

Indigeneity and fitness to place

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

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

The wandering vine

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

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

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

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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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