A small cellar in the middle of red-wine fermentation, two open-top fermenters side by side, both filled with the same fruit picked off the same hillside on the same October morning. One has a hand on a punching tool, driving the wooden disc down through a thick cap of skins and seeds until the cap breaks up and disappears into the juice underneath. The other has a hose looped from a valve at the base of the tank up over the rim, pumping juice out the bottom and spraying it back across the top of the cap in a slow,…
Author: TERROIR Editorial
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Clipped to a board on the wall of a small Loire cellar, the addition log for a single cuvée of Chenin Blanc runs eleven lines down a sheet of A4. Three are sulfur additions, all in milligrams per litre: 20 mg/L at pressing, 10 mg/L after malolactic, and a pencilled “10 mg/L if total falls below 25” ten days before bottling. The number that matters is not any single dose. It is the cumulative ceiling the arithmetic implies: this wine, if all three additions land, will leave the cellar around 25 to 30 milligrams of total sulfur dioxide per litre.…
On a tasting bench in a producer’s cellar in Villié-Morgon, two rock fragments sit on a tray labelled in pencil. One is pink, coarse-grained, with a sparkle of feldspar where it has fractured fresh: granite from Fleurie. The other is dark, almost slate-blue under the cellar lights, dense in the hand: blue diorite from the Côte du Py at Morgon. Behind the tray, ten bottles stand in a row: Brouilly, Chénas, Chiroubles, Côte de Brouilly, Fleurie, Juliénas, Morgon, Moulin-à-Vent, Régnié, Saint-Amour. The same grape variety in every bottle. The rocks on the tray explain why the wines do not taste…
Put two scoresheets side by side on the same desk. On the left, a tasting card with a row of small numbered boxes from one to twenty, half-point marks penciled in between, the kind Jancis Robinson and Clive Coates still use for the wines they evaluate every week. On the right, a 100-point page running from fifty to one hundred, the format Robert Parker codified in 1978 when he printed the first issue of his Baltimore-Washington newsletter on a borrowed mailing list. Both sheets are scoring the same flight. Both arrive at numbers that get reported in the trade press,…
The check arrives at the end of a long table. A bottle of 2010 Barolo, opened earlier with a salute from the somm, sits empty next to the espresso cups. On the bill, between the wagyu supplement and the second round of digestifs, a single line item reads “Corkage, 1 btl, $55.” The diner who brought the bottle has paid $55 for the privilege of drinking wine he already owned. That line, more than any tasting note or pairing decision, is the most negotiated transaction in a restaurant dining room. It is half service contract, half social ritual. It is…
Walk a row in an old California vineyard with someone who has spent a career looking at vines, and the inventory happens through their boots. Three steps in, a leaf with five deep lobes and pale undersides. Two steps further, a leaf with the rounded shoulders and looser canopy of a different grape entirely. Another step, something neither of you can place without snapping off a cluster and rolling a berry between your fingers. The row is not a row of Zinfandel. It is a row of Zinfandel and Carignan and Mourvèdre and Petite Sirah and Alicante Bouschet and ten…
In a Kakheti cellar in spring, after the floor has been swept and the room cooled to the year’s working temperature, a winemaker lifts a stone lid from a vessel buried up to its rim in the cellar floor. The lid comes off in two hands. Underneath, a kvevri eight hundred litres deep holds wine that has been sealed there since the previous autumn, fermenting on its own skins, seeds and stems through the cold months, the clay walls pulling heat out into the surrounding earth. The wine inside is the same colour as weak tea or pale amber, and…
On a Tuesday morning in November, in the small print-out of the by-the-glass list that lives on a clipboard behind the bar, a beverage director crosses out the line that reads Sancerre, Domaine X, $22 and writes underneath it, in pencil, Menetou-Salon, Domaine Y, $16. The list will be retyped before service. The wine will be poured at the same temperature into the same glass. The diners will not be told anything about the change, because there is nothing to tell. The Sauvignon Blanc by-the-glass is now a Menetou-Salon Sauvignon Blanc by-the-glass. The pencil mark on the clipboard is one…
On a morning in early 1961, somebody at the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine opened a copy of Sud Ouest and saw the list on an inside page. The list was not supposed to be in Sud Ouest. It was supposed to be sitting in a folder inside the agricultural ministry, waiting on the last few signatures that would have rewritten the Bordeaux 1855 Classification for the first time since the year it was issued. By lunchtime the phones in the Médoc had started ringing. By the end of the week the revision was effectively dead. It has stayed dead…
Two bottles on a wine-shop shelf in November of 2025, both white Burgundy, both Chardonnay, both bottled by Maison Louis Jadot in Beaune. The first price tag reads $80, the second reads $18. The first is a village Meursault from the Côte de Beaune, the wine that has come to define what serious white Burgundy is supposed to cost. The second is a Mâcon-Villages from a band of limestone hills sixty kilometres south, made by the same négociant from the same grape on geologically related rock. The buyer holding the second bottle is buying the part of Burgundy the price…