The Consultant, the Critic, Some Painters and Cooks: The Salt
This week’s top stories about wine, food, and culture
Welcome back to The Salt, a weekly curated collection of essays, articles, and marginalia at the intersection of wine and food.
Sietsma has lunch so you don’t have to
Food critic Tom Sietsma reviews the pop-up by famous/now-infamous chef René Redzepi in My Lunch at the Disgraced Noma L.A. Months ago, Sietsma bought two tickets at $1,500 apiece; “the most I’ve ever spent on a meal,” he says. While he was en route to L.A. for the lunch, Julia Moskin broke the story of Redzepi’s alleged abuse of staff at his Copenhagen flagship. “I knew I’d take heat for keeping my Friday lunch date,” writes Sietsma. But journalistic curiosity got the better of him (plus, most tickets were nonrefundable). “While I abhor the chef’s past behavior… now that he has distanced himself from the project, why punish his entire team?” Sietsma found a lot to love in the seventeen ultra-locavore courses, paired with a half-dozen or so California natural wines, which unfurled over the course of three hours. Was it worth it? He leans toward Yes, for a complex of reasons.
Vitis non interrupta
A new study of ancient French grape DNA has shown that for at least 4000 years, humans have been cultivating grapes via clonal selection to preserve the qualities they value. “Vegetative propagation, evidenced by genetically identical clones across sites and centuries, emerged by the mid-Iron Age and became a pillar of viticultural practice,” the authors write. “Remarkably, one Medieval sample from Valenciennes is genetically identical to modern ‘Pinot Noir,’ demonstrating clonal continuity over nearly 600 years.” In The New York Times, science journalist Rebecca Dzombak explores the implications, noting that such genetic continuity separates grapes from other food crops, like corn, which have been far more heavily manipulated. But unlike corn, which is an annual grass, the woody perennial vine is readily propagated by cuttings, which are also easily transported, preserving the recipe for vinous success.
Wine and Desire
Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit (c. 1593), considered the first painting in which the artist found his voice, is currently on loan to the The Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. Regrettably I have not seen it, but you can, through April 19. The model was sixteen-year-old Sicilian painter Mario Minniti, who worked alongside Caravaggio and modeled for many of his other works, including The Calling of Saint Matthew, and Bacchus. (So, vaguely wine-adjacent.) The painting is sensual, lavish, but the fruit is spotted, overripe, the leaves curled. These vanitas motifs contrast with the youth’s petulant come-hither gaze, as if to say, “I am alive, you are alive, we are both mortal, let’s eat the fruit.” I thought about this painting as I read Fredric Koeppel’s recent essay Wine and Desire and Death, which considers these same themes as explored by the Dutch painters of domestic still life, with their tables strewn with fruit and meat, fish and nut, bread and wine. The displays are lavish, yet the message is simple: Eat up, drink up. “[W]ine, as gratifying as it can be in its myriad dimensions, is as ephemeral as any human endeavor,” Koeppel writes. “We value most what vanishes before our grasp.”
Two men and a market
The news that sent me on my longest reading jag was the death last Friday of wine consultant and “flying winemaker” Michel Rolland, at age 78. Rolland was born to a wine growing family in Pomerol, studied with Émile Peynaud, at the University of Bordeaux, and, with his wife, the enologist Dany Bleynie, founded a wine consultancy that counted among clients not only top Bordeaux estates but also now-famous wineries in the U.S., Argentina, Chile, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere.
Jane Anson was among the first to publish an obituary of Rolland; Eric Asimov also shared a long profile. There have been more, and every one I’ve read also mentions American critic Robert M. Parker Jr. The two men shared a sensibility, a taste for wine that prioritized shiny technicolor flavors over the sepia-toned sensibilities of the past. Their work was always in dialogue, the critic rewarding the maker’s style, the maker advising his clients on how to get top scores. The result has been labeled “Parkerization,” but Rolland was the one with his hands on the dials. The feedback loop bent the world wine market in ways that still reverberate.
The men’s influence on Bordeaux, in particular, cannot be overstated. In his essay Michel Rolland and the Fall of Bordeaux, Andy Neather sketches how the region’s fortunes have swelled and ebbed, highlighting the roles each man played in the drama. In the late seventies Bordeaux had been suffering from bad vintages and global economic contractions. This is precisely when Parker launched The Wine Advocate and just as Rolland was gaining traction with his consultancy. “Bordeaux’s salvation came in the shape of climate change and more reliable ripening; better winemaking; and a Baltimore lawyer and amateur wine writer, Robert Parker,” writes Neather, noting that Rolland’s “style was also, fortuitously, precisely Parker’s taste in reds.” Today, Bordeaux is once again in extremis, and Neather doesn’t view the newly introduced, light red claret as a quick fix. “In the post-Rolland era, it will take a lot more than that to rescue the fortunes of France’s greatest red wine region.”
Following threads of these men’s biographies, I unearthed a lengthy portrait of Parker in The Atlantic by the excellent narrative journalist William Langewiesche. It runs to nearly eighteen-thousand words, but I wish I’d read it sooner. Published just over twenty-five years ago, in December 2000, the piece introduces us to a Parker at peak influence, right before he started hiring additional critics for The Wine Advocate. It was a period of wine oversupply in Bordeaux (not unlike today), and producers needed his help even while privately whingeing about the influence and tastes of this powerful critique américain. “When Parker criticizes their wines, they see their prices tumble. When he compliments their wines, they can’t resist using this to their advantage and proclaiming their scores,” writes Langewiesche. There’s much more in the piece to flesh out the man who retired from writing in 2019 yet whose influence lingers. Required reading for anyone who’s ever complained about Parker, or praised him, or both.
See you next week.
Images ©2026 Meg Maker