Author: TERROIR Editorial

The paddle arrives at the table a few minutes after the order: a narrow wooden board, three stemmed glasses arranged left to right, each with a measured pour the colour of strong tea, then garnet, then near-black. The server says two sentences about what links them, same producer across three vintages, or same grape across three soils, or same village across three estates. The conversation that follows is the entire point. By the time the diner reaches the third glass, the table has spent 15 minutes inside an argument the sommelier was making before the food even arrived. Three glasses,…

A bar in Sanlúcar de Barrameda in 2024, two glasses on the marble counter. The first is a fino as the modern category has been defined for a century: Palomino, dry, fortified to fifteen and a half, aged biologically under flor. The second is also a fino, but the pour is twelve and a half percent, unfortified, drawn from a Palomino vineyard on the same albariza, aged under the same yeast veil. Until 2021, the second glass could not legally be labeled as sherry. Now it can. The change reads as bureaucratic. What it actually unlocked is the shipping rights…

Inside the Consorzio’s DOCG bid for Etna Bianco: Carricante’s east-face Grand Cru argument, three producers, and what ratification will (and won’t) change.

60 to 90 millimeters of rain fell on Bordeaux in the last week of August 2025, rewriting a vintage critics had already written off. The wines came out saline and chalky — what Cheval Blanc’s Pierre-Olivier Clouet called “2010 without the alcohol.” James Suckling places the best 2025s at the level of 2019 and 2016. The May–June 2026 campaign that releases them is the one that decides whether En Primeur survives 2024’s collapse.

From autonomous robots in Cognac to AI-driven fermentation in Napa, precision technology is arriving in the vineyard faster than most producers anticipated. The question is what it changes — and whom it leaves behind.

Regenerative viticulture is rewriting vineyard economics from the soil up. At Tablas Creek and across California, fewer clusters per vine are delivering higher profits, raising a question the industry cannot ignore.

The 2025 Burgundy harvest produced stunning whites and almost nothing to put them in. Allocations are tightening, cellars are thin, and the shelf is not refilling.

Portuguese red wines from the Douro, Dão, and Alentejo offer depth and complexity that rivals France and Italy at a fraction of the price. The tariffs just removed the last excuse not to look.

The American wine industry lost a winery a day in 2025. Behind the closures, a structural reckoning that may reshape the business for a generation.

Wine tells you less about its contents than orange juice. The EU now mandates full ingredient disclosure. The United States has not followed, and the gap is widening.