Blouge, Beer, Failure, Frost, and Drinking Local Wine
This week’s favorite stories about food, wine, and culture
Welcome back to The Salt, my weekly curated collection of essays, articles, and marginalia at the intersection of wine and food. These are the stories that caught my attention, challenged my opinions, and deserve a wider read. Enjoy.
Blougie
Blouge hits mainstream media. A pastiche of blanc and rouge, blouge 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 with concoctions, 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.”
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 LaShea Delaney. “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. Paul Vigna, 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 Mathias Lentz 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
Stephen Taylor Marsh, 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
Thanks for the shout out!