Picture Gérard Depardieu in gumboots, crouched in a row of Pinot Noir vines in Nuits-Saint-Georges, buying his first vineyard. It’s 1979. Cyrano de Bergerac, the role that would make him a household name outside France, is still a decade away. He’s not a star cashing in on a winery. He’s…
The first time you book a wine tasting in Italy, there are questions nobody seems to answer. Do you just walk in? How many wines are you actually going to get? Are you supposed to finish every glass, and do you have to buy a bottle afterward? What if you…
I have a small grievance with a bottle of wine I used to buy for about eight euros. It is now €11.99. Nothing dramatic appears to have happened to it in the meantime. Same label, same producer, same grapes. It hasn’t discovered Burgundy or hired a publicist. Meanwhile, everything I…
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…
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