Pairings and Prose, Pop-ups and Pol-Roger: 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. They’re the stories that caught my attention, challenged my thinking, or simply invited me to sit back, relax, and enjoy the read.
Champagne problems
A few weeks ago, Brett Vankoski stumbled into a tasting of Pol-Roger, an experience that sent him careening backward through history. For producers, champagne is less a metaphor for life than the actual stuff it’s made of, especially for houses that endured the trials of two World Wars and subsequent shifts in fate and fashion. In an artful braided narrative, Vankoski interleaves his day’s tasting notes with the history of this house, their relationship with Winston Churchill, and the cuvée that bears that prime minister’s name. “Champagne is neither mere celebratory frivolity,” he writes, “nor the exclusive province of the endlessly discriminating connoisseur. It is both, and everything in between, and perhaps that is why it seizes the imagination and becomes, like some ancient myth, an object of timeless fascination.”
Ideal is just an idea
In the March 6th edition of The Salt, I recommended Dan Petroski’s year-long project to diagram dozens of pastas most emblematic of Italian culture. Now he’s back to share results of the first experiment, pairing regional wines with three traditional filled pastas: ravioli with walnut pesto (Liguria), tortellini in brodo (Emilia-Romagna), and agnolotti del plin (Piemonte). The pairing results surprised everyone present, because the most felicitous wine match wasn’t always technically the most obvious. “Ultimately, our evening proved that while regional tradition may provide the map, only the act of sitting at the table provides the direction,” Petroski writes. “It is a humbling reminder that wine pairing is not a math problem to be solved, but a living dialogue between Mother Nature, the producer’s style, the chef’s hand, and the taster’s palate.”
Effing the ineffable
Andy Neather deftly limns the issues confronting wine experts as they try to put flavor into words. Neather rummages through decades of British and American wine commentary to understand how we arrived at today’s favored approaches, which lean hard on olfactory metaphor, lively personification, and colorful analogy. Some commentators have begun to favor descriptions of weight, length, and structure, and while I tend to agree that texture is the new flavor, I’m not sure it alone drives a novice toward understanding. A mix of strategies is often best, and Neather relates how he tries to blend textural notes with a gloss on flavor and candid impressions of the wine’s character. But he acknowledges that his approach remains a work in process, one that compels him (as the rest of us), to “continue to muddle along.”
The shipping will kill you
It costs Tablas Creek Vineyards $1 million annually to ship $5.5 million worth of wine to club members and online buyers, a figure that eats up 10 percent of the winery’s total revenue. Shipping fees have lately rocketed skyward, fueled by gas surcharges and freighted by add-ons to collect adult signatures on delivery. Plus, wine is heavy. Shipping a case ground to the East Coast costs $75. Second-day air, necessary during some weather periods, costs $165. On the winery’s blog, general manager Jason Haas wrestles with the key question about shipping: Who should pay? The winery? Consumers? A mix? Now that Amazon and their ilk have trained loyal customers to expect free shipping on everything, the answers are complicated, and Haas explores them with transparency and a pragmatist’s eye. The comments section is also alive with good ideas.
An Austrian in Paris
Three years ago, dispirited by the weak showing of Austrian wine in France, winemaker Chris Sciacca decided to bootstrap a month-long Parisian pop-up to introduce his country’s wines to the City of Light. The first event, held in February 2025, took place during evening hours at a specialty coffee shop in the Marais. It was timed to coincide with Raw Wine and Wine Paris, but unlike those big fairs, did not require patrons to schlep to a soulless expo center in the ’burbs. Pop-up Part Deux just wrapped, featuring more wines, more producers, and bottles for sale as well as tasting. The footprint is nimble, lightweight, and sustainable, a model for other groups seeking to promote wines without the expense of a formal campaign. “[A]s an industry, we have to get out of our own way,” says Sciacca, by making the tasting experience enjoyable and unpretentious. “The pop-up also worked in part because we came to our guests and we didn’t make them come to us.” Sciacca and colleagues ran a similar event in Vienna and have set their sights on Copenhagen. They’ll be back in Paris in 2027. He encourages anyone who wants a pop-up in their European city to get in touch.
Kingdom come
In The New Yorker, Hannah Goldfield reports on her visit to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, “a region so remote and bucolic that you might struggle to find a single bar of cell service.” The N.E.K., as we call it here, comprises three Vermont counties, Caledonia, Essex, and Orleans, and lies about hour north of my own small hamlet. I’ve often traveled there both to recreate and to report on its food and wine culture. The character of the region is hardscrabble, poor, and its limited job prospects drive away many young people, leaving an aging population to its own devices. But over decades, affordable land has attracted a mix of free spirits and optimists who have launched food and beverage brands and kept agriculture, always a tenuous proposition in this climate, from becoming an anachronism. Goldfield admirably avoids caricature as she visits a sugar bush, cheese maker, general store, potluck, and bar, meeting the cast of characters who keep the scene rolling. “Listening to the group banter and commiserate, you got the sense that the region’s organizing principle is not just artisanal food but also a distinctly, defiantly Vermont way of living.” One that carries on, at least for now.
Marginalia
I like to make poetry by processing well-known poems through Google Translate, running the original through repeated translation excursions until I have a satisfying result. I call the series “Found in Translation.” Here’s one to take us out, using as base text “The Red Wheelbarrow,” by William Carlos Williams:
Red train
big
listen to me
red boots
visible genes
it’s winter again
I went for water
I’m six months old
baby
Images ©2026 Meg Maker