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 com- plex. 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.

Leave a comment

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.

Related Nebbiolo Content on Everyday Drinking

When you first hear about the scandal, it’s like something out of a Wes Anderson movie: the Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben—a blaufränkisch from century-old vines, hailed by critics as a masterpiece, the greatest Burgenland wine of all time, awarded 100 points—has been rejected by the official Austrian wine tasting panel as faulty, and must now be relabelled and sold as mere table wine. At a press conference during Austria’s premier wine salon in Vienna, two grown men engage in a shouting match. Insiders question the motives behind the tasting panel and call the Austrian wine law “bankrupt.” A shadowy article appears in a trade magazine accusing the winemaker and critic of conspiring to orchestrate a PR stunt. Both the winemaker and the critic make Instagram videos threatening legal action.

My colleague Simon Woolf has posted an excellent account of the kerfluffle over the Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben at The Morning Claret.

The Morning Claret

Austria's Wine Law is Bankrupt

Visitors to VieVinum - Austria’s most prestigious wine fair, held last weekend in Vienna - were expecting three days of deliciousness and conviviality. The sight of two grown men shouting at each other during a press conference was not supposed to be on the agenda…

Read more

22 days ago · 32 likes · 16 comments · Simon J Woolf

The wine in question, the 2023 vintage of Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben, was made by Roland Velich of Moric, perhaps Burgenland’s most famed winemaker. It is, without doubt, among Austria’s greatest red wines, from 80- to 100-year-old vines, a wine that can stand next to top reds all over the world. I profiled Velich and his wines in my book Godforsaken Grapes, as well as here at Everyday Drinking.

In that article, I reviewed the 2021 Moric Alte Reben Lutzmannsburg, calling it:

“Fragrant, perfumed nose of wild herb, cherry, wet stone, a hint of smoke. On the palate, it’s bright and crunchy, but refined, elegant, and complex, with lots of fresh red fruit, hints of licorice and tobacco, profound at the midpalate and a long, long finish. Deep and earthy, it’s like picking berries in beautiful, ancient forest after a heavy rain. An incredible wine.” (Yes, like all wine writers, I can be over-the-top sometimes.)

In any case, the idea that this wine could be “faulty” or “flawed” is ludicrous. According to Woolf, Roland Velich had good reason to be angry at the official tasting panel ruling, and suggested a wider conspiracy:

In particular, [Velich] outlined how growers who work with minimal intervention—spontaneous fermentation, no additives or corrections, no filtering or clarification—are regularly penalized for making wines that are supposedly “not typical.”

Anyone who covers Austrian wine knows that the official tasting panel regularly penalizes natural winemakers like Christian Tschida, Claus Preisinger, Franz Weninger, and others. Woolf says:

As I wrote in 2024, countless low-intervention winemakers have abandoned the quality wine system, instead declassifying their entire output to table wine, and accepting that they cannot mention geographic terms on the label. Growers usually make this choice after their wines are repeatedly refused the prüfnummer [the official certification to be labelled a quality wine]. The usual reasons given by tasting panels are that the wines are cloudy or hazy, they are not typical of the stated variety or region, or that they display a fault such as volatile acidity.

In response to the scandal, Rudolf Schmid, head of wine at the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture, poured gasoline on the fire, accusing Velich of gaming the critic’s 100-point score purely for marketing purposes. This, according to Woolf, made no sense:

Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben 2023 first made the headlines in late September 2025, shortly after wine critic Stuart Pigott—at that time employed by JamesSuckling.com - tasted and rated the wine with a perfect 100 points. Others also praised the wine. Falstaff’s Peter Moser scored it 99 points in November 2025…Velich bottled the wine on 4th September 2025, and made it available for critics to taste shortly after. He had every expectation that it would receive its prüfnummer—its passport to be labelled a quality wine from Mittelburgenland—as it had for the previous two decades. He submitted the wine to the tasting panel twice, first on 26th November 2025 and then again at the end of January 2026. It was rejected both times.

For me, the strangest part of the controversy is the two video statements posted on Instagram by Pigott, the critic who scored the wine 100 points—the second reel to vehemently deny that he is part of a “conspiracy.”

Woolf’s blunt assessment of the Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben fiasco: “There is little doubt that the system is broken.”

While I agree with Woolf, I believe the issue is even bigger and wider than that. Because this Austrian wine controversy is really about two broken, bankrupt systems colliding at the same moment: One the one hand, a quasi-fascist, judge-jury-and-executioner, self-important tasting panel; on the other hand, the gatekeeping, bullshitting, self-important business of scoring wines on a 100-point scale.

I mean, let’s be super honest here. In this controversy, we’re basically asked to take sides about who’s right: an imperious tasting panel’s ruling of “faulty wine” or a gatekeeping wine critic’s rating of 100 points. That’s a pretty cringe choice, if you ask me. After all, a $150 wine rated 100 points by JamesSuckling.com is a wine that’s going to be so heavily allocated that you will likely never taste it. If you’re taking the side of the wine critic, please take a moment to watch a video of that critic’s employer explaining how he rates on a 100-point scale:

As we all know, we are living in a nightmare era of conspiracy. Whether it’s the social media algorithms manipulating our consumer decisions, technofascists forcing AI down our throats, the Epstein files, the purging of January 6th by the Department of Justice, or PACs with questionable intent spending millions in our local elections, people are finally starting to question the broader, darker forces at play in their everyday lives. Most of us come to wine and spirits to escape all this.

But alas, as we’ve talked about many times here in this newsletter, the forces that influence what we drink are just as pervasive as in the rest of our lives. The only solution, as always, is to distrust the institutions—all of them, both “official” and self appointed—hell-bent on defining taste and quality for you. The first step in rejecting established hierarchy, arbitrary ratings and rankings, and received knowledge is independent tasting and thinking. Since you’ve read all the way to the end of this post, I believe you know where to find that.

Related Conspiracy Content on Everyday Drinking

Taking a little respite for the holiday weekend, and I’m posting an Everyday Drinking travel classic. This was anthologized in The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024 (the anthology that ironically replaces my former series The Best American Travel Writing).

In this terrible age of media—when we are told that travel writing is dead or dying—I made a travel writer’s pilgrimage, winding through miles of olive-tree forests in Andalusia’s interior, to the small hilltop town of Estepa. I’m still not exactly sure why.

Estepa is a relatively random town situated between the bigger cities of Córdoba and Málaga in southern Spain. I was in Córdoba on assignment, and I’d had a Saturday morning appointment with a winemaker in Montilla, a guy who made strange, dry wines in this hot climate from the Pedro Ximenez grape.

After the meeting, in the bar of an old restaurant in Montilla, I ate a big, carnivorous lunch alone. As a group of men argued over glasses of the local wine, I ate a plate of paper-thin jamón Ibérico de bellota, followed by grilled pluma Ibérico, washed down with a half-bottle of an oaky tempranillo. After lunch, I had a free afternoon and no one awaiting me in Córdoba, so I decided to drive another hour further south, through a series of bright, white-washed villages, to Estepa.

I had wanted to visit these so-called pueblos blancos of Andalusia for a long time—for at least three decades, ever since I read about them in Rick Steves’ classic guidebook, Europe Through the Back Door. As a dumb and impressionable 19-year-old college student, about to head off on a European backpacking tour, Rick Steves as my sherpa. The copy of Europe Through the Back Door that I took with me in 1990 was one of Steves’ early self-published editions that dated to the late 1980s, with hand-drawn maps, grainy black-and-white snapshots, and goofy, hippy-ish illustrations. I still own that dog-eared and marked-up copy. I will always love Steves’ nerdy, idiosyncratic voice and his deeply sincere belief that the world could be a better place if everyone traveled more outside their comfort zone. I revere it as much as any work of travel writing on my bookshelf.

In that early edition, Steves writes breathlessly about the south of Spain. He implores readers to leave the tourist trail, to rent a car and to explore the interior of Andalusia, which he called “wonderfully untouched Spanish culture.” He writes, “All you need is time, a car, and a willingness to follow your nose.”

Steves loved the small towns of southern Spain’s interior, but one stood out above the others. “My most prized discovery in Andalusia is Estepa,” he writes. Estepa is known mostly for its hilltop convent of Santa Clara (“worth five stars in any guidebook, but found in none,” according to Steves). In fact, if the town is known at all in Spain, it’s because the nuns at this convent make a famous cookie that’s eaten at Christmastime. “Enjoy the territorial view from the summit, then step into the quiet, spiritual perfection of this little-known convent. Just sit in the chapel all alone and feel the beauty soak through your body,” Steves writes.

It’s surprising how many words Steves commits to Estepa in this old edition of Europe Through the Back Door. He regales readers with anecdotes about “sleeping under the stars” on the convent porch and Estepa’s “evening promenade” where residents “congregate and enjoy each other’s company, old and young.” He loves Estepa so much that he literally transcribes a page from his own youthful travel journal, in italics: “Estepa, spilling over a hill crowned with a castle and convent, is a freshly washed, happy town that fits my dreams of southern Spain.”

My own backpacking trail in those days took me elsewhere—to Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany. I never made it to Andalusia until years later. But because I was such a fan of Rick Steves, I tucked those joyous descriptions of the region’s pueblos blancos away in my memories, vowing someday to visit. Whenever I would see a new edition of Europe Through the Back Door, I would flip to the chapter on southern Spain. Estepa was always there.

More than 30 years after my first backpacking trip to Europe, I realized I would be visiting Andalusia close to the pueblos blancos. Yet when I consulted the most recent editions of Europe Through the Back Door, as well as Steves’ country guide to Spain, I was dismayed to see that all mentions of Estepa had been removed. I looked through several recent editions and found no Estepa. I knew I wasn’t misremembering, that this wasn’t some false Mandela-effect-like memory. After all, as evidence, I had my three-decade-old, dog-eared, hippy edition of Steves’ book.

I needed to know what happened to Estepa. It seemed like precisely the sort of off-the-beaten-path destination that Steves, at least when I was younger, always preached that readers should visit. So, I reached out to Rick Steves, to see what happened to Estepa. Well, not Rick Steves, the man, directly. Rick Steves Europe is now a large travel and media company, and the books they publish are no longer hippy-ish at all. Still, the same day, I got a friendly Facebook message back from one of Steves’ top editors, Cameron Hewitt, with an explanation:

“In about 2015, we overhauled that book and reworked all those old ‘Back Doors’ sections that had been in the book for decades…I imagine Estepa simply didn’t make the new editorial cut; we wound up replacing lots of ‘heritage’-type content in that edition with fresher bits of writing from Rick. It was not necessarily because we feel that Estepa is no longer worth visiting; just one of those tough editorial calls you make along the way.”

So Estepa had not been canceled for any noteworthy reason. Rather, Estepa had been a casualty of the same cold, ruthless “tough editorial calls” that many of us in publishing have faced over the past few years—particularly those of us who work the so-called “lifestyle beat,” and particularly those of us who do longform travel writing. The lifestyle beat is a space that’s become increasingly homogenized, full of derivative clickbait tips and listicles driven by social media. Estepa disappeared like so many of the outlets that were once committed to publishing quality travel writing.

In my own life, in one 18-month span, I’d watched two of my anchor publications disappear. In mid 2021, I was told that The Best American Travel Writing, the annual anthology I’d edited for more than 20 years, would be discontinued. The reason given: the publisher was about to be acquired by a larger company, and they were “cleaning up the balance sheet.” Then, in late 2022, I learned that the Washington Post Magazine, the publication where a few times each year I published the best of my travel writing (such as this and this and this) would shut down and cease to exist.

I can’t say either shuttering was a surprise. Travel writing seems clearly to be in decline—both the supply and the demand. For years, during my annual process of reading and selecting for The Best American Travel Writing, I’d noticed a sharp drop in the amount of quality travel writing published in American magazines and newspapers. A decade or two ago, it was no problem to find a hundred notable travel essays and articles. By the late 2010s, I usually struggled to find 50.

More than a genre of writing is being lost by our current era of corporate consolidation. I know in my small corner of the world, I’ve tried my best to amplify voices that were outside of entrenched media structures. But legacy media continues to cut corners as it tries to wring more from underpaid work.

Across publishing, the basic rate for freelance writing has stagnated at around $1 per word for decades (very often less at many outlets). Consider how long this “dollar per word” has been a standard. Ernest Hemingway, filing dispatches for magazines from the Spanish Civil War in 1936, was also paid $1 per word. That 1936 dollar is the equivalent of about $22 in 2023. Even if they’re no Hemingway, today’s writers earn a fraction of the per word rate that writers did almost 90 years ago. What other creators have seen such a precipitous drop for their paid work? Young writers are having to rely more and more on canned press trips, subsidized by brands or regional organizations. It seems that the end result of all this will be that the only people who will have the time and resources to do travel writing will be the same sorts of affluent people that did it in the age of the British gentry on grand tour.

Given all this, is travel writing dead? Dying? When I think about this, I’m reminded that the distinguished UK literary magazine Granta posed this very question to a dozen or so writers in its Winter 2017 issue. Like so many of these faux-provocative questions (“Is the novel dead?” “Is pop music dead?” “Is baseball dying?”) no definitive answer was reached. As Geoff Dyer, who was among the respondents, wrote: “Yes and no. Sort of.”

Much of the discussion dwelled on nomenclature, the idea that the genre’s name —“travel writing”—did not adequately capture what it is to write about place in 2017. “So, what matters to me is not whether a piece of writing is called travel writing,” wrote Mohsin Hamid.

Dyer offers up Miles Davis’ work from the 1970s as a possibility. At that time, Davis no longer referred to his music as “jazz” but rather “Directions in Music.” Said Dyer, “That’s what I’m after: Directions in Writing.”

So yes, this was a pretty weird discussion in the pages of Granta. The simple fact that it was asking the dreaded “Is travel writing dead” question was astonishing enough, but it was especially alarming to those of us who have been ardent readers of both travel writing and Granta since the 1980s. Granta, after all, led a revival of travel writing in the 1980s, advocating for what had become a badly atrophied, nearly moribund genre in the late 20^th century. With Bill Buford as its editor, Granta dedicated two special issues to new travel writing, in 1984 and 1989. Legendary travel writers regularly turned up in the magazine’s pages: Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron, Martha Gelhorn, Jan Morris, Ryszard Kapuściński.

I can’t overstate how exciting and freeing it was when I first discovered writers like Chatwin or Kapuściński or Gelhorn or Rebecca West or Ted Conover or Pico Iyer. While I was supposed to be focused on fiction in my graduate creative writing program in the 1990s, I found my mind drifting toward travel writing. This was still before the rise of so-called “Creative Nonfiction,” several years before the mainstreaming of the memoir, and a decade before the emergence of personal blogs. Travel writing, in those days, was not a topic of polite discussion in graduate fiction seminars.

In any case, the travel writing published by Granta would inspire me, in the mid-1990s, to create my own journal devoted to travel, Grand Tour, which lurched along for few years, then died and went to small-underfunded-literary-magazine heaven. Out of Grand Tour’s ashes, however, the Best American anthology emerged. In early 2000, I scoured through the travel stories of 1999 along with our first guest editor, Bill Bryson—one of those travel writers who I’d first read in Granta — to gather our first anthology.

I did the same for 22 editions, spanning 9/11, the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lifting of the Cuban travel ban, the Syrian refugee crisis, the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump—chronicling the world as it has been transformed in so many previously unfathomable ways. Travel itself irrevocably changed over that time. I think about what did not exist when I began the Best American Travel Writing anthology: the euro, Brexit, Google Maps, translation apps, Uber, Yelp, so-called “Premium Economy,” boarding passes scanned from iPhones, and TSA Pre-Check.

This evolution is, of course, the sort of thing that’s supposed to happen with travel writing. In my first foreword, to the inaugural edition in 2000, I wrote:

Travel writing is always about a specific moment in time. The writer imbues that moment with everything he or she has read, heard, experienced, and lived, bringing all his or her talent to bear on it. When focused on that moment, great travel writing can teach us something about the world that no other genre can. Perhaps travel writing’s foremost lesson is this: We may never walk this way again, and even if we do, we will never be the same people we are right now. Most important, the world we move through will never be the same place again. This is why travel writing matters.

Maybe the blunt assessment of Granta’s former editor, Ian Jack, during Granta’s 2017 travel writing discussion summed up the way a lot of people think: “Travel writing isn’t dead. It just isn’t what it was.”

Looking backwards at what travel writing “was” has always been fraught. Given the genre’s history of cultural voyeurism, colonialist impulses, and straight-up racism, it’s often not pretty. When literary people ask “Is travel writing dead?” they’re suggesting that the genre is outdated or old-fashioned or in need of an avant-garde “subversion.” I don’t know that this is possible; travel writing is a reflection of its time. Travel writing has existed longer than most other forms of literature, dating at least to Herodotus in ancient Greece. And travel writing has faced criticism for nearly as long. In the first century AD, the Roman essayist Plutarch was already calling bullshit on Herodotus, accusing him of bias and “calumnious fictions.”

Maybe the most subversive, experimental, and most honest “direction in writing” one might pursue is to try one’s hand at classic, traditional first-person travel narrative? That’s what happened during the last real renaissance of travel writing, in the 1980s, the one driven by Granta, and by writers like Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, and Bill Bryson. And don’t forget Rick Steves in that pantheon of travel writers who came on the scene in the 1980s—whose service-minded guidebook writing had always been driven by quirky personal narrative.

When I finally arrived in Estepa, I found exactly what Rick Steves had promised all those years ago. The hilltop convent of Santa Clara is gorgeous, as is the view overlooking the white towns of Andalusia. It was a windy day in February. There were no other tourists at the convent and so I stood and listened to the wind rustle through the tall evergreen trees. Near the convent is a park, where families were having Saturday afternoon picnics. Further down the hill, a cheering crowd watched local kids playing a soccer game.

I wandered down to the town center, through small squares surrounded by orange trees. I passed a group of young people carrying huge ornate decorations into a pretty church. In the town center, I suddenly found myself caught in crowd of children, all dressed in costumes for Carnival (knights, cowboys, superheros, Mario Brothers, anything seemed to go) marching along with a band dressed as jesters and clowns walking on stilts. Afterwards, I followed the parents who crowded into the local bars and I shared a few beers with the good people of Estepa.

Yes, Estepa still seemed to be a lively and just as “freshly washed, happy” as a young Rick Steves found it in the 1980s. It may have been excised from the guidebooks by Rick Steves Europe’s “tough editorial calls,” but the town still exists. Let the TikTokers and Instagrammers—following the posts of other TikTokers and Instagrammers—pour into the bigger, better-known cities. Maybe Estepa is better off now. Maybe it’s been freed from the samsara of tourists who follow Rick Steves?

In telling you the story of my uneventful visit to this Andalusian hill town, I guess I wanted to make the simple point that travel writing is a bit like Estepa. It hasn’t stopped existing simply because of corporate editorial decisions. It’s still there, waiting for someone to enjoy it again.

The impulse to travel and explore—and to write about those experiences—will remain. Pico Iyer (guest editor of The Best American Travel Writing 2004) was one of the writers who took up Granta’s question in 2017. Iyer’s response can stand as mine: “Travel writing isn’t dead; it can no more die than curiosity or humanity or the strangeness of the world can die.”

Related Travel Content on Everyday Drinking

I approached the mustached wine steward in the camo hat at the German wine bar. Pouring wine from the window of a 19th century gothic-style mansion, he informed me—without asking what I’d like—that he was about to open something special. Blindly, I agreed. He gleefully revealed a simple-looking bottle, a Rully Blanc, from behind his Detroit Pistons jersey. He poured me a generous glass of Les Champs de l’Abbaye, and explained that it was produced by Alain Hasard and his partner Isabelle, the last winemakers left in the Burgundy village of Aluze. The wine was crafted from a small, prized lieu dit ‘La Chatalienne.’ It was never made again after 2023.

Pleased with my special little glass, I meandered through the garden to the fire pit. I joined a couple, already sitting there enjoying a beer, who I would soon come to know as Gabby, and her partner, Shawn the Umpire. I don’t remember exactly what urged Shawn to reveal he was a baseball umpire. But by the time my second glass was being poured, he was on his feet, with a small audience gathered, demonstrating his signature ring-up calls—the ways an umpire signals a called third strike from behind home plate. “There’s no parameters of what that is,” he told us, punctuating the point with an explosive drop of the hammer, his signature call for lefty hitters. The artistry of it, Shawn explained, is exactly why he loves umpiring—and exactly why, according to him, he never pursued a Major League career.

“There’s a high percentage of fascists among umpires,” Shawn said. “I’m not even joking. It attracts a lot of cops.” It’s perhaps ironic that umpires were once nicknamed “blue” due to their traditional garb, reminiscent of police uniforms. The connection between rule enforcement and baseball officiating is structural and historical, not incidental, and has over the decades lent an authoritarian personality to the role. And what does that culture do to individual expression? “They don’t want any variation or deviation. There’s a proper way,” Shane told us. The ring-up call might be the last gasp of the umpire’s artistry.

As of the 2026 season, Major League Baseball has fully implemented the ABS Challenge System—robot umpires—as part of regular play. A batter may now challenge the human umpire’s call and request a robot review. The robot’s call takes precedence. No matter what.

My new friends continued talking baseball while I became lost in thought as my sneaker unknowingly melted to the side of the fire pit. I kept thinking about what Shawn had said—that the institution didn’t resist the robot because it was already built for it. A culture organized around uniformity, authority, and the elimination of deviation doesn’t get disrupted by an algorithm. Rather, the culture becomes completed by it.

The commodity wine industry knows this feeling. The introduction of the 100-point scale, the consolidation of distribution, the birth of apps like Vivino and its successors—none of these were disruptions of wine culture. They were its natural progression. Legible, transferable signals engineered to move product efficiently through a complex supply chain. Never were they intended to be a genuine aid to the real culture of wine, but rather the natural endpoint of the “culture” manufactured by the (bulk) wine industry.

Like baseball, drinking wine is, at its core, play. Play, according to Dutch cultural theorist Johan Huizinga is voluntary, absorbing, bounded by rules—but requires tension and uncertainty. “If we’re obsessed with efficiency and precision, we’re ruining the whole thing it was supposed to be to begin,” Shawn told us during his umpire demonstration that night.

I knew exactly what he meant. When I worked in a wine bar, it was an every night occurrence: Patrons would be deep in conversation about what they wanted to drink, two or three bottles sampled out, immersed in the beautiful friction of figuring it out together; but then someone would turn to Vivino to make the final decision. Instead of trusting their own palate, the sommelier’s lead, or just the fertile give-and-take between two people in a real moment, they outsourced it to the wine robot—which informed them, with great authority, that a crowd-sourced 4.2 is objectively superior to a 3.8, regardless of whether the higher-rated wine is anything close to what they actually asked for.

Vivino has 65 million users, who essentially have a robot wine umpire in their back pockets, ready to throw an ABS Challenge at earnest, knowledgeable wine lovers anywhere. Of course, what most users don’t know is that Vivino’s recommendation engine isn’t purely in service of their discovery. It exists, in part, to clear inventory. Wines without sufficient rating volume don’t enter the system at all and automated decisions are made in Vivino’s commercial interest and then dressed up as personalization.

Wine-Searcher acts as the ABS Challenge in retail. Your local retailer has a bottle for $32, but Wine-Searcher says you can get it for $25. What it fails to tell you is where that retailer is, whether they ship to your state, what the minimum order is, shipping charges, or the facts behind why they paid so much less than your local guy for the same bottle. The transparency that Wine-Searcher promises obscures more than it reveals, nudging the everyday wine consumer to distrust their local retailer and reach instead for something that has experienced less price fluctuation. Which almost always means it was produced for consistency and mass appeal, not for anything else.

And now we have moved past challenges entirely. A growing wave of AI sommelier apps and discreet integration of AI into the apps we already know are no longer challenging the human call, they are replacing it. Every single one frames the human encounter with wine knowledge as the problem to be solved. The slight discomfort over ordering wine, the friction, the not-knowing are all now simply obstacles to be engineered away.

Yet the most valuable wine recommendations I have ever received came from a human being who knew something I didn’t, who read me correctly, and said, “Trust me on this one.”

Now, I don’t intend to be insufferably anti-tech—I am not an idiot and I realize it is now a part of our lives and we must learn to live with it. What I am warning is that when we involve machine learning and algorithms in decisions like what wine to drink, we are not getting an innocent recommendation.

Wine culture is built on interpersonal recommendations. When the human is removed and the system is optimized for inventory reduction, engaging with the algorithm means deciding which wines get to exist, and which don’t. In most cases, that looks like the erasure of small, quality producers. Wines like the Rully Blanc poured for me by mustached human somm in the camo hat, get pushed further to the margins of wine until they disappear.

I reached out to Randall Bush of Loci Wines, who imports Les Champs de l’Abbaye into the States, to find out why 2023 was the last vintage. “Those are extremely unheralded wines,” he wrote to me. “It must have been hard to work that much and not really get recognition.” The work he’s speaking of is the farming, biodynamic and by hand. On Loci’s website he describes that work as “inward-looking, imbued with a passionate attention to the sites they farm and a pathos of care to the wines they produce and the people they meet.” That prose, while a tad treacly—the sort of wine talk that’s easily parodied—is also true.

Alain and Isabelle made the choice to retire and move to the Ardèche. The land was sold to a cult natural wine figure in Burgundy, Tino Kuban of Maison Glandien, who bought their excruciatingly low-yielding plots. In some way, this means the wines may finally get the recognition they always deserved. But being labeled under a fetishized name also means those same wines will now be triple the price. So, if I’d like to drink the wine I had last week with any regularity, I will need to consider taking out a small loan from my dad or finally get into selling feet pics once and for all.

If it weren’t for the somm perched in the wine window, spotting my thirst for something interesting—and me meeting him with trust and openness—would I even know this wine existed? The point is, I know now, from one simple exchange on a spring night in Detroit. But that exchange required two humans, present in a moment and paying attention to our mutual need, to connect with something beyond the physical. There is no world in which an app could have brokered the decision to open that wine, nor any algorithm that would have surfaced Alain and Isabelle’s story from the depths of information obscurity. If we keep outsourcing those moments to the robot, we won’t just stop finding wines like this. We will stop making them altogether.

Am I saying that my children may never know the transcendent pleasure of these disappearing marginal wines? Or that Shawn the Umpire’s signature hammer-drop ring-up call is already a relic and there is no coming back? Well, I’ll let you ponder that one over your next ballpark hot dog and overpriced beer this season.

Related Content on Everyday Drinking

This whole exercise began because I got a bunch of rhubarb in my farm share box last week. I didn’t see myself baking a rhubarb pie, and so I was thinking about what to with it. As with strawberries (as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago), I’ve wondered why rhubarb isn’t used in cocktails more. So I decided to make some rhubarb syrup and see what I could do with it (all recipes below).

The first thing I learned is that rhubarb, while making a lovely crimson-pink-colored syrup, isn’t exactly the boldest flavor in the world. “Subtle” would be the diplomatic term for the flavor. My colleague, Sarah Parker Jang, shared her rhubarb syrup recipe, which involved a vanilla bean pod and pink peppercorns, but I wanted to get at the raw essence of rhubarb—whatever that might be—and see what happened.

Once I had my rhubarb syrup I started by adding it to a gin and tonic, and then to a margarita. The results were…fine. These were certainly pretty drinks. But I realized very quickly that the subtle essence of rhubarb was being overshadowed by the big flavors and aromas of the gin and the tequila. Did I basically just have a pink simple syrup on my hands?

I was sort of at a loss, until I spotted an old friend on the shelf, a bottle of Leblon cachaça. That’s when I knew what had to be done. I would be making a daiquiri with two ounces of cachaça, one fresh-squeezed lime, and a half ounce of my rhubarb syrup, shaken, strained and served up. Delightful. Yes, the Strait of Hormuz is still blocked, and AI is still going to ruin our lives. But for one moment, cachaça—rum’s funky Brazilian cousin—saved the day.

While I have never visited Brazil, cachaça and I go back a long ways. When I first started writing about cocktails in the late 2000s, cachaça seemed to be poised for a moment. The mojito was a mega-popular cocktail at that time, but the cachaça-fueled caipirinha always felt superior to me. A number of cachaça brands loudly entered the market. I don’t know what happened, exactly, but the cachaça revolution in the U.S. never really happened. You see it around, but it’s sort of drifted to the back of the bar.

While rum is often made with molasses, cachaça is made exclusively from fresh, unrefined sugarcane juice, which gives it a more vegetal, more earthy flavor. It shares more in common with another pure favorite of mine, rhum agricole from Martinique and Guadalupe.

While there are plenty of aged molasses-based rums I love to sip, I find that cachaça and young rhum agricole bring something special to cocktails.

What I’ve come to love about cachaça is how amazingly well it plays with all sorts of fruits, spices, and herbs. It’s the perfect spirit to mix with muddled fresh fruit. That’s why it’s always been used in a batida or caipirinha.

Perhaps a brief word on the caipirinha: It’s more of a technique than any particular recipe. I start with cutting a lime into eighths and muddling it in an old-fashioned glass with a tablespoon of sugar (turbinado is the classic). Toss in two ounces (or so) of cachaça and fill the glass with crushed ice. Cover the glass with a shaker, give a quick shake and pour all of the ingredients, including the ice, back into the drink. (One little tip on limes: Once you slice the lime into eighths, take the knife and carefully cut off the little white strip of pith left on top, as well at the tiny ends of the peel, to reduce bitterness).

Yes, cachaça is a spirit meant for muddling. And in this world of optimized cocktail bars and Diageo World Class branded mixology, the muddler has become a tool of disdain among many bartenders. Much like the espresso martini, if you really want to darken a bartender’s mood, order a bunch of muddled mojitos or caipirinhas on a busy Friday night.

But here’s the thing. There’s a reason muddling fresh fruit can be better that purees and juices. With the expression of the pith and the skin of limes or other citrus, you get a much rounder flavor. But it’s not just the flavor. You also get all the essential oils and aromatics. It’s hard to reproduce that without muddling. I have a delicious recipe for a blackberry-and-red-wine caipirinha below that exemplifies why muddling works.

Which perhaps has taken us far away from rhubarb syrup. But this winding road is what always happens when experimenting and searching for new cocktails to try. To close the loop, my suggestion is to replace the tablespoon of sugar in your caipirinha with the rhubarb syrup. Muddle away!

Cachaça Cocktails (And a Rhubarb Recipe)

Blackberry and Red Wine Caipirinha

Because cachaça is so bold and full-flavored, it’s a natural for pitcher drinks with lots of fruit ingredients. This was created by my friend Duggan McDonnell, a (legendary? infamous?) San Francisco bartender, pisco entrepreneur, and former owner of Cantina, which was a staple of the late 2000s cocktail renaissance.

• 12 blackberries

• 3 limes, cut into eighths

• 1 orange, cut into eighths

• 1 tablespoon sugar

• 6 ounces cachaça

• 2 ounces red wine

• Crushed ice

Muddle the blackberries, limes, orange and sugar in a large pitcher. Take your time. Add the cachaça and red wine; stir vigorously for at least 1 minute. Refrigerate for about 1 hour before serving. When ready to serve, stir again, then pour into wineglasses or old-fashioned glasses filled with crushed ice. Garnish with more blackberries.

Thieves’ Punch

This sangria-like punch that is one of my go-to, easy-to-make pitcher drinks for a party. The Thieves’ Punch swaps out red wine for port and brandy for rum and it’s a flat-out crowd pleaser (particularly if your crowd is a little boozier, as mine is).

Thieves’ Punch was also created by Duggan McDonnell. His original recipe calls for white rum, but I like to use cachaça because it’s funkier and sharper and stands up to the other strong flavors. If you use rum, I suggest a rhum agricole, made from fresh-pressed sugarcane juice. The simple syrup is slightly variable according to your taste and what sort of cachaça/rum you’re using—taste as you stir and add accordingly. This recipe calls for an eyebrow-raising amount of bitters, but don’t skimp on them: They keep things balanced.

• 16 ounces cachaça (or white rum)

• 5 ounces port (ruby or tawny)

• 10 ounces freshly squeezed lime juice (from about 5 limes)

• 3-4 ounces simple syrup

• 20 dashes Angostura bitters

• 1 cup ice, plus more for serving

• Lime wedges

Combine the rum, port, lime juice, simple syrup, and bitters in a large pitcher. Add the cup of ice, then stir vigorously. Strain into ice-filled old-fashioned or small wine glasses. Garnish with lime wedge. Serves 8.

Watermelon Mint Smash

Cacaçha simply loves to mix with fresh fruit and herbs, and summer watermelon is no exception. Unlike a caipirinha or mojito, this drink is strained, so the pulverized pulp, seed, and leaves stay in the shaker.

• 6 to 8 mint leaves, plus 1 sprig for garnish

• 1 cup watermelon chunks (seedless works best)

• ½ ounce simple syrup (or perhaps the rhubarb syrup below)

• 2 ½ ounces cachaça

Muddle the mint leaves, watermelon, and syrup in a cocktail shaker. Add the cachaça, then fill with the ice and shake well. Strain into an ice-cube-filled highball glass. Garnish with the mint sprig.

Rhubarb Syrup

Of course, you can’t just muddle a rhubarb stalk into a shaker. To work with this ingredient, you have make a rhubarb syrup that can be added to various cocktail recipes. You make rhubarb syrup much like simple syrup, a 1:1 ratio of water and sugar, plus the rhubarb.

• 2 cups chopped rhubarb stalks (leaves removed)

• 2 cups water

• 1 ½ cups granulated sugar

Combine the chopped rhubarb and water in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce the heat to a simmer. Simmer for about 10 minutes, or until the rhubarb is very soft and has broken down, and the liquid has turned a vibrant pink or crimson color. Remove from heat and let the mixture cool slightly.

Strain the mixture through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl or pitcher to separate the liquid from the pulp. Gently press on the solids with a spoon to extract as much liquid as possible. Avoid pushing pulp through the strainer, since you want a clear syrup.

Return the strained liquid to the saucepan, add the sugar, and heat until the sugar is fully dissolved, about 5 minutes. Simmer on medium-low heat for another 15 minutes until the mixture reduces into a syrup.

Cool the finished syrup completely before transferring it to an airtight jar or bottle for storage. Rhubarb syrup can be stored in the refrigerator for up to 2-3 weeks.

Rhubarb Gin & Tonic

• 2 ounces gin

• ½ ounce rhubarb syrup

• ¼ ounce lime juice

• 3 ounces tonic water

• Lime slice

In a highball glass filled with ice, add gin, rhubarb syrup, and lime juice. Give a quick stir, then add the tonic water and stir some more. Garnish with a lime slice.

Rhubarb French 75

• 1 ½ ounces gin

• ¾ ounce fresh lemon juice

• ½ rhubarb syrup

• 2-3 ounces sparkling wine (prosecco, cava, etc.)

• Lemon peel twist

In a shaker filled with ice, add gin, lemon juice, and rhubarb syrup, and shake well. Strain into a champagne coupe or flute, then top with sparkling wine. Garnish lemon peel twist.

Sara is Italian-born, living in Madrid via London, with a background in investments and a stint selling wine in China. Her newsletter, In the Mood for Wine, sits somewhere between her two loves: wine and numbers. Sara tends to look at wine analytically. “Some say that takes the romance out of wine,” she says. “Perhaps. But what I’m really trying to do is make each dollar spent on wine count.”

“All you have to do is write one true sentence,” Ernest Hemingway would say to himself, to combat his writer’s block. “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

Can that be applied to data? It’s worth trying, as I’ve been stuck on this analysis for what feels like forever.

For the past six months, I’ve worked with a start-up, WineLabs, and its founder, Ilias Miraoui, to build what is the largest analysis of wine lists from 1,063 Michelin-starred restaurants worldwide. The idea was simple: if these are the best restaurants, with the best sommeliers and the deepest cellars, what do they actually serve? My hypothesis was that we would uncover niche wine markets—hidden gems known only to insiders. But that’s not what we found.

The truest sentence I know is this:

After six months of cleaning data, Ilias and I found that Krug and Dom Pérignon appear on 42 percent of all Michelin wine lists.

Among the most represented producers, beyond these two Champagne houses, the pattern is equally conventional: Château d’Yquem, Gaja, Bollinger, Louis Roederer, Sassicaia, Château Margaux, Ruinart, Domaine Leflaive, Château Mouton Rothschild, Vega Sicilia, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and Château Haut-Brion.

Hopefully, that is not where the story ends, but it is where it starts. It starts with a question: are wine choices at the top end of the market homogeneous— homogeneous to the point of being boring?

The data suggests they are. Around 60 percent of wine lists are dominated by French regions, primarily Burgundy, Bordeaux and Champagne, with smaller contributions from the Rhône and the Loire. Italy is a distant second, accounting for roughly 10 to 20 percent of listings.

This concentration is not entirely organic. On the topic of Champagne, Michelin-starred restaurants sometimes have exclusivity agreements with certain houses, whereby a glass is served on arrival and bottles are available at a more favourable price. “However,” a sommelier at one such restaurant told me, “it becomes difficult to sell anything else sparkling.”

Another equally predictable finding: median bottle prices increase with star level, US$197 for one-star, US$325 for two-star, and US$446 for three-star Michelin restaurants. A quarter of two-star and a third of a 3-star menus are comprised of bottles above $1,000. Meanwhile, only 6 percent of the menus consist of bottles less than $100.

For context, the median price of the most expensive tasting menus is US$165, US$256 and US$356 for one-, two- and three-star restaurants, respectively1. Given that a tasting menu usually lasts between two and four hours, it is not unreasonable to assume that at least one bottle of wine will be consumed per person. Those bottles of wine will each be priced 18 percent to 27 percent above the most expensive tasting menu.

Having spoken to sommeliers, low- and no-alcohol pairings are becoming increasingly popular. Alternatives—low- and no-alcohol beverages, cocktails, and, not least, water—come in at way less than half the price of wine.

Does this mean that fine wine is pricing itself out of, arguably, the only establishments that can realistically sell bottles above $1,000—and where wine producers themselves want to be present—all in the pursuit of status and high prices for their own sake? Is status what’s killing fine wine?

I keep seeing statements like “alcohol is in structural decline due to changing youth culture and GLP-1s dampening consumption” presented as fact—but they are assumptions, not facts. I disagree; I think the decline is primarily driven by price, and more importantly by the availability of better value-for-money alternatives.

I can’t untangle which came first: fine wine producers raising prices to excess, or high-end restaurants treating wine as a cash cow. What starts as positioning becomes pricing. What starts as pricing becomes expectation. And what starts as expectation becomes a system that is very hard to unwind. But the outcome of this vicious cycle is clear—the lack of fine wine at reasonable prices is what puts consumers off.

One sommelier told me that when they started working at a Michelin-starred restaurant, they saw the same wine they had sold in a shop priced at eight times as much. “The ambience, the food and the scenography of a Michelin-star restaurant do a lot to elevate the wine.”

I find it infuriating myself: going to a restaurant—admittedly rarely a Michelin-starred one—where the choice is between an expensive glass of Veuve Clicquot or a non-descript “wine from Chile” at an excessive price. More often than not, I just get a beer.

In other words, consumers are not necessarily drinking less—they are substituting. And in that substitution, wine is losing.

Academic research points in the same direction. A recently published study by Riccardo Saracino, Stefano Corsi and Chiara Mazzocchi, “The STAR WARS of Michelin Guide restaurants: a wine list perspective — a case study from Italy,” analyzes the factors influencing restaurant ratings, including wine lists. “It turns out that,” they write, “wine list characteristics play a significant role in shaping customer satisfaction.”

Evidence suggests that customers appreciate wine lists offering a balance between affordable and premium-priced wines, suggesting that price diversity is a valued feature. While higher prices can increase customer satisfaction, this effect reverses beyond a certain point. In the case of wine, lower median prices are associated with higher ratings, suggesting that customers are sensitive not just to price, but to value.

At the same time, wine lists that are too narrow—whether overly local or overly conventional—tend to perform worse.

In other words, consumers are not rejecting wine; they are rejecting overpriced and predictable wine—which, incidentally, is what these menus increasingly offer.

The question is whether Michelin’s methodology, which clearly rewards a certain way of delivering excellence in food, is also painting the world of food and wine “beige.” A kind of “beigification”, technically flawless, globally consistent, but lacking distinction. And that is exactly what the data reflects: not a lack of quality, but a convergence of choices.

On YouTube, I came across an urban architect showing images of new builds and asking: “Why does this look like it could be anywhere, while these”—showing Amsterdam, Santorini and Brooklyn—“are clearly from a specific place?”

He explains it through the idea of a “sense of place,” the elements that make a location distinctive. Brooklyn’s brownstones come from locally available stone; Dutch brick architecture reflects an abundance of clay and a lack of natural stone; Santorini’s white houses are designed to reflect heat. These places are memorable because they respond to their environment.

There are faint signs of this in wine lists—South America leaning towards Mendoza, North America towards Napa Valley. But broadly, the “sense of place,” or terroir, so central to the production of wine itself, does not seem to carry through to the top end of dining. The result is carefully constructed, technically excellent—and increasingly forgettable—wine experiences. In a category built on terroir, the disappearance of place at the point of consumption is a striking contradiction.

Menu depth appears to increase with the number of stars: the median one-star restaurant lists 77 unique estates, while a three-star lists 184. But as the share of French wines rises alongside this, it raises the question: are three-star restaurants simply adding more of the same names? The data would suggest so. Depth is increasing, but differentiation is not.

This led me to ask a few questions: is there a written—or unwritten—rule about what wines are expected, either by the Michelin Guide inspector or by the restaurant-goer? Another hypothesis is that fine dining guests expect to find the rarest wines, rather than niche or good-value ones. That may well be. For all the emphasis sommeliers place on how wine can elevate food (and vice versa), it is also true that the Michelin Guide does not include the wine list in its scoring.

Some of these dynamics are reinforced structurally. For example, the Court of Master Sommeliers explicitly references “traditional” producers within regions, effectively establishing a canon. Many of those building wine lists treat these producers as the gold standard—names that must be present. The presence of these names on a list does not mean they are actually bought. Anecdotal evidence from several sommeliers suggests they account for as little as 5 percent of wine sales. More niche or interesting choices are often confined to pairing menus, which are narrower by design.

At the same time, the typical Michelin guest is a mix of price-sensitive and not particularly knowledgeable about wine, which makes recognizable brands easier to sell.

Only a handful of restaurants approach food and wine as a true pairing, where one is conceived alongside the other. In most cases, they remain separate worlds, where the business of hospitality takes precedence over more interesting, and potentially more coherent, choices.

And that may be the core issue. Not that fine wine has lost relevance—but that, in the places where it should matter most, it has become predictable, overpriced, and disconnected from the experience it is meant to elevate.

In my recent cultural readings, I really enjoyed Hilton Als’ delightfully bitchy review of the 2026 Whitney Biennial in The New Yorker. Als goes for the jugular from the very first paragraph. Of this 82nd edition of the Biennial, the bellwether of contemporary American art, he says:

“[It] introduces viewers to what I call ChatGPT art—facsimiles of facsimiles by makers who have little if any relationship to what they’re putting out there, aside from its being a product in service of a career. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of the people who grew up with and apparently condone the use of A.I. sources in the creation of “art” as artists themselves, especially if you define art as a creative expression of thoughts or feelings that have changed, and contributed to the vision of, the artists who made it.”

The main thrust of Als’ argument is that too many of the 56 featured artists offer derivative, unoriginal work, with little “acknowledgement of the artists who paved the way.” He sees an exhibition full of “received ideas” and “appropriating aspects” and artists who avoid the “labyrinth of perception and history—if they’re aware of it at all. What replaces it is a garbled rhetoric that is supposed to further substantiate the work, but what if the work just isn’t there?”

Most damning, Als speaks of “the vast divide between the artists who had worked to find a new vocabulary and those who were centered squarely in a language that was not their own.”

Now…why would all of this make me think of the current state of wine?

Well, partly because I am always seeing a lot of crossover between the worlds of art and wine.

And partly because of the piece we published this week, “Gen Z to Wine: Please Stop Condescending to Us” by Caroline Lamb, in response to Wine Spectator’s handwringing over young wine drinkers. Caroline goes after several of the received ideas and unoriginal, clichéd ways of thinking that happen in the wine world. Namely the lame populist argument against wine “elitism,” the empty straw man argument about “demystifying” wine and the bogeyman of the dreaded “wine snob.”

“Frankly,” she writes, “the elitism framing is just lazy—a tired recitation of wine culture’s snobby past. The real barrier is economic.” She continues:

let’s note the rich irony of Wine Spectator complaining about wine’s “elitism,” considering its own role in whatever wine culture exists today. But more than that, 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.

But beyond Caroline’s article, the wine world faces a similar problem to that plaguing the contemporary art world. There are too many people in wine who, in Hilton Als’ words, avoid the “labyrinth of perception and history—if they’re aware of it at all.” If, in art, there’s a lack of historical knowledge that’s been replaced by “garbled rhetoric,” in wine there’s been a push away from the idea of terroir or place and other complex knowledge, and toward a sort of facile populism and “demystification.”

I’ve written about this before, in a piece last spring entitled “Does Place Matter Anymore for Wine Drinkers?”

These days, in the middle of a worldwide wine crisis, it’s never been tougher to sell wine based on place. In fact, over the past couple of years, I’ve observed that a certain type of wine influencer/educator has begun to steer completely clear of talk about terroir. At the low end, the focus is on a certain populism focused on, say, wine in cans or alternative packaging. But much of the higher-end natural wine chatter also avoids a deep discussion of place. While the best natural-wine producers are committed terroirists, a lot of the derivative, middling natty wine talk is way more about winemaking technique and philosophy—which are similar whether we’re talking about Sicily, Loire, Oregon, or elsewhere. After all, you can make “zero/zero” wine anywhere.

While so many people blame “elitism” or “hierarchy” for wine’s problems, you could also just as easily blame the received ideas, derivative winemaking, and garbled rhetoric of so much of what became “the natural wine movement.” An earlier generation complained about an “international style,” championed by critics like Robert Parker, that negated place. Yet by the late 2010s, the new international style of natural wine was similarly flattening.

Certainly, many of the original natural winemakers made and still make amazing wines that are a testament to terroir. But so much of the current natural-wine chatter and marketing eschews place and history and knowledge, framing it as “gatekeeping.” When place and history—and wine’s inherent complexity—are presented as a negative, you lose something fundamental.

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Where I’ve Been Drinking: A Dry Island

After a busy winter spent in Spain and California (look for more upcoming pieces from both places) it’s been a quiet spring for travel. I’ve mostly been spending time in the beach town at the Jersey Shore where I spent my youth. What is perhaps ironic is that Ocean City, New Jersey, has prohibited booze since 1909. It is a dry island.

A while back, I wrote an essay about living in dry towns for Wine Enthusiast. Because for many years, I doubled down on living in dry towns, residing in the historic town of Haddonfield, New Jersey, which has has been dry since 1873.

Summer on a dry island has little effect on my life. After all, a prohibition on the local sale of alcohol does not mean drinkers can’t imbibe out-of-town booze at home. Indeed, in Ocean City, I have a well-stocked bar. I meet friends for happy hour on the public beach and we pour wine, beer or cocktails—concealed in a plastic cup. No one hassles us. I can also take a 10-minute Uber ride to the next island south, which has two bayside bars.

Clearly, I’m not the only one dedicated to workarounds. In 2017, USA Today voted Ocean City as New Jersey’s “drunkest city.” Since the town was originally founded in the 19th century by four Methodist ministers as a Christian resort, Ocean City’s old guard wasn’t very happy with this designation.

The main negative effect of local Prohibition is a rather poor restaurant scene on the island, compounded because Ocean City bans a bring-your-own-bottle option. Some private clubs have popped up, but by and large, you must leave the island to legally drink. I’ve always thought it was irresponsible of Ocean City—a city of more than 150,000 on a summer weekend—to compel residents who desire wine with dinner to hop into their cars. Yet the old laws aren’t changing any time soon. A decade ago, the town voted 2-1 against allowing the BYOB option.

What will I be drinking on the beach in my dry town this summer? Likely something cheap and portable that comes in a liter.

What I’m Drinking, Part 1: Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo

One style of wine I’ve been loving lately has been Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo, a robust style of rosato wine with direct-pressed montepulciano grapes from Italy’s Abruzzo region. These rosés are bold and dark enough to be confused as light reds.

“Rosé was the everyday wine of the farmers, and it’s the wines that best represent our region,” says Iole Rabasco, whose Vino Rabasco wines are amazing and worth seeking out. “I always say that montepulciano shows well in rosé wines.”

I’ve started to believe that montepulciano consistently produces some of the best rosé wines in the world. Here are my picks, including one from California made in the cerasuolo style.

Cora Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo 2025 ($12)

Private label wine made for importer Bowler Wine. Crazy good value and a great example of rosé made from montepulciano grapes. Lives up to its “cherry red” name, bursting with fresh cherry, but also notes of watermelon rind, blood orange, and citrus zest.

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.

Caprera ‘Le Vasche’ Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo 2023 ($34)

Caprera is a relatively new winery in Pietranico, Abruzzo. Luca Paolo’s Cerasuolo captures the pulsating energy of their mountain-meets-sea terrain with a nimble confidence. Floral, earthy, savory aromas, with bright, intense cherry and blood orange on the palate, joyful acidity, and a pleasant saline finish.

Vini Rabasco ‘Cancelli’ Rosato 2025 ($30)

A light and lively rosato with vibrant acidity from this highly-regarded natural producer in Abruzzo. Bursting with red fruit—cherry, strawberry, cranberry—with hints of herb, thrilling acidity, and underlying salinity.

Vini Rabasco ‘Damigiana’ Rosato 2024 ($40)

Direct pressed and aged in demijohn for 54 months, this is another level up of montepulciano rosé from Iole Rabasco. There’s all the bright red fruit, but something also deeper here—earthy, tannic, complex.

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.

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What I’m Drinking, Part 2: Bandol Rosé

My colleague, Sarah Parker Jang, might make the case that mourvèdre, particularly from Bandol in Provence, is even better then montepulciano. As she wrote in her recent piece about Provence, “Bandol rosés, with a high percentage of mourvèdre, are often deep in color, complex, structured, and ageworthy—a far cry from the pale, dull examples found throughout much of the region.”

I don’t disagree. So here are three mourvèdre-based rosés From Bandol from Sarah:

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

Domaine Tempier Bandol Rosé 2024 ($60)

Domaine Tempier is another benchmark Bandol rosé. Composed of about 55% mourvèdre, 25% grenache, and 20% cinsault, this wine is aged on the lees for 6 months in steel. Salmon-pink in the glass, with detailed and complex aromas and flavors: melon, strawberries and cream, grapefruit, roses and white blossoms, guava paste, thyme. Weighty, but with snappy, refreshing acidity and a long, mineral finish. A benchmark rosé. This can age for decades. —Sarah Parker Jang

Domaine de Terrebrune Bandol Rosé 2024 ($40)

An organically grown, ageworthy rosé with 60% mourvèdre, the rest equally split between grenache and cinsault. Mouthwatering melon, juicy blood orange, raspberry, and oyster shell. Weighty on the palate but never heavy, this is another traditional-style Bandol rosé with serious aging potential of 15 years or more. —Sarah Parker Jang

What I’ve Been Eating While Drinking: Asparagus

Asparagus season is serious business at Everyday Drinking. A few springs back, I even went to Schwetzingen, Germany’s famed white asparagus festival, where I ate white asparagus in more ways than I ever imagined, watched a thrilling asparagus-peeling competition, and harvested fresh spears with the local asparagus queen.

While I love asparagus, white or green, it’s also one of those foods that’s notoriously tricky to pair with wine.

The day after we debated montepulciano versus mourvèdre, Sarah Parker Jang and I actually got into another heated debate over text message about asparagus and pairing:

Me: What’s your feeling on pairing asparagus with wine? Would you agree it’s one of those ‘difficult’ pairings?’

Sarah: Yeah but I think a lot of it is because people don’t know how to cook asparagus properly. Even restaurants. Everyone cooks asparagus to death.

Me: You steam it for two minutes

Sarah: Exactly

Me: And then hit it with a little salt and a dash of balsamic vinegar. I feel like you’ve got to be an idiot for overcooking asparagus

Sarah: People don’t do it on purpose though. They just don’t know any better, they think cooking it for longer will make it less bitter or woody. People roast it to hell or they saute it for too long and put it in something where it doesn’t belong. Like pasta. Get your asparagus out of my f***ing pasta.

Me: Asparagus belongs in risotto not pasta

Sarah: Asparagus needs to be on it’s own

Me: You know you’re gonna be quoted in Thinking & Drinking now.

Sarah: I think if it’s cooked properly, something high acid and kind of herbal. Alpine whites are a surprisingly good pairing. I mean gruner and sauv b are the classic answers, right? I think that’s fine. With like a vinaigrette on it, something like you were saying. If you grill it you could do a volcanic white like listan blanco or something from Sicily.

The only thing Sarah and I disagree on is whether asparagus belongs in risotto. I made a delicious asparagus and mushroom risotto this weekend. And while I agree that grüner veltliner and sauvignon blanc pairs well with asparagus, I wanted something red. So, I paired my asparagus risotto with Langhe nebbiolo and it was perfect. Almost as good as pairing Langhe nebbiolo with radicchio:

We’d love to hear your pairing ideas for asparagus, too!

Leave a comment

Today, we’re introducing Caroline Lamb as a new contributor to Everyday Drinking. Caroline is a wine professional based in Detroit, who works in distribution, contributes regularly to the Business of Drinks podcast, and writes about wine and culture at The Enjoyer.

At twenty years old, I bought a one way ticket to Madrid on a budget that had absolutely no business getting me to Europe in the first place. I slept in the most basic youth hostels, crossed international borders in strangers’ cars, and ate (mostly) whatever was local and cheap. Yet, somehow, I always found the money for wine. I took tours in Rioja with old British holiday goers, drank classified Bordeaux, and smuggled a bottle of birth year Tokaji home in my 40L sac. I was waiting tables at the time and had just fallen in love with wine. When reading about wine failed to satiate, I could not help myself from diving headfirst into wine as a cultural experience. I’m 29 now and those early days of discovery eventually led me to many more unlikely places, more obscure wines, and taught me more about history, geography, agriculture, and humanity than my formal education ever did.

I don’t tell this story because I think I’m special. I tell it because I know I’m not. And also because, last week, Wine Spectator published a piece suggesting that people my age are too intimidated by the big, scary world of wine, entitled “Are We Winning the Wine War (Gen) Z?” The piece, by senior editor Alison Napjus, argues that wine is too “elitist.” She writes:

Novice wine drinkers feel like wine is a club to which they’ll never know enough to gain entry. Rather than try, many younger consumers are bypassing the club altogether and moving on to other options. And these days, there are many alternatives: cocktails, beer, cannabis products and/or embracing the sober movement.

Napjus argues that the industry’s job is to lower the intimidation factor. This is not a new idea. The wine industry has been trying to demystify itself for years—stripping information off labels, swapping tasting notes for infographics, and the endless content teaching people how to order “confidently” or “correctly” pair their Trader Joe’s wine with their favorite snack food.

First of all, let’s note the rich irony of Wine Spectator complaining about wine’s “elitism,” considering its own role in whatever wine culture exists today. But more than that, 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 have spent my entire adult life working in wine—in restaurants, at wineries, in distribution, in the media—and I do not recognize the young consumer Napjus is describing. Not in myself, not in the people I know, and not even in the data she buries in her own piece.

Let’s start there. Frankly, the elitism framing is just lazy—a tired recitation of wine culture’s snobby past. The real barrier is economic. Wine is expensive to experiment with on the average young person’s income in the age of inflation, tariffs, crushing housing costs, and student debt that undermines discretionary spending in ways previous generations simply didn’t face. That is a fundamentally different problem than intimidation, and conflating them leads the industry exactly where it keeps ending up: Apologizing for wine’s depth to people whose real problem isn’t that wine is too elitist—it’s that it’s too expensive to gamble on.

Napjus cites research showing that Gen Z spends the same percentage of their income on wine as previous generations. But she immediately pivots away from that fact, worrying more about volume than value and treating it as thin consolation rather than the remarkable finding it is. The young people who love wine are spending on wine at exactly the rate you’d hope. The data shows us just how much Gen Z is and will continue to engage with wine as their spending power grows. That is not a category in crisis, but a category with an attention problem the industry refuses to see clearly.

The engaged young wine consumer is not a myth the industry needs to manufacture. They already exist all around you. I think of my friend Kaira—a mid-twenties corporate attorney who runs a monthly wine club, organizes trips to wine regions with her friends, and writes about wine on Instagram and Substack just because she loves it. She has never worked in the industry and doesn’t plan to. She came to wine the way most passionate drinkers do: through someone who loved it first—in her case, her mother. According to NielsenIQ, 28 percent of Gen Z say they consider the opinions and suggestions of family and friends when making a beverage alcohol purchase, outweighing all other factors including social media influence. Kaira is that person for at least twenty of her peers. She is doing the industry’s most important work for free, and the industry completely ignores people like her. They’re too busy strategizing about people who never think about wine.

Napjus actually meets this consumer in her piece. Her own stepdaughter, she mentions, is pursuing a WSET Level 3 certification—a credential that takes real commitment and would impress most people who work in the trade. And yet she treats her as a footnote, a “thin straw,” before moving on to worry about the other young people in her family “none of whom regularly consume wine.”

But let’s do the math Napjus didn’t. Of the young people in her immediate family, one in four is not just drinking wine—she is pursuing a professional certificate. One in four. If 25 percent of a generation is genuinely obsessed with your product, you do not have a demand problem. The industry is so busy grieving the 75 percent that it cannot see the tens of millions of people already evangelizing for it for free. That’s why its answer, every single time, is to demystify wine and make it simpler. As if the path to winning the 75 percent who don’t care is to bore the 25 percent who do.

For those in my generation who naturally gravitate toward wine, depth is the draw, not the deterrent. In my work for Business of Drinks, I report on drinks brands that are resonating with younger consumers. That’s led me to follow the digital attention of my generation across platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and Discord.

Take Pilar Brito, for example. In my interview with her last year she shared that her audience exploded when she started making content targeted to young professionals who wanted to feel confident with a wine list at, say, a high-stakes business dinner. She framed wine as an expression of personal taste, as inseparable from your style in fashion or interior design. Her audience demographics tell us this approach draws the attention of Gen Z and Millennials: 42 percent of her audience is 25-34, 31 percent is 35-44, and perhaps most impressively 10 percent are 18-24. In a world where we can learn anything from YouTube or ChatGPT, giving young people a reason to care and a representation of how wine fits into a rich, expressive life is the path forward. Pilar proves the alternative: she challenged the demystification trend and attention followed.

I shared the Wine Spectator piece with my friend Seb, a 29-year-old non-industry wine enthusiast in England who I met in a fairly geeky wine discord channel. I wanted to see if any of it resonated from across the Atlantic. He said, “The same people who buy organic veg, rare cheeses, and heirloom tomatoes at farmers markets should be all over wine.” He’s right. Wine’s natural audience—curious, taste-driven, willing to spend real money on something of real quality—is already out there. The industry just keeps looking past them toward people who don’t care about wine, haven’t shown up, and likely never will.

Which brings me to the thing Napjus frames as a warning sign but to me looks like an opportunity for progress. She notes that her stepdaughter would rather share one $150 bottle of Barolo with friends than buy three cheaper bottles—and treats this as evidence of decline. Let’s be clear, this is only bad news if you are a mass producer of bulk wine. For quality-minded producers, a generation that buys less but buys better is not a crisis. It is only a threat to big brands that are propped up by pay-to-play schemes at the distributor tier that artificially inflate demand, all thanks to the system that lingers from the boomer gold rush of California wine in the 1990s. Gen Z is simply editing out exactly what the demystification crowd keeps trying to protect.

Napjus ends her piece by acknowledging that it’s hard to think outside the box from inside the wine industry. I’d suggest the box isn’t the problem—the assumption that the box needs to be dismantled is. The young wine drinker the industry keeps searching for is not waiting to be recruited by a friendlier label or a less intimidating tasting note. We’re already at the wine bar, two glasses into something we researched before we arrived, building a cellar on a non-existent budget, planning our next trip to a region we read about somewhere the industry isn’t looking.

In a world that has demanded constant optimization and digital connection for our entire lives, we are coming to wine for exactly what it uniquely offers: the chance for discovery, connection, and something tangible and deeply human that no algorithm can replicate. We do not need it stripped of everything that makes it so beautiful. We need the industry to stop condescending to us and start paying attention to what we’re already doing.

There’s a well-known anecdote in France about how Henri IV, the first Bourbon king, was baptized in 1554 in the city of Pau with a clove of garlic and a few drops of the local sweet Jurançon wine rubbed on his lips.

I read this story en route to Southwest France this winter, and as I walked past the castle in Pau where the future king was christened, I found myself wondering what that baptismal wine must have tasted like, and what 16th-century drinkers would think of the region’s wines today. That’s because Jurançon is swiftly moving past its traditional reputation for sweet wines.

A growing number of independent winemakers—many farming organically or biodynamically and working with minimal intervention in the cellar—have turned their focus to dry wines. At their best, these wines can rival Loire chenin or white wines from the Jura for their tension, texture, sapidity, aging potential, and ability to express terroir. Jurançon is still an important sweet wine region, of course, but it’s also the source of some of France’s most compelling dry white wines.

The success of Jurançon wines, both dry and sweet, is thanks to the dynamic between its two most-planted grape varieties, petit manseng and gros manseng. These native grapes are well-adapted to the climate: Jurançon is one of the wettest wine regions in France, warm and humid, with up to 1200 millimeters of rainfall every year, but these grapes have thick skins resistant to botrytis and fungal disease.

Petit manseng, the offspring of savagnin and a sibling of chenin blanc, tends to dominate blends for sweet wines, as it can accumulate high sugar (and thus alcohol), but retains searing acidity. Gros manseng, meanwhile, is typically the majority in blends for dry wines. It’s less aromatic and intense, but it keeps the alcohol content of the dry wines in check. The two varieties complement and balance each other in this way between the two styles. (Despite the name, there’s some doubt as to whether petit manseng is closely related, if at all, to gros manseng.)

Petit manseng and gros manseng are grown mostly on Jurançon’s poudingues soil, or puddingstone, a fast-draining conglomerate that defines the majority of the region. “Petit manseng matures on the poudingues at 15 and a half percent alcohol,” explained winemaker Jean-Marc Grussaute of Camin Larredya. “And it can go up to 16, 17, 18, very easily, very quickly.”

Grussaute is among the earliest independent winemakers in Jurançon and has raised the profile of its dry wines. A former professional rugby player, Grussaute took over his family’s domaine in 1988 and converted the vines to organics and then biodynamics. He now farms a little more than 12 hectares across three different terroirs: poudingues, limestone, and alluvial gravel.

About 75 percent of his production is dry wine, labeled Jurançon Sec. It’s one of three different designations that can appear on the label of an appellation wine in Jurançon: the other two are Jurançon (sweet) or Jurançon Vendanges Tardives (late-harvest).

“In the past, you put the bad grapes into dry wine, and you saved the good grapes for sweet wine,” Grussaute told me, explaining that the creation of the Jurançon Sec designation in 1975 was intended to improve the quality of sweet wines, by setting a minimum amount of residual sugar for grapes to be included and thus diverting poor quality grapes to dry wines.

But Grussaute is one of the Jurançon producers who set out to craft exceptional dry wines with a capacity for aging. He poured some older vintages for me to taste, from as far back as 2004. They showed beautiful notes of dried mango, truffles, and hay. There was still plenty of fruit on the palate, and the phenolic pithiness that these wines can have in youth had resolved into a vibrancy on the palate.

The pivot to dry wines in Jurançon began with the rise of independent vignerons like Grussaute in the region. For almost 50 years after the appellation was established, there was only a cooperative in Jurançon; the first independent vine growers weren’t established until the 1970s and 1980s.

Among them were Grussaute and Jean-Bernard Larrieu of Clos Lapeyre. Larrieu is a third-generation farmer who took over his family’s domaine in 1985. The domaine’s vineyards are near the top of steep hillsides, at altitudes of up to 400 meters, facing south and southwest with a stunning view of the Pyrenees, just 25 kilometers away. Among his 18 hectares, Larrieu works one very unique parcel in fermage (a farming tenancy). It’s a vineyard with the oldest vines in the region, some more than 100 years old, a traditional co-plantation of petit manseng, gros manseng, and a bit of camaralet and courbu (or petit courbu, as it’s sometimes called).

On the day of my visit, everything was bright green and lush under clear skies after weeks of rain. Dusk fell as we tasted wines on the patio of the domaine, and in the distance fires dotted the slopes of the mountains, set by French Basque shepherds to open up pasture for their sheep to graze. Larrieu, ever the farmer, hopped on his tractor as dark fell to do some final work for the day, and I got the sense that he could have made the sharp turns down the steep rows wearing a blindfold, steering from memory after 40 years of working in these vines.

There’s a generation of younger producers who are continuing what Larrieu, Grussaute, and others began with Jurançon Sec. Franck Lihour of Domaine Castéra noted that there is a great opportunity for making dry wines in Jurançon because it’s a blank slate: there is no standard profile for the style yet. But he also emphasized that it will take a lot of work to learn more and continue to improve the wines.

Lihour practices plot-by-plot winemaking for all his wines, dry and sweet. The minimalist vinification process is the same for all of the wines. “We have so much difference between grapes, terroir, and so much to learn about it. For me, I don’t want to bring something new in the cellar,” he explained. To that end, his barrel room feels a bit like a viticultural research library, where you can taste the impact of different soil types, vine age, massale selection, and exposition on four different varieties aging in large format oak.

His friend and peer in Jurançon, Maxime Salharang of Clos Larrouyat, farms three hectares of vines on a thin band of Triassic limestone that runs through the appellation. It gives typicity to his wines, with beautiful key lime and lemon verbena notes and powerful, linear acidity. The wines are fermented and aged in used barriques for six months; they also see a bit of bâtonnage depending on the vintage. Different winemakers on different terroirs, with different approaches in the cellar—there’s no uniform approach in the region right now, and the different results are incredibly exciting.

The dry wines of Jurançon have thrilling potential, but its sweet wines are still a revered and essential part of production for independent producers, too. Even Salharang, who focuses on Jurançon Sec, makes tiny quantities of sweet wine from a segment of his vineyard where the vines produce smaller yields and higher sugar concentration. It’s a testament to his time working at Domaine de Souch, an iconic producer of sweet Jurançon wines and one of the very first independent domaines in the region.

Domaine de Souch was originally the project of Yvonne Hégoburu, who renovated the abandoned property and ran the winery with her son, Jean-René Hégoburu, after her husband’s death in 1987. Along with Larrieu and Grussaute, she was one of the first organic and biodynamic producers in the region, inspired by seeing these practices in Pomerol. (She passed away in 2023, but you can see her at the very beginning of the 2004 documentary Mondovino.) Today her son runs the estate, and I met with winemaker Emmanuel Jecker, who has worked at Domaine de Souch for 18 years.

“Fifteen years ago, as with many sweet wine appellations, demand fell,” Jecker said. “We had the luck that dry wines were increasing and an opportunity to develop their quality. So we had less damage than other big sweet wine appellations, and now the sweet wines are developing again.”

Not that that ever affected the domaine’s focus. The winery’s dry wines are outstanding, but Domaine de Souch is renowned for, and focuses on, its sweet wines, including Jurançon, exceptional Vendanges Tardives, and a wholly unique cuvée made with passerillage (dried grapes) called Marie Kattalin. There is an exceptional freshness and power in these wines that has to be tasted to be believed.

“We are making great dry wines in Jurançon, no doubt, but our very specific wine is sweet wine, because you cannot achieve balance like this everywhere,” Lihour of Domaine Castéra affirmed.

It would be easy to see Jurançon’s evolution as a pursuit of fashion—whether riding the tide of increasing dry white wine consumption, or counting on a resurgence in sweet wines. But the winemakers I met aren’t chasing trends. They are making the wines they’ve always wanted to make, shaped as much by curiosity and conviction as by vintage and place.

Jurançon may never be an “it” region. That might be exactly why it’s worth watching.

20 Jurançon Jams, Both Dry and Sweet

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A few years ago, I attended a dinner at the home of a Rheingau winemaker, along with a few other journalists from Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium. It was the sort of nice-but-awkward social event that happens around wine festivals. The food and drink were lovely, as was our host, who made paella to pair with his wonderful aged riesling. The conversation was of convivial, but of the sort that happens when you throw together a bunch of tired professional adults, none of whom know each other and most of whom are speaking their second language.

That changed when we were served a simple but amazing dessert of fresh strawberries and cream. These strawberries had been picked at perfect spring ripeness—seemingly the platonic ideal of a strawberry. The buzz at the table over these strawberries changed the vibe of the evening. “Is this a Baron Solemacher?” someone wanted to know, naming a specific German berry variety. There were reminiscences of the wild Nordic berries of childhood and of the delicious tiny strawberries you find in Italy. The wine writers may have simply reached a point where they wanted to talk about anything except wine. But I want to believe it was something else, something elemental and human about our love of the red berry.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about strawberries. It occurs to me that strawberries—even though people love them—rarely show up in the world of spirits and cocktails, unlike so many other fruits. There’s no iconic cocktail involving strawberry. Unless your definition of “iconic” includes a strawberry daiquiri. (I could be wrong, and if I am tell me in the comments).

There are only two quality strawberry spirits I can even think of, and they are super super obscure. One would be a strawberry liqueur made by A. van Wees, distiller of De Ooievaar genever, and old craft distillery within Amsterdam’s city limits. A.v. Wees Aardbeien Likeur, at 24% abv, is very subtle, made with strawberries drenched in brandy. The result is, according to the distiller, “Literally the spirit of the strawberries…pronounced strawberry, WITHOUT the pungent fake candy taste that characterizes most fruit liqueurs.” I agree with that assessment, and I use Aardbeien Likeur less as a fruity accompaniment, and more as a mixer with gin (I substitute it for vermouth in a martini variation), the strawberry mingling with the gin’s botanicals.

The only other strawberry spirit I know to recommend is an aperitif I mentioned in Boozehound, called Chambéryzette, which is made by Dolin, the vermouth producer. Chambéryzette is a blend of Dolin’s blanc vermouth and a strawberry liqueur “made with strawberries from the Alps.” It’s a historic brand in France, and had its heyday in the early 20th century Parisian cafés “and, some even whisper, in the secrecy of the brothels,” according to Dolin company lore.

Chambéryzette is really just a pre-mixed version of the Chambery Fraise cocktail that was popular in Paris at the turn of 20th century, a mix of vermouth and strawberries. Chambéry is the Alpine town where Dolin is made. Chambéryzette is now imported by Haus Alpenz, but I’ve included my own recipe for Chambery Fraise below, which is also delicious.

The only other strawberry-infused cocktail that I have in my repertoire is a Jamaican rum punch, one of my go-to cocktails to bring to a spring party. Seriously, if you show up at a event with this punch, you will be the star of the evening. I’ve loved this recipe ever since I first saw it in Dan Searing’s excellent cocktail book, The Punch Bowl, which has always been a favorite of mine.

Jamaican Punch

This recipe dates from the 17th century and is beautifully pink. The strawberry syrup and the allspice add a layer of complexity to what is a refreshing summer quaff. Be sure to use a white, unaged rum. Note: Make the strawberry syrup ahead of time because it must be cooled completely. It can be made up to a week in advance. Recipe adapted from The Punch Bowl, by Dan Searing.

• Freshly squeezed juice from 8 or 9 limes (1 cup)

• 2 cups strawberry syrup (see recipe below)

• 3 cups white rum

• 3 to 4 cups water

• 2 to 3 pinches ground allspice

• Sliced strawberries

Combine the lime juice and strawberry syrup in a punch bowl or pitcher until well blended. Slowly add the rum, stirring constantly. Add the water 1 cup at a time, tasting as you go. Stop at 3 cups of water if you prefer a stronger punch. Season with the allspice to taste. Refrigerate until well chilled. Serve in punch cups or rocks glasses filled with ice. Garnish with strawberry slices.

To make strawberry syrup: Combine 2 cups of water, 2 cups of sugar and 6 to 8 sliced and hulled medium strawberries in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly to dissolve the sugar. Reduce the heat to low and cook for 5 minutes, then remove from the heat and cool completely. Strain out and discard the strawberry slices before using. Cover tightly and refrigerate for several weeks or more.

Chambery Fraise

A strawberry-vermouth concoction is a traditional apertif around the French Alpine town of Chambery. This version calls for fresh berries rather than the traditional strawberry syrup. Dolin vermouth is the local favorite, but other dry vermouths also work well.

• 3 medium strawberries, hulled

• ½ ounce simple syrup

• 3 ounces dry vermouth

• Mint sprig

Muddle the strawberries and simple syrup in a cocktail shaker. Add enough ice cubes to fill the shaker two-thirds full, then add the vermouth. Shake vigorously, then strain into the highball glass filled with ice cubes.. Garnish with mint sprig.

Related Everyday Drinking Cocktail Content

This week marks the fifth anniversary of Everyday Drinking. How time flies! Hard to believe that I’ve been publishing here for five years!

The traditional fifth anniversary gift is wood, representing strength and growth, which I guess makes sense when you think about wood barrels in the making of fine drinks. Five years isn’t a very long time in the world of wine and spirits, where things can age for decades. But it’s long enough to reflect on publishing this newsletter, and the challenges we all still face in the drinks industry.

When I started this in the spring of 2021, still in the thick of the pandemic, the media world was in a bad place. At the time, I felt like I was taking a big risk in going it alone. Media was certainly crumbling all around us. But who knew what this thing called Substack would become? Who knew that newsletters might be the way forward?

Well, as it turns out, the media world in 2026 is an even worse place! Quite honestly, who knows what the way forward might be? So many of the publications we all love have either shuttered, or are a shell of their former selves through layoffs, neglect, mismanagement, or clueless editorial direction.

But media isn’t the only thing in crisis. As we all know, it’s a time of crisis and reckoning for the wine and spirits industry. Big drinks companies have been slow to realize that people don’t want to buy what they’re selling any longer. The industry has been slow to embrace the idea that younger generations are drinking less, but better quality and at higher price points. At this point, one might think that drinks media and the drinks industry would have a common problem (and opportunity) to work together on.

But a curious thing that nobody talks about is the key role that the industry and its public-relations apparatus has played in the demise of wine and spirits media. I hear endless grumbling from industry people about messaging and media, about reaching new audiences, about the lack of new ideas and strategies. And yet, they continue to fund and support the same old, broken model. They gripe about critics, yet still advertise with and pay expensive “industry/pro subscriptions” for better placement in the same old legacy publications. I see companies trying to sell artisan, premium wines who spend their marketing dollars on wine media that’s mostly funded by mass-market brands. Make it make sense.

Every day, I get dozens of emails from PR and brand people, pitching me on “new” products and services that feel like the same old thing, notifying me of the same old tastings to attend, inviting me on old-fashioned group press trips. These PR and brand people, presumably, are emailing in hopes that I will write about their products, services, tastings, and places.

Honestly, it amazes me that the world’s appellations, drinks companies, entrepreneurs, and trade groups still keep pouring cash into this old, broken PR and branding model. What a waste of money! I cannot imagine that 90 percent (or more) of what clients spend on this old PR model nets any results.

Some days, as I am deleting these PR emails en masse, I wonder: For whom or for what, exactly, do these people hope that I am writing about their pitches? Seriously, like who? Given how much of drinks media has gone out of business or downsized. And for what? Given that anyone who works for what’s left of drinks knows even the legacy publications pay peanuts for content.

To which some of you may, reasonably, ask: Why don’t you write about these things for your own newsletter? It’s a great question! By now, Everyday Drinking has one of the biggest wine and spirits readerships in America. But you would be so surprised how disappointed that most of these PR and brand people are when—once in a blue moon—I reach out for more information…only to tell them that I will be writing this for my own humble newsletter. If you want to make a PR person cry, tell them you’re going to write about their client…but only for your Substack newsletter rather than pitching Wine Enthusiast!

The irony of this, of course, is how many of these people read every issue of this newsletter. Most of them without paying. (If this is you, I invite you to upgrade at my current deep discounted rate.)

All of which is to say: Everyday Drinking is entering its fifth year with its independence intact. Like everyone else in media and content creation, I’ve certainly had conversations with brands and regions and companies about sponsorships and partnerships and collaborations. But over and over, I encounter the same old way of thinking—thinking that completely misses the current reality of where both drinks and media stand. Therefore, I am pleased to say that we are still independent and ad free.

Which is why I am asking, once again, for your support to keep Everyday Drinking going. I am very grateful to loyal readers like you, who read what I write each and every week. It’s you who’ve made Everyday Drinking one of the top drinks publications in the U.S.

If you’ve been enjoying my work for free, please consider upgrading to paid. Your subscription helps keep Everyday Drinking independent and ad free, and allows me to continue my work as a voice and advocate within the wine and spirits industry.

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Cheers to (hopefully) five more years. Thank you!

More Industry Commentary on Everyday Drinking

So I’m writing for Wine Enthusiast once again, and I have a number of pieces coming out that I’ll be linking to over the next few months. My first is a feature in their May “Bubbles” issues on—what else?—the ongoing drama in Catalonia’s sparkling wine scene, and the rise of Corpinnat.

Readers of Everyday Drinking know this isn’t the first time I’ve written about Corpinnat, which in the past I’ve cited as a “wine of resistance.”

Over the past decade and a half, few corners of the wine world have experienced as much upheaval as Catalonia’s sparkling wine sector. Less than 20 years ago, almost all the bubbly made in Penedès was simply called Cava, Spain’s most famous sparkling wine. At the top end, Cava is considered Spain’s version of Champagne. Unfortunately, many people know Cava for the bottom end. While there are 300 wineries in Cava, more than 80% of the production comes from three houses— Freixenet, Codorníu, García Carrión—who influence the Denominación de Origen (D.O.). In Spain, 90% of Cava retails for under 10 euros. “Most Cava is basic-level sparkling wine. I have friends in the States who tell me, ‘Oh, I use Cava in my mimosa,’” said Roc Gramona [the sixth-generation winemaker of the venerable Gramona estate and the current vice president of Corpinnat].

For producers of higher-quality, higher-priced sparkling wine, being associated with an ocean of inexpensive Cava became unsustainable. “The situation was so bad that we realized we all had to get together to survive,” said Ton Mata, CEO of Recaredo and the first president of Corpinnat.

One of the major issues for Catalonia’s disgruntled sparkling winemakers is that the Cava D.O. lacks a clear geographic identity. Cava can be produced in over 20 different regions across Spain, as long as it’s made in the méthode traditionnelle. In Cava’s spiritual home of Catalonia, this lack of terroir has always rubbed producers the wrong way.

Please click here to read the whole feature, which I promise is worth your while.

Every time I write about Corpinnat, it keeps growing: At the time of my reporting there were 21 members. Among the big news I reported is that legendary winery Juvé & Camps, which makes more than 2 million bottles of long-aged sparkling wines each year, recently announced they will leave Cava to join Corpinnat. Meanwhile Cava’s sales continue to decline, dropping more than 13 percent, and by more than 18 percent in international export markets, from 2023.

“The ongoing effervescence in the world of Catalan bubbles might not mean much to entry-level and price-sensitive consumers, but the fact that some of our benchmark, flagship sparklers are not DO Cava anymore is likely to play out differently in premium segments of the trade,” says my colleague, Barcelona-based consultant and educator Nika Shevela, DipWSET and founder of Wine Alphabet.

As Corpinnat grows, I hope the confusion of naming Catalonia’s best sparkling wines will eventually become clearer. For those keeping count, if you buy a sparkling wine made in Penedès right now, it could be called by one of five different names: Cava, Corpinnat, Clàssic Penedès, Conca del Riu Anoia (used by Raventós i Blanc), or Vino de Mesa, a.k.a. table wine (used by wineries such as Mas Gomà and Terra de Marca).

Because Corpinnat is registered as a trade organization rather than an appellation, it moves differently than the typical European AOCs, DOCs, or DOs. As Ton Mata of Recaredo told me, “we can put more strict rules into place than an appellation can.”

This is an aspect of the story that was too broad in scope for my Wine Enthusiast feature. I believe the rise of organizations like Corpinnat, or the VDP in Germany (a trade group of around 200 top wineries that promotes strict quality standards) raises a bigger question: Do appellations matter as much as they once did? “There is certainly an ongoing debate over the relevance of appellations globally,” Shevela said.

The pushback against traditional appellations is happening in two ways. First, there is a long European tradition of maverick winemakers leaving the strict rules and confines of appellations, particularly in France. Sarah Parker Jang explored this phenomenon in her recent piece about Provence for Everyday Drinking.

Vin de France has become shorthand to consumers (especially young ones) for experimental winemaking, often minimal or low intervention. This serves a purpose for marketing—Vin de France is now a brand of its own, in a way. But will there come a day when the INAO has a mess of Corpinnats and Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüters (VDPs)—private organizations that broke away from the appellation systems—to contend with? How many Château Lafleurs will it take before things change?

Maybe this battle will simply devolve further along the lines it’s already taken, where the consumer has to simply know producer names—both the AOCs/Château Pradeauxs and the Vins de France/Le Temps des Rêveurs of the French wine world—and the story behind them to know who is making the styles of wines they want to drink in the way that consumer prefers that they be made: traditionally, transparently, organically, regeneratively, low-intervention, etc. For so many wine consumers who think in this dimension, appellation labels are already just that—simply a label.

But in numerous legacy regions, there is a pushback from winemakers who want stricter rules, who believe that the traditional appellations have become too mired in the past, too lax on quality standards, and lacked a commitment to terroir—often due to influence from big companies and cooperatives who sell cheap wine. This is what’s happening in Corpinnat. “We never made Cava because it wasn’t interesting,” said Jordi Annan of Celler Pardas. “It was only when Corpinnat started that we decided to make sparkling wine.”

In Rioja, as another example, a new-wave of smaller wineries has pushed for radical change, and to the Consejo’s credit, they are listening and (slowly) shifting. For years, Rioja classifications were based on oak aging (crianza, reserva, gran reserva). The focus is now much more on conveying a sense of place.

In Germany, the VDP’s focus on single vineyards and its classifying of “Erstes Gewächs” and “Großes Gewächs” (essentially Premier and Grand Crus) has led to the German Winegrowers’ Association adopting that classification for all of Germany. Changes to the German wine laws will be based on the VDP’s well-established classification pyramid vineyard sites. The VDP’s focus on special vineyards and terroir has superseded German wine’s old, dated classification of sweetness levels.

I wrote about those changes in Germany. It’s a bold move in this current era of wine, when so much so-called consumer “education” is about “demystifying” wine and avoiding so-called “confusing” talk of about the value of place in an age of terroir denial.

I’ve observed that a certain type of wine influencer/educator has begun to steer completely clear of talk about terroir. At the low end, the focus is on a certain populism…But much of the higher-end natural wine chatter also avoids a deep discussion of place. While the best natural-wine producers are committed terroirists, a lot of the derivative, middling natty wine talk is way more about winemaking technique and philosophy—which are similar whether we’re talking about Sicily, Loire, Oregon, or elsewhere. After all, you can make “zero/zero” wine anywhere.

With Corpinnat, the organization was built on very strict rules. Grapes must be 100 percent organic and harvested by hand, and all wine must be made at the winery, with no juice bought from outside. If Corpinnat wineries buy grapes, they are obligated to pay growers a premium under long-term contracts. Aging rules are also strict: All Corpinnat wines must spend at least 18 months on the lees (meaning all wines qualify as reserva), and wineries must make at least one wine that ages 60 months or more on the lees.

And those rules will soon get even stricter. From my Wine Enthusiast article:

Perhaps the biggest rule that Corpinnat has instituted, the one that will most profoundly alter winemaking in Penedès, is its plan to ban international grapes like chardonnay and pinot noir. Starting in 2035, Corpinnat producers will only be allowed to use xarel-lo, macabeo, parellada, and malvasia de Sitges for whites, and garnacha, monastrell, xarello vermell, and sumoll for reds. “My father was very against outlawing chardonnay,” Gramona said. “But we can only be an alternative to Champagne if we use our own grapes.”

Ton Mata of Recaredo took me to a vineyard that had originally been planted in 1996 with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, which they ripped out. 2014 was the last vintage they had both. “What was working in 1996 isn’t working today,” he said. “I’m glad the young people today already know this.”

12 Spanish Sparklers You Should Not Call Cava (Because They’re Corpinnat)

These Corpinnat tasting notes and bottle recommendations are for paid subscribers only. I am offering a deep discount today.

A great day to upgrade at 20% off!

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“Hpnotiq is back?” asked Punch, in a strange article posted this week. The answer? Maybe? “A handful of bars are reaching for the aquamarine bottles yet again,” and some are making updated versions of the Incredible Hulk, a venomous early aughts “cocktail” that combined Hpnotiq and Hennessey Cognac. Overall, not a particularly convincing argument that a renaissance is under way.

The Punch post is just one of several articles I’ve seen over the past year or so suggesting that the infamous electric-blue liqueur is having a moment. I mean, people have been actually predicting Hpnotiq comeback for more than a decade. In 2015, AdWeek reported, “Once a club staple, the spirit now looks to nostalgia.”

In what I guess we can call The Golden Age of Hpnotiq (2001-2009), the liqueur was a standard in hip-hop lyrics. In fact, there are at least 163 songs that name-check Hpnotiq. (Everyone from Drake to Kanye to Eminem to Karol G has used it in a rhyme). This would be the same era as Lil Jon’s “Crunk Juice” (a poisonous mix of Cognac and an energy drink like Red Bull) and Busta Rhymes’ “Pass The Courvoisier, Part II.” Y2K, baby.

So, what is Hpnotiq? Well, kids, just read the label on the slender bottle, which explains it’s “A Refreshing Blend of Premium French Vodka, Exotic Fruit Juices, and a Touch of Cognac.” It’s only 17% alcohol by volume, cloying, and tastes sorta pineapple, sorta passionfruit, sorta mango, sorta citrus. Honestly, Hpnotiq tastes…blue? But a crazy, artificial blue never before seen in nature.

According to a 2019 “oral history of Hpnotiq” in Mel Magazine (which also declared a “comeback” and a “Hpnaissance”), the liqueur in the “sex-toy-shaped bottle” was created in 2001 by Raphael Yakoby, a 25-year-old college dropout with zero business experience, who was living on Long Island—which, of course. “I was walking through Bloomingdale’s and saw this blue perfume in a beautiful bottle on a counter, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be great for a liqueur product?’” Yakoby told the New York Post in 2007. It was an instant hit. By the following year Yakoby was worth $50 million.

You started seeing Hpnotiq pop in all sorts of cocktail abominations: A Hpnotiq Margarita where it subbed for Cointreau, a Hpnotiq “Martini” with coconut rum and pineapple juice, and the aforementioned Incredible Hulk, which turned an angry green when Cognac was added. Cocktail menus were populated by these sorts of drinks in the mid-to-late aughts. If you ever wonder why the classic cocktail renaissance happened, well kids, it was a reaction to monstrosities such as the Emerald Ice (Hpnotiq floated on top of Sprite, lime juice, and Sour Apple Pucker). Now, I guess, the pendulum could be swinging back, away from the whole speakeasy-craft-cocktail thing and toward…Hpnotiq?

In Hpnotiq’s defense, I will say that in the category of bad, cloying liqueurs, it’s one of the better ones. Is that faint praise? Well, yes, but still praise all the same. And to be fair, with the brandy category in such a dire crisis, it might be time for Cognac to embrace Hpnotiq and the Incredible Hulk (and maybe even Crunk Juice) once again.

For someone who covered spirits during those heady days of the 2000s, Hpnotiq brings back warm memories of a time when the the spirits market was ecletic, the wild west, and people were willing to buy and try anything weird and new. This was long before celebrity tequila, before a million “new gins” crowded shelves, before every dude became a bourbon aficionado. Back then, a small handful of entrepreneurs seemed more apt to bring in crazy, off-the-beaten-path products, with a few hits (St-Germain elderflower liqueur, for instance) amid many misses. I wrote about this era a couple of years ago in an essay called “Cleaning Out the Liquor Cabinet”:

How about a stone pine liqueur from the Alps? How about a peanut rum liqueur from St. Lucia? How about Dutch genever in heavy clay bottle? How about a root-beer-ish-flavored “amaro” meant to historically recreate early American root tea? How about a Polish vodka made with bison grass that’s banned in the U.S. because it has a chemical that causes blood thinning?

Hpnotiq grew out of that time, and its sheer staying power is sincerely impressive.

All of which still fails to answer the question: Is Hpnotiq having a comeback? My only recent experience with Hpnotiq is when my brother gave a bottle to my son Wes as a joke gift as he went off to college. I asked Wes whatever happened to the bottle. “I drank it once and it sat in my closet for like a year,” he said.

Was it a Gen Z thing? I texted Everyday Drinking’s resident Gen Z drinks trend specialist Annie Arriaga. “So is Hpnotiq back or not?”

“Asking the wrong gal. Never left for me.” (Annie, who is from Miami, suggests however that it might be a Miami thing.)

In the end, whether you are a Hpnotiq hater or a fan, I invite you into the comments to share your memories, nightmares, and above all, cocktail recipes involving the infamous electric-blue booze.

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