Seats at the Table, Ice in the Wine
This week’s favorite stories about food, wine, and culture
The Salt is my weekly curated collection of writing and marginalia at the intersection of wine, food, and culture.
Wine and the Beards
Geologist and vineyard consultant Brenna Quigley 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 Arielle Bove’s inaugural post for her new Substack, Clueless & Sipping. 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
Stevie Stacionis 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 Road Less Poured 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 Emilie 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
Wait…the Beard awards are pay to play???