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…
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…
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…
Some wines make me thirsty. Not all of them, which took me a while to notice. I’ll finish a glass of one red and feel completely normal. Then on a different night, with a different wine, I’m reaching for water before I’ve even cleared half the glass. Real thirst, the…
Here’s a scene playing out at wineries across Italy most weekends now. You arrive, and the first thing that happens isn’t a pour, it’s a photo of the vineyard rows. Then a second photo, because the first one didn’t quite capture the sun drenched Tuscan mood you were chasing, even…
Ripasso and Amarone both come from Valpolicella in Veneto. Both lean on the same traditional grapes, mainly Corvina, Corvinone, and Rondinella. They can sit right next to each other on a wine shop shelf and look equally Italian. They still hand you two completely different evenings. One is richer than…
Have you ever read the back of a wine bottle and thought, did a poet write this or did someone just really need a job? “Velvety tannins with a lingering finish of dark plum and forest floor.” Forest floor. Someone held a glass of wine, took a sip, and thought,…
Europe has a genuinely strange wine problem this year. Some cellars have too much wine. Some vineyards barely have enough grapes to fill a bottle. Italy is looking at storage tanks it doesn’t know what to do with. France is heading into its smallest harvest since 1957. And somewhere in…
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