A Report From Wine Explorer Diego Samper – The Wine Manifesto
Paris, France
Dear Member,
Having a kid for the first time? You learn fast that nobody really knows what they’re doing. More questions than answers. More surprises than rules. The wine world is the same. Everyone has opinions. Few things actually help.
The past few weeks, I’ve been drinking my way through France with my mother-in-law. She’s here helping us with our newborn, who turns one month old next week. In her words: “I don’t know about wine. I just don’t like sweet.”
Her confession turned into a bond between us.
Wine has done that for centuries. The conversations flow both ways. She asks me about wine. I ask her about raising kids, and how times have shifted.
Somewhere between bottles and stories, I realized I’d been drafting The Wine Manifesto. Not rules, not pairings, just the principles that have shaped our wine club community through the years. The way we see wine, and why we send the bottles we do.
Wine is meant to be lived.
Not boxed into categories. Not fenced off by judgments made years ago. Too often we reduce it to a product on a shelf or a score in a magazine. But wine only matters when it is poured, shared, tasted, argued about, remembered. A bottle is not a thing. It is a chance.
The verdicts we carry are false.
“I don’t like Chardonnay.” “Malbec is too heavy.” “Riesling is too sweet.” These are not truths. They are verdicts delivered years ago, on a half-warm glass or a bad supermarket bottle. Somewhere along the way, a single glass, a supermarket brand, or a friend’s strong opinion planted a flag.
The mind turned that moment into a verdict: This grape, this region, this style is not for me. They calcify into rules that do not serve us. They close doors. And yet people cling to them because it feels safe.
Most people want to be surprised.
I’ve watched it happen countless times. Someone who swore off rosé lights up when they taste one that’s bone-dry and electric. A Malbec skeptic softens when they taste one grown at extreme altitude, in the far north of Argentina. What they really wanted wasn’t to be right. They wanted to be surprised.
The wine world has made us timid.
We’ve been trained to stay in narrow lanes. Supermarkets give us the same grapes, the same labels, the same tired language. Critics layer on scores as if numbers can dictate experience. Marketing floods us with safe stories. And slowly, we internalize the script.
We choose what won’t embarrass us. What won’t provoke argument. What won’t challenge us. That timidity is the opposite of what wine demands.
Safety shrinks joy.
Drink only what you know, and the glass gets smaller. The conversation dulls. The adventure is lost. Safety drains the soul from a bottle. Wine isn’t meant to be a shield against risk. It’s meant to be a door into experience.
The risk is the reward.
Every memorable glass carries some element of risk. That you won’t like it. That it tastes nothing like you expected. That it confronts you with something unfamiliar. But that’s what makes astonishment possible. The wines you never forget are almost never the ones you chose because they felt safe.
Our club is your signal.
The shelves are overwhelming. Thousands of bottles, labels, scores, categories, all screaming at once. Most people end up picking based on price or a grape they already know. We make wine more approachable without the noise. We don’t bury you in endless options. We bring you a few that matter. Well-made wines with stories. Wines that surprise. Not mass-market bottles stuffed with additives.
Discovery is the point.
Each shipment is a chance to step off the paved road and into the wild. Eighty-five percent of what we send you will be wines you love. The other fifteen percent is about discovery. Anchors and adventures. This club is about joy. You’ll sharpen your palate. You’ll open your mind. You’ll rediscover that wine isn’t about performance. It’s about discovery.
A Closing Thought
Children crave unsupervised play, a taste of freedom that helps them grow. Adults crave it too. Not just in life, but in wine.
Behind every “I don’t drink Chardonnay” is a hidden desire to be proven wrong. Behind every “I know what I like” is a quiet hunger for discovery.
The world of wine is too vast, too alive, to be shrunk by old verdicts. All it takes to reclaim it is a little guidance and the freedom to take a chance.
Salud,
Diego
Wine Explorer