Viticole Stories
Reimagining Terroir
So if you find yourself in wine circles long enough, you’ll undoubtedly come face to face with a concept the French call ‘terroir’. The industry is infatuated with terroir…Read More
Pardon the Infusion
It all started the other day, where every great controversy begins: on Zoom. We helped curate custom wine bottlings for Patagonia’s online marketplace and among the small collection was a white wine infused with thyme…Read More
Walter Scott: Trial By Fire
The air was thick and the sun a hazy pink flare, like a small moon. Knowing at some point that I needed to drop in on the Walter Scott family, it seemed as good a time as any to take the two-hour trek southwest from the Columbia Gorge to bluebird skies in the Eola Amity Hills…Read More
Myrtha Zierock: Foradori
Myrtha Zierock is the daughter of legendary winemaker Elisabetta Foradori who is known as a pioneer in Italy’s Trentino Alto Adige, and the late Rainer Zierock, a German writer and naturalist…Read More
Roberto Henriquez: A Wine That Carries Resilience At Its Roots
Our guest writer, Ann Harper, will take you on the journey of the vine and the Mapuche from colonization to present day. To add the seriousness of this fight, Ann Harper is a pen name to protect the sobering reality of likely repercussions when truth is spoken to power…Read More
Envinate Ribeira Sacra: The Struggle Is Real
Our ancestors were wild things. And wild things are no stranger to deprivation. Daily and seasonally the elements weighed on them with heightened intimacy. Heat, cold, periods of hunger were a packaged deal. Hunter/gatherers remained outdoors, constantly in motion…Read More
Nueva Aventura: Los Hermanos Cornejo
We tend to romanticize getting our hands dirty and working the land. But when it’s time to get down to business it is migrants who do the backbreaking work in orchards and vineyards all over the world. Executing the care and patience it takes for regenerative farming doubles that work…Read More
New Adventures: La Espina
In the fall of 2020, Kathline Chery was rerouting her life after being furloughed from her beloved role as pizzaiolo at Ops in Brooklyn. The summer of protests, sparked by the death of George Floyd, left her sleepless and longing to dive back into her passion of farming & fermentation…Read More
Burgundy, A closer look: Beru & Soyard
We have a habit of reading our history as if we’re not doomed to repeat it. As if there is no butterfly effect through the ages. Holy Roman armies and feudal lords are but fossils trapped in amber. Their oral traditions couldn’t possibly whisper in the ears of a Millennial could they? The founding fathers are as inanimate as the paper pages we turn. Maybe less so… Read More
Like water: Fruktstereo & Terada Honke
Water needs to move or it becomes stagnant and toxic. The particulate, mixed up in flowing water, falls to the sea floor when it is still, allowing light to penetrate the water column and mold to accumulate, then decay. As to our society, we may pulse and vibrate technologically. The inputs and outputs of commerce rushing ever faster… Read More
Fable farm & Floreal: Along Came a Cider
And just like that, there were apples. The very first cash crop America ever knew. Whose fermentation was once as common to every colonial household as a smart phone is today. And whose memory, as an agrarian country, faded into obscurity. Read More
Envinate Canary Islands: Trapped in Amber
“Once they paved the way in the Canaries, more and more projects appeared,” recalls ‘The New Vignerons’ author Luis Gutierrez, “and I must say there’s absolutely no doubt that Roberto Santana of Envinate started it all…” Read More
stirm & tatomer: Next-Gen California, East of Eden
California may just be the easiest place on earth to make wine. It may also be the hardest. From top to bottom, coast to mountains, what other land is veritable Miracle-Gro for just about anything? Read More
Pax Syrah: The Hills Are Alive
No two words in the wine industry have incited move spirited debate than ‘Robert Parker’. A close second, and far from mutually exclusive, would be ‘100 points’. After all, the man in question created the system…Read More
envinate Ribeira sacra: back to the future
“There is no place like Galicia…” declares local legend and restaurant owner Berto Dominguez Garcia, while holding up a live spider crab. “It’s not like Portugal or other parts of Northern Spain.” Read More
Muthenthaler 2.0: The winter of our content
Last month we negotiated our tumultuous relationship with Domestic Chardonnay, and got lost in the alchemy of dissension. “To oak or not to oak?”…”Can America hang on the world’s stage?”…Read More
Walter Scott: Rewiring Chardonnay
I realize there are bigger fish to fry in the world. But there is a time and place for the small fight. There is a time and a place for professionals in a given field to preach a cause…Read More