It’s not you, it’s me

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

Paydirt

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

Right on the money

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

“Best” “Sellers”

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

Succession plan

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

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Design for success

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

Getting spicy

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

Growth of a Gourmet

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

To taste is human

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

“You are being given a free recipe”

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

Marginalia: all nature in motion

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

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Sietsema has lunch so you don’t have to

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

Vitis non interrupta

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

Wine and Desire

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

Two men and a market

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

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

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

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

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Champagne problems

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

Ideal is just an idea

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

Effing the ineffable

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

The shipping will kill you

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

An Austrian in Paris

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

Kingdom come

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

Marginalia

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

Red train

big
listen to me

red boots
visible genes

it’s winter again
I went for water

I’m six months old
baby

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

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Required reckoning

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

Esther Mobley heads East

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

SLO Wine

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

Plugging hybrids

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

What’s velho is new again

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

Wine School

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

Marginalia: another favorite condiment

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

Bookmarking…

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

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

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

Burgundy, top of mind

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

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

A natural progression

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

The advice columnists

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

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

Pain and Pasta

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

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

The form isn’t even that old

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

Marginalia: a favorite condiment

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

Two poems (circling back to Burgundy)

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

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

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

Images ©2026 Meg Maker