Do the work of noticing

In The End of Taste as Currency, art director laments how “Taste, in 2026, has become almost entirely performative.” When we recapitulate the same cultural artifacts across myriad forms of production—ads, Instagram stories, Pinterest mood boards—the effect is to empty them entirely of their original significance. They get hollowed out, transformed into recursive patterns of themselves, which we re-absorb and regurgitate performatively without pausing to evaluate their meanings to us personally. As a consequence, “The subcultures that gave taste its texture, the small scenes where references travelled slowly and meant something specific to the people inside them, have been collapsed into a single global pool where everything surfaces at once.” The antidote is actually straightforward: Do the work. Notice what clicks. Trust your discernment. Build your sense of taste the way it’s long been done: slowly but inexorably.

Doing the work of noticing

Clothing designer shares one of his techniques for doing that work. He carries a film camera on his peregrinations around his new home city, Tokyo. The medium limits him to thirty-six shots a week, and once the film’s back he’s got a suite of images that constitute a subconscious mood board. He’s purposely not making photographs; instead “the idea is to be spontaneous, random, impulsive.” He summarizes these ideas further in another Note on his theories of subconscious design. An example: he noticed he’d captured many images of solitary men caught in private reverie as the busy cityscape whorled around them. These images made him think about what happens when we carry our private selves into public spheres, both physical and digital, and the pressure we all feel now “to be online, transparent, and palatable to a mass audience.” And that made him think about how his clothing designs can grant some privacy back to their wearers: adding details only available to them: interior pockets, hidden zippers, sensual hardware that feels good when a wearer clicks it closed. “None of this will translate on photo or video. It’s only for the person wearing it.” And none of this would have emerged had he not done that work of noticing and letting his mind go to work on the results.

Noticing what you’re not supposed to

Abourezk, an exhibition designer at the Guggenheim, has taken to Substack with , inviting readers behind the velvet cordons and temporary walls to see the machinery of the museum at work. In The Anatomy of an Exhibition, she diagrams (literally) every facet of an exhibit, from floor plan and traffic flow to placement, lighting, wall color, pedestals, vitrines, platforms, wall text, and more. It runs to almost four thousand words, heavily illustrated, and she finishes, breathless, realizing, “I ended nearly every section with some version of: I have so much more to say about this, but I’ll save it for another post. So let’s just say… there is plenty more where this came from, and I am so excited about it.” You’ll never look at an exhibit the same way again.

Hello, mini-tini

In The New Yorker, Hannah Goldfield writes about so-called intentional drinking, the rise of the half-sized cocktail, and drinks lists ordered by ABV. We’re in a “very honest” moment, one bar owner tells her, where patrons are aware of the wellness claims against alcohol but don’t want to give up on the ritual. Goldfield feels this. “Not long ago, after a civilized mezcal tasting left me with an earth-shattering migraine, I considered giving up alcohol entirely,” she writes. “The prospect filled me with surprising sadness. I was more attached than I realized, not only to the way that a cocktail makes me feel—chatty, sentimental, hopeful, expansive—but also to the sensual and ritualistic aspects of drinking. I appreciate the beauty and the gravitas of the drinkware and the bar tools, and the sense that there is a right time for the right drink: an austere gin-and-tonic to be nursed after work, a pour of sweet, earthy amaro following dessert, eggnog spiked with rum at Christmas. Drinking is rooted in tradition—it’s no accident that every generation since Hemingway’s has revived the Martini—but it’s also thrillingly captive to personal preference: for me, one Martini is not enough, two is too many, and three half sizes is just right, with plenty of olives to line the stomach.”

Good food writing is only partly about food

—as evidenced in this New York Times piece by Matt Goulding that’s nominally about pasta and ultimately not about pasta. Goulding and videographer Sam Youkilis traveled to Sardinia to document one of Italy’s rarest pastas, su filindeu, “threads of God.” The dough is hand-stretched and turned eight times to make a skein of 256 strands that get mounted on a rack for air drying. Only a handful of people remain who can make it. “It’s not a recipe that can be read and recreated by enterprising cooks in kitchens abroad,” he writes. “[T]he technique must be felt in the flesh, learned through repetition and error until the fingertips know the difference between just right and just wrong.” Yet its significance is inestimable to local culture, served at the annual feast welcoming Christian pilgrims who have trekked overnight through the mountainous terrain to reach the church of San Francesco di Lula. “For three centuries, the pasta and the pilgrimage have been inexorably connected,” Goulding says. “The power of the pilgrimage is found in the balance between solitude and community, sacrifice and hospitality, pain and pleasure.”

Expert ≠ Elitist

I attended college in the mid-1980s, and even at my so-called elite university the anti-intellectualist foment was so prevalent you could practically declare it as a major. Every generation thinks it’s the first in history to be subjected to elitist tropes, and popular backlash generally runs in one of two directions. Healthy communities decide the problem is behavioral and shrug it off, acknowledging the history while pursuing their own aesthetics to create novel cultural moments. And thank god. Unhealthy communities decide the problem is structural and the only remedy is to demolish all intellectual hierarchies, especially those rooted in longstanding tradition. That latter impetus is destructive rather than creative, and depending on scale, erases inestimably valuable aspects of the original. Expertise is not necessarily elitist; it’s only elitist when it’s performed to belittle rather than elevate. And so we arrive at the current hand-wringing about elitism in wine, and the conversation about how to get twenty-somethings to tune into the category. offers a characteristically clear-eyed take. “In an effort to appear democratic, parts of the industry now speak to younger consumers as though they are incapable of seriousness altogether,” he writes. “Expertise gets apologized for before it is even expressed.” The remedy is not to flatten complexity but to celebrate it, and hospitality plays a key role. “The best sommeliers I know understand this intuitively. They do not dumb wine down, nor do they perform expertise like a dominance ritual. They create permeability. They make it possible for people to move upward into greater fluency without pretending the fluency itself is meaningless.” Thirst for complexity is part of what makes us human. Stay thirsty.

See you next week.

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Images ©2026 Meg Maker

My Pinot essay now online

But first, a shameless self-promotion. has put my recent print cover story, The Evolving Languages of Pinot Noir, onto its website, free to read. The article is a lengthy consideration of the evolution of wine writing, using Pinot noir as lens. I outline the modern history of wine commentary, vocabulary, and lexicons, focusing on the shift from evaluative to descriptive gestures and motifs. These changing approaches greatly affected consumer discovery, understanding, and connoisseurship, not only of this grape but of wine writ large. I originally prepared this paper for the Pinot Noir and Identity Symposium held last July at Oxford University, and am grateful to WFW editor Neil Beckett for publishing it in full.

Put down the Aperol

Aperol is not delicious. Vermouth is delicious. Ergo, Abel implores us to jettison the ubiquitous Spritz and drink like a Spaniard this summer. “It’s been an anchor in Spanish culture for centuries,” she says. “La hora del vermut (the vermouth hour) is a sacred pre-lunch ritual across Spain.” She suggests vermouth and tonic over ice garnished with orange peel, salted lemon, green olive, even anchovy. “[I]nstead of cloying summer sweetness, you get something herbal, a little bitter, a little sophisticated.” She spotlights venues in New York and Spain where you can put her advice to the test. “Repeat after me: no more prosecco through a straw!”

News flash: Gen Z can handle complexity

The wine industry wrings its hands over lack of Gen Z engagement, but its approaches to reach this crucial demographic get nearly everything wrong, writes . Wine’s exclusivity is indeed off-putting, but so are condescending efforts to dumb it down to appeal to young drinkers. “Frankly, the elitism framing is just lazy—a tired recitation of wine culture’s snobby past,” Lamb says. “The real barrier is economic… That is a fundamentally different problem than intimidation, and conflating them leads the industry exactly where it keeps ending up: Apologizing for wine’s depth to people whose real problem isn’t that wine is too elitist—it’s that it’s too expensive to gamble on.”

Transhumanity

The spring transhumance is underway. Across Europe, herds of cows, flocks of sheep, and assorted other ruminants are being walked from villages to high pastures, sometimes along paths, sometimes along pavement, following routes they’ve used for centuries, even millennia. I’ve been getting get a kick out of seeing animals kick up their heels as the first spring grass tickles their hoofs. Find a few videos on Instagram here, here, and here and snippets of the journey here and here. English uses the French word, transhumance, meaning “across the ground (or humus);” it’s transumanza in Italian, trashumancia in Spanish, and Transhumanz in German, signifying the ancient roots of the phenomenon. The animals will spend the summer foraging mountain grasses and wildflowers, producing milk rich in carotenoids and other nutrients which yields cheeses of unique richness, color, and flavor; many traditional mountain cheeses are, as a consequence, strictly seasonal. In the fall the animals will reverse the journey, sheltering over winter in barns and paddocks until spring blooms anew.

Another win for the little guys

Don’t mess with small businesses striving to put good food and wine onto American tables. A few weeks ago I wrote that single-origin spice importer Burlap & Barrel, partnering with the Liberty Justice Center, had sued the Trump Administration over new 10 percent import tariffs. They won! At least for now. “On May 7, 2026, the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled in favor of the Liberty Justice Center’s clients in the first round of that challenge, rejecting the administration’s attempt to use Section 122 as a sweeping tariff authority,” they write. The L.J.C. was also behind the successful V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump, in which the Supreme Court ruled in favor of this small wine importer, declaring Trump’s so-called Liberation Day tariffs unlawful.

Agrivoltaics in the vineyard

In Cognac, a grower is partnering with private firm Sun’Agri to blanket their vineyard with 6,000 automated solar panels. The move follows trial installations in Roussillon and the Southern Rhône, where panels have been shown to improve production and mitigate climatic impacts. The new installation, on 4.5 hectares of Ugni blanc, will generate sufficient electricity to supply 2,000 households, but it’s less about power and more about protecting vines from frost, hail, and sunburn. Grapes will be monitored for quality, although since they’re bound for distillation, “quality” is likely more about yield than flavor.

Start making sense

There is no faster way to create animus with a team than to use jargon they don’t understand to explain why they’re failing. Restaurant operations consultant David Mann of learned this the hard way when he tried to talk EBITDA to a chef. “I thought I’d explained it clearly enough, [but] that circled number had nothing to do with the week they’d just run.” So he went back to basics, gathering the team to review the costs they themselves controlled, which is their greatest leverage on a balance sheet. “Once chefs and managers can see their own decisions in the numbers, they start bringing ideas to you instead of waiting for you to show up with another cut.”

Machine learning

Wineries began digitizing back-office operations at the turn of the millennium and now base business on a sprawling suite of tools that mostly don’t integrate. AI to the rescue, says winery management consultant , thanks to automated dashboards that make sense of the mosh. Silver explores the many implications of this imminent shift, including how offloading data grunt work to a machine paradoxically opens space to suffuse the business with humanism. “[W]hat remains is the part wine should always have been emphasizing in the first place: the hospitality, the ritual, conviviality and belonging, the magnificent culture, storytelling, the taste, and of course, the place.” Humans are freed to focus on what humans do best: being real.

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Renovating natural wine

interviews political philosopher Roberto Frega about his theory of “post-natural” wine. Frega argues that although natural wine “started as a conscientious and liberating movement, [it] quickly turned into dogma and marketing pap that gave cover to a lot of naïve, careless, and often anonymous liquids.” Happily, a new group of “post-naturalists” is returning to first principles and making much better wines. In his new book, Il Vino Post Naturale, Frega gives voice to a perspective that’s been sorely missing in the conversation about natural wine: It has done some good but can do better. I think in many ways the newest gestures are less post-natural and more pre-“natural,” made according to terroir-driven techniques that were forged in the pre-industrial era and have endured because they work. I’m hoping for an English translation of his book.

Exquisitely rare: a paid wine writing fellowship

Applications are open through 26 May for the Allen Shoup Fellowship, designed to introduce newer wine communicators to the wines of Washington State. Up to two writers will be selected, and the award includes travel expenses, accommodations, and wine samples along with a $3,000 stipend. The fellowship is coordinated by WA Wine, the state’s wine trade organization, a team that really knows their stuff. Washington terroir is diverse and the issues facing makers are unique. If you consider yourself “emerging,” throw your hat into this ring.

Every campus needs a cookie house

My husband attended Carleton College, in Minnesota, and after twenty-four years of marriage I thought I knew everything about it. But I was delighted to discover recently that Carleton has a cookie house: “a place where anyone from the campus, at nearly any hour, will find a pantry stocked with the ingredients for making chocolate-chip cookies.” Or really anything they want, provided they share it with others and clean up their mess. It started decades ago thanks to the generosity of a retired Carleton administrative assistant and, well—it’s a sweet story, in more ways than one, so you should just read it.

Roll your own press trip

Having taken scores of wine media trips, I’ve seen firsthand how costly and time consuming they are to produce. That’s why regions and wineries hire PR firms and travel agencies to attend to the details (c.f. costly). Recently, a group of six Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) wineries in Paso Robles pooled talent, time, and resources to stage one themselves. “The plan was simple: invite writers from across the country to show them that Paso Robles is the epicenter of regenerative organic viticulture.” The team got help from related stakeholders, like Travel Paso and the Regenerative Organic Alliance, and assembled a swag bag of ROC goodies to hand out to the twelve journalists on the three-day tour. Tablas Creek’s marketing director, Ian Consoli, one of the organizers, detailed the process on their winery’s blog—in yet another example of the winery’s commitment to helping fellow producers.

More Brunello for the rest of us

asks, “Is Brunello’s prestige earned or engineered?” The question was prompted by her Florentine wine writing colleague who eyes the style with animus. Montalcino was excluded from Chianti Classico for geographical and political reasons, prompting producers to push for their own DOCG to codify use of a local Sangiovese clone purposely developed by the Biondi-Santis. “This wasn’t the continuation of a long-standing regional tradition. It was a decision,” the argument goes, and “if Brunello is defined more by decision than by difference, then its identity begins to look less like nature and more like narrative.” But grapes always wander, sometimes by accident, often on purpose, and it should not feel surprising when makers create deliciousness from old things in new places. Coleman decides the wine’s success justifies its existence: “Brunello does what great wine is supposed to do: it ages, evolves, and tells a consistent story over time.”

The man, the mystique, the mystery of it all

Years ago, interviewing Vasco Croft on his patio in Vinho Verde, I snapped to attention when he remarked that “all kinds of people are doing biodynamics who not only don’t know Steiner’s thinking, but they’ve never even been through the biodynamic lectures. Writers write about biodynamics and they don’t know what it is. They never took the trouble.” That was me. (Read my full interview here.) It took me a decade, but I finally blocked a few hours on a weekend to read all eight of Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on biodynamics, otherwise known as “The Agricultural Course.” In 1924, a group of farmers had invited him to Schloss Koberwitz to tell them how to apply his Anthroposophic principles to their working landscape. Steiner was not a farmer, not experienced with agriculture any way, and certainly did not grow or make wine, yet the methods he advanced a century ago became the basis of the biodynamics still practiced today. My friends, these lectures are… a lot. If you posses even modest fluency in science they will catapult you into a state of exasperated stupefaction. But read them anyway, because if you’re going to embrace something, or criticize it, or a mix, Croft is right: You should at least know what you’re talking about.

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Blougie

If it’s in the mainstream media, it’s already over. Blouge, a pastiche of blanc and rouge, is the graceless moniker for a new class of wines made by blending white and red grapes. To review: Most wines are made from one or the other, not both, with conspicuous exceptions: champagne, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Côte-Rôtie, old-school Chianti, rosé in rare instances. Blouge is a light colored, low-tannin red best served chilled, essentially a red wine that drinks white. Along with orange wine (essentially a white wine that drinks red), pét-nat, carbonic glou, and other funky what-nots, blouge is positioned as an entry point for inquisitive Zillennials. I’ve yet to try one of these, although I make blouge all the time at home, concocting a petite cuvée to taste two wines as one. I also mix white with white and red with red, aiming to patch holes or smooth edges or balance acidity or tannin. This is not how true wines are blended; that happens in the winery, not the kitchen. But it’s fun to tinker, sacred cows be damned.

Town crier

Wine entrepreneur Maryam Ahmed penned a cri de coeur in Bon Appetit targeting hospitality businesses with a professed locavore ethos which fail to promote local wines. (Her article’s behind a paywall, but she also shared the main points on Instagram.) There are some structural causes. The three-tier system presents critical impediments, as reps rarely do the necessary market work for small local producers, especially in a commission-driven system that incentivizes reliable global brands. Local producers get stuck doing all the heavy lifting: showing up at accounts, leading trainings, hosting popups and takeovers, and muscling their way onto by-the-glass lists. Ahmed’s solution? First, customers need to speak up. “The beverage industry is a massive, layered system, but it moves in response to demand,” she writes. “That puts real power in the hands of the drinker.” Second, buyers need to listen. “[A] wine list can be an act of alignment—a chance to reflect where we are, who we are, and what we stand for. And I believe that if we want guests to feel a deeper sense of place, we have to make sure the place is truly present in the experience.”

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Speaking of reps

“Being a wine rep for a small company is a job no one really tells you how to do,” writes wine buyer and consultant . “The companies I’ve worked for have been much more like running your own business. It is your job to find the clients, build the relationships, and email every day, forever. And most of the time, the answer is no.” Delaney got her start in L.A. with a firm that provided zero training or support, so she had to learn how to handle failure. “Don’t take anything personally. Someone not emailing you back is not a rejection of you. It actually has nothing to do with you… The silence is part of the job,” she writes. “My job is to keep showing up with the bottle anyway.”

Shattering news

Last week wine growers from New York to Virginia and as far inland as Michigan were hit with a devastating, season-altering frost. , who writes about East Coast wines, reached out to producers to collect dozens of reports of the destruction. The Mid-Atlantic had been experiencing a stretch of unseasonably warm weather with temperatures in the 80s Fahrenheit, which prompted vines to push primary buds and start unfurling tender shoots. Then on two consecutive nights, the mercury dropped into the 20s, rupturing the cells of this new tissue. Vines have resources to push secondary and tertiary buds, but that growth is less productive, mostly serving to keep the plant alive and make carbohydrates for the following season. Some of the quotes Vigna gathered paint a grim picture of the 2026 vintage: “a frost unlike anything we’ve seen before;” “possible total loss; first time in 25 years;” “The worst day in my 38-year history of working with the wine and fruit industry;” “If there is damage, it certainly won’t be for lack of trying—we did everything we could to protect it.”

Bad bellywash

It’s not your imagination: cheap beer gives you a worse hangover. Beer expert is here to tell you why. Cheap beer is industrial beer, made with adjuncts like corn, rice, and corn syrup, whose fermentations create higher concentrations of the byproducts like fusel alcohols and acetaldehyde that contribute to hangovers. Filtration—common for less expensive beers—removes some of these volatile compounds, but it also eliminates protective polyphenols. “The reason that £3 can sometimes wrecks your morning isn’t a mystery or bad luck,” he writes. “It’s the predictable result of industrial shortcuts: cheaper ingredients, faster fermentation, aggressive processing that leave your liver dealing with a messier chemical cocktail than it would from a more carefully made beer.” Choose wisely.

The New (wine) Criticism

, a scholar of literary theory and twentieth century American public intellectualism, finds parallels between the New Criticism and wine criticism. Under both regimes, text and wine are treated as self-contained objects whose depths are plumbed solely by examining their constituent parts. In literary criticism that’s done via close reading of the text itself; in wine criticism it’s done via tasting and applying a fixed suite of evaluative criteria. Marsh calls New Criticism a democratizing force that unmoored texts from their socio-cultural and historical baggage; everyone, regardless of social status, “had the right to interpret, assess, and judge the thing in front of you. It was not locked in the past, nor behind reams of prior knowledge.” It is indeed true that WSET tasting grids, the Aroma Wheel, wine certifications, and related professionalizations aimed to standardize wine evaluation and remove personal bias. Problematically, this stripped humanism from the exercise, and also required tasters to master a suite of abstruse and arbitrary criteria in order to render “reliable” pronouncements. In the case of wine, instead of democratizing, we got gatekeeping. I’m working on that.

See you next week.

Images of spring ephemerals ©2026 Meg Maker

Drones in the vineyard!

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

Sweet success

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

A new AVA

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

Brace yourself, Vermont

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

The art of the blend

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

Wine’s structural economics

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

Natural language query

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

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

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

See you next week.

Paintings ©2026 Meg Maker

Tastefully yours

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

Randall ruminates

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

Who snebbed my cheese?

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

Snack/bar

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

Organized labor

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

Forbes adds voice to chorus

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

See you next week.

Cheese boards I have known ©2026 Meg Maker

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