Ripe grapes have abundant sugar, mostly fructose and glucose. During fermentation, yeasts eat the sugar and produce alcohol as a byproduct. Once these fermentable sugars run out, the yeasts die and fermentation stops. There remains a trace of residual sugar (RS), but not enough, and not of the right types, to support fermentation. The wine is now dry.

This is dryness as a laboratory metric, and it describes the vast majority of still wines on store shelves and wine lists. Think of technical dryness as the absence of sugar, much like cold is the absence of heat.

Dryness is also a perceived lack of sweetness

Wines with up to about 4 g/L RS taste dry. Above that, sugar starts to show itself to the palate, making the wine read as off-dry or sweet. High acidity can mask sweetness, even up to about 20 g/L RS, pulling the wine into balance. A handful of other confounding factors can make a technically dry wine seem sweet:

• Floral and fruit aromas. Wines made from highly perfumed grapes like Gewürztraminer or the Muscats trick the brain into anticipating sweetness.

• Vanilla, caramel, and warm spice aromas from oak aging. These feel extra prominent in white wines, but are also legible in reds treated to heavily toasted barrels.

• High alcohol. Our tongues read alcohol as sweet, so above 14% ABV a wine may seem sweet even if it’s technically dry.

Some classic wines and styles fall along a dry-sweet continuum

Even if you’ve had a dry one, you might also encounter a sweet one:

• Riesling can be bone dry or super sweet. The styles have legal names, but the alcohol percentage is a tell: dry Riesling is 12% to 14%, sweet is 7% to 9%.

• Sparkling wines have sugar to offset taut acidity. Sugarless wines are Brut Nature (literally “raw plain”). Wines with a bit of sweetness are Brut, and wines with more sugar, and readily perceived sweetness, are Sec (dry) to Doux (soft). Yes, Brut is dry and “dry” is sweet. It is what it is.

Talking about dryness in wine

Because some new wine drinkers start with sweeter wines, “dry” has come to signal sophistication. It’s a false hierarchy, but people often request a “dry wine” to telegraph authority in the category. This doesn’t give a retailer or sommelier much to go on, because most of their wines are technically dry.

If you want a wine you will perceive as dry, ask for any of the following:

• Crisp, refreshing white wines with good acidity;

• Savory, earthy red wines with firm tannins;

• Sparkling wines with low dosage, labeled Brut or Brut Nature;

• Wines lacking floral, fruity, vanilla, or oaky aromas and flavors;

• Lower alcohol wines.

Further reading

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Karl Marx was a lush. So was his friend Engels. has just put online ’s 2017 account of “the drinking lives of the original Champagne socialists.” Marx grew up surrounded by family vineyards in the Ruwer Valley, and his admiration for wine accelerated at university (alarmingly so), steadying (somewhat) as he matured. He met Engels in Paris and the pair became fast friends, bonding over a shared love of drink. When Marx move into exile in London, Engels obligingly kept the Marx household supplied with Port, Sherry, Bordeaux, and champagne. McCoy notes that “Today, it may seem a contradiction—or at least surprising—that these revolutionaries embraced what we now regard as a luxury product. But neither of them saw their love of wine that way. Instead, both believed the pleasures of life should be open to all classes. (That’s certainly my concept of social justice.)”

Wine writer has begun posting on Substack, after “17 debut months of deafening silence” (never fear, Andrew; my initial silence was twice as long). In Meaning: A Story, he recounts his visit to Beirut, in the early 1990s, to meet Serge Hochar of Chateau Musar. The region had just emerged from civil war, and Jefford discovered a culture where “[t]error, catastrophe, serenity and acceptance coexisted… mosaic-like, in a way that I found hard to understand.” He returned in 2016, meeting with more winemakers. After the events of April 2026, he reached out to some of them—“not as a journalist but as a human being”—to learn how they are grappling with the latest calamities and to reflect on wine as both signifier and signified.

fondly recalls a special birthday dinner he arranged for his then-girlfriend, now wife, in 1995, at The Clifton Inn in Charlottesville, Va. In advance of the meal, he’d purchased a bottle of Château Magdelaine Saint-Émilion Premier Grand Cru from the 1966 vintage, which a server at the Inn obligingly opened tableside. “I’ll admit that I felt some trepidation at the prospect of taking the first sniff and the first sip,” he writes. Sadly, “that feeling of apprehension was justified.” They set that wine aside and ordered a different bottle off the list. But wine being wine, that Bordeaux had other plans for them.

Recent fire seasons on the West Coast have demonstrated that vineyards can serve as effective firebreaks. Their relatively low fuel loads stifle blazes, halting their advance across the landscape and making it easier for authorities to gain control of the line. European viticultural regions have also learned this lesson the hard way, and the EU is now promoting landscape management tactics to mitigate wildfire risk. A new “Fire Wine” labeling scheme, currently being tested in Catalonia, allows producers of wine, truffle, and honey to use a special badge on their label after they’ve taken steps to limit excess vegetation, clear buffer zones, and grant water access for use during crises. “We are not only producing wine,” said Elena Górriz Mifsud, a senior researcher in forest science, “We are producing security.”

Speaking of scorchers, last weekend Europe and the UK were subjected to extreme high temperatures; London hit 34.8°C (about 95°F), fully two degrees above a record that had stood for eighty years. To beat the heat, brewery consultant , who lives in London, carried a cold pint out to his garden. As the liquid warmed in the glass, he got thinking about the ideal service temperature for various brews. “So I ran an experiment,” he writes. “I took two beers: an IPA and a Lager and tasted each at 4°C, 8°C, and 12°C. Same glass, same room, back to back… Testing both reveals something much more interesting than a single beer ever could: the relationship between style and serving temperature isn’t one-size-fits-all, and most of us are drinking at least one of them wrong.” His tasting notes tell all.

It should surprise no one that the world of fine cheese is just as complex as the world of fine wine. In , Ned Palmer shares notes on his recent stint judging blue cheeses for the Virtual Cheese Awards. I quote him at length because—well, doesn’t all of this ring a bell? “You have to taste mindfully, paying attention to appearance, aroma, texture, mouthfeel and flavour. We try not to use subjective judgements, like ‘I like this,’ and strive to be as clear and objective as possible. Here my more florid descriptions are inappropriate, and in fact useless. There is no point in saying that this cheese is like drinking from a cool mountain spring on a hot day, we just need to know if the salting is correct, if the flavours are complex but in balance, if there is a decent length of finish, if the texture is creamy, but not claggy. You have to resort to simile to describe flavours, but these need to be communicable; if I tell you this blue tastes of digestive biscuits, marmite and bubble gum I think you’ll get what I’m saying. If I say this reminds me of going for a walk in the Hindu Kush, or my granddad’s aftershave, probably not.”

See you next week.

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Images ©2026 Meg Maker

The word connoisseur derives from the French word connaître, earlier connoistre, meaning “to be familiar with” or “to know about.” A connoisseur is someone who uses their knowledge about a subject to guide decision making, especially but not exclusively in matters of taste.

Connoisseurship in art history

In the late 19th century, the term came to refer to a class of art historians and theorists focused on attribution, the technique of identifying the artist who made a piece of work. Art connoisseurship required extensive study of specific artists as well as their social and political contexts, plus a familiarity with the artifacts of material culture which find their way into portraits, altar pieces, history paintings, and other genres.

The art connoisseur used analytical, critical, and intuitive methods to render pronouncements about an artwork’s provenance. They also authored catalogues raisonnés of artists’ complete oeuvres, in part to share their knowledge and in part to justify their analyses. Their work was crucial to the secondary art market, especially to auction houses and museums whose reputations, and income, required trustworthy authentications.

Art connoisseurship demanded extensive expertise, persuasive reasoning, and earned trust in order to render reliable pronouncements about artifacts of visual culture.

Making the leap to gastronomy and wine

Art connoisseurship persists, but in the mid-twentieth century the term connoisseur leapt into new domains, particularly into gastronomy and wine. It came to refer to a passionate amateur whose knowledge granted them authority to make declarative statements about wine quality. Such pronouncements were not principally about provenance, as had been the case with the art connoisseurs, but were more about typicity, collectability, and value.

A general public skeptical about claims of authority in matters of taste eyed such pronouncements with suspicion, and wine connoisseurship became associated with snobbism, elitism, and condescension. The terms connoisseur and connoisseurship have, as a consequence, mostly disappeared from modern texts about wine, replaced with mentions of the “wine enthusiast” or “wine lover.”

Resurrecting wine connoisseurship

It is newly necessary to resuscitate wine connoisseurship, stripping the negative associations to restore original connotations of human expertise, faithful opinion, and reliability.

In this new construction, a wine connoisseur is a person who has educated themselves about the domain in general and certain sectors in particular. They may or may not possess formal credentials, but they are considered authorities whose judgments are viewed with respect rather than skepticism.

In this reading, wine connoisseurship is the practice of discernment, and the wine connoisseur is a practitioner who arises from the general populace to apply their expertise toward our collective understanding of taste.

In an era where taste is increasingly influenced, even litigated, by artificial intelligence and machine simulation, we need wine connoisseurs, people with physical palates and the skills to use them, to share insights forged by human experience.

Further reading

Image ©2026 Meg Maker

Do the work of noticing

In The End of Taste as Currency, art director laments how “Taste, in 2026, has become almost entirely performative.” When we recapitulate the same cultural artifacts across myriad forms of production—ads, Instagram stories, Pinterest mood boards—the effect is to empty them entirely of their original significance. They get hollowed out, transformed into recursive patterns of themselves, which we re-absorb and regurgitate performatively without pausing to evaluate their meanings to us personally. As a consequence, “The subcultures that gave taste its texture, the small scenes where references travelled slowly and meant something specific to the people inside them, have been collapsed into a single global pool where everything surfaces at once.” The antidote is actually straightforward: Do the work. Notice what clicks. Trust your discernment. Build your sense of taste the way it’s long been done: slowly but inexorably.

Doing the work of noticing

Clothing designer shares one of his techniques for doing that work. He carries a film camera on his peregrinations around his new home city, Tokyo. The medium limits him to thirty-six shots a week, and once the film’s back he’s got a suite of images that constitute a subconscious mood board. He’s purposely not making photographs; instead “the idea is to be spontaneous, random, impulsive.” He summarizes these ideas further in another Note on his theories of subconscious design. An example: he noticed he’d captured many images of solitary men caught in private reverie as the busy cityscape whorled around them. These images made him think about what happens when we carry our private selves into public spheres, both physical and digital, and the pressure we all feel now “to be online, transparent, and palatable to a mass audience.” And that made him think about how his clothing designs can grant some privacy back to their wearers: adding details only available to them: interior pockets, hidden zippers, sensual hardware that feels good when a wearer clicks it closed. “None of this will translate on photo or video. It’s only for the person wearing it.” And none of this would have emerged had he not done that work of noticing and letting his mind go to work on the results.

Noticing what you’re not supposed to

Abourezk, an exhibition designer at the Guggenheim, has taken to Substack with , inviting readers behind the velvet cordons and temporary walls to see the machinery of the museum at work. In The Anatomy of an Exhibition, she diagrams (literally) every facet of an exhibit, from floor plan and traffic flow to placement, lighting, wall color, pedestals, vitrines, platforms, wall text, and more. It runs to almost four thousand words, heavily illustrated, and she finishes, breathless, realizing, “I ended nearly every section with some version of: I have so much more to say about this, but I’ll save it for another post. So let’s just say… there is plenty more where this came from, and I am so excited about it.” You’ll never look at an exhibit the same way again.

Hello, mini-tini

In The New Yorker, Hannah Goldfield writes about so-called intentional drinking, the rise of the half-sized cocktail, and drinks lists ordered by ABV. We’re in a “very honest” moment, one bar owner tells her, where patrons are aware of the wellness claims against alcohol but don’t want to give up on the ritual. Goldfield feels this. “Not long ago, after a civilized mezcal tasting left me with an earth-shattering migraine, I considered giving up alcohol entirely,” she writes. “The prospect filled me with surprising sadness. I was more attached than I realized, not only to the way that a cocktail makes me feel—chatty, sentimental, hopeful, expansive—but also to the sensual and ritualistic aspects of drinking. I appreciate the beauty and the gravitas of the drinkware and the bar tools, and the sense that there is a right time for the right drink: an austere gin-and-tonic to be nursed after work, a pour of sweet, earthy amaro following dessert, eggnog spiked with rum at Christmas. Drinking is rooted in tradition—it’s no accident that every generation since Hemingway’s has revived the Martini—but it’s also thrillingly captive to personal preference: for me, one Martini is not enough, two is too many, and three half sizes is just right, with plenty of olives to line the stomach.”

Good food writing is only partly about food

—as evidenced in this New York Times piece by Matt Goulding that’s nominally about pasta and ultimately not about pasta. Goulding and videographer Sam Youkilis traveled to Sardinia to document one of Italy’s rarest pastas, su filindeu, “threads of God.” The dough is hand-stretched and turned eight times to make a skein of 256 strands that get mounted on a rack for air drying. Only a handful of people remain who can make it. “It’s not a recipe that can be read and recreated by enterprising cooks in kitchens abroad,” he writes. “[T]he technique must be felt in the flesh, learned through repetition and error until the fingertips know the difference between just right and just wrong.” Yet its significance is inestimable to local culture, served at the annual feast welcoming Christian pilgrims who have trekked overnight through the mountainous terrain to reach the church of San Francesco di Lula. “For three centuries, the pasta and the pilgrimage have been inexorably connected,” Goulding says. “The power of the pilgrimage is found in the balance between solitude and community, sacrifice and hospitality, pain and pleasure.”

Expert ≠ Elitist

I attended college in the mid-1980s, and even at my so-called elite university the anti-intellectualist foment was so prevalent you could practically declare it as a major. Every generation thinks it’s the first in history to be subjected to elitist tropes, and popular backlash generally runs in one of two directions. Healthy communities decide the problem is behavioral and shrug it off, acknowledging the history while pursuing their own aesthetics to create novel cultural moments. And thank god. Unhealthy communities decide the problem is structural and the only remedy is to demolish all intellectual hierarchies, especially those rooted in longstanding tradition. That latter impetus is destructive rather than creative, and depending on scale, erases inestimably valuable aspects of the original. Expertise is not necessarily elitist; it’s only elitist when it’s performed to belittle rather than elevate. And so we arrive at the current hand-wringing about elitism in wine, and the conversation about how to get twenty-somethings to tune into the category. offers a characteristically clear-eyed take. “In an effort to appear democratic, parts of the industry now speak to younger consumers as though they are incapable of seriousness altogether,” he writes. “Expertise gets apologized for before it is even expressed.” The remedy is not to flatten complexity but to celebrate it, and hospitality plays a key role. “The best sommeliers I know understand this intuitively. They do not dumb wine down, nor do they perform expertise like a dominance ritual. They create permeability. They make it possible for people to move upward into greater fluency without pretending the fluency itself is meaningless.” Thirst for complexity is part of what makes us human. Stay thirsty.

See you next week.

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Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Bouquet is a derided term of wine speak, but it does useful work by summarizing complexity. Although often used interchangeably with aroma, many professionals reserve bouquet for the impression of development and maturity—the complex of aromas that arise as a result of cask and bottle aging.

Wine aromas are divided into three classes:

• Primary aromas arise from the fruit itself and reflect its varietal character.

• Secondary aromas develop when fermentation generates new aromatic esters.

• Tertiary aromas develop as a result of chemical maturation and exposure to oxygen.

Bouquet generally describes those tertiary aromas, the overall aromatic impact of a mature wine that has been aged in cask and bottle. You might see it mentioned specifically as bottle bouquet. The cutoff is not neatly agreed, however, as some commentators include fermentation aromas under the umbrella of bouquet. But the principal distinction is between youth and age.

The word is from French, and we use it also to refer to a bunch or bundle of assorted flowers. So think of bouquet as a bundle of assorted aromas whose overall impact is more than the sum of its parts.

Talking about bouquet in wine

Bouquet is generally used for favorable aromas that develop as the wine matures. Specific terms used for these positive tertiary or aging notes include:

• Red wine: truffle, leather, dried fruit, earth, tobacco, sandalwood, balsamic

• White wine: honey, dried fruit, nut, toast, beeswax, sherry

• Rosé wine: dried fruit, dried flowers, tea

• Orange wine: earth, tea, dried stone fruit, spice

• Sparkling wine: brioche, biscuit, nut, toast, caramel

• Sweet wine: honey, caramel, beeswax, nut, marmalade, sultana, marzipan

Bouquet is a useful short-hand to summarize these impressions, letting you simply name one or two that seem most prominent.

Homework: Use bouquet in a sentence this week without irony or embarrassment. Bonus points for bottle bouquet.

Read about some wines with bouquet

Image ©2026 Meg Maker

But every few weeks my husband and I host a friend for a purposeful tasting. The friend provides wines that have slumbered for decades in his cold northern cellar, and I provide whatever samples I’ve been working through. It’s a study in contrasts, since the samples are invariably new releases still figuring out their new lives in bottle, while the aged wines, mostly French classics, have lived so long in bottle they’ve already had to redecorate twice.

Recently he offered these two Bordeaux, from Left Bank and Right, both from the 1995 vintage: Château Léoville Barton Saint-Julien and Château Monbousquet Saint-Émilion Grand Cru.

One of them was wonderful, and the other was flawed, but so subtly it sent me on a chase to find out why and how, and especially whether the flaw had originated in making, aging, or a mix.

Let’s start with the better wine.

Read more

My Pinot essay now online

But first, a shameless self-promotion. has put my recent print cover story, The Evolving Languages of Pinot Noir, onto its website, free to read. The article is a lengthy consideration of the evolution of wine writing, using Pinot noir as lens. I outline the modern history of wine commentary, vocabulary, and lexicons, focusing on the shift from evaluative to descriptive gestures and motifs. These changing approaches greatly affected consumer discovery, understanding, and connoisseurship, not only of this grape but of wine writ large. I originally prepared this paper for the Pinot Noir and Identity Symposium held last July at Oxford University, and am grateful to WFW editor Neil Beckett for publishing it in full.

Put down the Aperol

Aperol is not delicious. Vermouth is delicious. Ergo, Abel implores us to jettison the ubiquitous Spritz and drink like a Spaniard this summer. “It’s been an anchor in Spanish culture for centuries,” she says. “La hora del vermut (the vermouth hour) is a sacred pre-lunch ritual across Spain.” She suggests vermouth and tonic over ice garnished with orange peel, salted lemon, green olive, even anchovy. “[I]nstead of cloying summer sweetness, you get something herbal, a little bitter, a little sophisticated.” She spotlights venues in New York and Spain where you can put her advice to the test. “Repeat after me: no more prosecco through a straw!”

News flash: Gen Z can handle complexity

The wine industry wrings its hands over lack of Gen Z engagement, but its approaches to reach this crucial demographic get nearly everything wrong, writes . Wine’s exclusivity is indeed off-putting, but so are condescending efforts to dumb it down to appeal to young drinkers. “Frankly, the elitism framing is just lazy—a tired recitation of wine culture’s snobby past,” Lamb says. “The real barrier is economic… That is a fundamentally different problem than intimidation, and conflating them leads the industry exactly where it keeps ending up: Apologizing for wine’s depth to people whose real problem isn’t that wine is too elitist—it’s that it’s too expensive to gamble on.”

Transhumanity

The spring transhumance is underway. Across Europe, herds of cows, flocks of sheep, and assorted other ruminants are being walked from villages to high pastures, sometimes along paths, sometimes along pavement, following routes they’ve used for centuries, even millennia. I’ve been getting get a kick out of seeing animals kick up their heels as the first spring grass tickles their hoofs. Find a few videos on Instagram here, here, and here and snippets of the journey here and here. English uses the French word, transhumance, meaning “across the ground (or humus);” it’s transumanza in Italian, trashumancia in Spanish, and Transhumanz in German, signifying the ancient roots of the phenomenon. The animals will spend the summer foraging mountain grasses and wildflowers, producing milk rich in carotenoids and other nutrients which yields cheeses of unique richness, color, and flavor; many traditional mountain cheeses are, as a consequence, strictly seasonal. In the fall the animals will reverse the journey, sheltering over winter in barns and paddocks until spring blooms anew.

Another win for the little guys

Don’t mess with small businesses striving to put good food and wine onto American tables. A few weeks ago I wrote that single-origin spice importer Burlap & Barrel, partnering with the Liberty Justice Center, had sued the Trump Administration over new 10 percent import tariffs. They won! At least for now. “On May 7, 2026, the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled in favor of the Liberty Justice Center’s clients in the first round of that challenge, rejecting the administration’s attempt to use Section 122 as a sweeping tariff authority,” they write. The L.J.C. was also behind the successful V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump, in which the Supreme Court ruled in favor of this small wine importer, declaring Trump’s so-called Liberation Day tariffs unlawful.

Agrivoltaics in the vineyard

In Cognac, a grower is partnering with private firm Sun’Agri to blanket their vineyard with 6,000 automated solar panels. The move follows trial installations in Roussillon and the Southern Rhône, where panels have been shown to improve production and mitigate climatic impacts. The new installation, on 4.5 hectares of Ugni blanc, will generate sufficient electricity to supply 2,000 households, but it’s less about power and more about protecting vines from frost, hail, and sunburn. Grapes will be monitored for quality, although since they’re bound for distillation, “quality” is likely more about yield than flavor.

Start making sense

There is no faster way to create animus with a team than to use jargon they don’t understand to explain why they’re failing. Restaurant operations consultant David Mann of learned this the hard way when he tried to talk EBITDA to a chef. “I thought I’d explained it clearly enough, [but] that circled number had nothing to do with the week they’d just run.” So he went back to basics, gathering the team to review the costs they themselves controlled, which is their greatest leverage on a balance sheet. “Once chefs and managers can see their own decisions in the numbers, they start bringing ideas to you instead of waiting for you to show up with another cut.”

Machine learning

Wineries began digitizing back-office operations at the turn of the millennium and now base business on a sprawling suite of tools that mostly don’t integrate. AI to the rescue, says winery management consultant , thanks to automated dashboards that make sense of the mosh. Silver explores the many implications of this imminent shift, including how offloading data grunt work to a machine paradoxically opens space to suffuse the business with humanism. “[W]hat remains is the part wine should always have been emphasizing in the first place: the hospitality, the ritual, conviviality and belonging, the magnificent culture, storytelling, the taste, and of course, the place.” Humans are freed to focus on what humans do best: being real.

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

Acidity is a key component of wine

Wine’s acidity originates in grapes, but acid is also created during winemaking and aging. Wine contains two types of acids: fixed and volatile. Fixed acids, also called stable acids, remain in a liquid when it’s boiled, while volatile acids readily evaporate.

Wine’s fixed acids are tartaric, malic, lactic, citric, and succinic. These acids give a wine structure, texture, and zing. Wine’s volatile acids are acetic, butyric, formic, isobutyric, propionic, hexanoic, sorbic, and sulfurous. These volatile acids are present in smaller quantities than the fixed acids.

We sense wine’s fixed acids texturally, and its volatile acids aromatically.

Tartaric, malic, and acetic acids play significant roles in wine

The most important fixed acids in wine are tartaric and malic. Grapes have an uncommon abundance of tartaric acid, which gives the wine tanginess and structure. Tartaric acid precipitates out of wine over time, forming tartrate crystals. Malic acid is abundant in grapes and survives primary yeast fermentation, but may undergo a change that weakens its potency during malolactic conversion, which transforms it into lactic acid.

The most important volatile acid in wine is acetic acid. Acetic acid is a byproduct of both yeast fermentation and oxidation. This is the same acid in vinegar, but there’s far less of it in wine. Below the perception threshold of about 1.2 g/L, acetic acid puts a shiny polish on the wine’s aromatic profile.

Aged wines have more acetic acid, and at end of a wine’s life the vinegar aroma and flavor are pronounced. When acetic is present at high concentrations, and especially in combination with another volatile compound, ethyl acetate, the wine is regarded as having elevated volatile acidity.

Talking about acidity in wine

Wine writers generally assess the combined impact of all of these acids, describing it broadly as low, medium, or high, although commentary may focus on the presence of tart, green-apple flavored malic versus smoother, softer lactic. Wines at the extreme ends of the acidity spectrum—too low, too high—are often described as unbalanced.

• Wines with low or insufficient acidity may be described as soft or flabby.

• Wines with medium acidity might be called fresh, crisp, bright, or lively. Those with a bit more may be described as racy, nervy, linear, zesty, or crunchy.

• Wines with excess or high acidity may be described as bracing, tart, or sour.

• Wines with elevated volatile acidity may be described as lifted or high-toned (if it’s pleasant), or simply volatile (if it’s not).

Read more on acidity in wine in these two features:

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

There are glimmers of hope. Rob McMillan, author of the 2026 Silicon Valley Bank State of the U.S. Wine Industry report, thinks American wine has endured the steepest declines and is entering a period of correction. He predicts better times in 2027 and 2028.

But while the industry itself will survive, individual producers might not. “The recovery that follows will favor those already executing outward-facing, consumer-driven strategies,” he writes. Wineries that reorient their efforts toward keeping top customers, streamlining their SKUs, and avoiding risky experiments are the most likely to make it through. Those with a strong tasting room game are in the best position, because “hospitality and experience remain the bedrock.”

That’s good advice for existing brands with strong engagement, attractive venues, and enough fat to trim. But what about a new winery or region that has yet to find its footing? At the recent annual meeting of the Vermont Grape and Wine Council, these questions floated like ghosts in the room.

Vermont’s wine culture is so young it hasn’t had time to develop immunity to the economic maladies plaguing the American wine industry. Vermont’s wineries are principally family operations, many first-generation. Volumes are small, costs of production are high, and principals wear many hats, from pruning to production to sales. Many work organically or naturally, requiring significant labor that further drives cost. The industry enjoys less regulatory clout than more established Vermont ag sectors like maple and dairy. And the hybrid grapes planted here are, to consumers, at best unfamiliar and at worst mistrusted.

Nonetheless, Vermont wine producers make a significant contribution to the state’s economy. According to the 2025 Vermont Wine Impact Study, the two-dozen wine producers, farming just 200 acres—the area of a single dairy farm—generate $687 million of economic activity. Wine tourism and hospitality play an outsized role in that total, especially in the ski towns of central Vermont and in the scenic Champlain Valley, where much of the state’s wine is grown and made.

That figure is at risk as Vermont’s $4 billion tourist economy fell off the cliff in 2025 after protectionist policies precipitated a 30 percent drop in Canadian border crossings and 50 percent drop in Canadian credit card spending. According to Vermont Business Magazine, “This dip is felt most significantly at restaurants, campgrounds, inns, marinas, retail stores, and festivals.” Put “wineries” onto the list.

Read more

Renovating natural wine

interviews political philosopher Roberto Frega about his theory of “post-natural” wine. Frega argues that although natural wine “started as a conscientious and liberating movement, [it] quickly turned into dogma and marketing pap that gave cover to a lot of naïve, careless, and often anonymous liquids.” Happily, a new group of “post-naturalists” is returning to first principles and making much better wines. In his new book, Il Vino Post Naturale, Frega gives voice to a perspective that’s been sorely missing in the conversation about natural wine: It has done some good but can do better. I think in many ways the newest gestures are less post-natural and more pre-“natural,” made according to terroir-driven techniques that were forged in the pre-industrial era and have endured because they work. I’m hoping for an English translation of his book.

Exquisitely rare: a paid wine writing fellowship

Applications are open through 26 May for the Allen Shoup Fellowship, designed to introduce newer wine communicators to the wines of Washington State. Up to two writers will be selected, and the award includes travel expenses, accommodations, and wine samples along with a $3,000 stipend. The fellowship is coordinated by WA Wine, the state’s wine trade organization, a team that really knows their stuff. Washington terroir is diverse and the issues facing makers are unique. If you consider yourself “emerging,” throw your hat into this ring.

Every campus needs a cookie house

My husband attended Carleton College, in Minnesota, and after twenty-four years of marriage I thought I knew everything about it. But I was delighted to discover recently that Carleton has a cookie house: “a place where anyone from the campus, at nearly any hour, will find a pantry stocked with the ingredients for making chocolate-chip cookies.” Or really anything they want, provided they share it with others and clean up their mess. It started decades ago thanks to the generosity of a retired Carleton administrative assistant and, well—it’s a sweet story, in more ways than one, so you should just read it.

Roll your own press trip

Having taken scores of wine media trips, I’ve seen firsthand how costly and time consuming they are to produce. That’s why regions and wineries hire PR firms and travel agencies to attend to the details (c.f. costly). Recently, a group of six Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) wineries in Paso Robles pooled talent, time, and resources to stage one themselves. “The plan was simple: invite writers from across the country to show them that Paso Robles is the epicenter of regenerative organic viticulture.” The team got help from related stakeholders, like Travel Paso and the Regenerative Organic Alliance, and assembled a swag bag of ROC goodies to hand out to the twelve journalists on the three-day tour. Tablas Creek’s marketing director, Ian Consoli, one of the organizers, detailed the process on their winery’s blog—in yet another example of the winery’s commitment to helping fellow producers.

More Brunello for the rest of us

asks, “Is Brunello’s prestige earned or engineered?” The question was prompted by her Florentine wine writing colleague who eyes the style with animus. Montalcino was excluded from Chianti Classico for geographical and political reasons, prompting producers to push for their own DOCG to codify use of a local Sangiovese clone purposely developed by the Biondi-Santis. “This wasn’t the continuation of a long-standing regional tradition. It was a decision,” the argument goes, and “if Brunello is defined more by decision than by difference, then its identity begins to look less like nature and more like narrative.” But grapes always wander, sometimes by accident, often on purpose, and it should not feel surprising when makers create deliciousness from old things in new places. Coleman decides the wine’s success justifies its existence: “Brunello does what great wine is supposed to do: it ages, evolves, and tells a consistent story over time.”

The man, the mystique, the mystery of it all

Years ago, interviewing Vasco Croft on his patio in Vinho Verde, I snapped to attention when he remarked that “all kinds of people are doing biodynamics who not only don’t know Steiner’s thinking, but they’ve never even been through the biodynamic lectures. Writers write about biodynamics and they don’t know what it is. They never took the trouble.” That was me. (Read my full interview here.) It took me a decade, but I finally blocked a few hours on a weekend to read all eight of Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on biodynamics, otherwise known as “The Agricultural Course.” In 1924, a group of farmers had invited him to Schloss Koberwitz to tell them how to apply his Anthroposophic principles to their working landscape. Steiner was not a farmer, not experienced with agriculture any way, and certainly did not grow or make wine, yet the methods he advanced a century ago became the basis of the biodynamics still practiced today. My friends, these lectures are… a lot. If you posses even modest fluency in science they will catapult you into a state of exasperated stupefaction. But read them anyway, because if you’re going to embrace something, or criticize it, or a mix, Croft is right: You should at least know what you’re talking about.

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

He had received various responses, including from a few writers who said their palates had not changed at all. I was gobsmacked. My own experience is completely orthogonal: not only has my palate changed, it’s always changing.

But untangling the drivers of change is difficult, because the evolution is both physiological and aesthetic. I wondered aloud whether it’s an existential question for wine writers: If my palate is different now from twenty years ago, what does it say about the trustworthiness of my earlier pronouncements, my reliability?

I kept thinking about all of this after our call. I was captivated by questions about what constitutes a palate: how much of it is somatic and how much emoto-psychological, how much of its development is driven by exogenous versus endogenous factors, and what palate changes over time say about about taste, preference, and discrimination. (In a parallel track, I’m working to understand the nature of taste—good, bad, and otherwise—and issues of palate slot into that inquiry.)

So, what is a palate, and how does it learn?

The short version feels like this: The somatic effects of taste (sensory detection) continually collide with the emoto-cognitive effects of taste (discernment) in an ongoing negotiation, one learning from and influencing the other in a never-ending spiral.

The long version has to start with biology: the sensory apparatus, the equipment on board. I’m neurologically sensitive, a common characteristic of red-haired people, who notoriously need more lidocaine for dental work and anesthesia for general surgery. I live with a palette of sensitivities that can sometimes result in cacophony. I’m particularly sensitive to cold, light, smell, and sound. Loud noises cause me physical pain.

My sense of smell has always been exceptionally acute. Oddly, as a child I was not a picky eater and had few food aversions, which mostly centered on texture (slippery) and visuals (chop suey). I had no strong feelings about bitterness, sourness, or saltiness. I enjoyed savoryness and sweetness.

My mother, our household cook, worked in a Franco-American tradition of roasted or boiled meat, starch, veg. Like many American housewives in the 1970s, she experimented with a handful of global cuisines, but principally the food was mild and under-seasoned thanks to the era’s burgeoning fear of salt. I doubtless would have enjoyed more elaborate flavors. It was as if I had the machinery but it was never driven over fifteen miles per hour.

It finally got into gear when I moved out and started cooking for myself. Cooking makes many demands of the sensorium, the first of which is not to poison anyone. I became vegetarian after a particularly objectionable chicken dish a housemate prepared, and I can still recall the stench when another housemate cooked spoiled meat, then burned it. At 2 a.m.

I taught myself to cook by flailing through vegetarian cookbooks, learning to pay attention not only to flavor and smell but also to texture, color, freshness, balance, seasoning, doneness. Learning how to cook was learning how to taste, and as I became a better and more experienced cook, my palate became both more literate and more fluent. I began to notice that flavors were more pronounced for me than they were for other people. My first husband preferred strongly flavored foods; if to me a dish felt nuanced and subtle, to him it seemed bland.

So, until my thirties, my relationship to my palate was principally one of awakening: What is this tool, what can it do, how fast can it go, what can it tell me about my own preferences and those of the people I’m feeding? I would not characterize this as evolution but as discovery. And I wouldn’t say that I had taste, good or bad, meaning I held no particular stylistic attitude toward food. I had some fences on the table—no meat, poultry, or fish—but those rules were about nutrition and ecological philosophy, not aesthetics.

It was when I began writing about food, in my late thirties and early forties, that the discovery process accelerated. Especially when I learned the formal process of wine evaluation, which makes structured demands of the tasting experience and invites the taster to conjure myriad, variegated taste memories in order to make analogous and metaphorical pronouncements. I had never paid such close attention to flavor before I started tasting wine. After thousands of wines and thousands of tasting experiences, the attention-paying became second nature, just as it does for many colleagues. But it’s critical to remember that most non-wine-writers do not approach tasting this way. The exercise is not a natural act. It is learned.

Through this process I started to develop discernment, taste in the sense of aesthetic standards versus simple likes and dislikes. As I began traveling to research wines, which are naturally served in the context of a region’s gastronomy, my flavor world expanded. My palate was no longer simply a mechanism for tasting the world, it was a tool for understanding it. And by “world” I mean food traditions, trends, the flavors of an era: taste in a figurative versus literal sense.

Writing about food invited me to interrogate my proclivities in a way that simply eating does not. I cannot overemphasize the importance of articulation to this process—putting these insights into language. Compelling myself to describe the signals I was receiving from my sensorium changed my relationship to the signals themselves. A food I formerly found repulsive—mushrooms, say—was now, in the context of new ingredients, preparations, and cultural ambiance, delicious. I was no longer “a person who doesn’t like mushrooms.” My register expanded.

It’s worth noting that being a good food writer demands skills that are uncommon in specific and exceptionally rare in aggregate. You need fluency with your own sensorium, how you turn the signals it receives into something like meaning. You need to have had this fluency over a long period during which you’ve been curious enough about these phenomena that you’ve built memories and associations based on them. You have to be able to make imaginative comparisons between those memories and your present impressions. And then you have to be able to articulate all of this to yourself and others.

Wine writing poses particular challenges, with its heavy reliance on analogy. If a wine “tastes like cherries,” we assume the reader knows what cherries taste like, and that’s not merely a personal but also a socio-cultural proposition. Most of us have low taste literacy, because as children we’re rarely asked to describe food beyond utterances of “yum” and “yuck.” Fast forward to adulthood when we have our first glass of wine and suddenly we’re called upon to catalogue our somatic and emotive responses in complete and cogent prose. Perhaps if we’d been taught from a young age to describe each glass of milk, or to disambiguate apple from pear, we would be better equipped for this exercise. But we’re not, and so we’re stuck with a predicament I’ve been grappling with in my writing, speaking, and teaching: how to put the entirety of a flavor experience into words.

Putting sensations into language is a way to have another kind of relationship with them, cognitive-emotive versus strictly electro-chemical. As an artist, I find it’s the same with painting. Once I make the first gesture on the canvas, I have something to respond to, so I make another, each mark accreting in a dialogue with the image that was impossible before the image existed. The process of externalizing the internal idea changes the idea itself.

Language similarly transforms sensations into sensory ideas, which can be assimilated and learned from. Verbalizing flavor sensations invites me to catch the sensory signals and turn them into feelings, thoughts, and comparisons. That adds data to my matrix of preferences and predilections. It’s more than simply grasping “what I’m tasting now.” It’s an exercise in a longer evolution, or co-evolution, of my sense of taste.

All of this is what gives me confidence to say that, especially over the last two decades, my palate has evolved in myriad ways. I pay closer attention to texture, structure, and tactile sensations, including warmth and coolness, and take more pleasure in these sensations thanks to qualitatively better attention-paying. My skin is dryer now, and it seems no matter how much water I drink my mouth and sinuses are always parched, so astringency is physically more impactful. Whereas I used to like bolder red wines, I now prefer aged wines whose tannins have fully melted, or wines with enough acidity to provide offsetting salivation. I am more attuned to savoriness and salt, and appreciate them more, and realize both were missing from my early cooking. And I no longer truly enjoy sweetness unless it’s twinned with a balancing flavor like bitterness (dark chocolate), sourness (lemon curd), or saltiness (caramel).

I’m glad to be able to recognize these changes, but the physical changes aren’t the most interesting to me. What’s most interesting is the change not in sense but sensibility.

It’s like this: Flavor becomes sensation becomes notion, which adds information to my aesthetic code base. Taste (somatic) becomes taste (discernment), which helps me make future choices. The evolution feels less like a line and more like a feedback loop. And reminds me I’m alive.

Images credit The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access collection

Blougie

If it’s in the mainstream media, it’s already over. Blouge, a pastiche of blanc and rouge, is the graceless moniker for a new class of wines made by blending white and red grapes. To review: Most wines are made from one or the other, not both, with conspicuous exceptions: champagne, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Côte-Rôtie, old-school Chianti, rosé in rare instances. Blouge is a light colored, low-tannin red best served chilled, essentially a red wine that drinks white. Along with orange wine (essentially a white wine that drinks red), pét-nat, carbonic glou, and other funky what-nots, blouge is positioned as an entry point for inquisitive Zillennials. I’ve yet to try one of these, although I make blouge all the time at home, concocting a petite cuvée to taste two wines as one. I also mix white with white and red with red, aiming to patch holes or smooth edges or balance acidity or tannin. This is not how true wines are blended; that happens in the winery, not the kitchen. But it’s fun to tinker, sacred cows be damned.

Town crier

Wine entrepreneur Maryam Ahmed penned a cri de coeur in Bon Appetit targeting hospitality businesses with a professed locavore ethos which fail to promote local wines. (Her article’s behind a paywall, but she also shared the main points on Instagram.) There are some structural causes. The three-tier system presents critical impediments, as reps rarely do the necessary market work for small local producers, especially in a commission-driven system that incentivizes reliable global brands. Local producers get stuck doing all the heavy lifting: showing up at accounts, leading trainings, hosting popups and takeovers, and muscling their way onto by-the-glass lists. Ahmed’s solution? First, customers need to speak up. “The beverage industry is a massive, layered system, but it moves in response to demand,” she writes. “That puts real power in the hands of the drinker.” Second, buyers need to listen. “[A] wine list can be an act of alignment—a chance to reflect where we are, who we are, and what we stand for. And I believe that if we want guests to feel a deeper sense of place, we have to make sure the place is truly present in the experience.”

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Speaking of reps

“Being a wine rep for a small company is a job no one really tells you how to do,” writes wine buyer and consultant . “The companies I’ve worked for have been much more like running your own business. It is your job to find the clients, build the relationships, and email every day, forever. And most of the time, the answer is no.” Delaney got her start in L.A. with a firm that provided zero training or support, so she had to learn how to handle failure. “Don’t take anything personally. Someone not emailing you back is not a rejection of you. It actually has nothing to do with you… The silence is part of the job,” she writes. “My job is to keep showing up with the bottle anyway.”

Shattering news

Last week wine growers from New York to Virginia and as far inland as Michigan were hit with a devastating, season-altering frost. , who writes about East Coast wines, reached out to producers to collect dozens of reports of the destruction. The Mid-Atlantic had been experiencing a stretch of unseasonably warm weather with temperatures in the 80s Fahrenheit, which prompted vines to push primary buds and start unfurling tender shoots. Then on two consecutive nights, the mercury dropped into the 20s, rupturing the cells of this new tissue. Vines have resources to push secondary and tertiary buds, but that growth is less productive, mostly serving to keep the plant alive and make carbohydrates for the following season. Some of the quotes Vigna gathered paint a grim picture of the 2026 vintage: “a frost unlike anything we’ve seen before;” “possible total loss; first time in 25 years;” “The worst day in my 38-year history of working with the wine and fruit industry;” “If there is damage, it certainly won’t be for lack of trying—we did everything we could to protect it.”

Bad bellywash

It’s not your imagination: cheap beer gives you a worse hangover. Beer expert is here to tell you why. Cheap beer is industrial beer, made with adjuncts like corn, rice, and corn syrup, whose fermentations create higher concentrations of the byproducts like fusel alcohols and acetaldehyde that contribute to hangovers. Filtration—common for less expensive beers—removes some of these volatile compounds, but it also eliminates protective polyphenols. “The reason that £3 can sometimes wrecks your morning isn’t a mystery or bad luck,” he writes. “It’s the predictable result of industrial shortcuts: cheaper ingredients, faster fermentation, aggressive processing that leave your liver dealing with a messier chemical cocktail than it would from a more carefully made beer.” Choose wisely.

The New (wine) Criticism

, a scholar of literary theory and twentieth century American public intellectualism, finds parallels between the New Criticism and wine criticism. Under both regimes, text and wine are treated as self-contained objects whose depths are plumbed solely by examining their constituent parts. In literary criticism that’s done via close reading of the text itself; in wine criticism it’s done via tasting and applying a fixed suite of evaluative criteria. Marsh calls New Criticism a democratizing force that unmoored texts from their socio-cultural and historical baggage; everyone, regardless of social status, “had the right to interpret, assess, and judge the thing in front of you. It was not locked in the past, nor behind reams of prior knowledge.” It is indeed true that WSET tasting grids, the Aroma Wheel, wine certifications, and related professionalizations aimed to standardize wine evaluation and remove personal bias. Problematically, this stripped humanism from the exercise, and also required tasters to master a suite of abstruse and arbitrary criteria in order to render “reliable” pronouncements. In the case of wine, instead of democratizing, we got gatekeeping. I’m working on that.

See you next week.

Images of spring ephemerals ©2026 Meg Maker

Argentiera, in Bolgheri

Bolgheri is famous not for Italian grapes but French. If you squint hard enough, the region’s gravelly coastal plain is vaguely reminiscent of Bordeaux, and in the mid twentieth century, a handful of enterprising Italians started tinkering with Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc, aging blends in French oak barriques to yield polished, international-style wines that captured critics’ hearts. The varieties weren’t legally permitted in Tuscany so the wines were labeled Vino da Tavola, but they swiftly reached escape velocity and by the end of the century had earned Bolgheri DOC status and an international reputation as so-called Super Tuscans.

There are now 76 members of the Bolgheri consorzio, including Argentiera. The estate, founded in 1990, lies at southern tip of the appellation and comprises 85 hectares spread across four vineyard sites, from the sandy lowlands to the coastal hills that offer a spectacular view of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Farming is organic but not certified.

Winemaker Nicolò Carrara, who has worked for Argentiera since 1999, led the virtual tasting of four of their wines: three red blends variously of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Petit Verdot; and a white wine made from Vermentino (a grape of the Mediterranean, not the Aquitaine).

I should confess my wariness of vinifying French grapes in Italy, and in a French style, to boot. The Italian peninsula bristles with grapes that have, over centuries, become intimately attuned to Italy’s variegated territorio, and these tend to be the wines I prize. Grapes do wander, of course, via trade routes and other cultural peregrinations; that’s partly how Italy historically earned so much vinous variety. But the direct importation of French cépages into Italian viticulture for the express purpose of producing French-like wines has always struck me as redundant at best and needlessly appropriative at worst. Plus, I’ve rarely tasted one (especially made from Merlot or Chardonnay, two French grapes widely planted in Italy) that felt truly Italian, by which I mean nervy, earthy, maybe bitter, definitely savory, even salty; in other words, true to place.

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Drones in the vineyard!

visited Jerez to watch organic producer Raúl Moreno using his drone to spray vine treatments. Moreno has found drones offer myriad advantages over tractors, including speed, water efficiency, and zero soil compaction. There are some downsides. Operators must pass rigorous exams before flying. “The training is pretty much identical to what you need to do to become a helicopter pilot,” Moreno told Woolf. Spraying in windy conditions can be problematic, as seen in Woolf’s Instagram video. And the European Union forbids aerial spraying at high concentrations. Still, “Might they be a better solution than driving heavy, polluting tractors through the vines?” Woolf asks. “Could they sit side-by-side with the ethics of artisanal organic, biodynamic, and natural growers?” Steiner, in his lectures, actively encouraged farmers to go forth and experiment; I think he’d approve.

Sweet success

Maple sugaring season has ended in northern New England. Mud season was brutal, truly interminable, and we endured long stretches of sniveling cold punctuated by false springs that teased us with mild sunshine before shoving us back into winter’s bitter embrace. This did not get my juices flowing, but it did wonders for maple sap, which requires cold nights and mild days to start running. In Vermont, many producers reported a strong season, with a total production estimate of three million gallons. According to Anson Tebbetts, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets, that’s over half of the production of the entire United States. Vermont: small but mighty.

A new AVA

Speaking of Vermont, last week I attended the annual meeting of the Vermont Grape and Wine Council (on which more later) just as news broke that the federal government is on the verge of approving the state’s first sub-AVA, Champlain Valley of Vermont. Local indy news site VTDigger wrote about the proposed rule, which is currently in a comment period. If approved, the valley’s wine producers will at last be able to list their vineyard and locale on the label, which is forbidden for state-appellated wines. Vermont wine pioneer Kenneth Albert, founder of Shelburne Vineyard and a former president of the VGWC, submitted the original petition in 2022. “It gives us validity,” he told VTDigger. “We’ll finally get some respect.”

Brace yourself, Vermont

Regional regulations bring pluses and minuses. On the one hand, they offer assurances a wine is authentically produced, sourced from the defined area and made within certain strictures. But they also stifle creativity and hamstring innovations that may be sorely needed, especially under rapidly changing climactic and economic conditions. lays out the issues and highlights many examples of makers purposely going off-piste, especially in natural wine. He thinks it’s time to break the rules.

The art of the blend

Jason Haas, general manager of Tablas Creek Vineyard, in Paso Robles, reports on last week’s blending sessions for the 2025 white wines. He’s encouraged by the quantity and quality of the vintage, and this year they’ll be able to make varietal bottlings of Picardin, Clairette blanche, and Bourboulenc—grapes that never get bottled varietally in their native Rhône—along with good quantities of their flagship white blends. Haas’s text is long and wine-geeky, but if you have ever wanted a peek inside the vinous sausage factory, or pored over a tech sheet wondering how two percent in a blend could possibly make a difference, this post’s for you.

Wine’s structural economics

has spent nearly two decades building and scaling national wine brands, riding the industry’s ups and downs. But last week, after conducting a deep dive into wine retail trend data, he confessed his shock at the degree of the recent decline. In his latest post, he deconstructs the three-tier system, taking it apart like a machine to find the sand and broken cogs. His piece is required reading for anyone managing flow at almost any scale. “What the industry needs is not perfection,” he concludes. “It needs to work well enough to direct capital to the right places, give genuine ideas enough runway to prove themselves, and preserve what drew most of us here and keeps us here still.”

Natural language query

Importer digs into the semantics and semiotics of the term natural wine, what it means and what it signals, and how its use and interpretation (unremarkably) say more about the speaker than the style. “Over the course of some years, the term has been stretched and strained, but that does not detract from its essential usefulness nor practicality,” he writes. Graf cautions us to evaluate process and product independently, separating makers’ stylistic and philosophical intentions from their specific outcomes, which are highly contingent. (It is wine, after all.)

“If you don’t want the chicken, don’t get it”

In early April, New York City councilman Chi Ossé took to Instagram to rant about a wine bar’s $40 price tag for a roasted half-chicken with potatoes. Said wine bar, Gigi’s, in Greenpoint, is not even in his district. Commenters showed up with pitchforks and torches, and the brouhaha spilled into the streets of mainstream media, picked up by The New York Times, Bon Appétit, and Today. Abel of Pour Things thinks everyone’s missed the point. “I get it. I really do. New York pricing fatigue is real,” she writes. “But here’s what nobody is saying: Yes, the half chicken is $40. But you can also get a whole bottle of wine for $40. Or choose any of 300 bottles for under $100.” In other words, the wine bar part of the machine is functioning as intended, encouraging exploration and discovery. She confirmed this when she sat down with the bar’s manager and wine director to talk about their strategy. “Within about thirty seconds it’s clear: the place is designed to make you curious.” And thirsty.

See you next week.

Paintings ©2026 Meg Maker

The region is washed by Pacific fog, and the breezes are constant and cooling. Pisoni’s vineyards are east-facing, catching morning light but protected by the highland ridges from late afternoon heat. Grapes ripen slowly so hang times are long.

After enjoying success with his first five acres, Pisoni added another seventeen and began selling fruit to local vintners. In 2000, he and his sons, Mark and Jeff, started bottling their own wine under the Lucia label. Today they produce Pinot noir, Chardonnay, and Syrah from three vineyard sites.

The Lucy Wines are meant as an approachable, affordable entrée to the estate’s production. Below are my notes on the Lucy Pico Blanco, Pinot noir Rosé, and Gamay noir, all from the 2025 vintage. They are delicious, and as a bonus the family donates $1 from the sale of each wine to a designated charity. I’ve also paired each wine with one of my original paintings that matches its sensibilities.

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Tastefully yours

Taste is a slippery fish, one I’ve never quite landed. I have formal education in art history and literary criticism and have spent the last two decades as a critic of material culture, but the nature of taste has long eluded me. Perhaps that’s because academia views taste as vulgar and populist so leans instead into so-called eternal truths. (Which, underneath, are just cultural preferences; circular.) Recently I’ve been reaching out to writers I admire to get their take on taste: what it is, how it forms, whether it can be taught. emailed me a brilliant gloss, then took to his own Substack to meditate on how taste gets enacted within spheres of cultural production, including but not limited to wine, and whether AI machines could ever rise to the task. In Landa’s definition, taste is not merely selection, it is “articulation,” and the job of a sommelier (or DJ or designer or name-your-taste-mediator) is not simply to locate value but to translate it meaningfully to others. That talent is hard-earned, messy, frictive, but that’s the point: “This is the part of taste that resists automation—not the identification of the thing, but the negotiation around it. The small, human adjustments that turn a preference into a moment, and a moment into something that feels, however briefly, like meaning.”

Randall ruminates

I worked for Randall Grahm at Bonny Doon Vineyard for a few years, nominally directing the wine club and e-commerce but mostly executing Other Duties As Assigned, including staff training, staff management, media relations, marketing, product design, trade events, and editing reams of copy written by the man himself. This week he’s on Wine Searcher with characteristically rangy reflections on the state of play of the U.S. wine industry. It’s transparently obvious to his former editor (me) that the publication refused to footnote his text, à la David Foster Wallace, instead executing them as long parentheticals in the running copy. No matter. Among his best observations is his theory that visual culture has muted the impact of wine communications and that text remains the more imaginatively evocative medium. “Language has the agility to at least hint at the give and take that occurs in the tasting experience, attempting to convey something that is intensely subjective to an intelligence beyond one’s own,” he writes. “Watching a video, an Instagram moment of someone tasting something, somewhere (that you presently are not!) creates a vast chasm between two subjectivities and thus leads inevitably to alienation.” Lots more at the link.

Who snebbed my cheese?

British cheese monger and author Ned Palmer cautions us to avoid becoming a “snebber”—that person who nips the tasty nose from a wedge of cheese, leaving others to fumble with awkward offcuts. On , he shares the correct way to cut various types of cheese so that each piece winds up with bit of paste and a bit of rind and no one’s left holding the hard moldy bits. “[C]utting cheese properly ensures that everyone’s piece is of equal and optimal quality, and we want to be nice and fair, don’t we.” Yes, we do.

Snack/bar

Speaking of cheese, ’s answer to her spring doldrums has been to lean into apéro, “the hour-plus during which we force our guests to talk with us over martinis, wine, and snacks before dinner.” She revisits a few favorite spreads to demonstrate styles and modes, which range from spartan (Brillat-Savarin, baguette) to rococo (tea sandwiches, shrimp cocktail, baked brie, dressy bites), paired sometimes with martinis, sometimes with wine, often with negronis, made once, but never again, with mezcal. The approach is agreeably low-stress, limitlessly diverse, convivial, “and no one is worried about dinner, since we’re all going out together, or maybe going our separate ways. The night is a journey.” Chez Maker, the journey often starts and ends with snacks. Same reasons. Same pleasure.

Organized labor

“Spring cleaning, for most people, means squeegeeing windows, packing up the winter coats, and, just maybe, washing that rug you bought because it’s washable but have literally never washed. For me, it starts in the pantry,” writes chef and recipe developer . In Your Pantry Is a Cry for Help, she shares advice and step-by-step instructions for a spring kitchen re-set, from cleaning and sorting to storage and organizing the spice rack. The goal is not only a tidy pantry but one from which you want to cook, a place “where great meals are hiding.”

Forbes adds voice to chorus

The last 18 months have seen an inflorescence of food media startups, including Best Food Blog, the Gourmet reboot, Caper Media, and, just last week, Ravenous. All of these projects evince a bootstrappy, leftist, alt-media vibe, and more power to them. This week business juggernaut Forbes waded into the wine media space with the announcement of Forbes Wine, an editorial-cum-commerce play with a more expressly capitalistic sensibility. Clive Pursehouse, recently of Decanter, will serve as executive editor, and sommelier will curate the project’s wine club. The effort aims to reach a broad spectrum of the wine-curious, from collectors to tire-kickers, and the team plans to spin content across multiple channels, “meeting our audience on the platforms that they’re already consuming content,” said Emily Jackson, senior vice president of consumer growth. Editors plan to recruit a mix of experienced stringers and new voices, and to introduce formal reviews and 100-point scoring. What’s old is new again.

See you next week.

Cheese boards I have known ©2026 Meg Maker

Domaine des Sanzay Beauregard Saumur Champigny 2018

13.5% ABV | $25; imported by Ansonia Wines
Seventh-generation winegrower Antoine Sanzay transformed his family’s company in 1999 when he stopped selling fruit to the cooperative and started bottling wine. Today the 11-hectare estate is certified organic, and winemaking is old-school, with ambient fermentations and aging in a mix of wooden foudres and barriques. This wine shows the true character of Loire Cabernet Franc: fragrant of green herbs and candied cherries, bright with juicy acidity but animated by rustic tannins. Its senses of sweet and tart and herbal and bitter conspire to create dark red refreshment. It’s not highly polished, not overconfident, just a drinkable, food-loving reminder of spring days in the Loire.

Benoît Cantin La Grande Côte Irancy 2022

13% ABV | $35; imported by Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant
Irancy is a red-only appellation south-west of Chablis, near Auxerre, with soils that are likewise Kimmeridgian limestone. Pinot noir is the anchor grape, but the wines may contain up to 10 percent César, an ancient hyper-local variety first mentioned in literature in 1783 but farmed there for much longer.

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It’s not you, it’s me

When no Boston chef, restaurant, or culinary professional was named Finalist in this year’s James Beard Awards, the Boston food commentariat erupted in a fit of pique. Boston-area food writer unpacks the reasons her region’s talent often goes unsung. For starters, the Awards’ focus has shifted, so winning projects tend to be, “small, idiosyncratic, and built around a chef/owner’s interests, not a market analysis,” she writes. Given the metro region’s high costs, “Boston makes that restaurant almost impossible to keep alive long enough to build a reputation.” But it’s not merely a matter of economics. “There is also something harder to quantify but impossible to ignore, which is the question of (I’m really sorry to say it)… taste.” In Boston, the classics are rewarded while innovations falter. She partly blames a food media that celebrates sameness and safety. “What’s missing is sharp, honest, independent criticism. Not meanness, but standards.” Her piece is a good example.

Paydirt

It’s not a secret that American farms are failing. According to the USDA, in 2022 fully 57% of farms ended their fiscal year in the red. But that statistic is too coarse to tell the full story, says farmer, illustrator, and former investment analyst . It lumps the Vermonter’s pumpkin patch with the Nebraskan’s six-thousand acres of corn. Gold follows the money to show how taxpayer subsidies have effectively created a new financial instrument, “a long-duration, low-correlation, inflation-hedged asset class for institutional investors whose connection to the ground is a spreadsheet.” One perverse outcome is that Bill Gates is currently America’s largest individual private farmland owner; “When asked why, he’s said it’s a diversified long-term investment,” writes Gold, adding, “He’s not wrong.” The article is a long, clear-eyed, eye-opening read even for this lifelong rural dweller. Bonus touching graphic comic at the top about the death of a Vermont farm.

Right on the money

Speaking of economics, digs into financial and demographic data to pinpoint the reasons younger American’s aren’t choosing wine. He concludes that the issues are structural and macro-economic and not easily fixed by better storytelling. “[T]he wine industry’s ‘young consumer problem’ is not primarily a marketing problem. It’s a purchasing power problem,” he writes. Student debt, housing costs, stagflation, and myriad systemic factors conspire to limit Gen Z’s discretionary spending power. “We say young people prefer RTDs and spirits. A $3 seltzer requires less financial commitment than a $20 bottle of wine. We say they’re health-conscious and sober-curious. But ‘I’m not drinking tonight’ is easier to say than ‘I can’t afford to drink tonight.’” Yingst thinks the solutions fall outside the industry’s control. “The industry keeps asking how to change the consumer’s mind. The better question is what would have to change about the consumer’s economic position before wine becomes a realistic option.”

“Best” “Sellers”

Chef and recipe developer released a new cookbook that swiftly hit No. 1 in the Cooking category of the USA Today Best-seller Booklist. Even so, it did not appear on New York Times Best Sellers, a list that’s arguably more persuasive to readers and markets. Ham’s wife, , also a chef and cookbook author, took to her Substack to, yes, vent, but also to explain the mechanics and rationale behind the Times’s list, which relies on an unseen cadre of editors who handpick books according to undisclosed criteria. Making the list “is opaque and mysterious,” she writes, adding that the roster is “not a record of what sold. It’s a record of what they decided should be seen as having sold. Not technically a lie. Just a system that benefits from no one knowing how it works.” In a sanguine flourish, Sohla finishes her post with her own list of favorite new cookbooks.

Succession plan

Paul Jaboulet-Aîné’s Domaine de la Chapelle has appointed Chiara de Iulis Pepe as head of viticulture and winemaking. Pepe will also continue to lead production at her family’s estate, Emidio Pepe, in Abruzzo. In Wine Spectator, Kristen Bieler calls the appointment of the thirty-two-year-old winemaker bold and unexpected. For herself, Pepe is circumspect. “I’m arriving with a learning attitude and asking lots of questions,” she said. “Aside from a harvest in Patagonia and one in Burgundy, I’ve spent my whole life in Abruzzo.” Her first focus is to improve vineyard health and introduce ambient fermentations. Northern Rhône vignerons have welcomed the news with warm sangfroid. Michel Chapoutier thinks her “Italian sensibility” will be a plus, because “Italy is among the countries that understands how to let the land speak” (he also cited the Iberian peninsula and, of course, France). Jean-Louis Chave confessed, “We were not expecting this… The Italian touch in Hermitage?” Still: “I wish Chiara all the best and I really hope she will succeed, even if it won’t be easy.” Nothing worth doing ever is.

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker

The post-war economy and industrialization brought innovations. Winemakers began tinkering in the field and cellar, applying new techniques to create wines of ripeness, extraction, and polish. Producers like Rolland were no longer protectors of tradition, they were makers of taste.1

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Design for success

salutes leading women in wine while observing that the industry isn’t reaching those on the receiving end—the female consumers who buy the stuff. It’s essentially a problem from design thinking; wine industry product management has historically been led by men who have focused on the proclivities of male consumers. That might have worked historically, but it’s not working under newer demographic and psychographic realities. “The women who never became fine wine customers were not born indifferent to it. They were never given a compelling reason to care,” he writes. “The premium tier isn’t female-proof. It’s simply that until recently it’s been mostly female-neglected.” Vankoski concludes by admitting that as a male industry veteran he was nervous about sharing these insights, but “I would be doing both myself and this industry a disservice by staying quiet.”

Getting spicy

Spice importer Burlap & Barrel has sued the Trump Administration over new sweeping global tariffs. The company direct-imports from spice farmers in over twenty countries, and since its founding, ten years ago, $2 million has gone to these small and family businesses. The products are highly regional with few or no substitutions: onion from Vietnam, dried tomato from Turkey, cacao from Tanzania, herbes de Provence from, you know, Provence. The suit has been filed by Liberty Justice Center, which writes, “For small businesses like Burlap & Barrel… the stakes are immediate and practical: unlawful tariffs can disrupt supply chains, force price increases for American consumers, and threaten jobs and investment.” In their own statement, Burlap & Barrel noted, “When these tariffs were first announced last April, we made two promises: we would not raise our prices, and we would not ask our partner farmers to absorb the costs. A year later, we’re proud to say we’ve kept those promises. This lawsuit is about protecting our ability to continue doing that.” Please consider supporting them by spreading news about the suit and by purchasing their excellent wares.

Growth of a Gourmet

As a young man, , former editor of Epicurious, now with King Arthur Flour, fell in love with Gourmet magazine with an ardor bordering on obsession. One story in particular fingered his psyche so stubbornly it set him on the path to become a food writer. When at last he landed his first byline in Gourmet, his boyfriend had the print piece framed (he’s always been too embarrassed to hang it). In 2009, when the magazine shuttered, “I felt I’d lost not just an outlet but the source of all my ambitions,” he writes, in his new essay, Gourmet is a Sickness. The magazine has recently been relaunched with an altogether different editorial mindset, and Tamarkin contemplates what the original might have become had it slid into a digital publishing age rife with listicles and slideshows and SEO gimmickry. “It’s a luxury that we never had to see Gourmet navigate the last 17 years of the internet. And yet we can’t help wondering what it would look like now if it were still alive.”

To taste is human

In the New York Times, culture journalist Joseph Bernstein asks, Is Taste the One Thing AI Can’t Replicate? The piece is less about the software mechanics of programming taste into an AI machine and more about the social mechanics of cultivating taste in the programmers themselves. Not, Can taste be taught to a bot? but, Can taste be taught to a human? I argue it cannot. Taste is not a skill, it’s a tactic. Its input is lived experience and its output is a rainbow of personal predilections: thirst and desire, aversion and displeasure. Taste is contingent and conditional, aesthetically elastic, a continuous dialogue between our ideas about excellence and our need for something better (which makes it inherently optimistic). Taste is a muscle that strengthens as we mature, which makes it hard to teach but easy to learn. For a human. For now.

“You are being given a free recipe”

In , Kristen Hartke reminds us that food writing is never only about food: it’s about memory, family, trauma, politics, sadness, joy, and more. Even recipes—or maybe especially recipes—are about more than food now that so many are created by self-publishers. “When food blogging began its dizzying rise in the 1990s, it became populated with a lot of people who loved food and cooking but, to be honest, didn’t have the first clue how to write and desperately needed editors,” she says. “This led to a genre of writing that I like to call The Ramble, and it’s had an impact on all food writers, no matter how accomplished they are.” So next time you google a recipe and run into a wall of text at the top, be generous. “There is always some jerk in the comments… who has to complain about having to read about my food memory before they got to my recipe. Seriously? Have these people never heard of scrolling?”

Marginalia: all nature in motion

In the Northern Hemisphere, the northward bird migration has begun. Bird movements can be tracked—this feels nearly miraculous—by the same radar system used to monitor the weather. BirdCast, a project of Cornell Lab and other researchers, publishes a live migration map during both spring and fall movements. The main heatmap shows nightly traffic across the lower forty-eight states, from sundown to sunup, when birds are on the wing. The Mississippi and Eastern Flyways are especially hot right now. They also offer a dashboard that you can configure for your specific location. On March 29th, 367,800 birds flew over Grafton County, where I live. The current total count this season—again, for my county alone—is nearing 1 million, and we’re just getting started. Because they fly at night, birds can get disoriented by bright lights. We can support them by keeping our properties dark during these critical periods—as we say, Lights out for the birds!

See you next week.

Images ©2026 Meg Maker