A Report From Wine Explorer Diego Samper – Real Wine Gifts
Dear Matt,
Thanksgiving is the one holiday you cannot fake.
You feel the truth of that the moment you step into the kitchen. The table does not appear out of nowhere. Someone burns fingers on a roasting pan. Someone else peels potatoes before the sun comes up. There are arguments about stuffing and the one dish that never turns out the same twice.
It is a holiday built by hand. Built with intention. Built with thought.
And this year the day pulled my attention in a different way. Maybe it was the changes in the family. Maybe it was watching friends face hard seasons. Maybe it was becoming a father and feeling the holidays land in a new register.
There is a line often attributed to Confucius.
“A healthy man wants a thousand things. A sick man wants one.”
You feel that truth differently when there is a child sleeping down the hall.
December brings another rhythm. You meet more new people in three weeks than in the previous three months. A cousin arrives with a new boyfriend. A friend shows up with someone you have never met.
People ask what you do. How the year went. And you give the short version again.
A few weeks ago someone heard that we run a wine club working directly with winemakers. They raised an eyebrow. That must be very expensive.
We are not expensive. We try to stay lean. Most of what drives cost is logistics. Shipping has its own pulse. Glass rises. Storage rises. Nothing waits for anyone.
But the part most people never see is trust.
When you work directly with winemakers, you are tied into the rhythm of their season. When you pay on time, you support their entire year. Farmers depend on timing. Cash flow is not an accounting term for them. It is survival.
Your membership gives them stability at the moment they need it most.
Several winemakers asked me to pass along their thanks to you. The real kind of thanks. The kind that comes from someone who has watched frost creep across a vineyard and still gone out the next morning to prune.
All of this brought me back to a restaurant in the New York wine region, a place called Grana in Jamesport.
I used to visit often. Their pizza was great, but the soul of the place came from the owners.
Every year they closed the restaurant and flew to Italy to find ingredients worth sharing. Oils from tiny groves. Cheeses made by families they met. Tomatoes harvested before dawn.
They returned with things you would never find in a grocery store. And when they talked about them, it never sounded like a pitch. It sounded like honesty. Like someone returning from a long walk with a story.
We live in a world where products try to imitate that kind of story.
Even music is drifting that way. A few weeks ago a song titled Walk My Walk, by a fictional group named Breaking Rust, reached number one. It turned out to be an AI project.
People enjoyed it. Nothing wrong with that. It was designed to please.
But real musicians work differently.
They learn scales until their fingers ache. They write bad songs before they write good ones. Many will tell you that at some point the work has to hurt. That friction is where truth enters the sound.
When special effects arrived in film, they expanded the magic of the seventh art. But when music becomes frictionless, you lose the fingerprints. The breath. The tension. The tiny imperfections that prove a person was there.
Wine still gives you those fingerprints.
Unless you are drinking the mass produced stuff, you know exactly what I mean. Boutique winemakers put their entire season into each bottle. Their risks. Their terrain. Their hands.
Wine is not made to flatter you. It is made to be shared at a real table, with real people, in a moment that deserves it.
And that brings me to gifts.
You will see many people this month. Some familiar. Some new. If you want to give a gift that has meaning, consider wine.
A bottle forces you to think about the person receiving it. What they enjoy. What they might be curious about. A good gift teaches you something about them as you choose it.
The owners at Grana understood that. We try to do the same when we select wines for this club.
If you plan to give wine this season, our store makes it simple to send something thoughtful. And if someone in your life would enjoy being part of this community, a subscription is easy to share.
We are taking orders until December 14 to guarantee Christmas delivery with ground shipping.
Thank you from our team. And thank you from the winemakers whose year you help carry.
Warm regards,
Diego Samper
Bonner Private Wines
P.S. If you want help choosing bottles for specific people on your list, email me with a little about them. We are happy to guide you.
