The Pope, The Hamptons, Substance and Style
This week’s favorite stories about food, wine, and culture
Welcome back to The Salt, my weekly curated collection of writing and marginalia at the intersection of wine, food, and culture.
“Accipite et bibite ex hoc omnes”
It’s not surprising that the Pope maintains a large estate in the countryside of Lazio, outside of Rome, where he can kick off his papal regalia and crack open a book not written in Latin. It’s not surprising that this 55-acre estate, dubbed Borgo Laudato Si (roughly, “Praise-be-to-you hamlet”), includes many acres of regeneratively grown vegetables, olive trees, and herbs. It’s not surprising, given Christian ethos, that the operation trains refugees and formerly incarcerated people in the skills of sustainable ag, livestock production, and hospitality. It’s even not surprising that the site has a small vineyard; this is Italy, after all. What is surprising is that they’re growing—wait for it—Cabernet Sauvignon. Yes, the grape of Bordeaux, made varietally, aged in oak barrels, to be sold exclusively within the Vatican or poured for visitors at the estate. Pope Leo XIV blessed the first release of 5,000 bottles, raising a glass in praise. No word on how it tastes.
Cult of personality territory
Belgian-turned-Sicilian winemaker Frank Cornelissen recounts lessons learned from two decades on Mt. Etna. Cornelissen moved to the volcano to chase the platonic ideal of Nerello Mascalese by way of Burgundy and Barolo. He always worked organically, and eventually became a scion of the natural wine movement, eschewing all interventions. Then the moldering 2015 vintage made him realize that a few parts per million of sulfite might save his tail. “Yes, I’ve changed. I needed to,” he writes, “In the first 10 years, my wines were very much Frank Cornelissen wines, and much less Etna wines. I made some great wines but also some that were off.” I’ve tasted this variability with his production over the years; sometimes the wines felt magical, ineffable, and sometimes they were so volatile that drinking them felt like biting red tinfoil. Cornelissen now produces 180,000 bottles per year and manages a team of thirty workers. A focus on territorio is hard, but not impossible, at such scale. “People say I’ve mellowed or become more conventional,” he writes. “but if you don’t evolve when you learn new things, you’re stupid—and I’m not stupid.”
Idle fancy
Bodhi Landa, in Thirst Behavior, takes stock of the excesses of the Hamptons leisure class and the new pall of ironic detachment that lingers over North and South Forks. Recreation is performed, documented, and re-cut into new stories about itself. “There is now a socially mandatory quantity of irony one is expected to bring to luxury. You can spend four hundred dollars on a melon, provided you acknowledge that four hundred dollars for a melon is objectively insane,” he writes, adding, “There is no outside position from which to critique the Hamptons, because the Hamptons will film your critique, add a location tag, and sell it back to you as ambiance. The machine no longer needs beauty as raw material. It runs on its own exhaust.”
Lost in translation
Readers may be aware of my longtime interest in the language of wine, how we use words to make sense of it for ourselves and others. I’m especially interested in how our English word choices span cultural and social divides—or don’t—as they make leaps into translation. Allison Creed, a researcher in cognitive linguistics at the University of Melbourne, has just published a review paper of 77 recent publications about wine language. In The Conversation, she shares examples of English-language wine metaphors that don’t travel well, causing problems for understanding and economics. “This matters for the wine industry, because wine descriptions directly influence purchasing decisions and overall enjoyment,” she writes. “The solution is not to stop using metaphors to describe wine—that would be impossible. The question is how metaphors can work inclusively across cultures, rather than carrying cultural baggage that can lead to bias and market undervaluation.”
At a loss for words
Ivo Freeman (on Substack as ivo.) is also thinking about the limitations of wine language. The handful of words we use to describe direct flavors—bitter, sour, salty, sweet, and savory—forces us toward metaphor and analogy to convey the qualities that make food worth talking about. Wine’s comparables consider the chemical signatures we can directly detect—flavors of sweetness, bitterness, and savoriness, yes, but also volatile acidity, Brett, TCA, and others often caused by flaws. Like Creed, Freeman thinks metaphors are here to stay—even the more contested terms, like mineral—because they do useful work by advancing wine education and sales. Still, language often fails us. “Describing wine is like trying to thread a needle with oven gloves on,” he says. “You can perceive the required specificity, but you simply don’t have the tools available to you to do it justice.”
Style and substance
The Wine and Spirits Education Trust (WSET), founded in the UK in 1969, gives many wine students their first brush with formal wine lexicons. WSET has striven in recent years to modernize and, crucially, globalize their credentialing programs, but as we’ve seen, the project is complex. The organization just announced a brand refresh or, as they put it in their press release, a “comprehensive brand evolution,” aimed to enhance their international appeal and reach younger audiences. The name is now just WSET, the tagline is “Global Drinks Education,” and the streamlined logotype erased an image of Greek goddess Ariadne. I’m picky about graphic design, and to me the new wordmark feels bland and generic. Is this a tennis club, a consulting firm, a pharmaceutical, or something else? Brand updates are hard. There are always too many stakeholders, too many voices, more cooks than the kitchen can hold, and some should have hung up their aprons long ago. But I wonder what might have happened had the designers embraced the Zillennial design aesthetic: goopy, organic, playful, hand-made. There are plenty of food and drinks examples already in the wild: Swurl, Full Pour, Gourmet, Vittles, Caper, Juice. The brand would look different, feel different. It could be more than redesign; it could be revolution.
See you next week.
June Peonies ©2026 Meg Maker