After the first visit we’d head to lunch at a small restaurant where menus leaned hard on local dishes. We’d start with crispy appetizers, move to primo (always pasta), mercifully skip secondo (it was lunch, after all), and finish with dessert and restorative coffee.

Next we’d light out on a gastronomic micro adventure. We met a goatherd cheesemaker and his flock in a field. The goats mobbed us like Golden Retrievers as we stroked their ears and grasped their horns. A few of us tried our hand at a lactating teat, and we sampled the minute-old milk, warm and sweet.

We toured a 12th-century private castle that had been furnished over the centuries with contemporaneous bric-a-brac, giving the place a historic shabby-chic vibe: medieval ironworks, Renaissance frescos, Murano chandeliers, Victorian bedframes, Art Deco dressers, a velveteen settee that would have looked at home on the set of The Brady Bunch. We made gelato with a chef, visited a honey producer, tasted hazelnuts with a woman who’s revived her family’s grove, and ventured into the forest with a tartufaio and his truffle dog, Hedwig (yes, like Harry Potter’s owl), a German Shorthaired Pointer who scratched black truffles from the soil with the zeal of a starved wolverine.

After these excursions, around 5:00 p.m., we would visit a second wine producer for another tour and tasting. At 8:00 we’d move to dinner, joined by yet another winemaker and sometimes two. Despite fastidious planning by our host, dinners were curiously recapitulative of lunch, with only faint distinguishing flourishes. I believe I had vitello tonnato four times, agnolotti three, tajarìn three or four, mostly with ragù but once with shaved black truffle, plus lots and lots of cheese: tome-style Bra plus robiola and blu, in versions caprine and bovine. I’ve never had to consume so many lactase pills in a single day.

Finally, back to the hotel around 10:30 or 11:00 to shower, sleep, and get ready to do it all again.

Did I mention the wine? The Roero growing zone lies north of Alba across the Tanaro River, a roughly triangular, undulating region mottled with vineyards, hazelnuts, peach trees, olive groves, pastures, and woodland. Castles and other blocky ruins stitch the hills, creating a jagged horizon that evokes wilderness and habitation in equal measure.

Roero’s territorio is markedly different from that of the Langhe to its south, underlain not with marl but with sedimentary sandstone. This rock or rocche was carved into steep gulches a quarter of a million years ago when the Tanaro abruptly changed course.

The grapes of the D.O.C.G. are white Arneis and red Nebbiolo, and the vines speak a different dialect than in other parts of Piemonte. Roero Nebbiolo is approachable, its tannin more limber than that of its southern neighbors, the acid brighter, the fruit red and charming. Arneis here is peachy, floral, and saline, with streaks of acidity. These are gastronomy wines, amiable rather than petulant or showy at table, which makes sense given the strong food culture. And they’re affordable; on my return I’ve found prices in the U.S. ranging from $25 to $45 for the reds with whites rarely topping $25, and that only for the Riserva bottlings.

Producers in Roero actually grow far more Arneis than Nebbiolo, with a total of 1,000 planted hectares of white versus 360 of red. Arneis offers a key market advantage thanks to a fashionable thirst for white wine, in particular white D.O.C.G wine from Piemonte, something that Barolo and Barbaresco cannot boast. (There’s also an infinitesimally small quantity of Arneis spumante D.O.C.G.) Still, Roero isn’t exactly a household name, and some makers label their reds Langhe Nebbiolo or Nebbiolo d’Alba, which they’re legally permitted to do, to take advantage of laxer production rules and more recognizable trade names.

As for the winemaking culture, I sensed among producers more mutual support and admiration than frank competitiveness. Roero’s true competition lies to the south, in Barolo and Barbaresco, and the region gives the impression of an underdog vying for the world’s attention. To be sure, the Roero Consorzio summoned us Americans hoping we could give voice (in English) to the territory, to make our readers aware of its many fine qualities. What I saw and heard and tasted convinced me that Roero is indeed worth talking about and drinking. Stay tuned for much more.

Here’s what I’m reading this week

Simple is Boring

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: We wine writers are trying too hard to explain wine. Wine’s complexity isn’t a minus, it’s a plus, pleasurable especially when it leads to epiphany. But that only happens to people who stick with it beyond a bottle or two. “In wine, drinking and learning about the drink go hand in hand,” argues . “I think it’s generally true that the more you know, the better wine is. Understanding is part of the thrill.” The key, given the morass of wine “content” online, is to find a writer whose voice, cadence, pacing, and tastes fit yours. This is what I’m trying to do here at Maker’s Table: tell stories about food and wine culture in an authentic voice, inserting tidbits of information that, over time, add up to something like a meal.

Bros Taste Blind

“Like the Mets, wine is in a rut… The industry has not adapted to the social-media era,” echoes Arthur Holland Michel, in The New Yorker. Enter the SuperVinoBros, fraternal twins Ryan and Chris Goydos, who serve a steady pour of wine “content” to their hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram. Michel recently accompanied the twins to a Mets game, where they set up a blind tasting exercise in the parking lot after a predictable home-team loss. Ryan’s girlfriend, Carolina Mehedy, a former somm at Le Bernardin, took a sip off-camera. “This is Cabernet Franc,” she told Michel, sotto voce. She nailed it. The Bros did not. Put another chalk mark in the column of hard-won expertise.

Mother Malus, Hiding in Plain Sight

Geneticists have determined that an apple tree planted in Maine centuries ago—and still producing fruit—is a Drap d’Or de Bretagne, a variety first described in a French pomological text in 1628. French settlers evidently brought cuttings of this prized apple, whose name means “Brittany’s cloth of gold,” to the New World, propagating it locally before its promiscuous Malus genes crossed with others and spread across the continent. “The Maine team had found a living lost progenitor to hundreds of varieties—a tree that had been contributing its characteristics to American apples for hundreds of years,” writes , in Scientific American. These survivor trees, which have endured hundreds of years of harsh weather, may harbor genes valuable for creating new cultivars that can withstand climate chaos: “the identification of the Drap d’Or isn’t only about illuminating the past. It also represents the promise that the apple’s characteristics, only partially preserved in its many descendants but now recovered intact, may improve fruit yet to come.”

People Skills I

The wine commentariat is still fizzing over a £3,000 wine writing prize awarded to a piece evidently written, so-called, by A.I. (Full disclosure: I was longlisted in the competition’s short- and long-form writing categories this year, as I have been in years past.) Last week wine writer waded into the conversation with a stern warning for the profession. Yarrow’s no stranger to tech thanks to his decades leading creative digital agencies, and he’s separately described how he uses A.I. tools in his own work. But this episode feels a bridge too far. “I can’t shake the feeling that this isn’t just a story about a wine-writing contest fallen victim to the pitfalls of an A.I.-enabled world. It’s a symptom of a profession slowly being strangled,” he writes. That’s partly because “[t]here is almost no one left to pay anything resembling a living wage for those who want to write about wine professionally. Fewer and fewer people therefore will write about wine, and the quality of the writing that does get done will necessarily suffer.” It’s no wonder people turn to LLMs to create “content.” But it’s also galling considering that £3,000 is more than I make from this Substack in an entire year.

People Skills II

Bear with me: There’s a fun parlor game in which each person writes a famous quote on a piece of paper—“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” or “If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.”—then hands the paper to the person to their left. That person creates an illustration of the quote, then—this is key—folds the paper so only their illustration is visible, then hands it to the person to their own left. That person tries to suss the original quote and write it as a caption to the illustration, or at least write what they think the illustration is about. Then they fold the paper so only their quote is visible, hiding the illustration, and hand it along. This process continues, with each person trying to interpret either the quote or the illustration without benefit of seeing all the prior work. It’s essentially a visual game of telephone, and the reveals at the end, after everyone opens the accordioned pages, are gut-bustingly hilarious, showing wild deviations from the original passages. A team of researchers recently ran this exercise through an A.I. tool and discovered that, unlike the human results, runs eventually converged on the same twelve motifs. Giorgia Lupi, a designer and partner at Pentagram, one of the world’s top design agencies, thinks this makes a strong argument for our messy organic creativity. “Human experience is complex and particular. Creative work means contemplating and translating that complexity rather than flattening it into the simplest answer,” she writes. “This is true whether you are making a data visualization, a brand, or a story. The impulse to optimize for the obvious and to stop at the simplest answer is what I believe we have to resist.”

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker. The Roero Consorzio covered transportation, lodging, food, and logistics for my tour of the region.

It’s a press trip, and I’m looking forward to it, but I’m also feeling a degree of trepidation, because as usual the itinerary’s so tight one couldn’t slip a silk thread between appointments. Our group of eight American journalists will pile into the van at 9:00 a.m. and not return to the hotel until 11:00 p.m., so at dinner I’ll still be wearing the clothes I donned for breakfast, the boots that carried me through the truffle woodland, the sweat-stained (with luck not wine-stained) shirt I wore for tastings at cantinas. There will be no opportunity to freshen up, catch up, call home, or, heaven forbid, jot notes and impressions throughout the day.

This is unquestionably not my favorite way to travel, but it has been the way I’ve traveled since about 2009, when I took my first press trip, a Riesling junket through Mosel, Pfalz, and Rheingau. I was utterly unqualified for that tour, a newbie joining a group of seasoned pros that included a Master of Wine, a pioneering winemaker, and journalists in late career. I tasted a lot, learned a lot, and broke a crown (not recommended, but not surprising given the amount of acid rinsing my teeth). I’ve not been back to Germany, but have since tasted all over Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Chile, Argentina, British Columbia, and the U.S., and attended wine events in Belgium and the U.K.

So this is how I’ve seen the world, carry-on stuffed with clothes that can be repeatedly wrinkled and smoothed and washed in the hotel sink to hang in the shower to dry in time for morning. Camera, notebook, chargers, cables, a hat and a special sunscreen that doesn’t smell. Some years, before covid, I would take six or eight tours like this. After covid and more recently the trips have been less frequent. I’ve declined many invitations, but there are also fewer overall, perhaps because organizers want a fresher voice but certainly because the wine industry is struggling with oversupply and under-consumption. On one hand this might drive producers to push for more media coverage to woo new consumers. On the other hand money is tight and press tours aren’t cheap.

The tours have curious commercial mechanics. Nominally, journalists are guests, wineries are hosts, and organizers act as facilitators. But scratch the surface and things get weird. Let’s take Europe as an example. Producers pay into a regional consortium that handles legal niceties, compliance, research, and other shared objectives. The consortium contracts with a marketing and P.R. agency to promote the wines. This agency maintains relationships with other publicists and marketers, both in country and in important export markets, and works with them to identify journalists to invite on a tour. Trip costs are often substantially offset by subsidies and grants from the European Union, which has an interest in boosting its countries’ economic prosperity. That means in practice, the P.R. firm is a client of the consortium, the consortium is a client of the E.U., and the journalists are the product, acquired toward the desired outcome: good press coverage.

On press trips, all travel, lodging, transport, and food are supplied gratis, but I always incur fees for airport transfer, meals en route, international roaming charges, sundries like water for the room, and, if I’m feeling particularly flush, a seat upgrade from Economy to Economy Comfort. It usually adds up to a few hundred bucks, and once upon a time I could make that back by selling a freelance story from the tour. Nowadays publishing on Substack is actually more lucrative. (Subscribe today!)

But hey, “free trip to Europe,” right? Sure, but it’s exhausting, plus a huge time commitment. I can do nothing else while traveling, so all other paid work grinds to a halt. And although I’m supposed to be the one doing the interviews, producers understandably like to pepper us journalists with questions about the U.S. wine market: trends, consumer preferences, how their wines fit in. Most awkward is when they ask directly for my impressions of the wines in the glasses before me. I prefer not to blurt my tasting notes when surrounded by fellow critics, so I tend to turn the questions around, further probing their stylistic aims or asking how they achieved, in the wine, a particular quality of X or Y or Z.

I return from a weeklong trip with a sheaf of notes on hundreds of wines, at which point I must try to make steak out of hamburger. This is especially challenging when I haven’t had time to pen contemporaneous reflections, to write down quotes I’ve overheard or sketch the details of the larger scene: the light on shiny grapes, the wasps who’ve bored into them, the sticky fruity smell of the crush pad and the tang of alcohol wafting from the fermenters, the fizz of the must as it gets underway, my boot print on the tile floor wet with washing down. And the less glamorous scenes, too: trash along the roadway en route to the fancy castello, a harvest picker peeing in the bushes, a scrawny dog loping around, hoping for a handout. Those are not the scenes the consortium brought me in for, but they’re part of the truth of the region, and it’s my job to record those, too.

The Salt will be off next week, for obvious reasons. I fly out Monday and will return Saturday. Then I’ll set about transforming the itinerary into a story worth reading.

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Here’s what I’m reading this week

Drinking the Old-Vine Kool-Aid

Sarah Marsh MW attended the Old Vine Conference in Napa and left concurring that, yes, old vines have many fine qualities and are worthy of preservation, but not at all costs. “It’s just too simplistic to say that all old vines are good and/or better than young vines. Many old vines have viruses,” she observes. “And if it’s not the scion that’s the problem, it can be the rootstock….Frankly, one can find as many examples for as against old vines in terms of virus, health, and resilience to climatic extremes.” It’s an argument I made recently in Renovating Wine, and I’m gratified to read her take.

Michelin Rates Bordeaux

In July, the Michelin Guide issued its first wine producer ratings, for Burgundy, and earlier this month released a second tranche, for Bordeaux. Master Sommelier has thoughts—or at least questions, including why this, why now, why them, and for whom? He ruminates thoughtfully about the situation, concluding that, at least at first, Michelin needs these regions more than they need Michelin. “To me, this reads more as a brand story that happens to be about wine, wrapped around an honor that at least some of the people receiving it seem to take very seriously. Once you hold both of those at once, the whole thing makes a lot more sense.”

Getting Closure

In The New York Times, looks at the K-shaped trend in wine retail, where larger stores with big-ticket bottles are doing well even as corner shops shutter. The latter just happened to a tiny local wine shop (pictured here) where I led tastings and where, last summer, Asimov stopped in for a visit. “[T]he bigger, wealthier businesses are getting richer, the smaller, less well financed are getting poorer and those in the middle are not quite sure where they are heading other than that they are hustling more than ever.” Asimov offers no solutions, but notes that the small shops that are surviving deliver more than liquid in bottles. They understand their neighborhood, their community, and they engage.

Real Feelings

The wine commentariat remains in a lather over an apparently machine-generated winner in a recent wine writing competition. (See last week’s edition of The Salt and more coverage here and here. You can also read the winning piece yourself.) Much commentary has focused on the facts of the case, but offered a more piercing cri de coeur. “[L]ast Friday morning when I woke to a tri-continental WhatsApp conversation among friends lamenting that the short-form winner of the 67 Pall Mall Wine Communicator Awards appeared to be A.I. slop, I had a violent reaction. Yes, as my mother would say, knife to the heart.” Feiring is one of the world’s most revered wine writers, and this episode caused real pain. Still, she says, “while the award hurt my heart because my own people are hastening the end of the written word, this debate, I hope, will do some good.” We wine writers are only human, after all.

See you week after next.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Yesterday, the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Awards were announced, then swiftly earned criticism for a winning piece that reads like it was made by machine. Several commentators questioned how the judges could have missed the machine’s flashing lights, while the organizers defended their selection. I haven’t seen that anyone’s interviewed the writer, which seems like an obvious next step.

This is an ongoing story, but whatever the outcome, it’s evident that a published policy about A.I. use, transparency about the evaluation rubric, and consent and disclosure by writers would have saved a lot of heartbreak.

This incident invites us to confront an essential truth of wine writing, which is its sensoriality. The writer experiences a wine’s sensory inputs, runs them through their own lived experience and memories, then uses language to craft insights for readers. This is equally true of tasting notes and of stories about people, regions, and styles. The reader relies on the writer’s eyes and ears and palate and mind to taste the world, as well as their ability to generate ideas about these impressions that are worth reading.

An LLM or an A.I. bot (let’s just call it the machine), being non-corporeal, lacks not only that human sensory apparatus but also that human mind and memory. It has none of the capabilities that enable a human to write persuasively about the aesthetic phenomena of material culture. To write, in other words, about wine.

Yet A.I.-generated wine writing is everywhere. The machine gamely spews text that mimics the cadence of the works on which it’s been trained. The results are an exhausting read. The pacing is staccato, each paragraph a single sentence. There are repeated not-this-but-that constructions. The text is rife with analogies that seem novel but don’t hold up to scrutiny. There are arguments that tilt at meaning without landing their point. The pieces end, invariably, in a non-sequiturial mic drop. The machine has ingested the motifs of good writing, but has used them like meat, not salt.

Worse, there’s nothing in the work to drink or eat, to see or feel. There’s no fingerprint on the stem or lipstick on the rim. There’s no light on the vines or smell of the moldering cave. And there’s certainly no maudlin revelation, three glasses in, that the boyfriend was right to leave after all. The text is a ghost, non-carnate, like its creator.

A wine writer who’s used the machine has forfeited the joys of a fiercely difficult, but deeply rewarding, exercise. Writing about wine invites me to confront my own messy humanity as well as that of my reader. That effort’s only worthwhile because we’re both alive.

Here’s what I’m reading this week

Guide to Le Guide

Hospitality writer interviews Chris Watson, a former inspector for the Michelin Guide in the UK and Europe, getting deep into the works of the review machine. Among the gems: “People assume Michelin hires for a refined palate, but that’s not it,” Watson says. “They’re actually looking for a neutral palate, one they can mould to match inspectors around the globe. The expectation is that after training, you rate a restaurant consistently with everyone else. A 1-star in Tokyo should be consistent with a 1-star in London.” Neutral palate; I cannot possibly imagine what that’s like.

I get too hungry for—

Spaniards are eating earlier. At least some Spaniards, those who’ve decided to prioritize sleep, digestion, and an earlier morning start over the tradition of dinner at 10:00 PM. Since the pandemic, dining has shifted a full hour earlier, according to restaurant booking data, and the curve continues to bend. Some people are concerned about losing their culture of socializing, even as others have rebooted the old tradition of tardeo, gathering with friends for a late afternoon snack and drink. Sometimes that’s all you need.

Slopping it up

finds a dispiriting lack of imaginative food writing about her local scene. Dubbing it “Boston restaurant slop,” she offers a primer on the most overused terms, including spritz, subterranean, speakeasy, swanky, lounge, moody, and maximalist, along with evergreen clichés like haute, exclusive, and elevated. The writing is bad, but worse is “the absence of a point of view,” she says. “Not a theme—these restaurants are positively bursting at the seams with theme—but an actual position, a hill on which to die.” If everything is maximalist, then nothing is maximalist.

Red sauce, white wine

Winemaker and pasta aficionado is back with another installment of A Year in Pasta, reporting this time on wine pairings for the summer pastas of Sicily, Tuscany, and Campania. Think tomatoes always need red wine? Think again. “We went into dinner asking whether regional wine belongs with regional cooking and food. We left with a less orderly question: what if belonging is not only a matter of address, but of behavior? The wines that belonged knew when to brighten tomato, when to absorb chile, when to accept eggplant, and when to bring enough tannin for meat. They did not need to be the greatest wines in the room. They needed to keep us eating.”

A wine to take us out

Colli di Lapio Clelia Romano Fiano d’Avellino 2023

About $25; imported by Skurnik
Pale gold, highly perfumed, wild-flowery, with a fragrance of honey and pear and grass. Texturally it’s almost viscous, broad and deep but not sprawling, with flavors of quince paste and green olive, peppercorn and brine. Pour it with fennel salumi, toast points with lardo, oysters or other oceanic things, maybe almonds or hazelnuts. Nothing too complicated, too saline or sharp; you want to let this light shine through.

See you next week.

River vineyard sketches ©2026 Meg Maker

Dystopian food media was a theme of the week.

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

Still reeling…

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

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

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

The restaurant is the story is the restaurant

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

Speaking of taste

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

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Would we ever.

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

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

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

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

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

Why this, why now?

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

What prompted you add the new Wine & Spirits category?

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

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

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

How will this new category benefit beverage writers?

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

Anything else you’d like to add?

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

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

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Here’s what I’m reading this week

The World Atlas of Wine, revised

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

Margaritifesto

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

Peak Hospitality

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

Carbon Sink

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

A Case for a Bottle

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

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

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

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

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

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

Ugh, terrible analogy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Here’s what I’m reading this week

Seeing the Extra in Ordinary

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

European Wine, Mapped

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

The Cellar as Biome

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

West of Eden

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

Guy on Guywear

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

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

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

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

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

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

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

Gourmayto, Gourmahto

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

Family meal

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

Rhymes with natural

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

Absence and salience

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

Metaphorically speaking

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

Wake up and smell the

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

See you next week.

Coffees I have known ©2026 Meg Maker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living the sweet life at last

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

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

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

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

Appetite for change

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

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

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

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

See you next week.

Photos of Burgundy ©2026 Meg Maker

Please note: Our menu options have changed

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

Rules hidden in plain sight

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

Meanwhile at Le Bar

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

Build a better mousetrap

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

Wine in situ

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

See you next week.

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

Wine and the Beards

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

Fluency’s many forms

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

Flipping the script

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

Let’s (not) do the numbers

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

Dive into la piscine

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

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

“Accipite et bibite ex hoc omnes”

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

Cult of personality territory

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

Idle fancy

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

Lost in translation

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

At a loss for words

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

Style and substance

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

See you next week.

June Peonies ©2026 Meg Maker

The death of the photograph as proof

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

Lights, camera—

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

Caveat lector

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

The global wine scene

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

Wine-to-consumer

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

Marginalia

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

See you next week.

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

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

Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Libation: A Bitter Alchemy

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

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

How to Love Wine: A Memoir and Manifesto

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

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

Reading Between the Wines

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

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

Amber Revolution: How the World Learned to Love Orange Wine

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

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

See you next week.

Book cover photos: Meg Maker

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you next week.

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Images ©2026 Meg Maker

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