Fire Wine, Marx and Engels, Cheese Words, Serving Temps, and Lessons From the Glass
This week’s favorite stories about food, wine, and culture
The Salt is my weekly curated collection of essays, articles, and marginalia at the intersection of wine, food, and culture.
Karl Marx was a lush. So was his friend Engels. World of Fine Wine has just put online Elin McCoy’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 Andrew Jefford 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.
Fredric Koeppel 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 Mathias Lentz, 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 A Cheesemonger's Odyssey, 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
Claggy - a word I did not know, but somehow in context the meaning was completely clear.