Welcome (back) to Maker’s Table

Reaffirming my roots and rolling it all together

On February 20, 2008, I launched a blog and named it Maker’s Table. Here’s the first post in its entirety (there was no photo):

Like Drinking a Tree
Ross Estate
Barossa Valley Shiraz
2001
This is our second bottle of Ross Estate’s ’01 Shiraz. We were impressed the first time by the big, dark fruits and balanced tannins. This bottle is woodier, and at 14% alcohol, the fruit is overwhelmed. We’ll let it sit a day with nitrogen to see if some of the oak blows off.
Cost: $17
Update, day two: pure dreck. This wine cleaned our drain.

It was the first time I’d ever written about wine and (need I state the obvious?) I hadn’t a clue what I was doing.

But it wasn’t my first time writing online. Since the turn of the millennium I’d had a personal website, and later added a blog about communications design. Also, I was nearing completion of my master’s in creative writing, with coursework focused on narrative nonfiction and personal essay; my thesis was a memoir. I had started to think of myself as a writer, and as someone who thought about, and wrote about, writing itself.

The new blog was supposed to be an outlet to explore my nascent wine interest. It would make me pay attention to experience and figure out how to wrap words around the thoughts and feelings that arose. It was about learning about wine and learning about writing about wine. But it was mostly a lark.

Ha. A year and a half later I was on a plane to Germany on my first wine press trip. The week I returned I started a new job as head of wine marketing for a California winery. Many more press trips followed. I started contributing freelance articles to wine consumer and business publications. I wrote features, profiles, interviews, reports, and thousands of wine reviews. I helped launch four other wine publications, spoke about wine writing at conferences, took on mentees, joined wine associations. I became passionate about terroir, territorio, territory.

I kept my website going. But eight years ago, tired of laboring on it solo, I renamed it Terroir Review with an aspiration to transform it from wine blog into literary wine and food magazine with multiple contributors. I bought and ran a handful of stories from other writers, but the business model was unsustainable, financed by my main hustle as communications consultant.

I kept learning. Kept writing. Not only about wine. For a while I’ve also had a notion to launch a website about the craft of nonfiction writing. It would be, as the wine blog was, a way to explore and share what I know about the subject, in this case the writing practice, storytelling, narrative, style. A few weeks ago, I decided to go for it and launched this Substack, naming it Plain Stories. My subscribers: I salute you!

But, well, what about the wine and food writing? Where does that material live? I’m also an artist, illustrator, painter, and photographer. Where does that material live? Do I really, truly, need to split my interests, my time, my thinking, myself into N categories, sites, and brands?

I’ve decided the answer is No.

And so I’ve returned to my roots. I have renamed this newly launched Substack Maker’s Table. I continue to love the metaphor of the table, sitting as it does at the heart of the house. It’s a place to come together to eat, drink, talk, share, and love one another. But it can also support solitude: a place to sit with a single cup, a pen, a notebook, and get some thinking and writing done. And of course I am a maker in both name and substance, and admire the many makers (wine and otherwise) I’ve been privileged to meet and write about over the years.

This week I migrated more than 100 feature stories into Maker’s Table from Terroir Review (leaving over 1,300 wine reviews behind; phew). All of those posts are free. Soon I’ll add sections focused on specific topics, so you’ll have options for your subscription notifications.

I appreciate your patience as the publication coalesces into an identity that is the new Maker’s Table. I’m thrilled to have you here.

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A Break in the Clouds, digital painting ©2025 Meg Maker

Coda: You can go home again. Just don’t expect it to be the same or different.