New Tech, Novice Drinkers, Pinot Talk, Vermouth Summer, Transhumance, and Humanizing Wine

This week’s favorite stories about food, wine, and culture

May 14, 2026

The Salt is my weekly curated collection of essays, articles, and marginalia at the intersection of wine, food, and culture. These are the stories that caught my attention, conveyed new insights, and sparked creative thinking.

My Pinot essay now online

But first, a shameless self-promotion. World of Fine Wine 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.

The author standing in seedling apple blossoms in Lyme, NH

Put down the Aperol

Aperol is not delicious. Vermouth is delicious. Ergo, Emilie 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 Caroline Lamb. 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.”

Real food isn’t uniform; one day’s haul in Lyme, NH

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.

The Connecticut River in early May, Lyme, NH

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 Restaurant 101 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 Jim Silver, 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.