Journal

Most people know where to find a wine’s vintage. It’s the year printed on the bottle. What many people don’t know is what that year is actually telling them. A wine’s vintage is simply the year the grapes were harvested. It isn’t the year the wine was bottled, released, or purchased. The date refers to…

Many people assume wine differences come down to grape variety or region. But scale changes wine too.

Most people assume good vineyard land means fertile soil or warm weather. But vineyards often succeed for the opposite reason. Vines tend to produce better wine when conditions are slightly difficult. Soil that drains quickly forces roots deeper into the earth. Hillsides create variation in temperature and sunlight. Cooler nights slow ripening and help preserve…

A bottle of wine does not stay fixed once it is opened. Air begins to enter immediately, and the wine starts adjusting to it in stages rather than all at once.

Most wine is made to be consumed relatively young. That doesn’t make it bad. It just means it was never intended to change very much over time.

Most people stand in front of a wall of bottles and guess. Maybe it’s the label, maybe the price, maybe something someone mentioned once. There’s a better way to approach it, and it doesn’t take much.

Most people make wine more complicated than it needs to be. You’re told to look for notes, structure, balance—at a certain point, you stop actually tasting what’s in front of you. It doesn’t need to be like that.

Old world and New world wine sounds more complicated than it is. It is really just a way of separating where a wine comes from and how it’s made. At the simplest level, it starts with geography.

There are things made to resist time, built to remain exactly as they are. Then there are things that don’t—leather that creases, wood that marks, linen that softens. These things are not preserved, but shaped by use.