Did Benjamin Franklin really say, “In all your amours, prefer old women to young ones”? That’s what Stephen Vizinczey suggests in the opening of In Praise of Older Women, where he argues that “modern culture—American culture—glorifies the young; on the lost continent of old Europe it was the affair of the young man and his older mistress that had the glamour of perfection.”

Substitute mistress with white wine, and you’ll have the point of this essay. And, of course, I want to pique everyone’s interest in the merits of older white wines. I suspect, however, that the more experienced among us already know the pleasures they offer, while the younger ones have yet to discover them.

It turns out that white wines would very much like us to believe they can age gracefully. Well, I say white wines, but what I really mean is the Italian wine consortiums and the like. Their job is to convince people like me, who in turn try to convince people like you, that mature white wines can offer the kind of pleasure to the discerning collector that was once thought to be the exclusive preserve of structured reds.

This charm offensive has meant that, over the past three years, I’ve been invited to a number of events designed to showcase the aging potential of Gavi, tocai friulano, sauvignon blanc and, most recently, Lugana. As a result, I’ve tasted some truly fabulous older white wines—sometimes in even more fabulous locations, lucky me!—and had the chance to reflect on why so many white wines capable of aging remain wines we almost always drink young.

The premise of every event has been the same: people usually drink Lugana/Gavi /sauvignon blanc…while they’re young. But here are some older bottles. Aren’t they great?

And the premise holds true not only for wines with a reputation for being easy-drinking whites, such as Lugana, but also for wines with an established reputation for longevity, such as top white Burgundy. Octavian Wine, one of the world’s leading bonded fine wine storage providers, with more than £2 billion worth of wine under management, shared some striking data when I asked: What is the average age of a wine when it leaves your warehouse and is delivered to a customer’s home address (presumably to be drunk)?

Of course, Octavian caters to collectors, and the wines stored there are, by definition, collectible. Yet even in this setting, the contrast between white and red wines is striking. The overwhelming majority (78 percent) of white wines shipped to customers came from the previous six vintages, whereas only 40 percent of red wines fell into the same age bracket, with the remainder distributed much more evenly across older vintages. At the other end of the spectrum, just 2.5 percent of white wines delivered were more than 20 years old, compared with 10 percent of reds. In other words, even among serious collectors, white wines are consumed far earlier than reds.

So, can we say that white wines have a reputation problem? (Isn’t it a bit like the old belief that men get better with age, while women, well… they don’t?) Could part of it still be a legacy of the premature oxidation (“premox”) crisis that emerged in white Burgundy in the early 2000s?

The problem known as “premox”—the imperfectly understood phenomenon of white Burgundies aging far more quickly than they should, with some bottles becoming completely oxidized—began to emerge in wines from the 1995 vintage and affected many wines produced through the mid-2000s. Even great Puligny-Montrachet and Meursault, including bottles from some of Burgundy’s finest producers, were not spared. It spread through the region like the plague. Corks, sulphur dioxide, and a host of other factors were blamed. Yet, despite years of research, there is still no consensus on what caused the problem in the first place—or, perhaps more intriguingly, why it seems to have largely disappeared.

While that may well have scared collectors into favoring younger Burgundies, I’d argue that—particularly in Italy—we’re dealing with something different, something more of a chicken-and-egg problem. Italian producers tend to rush their white wines to market rather than holding back stocks for later release. As a result, consumers rarely encounter mature bottles, very few people are systematically tasting mature vintages, and there is little opportunity to build confidence in how these wines age. When invited on press trips producers pour superb older vintages, and in most cases they come from the family’s personal cellar, giving critics the chance to experience and write about just how well some of these wines can evolve, but only anecdotally rather than in any systematic way. These wines almost never reach the market, they exist as demonstrations rather than products. While critics may leave convinced, consumers remain unconvinced because without those experiences, confidence in the wines’ longevity never becomes firmly established.

This, I think, is the heart of the issue. A wine’s ability to age and its reputation for aging are two different things.

The first is determined by the wine itself—its acidity, concentration and balance. On this front, research is advancing along two complementary lines.

One seeks to establish whether a grape variety possesses intrinsic aging potential by identifying its reservoir of aroma precursors and understanding how these evolve over time—whether they generate new layers of complexity during ageing or simply fade as the wine oxidizes. For example, the team at the University of Verona, led by Professor Maurizio Ugliano, has been mapping the volatile compounds and aroma precursors of dozens of Italian grape varieties (including turbiana, the grape of Lugana) to understand how each develops its own distinctive aromatic signature with age.

The other line of research seeks to answer a more practical question: what do producers need to do in the vineyard and the winery to craft wines that age well? While Chardonnay’s capacity for aging is well established, the Burgundy Wine Board (BIVB), perhaps prompted by the lingering shadow of the premox crisis, sponsored a six-year study (VOLTA) to investigate how vineyard and winemaking practices influence the longevity of white Burgundy. The study concluded that much of a wine’s ageing potential is built during pressing and élevage, rather than being determined by the grape variety alone.

Yet aging potential alone is not enough to create a reputation for longevity. That reputation is built by the market. A region only earns a reputation for longevity when producers keep back stock, critics regularly taste mature vintages (as they do with features such as “Bordeaux 10 Years On”) merchants sell them and consumers learn what those wines become with time. Without that ecosystem, even genuinely age-worthy wines continue to be treated as wines to drink young.

Only two of the Lugana producers I visited in my recent press trip hold back stock. And even then, the quantities they retain don’t seem sufficient to create a meaningful secondary market or establish a culture of drinking mature vintages. There is, of course, an obvious reason for this. Holding back wine requires producers to sacrifice current cash flow while investing in additional storage capacity—whether barrels, tanks or bottle aging—in the hope of selling the wine later at a higher price. I recently tried to estimate what aging actually costs a producer (calculations from Credible Signals):

A good barrique costs around €1,000 and can be used new or seasoned. Assume it’s used once: after losses you get 200 liters of wine, so the barrel cost is €5 per liter. Labour and electricity add €0.40 per liter. Storage costs €6 per month per barrique — about €0.40 per liter per year. Financing adds another €0.30 per liter if you borrow at 5% on €5.80 (barrel + handling + storage). That’s roughly €6 per liter, or €4.50 per bottle. If you use the barrique three times, the additional cost drops below €2 per bottle.

Bottle aging is cheaper but still significant. Storage might cost €6 per month per pallet (600 bottles), or €0.12 per bottle per year. The real cost is the so-called opportunity cost: if a wine could sell now for €10 but doesn’t, the producer must finance that cash flow, adding roughly €0.50 per bottle in interest. The total cost for an extra year in bottle is around €0.62 per bottle.

Depending on the aging method, every extra year can cost a producer anywhere from around $0.77 to $5.14 per bottle before any additional profit is realized. Building a reputation for longevity requires producers to sacrifice that cash flow in exchange for uncertain future returns.

For collectors, however, that scarcity creates an unusual opportunity. Because relatively few mature white wines reach the market, the category remains underdeveloped. Prices often reflect how these wines are consumed rather than how well they actually perform with age.

I realize this may sound a little far-fetched, but indulge me for a moment. Imagine collecting Meursault in the 1970s or 1980s. On a recent trip to Burgundy, the president of the Comité Bourgogne told me that many Meursault producers in those days barely made ends meet because the wines simply weren’t in fashion. (I can’t help wondering whether the dominance of Robert Parker’s Bordeaux-centric era played some part in that...) Those who bought and cellared Meursault back then weren’t following trends but instead investing in something before the rest of the market caught on. Looking back today, it’s hard not to envy them. They were able to buy extraordinary wines at prices that seem unimaginable now.

I’m not predicting that Lugana, Gavi, or Soave will become the next Meursault. That’s beside the point. Every great collecting category was once obscure. The excitement of collecting lies in the possibility of discovering tomorrow’s classics before everyone else does. Mature Italian white wines feel like one of those rare corners of the wine world where there is still genuine room for exploration.

Unlike Bordeaux or Burgundy, where decades of criticism have established fairly clear hierarchies, many Italian white wines remain largely unexplored territory. We don’t yet know which producers will prove the most age-worthy, which vintages will shine brightest or which wines will ultimately define their regions. We simply don’t have enough evidence yet. And perhaps that’s precisely what makes this journey so fun. The reality is that many producers themselves are still discovering the ageing potential of their own wines.

But things are turning. From tasting a number of Lugana, I can say that some are genuinely age-worthy and compelling, while others are less convincing. In some of the less successful examples, the oak dominates, overwhelming rather than complementing the grape’s delicate aromatics. More broadly, I think Lugana—and some other emerging fine wine regions—is still searching for its signature style. By that, I mean that producers are still working out which winemaking techniques best express the region and its native grape. The balance between oak, lees aging, texture, freshness and fruit purity has yet to reach the level of consensus and refinement seen in more established fine wine regions.

That impression was echoed by Davide Slaghenaufi, an oenologist and biotechnologist at the University of Verona, where he is part of the team studying the aging potential of turbiana in Lugana. Having also trained in Bordeaux under Denis Dubourdieu, he believes that Italian producers, particularly when working with the country’s many indigenous grape varieties, still have much to learn about the use of oak from their French counterparts.

Yet the progress already made is remarkable. Some producers have demonstrated just how extraordinary mature Lugana can become. Zenato’s Lugana Riserva ‘Sergio Zenato’ 2005 was one of the finest mature white wines I tasted on these trips, offering a glimpse of what the region is capable of when terroir, viticulture and winemaking come together.

Elsewhere, there are producers trying to build a reputation for age-worthy white wines almost single-handedly. Villa Bogdano, for example, is championing the little-known Lison DOCG, investing in research, innovation and a deeper understanding of tocai friulano, despite the financial incentives that often favour uprooting old vineyards rather than preserving them. Changing perceptions of an obscure appellation is a slow and expensive undertaking.

That may sound like a limitation, but I increasingly see it as an opportunity. Collectors often dream of discovering great wines before everyone else does and that’s why mature Italian white wines are exciting.

They are not a finished story. They are a story still being written.

Related Aging Content

Big news over here at the Everyday Drinking headquarters: your humble correspondent has earned himself a major certification. Yes, some of you have been studying for years and years to gain advanced WSET certifications—and that’s great; I salute you. My certification is nothing like that. It took less than five minutes, but I am now a fully ordained minister. Yes, I am now officially among the clergy, a man of the cloth.

No, I didn’t have a sudden come-to-Jesus moment. I got ordained because I was asked to officiate the wedding of my niece Mia and her fiancé Derek this fall. I am honored and it’s going to be fun.

There’s been a bunch of wedding-related festivities all summer, including multiple wedding showers. For the most recent shower, I was tasked with buying some wines for the event, a mix of nice bottles to try.

I let someone else handle the bubbly for the mimosas, and focused on getting seven different still wines. We wanted to offer a mix of rosé, white, red, and orange wines that would appeal to wide mix of ages. They had to be wines that were accessible, drinkable, and good value—and above all, they had to be unfussy and fun. If people wanted to taste and think about any of the seven wines, great. But mainly, these should be wines that would glide into the background.

I did my wine shopping at a suburban liquor store in Marlton, New Jersey that I frequent, called WineWorks. It’s not a boutique wine shop specializing in special, small-production wines. It’s the sort of place where most Americans buy their wine. This store does a brisk business in the kinds of industrial, manipulated, additive-laden, artificially-priced wines that we railed against a couple of weeks ago. Josh, Chloe, Meiomi and the gang are all there, along with the usual suspects of Seaglass, The Prisoner, and Caymus.

In the “Sysco-ification of Wine,” we depicted a broken system, where shady distribution practices choked out choice. These relentless distribution practices have warped wine consumers’ perception of what good wine costs.

This is why the anti-snob “drink what you like” message not only fails, but ends up unequally promoting bad mass-market wines, protecting them from any kind of qualitative comparison with better wines. These mass-market wines are so ever-present and over-available that they’ve superseded even the average consumer’s own personal taste. But that omnipresence is not by accident. It’s the result of careful business decisions by corporate wineries and their distributors.

We faced a lot of criticism and pushback to this article from the “drink what you like” crowd. The main argument seemed to be this:

“I think we have to celebrate on ramps. These kind of takes, I think, hurt the industry overall. If people want to drink Caymus, fine. If they want to drink small producers and underrepresented regions, dope. But they’ll never get to the latter if we’re dismantling their path forward.”

There are two falsehoods in this position. The first is the fake idea that there are “starter wines” that provide “on ramps.” I’ve already dealt extensively with that untrue statement.

But more damaging is the false dichotomy suggested, as if there is only Caymus and other big brands on the one hand versus tiny producers on some mountaintop nobly hand-crafting a few hundred bottles per year on the other. But there are thousands of wineries and wines that fall between those corporate industrial wine brands and tiny artisan producers. What we were depicting was the pervasiveness of the manipulated wine…versus literally all other wines. “Wine-based products” with zero transparency versus wines made with integrity. That choice is what the American distribution tier, through its consolidation and tactics, is choking out. There are plenty of big wineries who make honest wines that are getting blocked out of distribution as well.

As I shopped in WineWorks for the wines for my niece’s shower, I was simply looking for good wines that cost under $20—basically the same price points as those mass-market industrial wines. Fortunately, WineWorks happens to have a very good wine buyer, named Charlie, who stocks the shelves with great-value selections next to all the big brands.

The wines I found for the wedding shower could be served by the glass on any wine list across the country, and would be a marked improvement over those manipulated mass market wines. But only if the American wine distribution system wasn’t rigged.

I invite you to look at my list of seven wines below, argue with them, suggest your own alternatives. Meanwhile, everyone will be enjoying drinking them at the shower.

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A bite from the wine bug is exactly the type of infection that will drive an otherwise normal person to spend hours scouring the dusty, creaking old shelves of an eight-story used book store, hoping she might discover a new wine book. That’s where I was when I spotted Joyous Anarchy: The Search for Great American Wines, by William E. Massee. Joyous Anarchy, published in 1978, is a peculiar example of 20th-century wine writing that comes at a very particular time in American wine history. It might offer us an interesting perspective on our own cultural moment.

Massee’s writing veers toward the quirky and oversaturated, depicting lots of dialogue between the author as his industry colleagues. He loves long lists for a variety of occasions: An American Wine Sampler; America’s Ten Best Wines; Top American Jug Wines; Good Wines, Good Buys. “A list plunges you right into the middle of things, but when there are a dozen Chardonnays on the shelf, a score of Rieslings, where do you begin?” he asks. “Be sure that when you have tried one you have not tried them all. Variety in excellence is the joy of wine.”

My favorite chapter is on Salad Wines. “It was a great leap to freedom when Californians decided wine was fine with salad,” Massee writes. “Salad wines help to loosen us up about eating and drinking.” His list of American salad wines feels fairly esoteric, even for today: Chasselas? Colombard? Sauvignon Vert? Sylvaner? Pinot St. George?

Above all, Joyous Anarchy takes on the American wine scene as it was in the late seventies. Massee depicts a Europhile world that is totally skeptical of American wine, and Joyous Anarchy is his attempt to debunk these anti-American-wine biases. Many Americans like to believe that, after the Judgement of Paris in 1976, everyone just suddenly fell in love with California wine. But Massee’s book shows that wasn’t true; there was still work to be done.

Massee quotes fellow wine lovers asking, “Are there really any good wines in California?” Oregon and Washington were promising but not major players yet. Eastern regions that would soon slide into obscurity—such as Pennsylvania and the Midwest—were, in Massee’s telling, simply part of the country’s wine geography. Massee explores wine places we might now consider strange, such as Ohio, New Hampshire, the Ozarks, and Egg Harbor, New Jersey.

Massee’s friends and colleagues in the world of wine play the role of skeptics. In a chapter called “The Best Bottles: High, Sloping and Slender,” he recounts a meeting with a retailer at a small wine shop who’s despondent because he can’t sell American wine:

“Nobody knows anything about American wines and nobody wants to admit it,” said the retailer. “A few read about a wine, usually a six-dollar bottle and when they say that’s too much and I suggest another, they think it’s a con. The kids don’t trust me because I’m gray; women don’t trust me because I’m male; and men don’t trust me because they don’t trust anybody.”

In his chapter on California wines, Massee recounts a conversation with his seatmate on an airplane. After he’s ordered a glass of California wine, she asks, suspiciously, “Why are you so hot on American wines?” Massee responds:

Because they are exciting; there are new wines coming on the market all the time; there’s experiment everywhere, and change. Besides, I’m going to write about them. “I see,” she said, snuffing out her cigarette in my armrest. She leaned back and closed her eyes. Obviously, I had to get my axe well ground before we landed and she was leaving me to do it. “Didn’t you like your wine?” asked the stewardess as she took my tray. It was fine, fine, I answered. Seatmate smiled. But she didn’t open her eyes.”

Massee begins the third chapter, “America’s Ten Best Wines,” in dialogue with someone he calls The Professional Wine Buyer. Over a snifter of Cognac, the buyer vents his frustration with American wine. First, he compares California to Burgundy in the “old days when Frank Schoonmaker used to bustle around the peasants,” adding: “Burgundy was easy. All you had to know was French, and how to select the right piece, and how to talk a peasant out of his wine.” When the wine buyer continues ranting against California wine, Massee tries and fails to intervene:

“But they make lots of good wines, it was necessary to interject. This was a mistake. The wine buyer thumped his snifter. ‘So what? It’s anarchy up there. People making all kinds of wines, all different ways. I can’t buy just Chardonnay. They want me to buy Cabernet, too, and Zinfandel, maybe the whole line. And they keep changing the way they make the wines—one year full, the next year light, one year lots of wood, the next year none. They drive you crazy.’”

“Joyous anarchy,” is Massee’s response. “Wine lovers will find the wines, somehow. They’ll get marketed, somehow.”

Let’s just say that Joyous Anarchy is a strange, obscure book to discover. But it made me curious about exactly who Willam E. Massee was. Though he’s mostly forgotten, it turns out that Massee was one of wine’s most important mid-20th century figures. He is remembered as “one of the first American wine writers in the post-World War II era,” according to his 2006 obituary in the New York Times. “Massee was a prolific writer, and much of his work in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s coincided with the beginning of America’s postwar preoccupation with good living. His books championed American wines at a time when connoisseurs dismissed them as inconsequential.” The author of other books such as The Art of Comfort, Wines of France, Pasta Pronto, and Eating and Drinking in Europe, Massee was one of mid-century America’s professional bon vivants (a man after my own heart). We can see him as an influencer of his era.

In 1955, John Updike actually profiled Massee in a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece. Updike tailed him through a sherry tasting arranged by the Spanish Sherry Information Bureau, describing Massee as “a sandy gentleman whose collegiate exterior is lit from within by a devout and evangelical epicureanism.” While they taste, Massee’s pitch to Updike is refreshingly inclusive: “Anybody can be a wine expert… it’s just a matter of drinking wine.” But then he narrates three glasses of fino to Updike using descriptors like “breed,” “masculine,” “flabby, even vapid.” Updike doesn’t editorialize, but also doesn’t miss a snarky beat. He just lets Massee talk and quotes him—eleven unbroken sentences—and trusts the volume of wine talk to do the mocking. It’s a classic Talk of the Town move: fidelity as satire. Transcribe the expert at full length, with perfect courtesy, until the expertise sounds like unctuous performance. A paragraph later, Updike writes: “We whistled in our two finos, one on top of the other, and pretended to notice a difference.”

When Joyous Anarchy was published in 1978, wine culture in the United States was fraught with confusion and institutional mistrust. Something was clearly in the air, since ten major wine books were published that year. William Rice, then the Washington Post’s food editor, wrote a very critical review of these books, including Joyous Anarchy, warning readers that many of the wine writers are “boosters” of the industry. “Don’t look for harsh appraisals of wines, scandal, or criticism of the industry,” he writes. It’s unclear whether Massee ever took money from the industry. But unfairly or fairly, he was lumped in with writers who did.

The defining post-war preoccupation with “good living” and the subsequent birth of the “American Dream” meant hosting at home in the suburbs. In Joyous Anarchy, it’s clear that Massee is writing for a certain type of affluent wine drinker, one who he believed needed prescriptive directions on how to buy, enjoy, and share wine with friends. But, in 1978, Massee’s book feels backwards-looking. By the end of the 1970s, the public’s post-Vietnam, post-Watergate distrust, along with severe economic stagflation, made Massee’s epicurean, joy-of-living philosophy a hard sell. In Joyous Anarchy, Massee’s retailer friend clearly states how people saw wine: “They think it’s a con.”

Which is why it’s interesting to note the work of another wine writer in 1978—one Robert Parker, who launched his Wine Advocate newsletter the same year. By now, we’ve all internalized the negative talk about “Parkerization,” Parker’s preference for high-alcohol, heavily oaked fruit bombs, and the outsized influence that he wielded on wine culture by the end of the 20th century. But it can be shocking to remember what an outsider that Parker was in the beginning. The Wine Advocate’s (self-told) origin story is nothing if not revolutionary:

“In the early 1970s, when Parker was conceiving of writing his own wine guide, he was taken with the work of Ralph Nader, an American political activist who sought to ‘out’ corporate and political corruption by challenging compromised propaganda. Parker recognized that much of what was then being written about wine was compromised by the financial agendas of many of the famous wine writers of the day. He dreamt of a publication that could be free of financial ties to wineries and merchants, a guide that would produce wholly unbiased views on wines and that served only the interests of wine consumers. This would be a magazine that would be funded purely by subscribers—the people that buy, read and use it. And so, The Wine Advocate started and remains true to this day.”

Whatever we think, in 2026, about the bankrupt nature of the 100-point scale, when Parker first started scoring wines in 1978, wine culture desperately wanted it. Writers like Massee found themselves on the wrong side of that cultural moment.

Today, we find ourselves in a similar moment of institutional distrust, confusion, and crisis—not just in wine culture, but in society at large. Is it too simplistic to say we have come full circle? Perhaps the difference today is that both writer/influencers like Massee, as well as many of the so-called “independent” points-scoring critics, are equally compromised by industry ties. So where does that leave us? Maybe it’s time once again for a little Joyous Anarchy.

Related Content on Everyday Drinking

It’s been nine days since Caroline and I posted “The Sysco-ification of Wine,” our call-to-arms dealing with shady corporate distribution, wine culture’s lazy “drink what you like” ethos, and why it’s time to break out the pitchforks. Clearly, we struck a lil chord. The comments, both here and on social media, keep coming in hot. I’ve been called a “snob,” a “wanker,” an “asshole,” among other things. “You two argue like evangelical Christians,” whined one wine writer. Prominent Men In Wine have been sliding into my co-author’s DMs (though not mine lol) to mansplain how they disagree with our points. The whole thing has made me slightly worried about Americans’ reading comprehension abilities, but here we are.

Yet here’s the thing. Ever since I hit the publish button, I’ve felt lighter, as though I’ve gotten something heavy off my chest. Like I can finally start my relaxing deep summer beach life. I haven’t worn shoes very much since that post. I’ve been going for long walks on the beach, and watching soccer and tennis and the Phillies when it gets too hot. I’ve been drinking Mexican beer, and listening to the old reggae songs in praise of Jah and sensimilla. My friend Bryan has been making a beach happy hour drink with bourbon, Lillet, and Aperol called the Golden Hour (“not to be confused with a golden shower,” is the groaner dad-joke he makes when mixing them). The Golden Hour has become the cocktail of the summer.

Perhaps the most tangible sign that we’re moving into deep summer is the debut of ripe, juicy local tomatoes in the farm markets. Yes, the corn and the melons and the blueberries and the peaches around here are all wonderful. But it’s the tomatoes that mark the season when I can finally turn my brain off a little bit. The other day the only thing I ate was a tomato-and-pork roll sandwich (mayo and white bread, thank you) and then a tomato risotto that I adapted from David Tanis’ vegetarian recipe (sorry veg friends, I used chicken stock because I am not using…*checks notes*…boiling water…in a risotto). Anyway, stirring tomato risotto is as close to zen as I may get.

Of course, since this is a twice-weekly newsletter, I can’t turn off my brain entirely, and so my summer-addled thoughts inevitably turn to…what wine do I pair with tomatoes.

Yes, I know, wine-and-food pairings can be such a banal topic. A while back I asked, “Are Food & Drink Pairings Ridiculous?” Spoiler alert: They are not more ridiculous than life itself.

Tomatoes are always highlighted as one of the most “challenging” wine pairings, right up there with artichokes, asparagus, and spicy dishes. A lot of ink has been spilled on how to pair tomatoes with wine. The common advice is to match the acidity of the tomatoes with a higher-acid wine, and that seems sound. Dry rosé, and sauvignon blanc pop up. Because of the Italy-tomato connection, barbera and sangiovese are inevitably mentioned. Sometimes a wine with earthy or herbal notes is suggested, syrah or cabernet franc. I’ve even seen off-dry riesling suggested.

For me, when I think about tomatoes and wine, I think about the ones I ate a few years ago at a restaurant in Madrid, called Angelita. I had lunch there with my friend François after visiting the Prado. I wrote about that lunch in my essay “Still Life With Wine.” I had been looking at Juan Sánchez Cotán’s austere bodegón “Still Life With Game, Vegetables and Fruit,” a strange still life from 1602. The objects in the painting, according to the audio tour on my headphones, were “precise and sober, and at the same time, poetic and strange. They highlight everyday simplicity.” About 17th-century still life, the audio tour narrator suggested, in full sincerity and with zero irony, that “one could see the creative hand of God in even the most trivial of objects.”

As for the tomatoes I ate afterwards:

François insisted we order tomatoes as our first course. “These are the best tomatoes you will ever eat in your life,” he insisted. There are not many times in life where someone says something so hyperbolic and it turns out to be true. That two-hour lunch was among the most memorable meals I have eaten. And those tomatoes! They were a variety called Corazón de Buey that were grown in Zamora at the family farm of Angelita’s owners. They were so red, so meaty, so juicy, that one bite nearly brought tears to my eyes. Is it ridiculous to say that one of the most exciting, inspiring things I’ve done in Spain was eat that tomato? In any case, Cotán still life and that tomato are somehow intertwined in my memory.

Once I think about that, I’m off and running thinking about Spain and tomatoes. I think about gazpacho or pisto, or about the simple pan amb tomàquet that’s served first at every Catalan restaurant—the small ripe tomatoes you rub vigorously on bread with garlic, a drizzle of oil, and a pinch of salt.

And so any pairing recommendations from me, regarding tomatoes, begins in Spain. I would point you toward Catalonia’s whites from grapes like xarel·lo, malvasia de Sitges, or garnacha blanca. I will even steer you toward albariño and verdejo, though much more carefully. For rosé, I will swing toward Italian grapes, such as montepulciano, or earthy mourvèdre-driven Bandol rosé, as well as some mashup blends of white and red grapes.

The reds are always trickier, but I do like the brighter, juicier, more savory examples of Chianti Classico, as well as ciliegiolo, the local grape of the coastal Tuscany. And then, of course, there is always Chinon, among my dearest wine loves. You see the tasting note descriptor “tomato” more with Chinon than another wine. After all, tomato—as I always point out in talking about Chinon—is a fruit. And so matching fruit on fruit always seems like a sound pairing way to go.

Let us know what you pair with tomatoes!

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The Tomato Pairings

The Pa Amb Tomàquet Pairing: Catalan Whites

Celler Pardas Pur Xarel·lo 2022 ($30)

Xarel·lo is swiftly becoming Catalonia’s world-class white grape. From two vineyards that are more than 50 years old and aged half in concrete and half in oak, this is serious xarel·lo, precise, full of tension, with layers of minerality. Aromas of blossom, cut flower, and hints of spice, and a core of saltiness leading to a long finish. An amazing value for an age-worthy white wine of this caliber.

Celler Frisach ‘La Foradada’ 2023 ($28)

‘La Foradada’ is a wonderful example of skin-contact garnacha blanca—herbal, citrusy, tropical. In Catalonia, skin-contact or “orange” wine is not trendy, but rather a traditional style dating back centuries, called brisat. Celler Frisach is in Terra Alta, just over 2 hours from Barcelona. “The most important region in the world for garnacha blanca,” says winemaker Francesc Frisach.

Celler Pardas Blau Cru 2022 ($24)

Malvasia de Sitges (not to be confused with other varieties of Malvasia) is an ancient white grape variety in Catalonia that nearly went extinct—by the 1970s, there was only vineyard remaining. It’s been painstakingly revived by Ramon Parera and Jodri Annan of Celler Pardas, who have shared cuttings with numerous other wineries in Penedès. “Malvasia de Sitges is a difficult grape. That’s why our grandfathers preferred to plant something else,” says Parera. Vibrant, crisp, and intense, with notes of stone fruit and bright citrus with underlying saline and smoke, and a chalky texture and electric acidity.

Pepe Raventos ‘Vinya la Plana’ Malvasia de Sitges ($36)

Another great example of malvasia di Sitges. Delicate, textured, full of herbs, bright lemon, and sea salt. From a tiny single vineyard (1.4 ha) of young vines, with 15 days of skin contact, and aged in foudre for 8 months.

The Gazpacho Pairing: Verdejo and Albariño

Barco del Corneta ‘Cucu’ ($25)

“Verdejo has great potential and is a great grape, but it’s been in bad hands,” Barco del Corneta’s winemaker Félix Crespo Álvarez told me. This bottle is a good (and good value) intro to a vibrant, higher-level of verdejo—zesty, floral, and fresh, with racy acidity.

Esmeralda García SantYuste 2023 ($37)

This is verdejo like you’ve never tasted. A beautiful natural wine from 200-year-old vines at an elevation of more than 2,600 feet, aged in amphora and steel tank, slight skin contact. It’s complex, floral, tropical, with great acidity, notes of nectarine and warm citrus, and an attractive salty backbone.

Granbazán ‘Etiqueta Ambar’ 2024 ($30)

A classic expression of albariño from this benchmark Rias Baixas producer. Made with free-run juice, aged on the lees for five months, ripe and complex, with deep warm citrus, herbal and floral, cut grass, talc with underlying salinity.

Zárate ‘El Palomar’ Albariño 2024 ($59)

A more complex side of albariño, from half-hectare vineyard named after the large granite dovecote that overlooks it. The oldest of Zárate’s plots, with vines dating to around 1850 and grown on their own rootstocks. Fermented in large oak foudre. Slightly tropical, with grapefruit pith and a hint of honeycomb.

Rosato con Pomodoro

Broc Cellars Rosato 2024 ($30)

The only non-Abruzzo bottle here is from Broc Cellars, one of my favorite California wineries. Made from 100% montepulciano, this rosato is savory, floral and herbal on the nose, with rose, sage, and a hint of forest floor. On the palate it’s deep cherry, maraschino, and even a hit of cherry Coke, with a crisp, dry finish. My friend who I tasted this with called it “a boy’s rosé. It’s giving handlebar mustache.” Broc Cellars gets its montepulciano grapes from Fox Hill, an organic vineyard above the Russian River in Mendocino County, known for its Italian varieties.

Tiberio Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo 2024 ($25)

Sibling winemakers Cristiana and Antonio Tiberio make this lovely rosato from the free-run juice of destemmed, massal selection montepulciano grapes. Ripe strawberry, cherry, and pomegranate, with fresh rose petals and fragrant herbs, a little earthy and spicy. It’s crisp and juicy, but structured, with a nice mineral-driven finish. Good value, and great with all kinds of food.

Château Pradeaux Bandol Rosé 2024 ($32)

Château Pradeaux is a benchmark Bandol winery. This is their flagship rosé blend of 70% mourvèdre, 27% cinsault, and 3% grenache, from the domaine’s younger vines. After a direct pressing of 24 hours, it’s fermented by native yeasts in cement or enameled stainless steel tanks, with no malolactic fermentation to preserve acidity, before it spends some time on the fine lees. Moreish, with concentrated fruit: strawberries on the vine, peaches, ruby red grapefruit, raspberries, dried herbs, salt. A gastronomic rosé, and an incredible value for such an ageworthy wine. —Sarah Parker Jang

Stirm ‘Neptunite’ Rosé 2024 ($25)

One of the best rosés I’ve tasted over the past year or so, from a crazy blend of riesling, chenin blanc, cabernet pfeffer from San Benito County—tart, fruity, earthy, and savory. The chenin comes from 30-year-old vines and the riesling comes from 60-year-old vines.

Christian Tschida Birdscape Pink 2025 ($44)

Anyone who follows my work knows how much I love the wines of Christian Tschida. I had this bottle on numerous occasions, and its quickly become a favorite. So, is this a rosé or a light red? Honestly, who cares? Tschida’s “pink maceration” wine—a mashup blend of blaufränkisch, pinot noir, and a few white varieties—is the dictionary definition of the wine term “crunchy.” Savory, spicy, with notes of dill, tarragon, forest floor, cranberry, pomegranate, and rhubarb. Simply delightful.

Tinto, Rosso, To-may-to, To-mah-to

Raúl Moreno 'La Esencia' 2024 ($36)

This field blend from Andalusian experimentalist Raul Moreno presents as a red wine, and drinks like a white wine. A mix of palomino, Pedro Ximénez, and arinto, along with the local red grape tintilla, it’s fermented whole cluster and then aged in amphora.Perfumed and lifted, fresh and vibrant, dense and salty, with notes of blood orange, sour cherry, and a hint of Campari.

Tenuta di Lilliano Chianti Classico 2022 ($20)

How can we have a tomato pairing article without a Chianti Classico? This is one of my favorites from the major Tuscan tasting report I did last year. 90% sangiovese, 5% colorino, 5% merlot, aged in large casks for 12 months. Nose of wild berries, dried herbs, and rose, flavors of black cherry and cherry tomato, and an underlying spice note, and supple tannins.

Castello di Volpaia Chianti Classico 2023 ($28)

A fantastic Chianti that’s fresh, savory, with bright fruit and fragrant flowers on the nose, great energy on the palate, juicy red fruit, and an underlying savory note of cherry tomato and herb. 90% sangiovese, 10% merlot.

Alberto Motta Ciliegiolo Rosso Toscana 2022 ($23)

Ciliegiolo (which takes its name from the Italian word for “cherry”) was once just a grape to blend with sangiovese. Now, one of the most exciting trends in Tuscany is the emergence of red wines in Maremma made from 100 percent ciliegiolo. This delightful, of-the-moment wine from organic producer Alberto Motta is cool, savory, and mineral, but also bursting with juicy cherry (of course), great acidity and balance and a hint of amaro on the finish.

Bernard Baudry ‘Les Granges’ 2024 ($23)

When I think of “tomato” wines, I always think of Chinon. Expressive aromas of dried herb and pepper, with swirling fruity-savory notes of blackberry, grilled tomato, black olive, tobacco, and a spicy finish.Organic, spontaneous fermentation with native yeasts, and aged seven to 10 months in concrete. Amazing value for such a complex wine.

Domaine de la Noblaie ‘Les Chiens-Chiens’ 2022 ($33)

From 30-year-old vines of a vineyard that translates to “The Dogs-Dogs.” An example of understated oak aging in Chinon (this spends 12 months in 400-liter neutral barrels). Textured, serious, dark, and chewy with dried herb, plum, black olive, blistered tomato, and even a hint of espresso. Super complex, and spectacular wine for the price.

And One Tomato Spirit

Cazottes Tomates ($70/375 ml)

Cazottes includes more than 280 varieties of tomatoes in this liqueur (18% abv). Handpicked at peak ripeness, they are destemmed and quartered (also by hand), and macerated in Cazottes’s eau de vie—made from Jurançon Noir grapes—for 10 months. It’s redolent of fresh summer tomatoes, olive tapenade, oregano, sultanas, tomato leaf, even a touch of fish sauce. The rich flavor, almost sweet, is balanced by refreshing acidity. It’s bright, saline, and incredibly detailed. There’s unlimited potential here for cocktails and food pairings. It’s also the basis for the best martini in New York. —Sarah Parker Jang

On Monday, food writer Alicia Kennedy published an excellent essay on the dirty martini in her newsletter (definitely consider subscribing). Alicia herself is not a dirty martini lover. She takes her martini the same classic way I take mine: Beefeater gin and Dolin dry vermouth, stirred and garnished with an olive. When Alicia recently passed through Philadelphia on the book tour for her memoir, On Eating, we enjoyed a few martinis together.

In “Notes on the Dirty Martini,” she talks about how the prevalence of the dirty martini has skewed classic martini orders:

If you order an olive—an aceituna, if you will—as your garnish for a martini, as I do, you also must specify that you do not want it dirty. The bartender will assume dirtiness and pull out tins for shaking rather than a mixing glass for stirring. I don’t know whether this has always been the case, or whether it’s a symptom of the current popularity of this specific variation.

Dirty means there’s an addition of olive brine to the cocktail. There are people who think a “filthy” and “icy” (meaning shaken) vodka martini are the pinnacle of the beverage: I don’t agree with them. This is not a categorical imperative; I’m not Kant. I just have some thoughts on how the brine obsession has affected my martinis negatively.

Despite her reluctance to engage with the dirty martini, Alicia lays out some basic rules. A dirty martini differs from a regular martini in that it must always use vodka (brine doesn’t play well with juniper-kissed gin). Also, it must always be shaken and not stirred. Finally, the olives must be chilled in the fridge so they don’t bring down the drink’s temperature.

I concur, though I haven’t always. I’ve always said that a real martini (dirty or otherwise) must always use gin, but over the years I’ve come to realize that vodka is simply better in the dirty martini. My ratio is 2 ½ ounces of vodka, a half-ounce of dry vermouth, and a half-ounce of olive brine—shaken, strained and poured with cloudy majesty, and garnished with several skewered olives.

Dirty martinis certainly meet that 21st century demand for more robust flavor. The taste of olive and its brine brings a divisive flavor that has both lovers and haters.

Among the mixology crowd, there’s generally been a vague sense that the dirty martini is sort of…well…not what Cocktail People drink. It’s not trashy or declassé, per se. It’s not in the same category as, say, the Long Island Iced Tea or Fuzzy Navel or Appletini. But still. I don’t know if the dirty martini gets more side eye than the espresso martini, but it definitely gets side eye. In Alicia Kennedy’s essay, she addresses this. “I will admit to finding a dirty, and especially a ‘filthy’ martini to be a bit tacky, ok? The cloudiness of it! The iciness! But I can understand the desire,” she writes.

I believe the dirty martini can still claim status as a “classic.” It has a history. According to the Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails, adding olive brine to a martini has been around since at least 1901, served with muddle olives at the bar of the famed Waldorf Astoria.

Though he didn’t call it a “dirty martini,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt loved using olive brine in his martini. Roosevelt “was reported to have splashed a bite of brine in his drinks at the White House,” writes Robert Simonson in his book, The Martini Cocktail. “Because of this, many have called FDR the author of the dirty martini.” Legend has it that he poured dirty martinis for Stalin and Churchill at the Yalta Conference in 1945 as they discussed post-war Europe. A sketchier legend claims Stalin actually put the idea into Roosevelt’s head.

But at this point, the popularity and ubiquity of the dirty martini goes well beyond its place in the glass. “Dirty martini” as a conceptual flavor trend has likely entered the same realm as “everything bagel” and might be nearing the status of “pumpkin spice.”

“Dirty martini” seem to have already overtaken the space formerly occupied by the “bourbon-flavored” phenomenon. We live in a world where you can find bourbon-flavored toothpicks, bourbon-flavored maple syrup, bourbon-flavored cigars, and bourbon-flavored Dr. Pepper. Whiskey expert Susannah Skiver Barton wrote about this trend, which she called “Creeping Bourbon Effect,” for Everyday Drinking a few years back. As Barton writes:

Why is this happening? The bourbon boom, of course, has everyone scrambling for a piece of the pie. But more insidious, and powerful, is the changing palate of the bourbon drinker, which now demands more robust flavor (and often concurrent higher proof) than that which was offered in the past. This may be part of a broader shift toward more flavorful food and beverages generally, reflected in the 21st-century ubiquity of foods that would have been unusual by most Americans’ standards even a generation ago: sriracha, queso, kale chips.

Likewise, we are now seeing dirty martini ice cream, dirty martini scented candles, and dirty martini desserts. I wish I knew why, at this moment in human history, the dirty martini is having its flavor moment. Perhaps my readers have some idea of why?

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I believe I saw the beginnings of this dirty-martini-flavored trend a few years ago, when I worked as writer on the “trend team” at Taste of Home. The job often involved chronicling viral TikTok mashup recipes. Whether it was lasagna soup, cowboy butter, crispy sushi rice waffles, kimchi grilled cheese, caviar and Doritos, cheese-wrapped pickles, or Dr. Pepper cupcakes—if it was a mashup or hack that has several millions views on TikTok, I’ve likely made it and written about it.

During that time, I cooked a dish called Dirty Martini Pasta and wrote an article about it. “This is like, if you took a dirty martini and made it into a pasta,” said the TikTok creator, legallyhealthyblonde, who developed the recipe. As I explained in my article:

When I first saw that a recipe for dirty martini pasta was trending on social media, my immediate thought was: Why didn’t someone think of this before? After all, people love dirty martinis and they love pasta…

Just like everything bagel seasoning or bourbon-flavored stuff, “dirty martini” has become a super popular flavor descriptor for food beyond cocktails. We’ve seen the rise of dirty martini salads and dirty martini deviled eggs, for instance. So dirty martini pasta just makes sense.

Dirty Martini Pasta, despite a catchy name, has its basis in classic pasta flavors—olive, lemon, garlic, parsley, oil, butter (I’ve included the recipe below). The only element that might make an Italian mad is the optional crumbling of blue cheese, or perhaps de-glazing the saucepan with gin. The Dirty Martini Pasta is likely less offensive to Italians than my own experiments with pesto (as I wrote about in “God and Pesto are Dead”).

In the end, like Alicia Kennedy, I generally avoid the dirty martini and stick to the real thing, with gin, vermouth, and a solitary, briny olive. A few months ago, I posted my own martini manifesto, and I will leave you with this:

More than a decade ago, I wrote columns insisting that the Manhattan was a superior cocktail to the martini (“more complex” and “more flavorful”). I was wrong. As I get older, I realize that a martini is clearly superior. I find myself making more of them these days, often in my grandmother’s martini pitcher with the etched seagull. Recently, I’ve decided I like them with more gin—more of the juniper bite—and less vermouth. Or maybe I’ve always liked them this way, but for whatever reason have always been trying something different.

I don’t exactly know what’s made me reconsider something as basic as the martini. Maybe it’s been seeing my sons and their friends “discover” the dry martini for themselves. Maybe I’m just finally willing to embrace some of life’s truths and certainties—even if it’s simply a 5:1 ratio of gin to vermouth.

I’ve often quoted H.L. Mencken’s famous assertion that the martini is “the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet” and there’s certainly something poetic about it.

But by a certain age, trust me, too much poetry—frankly, too much talk, too much texting, too much communication in general—can be a recipe for disaster. Better just to focus on gin, vermouth, and bitters in the way you like it best.

Dirty Martini Pasta

People love dirty martinis and people love pasta. Mixing the two was inevitable. Depending on your level of traditionalism—or how Italian you are—this is either an innovative idea or a heretical abomination. Castelvetrano or manzanilla olives work best.

• 1 pound spaghetti, linguini or other long pasta

• 4 tablespoons butter

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

• 3 cloves garlic

• 20-24 olives, pitted and chopped (10-ounce container)

• Zest of 2 lemons

• 2 tablespoons gin

• 3 tablespoons olive brine

• Juice of one lemon

• Salt and pepper to taste

• Crumbled blue cheese (optional)

• Parsley, freshly chopped

Boil the pasta in salted water according to the directions on the package. Drain the pasta, then toss it with a tablespoon of butter. Reserve some of the pasta water.

Heat the oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the garlic and cook it for 1 minute. Add the chopped olives and lemon zest. Cook them until garlic turns golden.

Add gin to deglaze the saucepan, stirring until it evaporates. Then add the olive brine, lemon juice and 3 tablespoons of butter, stirring until they’re combined.

Add the cooked pasta to the saucepan, toss to combine, and season it with salt and pepper to taste, adding reserved pasta water if necessary to make the pasta creamier. Top the dirty martini pasta with more chopped olives, parsley, lemon zest and blue cheese (if desired). Serves 4.

Of course, Jason was the jerk as usual, the “wine snob.”

I was at my friend Rachel’s beach house for a happy hour, and I’d been tasked with uncorking the next wine. I opened the fridge to grab the Ampeleia ‘Unlitro Bianco’ I’d brought, and I saw it: the bottle of Chloe chardonnay with the cute bow on the label. Rachel and I have a long-standing joke about her love of buttery Josh chardonnay, and so I shouted to her: “Chloe? Wtf is this? Is this Josh’s age-gap girlfriend?”

But Rachel had not bought the Chloe, some other guest had, and this person heard my dig and immediately got defensive. “You know, Jason, I never know what to bring if you’re at the party,” she said.

I felt bad. In shaming the bringer of the Chloe, I had violated one of the central tenets of contemporary wine culture: the doctrine of “drink what you like,” the idea that any bottle anyone is enjoying is a net positive for Wine. The “drink what you like” ethos, as it’s come to be practiced on social media and in social settings, vilifies any judgement about one wine being higher quality than another, dismissing that judgement as “snobbery.”

Of all the cultural pursuits, wine is the one that most easily gets derailed by accusations of “snobbery.” Wine people are so afraid of being called snobs that they’re always twisting themselves into pretzels. “Drink what you like!” they exclaim, with fake smiles.

In a world of “drink what you like,” one must remain always positive. Even if one wants to advocate for certain wines—made the right way, sustainably, from high-quality artisan producers—one must do so gently. One is discouraged and disincentivized from ever talking bad about the big, ubiquitous brands, regardless of whether or not they are sourced from cheap bulk wine, grown with questionable agricultural practices, or made with manipulation and additives. At least not publicly. To do so is to be seen, at best, a killjoy curmudgeon, and at worst, an enemy of the wine industry.

Yet the fact is, the market is flooded with so many poor-quality, branded wines with little transparency. For the most part, we have no clue what is inside the bottle, how it was grown, if anything was added. They leave us wondering how a wine made in California can cost between $11 and $13—the exact price range which is cratering in sales, and is the locus of the wine crisis. Bottles like these demand some critical thinking and questioning on their role in the demise of wine, not a free pass on the back of “drink what you like.”

A few days after my happy-hour faux pas, I found myself in Florida at a busy, popular beach restaurant—the kind of place that’s in every beach resort and is likely a good customer of Sysco. The wine list had 23 still wines. Those wines were: Seaglass Pinot Grigio, Ferrari Carano Pinot Grigio, Unshackled by The Prisoner Chardonnay, Seaglass Chardonnay, The Calling Chardonnay, Jordan Chardonnay, Far Niente Chardonnay, Seaglass Sauvignon Blanc, Silverado Sauvignon Blanc, Crossings Sauvignon Blanc, Hampton Water rosé, Studio by Miraval rosé, Seaglass Pinot Noir, Meiomi Pinot Noir, Belle Glos Pinot Noir, Four Graces Pinot Noir, Seaglass Cabernet Sauvignon, Joel Gott Cabernet Sauvignon, Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon, Austin Hope Cabernet Sauvignon, The Prisoner Red Blend. Oh, and two offerings from Caymus: a liter bottle of its Cabernet Sauvignon, and The Walking Fool red blend.

That’s a wine list possibly created by a single distributor. It’s the kind of nightmare list that would give a wine lover hives, filled with manipulated, mass-produced wines. Yet this kind of wine list can be found nearly everywhere, all across the U.S., at the sorts of popular middlebrow restaurants that everyday people frequent. In fact, this may be the only kind of wine list that most middle- and upper-middle-class Americans are exposed to. Wine selections like this are so widespread that their ubiquity creates a feedback loop. These wines aren’t popular because people seek them out. They’re popular because, in most cases, it’s the only thing available. To someone who’s only ever been exposed to this kind of wine—at an artificially low price—how can you even suggest a better-made alternative?

This is why the anti-snob “drink what you like” message not only fails, but ends up unequally promoting bad mass-market wines, protecting them from any kind of qualitative comparison with better wines. These mass-market wines are so ever-present and over-available that they’ve superseded even the average consumer’s own personal taste.

But that omnipresence is not by accident. It’s the result of careful business decisions by corporate wineries and their distributors. To explore this further, I’m bringing contributor Caroline Lamb into this piece. Caroline has worked in wine distribution, and her experience includes years selling mass-market wines for a big distributor—before reclaiming her power for good.

Caroline: The View From Inside Distribution

Despite the seemingly endless array of wine choices available in the United States—more than 115,000 new labels are approved by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau every year—it’s all an illusion of choice. What mostly you get are store shelves and wine lists with selections from only a handful of corporate wineries.

This is no different than the chain restaurant with a 15-page food menu offering hundreds of “choices” for dinner. In reality, the majority of American restaurants are reheating factory-made food supplied by Sysco, America’s largest food distributor.

Criticism of Sysco has recently gone mainstream. There are reels on Instagram and threads on Reddit with millions of views and thousand comments chronicling exactly why a corporate monopoly related to our food supply is bad and should concern anyone who eats at restaurants in America. The Sysco discourse online has us thinking it’s time to talk about the similarities in our alcohol distribution system and exactly how that leads to the pervasive mass-market wine lists that Jason mentions earlier.

According to data published by the American Association of Wine Economists in 2024, 71 percent of wine in the United States is controlled by the top 11 wine suppliers. It is safe to assume that the dominance of these top suppliers has grown in the two years since—thanks to the continued and aggressive mergers and acquisitions happening across the industry. And the consolidation doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Mark Chaplin, president of commercial sales at Southern Glazer’s, the largest alcohol distributor in the U.S., recently told The Spirits Business to expect “continued consolidation across all three tiers.”

A single company, Gallo, controlled 33 percent of all wine in the market in 2023. Since then, they have acquired major players like Rombauer (3.8 million+ bottles annually) and Hahn Family Wines (3.6 million+ bottles annually), as well as newer wineries like Massican (120,000+ bottles annually), Whiny Baby (120,000 bottles annually) and Bev canned wine (10,000+ cases annually).

Over the last twenty years, the number of independent wine distributors has fallen dramatically—from roughly 3,000 in the 1990s to just over 1,000 today. According to 2024 numbers from Shanken’s Impact Databank, the three dominant players in distribution—Breakthru, RNDC, and Southern Glazer’s—controlled 53 percent of wine and spirits distribution in America. RNDC, formerly the second-largest distributor with roughly $12.2 billion in yearly sales, is no longer a player. The company has been in a years-long tailspin and now is selling off its remaining business to a handful of distributors nationwide. Which means even greater consolidation.

Following Breakthru’s recent acquisition of RNDC’s joint ventures in Indiana and Kentucky, the company has grown into the second-largest distributor nationally, with projected revenues nearing $8.7 billion. That figure is eclipsed by Southern Glazer’s, which at $26 billion in projected revenue controls roughly a third of all distribution outright.

A whopping 81 percent of wine sold in the United States moves through just the top ten distributors—mirroring the same concentration of power we see at the supplier level. With portfolios at these large distributors comprising upward of 7,000 brands, only wineries with serious marketing budgets and a dedicated sales rep in every market get placements. Smaller wineries get completely lost in the mix.

When honest tactics fail to deliver the growth these suppliers demand, the game gets dirty. I can say that from experience. From within the business, you often hear of shady corporate suppliers offering “programming”—code for free goods—to secure coveted by-the-glass placements on restaurant menus or floor stacks in retail stores. The practice is illegal, but it’s so normalized at the distribution tier that even some small- and mid-sized distributors play along just to compete with the major players in their market.

What happens when free goods start flooding the market? Restaurateurs already running on razor-thin margins see a chance to make extra money in exchange for loyalty to one manipulative distributor. These distributors mostly sell wine manufactured to taste the same year after year, operating largely outside the normal constraints of agricultural scarcity. The public accepts this because companies like Sysco have conditioned us to forget that produce is finite and seasonal. Nothing worth putting in your body should be produced at near-infinite scale, available at any time.

Given that most suppliers mark up their wine 50 to 100 percent from production cost, most suppliers can easily absorb the cost of a free case here or there. But when suppliers give in to the pressure of the free goods game, it plants a seed: Their wine isn’t worth what they're charging for it. That cheapens the value of wine across the board and, more critically, at the ground level where taste actually gets shaped: Among the restaurant and retail buyers deciding what reaches the rest of us.

The end result is that consumers experience only a fraction of the wine available in the U.S. How could they ever drink what they like if they haven’t experienced enough wine to even know what they like?

Yet the “drink what you like,” all-wine-is-good narrative is strictly followed in the industry. That’s because no one knows who they might one day wind up working for. There is an unwritten rule when you work for a big distributor who reps the corporate suppliers: Never talk badly about another winery—even if you know their wines are shit—because next week’s acquistion by one of your corporate suppliers might leave you selling that same wine next week.

This refusal to call out any wine—or even to engage in honest critical comparison—has normalized wine lists full of questionable quality across the country.

Back to Jason: The Cheesesteak Egg Rolls of Wine

Around the turn of the 21st century, some chef in Philadelphia invented the cheesesteak egg roll—a cheeky take on Philly’s most famous food item. The cheesesteak egg roll was a fun, inventive bar snack, and you quickly started seeing them on menus all around the region. Soon enough, however, big corporate food distributors jumped on the cheesesteak egg roll and started selling pre-made, fully-cooked versions that restaurants could just reheat and serve. By now, the corporate cheesesteak egg roll is a pervasive bar menu item. Its presence signals something about the kitchen to the observant diner. I have friends who’ve become skeptical about eating at a place that has a cheesesteak egg roll on the menu.

I hope wine drinkers become equally observant and skeptical about seeing certain corporate wines on wine lists. The wine world needs to drop the “drink what you like” act and start calling out poor-quality wines that exist simply because of sheer marketing will.

Wine culture and the wine industry are not going to be saved by playing nice nor by being polite and accommodating to the big brands—big brands, to be clear, who would be more than happy if smaller artisan wineries disappeared from the face of the earth. It’s time to break out the pitchforks, folks.

In the comments below—in our Everyday Drinking safe space where “drink what you like” doesn’t apply—tell us which wines are on your personal reject list, the ones that signal to you that a wine list was written by corporate interest.

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Related Content on Everyday Drinking

Let me begin by saying I love the Negroni, deeply, despite…everything.

I’m old enough to remember when the Negroni was first taken up by drinkers who wanted to show themselves to have superior palates. Early adopters of the Negroni would have been insufferable Gen Xers (like me) in the mid-to-late 1990s, usually someone who studied abroad in Italy (like me).

If I can pinpoint the moment when Negronis came on the radar, I would guess it was slightly after the swing-dancing, cigar-bar, martini-renaissance of the late Clinton administration (think Swingers) and right before the start of the speakeasy trend (which still refuses to die). What happened over the next decade—Negroni Discourse, ubiquitous variations on cocktail lists, Negroni Week—was perhaps inevitable.

By the early 21st century, there seemed to be three ways a mixologist could make their mark on a recipe: 1) Add a bunch of green Chartreuse; 2) substitute mezcal; 3) put your own little spin to the Negroni. By a slight majority, most chose Option 3.

This was the era of so many articles explaining that Negroni Sbagliato meant “mistaken Negroni,” and was made with prosecco instead of gin. People began eschewing Campari for knock-offs like Gran Classico or Luxardo Bitter, or other amaros (or amari, if you were insufferable). The so-called Negroni Bianco, with white vermouth and Suze/Lillet/Cocchi Americano/whatever reared its ugly head. There was the Agavoni (with tequila), the East Indian Negroni (with rum), and the Unusual Negroni (with gin, Lillet Blanc, and Aperol).

I admit that, in the late aughts, I did all of the above. In Boozehound (2011), I even devoted an entire chapter to, ahem, “Improving the Negroni”:

In theory, I wanted a Negroni, but in reality, the Negroni was lacking something. That distressed me: What if all the fancy-schmancy tasting I’ve been doing lately has irrevocably rewired my palate? What if I can never again go back to being the young, carefree person who loved nothing better than the simple pleasures of a Negroni in summertime?

My solution: I would use my hard-won cocktail wisdom and experience to re-engineer, and possibly improve, the Negroni. Starting with the classic formula, I would illustrate how nearly all good new cocktails evolve. In doing so, I would also reclaim my old drink and perhaps a part of my youth. Or something like that.

Ummm, yeah. The late aughts “cocktail renaissance” was a wild time.

Then came the “Negroni backlash,” which lasted at least another decade. In the 2010s, The Awl’s regular bashing of the Negroni always made me chuckle. First was, of course, Evelyn Everlady’s darkly funny, bad-boyfriend classic, “Negroni Season,” in 2010 (“Actually, he is asleep on my couch. It’s Negroni season, and you know he makes the absolute best Negronis ever, so we may have had a few too many and he slept here. Sorry you were worried,” is the message she gets from the woman her man is sleeping with).

Then there were Matt Buchanan’s gleeful hit pieces, “Negroni Weak” and “Death to Negronis”:

When made properly — not too heavy on the gin, not with shitty vermouth and without telling anyone next to you how great it is — the negroni is perfectly fine. It has, itself, committed no sins. However, if you were to put everybody who is dying to tell you how much they like negronis into a bar, it would be the single largest and worst bar in the world, a sticky cesspool of people, standing should to shoulder, talking animatedly about nothing except how wonderfully the negroni balances its floral, herbal notes with bitterness and sweetness; how they can’t believe that other people don’t love them as much as they do, what is wrong with their palate; how they had the best negroni of their life at some bar you’ve never been to, or in Italy (which is a steadfast lie, because no one in Italy knows how to make cocktails); how their own slightly tweaked proportion of clear liquor to sweet wine-liquor to bitter pink liquor is in fact the best of all possible negroni variations, and while the negroni spinoffs like the far sturdier boulevardier, with a backbone of whiskey, are fine, the true negroni is better and able to be enjoyed at all times of day, but most especially during negroni season

That type of person still holds forth on Negronis and their variations. In 2019, Helen Rosner wrote a lovely piece in The New Yorker about her own favorite variation, entitled “The Perfect Thanksgiving Cocktail Is the Boulevardier,” (“My preferred rendition, made with rye, is something that sticklers will note is more properly called an Old Pal”) only to be mansplained by the sticklers of Cocktail Twitter who didn’t read her article and scolded her version as “actually an Old Pal not a Boulevardier.”

As I said at the beginning of another “Negroni Season,” once upon a time when I was a heavy Twitter user:

Years later, as much of the Negroni Discourse fades into memory, the one thing that remains is the Negroni itself. Despite all the nonsense, despite the backlash, it is still the finest drink, its simple ratio of equal parts gin-vermouth-Campari nearly impossible to mess up. It is the perfect cocktail. Or at least it is for me.

Of course, I have my own preferences. I prefer Dolin or Cocchi Storico sweet vermouth to the Carpano Antica Formula that so many people use. After dalliances with other liqueurs, I rarely stray from Campari. (Yes, I keep both vermouth and Campari in my fridge.) I generally go for a juniper-forward, big-brand gin like Beefeater’s or Tanqueray. In my mind, a proper Negroni is always stirred and always garnished with an orange peel. Probably my main difference with other people’s Negronis is simply that I enjoy mine straight up and not on the rocks.

When I opt for a variation, because I’m out of gin or Campari, I generally do one of two recipes. I enjoy the Boulevardier (bourbon-sweet vermouth-Campari), but like Helen Rosner, I prefer the Old Pal: rye, Campari and dry vermouth. In fact, I sometimes will substitute dry vermouth in a normal Negroni as well. (I find that the Old Pal and Boulevardier are sometimes nice with 1.5 ounces of the whiskey to one ounce of the vermouth and Campari, along with a lemon-peel twist).

Or, since I also love the artichoke-based amaro Cynar (I am 100% on Team Cynar), I will substitute that in place of Campari in a Cyn-Cin. There are numerous versions of the Cyn-Cin, but like the Old Pal I find that dry vermouth works really nicely. I made a Cyn-Cin recently with equal parts Cynar, dry vermouth, and Beefeater’s (stirred, straight up, orange peel twist) and it was the best cocktail I’d had all summer.

In any case, if you haven’t figured it out by now: There is no such thing as Negroni Season. Every season is Negroni Season.

Readers, as always, I would be delighted to hear your own Negroni variations.

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As we move into summer days, I always think about a certain June when I first arrived in a certain village in Italy. Today, I am reposting my essay about my three-decade relationship with that place.

There’s a saying in Cremonese dialect: En piàt de marubéen el fa resusitàa àan i mòort—“a plate of marubini can bring the dead back to life.” Marubini is the stuffed pasta of Cremona, the province in Lombardia along the Po River where I lived when I was 19. Marubini are plump little rings similar to tortellini, filled with a rich, hearty mix of meats and cheese—each Cremonese family has its own unwritten recipe for the stuffing, or ripieno. They’re very labor intensive, which is likely why marubini is best known now as a dish for holidays and special occasions.

Anna Bernabe made marubini almost every weekend, a monotonous hours-long process crafting each tiny pasta with her fingertips. The result, served simply either in a meat broth or with brown butter and sage, made for a wonderful Sunday lunch. Would it be too much to say that these lunches were the sort of experience that changed the course of one dopey, suburban American boy’s life? Would that sort of hyperbole make me an unreliable or insufferable narrator? Maybe, maybe not. Let’s just say that, as a writer, marubini is my own Proustian madeleine.

Cremona is a lovely city of around 70,000 citizens—a well-kept, bourgeois, mercantile place with amazing food, at the center of one of Italy’s most important agricultural areas, particularly for dairy farming. But among Italians, it’s seen as somewhat parochial, perhaps the equivalent of, say, Des Moines. There is no local wine region. There are no grandiose must-see sights. In Italy, Cremona is known as the city of “torrone, torrazzo, e tettone”—torrone for its famed nougat candy, torrazzo for it’s iconic 14th century bell tower, and tettone for…well, you can translate that for yourself, and I will not be commenting on whether or not that’s true.

When I meet Italians from other regions, they’re always surprised and amused to learn that I studied in Cremona. The incredulous response is generally: “Cremona? Why Cremona? Of all the cities in Italy?” Before I can answer, the next question is almost always “Do you play the violin?” That’s because the most famous thing about Cremona is violins. The city is the birthplace of Stradivarius. The Cremonese method of making violins dates back to Andrea Amati, “father of the violin” in the 16th century, and to the Guarneri family in the 17th and 18th centuries. The craft is protected by UNESCO and celebrated by a great modern museum. There are still more than 100 violin-makers’ studios in Cremona. [I wrote a travel feature about all this for the New York Times a decade ago.]

In any case, I do not play the violin and never have. But several Italian friends teasingly refer to me by the nickname “Cremonese.”

When I arrived to Cremona—wearing Birkenstocks, a tie-dyed University of Vermont Bong Team T-shirt, and a backpack redolent of patchouli—I was informed I would actually be staying in Pieve San Giacomo, a village about 20 minutes from the city of Cremona. I would be living with the Bernabe family: Anna, her husband Paolo, and their daughter Daniela, who was several years older than me.

The Bernabes lived in an aging, rustic but warm and tidy farmhouse with a stone fountain in the garden, and with dark antique furniture and yapping dogs. The chickens, or at least the rooster, in the coop outside my window woke me early in the morning. When I came to the breakfast, Anna was busy in the kitchen and Paolo was taking his caffè corretto, coffee with a little nip of grappa—he’d already been working in the farm for hours. I took the train into Cremona for school, stopping to have a macchiato at the same place, Caffè Tubino, every morning.

In the afternoons, I would have a drink with my classmates in Cremona’s piazza or snack on pizza or tramezzini. Or perhaps visit the studio of Massimo, Daniela’s artist boyfriend. But eventually I had to catch the train back to the village. There wasn’t a whole lot going on in Pieve San Giacomo, besides the Auricchio cheese factory, but I’d play soccer with the local boys or ride my bike through the village, or flirt with one of the Bernabes’ nieces, who was my age.

Every night, Paolo sliced a plateful of prosciutto and cut a hunk from a wheel of Grana Padano. Then he uncorked and poured a fizzy red, chilled, from an unlabeled liter bottle he’d fetched from a dark corner of the barn—the same barn I’d wandered into one morning and saw him butchering a cow. Paolo didn’t go for fancy wine glasses, but rather used what we would have called “juice” glasses back home. Beyond sliced meat, cheese, and wine, men were otherwise forbidden from Anna’s kitchen. So while Anna prepared handmade pasta, meat from their animals, vegetables from the garden, Paolo and I would sip our cool, fizzy red wine from our juice glasses on those hot evenings. As I wrote about this wine, Gutturnio, in Godforsaken Grapes:

I had never tasted or witnessed a wine like this. The liquid was bright purple, with a thick pink foam that formed as it was poured. Paolo’s wine certainly tasted fruity, though it was more tangy than sweet, and what made it strange to me was the aroma. At home, my father’s wines from Napa or Sonoma smelled like identifiable fruits—plums, cherries, berries. But this fizzy wine was a little stinky, to be honest, though in a very pleasant way. I didn’t have the language back then, but in my memory the aroma smelled earthy, rustic, fertile, alive, almost like the essence of the farm and dusty streets of the village. Back then, it simply smelled and tasted like the Old Europe I had hoped to find. [You can read the whole passage about Gutturnio here.]

We drank this same wine with whatever Anna made for dinner. Depending on the night, it might cotoletta milanese, risotto milanese, guinea fowl baked in clay with pancetta and mushrooms, osso buco, or bollito misto (a stew of boiled meats and poultry), served with Cremona’s famed mostarda. I always looked forward to the pasta, of course. Since Pieve San Giacomo is close to the border of Mantova province, Anna also made a lot of Mantova’s famous stuffed pasta, tortelli di zucca. But marubini was always my favorite.

It was all pastoral and wholesome and lovely. Still, I was 19, and used to my independence. Back home in the States I’d already been living on my own, and I definitely enjoyed being out late and “looking for trouble,” as my mother might say. (My mother once reprimanded my brother and I as “dirty stay outs.”) In Italy, I would get slightly jealous of my classmates who lived in Cremona proper, where I imagined there was more action (there wasn’t). A few times, I ended up staying for a few more drinks with friends, barely catching the last train back to Pieve San Giacomo. Once, I had made a plan to rendezvous with some local girl, and missed my train. Tipsy, I had to call Anna from a pay phone. She scolded me (“How could you miss dinner! We thought you might be dead!”) and sent Paolo to fetch me in the car. “Have a good time?” he grunted and drove the rest of the way home in silence. There was a plate of food waiting for me on the table. I never heard the end of this. Anna reminded me of the train schedule every morning before I left for school. “Oh, Jason likes to drink beer,” she’d tell friends that dropped by, with a smirk. So, basically, Anna treated me as a mischievous teenager the same as my own mother.

One afternoon before I left Pieve San Giacomo, a vivid meal took place. Paolo was working in his fields, and Daniela was working in Milan, so Anna and I rode our bikes to visit the family’s recently widowed Aunt Gina, who, as a surprise, had prepared a tremendous feast in my honor, with tables teeming with food in the sunny courtyard. Naturally, there was marubini.

At the end of the hours-long meal, when I could eat no more, Aunt Gina insisted that we tour her house. The three of us entered the cool, dark living room. Aunt Gina fidgeted with a yellowed photograph of a young man in a soldier’s uniform and told me it was her husband. There were no other photos of sons or daughters, only a crucifix and an image of Jesus Christ hanging over the sofa.

Aunt Gina motioned for me to stay where I was and shuffled down a long hallway. Anna whispered and crossed herself. We waited for what seemed like 20 minutes and could hear the older woman rummaging through the bedroom. Finally, she emerged from the hallway cradling her dead husband’s bathrobe. She thrust it into my hands and urged me to slide it on over my clothes. I hesitated and looked wide-eyed at Anna, who also urged me to try it on, so I wrapped it around my Grateful Dead T-shirt. Silence enveloped the room. I stood with my arms wide, modeling the robe that presumably her husband had worn most mornings while he sipped his caffè corretto. I stood dumbfounded, staring at the sleeves of the heavy floral-patterned robe—cut too big, less than absorbent, pocket sitting too high for a hand to rest in.

“So elegant! Handsome!” Aunt Gina exclaimed. She then burst into tears and hugged Anna, whose eyes also welled up.

What the hell was I going to do with this bathrobe? Could this whole presentation possibly have been all just for me? The one preparing to shove off in a few days with a rail pass and a hostel itinerary? “You’ll promise to wear it?” asked Aunt Gina.

I knew I had no choice but to smash down what I could in my already stuffed backpack and leave some of my belongings behind. Even as a stupid young American, I knew you didn’t refuse gifts from Italian widows who’d just prepared you an afternoon banquet.

Over the next 30 years, I kept in touch with the Bernabe family, and visited every few years. By the late 1990s, Paolo and Aunt Gina had both passed away, but Anna remained in good health and Daniela, now teaching in Cremona, still lived at home with her mother.

My own family spent time there when my sons were babies and then again as pre-teens. I can mark major events in Pieve San Giacomo. I was there when the terrorist attacks happened on 9/11, during the space shuttle Columbia disaster, and during that time the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull shut down air travel in Europe. Guys I had played soccer with were now married to women from the village. It got to the point where I could randomly walk into one of the village’s two bars—La Quercia or Night n’ Day—and the bartender would know my drink order.

Anna made marubini every time I visited. I always wanted to help—in large part because I really wanted to know how to make them. She let me try only once. I couldn’t get the shape correct, something Anna could do with the flick of a finger. Once I’d messed up too many, she shooed me out of the kitchen, never to be invited again.

In fact, the only time Anna had let me cook anything in her kitchen was kind of a disaster. I’d become obsessed with this weird pasta that was traditional in the neighboring town of Crema, called tortelli cremaschi. While the pasta itself follows the basic egg-and-flour recipe, the ingredient list for the filling reads like an absurdist creation: amaretto cookies (nearly a pound); candied citrus; mint candies; raisins; egg yolk; grated lemon zest; grated cheese; nutmeg; Marsala wine; mostaccino, a local cookie that is sort of like a ginger snap. It’s like a stuffed pasta a kindergartner would design.

Yet tortelli cremaschi is real and dates back to at least the 16th century, when Crema was under the rule of the Republic of Venice. There is even a Brotherhood of the Tortello Cremasco (“To defend, enhance and promote the Tortello Cremasco”) and an annual festival. In fact, it’s fairly typical of pastas dating back to the Renaissance, which were historically sweet. The dish fit with the types of spices and candied fruit that Venice’s traders imported from the East.

None of this mattered to Anna. No proper kitchen outside of Crema would ever prepare tortelli cremaschi. So if I wanted to introduce this heresy into her home, I was told to make it myself. The only place I could buy all of the random ingredients for tortelli cremaschi was at one old-fashioned drogheria in Crema’s town center. When I returned home, she shook her head. “Matto,” she said. She tossed me an apron and handed me her mezzaluna knife. As I chopped the cookies, and the candied fruit, and the mint, and everything else—all while Anna watched, bemused—I grew nervous. As I added the chopped mint candies to my filling, and then the egg yolk, it dawned on me that I would likely not be invited into the kitchen ever again. Anna helped me shape them into proper tortelli. “What do we serve with these?” she asked. “Broth? Butter? Sage?”

To make matters more stressful, Daniela had invited a couple of sophisticated friends from Milan to join us for dinner. The husband, who worked in finance, had just come from the golf course. Daniela told him I was an American food writer, and he seemed extremely skeptical. Anna and I served the tortelli cremaschi, with butter and sage, as a first course. Everyone sat and took a bite. Silence. The guy from Milan winced a little. Everyone gingerly took another bite. Oh my, yes, it was very sweet. And gooey. Anna and Daniela spoke quietly in dialect. Eyes around the table darted at me. Anna looked at me and said, “Troppo dolce.”

Everyone began chuckling at the quirky American. “Ah, our Jason!” said Anna, making that Italian hand gesture that basically translates to “this knucklehead!” Anna still treated me exactly as my own mother does. No matter how old I’d get, in her eyes I will forever be a silly 19-year-old, the same boy who arrived at her door wearing a tie-dyed shirt, a man-child with a shaky grasp of Italian grammar.

“Wait a minute!” I protested. “I didn’t invent this dish! You can’t blame me for this recipe! Blame the Venetians who ruled Crema!” Everyone nodded. It was agreed that the people of Crema must be completely crazy.

“However,” said the guy from Milan, in English. “Your new nickname will be Tortello Cremasco from now on. You should use that as your alias when you review restaurants. Or when you appear in pornographic movies.”

After the Tortello Cremaso fiasco life got more complicated and I began to visit Pieve San Giacomo less and less. I had been scheduled to visit in spring 2020, but the pandemic and its travel bans scuttled that trip. When travel started up again, my work travel took me in other directions, as did family and life. It would be years before I returned.

In fact, I did not return to Pieve San Giacomo until this past winter. That’s when Daniela messaged me with the news that Anna had died, only a few weeks before her 90th birthday.

Before I returned to Pieve San Giacomo, I spent the evening in Soave, which is a seminal region of my wine journey (I wrote a feature about Soave for Wine Enthusiast.) I ate dinner alone in neighboring San Bonifacio, at the bar of iconic, new-wave pizzeria I Tigli—long before that overpriced place popped up in your gentrified neighborhood, I Tigli was already serving postmodern pizza and natural wine. I drank a skin-contact garganega from natural wine OG, Angiolino Maule. I ate one half pizza topped with snails, pancetta, and radish greens, and another half topped with pigeon, artichoke, and mozzarella.

Everything was delicious, yet I was lost in thought about how far removed it all was from the very traditional Italian food and wine I had first known in the early 1990s, from Anna’s kitchen. As Italy becomes even more and more popular for American travelers, I find it incredibly difficult to explain to people how much Italy has changed in even just the last 15 or 20 years.

When I first arrived there, and for at least two decades afterward, many Italians could not pronounce my first name correctly. Even to this day, when I introduce myself as “Jason” to an older, non-English-speaking Italian, there’s a slight chance he or she will reply: “Jackson?” Actually, for a long time, what many people said was: “Jackson? Like Michael Jackson?” And they would often raise an eyebrow, and smirk. The Michael Jackson line doesn’t really happen anymore. But until only the past few years, whenever I booked a hotel or made dinner reservations, or told my phone number to someone as they typed it into a phone, it was still a 60-40 chance that I would be identified as Jackson Wilson.

One night, about a decade ago, Anna, and Daniela and two of her cousins took me to a pizzeria near Pieve San Giacomo. We were looking at a huge chalkboard full of pizza choices. Everyone ordered, and I was taking a little too long with my decision-making, and so they began to fuss in that endearing Italian way. “What? You don’t see anything you like? Do you need a translation? Should we order for you?” Finally, Daniela said, a tad impatiently, “If you don’t see a pizza you like, they’ll make any pizza you want.” The waiter, also impatiently, reiterated this.

At that moment, for some reason, my eye lighted on the word “gorgonzola” and then the word “pear” flittered into my brain. Gorgonzola and pears. That sounded good. It didn’t seem any stranger than the “Hawaii” Pizza or the “Texas BBQ” Pizza on the chalkboard. And so I verbalized this: “May I have my pizza with gorgonzola and pear?”

All conversation stopped. The waiter looked at me like I may be mentally ill. He looked beseechingly at Anna and Daniela as if I needed special help with my Italian. But no, I repeated my order. He rubbed his stomach and winced. Everyone at the table burst out laughing. Whoever heard of a pizza like that? Gorgonzola! And pears! That’s the craziest pizza we’ve ever heard of! Ah, Jason! Always the mischief-maker! Perpetually the dopey 19 year old!

All through dinner, it went on. Every time the waiter came over, the family laughed and apologized: “Ah, he’s American, you see. Don’t be alarmed.” I offered samples to everyone at the table, just to show them how good the pizza really was—and it was very good. But none of them would entertain one bite.

Near the end of the meal, the chef came out of the kitchen to see who was actually eating a pizza with gorgonzola and pears. That’s when everyone suggested, with a laugh, that this pizza should have a name: “Pizza Jason.”

Except here’s the thing—when the chef repeated the name, he called it “Pizza Jackson” and wrote it on the chalkboard just like that. So, if you happened to be at this pizzeria in the province of Cremona, and for some reason you wanted my pizza that has gorgonzola and pear, you had to ask for a Pizza Jackson.

I tell that story for a couple of reasons. The first being to underline how resistant to outside innovation, ingredients, and ideas that Italian food and wine was, even just a decade ago. It’s a topic I’ve explored before, particularly in “God and Pesto are Dead” and my essay on Verona’s crackdown of kebab shops.

But secondly, I’d like to say that I’ve always enjoyed being called Jackson in Italy—and don’t usually correct it. Being called Jackson reminds me that Italy, despite its familiarity to Americans, is still a strange and foreign place, still full of surprises and new discoveries. In a sense, becoming Jackson re-mystifies Italy for me.

I finally made it to Cremona the evening after my dinner at I Tigli, a Friday. I picked Daniela up at school, where she’s now head of the foreign language department. We drove to Pieve San Giacomo along the dark but familiar Via Postumia—a road that has existed since the Romans built it in 148 B.C. to connect Genoa with the Adriatic.

Daniela seemed to still be in shock over her mother’s death, which even though Anna was almost 90 had come as a surprise. Daniela spent her whole adult life living with her mother in the village, taking the train to and from work every day. Now, she honestly didn’t know what she was going to do, or how she would take care of the old house.

The family property had changed over the years, with some of it sold off and developed. We ate dinner next door, at a relatively new restaurant called Osteria del Miglio, which is cited as “Bib Gourmand” in the Michelin guide. Osteria del Miglio is literally in the old barn where Paolo kept his wine and where I’d seen him butcher a cow.

Dinner at Osteria del Miglio was fantastic, like no place that ever existed in the Pieve San Giacomo I’ve known, beginning with the first wine, a Portuguese sparkler from Filipa Pato. My secondo piatto of roasted germano—or local mallard duck—was classic, but my primo was a very non-traditional pasta: tortelli al cacao (yes, a pasta with cacao) stuffed with oxtail. Tortelli al cacao was savory and delicious, but Daniela and I chuckled that Anna would not have approved of such experimentation. “Let’s not forget tortelli cremaschi,” Daniela said, with a wink.

After dinner, we talked about making marubini for Sunday lunch, in honor of Anna. It seemed like a lot. Both the pasta and the ripieno presented challenges.

Anna’s recipe for the stuffing was straightforward, yet vague. “I can tell you ingredients but not quantity as it depends on how you feel the filling,” Daniela said. The meats: grilled veal chop; grilled pork loin; boiled turkey or chicken breast; a thick slice of mortadella. Basically, these would have been the meats that Anna would have cooked for lunches or dinners over the course of the week, and the leftovers would be ground together on the weekend for the ripieno. Grana Padano cheese, grated nutmeg, egg, and salt were added to the meat. “You mix everything and wait for a while. A friend of Anna’s leaves her filling on the windowsill outside at night,” said Daniela.

Making the pasta itself was also straightforward, but neither of us had mastered the shape. During the pandemic, I’d tried making marubini and I could never get it right. I’d scoop too much ripieno onto a fresh-cut pasta square, fold it, and immediately it would fall apart. The next I’d do would have too little meat and too much dough. I ended forming the pasta into what I could manage: the shape of maybe a tiny hat, sort of like cappelletti, but not exactly that either.

When I’d sent Daniela a picture of my marubini on WhatsApp, she was generous. “Anna approved,” she messaged. “Even the shape fits the time. It’s like a crown. So let’s call them Corona Marubini.”

At Osteria del Miglio, we talked about how, across Italy, things like homemade marubini may be disappearing faster than any of us can fathom. Italy has the oldest population in Europe, with almost a quarter of its citizens over 65 years old. Nearly 180,000 Italians over age 60 died due to COVID. That is the generation born into the postwar Italy that we’ve long mythologized and now lives mostly in memories. What will die with these septuagenarians and octogenarians?

The next morning, we walked through the village to the cemetery, and inside the Bernabe family mausoleum, and I paid my respects to Anna, as well as to Paolo and to Aunt Gina. We stopped for pastries in the center of Pieve San Giacomo, and I noticed that the two bars, La Quercia and Night n’ Day, had both closed.

In the afternoon, we made a day trip into Cremona, wandering the city, stopping at old haunts. We went to Ugo Grill, a little storefront that’s famous for its tramezzini, perfect little triangle-cut sandwiches with spongy white bread slathered with mayonnaise. I’ve always preferred prosciutto e carciofo or prosciutto e uvo on mine. Ugo Grill still swarms with both young and old. I’ve been eating tramezzini here since I was a student—it’s where I chatted up the girl who made me miss my train all those years ago.

Ugo Grill had changed owners, and offers more products than just tramezzini these days. In fact, they now sell fresh, housemade marubini. That’s when we decided not to make our own marubini, after all, and left it in Ugo Grill’s hands.

That night, I went with some old friends to a newer restaurant on the outskirts of Cremona called—in English—Food Factory. Normally, we would have finished at either La Quercia and Night n’ Day, but we had to go out in the city to find a bar.

On Sunday, the marubini preparation was easy. We cooked the premade ones from Ugo Grill and served half in broth, and half in brown butter sage. I opened a bottle of La Stoppa Trebbiolo, from the Colli Piacentini (as a hat tip to Paolo and his Piacenza wines) and we toasted Anna. Ugo Grill had opted for a very basic ravioli shape—not the more complicated tiny rings like Anna made. Still, the taste brought back a flood of memories. We didn’t talk much as we ate.

Early on Monday morning, I drove Daniela to work in Cremona. We had coffee and brioche at Pasticceria Dondeo near the train station, as we have many times before. When she left for the school, I drove on to Orio al Serio airport in Bergamo—the hub of Ryanair, which did not exist when I first came to Italy.

As I waited for my flight to Spain, where I am living more and more of my middle-aged life, I was a mixed bag of emotions. The main theme of those emotions seemed to be: I am old as fuck. I feel so far away from that 19-year-old who arrived in Cremona. I’ve been traveling almost nonstop in those three decades since.

Oddly, I also thought about my graduate creative writing program in Boston. This would have been less than three years after my Italian experience, and so I realized two things. First, I have been trying to write something meaningful about Pieve San Giacomo for a very long time. Also, I can clearly see how far away I am, now, from the kind of writer I had imagined I would be back then.

I thought about my old classmate Jhumpa Lahiri. As a writer, I was (and still am) a hack next to Jhumpa. Yet once, when she learned I spoke some Italian, she invited me to see a Fellini movie, Amarcord, with her at Coolidge Corner and then tea afterwards to discuss the film. I would never call this evening a “date” because even though I was enrolled in the same creative writing program, I was still very much a silly boy, and would be a silly boy for many years. Perhaps even still.

In any case, I have always loved and admired Jhumpa’s story “The Third and Final Continent,” from her exceptional collection, Interpreter of Maladies. Frankly, “The Third and Final Continent” may be the greatest American short story published in the last 30 years.

The story is deceptively simple, narrated by a Bengali man (based on her father) who tells the tale of his emigration to London, and then Boston. He rents a room for a short time from a 103-year-old woman, Mrs. Croft, while he’s waiting for his bride from an arranged marriage to come to America. He ends up having the same funny conversation with Mrs. Croft every evening. A little while after his new wife arrives and he’s moved into his own home, the narrator learns that Mrs. Croft died. Even though he’d only known her briefly, hers is “the first death I mourned in America.” As the story quietly closes, he humbly explains how he’s remained living in the U.S. for nearly 30 years.

As I grow older, it’s the last paragraph that stays with me. And it’s the one I thought of that afternoon as I left Italy:

Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

Cremonese, Tortello Cremasco, Jackson, the boy with the tie-dyed shirt, they’re all the people I used to be, the parts of me that often feel as though they might be gone forever, or even dead. But they aren’t. As the old saying goes, “A plate of marubini can bring the dead back to life.” If there’s anything I know to be true, it’s this.

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A couple of weekends ago, standing in a boutique bottle shop, I was confronted with a deep sense of confusion as I became hypnotized by their many-hued vermouth section. Between the artistic labels—many of which feature illustrations of animals and saturated color palettes—I recognized words I know: dry, sweet, rosso, blanc. But beyond that I was befuddled, even after asking the clerk for guidance. Two from Pennsylvania, one from New York, one from Spain, one from France, a few from Italy. I didn’t have a plan that day, just a thirst for an aromatized discovery, so after many minutes of deliberation I left with three bottles I had never seen before: one dry, one bianco, and one sweet (black?) for a grand total of $140.

According to Vogue, “everyone” is drinking vermouth. The Spirits Business says vermouth is finally getting its “starring role.” Hell, I even predicted this would be the year of vermouth on Business of Drinks’ 2026 predictions episode. These claims are based on recent data showing a 28.7 percent increase in vermouth sales beyond the traditional strongholds of France, Italy, and Spain from 2019 to 2025. In North America specifically, the vermouth market size is projected to reach $9.51 billion by 2034 from $5.06 billion in 2026.

On the surface you may, like Vogue, think this suggests tangible and widespread changes in the way vermouth is being consumed in the United States. You may think La Hora del Vermut has finally taken hold of the masses like the New York Times has claimed it will for years. But no, that is not what is happening. What I am observing is a bifurcation in the vermouth category—driven by a misinterpretation of the data—that conflates a real rising demand for classic cocktail vermouth with the much lesser demand for new-age sipping vermouth. This is inadvertently leaving producers and drinkers of vermouth as confused as I was in the bottle shop.

Though the craft cocktail revival originally launched in bigger American cities in the mid-2000s, it never stopped spreading. In 2026, you’d be hard pressed to find a suburban American downtown without a New American small plates restaurant serving craft cocktails—the kind of place where a too-large group of millennial moms gathers for a rare night out over riffed-on classics with clever names. Vermouth is the defining difference between a nonsense cocktail and a quality classic, something that almost any cocktail bar is getting right today. The craft cocktail culture eventually left the headlines and colonized the suburbs. Now it’s clear vermouth’s astounding growth metrics may simply be riding that wave instead of reflecting something specific to vermouth at all. Could the billions of dollars of growth be just the slow, steady spread of normal Americans learning how to make a proper drink?

However, everything I have read about vermouth’s re-emergence locates its relevance in something outside the product itself: wellness, moderation, European aperitivo culture. In Vogue they say, “the growth of a lower-ABV drink like vermouth feels aligned with larger cultural conversations around wellness, decreased indulgence, and mindful drinking.” The Spirits Business says, “many other markets are using apéritifs as opportunities for flexible, early‐ evening imbibing.” This is allowing the category—and vermouth in particular—to travel globally.

The only people I hear praising vermouth on its own are a relatively small number of devoted vermouth fans running obscure beverage programs—and they’ve been saying it for years. This is not unlike the “explosion” of craft non-alcoholic drinks, marketed as the answer to the sobriety movement, until we learned that most craft NA products are consumed by people who also drink alcohol. There is a lot of noise in this category, and despite there being a seemingly infinite array of NA options, most people just buy a rack of Athletic Brewing and call it a day.

The prevailing narrative and the actual consumer are two different things. Vermouth has its own version of this: a new wave of restaurants in Los Angeles, New York, and beyond are running genuinely interesting vermouth-by-the-glass programs. Vogue cites a handful—Dom’s Taverna in Santa Barbara pours a house vermouth made in Barcelona, Bar Siesta in Los Angeles offers vermouth flights, Park Rose in New York runs a tableside vermouth cart, and Eleven Madison Park makes a house-made, zero-proof vermouth with seasonal variations. This might feel like a watershed to anyone who remembers a time (the aughts?) when vermouth had no presence on a menu at all (I don’t). But I cannot fathom that a dozen restaurants committing to vermouth by the glass is what’s driving billions of dollars in category growth. This is where the narrative gets hijacked: the growth gets credited to what is, in reality, a vast minority of vermouth drinking—new, but minor. It feeds the culture of vermouth in the US, but it isn’t what’s paying for that $9.51 billion projection.

Once I returned home that weekend, hands pulverized from carrying a double paper bag of vermouth and bitters fifteen blocks in the summer sun, I unloaded and immediately poured the cloudy Philadelphia-made dry vermouth over ice. Ripe ruby red grapefruit exploded from the glass, carrying me back to winter mornings watching my mother eat her half grapefruit with a serrated spoon and a steaming cup of herbal tea. A minty mid-palate, a mellow finish, grapefruit bitterness lingering. Delicious? Yes. Would I mix this in a martini? Absolutely not.

Many vermouth advocates point to vermouth culture in Spain as the case study for drinking vermouth on its own. The Spanish style, less bitter and more sweet, is made to be drunk solo. I think almost anyone could enjoy vermouth this way if it was presented to them. I also love a siesta and a 10 pm dinner, but will these cultural phenomena ever really penetrate American daily life? I don’t think so. The reality is that most Americans are not regularly putting themselves in scenarios where they might discover this way of enjoying vermouth.

The concept of drinking vermouth on its own has piggybacked on the “no and low” conversation, positioning vermouth as a lower-alcohol alternative to sipping a spirit—but when you sit with that idea, it’s clear that not many people would reach for three ounces of 16 percent vermouth to moderate when they could just have a 12 percent abv grüner veltiner. I’ve amplified this narrative myself, so I understand its appeal. Once, at a bachelorette party in Charleston, I asked the bartender to sneakily trade out my tequila shots with blanc vermouth so I could “keep up” with the group. That worked for me, but that is some real 20-something industry girl stuff, not a normal use case. From what I can see, the moderation conversation is already falling out of fashion as younger people push back on optimization culture and embrace the “party girl” aesthetic once again.

American vermouth culture may be, for now, more aspiration than reality. Many of the new-wave vermouth producers may be making a product for which there is far less demand than they realize. Take Matthiasson, the pioneering winery behind new-age, organic, European-style Napa wines, which produces a vermouth from mostly a rare and obscure grape called flora, infused with homegrown botanicals. It changes with every vintage—marked not by year but by number—and costs $50 for a half bottle. It has become something of a benchmark for American sipping vermouth, and no shortage of producers have followed in its wake. But these vermouths are more at competition with natural wine than with other styles of vermouth. They’re vintage-driven, producer-specific, priced for occasion, opened like a bottle of something special and drunk slowly—and at that price and in that context, they make complete sense. The noise and the confusion come from the fact that they share a label with something that costs $12 and lives in a speed rail.

The classic vermouths—Martini and Cinzano on the low end, Dolin, Cocchi, and Carpano on the higher end—are winning the game that’s actually being played in bars across America: predictable and precise classic cocktails with low overhead and high margin. Most hover between $14 and $18 a bottle—a price point that delivers outsized value in a martini or negroni program, where a single bottle goes a long way. Most bottle shops offer half bottles too, which cost around $6 to $12 a bottle. Carpano Antica ($35/liter) or Cocchi’s excellent Vermouth di Torino Extra Dry ($26) are the exceptions.

Something unique and respectable about vermouth is that the big names have reached global scale while maintaining their provenance, quality, and reputation. Unlike, say, Barefoot in wine or Jose Cuervo in spirits, even the “worst” vermouths are good enough to mix a solid cocktail with and most pros wouldn’t sweat over it.

Nothing about this type of cocktailing vermouth is new or trendy. Jason’s first column for the Washington Post in 2007 tracks the earliest days of the modern vermouth “revival”—nearly two decades ago, before most people had heard the word craft applied to a cocktail. The previous generation of bartenders did the work. They single-handedly rescued these dusty, turned-to-vinegar vermouth bottles from the back bars and home bars of boomers, who were more interested in the other brightly, fruit-juiced drinks of the 1980s and 1990s. That restoration was completed more than a decade ago. Vermouth’s place in the cocktail canon was settled long before anyone called it a trend.

So where does that leave this new wave of artisan producers whose vermouths are too expensive for most bars to pour in a cocktail? Do I think they should concern themselves with “the market”? Well, yes and no. I do believe in the inherent value of creative experimentation and think that our late capitalist hellhole is the death of creativity. I believe in the value of making beautiful things just for the sake of enjoying the beauty. Yet, I have also watched the wine industry deal with the fallout of what happens when you stop listening to what people want in the endless pursuit of imposing one’s will upon others.

This is why the artisan world of vermouth—creative and experimental—must be separated from the vermouths operating at scale. Confusing these two worlds risks either overselling the experimental vermouth world for something more universal than it is, or judging it against a standard of mass appeal it was never trying to meet.

Back home on a Saturday evening, changed and cooled down, I tasted through the rest of my strange vermouth bounty alongside the Dolin already in my fridge. There was no clear through line between the Pennsylvania dry, the Pennsylvania-made, Spanish-style sweet, the Italian bianco, and the French blanc, which made for a lively mixing and sipping session that night. More bottles were pulled from the fridge to compare. I love how raucous and diverse the vermouth category has become. But I’m still very confused.

Seven New-Wave Vermouths

Hubba Dry ($25/375ml)

This is a single-vineyard, white-colored dry vermouth produced in Paso Robles from the verdelho grape. The nose is extremely mentholated, with undertones of mushroom, juniper, smoke, and an almost meaty finish. Dryer than a French style dry, though with the addition of anise, cardamom, and coriander it could be an interesting addition to a gin martini.

Fell to Earth Dry ($47)

Philadelphia-made with spontaneously fermented wine from Andrews Bridge, Pennsylvania, with botanicals from a low-impact farm in Lancaster County. Ripe ruby red grapefruit on the nose, mint and coriander on the mid-palate, with a mild finish where a pithy bitterness lingers. After a moment in the glass, aromas of chamomile become very apparent and the fruit becomes more fleshy. Pleasant on its own in a way that many dry vermouths are not. Would sip over rocks with a grapefruit slice and a sprig of mint. But does it work in martini?

Bordiga Bianco ($33)

Piemontese white sweet vermouth crafted from trebbiano, moscato, and cortese from the Langhe. It has a mouth coating texture, rich with orange peel, elderflower, and an array of warm spices. Aromas of cardamom, vanilla, and honeyed white flower make for a very rich vermouth. It doesn’t stand up well mixed in a spirit forward cocktail. I recommend enjoying over ice with a lemon.

Comoz Blanc ($19)

Not exactly “new wave,” but newly back in the market. Comoz is the first Vermouth de Chambery to produce a crystal-clear style, a quality that was highly prized in the mid-20th-century. Comoz didn’t survive the vermouth downturn of the 1980s, but was curiously revived by its former rival Dolin and reintroduced to the US market through importer Haus Alpenz in 2020. The flavor is semi-sweet, rich with stone fruit, alpine flowers, and herbs like tarragon and rosemary, with a pleasant undercurrent of wormwood uniting it all.

Casa Carmen ‘Tender is the Night’ ($35)

A so-called “black vermouth” from Casa Carmen, a winery located in West Grove, Pennsylvania. Bitter, nutty, and herbal. Not overly sweet or cloying. Actually quite light on the palate for a sweet vermouth. Infused with black walnuts from their farm and orange peel from Seville, this is an interesting American answer to a Spanish-style sipping vermouth.

Partida Creus MUZ ($35)

Organic Spanish vermouth made by Italian duo Massimo Marchiori and Antonella Gerona. Lighter in alcohol (13% abv) and body than most traditional Spanish vermouths, without sacrificing the rich flavors of orange peel and oregano that are so endearing about this style of vermouth to begin with. Serve over ice with an orange and olive.

Matthiasson Sweet No. 9

Late picked, semi-botrytis affected flora, muscat of alexandria, and viognier compose the base of this vermouth. The young wine is folded into the solera providing the finished vermouth a base of nutty and dried fruit flavors to balance the vibrancy of the fresh wine. Homegrown blood oranges, cardoons, wormwood, and sour cherries are infused with neutral grape brandy to fortify the vermouth and organic cane sugar added as needed to balance. The result is a sublimely layered, though-provoking sweet vermouth, highly reflective of the Matthiasson’s regenerative organic farm and garden in the Napa Valley.

Related Vermouth Content on Everyday Drinking

A trendy Barolo grower who had just returned from a work trip to the US told me that “people in Dallas don’t drink what we drink.” Their tastes are different, he said, they want different wines. From what he had observed, Americans gravitated towards richer, more powerful wines with riper fruit, while the lighter, more savory expressions prized in Europe were largely absent.

Beyond the obvious observation that restaurant wine lists differ from place to place, what intrigues me is the idea that taste is somehow of a place: that people develop preferences so deeply rooted in culture that they become difficult to translate across borders. A bit like the butter-versus-olive-oil divide: you are either an olive oil person or a butter person. Or, worse still, a margarine person. We tend to speak of such preferences as though they were innate rather than acquired.

His assertion also seemed straightforward enough to test. With WineLabs, I analyzed more than 172,000 wine listings from 501 restaurants and wine bars in Dallas and 1,310 venues in London.

At first glance, comparing Dallas with London may seem unfair. But I wanted to avoid skewing the results by choosing a wine-producing capital such as Paris or Milan, where domestic wines would naturally dominate restaurant lists. London, by contrast, combines an unusually international wine trade with comparatively limited domestic production, making it a more neutral benchmark against which to assess whether tastes really do differ across cultures.

According to the data, my Barolo-producing friend isn’t wrong.

In its restaurants and wine bars, Dallas serves wines with average alcohol levels around one percentage point higher than those in London (14.9 percent versus 13.8 percent ABV). The difference is driven almost entirely by the cities’ red wine selections. Nearly 60 percent of the wines on offer in Dallas are red, compared with less than half in London. Meanwhile, London offers a greater share of sparkling and dessert wines.

London is resolutely Old World: nearly 70 percent of the wines listed originate from France, Italy, and Spain. Dallas, by contrast, looks westward, with wines from California accounting for around 23 percent of all listings. French wines alone make up 46 percent of London’s wine lists, while Dallas offers a broader mix of New World regions, including Oregon, Mendoza, Marlborough, and Washington State. The difference is equally evident at the regional level. Burgundy and the Loire Valley feature prominently in London, whereas Napa Valley occupies a much larger place on Dallas wine lists.

Interestingly, Italian wines feature prominently in both cities, although preferences diverge at the regional level. London appears to favor Piedmont, home to Barolo and Barbaresco, whereas Dallas shows a stronger preference for Tuscany and Veneto.

The average London wine list spans seven countries and 20 regions, while Dallas typically draws from just four countries and 10 regions. The two cities also diverge sharply in their red wine preferences: cabernet sauvignon and Bordeaux blends account for 35 percent of the red wines offered in Dallas, compared with just 18 percent in London, where pinot noir reigns supreme. White wines, however, reveal an unexpected point of agreement. Chardonnay dominates in both cities, accounting for roughly 30 percent of their selections. Sparkling wines once again expose the divide, with London favoring traditional-method Champagne and Dallas showing a stronger preference for Prosecco.

European vs. American taste? Paging Dr. Kant

For the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, judgments of taste rest on a paradox. Taste is subjective, grounded in feelings of pleasure or displeasure rather than objective truths. Yet judgments of taste also claim universal validity. When we describe something as beautiful, we do not simply state a preference; we imply that others ought to see it that way too.

We Europeans like to think that taste is our birthright, dismissing any departure from them as a failure of taste itself. When it comes to the creation of luxury goods, for instance, it is true that Western Europe dominates. France, Italy, and Switzerland produce more than 60 percent of the world’s personal luxury goods by value. With wine, Italy, France, and Spain account for around half of global production. This only reinforces the prejudice of European taste, though quantifying it is difficult because no universally accepted definition exists.

Yet while luxury goods are still largely produced in Europe, the market for them is global. Asia accounts for roughly a third of luxury purchases, North America for another third. Europe represents around only a quarter of consumption, although many of those purchases are made by tourists rather than local consumers.

So who creates and shapes taste? The makers or the consumers?

In a recent piece for Bon Appétit, Maryam Ahmed argued that American wine drinkers are offered too many of the same wines—often ones that are rarely local. It is an observation I have made about Michelin-starred restaurants too. Ahmed exhorts consumers to take control and choose local wines instead.

But how much control do consumers actually have? If I walk into a restaurant, I can only choose from what is on the wine list. The act of choosing is constrained by the options that have already been selected for me. So, are wine lists reflecting or shaping demand?

If you’ve seen the first Devil Wears Prada, you’ll remember the scene in which Miranda Priestly—the editor-in-chief of Runway, a thinly veiled version of Anna Wintour at Vogue—scolds her new, unfashionable assistant for mocking a discussion about two belts that appeared to her almost identical. Miranda’s point is that even the assistant’s tragic choice of a blue sweater is the result of decisions made by a handful of influential people in fashion. Taste, she argues, is shaped by the few tastemakers in that very room.

If Anna Wintour had a counterpart in the wine world, it was Robert Parker. Perhaps the most influential wine critic in recent history, I needn’t tell you what a “Parkerized” wine tastes like. Suffice it to say that it tastes almost exactly the opposite of what we traditionally think an Old World wine should taste like. Yet, for all the complaints that European winemakers supposedly have for him, it’s hard to deny that many of them catered to his palate in pursuit of a coveted 100-point score, or something close to it, and the economic gains that came with it. Which means that one wine critic helped shape both the supply of wine and the demand for it according to his personal taste.

This is precisely what the WSET teaches students to avoid. The aim is to assess whether a wine is good or outstanding on its own terms, rather than according to whether you happen to enjoy it. It is an exercise that irritates me every time I do it. Perhaps that is because—despite, once upon a time, knowing very little about wine—I rather recklessly set up a business selling it and simply chose bottles I liked drinking. I had little interest in abstract quality assessments divorced from my own pleasure—my own idea of what made a wine good. In that sense, I empathize with Parker. He scored wines according to his conception of good taste.

The problem was not that Parker had preferences but that his preferences carried such extraordinary weight that they moved markets. Producers adapted their wines to suit his palate, while those that did not align with it were overlooked. One man’s taste became, for a time, the market’s definition of quality.

Which brings me to this question: Did Robert Parker like big, bold, jammy wines because he is American, or did Americans come to like big, bold, jammy wines because Robert Parker said they should?

Selling Prosecco in China

When I first started exploring the Chinese wine market in 2018, there was a clear idea of what “Chinese people liked” when it came to wine: big Bordeaux reds. And that’s what was imported and sold. I once brought a Prosecco to a tasting with a group of Chinese importers in Guangzhou. They all agreed it was a good wine, but insisted that nobody would buy it. “Chinese people don’t drink sparkling wine,” they told me.

“What do you mean?!” I asked. Prosecco is the most popular wine appellation in the world, bar none (660 million bottles sold versus 500 million of Bordeaux). Were Chinese people somehow immune to its charm? I didn’t think so. So I imported it myself and sold it online and quickly became our best-selling wine. Today, Vino Joy reports that sparkling wine sales in China are growing at double-digit rates while sales for still wine are falling.

Now, I’m not telling you this because I want to take credit for the boom of sparkling wine in China. Rather, to illustrate how quickly supposedly fixed preferences can change. And if anything, what changed perceptions was a major Champagne marketing push between 2020 and 2022. I know because every influencer we worked with seemed to be invited to lavish hotel stays and caviar-and-Champagne dinners.

Again, taste isn’t fixed, it can be changed. With the right amount of marketing budget, that is.

That even Kant’s attempt to reconcile the paradox of taste remains contested is, in a way, reassuring. This piece is an argument against the idea that preferences are immutable; that people in London are fundamentally different from those in Dallas; or that today’s wine lists merely reflect what consumers have always wanted.

Perhaps people in Dallas would happily embrace lighter, lower-alcohol whites, just as Londoners might develop a taste for higher-alcohol cabernet sauvignon. But that requires people willing to challenge convention. Critics, importers, restaurateurs and retailers do more than respond to taste: they create it.

Taste, taxation, and terroir

It has to be said that, while Dallas appears to have different tastes in wine, geography and price may explain much of the apparent gap.

London’s proximity to northern France means French wines reach British shores more easily than they do Dallas, where bottles must cross an ocean and navigate a complex supply chain, often at a significantly higher cost. As ever, choices ultimately come down to price—or rather, value for money. The median bottle on a Dallas wine list costs $36, compared with $86 in London.

Supporting this argument, rather than the idea that Dallas simply has a preference for warm-climate wines, is the city’s emphasis on other cool-climate regions, such as Oregon and Washington. These wines feature prominently on Dallas wine lists but are largely absent from London’s—or perhaps simply drowned out in a sea of French choices.

London’s apparent preference for lighter wines may also reflect policy rather than taste. In the UK, alcohol duties are linked to alcohol by volume (ABV), creating a financial incentive for restaurants to stock lower-alcohol wines.

The occasion on which wine is consumed may also play a role. Dallas has a strong tradition of steakhouse dining and casual upscale restaurants, where wine is expected to complement richer, meat-based dishes. The popularity of cabernet sauvignon in Dallas may therefore say less about a city’s willingness to experiment and more about the role wine is expected to play at the table.

In other words, wine lists may reflect not only what people like to drink, but also the occasions on which they drink it.

Perhaps the real lesson is that wine lists reveal less about what people inherently like and more about the choices available to them. Taste is shaped not only by culture and preference, but also geography, taxation, economics and social ritual. Which city has “better” taste depends, perhaps, on whether one believes taste correlates with price. But the more interesting question is not whether London or Dallas has better taste, but how different systems produce different expressions of it.

Related Analysis on Everyday Drinking

This week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Virginia Wine Trade Intensive, a lovely event at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, Virginia. My panel, “Today’s Industry: Trends & Virginia’s Role,” was a wide-ranging conversation, with our moderator asking us about the trends reshaping wine consumption and what they mean for Virginia. The audience was clearly curious about how a region like Virginia might level up and elevate its presence in the world of wine.

I talked a bit about how the wine industry, everywhere, needs to unlearn certain myths and ways of thinking, to come to terms with funflation, to focus on connecting with the people who actually care about and buy fine wines, and to stop chasing people who either don’t care about wine at all, or only buy cheap branded bulk wine. There was the inevitable talk about creating “experiences” around wine. All topics, as readers know, that I’ve written about extensively in this newsletter.

Then the moderator asked me perhaps the diciest question in American wine: “Do you think Virginia needs to have a signature grape?” Both the audience and the panelists had been dancing around this issue. It’s a touchy issue in Virginia. Back in 2011, viognier (yes, viognier!) had been designated the state's signature white grape. Fifteen years later, many people in Virginia see the viognier-as-signature-grape move as having been a mistake.

When the moderator asked, “Do you think Virginia needs to have a signature grape?” I looked out into the audience and could see plenty of people vigorously shaking their head “no.” During the panel, there had already been some boosterish talk about Virginia’s “diversity of grapes”—from chardonnay to merlot to cabernet sauvignon to cabernet franc to petit verdot to petit manseng.

But I said what I said: Yes, after decades of experimenting with dozens of varieties, Virginia absolutely needs to choose two or three signature grapes and focus on those. I suggested that cabernet franc as a red and petit manseng as a white both seemed to have a lot of potential in Virginia’s terroir. There was pushback.

In U.S. winemaking, it always surprises me what an unpopular opinion it is to suggest that a region focus on a signature grape that works well in the terroir. This concept seems old hat in Europe. You don’t just open a winery in the Loire Valley and start growing furmint, grüner veltliner, rkatsiteli, or whatever the hell else you want to grow. There’s a reason winemakers grow and focus on chenin blanc and cabernet franc in Touraine and Anjou, sauvignon blanc and pinot noir in Sancerre, and melon de bourgogne for Muscadet along the western Loire near the coast. Meanwhile, in the U.S., no one would be surprised to find chenin blanc, sauvignon blanc, pinot noir, and melon de bourgogne—plus furmint, grüner veltliner, and rkatsiteli—grown in the same vineyard, somewhere in New Jersey or Idaho or Michigan.

I mean, I get it: we’re ’Muricans and we don’t like being told what we can and cannot do. Also, the AVA (American Viticultural Area) system simply does not carry the same qualitative weight as European AOCs, DOCs, and DOs.

For years, I’ve covered the Finger Lakes—where it is very clear that riesling and cabernet franc should be the white and red grapes of focus. But show up at any Finger Lakes winery and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll find a crazy array of grapes: pinot noir, syrah, chardonnay, pinot grigio, grüner veltliner, blaufränkisch (called lemberger in FLX), or even hybrids like catawba, concord, and delaware. As a critic, I visited wineries that poured me over thirty expressions from one vintage. Focus, people, focus!

Beyond the obvious reason that certain grapes just grow better in certain soils and microclimates, there is a human creative element to constraints. Constraints are a creative virtue; they force innovation. Growing any old grape where it may or may not belong is, as Robert Frost famously said about free-verse poetry, “like playing tennis with the net down.”

This is not to say that one shouldn’t experiment with new grapes. (And those of us who like free-verse poetry may disagree with Mr. Frost). Certainly, with any up-and-coming wine regions, there’s always an ongoing, and healthy, debate over which grapes actually grow best and should be the signature grape. But at some point, a movement of winemakers will coalesce around particular grape variety and lead the charge.

In Virginia, that seems to be happening right now with cabernet franc and petit manseng. Cabernet franc is swiftly becoming the key red grape throughout northeastern U.S. and so that’s not a surprise. On the other hand, petit manseng, the white grape of Jurançon in Southwest France, is a bit more unique.

I tasted terrific cabernet franc from wineries such as Paradise Springs, Veritas, Early Mountain Vineyards, and Cross Keys Vineyards. As for petit manseng, I tasted interesting ones from both Paradise Springs and Veritas, as well as from The Winery at La Grange. I also tasted a super interesting white blend from Veritas, with petit manseng along with chardonnay, viognier, and sauvignon blanc.

However (going against my own argument here) one of the favorite wines I tasted was Barboursville Vineyards’ 2024 Vermentino Reserve. So, who knows, maybe vermentino could be Virginia’s signature grape?

What I’ve Been Drinking, Part 1: Ageworthy Whites

Many believe the future of wine is white. White wine recently surpassed reds in worldwide consumption. In the U.S., white wine consumption has risen nearly 75 percent over the past two decades. So why aren’t more people collecting and cellaring top white wines? White Burgundy isn’t getting any cheaper and where else should you be looking?

In that latest edition of my Beyond Everyday Drinking Wine Club, I’ve got a few answers for you. This quarter, it's all about premium white wines, and I've picked three top, ageworthy whites for you, from Rioja, from Mountlouis in the Loire Valley, and from Germany's Rheinhessen. I’ve also got a surprise rosé in the box that will become your favorite summer pink wine.

Anyone who signs up for my wine club this month will receive the current box, plus my partners at SocialSomm will send you a free bottle of wine as a special gift.

Sign up for my wine club today!

If you’d prefer to just buy one of the three wines I’ve selected, just scroll down.

Knewitz ‘Appenheim’ Riesling Trocken 2022 ($33)

Knewitz is among the best up-and-coming wineries in Germany, and this bone-dry riesling, with thrilling acidity, profound minerality, and intense power is a great introduction to the new wave of German wine. Brothers Bjorn and Tobias, along with Tobias' wife Corina, make honest, terroir-driven wine in Rheinhessen, and this 2022 shows just how ageworthy good riesling can be.

Domaine de la Taille aux Loups 'Clos de Mosny' 2024 ($46)

Jacky Blot was one of France’s legendary winemakers, known for putting the Loire appellation of Montlouis on the map with his bone-dry chenin blanc at Domaine de la Taille aux Loups. His son Jean-Philippe now carries on the family legacy after Jacky’s death in 2023. This complex white represents everything you should love about chenin blanc, with a balance of fruit and minerality, thrilling tension, crisp acidity, and great texture.

Sierra de Toloño ‘Nahikun’ Blanco 2025 ($47)

This stylish, elegant white comes from high-altitude, 80-year-old vines of viura and malvasia. Winemaker Sandra Bravo is among Rioja’s excellent new wave, and this shows why the region, known for its reds, is also a world-class place for ageworthy white wine.

What I’ve Been Drinking, Part 2: California Chenin Blanc

I have an article on California’s chenin blanc revival in Wine Enthusiast’s current California issue. The article is only in print, so you’ll have to find a copy. But here’s a snippet:

It’s early impossible to talk about California white wine without focusing on Chardonnay. But there was a time before Chardonnay overshadowed every other white variety. In the 1970s and ’80s, surprising as it may seem now, Chenin Blanc was among California’s most popular grapes. In 1985, Chenin Blanc accounted for 25% of all white-wine grapes crushed in thestate, second only to Colombard.

Consequently, there are a lot of older chenin vineyards in California, dating to the 1970s and 1980s, that grow amazing chenin blanc. With wineries like Haarmeyer Wine Cellars, Sandlands Vineyards, Pax Wines, Hammerling Wines, Broc Cellars, and The End of Nowhere leading the way, chenin blanc has a bright future. In May, the latest edition of Hella Chenin, a super fun, chenin-based festival went off to a roaring success. Is California chenin blanc about to have its moment?

“I’ve been waving the Chenin flag for 15 goddamn years,” said Craig Haarmeyer, the West Sacramento–based producer whose organic, low-intervention Chenin Blancs grown in Clarksburg have become some of the most sought-after in California….“It’s acid-driven, food-friendly, and complex. It’s a three-dimensional wine…It’s Chardonnay without training wheels.”

Haarmeyer freely admits that California chenin blanc will always be different from that found in the Loire Valley, chenin’s homeland. “It’s damn near impossible to pick Chenin underripe here,” he told me. “I’m not trying to make French wines. I love Savennières, but we’re never going to make Loire Chenin here.” That’s totally okay! Perhaps it more closely mirrors the best chenin blanc coming from South Africa. Or perhaps California chenin is its own wonderful thing entirely.

Four Fine California Chenin Blanc

Haarmeyer Wine Cellars ‘St. Rey - SRV’ Chenin Blanc 2024 ($20)

Among California’s very best chenin blanc, from Sutter Ranch Vineyard in Clarksburg. Dry, austere, and mineral, yet also ripe, vibrant, and fruity. If you want to try “alt California” here’s a good place to start.

RZN Wines ‘The Lightning Issue” Chenin Blanc 2023 ($30)

I tried this bottle from a new-to-me Santa Barbara winery (pronounced “Reason Wines”) the other day and loved it. From Tres Hermanas Vineyard on the Central Coast. Fresh, zippy, pithy, chalky, with tangerine, white grapefruit, and honeysuckle.

Broc Cellars ‘Happi Chenin’ 2023 ($34)

Berkeley-based Broc Cellars is one of my favorite California wineries. Their gorgeous chenin blanc from Massa Vineyard in Carmel Valley, grown at 1,500 feet. Peach skin, grapefruit, fresh herb, ripe but precise, pithy and silky. Hard to find.

The End of Nowhere ‘Little Faith’ 2025 ($22)

Love this producer in quaint Amador City (great tasting room, you should visit). This skin-contact bottling is a blend of 40% chenin blanc, 30% chardonnay, and 30% pinot gris. “Chenin brings the leaness, chardonnay the roundness, and pinot gris brings the aromatics,” says winemaker Chris Walsh.

Where I’ve Been Drinking: Philadelphia

This is going to be an exciting summer in my home city of Philadelphia: We’re hosting the FIFA World Cup and the MLB all-star game, as well as plenty of festivities around the 250th anniversary (aka Semiquincentennial) of the United States. (Note: for my European readers, and for younger people who used AI in history class, Philadelphia was the first capital of the U.S. and is where the Declaration of Independence was signed).

Given all the exciting things happening in Philadelphia, I figured I would share a few of my favorite places for wine in the city.

Manong

I’m loving this newish Filipino wine bar/all-day café/restaurant that opened in my neighborhood at the end of 2025. It’s a super spot to sit at the bar and eat lumpia, tagalog skewers, pork adobo, or swordfish along with great wine list and cocktails. Manong also has a nicely curated wine shop of organic, low-intervention bottles.

Wine Dive

Another fun spot, in Center City near Rittenhouse Square, that opened in late 2025. Wine Dive describes itself as “Where Old Hollywood meets Atlantic City,” dark with red accents, and it’s definitely a vibe. There’s a good selection of 20 wines by the glass, but my favorite feature is the fresh chicken cutlets served from behind the bar ($10).

Superfolie

Probably my favorite wine bar in the Center City right now, with super food and always one of the best wine selections in the city (and also a great take on the Spanish tinto de verano). Also check out their sister location, Superétte, in East Passyunk.

Jet Wine Bar

Jet Wine Bar has been around for a while, a staple on 15th and South. But they’ve recently opened their outdoor wine garden, which is a great. Owned by Jill Weber, a professional archaeologist who loves obscure wines, it’s always been a place to find Georgian, eastern European, and other lesser-known wines.

Fountain Porter

This cool neighborhood spot in East Passyunk is not technically a wine bar—in fact, you could also call it a craft beer bar. But there’s always a great rotating selection of interesting low-intervention wines on the chalkboard. The only food on the chalkboard is burgers ($6), pickles ($5), and fries ($4).

Sally

Pizzeria Beddia always grabs the headlines for pizza and natural wine. But I’ve always liked this Fitler Square spot (which also was awarded a Michelin Bib Gourmand in 2025) much more, without the crowds and hype. Besides great pizza and pasta, Sally has a nicely curated natural wine shop.

What I’ve Been Eating While Drinking: Skirt Steak

One of food media’s most cherished tropes is “grilling season.”

This is, presumably, the season when the weather starts to warm, and readers liberate their grills from the depths of cold winter storage to fire them up en masse. We start seeing these articles in April, though sometimes a bit earlier, depending on when the news gap after Easter and Passover falls. It usually begins with annual grill reviews and tips on, say, best barbecue sauces, then moves on to recipes for “unusual” things to grill (Have you ever grilled a vegetable!? Or a peach!? Maybe you should!). By Memorial Day, there’s a full slate of stories about how to clean your grill and a shoutout to plant-based grilling options, and by the lead-up to July Fourth, we get features about safety, on the dangers of cooking with fire, and of undercooked meat.

At some point during this season, we’ll get the annual articles on what wines to pair with the food you grill. This is where we generally hear about how well barbecue pairs with California zinfandel, or matching Argentine malbec with steak.

For many of us who love grilling, the whole idea of “grilling season” feels a little imaginary. It presumes a readership consisting only of those in northern climes where winter temperatures hypothetically discourage grilling. Moreover, committed grillers do not pay too much attention to the weather. I’ll grill in a snowstorm if the spirit moves me. I take both grilling and wine seriously regardless of the season.

I like grilling pork, fish, burgers, whatever. But my absolute favorite cut of beef is skirt steak. It’s simple and delicious.

I usually prepare it one of two ways. First, would be with simple marinade—soy sauce, toasted sesame oil, grated garlic and ginger, salt and pepper—several hours before grilling. Or, if I’m being super lazy, I’ll do a cheater “carne asada” style, by rubbing the skirt steak with olive oil and the Whole Foods “Peruvian Style Seasoning” (“Citrusy & Robust” according to the label). In either case, the grilling part is simple, about three minutes each side on super-hot direct heat. Let it rest for a few minutes, and then slice into thin strips. A grilling season delight!

What to pair with it? Keep reading.

Seven Skirt Steak Wine Picks

Felix R&B NV ($15)

An exciting new collab from importer Winemonger and Stefan Wellanschitz of Kolfok from Burgenland, Austria. This is a blend of blaufränkisch and rotburger (they chose to use the local name of zweigelt to avoid its complicated and controversial associations). But there’s nothing complicated or controversial about this juicy, crunchy, fresh, and delightful wine with a great balance of savory herb, red fruit, and peppery notes. A wonderfully affordable spring red.

Olga Raffault ‘La Fraich’ 2024 ($20)

Entry level wine from this benchmark Chinon winemaker. From young vines, organic, and aged only for six months in stainless steel. It’s a classic vin de soif with great juicy acidity, fresh fruit, and earthy notes.

Celler Pardas ‘Sus Scrofa’ 2023 ($23)

I’ve fallen in love with sumoll, the Catalan grape that makes bright, fresh, savory reds. “Nobody loved sumoll until recently,” says winemaker Ramon Parera. "It’s a crazy grape.” Sus Scrofa is a red for contemporary tastes. Electric and lively, almost like a young nebbiolo with earthiness, dark minerality, juicy red fruit, cherry tomato edgy tannins and a cool, stony finish.

Sierra de Toloño Rosado 2025 ($24)

Everyone needs a house pink wine for summer sipping, and this rosé from Rioja is mine for the season. Sandra Bravo's rosado from tempranillo and garnacha is serious and complex, darker in color than the typical pale pink. But it doesn't forget what rosé is supposed to be: fun, fruity, delicious, and refreshing.

Château La Colombière Fronton 2024 ($30)

Négrette is a lesser-known grape from Southwest France, particularly from the AOC Fronton, near Toulouse. This blend of 90% négrette and 10% syrah is a good introduction to the grape, which makes juicy, drinkable wines, balanced by savory notes. This is a perfect chilled red.

Domaine de la Noblaie 'Les Chiens-Chiens' 2022 ($33)

Chinon, in France's Loire Valley, is a spiritual home of Cabernet Franc. Jérôme Billard of Domaine de la Noblaie is among my favorite Chinon winemakers. This bottle comes from 30-year-old vines from a vineyard that literally means “Dogs-Dogs.” Textured, serious, dark, and chewy with dried herb, plum, black olive, blistered tomato, and even a hint of espresso. Super complex. An example of oak aging in Chinon (12 months in large neutral oak) that’s understated.

Christian Tschida 'Kapitel I' Cabernet Franc ($54)

Cabernet franc from Austria? Yes, it exists! You can find it in Burgenland, around Lake Neusiedl, where Christian Tschida works wonders with this variety - adding a bit of local blaufränkisch to the blend. Anyone who's followed my work knows how much I admire Tschida's wines, and this is one of my favorites. This wine has finesse, texture, and elegance, with spice, pepper, red berry and a great long finish.

A few weeks ago, the WSET unveiled what it’s calling a “brand refresh” and others in the trade are calling a “major rebranding exercise.” Out is the old official name, Wine & Spirit Education Trust, in favor of just the acronym. Also out is the old “wine goddess” logo, a design move that feels oddly similar to Cracker Barrel canceling the old man in its logo last year. Hoping it works out better for WSET than it did for Cracker Barrel.

In an interview with The Buyer, WSET’s chief executive Michelle Brampton said the rebranding was “more than cosmetic.” She explained the “brand evolution” as “making WSET more accessible, recognizable, and relevant to a global audience, regardless of geography, language, or drinks category.” Amid the expected corporate talk of being an “organization that inspires, connects and champions inclusion, sustainability, and innovation,” Brampton said:

“Research told us that the previous brand was trusted, which is important to maintain, but that it felt wine-focused, overly academic and formal. It wasn’t always seen as empowering or inclusive, and that’s important to us too…

Our tone and language are evolving too, we want everyone, whether a trade professional or an enthusiast, to feel they belong.

She also mentioned that the WSET pin badges were “redesigned in sustainable materials.”

What I did not see addressed was the actual education—whether the curriculum, the materials, or the cost had changed. If WSET feels it’s become too “wine-focused,” what does that mean for its wine education? More emphasis on spirits and cocktails? On beer? On sake?

Almost three years ago, I asked the question, “Is It Finally Time for a New Wine Education?” I wasn’t talking about redesigning the logo.

What I don’t understand is why wine media, professional training certifications, and wine education in general still follows the same curriculum. In every other realm of culture, the canon has been questioned and often blown up. Visual art has not been governed by The Academy for more than a century. We don’t read solely the Dead White Males in lit class anymore.

Maybe to put this in more simple pop-culture terms. I’m old enough to remember that, in the 1990s, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins and their ilk were considered “alternative” rock. They were the alternative to “classic” rock like Led Zeppelin, The Who, Bad Company, Boston…whatever 1970s bands my generation was force fed on the era’s classic-rock radio. Eventually, the tide turned, and now what was once was alternative has become mainstream and old hat. I think we all understand how this happened. The same thing is happening now in wine.

To meet the current moment, I believe we need to envision what a new wine education looks like. It’s not about throwing away what’s “classic.” But it’s also about accepting that the alternative is becoming the mainstream. Part of the problem is language—what do we call these new categories? And part of the problem is curation—what of the newly popular wines are worth learning about and what’s a fad. These are questions worth trying to answer, rather than ignoring them.

Wine does not have a “knowledge gap” problem. Knowledge abounds. People can access every wine fact known to humankind at their fingertips. If they seek more education, there are more than 100,000 people holding WSET certifications. Almost 15,000 hold the DipWSET. That should be more than enough educators to spread wine knowledge throughout the land.

The answer to wine’s problem is not more knowledge. The answer is in the translation of that knowledge. Wine has a communication problem. WSET is great, knowledge is great. But we need a wine education that veers away from treating wine knowledge like an expensive, wine-themed game of Quizzo. We also need to start teaching wine educators how to actually communicate all that knowledge. I don’t believe that any of the certification organizations are teaching wine communication effectively.

Too often, the solution offered to this communication problem is to “de-mystify’ wine. Caroline Lamb addressed that a few weeks ago in her viral essay, “Gen Z to Wine: Please Stop Condescending To Us.”

I’d argue this idea that wine needs to be dumbed down is more condescending than any of the exclusivity it claims to be fighting. Embedded in the entire demystification agenda is an unspoken assumption: That young people need wine to be easier because they can’t handle complexity, aspiration, or even a simple conversation with a sommelier, that the only way to engage young people is to meet them at the bottom rather than invite them up.

I am not a WSET hater, and I say all this with love. Because here’s a fun fact: based on my surveys, more than a third of Everyday Drinking readers hold some sort of drinks certification. So, dear readers, I would like ask you: what might a new wine education look like? What is currently missing from the curriculum? What was missing from your experience? What could be improved, deleted, evolved? Let’s start this conversation.

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My friends and I let out a collective post-wedding exhale over a handful of half-drank bottles of wine, haphazard snack foods, and mismatched Airbnb glassware. We were all gathered to celebrate the marriage of our close friend Anastasia. After we drained a few liters, I spotted a clear bottle at the back of the fridge. “I know that wine,” I thought, plucking the 2018 Montesecondo ‘Tïn’ from behind the tub of guacamole.

In 2019, Anastasia and I had enjoyed this same vintage of Montesecondo ‘Tïn’ around an enormous farmhouse table, with friends, over a bowl of polenta with Tuscan kale. A skin-contact blend of trebbiano and malvasia from a small village on the northern edge of Chianti Classico, it was now, at eight years old, even better than I remembered.

Trebbiano toscano is possibly the most unremarkable white wine grape in the world, mostly cultivated to criminally high yields and produced into wines without much flavor or character. But this mature bottle of Montesecondo’s trebbiano toscano was incredible, and awakened memories of the season I spent in Tuscany. More broadly, it reminded me of the largely misunderstood and overlooked white wines of the region.

Anastasia and I worked together at Montesecondo during the 2019 harvest. We had both come to Tuscany curious to find what was below the tidal wave of bulk Chianti that we were positive was composed of equal parts cab concentrate, American oak, and Round-Up.

Montesecondo is a pioneering biodynamic winery in the village of San Casciano in Val di Pesa within the Chianti Classico DOCG, founded by Silvio Messana after taking control of his mother’s old vineyard in the 1990s. At the time, being an innovator in Tuscany meant looking back to the traditional way from the early 20th century and earlier. Silvio’s wife Catalina pushed him to find a better, more natural way to farm their land, while most neighboring vignaioli doubled down on industrialized farming and score-chasing wines to compete with the Parkerized reds of the era. Gradually, they were introduced to other contemporary biodynamic pioneers in Italy and France, and by 2003 were a fully integrated biodynamic farm, vinifying their first complete vintage with indigenous yeast in 2004. During our time there, we guided countless indigenous ferments in cement, stainless steel, clay, and wood—each its own special experiment in transparent, terroir-driven winemaking.

Though we produced wines labeled Chianti Classico DOCG, the real focus and excitement of the production lived inside the winery among the twenty-some clay tinaja (what wine lovers more commonly call amphora) crafted by Juan Padilla, Spain’s most internationally renowned artisan. This is where wines like the Tïn were macerated and fermented on their skins and seeds in the so-traditional-it’s-now-experimental way. Due to the fact that Tuscany has a weak system of white wine appellations, most of Tuscany’s cutting-edge white wines are labeled IGT—Indicazione Geografica Tipica—a catch-all geographic designation one step above table wine.

The white wines we made at Montesecondo were produced in much smaller quantities than the reds due to lower demand, which meant the process was more intimate: moving grapes to the winery in handheld bins without the high-low, filling bucket after bucket with fermented grapes and wine to carry to a small antique press that we took turns cranking until the pomace was as dry as it could get.

Many afternoons we would break up the long hot days on the crush pad with a leisurely lunch at Agriosteria del Frontoio in nearby Scandicci. This restaurant serves only hyper-local Tuscan food, most of the produce grown in their own garden, and an all Tuscan wine list spanning from the Apennines to Montalcino to the island of Giglio. Here, I discovered traditional sparkling from the aleatico grape, from the terraced vineyards on the island of Capraia, or lightly-macerated vermentino nero from the northern corner where Tuscany meets Liguria, or many other surprises and delights from the diverse range of Tuscan white wines.

The most widely planted white grape in Tuscany is trebbiano toscano. Once sanctioned for use in Chianti Classico, it was banned by the consortium in 2006. Older vines of trebbiano that have been preserved in the Chianti zone, like the 50-year-olds used in Montesecondo’s Tïn, benefit from the reduced yield and complexity that can only come from old vines. Trebbiano toscano also responds well to fermenting with its skins to produce orange wine, another way winemakers add depth and age-worthiness to the workhorse native white grape.

About 100 kilometers to the west of Chianti on the Tuscan coast, Massa-Carrara and Maremma are home to a growing number of quality white wines made from vermentino, albarola, and ansonica. It is widely accepted that these varieties thrive in proximity to the sea, where they often mirror their surroundings in a distinct salinity. In Colline Metallifere, the mineral-rich hills high above Maremma, Ampeleia is pioneering quality winegrowing in a region not historically known for agriculture. Jason has written about Ampeleia’s bianco before, a blend of trebbiano toscano, malvasia, and ansonica. They just released a bianco version of their hugely popular Unlitro to celebrate 15 years of the rosso, a bottling of vermentino, trebbiano, and malvasia picked early to preserve acidity and keep alcohol low—in line with the global trend toward lighter, lower-alcohol whites.

Malvasia grows widely across Tuscany, and like trebbiano was historically used in the blend of Chianti Classico DOCG wines. Now, it’s mostly used to make Vin Santo. Malvasia thrives at elevation or near the coast, where its tendency for producing high-alcohol wines can be more easily controlled than the valley floors. Down in the Val d’Orcia, home of Brunello di Montalcino, there are a few producers experimenting with Rhône white grapes like marsanne, roussane, and viognier. These heat-tolerant whites are finding success in the mineral rich clay soils of the valley.

Beyond the cloak of bulk Chianti, the innovations occurring at the margins of Tuscan wine are some of the most exciting happening in any legacy region right now. The diverse whites produced here offer a new path into an ancient place. As producers across Europe continue to push back against appellation regulations, often created to protect deep-pocketed players at the expense of small, natural producers, I hope more of them follow Montesecondo’s lead, putting their energy behind the lesser-known wines worth preserving.

8 Untypical Tuscan Whites To Try

These are exciting days for Tuscan whites, with a lot of experimentation going on in the lesser-known parts of Tuscany. Here are eight bottles to look for. As always, recommendations and tasting notes are for paid subscribers only. Upgrade today!

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Back in March, I spent a few wonderful days in Valle de Guadalupe in Baja, Mexico. I adore Valle de Guadalupe. It’s such a unique place and, from a travel perspective, it’s among my favorite regions to visit. A few years ago, I wrote a feature about the challenges of making wine in such a dry place for San Diego Magazine.

On my latest trip, I was on assignment for Wine Enthusiast, in an attempt to unravel the mystery of Mexican nebbiolo. You can read my article here.

One gorgeous spring day in Valle de Guadalupe, as a band played a romantic Mexican folk song, I tasted two Nebbiolos under a 450-year-old oak tree at Casa Magoni winery. Or perhaps I should say I tasted one Nebbiolo and one “Nebbiolo”—in big air quotes.

I was with the 85-year-old winemaker Camillo Magoni, who poured two different bottlings. First, his 2016 Nebbiolo Clone 34, grown from vines native to Valtellina in Italy’s Lombardy region, where Magoni was born. Next came his 2019 Nebbiolo de Baja. The difference was stark: Clone 34 had the light color, finesse, and rose and cherry notes of a young Piemontese Nebbiolo. The Nebbiolo de Baja was darker, more muscular, and more brooding. I enjoyed both, but the question was unavoidable: How were these two wines from the same grape variety?

Other Baja winemakers are more blunt about their skepticism toward the so-called Nebbiolo that grows in Baja. “Some people say that it’s Dolcetto or Lambrusco,” said Lulú Martinez Ojeda, winemaker at Bruma, one of Valle de Guadalupe’s most highly regarded producers. “All I can say is it’s not Nebbiolo. I love it, but it’s not Nebbiolo.” Martinez Ojeda says a Mexican-American sommelier in New York once asked about her wine, “So is this Nebbiolo, or is this Nebbio-cholo?”

So, if the Nebbiolo in Valle de Guadalupe is not really Nebbiolo, then what is it?

You’ll have to go to Wine Enthusiast to get the answer of that question, but suffice to say that Nebbiolo de Baja is quite different from what you’d recognize in Italian wines made from it, like Barolo or Barbaresco.

Like most up-and-coming wine regions, Valle de Guadalupe has struggled to find a signature grape. The region’s drought conditions and heat lead to a lot of experimentation, and many vineyards grow chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon. Some grow very good chenin blanc. Some believe Rhône varieties like mourvèdre and grenache do best. Others veer toward Spanish varieties like tempranillo. Others still insist on Italian grapes like sangiovese, montepulciano, and aglianico.

But for now, the signature grape in Valle de Guadalupe is nebbiolo. Or “nebbiolo” as the case may be.

My Travel Recs for Valle de Guadalupe

If you’ve never been, I strongly recommend that you make a wine and food journey to this part of Mexico. Valle de Guadalupe stretches northeast from the Baja coast, near Ensenada, less than two hours’ drive from San Diego. It’s a perfect two-to-three day trip.

Taste: If you have a couple of days, prioritize these wineries: Bruma, Casa Magoni, Lechuza, Solar Fortún, Bodegas Henri Lurton, Madera 5, and Viñas de le Erre. Also, check out Baja Divina (right next to Finca Altozano) a wine shop with a good selection of smaller production wines curated by sommelier Lauren Plascencia.

Drink: Have you ever sipped natural wine in a bar shaped like a head of garlic? Well, you can and you should at a wine bar called Bloodlust.

Eat: Seafood fresh from the nearby coast is generally a can’t-miss in Valle de Guadalupe. Dinner at Fauna (#17 among Latin America’s 50 Best restaurants), overlooking Bruma’s vineyards, is a must-do. Chef David Castro Hussong’s menu is always changing, and this video shows what I ate on my last visit:

At Javier Plascencia’s mainstay Finca Altozano, there was a fabulous lunch of bluefin tosada and lamb birria. Javier Plascencia’s flagship restaurant, the Michelin-starred Animalón, is a more modern take on Mexican wine country cooking, with more international fare of foie gras, sea urchin, lobster ravioli, or perhaps beer-braised barbacoa, wrapped in a banana leaf, steamed and smoked in a pig's bladder, and served tableside—dramatically, under a 200-year-old oak tree.

Wineries such as Casa Magoni and Solar Fortún are nice spots for casual al fresco lunches. In my Wine Enthusiast piece, I already talked about Casa Magoni’s lovely courtyard, tasting and eating under a 450-year-old oak tree. I’ve also really enjoyed the marlin tacos and salpicón de pulpo while tasting wines at Solar Fortún.

Stay: If you can afford it, stay at Bruma winery’s exclusive and beautiful resort. Even more exclusive is the six-room Hotel Partana. For a more budget option, I’ve also enjoyed Casa Entrevez at a fraction of the price.

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