I watched a vineyard crew do something last August that looked a lot like vandalism. Entire rows of grape bunches, still small, still green, still weeks away from anything you’d want in a glass, got stripped off the vine by hand and left to rot between the rows. My first…
Here’s a piece of pricing math nobody explains before you book: the fewer people in your group, the more each person pays. Book a private wine tour for two and you’ll pay roughly double, per head, what a group of eight pays for the exact same wineries, the same driver,…
Sit down at a café in Piazza San Marco with the orchestra playing, and a single glass of wine can run you €20 or more, plus a €6 per person charge just for the music. Walk two streets back from the square, and locals are paying €2 to €4 for…
A transcript. He would like it noted that he has a Level 3 WSET and did not spend four years studying tannin structure for this. The Evening Begins 19:04 Table seven has arrived. Four people. They’ve asked for the wine list immediately. No phones out, no checking the menu first,…
Most guides to this day trip start with the same assumption: you have a rental car waiting. You don’t. You’re in Venice. Nobody drives in Venice. Renting a car just to sit in it for a day, on roads full of hairpin turns, sounds like a strange way to spend…
Years ago, at a blind tasting with a few other wine obsessives, I confidently guessed the same grape for two glasses that turned out to be nothing alike. Different country, different colour, different everything on paper. I blamed it on a long day and moved on. I think about that…
A friend of mine once brought a bottle of Vino Nobile di Montepulciano to dinner and spent the entire meal insisting it was “basically the fancy version” of the Montepulciano d’Abruzzo we usually drink. I let her enjoy the theory for about an hour before I ruined it. She wasn’t…
Marsala wine gets marketed as pure Sicilian tradition. Old-world, sun-baked, passed down through generations of Sicilian winemaking families. Here’s the part that never makes it onto the label: the man who built the entire industry wasn’t Sicilian. He wasn’t even a winemaker. He was an English merchant who came to…
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