Hi folks,

How much do you want to be surprised and delighted when you go out to drink wine? Ok, but — put another way, maybe less appealingly — how unfamiliar and challenging do you want that menu to be?

When I was on the floor at Bridges this summer, I’d pretty frequently go in front of guests — often wine people! — who told me they didn’t recognize anything on the list. Sometimes the tone was excited — the food was adventurous, why not the bev? Sometimes it was adversarial, my dude already curled up in fighting stance by the time I was tableside, this fucking hipster virtually tattooed on their retinas. Is he going to even know what I mean when I say I like Puligny-Montrachet?!

There’s for sure a type of person who feels that they’ve devoted several decades to figuring out this whole wine thing, hearty red Burgundy with your duck, Sancerre a perfect pairing for a certain goat cheese, Chianti means this, cabernet means that, and I think that can lead to a degree of frustrated alienation: What do you mean the game changed? Don’t you just have a good claret? What kind of grape is — what did you call it — delaware? What is this section, ‘orange wine’? And where is this bottle from that you said would be like the Chablis I wanted? — Rheinhessen? — no, no, I don’t speak German, thank you.

Certainly, there are a lot of styles and regions on contemporary wine lists that are going to be surprising, or feel unusual, or seem weird, even relative to a decade or two ago.

There are a throng of varieties native to different corners of the world (we live in the renaissance of vitovska / xarello / juhfark / cesanese / nerello mascalese and many others, a hundred hundred grapes filling their ecological niches like Galapagos finches) — not to mention hybrid varieties and native vine species and other fruits joining the party. There’s skin maceration and co-fermentation across a rainbow of shades and colors. The wines are sitting in aging vessels ranging from fiberglass and concrete to chestnut and clay, making the “oak-aged or steel tank?” box on the blind tasting grid feel a little silly. Places like the Roussillon or Crete or Emilia-Romagna or Burgenland or Itata or the Sierra Foothills or Anjou or Ribeira Sacra or Penedès are being reborn, product of networks of young outsiders and stubborn village aunties and kids coming home, farming changing, often in the shadow of defunct cooperatives or across the road from the scorched-earth of industrial ag.

Picture antiques dealer Luthen Rael behind a bar, telling the master sommelier who doesn’t like the amphora-aged albariño: “There’s a whole galaxy out there waiting to disgust you.”

In the face of this, there’s a temptation to see these unfamiliar things (if they are unfamiliar, or if they do feel left-field and weird to you — and this is a good reminder that all of this feels left-field and weird to somebody just starting out!) as shiny new innovations. They’re novelties, fodder for breathless trendpieces about the way we drink today. (2025 was the summer of chilled red (again). What will 2026 bring?)

But one of the pleasures I take in history is the sheer variety, expanse, and weirdness that humans get up to. It’s a reminder of forgotten possibilities, temporary utopias, or maybe just something even more basic: that things have been different before, and will be different again. That alone can help us imagine better versions of those futures, in a moment where the idea of the future being better at all feels very fucking distant.

In wine, at least, what that means is that when I look at the contemporary kaleidoscope of weird and unexpected, I don’t see novelty. I see the ways wine will be to everyone coming after me.

And when I try to figure those ways out and wrap my head around them, I look for how they’ve grown out of a whole tangle of precedent and past practice and stories we could tell about where wine came from in the first place.

So that’s what this season’s wine club is about: tugging on six threads connected to how we drink today, and following them backwards to see how far they go.

If you want to go ahead and order it, please do! Each shipment carries 3 to 6 bottles and includes art (in this case, a giant illustrated wine timeline), handwritten info cards, digital resources, a virtual club meetup and Discord server, and the pricing folds in domestic shipping, too, fulfilled by my friend Christy Frank at Copake Wine Works.

Either way, though, I wanted to write a little bit about those six threads we’re pulling on, what I think about putting together a pack like this, and some previews about what’s going to be in the box when it goes out next month.

Every couple of days from now until the club deadline on Tuesday, December 9, I’ll write up one of the timelines we’re working on, and the wine in the pack it’s tied to.

(I was going to do all six in one go, but after spending three days on Chablis, I think we’ll all be better off if they’re spaced out.)

Ok, let’s talk seashells.

<3,
grape kid

Our story starts ~150,000,000 years ago with the sound of warm waves on tropical atolls, coral reefs swarming with squat lobsters, spiral-shelled carnivorous ammonites, the bottle-green shadow of a plesiosaur below the water’s surface.

They’ll all become sedimentary rock, one day, compressed into the limestones of the white cliffs of Dover, the natural caverns that honeycomb Paris, and the eroded slopes around the little rivers of the Yonne.

Those little rivers flow through walled towns named for legionnaire colonies (Coulanges-la-Vineuse), or Gallo-Roman estates (Capeleia, “house near the woods” 867 AD —> Chableia, 1118 AD —> Chablies, 1187 —> Chablis, 1308). Let’s check in there, around the 16th century: you’ve got Cistercian abbeys with granted vineyards, polyculture on the flats, forests for firewood and game on the hilltops. Glass bottles aren’t being used for wine yet, everything’s drunk out of cask within a year of harvest. Also — everything is currently on fire, having been recently sacked by Huguenots, crippling a place that had been humming along in the same vein as Burgundy and Champagne. It will take two centuries to bounce back.

By 1850 or so, though, it’s a booming modern wine region, 40,000 hectares planted mostly to red grapes like césar, gamay, gouais noir, or pinot, selling oceans of fresh, pale ruby-colored bistro wines to Paris via river barge. Here, at its height, the end is already hidden inside what looks like success: railroads bringing cheaper Mediterranean red from the south (the railway to the Midi gets completed in 1856); phylloxera bringing death and destruction from across oceans (the louse will land in 1863), two world wars, adulteration and fraud, killer frost. A century later Chablis’ planted area has shrunk by 90%, the slopes above the village so denuded of vines that villagers going skiing on the grand crus.

But Chablis as a concept survives its near-extinction. As a generic label, it adorns dry-ish white wines around the world. It’s called for in a 1964 Vogue crash diet (black coffee, unsalted steak, and one hard-boiled egg, and a glass of wine with every meal, “preferably Chablis.”) Gallo’s jugged ‘Chablis Blanc’ debuts the same year. In 1980, Orson Welles dubs it “America’s most popular wine” — while advertising a chablis blanc made by Paul Masson of California.

Meanwhile, “minerality” as a wine description and conceptual category is just about to take off. (In French, it enters the lexicon in 1988.) Soon, Chablis will be its ultimate avatar, the geological era of its particular band of limestone used in test questions, the wine itself considered synonymous with the idea of wine that tastes like rocks. The wine critic for the New York Times will write, as though it’s always been thus: “at its best [Chablis] has a particular stony, chalky, seashell minerality that I consider the most distinctive expression of chardonnay. I’ve seen many chardonnays from elsewhere described as “Chablis-like,” but never have I found the characterization to be true.”

By many measures, then, things are going great. Brand Chablis has never been more popular — a 200% increase in export sales over the last decade, the permitted appellation area expanded dramatically, the link between place and style now etched in bedrock.

Prices have been paid for this success, though. Mechanical harvesting is commonplace. The proportion of organic viticulture is among the lowest in France. There are annual catastrophic losses to frost, supercharged by winters made mild by climate change.

I hear whispers of syrah being planted up north in the Yonne. With mildew pressure rising, can PiWis be far behind? And meanwhile, as bringing in a successful harvest becomes harder and harder, many drinkers are once again perfectly willing to drink the idea of Chablis.

That’s what we’ll be doing, too: uncorking exactly the kind of bottle you would have gotten if you’d come into Bridges this fall with Chablis your point of reference.

What does the future of Chablis and the concept of minerality look like? In one way, maybe like this: flinty, salty-smoky weissburgunder on limestone outside of Ingelheim, from a young new grower on his fifth vintage…