The Wine Explorer’s Letter

American wine was reborn in the basement of the Modesto Public Library in California. There, brothers Ernest and Julio Gallo found old instructional guides on winemaking from the...

How did America’s wine industry go from rivaling Europe to becoming almost nonexistent by the 1960s? This week we’ll revisit the history of American wine. Editor’s Note: If...

With the Wine Explorer out this week, we’ll revisit a classic essay from last year, about Napoleon III, the greatest wine marketer of all time. Speaking of France…...

For those unfamiliar with the gris de gris, it’s one of the more rare wine styles. Untouched, as of yet, by the industry’s hype machine (which is still...

Finally, it arrived – a bottle of clear, ruby liquid… clairet. If you’ll remember from a couple weeks ago, clairet is a type of Bordeaux, the last vestige...

Regular readers might accuse us of saying some hurtful things about chardonnay – that buttery oak syrup of a wine so often found in cheap magnums on the...

The poet Keats said of ‘claret’ that it did not, like other wines, “assault the cerebral apartments,” “but rather walks like Aladdin about his enchanted palace, so gently...

Our upcoming French Collection has more old vine wine than any other collection we’ve sourced. Call it our “old souls” collection… But is that a good thing? More...