Hi everybody,

Pay attention to wine for long enough and I think it changes your relationship to the world around you.

One way this might be true is along the lines of a mindfulness practice, that wet colorful stuff in your glass a focusing lens for somatic reset: I’m present, I’m tasting, I’m here with my body, lips tongue throat memory.

What I’m thinking about, though, has a little less to do with ourselves in isolation and more to do with the outside. After having done this for a while — starting to get to know growers, seeing vine, connecting that wet stuff in my glass to their work — I found myself attuned a little more differently to the year than I had been: to the cycle of growth and decay, to equinox and solstice, to seasonal change.

I think it’s maybe a little too easy to spiral cosmic and abstract with this, but I mean it very tangibly: waking up to an overnight cold snap in April and thinking, jeeze, I wonder if everybody’s vines are ok. Noticing in a different way whether a summer was rainy or dry (mildew pressure and sprays), or that it’s harvest time, or going outside in January and thinking, ‘it’s pruning season.’ Linking earlier sunsets and the angle of the light to fermentations finishing up in quieting cellars.

So it’s witchy season, and back to school season, and the end of harvest. (And a season, it seems, for the gleeful wielding of debased, brittle authority, on block after block.)

This is not something that has a beginning or an ending — it’s a station in the cycle.

“The sea is not all that responds to the moon,” writes John McPhee in Annals of the Former World, a book featuring no wine that tops my list of recommended wine books. “Twice a day the solid earth bobs up and down, as much as a foot. That kind of force and that kind of distance are more than enough to break hard rock. Wells will flow faster during lunar high tides.”

I want to feel a little more directed myself, these days. Having a schema feels helpful. What are we doing and why? Where is this all going? Natural wine — did it matter? What’s it done for me lately? Why do we taste wine, and who’s making it for us, how are we drinking it? (Are we even drinking anymore?)

So I decided to make a syllabus.

There’s no beginning or ending. You can enter at any time, and assemble the pieces in any order. It’s a spiral, not an escalator. By the time you’ve gone all the way around, starting again just leads you deeper.

The goal is a wine study that perpetually builds its own foundation. For those of you who have been asking me for a more structured approach to learning about wine, I hope it offers ways to do that with us. (If you’re just trying to dip in and taste something good, I think it leaves the door open for that, too.)

In a cycle like this, every point along the way has an opposite number on the other side. As I’ve fit these together, I find that this often means the two are in conversation with one another, and it shook out naturally for me to sort these into four sets of pairs, each phase with its other half.

So here’s a little tour of moon school: some of the thought I’ve put into it and some ways I’ll be applying it going forward. By the end, you know what Napa is and you also know about pais in Itata. You’ve tasted orange wine in amphora, and you’ve tasted champagne. You have language to talk about what you like, and you know what happens when a vine is flowering. Old nebbiolo in the Piedmont? Sure, but also garnacha in Gredos.

I’ll be building more tools, games, and teaching materials for this in the weeks and months to come. Let me know if you’d like a lesson plan or if you have a space and would like to host one of these, and I look forward to tasting with you soon.

<3,
grape kid

Renewal/rebirth shrouded in darkness: where did it all begin?

One way to answer the question is with wine’s Neolithic birth, in the Caucuses. We can make things out of clay now! Vines, we domesticated them — fruit each year! Wizz bop bang — ferment, it’s happening!

Fast forward just slightly, we’re on Phoenician boats leaving Tyre to sail the length of the Mediterranean, the first wine in France is Greek and being mixed in Marseilles, etc.

And what were the wines like?

Orange wine feels like a new, current trend. It’s in a liter bottle with a twist-off at your neighborhood shoppy shop. It’s a glass pour at that place with the wood-fired pizza that just opened.

But fermenting on skins, or burying ferments in clay, is also a way of accessing ways of seeing wine that aren’t new so much as temporarily forgotten. Skin contact has a practical side, if you’re fermenting fruit. (Easier, more stable.) It tastes great with weird vegetables, or pickles, or spice. It helps to understand the revival of places that might be unfamiliar as something other than an exotic novelty or a “discovery.”

Culmination, progress (or lack thereof), illumination (revelation).

Wherever wine began, the mass extinction event of phylloxera was a planet-wide reset. The world we drink in today was formed out of the wreckage of a pandemic barely 150 years old. The grape varieties and the regions we know, our sense of the classics, what wine looks like? In a lot of ways, it’s all post 1863, whether we’re talking about sparkling catawba in the Ohio River Valley or grand cru red Burgundy.

Vines: what do we do with them? Graft them onto resistant rootstock? Spray them to treat disease, either with synthetics that are the legacy of WWII chemical weapons or less poisonous alternatives?

What does natural farming look like? What does it mean for “grape variety” to be a brand, and how does that affect landscape?

A growing light, building energy, laying down roots, setting intentions.

As a former English language teacher, I’ve been struck by how people learning how to talk about wine do it just like people trying to learn any language, from clamming up out of embarrassment to struggling to retain what isn’t part of everyday immersion.

If wine language is just…language? — how can putting our sociolinguistics ballcaps together help us make sense of the way that we talk about this drink?

We deploy language around wine to so many different ends: to try to signal discernment to the ‘right’ people, to attempt to define the parameters of our taste and preference, to communicate experiences we can’t directly share, to try on different personae, to play.

What does it mean for wine to be ‘fine’ or ‘ordinary’? What does having a good “palate” mean? When is a wine just … bad?

Some of the most freighted, meaning-laden words in contemporary wine discourse — ‘funky’, ‘mineraliy’, ‘sweet’ — can become useful ways to dig into what’s actually going on in our glass, and make these languages our own.

Introspection, re-evaluating your goals, letting go of what’s holding you back.

There are wine regions so defined by a commercially powerful style that exceptions are treated like they’re breaking the rules.

It might be the sparkling wines of a region like Penedès, dominated by D.O. Cava. It could be the reds of Chianti, where ‘improving’ initiatives have changed a 19th-century juicy co-ferment beyond recognition. It’s often a supermarket white wine that meets this fate: Rías Baixas albariño after the planting boom of the 1980s, Loire Valley sauvignon blanc alongside the rise of Sancerre.

What all these places have in common, though, beyond being well-known brands and cultivating expectations around what they’re supposed to taste like, are strong counter-currents: insurgent growers, incompatible ancestral grapes or traditional styles, square wines meeting round holes.

In testing and education, a lot of time is given to the former: the rules, the “typical expression”, what gets counted as normal for a place and a grape. But what happens when some of a place’s most compelling wines have nothing to do with the typicity they’re supposed to be living up to? And how do you know when expectations about what’ ‘typical’ have become hopelessly out of date?

a pivotal moment, turning intention into action, meeting a significant challenge

In one telling, the natural wine movement is born already coiled around a style: whether it’s Jules Chauvet positing zero-sulfur vinification or the entire scene fitting into Marcel Lapierre’s living room, it’s carbonic, glou glou reds.

Like any good myth, this one has a secret at its heart: the carbonic maceration that became synonymous with Beaujolais and in turn with a whole universe of juicy, lightweight reds, was itself a response to a problem. Beaujolais had been so chemically farmed in the decades after WWII that its dead soils were wrecking fermentations. Carbonic was a solution to reduced, stuck wines, as a way to keep them lively and fresh.

If native yeast fermentation and farming without chemicals are the double helix of natural wine, then Beaujolais and the mid-20th century rise of carbonic shows just how inseparable they are.

Jules Chauvet–inspired carbonic is one way to find freshness (in the face of a climate only getting hotter and more chaotic), but it’s not the only one….

A shift in awareness, creating space for something new

Beyond appellation boundaries or geological strata, wine regions are constituted by human community. (Those living room parties at Marcel Lapierre’s place above, for example — see First Quarter – Ferment 🌓) Weather and rocks (and money and language and borders) play into it, but in the end, regions are made out of people.

How do growers influence, mentor, and learn from each other? What does access to land and capital look like for young producers? How do people get started? What makes a place dynamic and feel like it’s growing the future? What tools can we use to understand a new producer or a place that’s new to us?

Development, adjustment, refinement, attention to detail

As soon as wine isn’t just something you make at home and drink in your backyard with friends, it changes. For most of human history, that meant radical transformation for shelf stability: intentional oxidation, drying on straw mats, aging under a veil of living yeast — or just drinking fast, before they went sour. Loire wines bound for Paris on river barges stopped at Orleans if they had gone off; the cathedral town became the capital of French vinegar.

The wine trade gone global changed the world; and the world, in turn, changed wine, which like everything else became part of what Sven Beckert in Cotton: A Global History defines as “war capitalism”.

The Canary Islands, after a piecemeal century-long series of expeditions and conquest, became a restock and replenish base for the conquest of the Americas. Listan prieto, brought from central Spain and now vanished on the mainland, was planted and propagated to stock ships bound for South America, Mexico, and Baja California. On their own roots, farmed by (often indentured or forced) indigenous labor, for more than 300 years listan prieto — mission, pais — was at the heart of grape wine in South America and the West Coast. (See Full Moon – Vines 🌕.)

Madeira, from an island first deforested and burned, then planted to sugarcane until the soils were exhausted, became a sweet, fortified wine, marked by the sun and the sea, that was shipped to ports in the eastern United States in the same slave ships that carried abducted people from West Africa in their holds. (The enslaved Black men serving the Madeira beloved of the Founding Fathers at venues like the Charleston Jockey Club — along with Champagne, Port, and Rhine wine — were the first sommeliers in the United States.)

Until the middle of the 19th century, Bordeaux crossing the channel was routinely fortified with brandy or stronger red wines from further afield (Spanish alicante, Hermitage).

Champagne merchants used grapes from as far away as the Mosel and Algeria until grower riots and worker action led to the legal definition of the wine and the region as synonymous. (See Waning Gibbous – Typicity 🌖)

Today, refrigerated supply chains and global container shipping mean stability is no longer an issue, and contemporary tastes prefer fresh fruit to oxidation. But while the wine styles may be changing — take the rise of dry red wine in Porto or dry white wine in sherry country — what’s in the ground, where it’s grown, and what we think about it continue to reflect the histories and priorities of people piled up before us.

Surrender, stillness, what comes next?

I remember wine aging and the idea of a vintage being one of the more mysterious things to me, starting out. Was older wine better? How did all the things I could read about in a vintage report translate into what was in my glass? And what did “a great vintage” actually mean?

A vintage is just a year in somebody’s life, and in the life of a vine. I’ve found it can be less helpful to think of these as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It’s more that a year can be ‘easy’ or difficult’. For us, and for the plant. Maybe it was a cold summer, or maybe you went through a breakup.

Paradoxically, vintages that are lauded for their power and ease can be less available, fun, and delicious when you open them. A 'bad’ vintage can be one that was a nightmare for a grower, in terms of the amount of work they had to do — but you can still find a lot of joy in the face of adversity.

And if we’re going to talk about vintages, we’re going to have to engage with the discourse around what a “classic” vintage is, why every year seems to be a hot year, and why so many more vintages seem difficult, these days…