For my fellow Austinites, the closest comparison is SXSW (South by Southwest.) The entire city shifts. Locals adjust. Streets swell. Every bar, restaurant, and café becomes part of the event, whether it intends to or not. Verona follows the same pattern—but instead of film, music, and tech, it becomes a living map of Italian wine. Barolo here, Etna there, Franciacorta at the next table. For one week, the country folds into itself.

This will be my third Vinitaly. Long enough to understand the cadence, but not so long that it has lost its charge. The days are structured—appointments, tastings, meetings—but they blur quickly. What remains distinct is the rhythm: the slow build, the midweek intensity, the late-week unraveling into something more human, more honest.

And within that rhythm, I’ve found my own ritual—a daily pilgrimage to Antica Bottega del Vino.

It’s there, just off the main thoroughfare, that everything converges. Not at the fairgrounds, but in a room that seems to absorb the energy of the entire week and give it shape. Everyone, eventually, ends up at Bottega Vini. And once you’ve been, you understand why.

What follows is an excerpt from Italianity—a reflection on that place, and on the role it plays during Vinitaly, when it becomes something close to sacred.

Bottega Vini: The Temple of Verona

By Jessica Dupuy

Verona is a city built on layers—Roman stone beneath medieval towers, Renaissance frescoes fading into café chatter, and always, always, the steady presence of wine. The Arena still holds echoes of ancient dramas and visitors may stop at Juliet’s balcony or sip a spritz in Piazza Bra, but those who know—even if only by intuition—make their way down Vicolo Scudo di Francia. It’s there, just off the main thoroughfare, that the city reveals one of its most sacred spaces: Antica Bottega del Vino. The weathered sign above the door reads simply, “Bottega Vini,” as if assuming you already know. And if you love wine, you probably do.

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In much of Italy—especially in regions like Lazio, Campania, and Tuscany—zucchini flowers are one of the clearest expressions of cucina povera: cooking that is guided not by luxury, but by immediacy, seasonality, and respect for what’s on hand. These blossoms are fleeting, delicate, and highly perishable, which is precisely why they’ve long been treated as a small seasonal luxury. You’ll find them stuffed and fried in Rome (fiori di zucca fritti), folded into pasta, or simply sautéed with a bit of olive oil and garlic.

The filling here—ricotta, vegetables, and a touch of Parmigiano-Reggiano—reflects a broader Italian instinct: building flavor through balance rather than excess. Ricotta brings softness and sweetness, Parmigiano adds depth and salinity, and the vegetables ground the dish in the garden. It’s not meant to be heavy or overworked; the goal is a filling that feels light, cohesive, and quietly expressive.

If you want a quick “taste map,” think of how this dish shifts across Italy: in Rome, often fried with mozzarella and anchovy; in the south, sometimes baked or folded into rustic tarts; in home kitchens, endlessly adapted depending on what’s growing nearby. The common thread is restraint—letting the flower itself remain the star.

These stuffed zucchini flowers lean toward that lighter, baked style. They’re simple, elegant, and deeply seasonal—best enjoyed warm, when the filling has just set and the blossoms still hold their delicate shape.

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This week, serving as a judge for the TEXSOM International Wine Awards, it didn’t feel like stepping into a professional obligation. It felt like stepping back into a room I’ve known for years. A room that, somehow, has continued without me, and yet still held my place.

That has everything to do with the people who built it. James Tidwell and Amie Hendrickson have kept this beat going for years now, quietly and consistently creating something that is far more than a competition. What they’ve assembled is a kind of gathering point. A place where the wine world, in all its corners, converges with purpose.

And then there are the judges. A familiar constellation of sommeliers, importers, distributors, retailers. These are people I’ve admired, learned from, debated with, and grown alongside. We’ve watched each other move cities, change roles, build businesses, raise children. The conversations now stretch well beyond what’s in the glass. They wander into book collecting, Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, fly fishing trips. Life, in other words.

We come from across the country, and beyond, but for a couple of days, we’re back in orbit together. And especially now, in a moment that feels unsettled for the wine world, that kind of proximity matters. It’s a reminder of why any of us started doing this in the first place.

If the TEXSOM Conference has always felt like summer camp, the Wine Awards feel like something else entirely. A retreat. A recalibration. Less noise, more focus. A return to the work itself.

Of course, there is also the work.

In my case, roughly 180 wines over two days. Flights that demand attention, calibration, conversation, and consensus. The rhythm comes back quickly. A quiet concentration, the shorthand between panelists, the small moments when a glass is passed across the table because something in it deserves a second opinion.

And then, for me this year, there was Texas. Sitting on a Texas-focused panel felt like another kind of return. A deeper one.

Many of you know that I got my start in wine writing covering Texas wine. It began simply enough. An assignment from Pat Sharpe at Texas Monthly: Is Texas wine good? Is it worth covering?

Around the same time, I attended the Drink Local Wine Conference, organized by wine writers like Jeff Siegel and Dave McIntyre. I had been invited by fellow organizer Denise Clarke, a longtime Texas wine publicist and advocate, and a dear friend.

It was the first moment Texas wine felt like more than a question. It felt like a story beginning to take shape.

And not coincidentally, it aligned with my very first TEXSOM Conference. I remember sitting through a full day of seminars in the Four Seasons Las Colinas ballroom, not yet realizing what was happening. That was the moment my life in wine began.

That was more than 15 years ago. (Give or take.)

What followed was more than a decade of telling the Texas wine story in profiles, reviews, road trips, long conversations in vineyards and tasting rooms. Texas wine wasn’t just a subject. It was a center point. My grounding force.

But at the same time, my wine world expanded. Outward, in every direction. Europe. The Southern Hemisphere. The American West. Each place adding its own layers with history, culture, climate, the thousand variables that shape what ends up in the glass.

Then, a couple of years ago, I stepped more fully away.

The work that became my forthcoming book, Italianity pulled me deep into another place entirely. It was a gift. One I owe to my co-author, Andrea Lonardi. But it also meant loosening my grip on Texas, letting that story continue without my constant presence.

Travel does that. It stretches you outward. But if it works the way it should, it also sharpens your understanding of home.

But how do you come back? How do you re-enter a place that hasn’t stood still? It turns out, you sit down at a judging table and taste.

Flight after flight this week, I recalibrated. It wasn’t just my palate. It was also my understanding. Almost immediately, it all came back. Like riding a bike. When questions from fellow tasters arose—about varieties, sites, producers—it felt instinctive to answer.

But what surprised me more wasn’t just the familiarity. It was the progress.

For years, Texas wine carried a certain narrative. A promising one, yes, but often framed as emerging, experimental, even a little “quaint.” A region finding its footing.

That’s no longer the story. What’s happening now is something more serious. More confident. Wines that not only meet the standards of a competition like TEXSOM, but belong there. Wines that invite curiosity from across the table. Wines that get passed from judge to judge, not out of politeness, but because they demand attention.

Grenache with bounce and finesse from the Hill Country. Coastal expressions of Blanc du Bois that felt precise. Teroldego glory from the High Plains. (Yeah, you read that right.) Rosés with intent. Fortified wines seem as destined for greatness as those from Madeira or the Douro Valley.

When you’ve been away for a while, that realization lands differently. It feels a bit like coming home to find that the people you’ve believed in all along have quietly gotten better. That the thing you invested your time and attention in has continued to evolve in the very best ways.

There’s pride in that. But there’s also something else.

It’s that feeling you get when you see an old friend and immediately reconnect. The feeling that no time has passed. That you’ve grown, and so have they. And that picking up the thread again doesn’t require starting over. It just requires showing up.

There’s no denying that the broader wine world feels uncertain at the moment. Declining sales, shifting cultural attitudes, economic instability. Right now, it’s easy to get caught in the noise. Easy to focus on what isn’t working in wine. But that’s not what stayed with me.

What stayed with me was how quickly it all came back. The pace of the table. The life updates between colleagues. The instinct to lean in when something in the glass demanded attention.

And Texas, no longer tentative and no longer asking permission, met that moment with wines that felt resolved, confident, and entirely its own. I had been away long enough to wonder what returning might feel like.

As it turns out, it didn’t feel like returning at all. It felt like picking up a conversation mid-sentence. It turns out I hadn’t lost my place. I had just stepped away from it. And now, I was back.

It’s still too soon to speak in detail about the wines. TEXSOM International Wine Awards will release results in the coming weeks, and they’re worth the wait. Until then, I’ll just say this: it was good to have a seat at the table.

Further north, tucked into the trees above St. Helena, Meadowood Napa Valley offers a particular kind of hush. Not spectacle, exactly, though it is beautiful enough for that. What stays with me there is space. Space between the cozy bungalows. Space in the air. Space to breathe.

I had hiked the ridge before, along the back of the property in 2022, not long after the 2020 fires, and returned again this winter. What struck me both times was not devastation so much as continuity. Blackened trunks beside new growth. A reminder that Napa’s story is not just architecture and allocation lists. It is land. It is recovery. It is the ongoing cost of keeping a place alive.

That makes Meadowood an especially apt setting as the home of the annual Wine Writers’ Symposium, a gathering devoted to the craft of wine writing and the people trying, in different ways, to keep that craft alive. For a few days in late February, it became a place where thought, conversation, ambition, vulnerability, and generosity could all occupy the same room.

The opening dinner set the tone. Bill Harlan offered remarks with the easy authority of someone whose name is inseparable from Napa’s modern mythology. Then came Jane Anson, the Bordeaux-based critic and author, who delivered the sort of encouragement that lands because it is both intelligent and unfussy: a reminder of how far each of us had already come to be there, and a simple directive to keep going.

The next morning, the Symposium moved quickly into what felt like its real ignition point: three short “Speed Talks” on wine’s relevance from Osayi Endolyn, the James Beard Award-winning culture writer, Dan Petroski, the former journalist and current Napa winemaker behind Massican, and Elaine Chukan Brown, the writer and global wine educator. Three speakers. Three sharply different minds. Three ways of approaching the same question from entirely different angles. It was an ideal opening move for a Symposium built around this year’s theme, Wine as Art and Science—the challenge of using both the left and right brain to communicate wine with clarity, intelligence, and feeling.

Osayi Endolyn approached wine as a living expression of collective genius rather than an isolated artifact of talent or luxury. Her remarks drew wine back into relationship: between people and land, history and culture, labor and care. In her framing, wine has relevance only when it is rooted in something reciprocal and human, not extractive or transactional. It was a reminder that wine is never just the product in the glass, but the tapestry of lives, systems, and communities that made it possible.

Dan Petroski came at the question from an entirely different direction, channeling economic history with the force of a monologue. Tracing wine through the Gilded Age, Prohibition, postwar growth, the 1980s boom, the dot-com era, and into today’s AI-fueled wealth cycle, he argued that wine’s relevance has always been shaped by money, media, and aspiration as much as by taste. Wine, in his telling, does not simply matter on its own terms. It becomes culturally potent when it aligns with new forms of prosperity, status, and shared lifestyle. If Osayi’s lens was relational and communal, Dan’s was structural: wine as a product whose importance rises and falls with the machinery of economics, attention, and desire.

Then Elaine Chukan Brown turned the room again, this time toward philosophy, story, and significance itself. Drawing on William James, they argued that meaning is never inherent in the object, but in the lives it has touched and altered. Wine is not important because we insist that it is; it becomes important when we situate it within the realities it has shaped—migration, survival, celebration, identity, economy, belonging. Their challenge to wine communicators was both quiet and radical: stop assuming wine’s relevance is self-evident. Stop writing as though the subject alone is enough. Instead, use wine as a lens through which to reveal the larger human story.

Each speed talk modeled exactly what the Symposium would continue asking of everyone in the room: to think about wine not as a narrow subject, but as a living one—scientific and sensory, economic and emotional, cultural and deeply human.

I won’t try to catalogue the rest of the Symposium too neatly. Partly because doing so would take more space than you care to spend time reading, but mostly because there was something intimate, almost protected, about the discussions that unfolded after those opening talks. Not secret, exactly. Just the kind of experience that loses something when over-explained. It had a sacred quality to it. Not in any grandiose sense, but in the way certain conversations feel when people are fully present, candid, and generous with one another.

This was my first year attending, though I had heard glowing reports from colleagues who had been there before as fellows or speakers. Very quickly, I understood two things: first, that you cannot quite explain everything that happens there and expect someone else to feel the same gravity of it. Some experiences really do belong, at least in part, to the people who were in the room. And second, that what you get from the Symposium is inseparable from what you are willing to bring to it.

The experience carried a steady current of seriousness and warmth running beneath everything. There were insider discussions on pitching, on broadening your editorial scope, on the increasingly difficult question of how to make a living in an uncertain industry. There were creative writing workshops, one-on-one mentorship sessions, and the sort of exchanges where you leave wondering who exactly was the mentor and who was the mentee. There were also excursions that reminded us wine writing cannot live on abstraction alone: a visit to Honig, where sustainability is not a slogan but a way of working, and a rainy, moody hands-on lecture in the soils of Continuum on Pritchard Hill with geologist Alex Maltman, where the landscape itself became part of the lesson. There was an elegant cellar dinner at Louis M. Martini with myriad Napa Valley producers, and there were also more casual moments—burgers and fries at Gott’s Roadside, easy laughter, bottles that moved well beyond the valley’s most expected shorthand.

What stayed with me most, though, was the larger realization that community matters more than many of us allow ourselves to admit. Especially as a freelance journalist based in Texas, where so much of my interaction with colleagues happens in passing—on assignment, in airports, between tastings, across borrowed tables—rather than in any communal office or around a conventional water cooler. The Symposium offered something rarer: sustained proximity, shared inquiry, the chance to think alongside other people who understand both the pleasures and precarities of this work. In that setting, it became clear that wine writing may often be practiced in solitude, but it is not, at heart, a solitary act.

If the Speed Talks lit the fuse, the closing remarks from John Brecher, the longtime Wall Street Journal wine columnist and editor, felt like a final, clarifying flame. Equally provocative and inspiring, a fitting sendoff for a Symposium devoted to both thought and truth. He reminded us of the importance of White Zinfandel, peeling back its familiar mythology to reveal something far more interesting than legend: truth. Its popularity, he reminded us, was not born of accident, but of intention. Of listening to what people actually wanted, rather than what the wine world thought they ought to want. His message widened into something larger and more urgent: that wine writing, at its best, is not about repeating inherited stories because they are charming, flattering, or convenient. It is about doing the work of finding what is real.

That charge landed with unusual force. It spoke not only to craft, but to character. Brecher reminded us that wine is so often only the doorway into bigger stories—about culture, class, commerce, identity, desire, and change—and that writers have the responsibility to approach those stories with honesty, skepticism, and care. By the time he finished, the room was on its feet, a hand wiping away a tear here and there.

It felt like a benediction of sorts. A final urging to leave the room and tell the truth.

And perhaps that is part of what makes the Symposium so difficult to fully explain once you’ve left it. Every year, I imagine, it becomes something slightly different for the people who pass through it. The conversations change. The chemistry changes. The questions, anxieties, and hopes each group carries into the room change too. What one cohort experiences together belongs, in some essential way, only to them. It cannot be replicated exactly for the group that came before, nor for the one that will come after. That fleetingness feels less like a limitation than part of the gift.

What seems to remain constant is this: you get from it what you are willing to bring. And if you approach writing as craft, as work that asks for rigor, humility, imagination, and care, perhaps you leave with even more than that. You come hoping to contribute a small piece to the larger puzzle of wine communication, and leave with something greater: a renewed sense that you are not just recording the story of wine, but helping to push it forward.

Maybe that is why I stayed an extra night at Meadowood. I needed the space for the experience to settle a little. For the conversations, challenges, and unexpected gifts of those days to find their grounding. (And for one more luxurious soak in the expansive tub.) Meadowood, with its hush and its trees and its room to exhale, felt like the right place for that. A place to take stock of what had been offered, and of what, quietly, I would be carrying away.

There is something about this place, the continuity of it, the calm, the sense of life persisting and reshaping itself, that seems to mirror the work itself. We come to it with what we know, what we question, what we fear, what we hope to say. And if we are lucky, we leave with clearer eyes, steadier purpose, and the feeling that we are part of something both deeply rooted and still growing. Perhaps that is what so many of us need right now as wine writers: not only sharper tools or fresher angles, but renewed faith that the work matters.

And that we do it better when we are not doing it alone.

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Not because I don’t love the valley. I do. In fact, I’ve found a new respect for it after several visits this winter. But Napa does not need another definitive list of wineries to visit, and to be very honest, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface myself.

The truth is, most people who come here aren’t looking for a spreadsheet anyway. They’re looking for something harder to define: a feeling. A premium time. (Let’s be honest, “Napa on a budget” is an oxymoron.) People come wanting to feel that they’ve arrived somewhere that represents the pinnacle of American wine.

And in many ways, Napa earned that perception.

This is the valley where Robert Mondavi gambled on the idea that California could compete with Europe. Where Joe Heitz, Warren Winiarski, and Mike Grgich helped prove it. Where the 1976 Judgment of Paris didn’t just surprise the French, it altered the trajectory of American wine. Where families like the Martinis, the Mondavis, the Phelps, and the Shafers built something from conviction long before it was fashionable.

That history wasn’t inevitable. It was built.

But Napa didn’t stop there.

Over the past few decades, it has also become a global luxury address. Vineyards trade at prices that would have stunned the pioneers. Tasting rooms feel architectural. Hospitality rivals resort culture anywhere in the world. New money, international investment, and generational wealth have reshaped parts of the valley into something polished, curated, aspirational.

At the same time, Napa is staring down the questions that come for every mature wine region: What happens when the founding generation fades? How do the next stewards balance land prices, consolidation, climate pressure, and inheritance? Can Cabernet remain both icon and identity in a shifting world?

Napa has evolved beyond a wine region, though it is still a very serious one.

Look beyond the labels and it becomes something larger: an idea. A projection. A performance of what people believe wine country should be.

And yet, beneath that polished surface, there is still a working valley.

Vineyard crews clock in before sunrise. Small producers operate quietly next to billion-dollar estates. Fire seasons and water access are not abstractions. This is not a theme park. It is agriculture wrapped in luxury.

The trick, at least for me, is letting those versions sit side by side.

The Spine of the Valley

Geographically, Napa is simple: two main arteries, Highway 29 and the Silverado Trail, running north to south like parallel thoughts. Between them, towns stitch the valley together: Napa at the base, then Yountville, Oakville, Rutherford, St. Helena, and Calistoga at the northern end where the air cools and the mineral springs still bubble.

Each town has its own rhythm.

Napa proper feels the most lived-in with restaurants, tasting rooms, and riverfront development layered over an agricultural past.

Yountville is compact and immaculate, culinary gravity condensed into a few manicured blocks.

Oakville and Rutherford are quieter, more vineyard than village. These are place names that read louder on labels than on storefronts.

St. Helena carries both polish and residue: historic storefronts sandwiched between Silverado and 29, tourists drifting in and out of long-standing hardware stores and tasting rooms.

Calistoga, at the top, still holds onto a slightly scruffier spa-town energy, relaxed, faintly rebellious.

You can drive the valley in under an hour. But that simplicity is deceptive. What unfolds between those two roads is layered and contradictory.

Where to Stay: Three Ways to Wake Up in Napa

Where you sleep in Napa quietly determines what kind of valley you experience. The altitude, the proximity to the roads, the density of the town around you, all of it shapes the rhythm of your days.

For me, it tends to fall into three modes: the ridge, the Southern Gate, and the woods.

The Ridge: When You Want the Valley to Feel Like a Dream

For all my caution about postcard Napa, there are times when you want the valley to feel like a carefully framed dream. If I’m going to lean into that version—quiet, high up, Cabernet vines falling away beneath me—I’m going to do it properly.

Sttupa Estate (formerly Poetry Inn) sits above the Stags Leap District off the Silverado Trail. It’s tiny. Adults-only. Less hotel, more being handed the keys to someone’s very glamorous private wine-country home. I’ve been hosted here before; as always, opinions are my own.

What keeps pulling me back isn’t just the outdoor showers or the architecture. It’s the return at dusk. You wind back up the hill, the staff quite literally welcomes you home, and then you watch the light slide down the valley from your terrace, glass in hand. The quiet feels intentional. Briefly, you feel rooted.

This is Napa as dreamscape. And sometimes, that’s exactly what you want.

The Southern Gate: When You Want Optionality

At the southern end of the valley, where Napa begins to blur into Sonoma and the air cools with Carneros fog, the energy shifts. This is the entry point, the Southern Gate, where the valley opens rather than narrows.

Carneros Resort and Spa works for me because it functions as a hinge. You wake up knowing you can pivot: north on Highway 29, up the Silverado Trail, or west toward Sonoma. It doesn’t insist on a single narrative for your trip.

Freestanding cottages with fire pits if you want privacy. Or, simply, cozy single rooms if you plan to be out most of the day and just need somewhere quiet to land. It’s less about performance and more about freedom, especially if you want your time here to feel fluid rather than choreographed.

The Woods: When You Want Space (and Perspective)

Further north, tucked into trees above St. Helena, Meadowood Napa Valley offers something different. I’ve been hosted here before, and what stays with me isn’t spectacle — it’s space.

I walked the ridge in 2022, not long after the 2020 fires, and again this winter, and what struck me wasn’t devastation but continuity. Blackened trunks standing next to new growth. A reminder that Napa’s story isn’t just architecture and allocation lists. It’s land, and the ongoing cost of keeping it.

Meadowood is an upper-tier stay, yes. But what it affords is a different kind of premium: room to exhale. Each bungalow feels like its own clearing. You return to trees, to quiet, to something that predates tasting notes and press releases.

It’s where “wine country” softens into actual country.

Where Napa Eats

The best meals I’ve had in Napa weren’t necessarily the most elaborate. They were the ones suggested by people who live here — winemakers, vineyard managers, friends who have to decide where to go on a Tuesday.

Mustards Grill still carries its 1980s origin story proudly. It is one of the early anchors of Napa dining long before Michelin stars multiplied and it feels like a through-line to the valley’s earlier chapter.

In St. Helena, mornings start at The Station. Coffee. Breakfast. No theatrics. Lunch rotates between Cook, Farmstead at Long Meadow Ranch, or Charlie’s — where the move is to sit at the bar and let the room unfold. (Or stop in to the bar at Charlie’s for a clever cocktail to offset wine tastings. I like The Red Eye, a gin/Aperol concoction with just the right hit of bitterness for balance.)

In Yountville, yes, there are temples of fine dining. But sometimes the smarter move is Burgers & Half Bottles, Thomas Keller without the ceremony, or the bar at Ad Hoc, where you can order à la carte and keep the evening loose. Bottega still carries the late Michael Chiarello’s Italy-meets-California spirit, and it’s one of the better places in the valley to chase a serious Italian bottle without leaving Napa.

In Napa proper, TORC hums. Cadet feels like where locals actually linger over interesting bottles. Il Posto satisfies when pasta is non-negotiable. Hog Island in the Oxbow keeps things briny and direct. (Oysters and Chowder are a must.)

And if the day has been nothing but Cabernet, Amami Sushi Bistro offers a quiet pivot — not just to sushi, but to sake. A small recalibration.

Then there’s Gott’s Roadside.

A burger and fries here feel less like indulgence and more like ritual. Every valley has its cathedral. In Napa, sometimes it comes wrapped in wax paper.

Letting the Versions Sit Side by Side

The mistake with Napa is thinking you have to choose which version is real.

The ridge fantasy.
The Southern Gate flexibility.
The wooded reset.
The Tuesday-night burger.
The legacy of Mondavi and the uncertainty of what comes next.
They all are.

If you let them coexist, both the aspiration and the agriculture, you leave with something far more interesting than a checklist.

If you’re looking for the logistical layer. The room numbers I request, how I structure three days without palate fatigue, where I spend and where I relax, I’ve put those notes in the paid Field Notes section.

I travel often enough that I’ve learned to separate philosophy from planning. The first is free. The second, thoughtfully organized, is not.

Field Notes: Napa

How I Actually Design a 3-Day Excursion

If the public essay is about understanding Napa, this is about moving through it well.

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There’s a certain kind of thirst that shows up out West. Not the “it’s hot and I need something cold” thirst. The other one. The itch to test a boundary.

We like our landscapes big and our answers a little unfinished. We like the idea that if you walk far enough, you’ll find something nobody has named yet. And when it comes to spirits, the kind with grit, there’s always been an unbridled streak in the Americas: Mexico’s agave defiance, rum’s maritime swagger, whiskey’s frontier stubbornness, pisco’s sunlit precision, the bitter botanical traditions that never fully belonged to polite society.

This is what I mean when I talk about Western Spirits. It’s more of a temperament than a geography lesson.

Which is precisely the type of thing my friend and Western Spirits co-concept creator, Morgan Weber knows how to express beautifully, and sometimes dangerously. Weber, beverage director for Agricole Hospitality in Houston and owner of Marfa Spirit Co. Morgan doesn’t just make drinks. He builds little arguments in glassware. And sometimes those arguments flirt with perfection in a way that makes you want another round… and also want him to stop before he ruins your evening by making the third one too good.

That tension between pleasure and precision is exactly where the West tends to live.

In 2014, he opened Coltivare in Houston’s Heights neighborhood, the premise was already promising with co-founder Chef Ryan Pera’s, garden-driven cooking with a deeply Italian DNA, and a room that felt like it belonged to the neighborhood rather than landing on it.

The cocktail program, though, almost outpaced the menu. Not because it was louder, but because it carried a mission. Weber wanted to go beyond just offering Italian riffs on cocktails. He wanted to use Italian bitterness as a language.

And he found his grammar in amaro.

For context, amaro (plural: amari) is a category of Italian herbal liqueur typically made by infusing a base spirit or neutral alcohol with a proprietary mix of herbs, roots, flowers, bark, seeds, and citrus peel, then sweetening it into something that lands somewhere between medicinal, aromatic, bitter, and comforting.

If you’re new to it, the most important thing to understand is this: amaro is more about regional footprint more than it is about a recipe.

Every village has some version of bitter herbal spirit culture. Italy simply institutionalized it, bottled it, named it, and then argued about it for a few hundred years. And you’ve likely seen them without realizing it—Averna, Montenegro, Campari, Fernet-Branca, Cynar, and Nonino—lined up behind the bar, waiting for their moment after dinner. Alpine amari can feel sharper, more resinous, more pine-and-gentian-driven. Southern styles often drift warmer, with citrus peel, baking spice, and deeper caramel tones. Some are mentholated or medicinal; others are round and cola-like; some are practically forest floor in liquid form.

Bitterness in amaro is just the beginning. It’s really identity. It’s place, habit, digestion, ritual, and stubbornness distilled.

For Weber, amaro was the through-line for this bar program. A way to teach people how to drink something unfamiliar without making them feel like they’d wandered into a lecture.

He stocked a deep bench—dozens of selections, many hard to find—and created a menu that used bitterness as a compass: not to overwhelm guests, but to give them a north star. A method. A medium.

Coltivare’s cocktail menu was meant to move with the seasons, following the logic of the kitchen. New produce, new dishes, new drinks. Rotation as philosophy.

But one cocktail turned into a permanent fixture. A fan favorite. The drink that caused quiet outrage if someone even hinted it might be rotated off the menu. That cocktail was The Ava Crowder.

Which is, on its face, a little absurd.

Because the name doesn’t come from Italian spirits history. It’s not an amaro producer. It’s not a monastery. It’s not an old-world apothecary. It’s not even Italian.

It’s Ava Crowder, the sassy, formidable blonde from FX’s neo-Western crime drama Justified, set in eastern Kentucky’s Harlan County (with the U.S. Marshals office based in Lexington). It was a series where everyone spoke in moral compromises and threats that sounded like poetry. (It was the precursor to Walter Goggins’ breakout fame.) Ava, played by Joelle Carter, isn’t just a character. She’s a reminder that charm and danger can share the same smile.

And that’s the drink.

A cocktail built on bourbon and Ramazzotti—a bitter-sweet-spiced amaro—then sharpened with lemon and complicated by an ingredient that feels like Texas leaning into the conversation: sorghum vinegar.

So you’ve got the Old World’s botanical bitterness meeting the American South’s molasses-grain soul. A cross-cultural handshake that turns into a grip test.

If you want to understand what I mean by Western Spirits—this is it. The West borrows, steals, adapts, and then dares you to say it isn’t authentic.

Ramazzotti is one of those gateway amaros that still has depth. It’s known for a layered botanical recipe (commonly cited as dozens of herbs and spices) and a profile that leans into orange peel and warming spice—cardamom, cinnamon, ginger-like heat—without losing the bitter backbone.

It’s bitter. It’s sweet. It’s spiced.

That’s Ava.

And then the sorghum vinegar shows up like a plot twist with just enough tang to turn the sweetness toward something more adult. More angular. It makes the drink feel like a marriage between Southern pantry logic and Italian after-dinner ritual.

A drink that tastes like: “I’m friendly, but don’t assume anything.”

Which is also, frankly, one of the West’s great mottos.

Weber once described the bar as a kind of playground for unfamiliar ingredients—getting bottles in front of people they didn’t yet have language for.

But the real lesson is simpler:

You don’t win people over by making bitterness disappear. You win them over by making bitterness appealing and meaningful.

And that’s why amaro works in the American West (and the wider Americas) better than we sometimes admit. Because bitterness is part of our palate story—coffee, cacao, char, smoke, citrus pith, agave bite, oak tannin, hop snap. We just don’t always call it “amaro.”

Weber did. And the Ava Crowder became the proof. Italian? A little bit. Southern. Not completely. Just honest boundary-pushing—built with respect.

The Ava Crowder (Coltivare)

• 1.5 oz bourbon

• 0.75 oz Ramazzotti

• 0.75 oz lemon juice

• 0.25 oz sorghum vinegar*

• 0.25 oz simple syrup

• 3 dashes Woodford Reserve Sorghum & Sassafras Bitters

Sorghum Vinegar*

• 2 parts Muddy Pond Sorghum Molasses

• 1 part Steen’s Cane Vinegar

Method

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker and shake vigorously. Double strain into a coupe glass. Garnish with two cherries.

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Pre-Order Italianity

Sometimes they arrive as a conversation in a car. Sometimes as a voice note. Sometimes as Andrea, a native Italian, and one of the sharpest strategic minds I know, standing in front of a room in Alto Adige, building an argument in real time with a flight of glasses and a language that feels more architectural than academic.

This piece began that way: as a recent presentation Andrea gave on tannins. On the surface, it was an exploration of texture—how tannins behave, how they move, how we describe them. But underneath, it was the kind of question that sits at the heart of Italianity: How do modern wine markets shape what we make? And how do we respond without sanding off the edges that make a place itself?

That tension is exactly what this book is trying to name.

Italianity is a collection of essays—some written outright by Andrea, some written fully in my own voice, and many formed the way this one was: collaboratively. My role in the project has often been to hear what Andrea is reaching for—what he means beneath the technical layer—then shape it into a written form that holds attention and carries the idea with clarity. Andrea brings the deep Italian grounding, the precision, the instinct for where the market is headed; I bring the editorial lens, the pacing, and the translation of thought into narrative.

In this essay, you’ll feel that collaboration at work.

What started as a structured tasting framework in Alto Adige became, in writing, something more personal: a reflection on why tannin is suddenly such a live-wire topic; why “less” has become a stylistic default; and why Italy—in particular—can’t afford to chase drinkability in a way that erases soul. Because in Italian wine, tannin isn’t simply a technical lever. It’s part of identity. It’s part of the table. It’s part of what we mean when we say Italianity, which is the culture of Italian wine, expressed through choices, not just regions.

Below is a small glimpse into the world we’re building in Italianity—and into the collaborative process behind it.

Now, Andrea.

Beyond Tannins: Italianity, Pleasure, and the Problem of “Less”

Andrea Lonardi MW

It began for me in the least romantic place: between two stainless-steel tanks.

Both samples were from the same harvest. Both were clean, healthy, full of promise. On paper they could have looked like variations on the same wine. Even aromatically they were close enough to be cousins—fresh fruit, a clear register, the familiar signals of a good year. But in the mouth they behaved like two philosophies.

One had been handled to satisfy a modern instinct: immediate charm, minimal resistance, a shape that would read as “light” and “easy” on first contact. The other carried more friction. More grip. But also more architecture. It didn’t merely taste of fruit; it felt like a place. And standing there with a pipette and two glasses, I realized the question isn’t whether we should chase lightness. The market is already asking for it. The real question is what we mean by lightness, and what we might lose if we interpret “less tannin” as “less identity.”

What tannin is—and why the conversation keeps returning to it

Tannin is the structural grammar of wine: a family of phenolic compounds that translate the raw material of grapes, and sometimes oak, into texture. We don’t smell it, but we experience it as grip, dryness, drag, bitterness, and the length of that tactile echo after we swallow. Tannins come primarily from grape skins and seeds, sometimes stems, and can be layered by wood. In many wines—most reds, some rosés, skin-contact whites—tannin is not decoration; it is a determinant of balance, colour stability, longevity, and the kind of pleasure that makes you reach for a second glass rather than a glass of water.

At the same time, tannin is not universal in its role. In delicate whites made without skin contact, the objective is often to minimise phenolics so bitterness doesn’t interrupt purity. This contrast matters because it clarifies the real point: tannin is not a virtue on its own. It is a tool whose value depends on how it carries a wine’s identity.

The market demand is real—but the response is not obvious

We’re living through a stylistic shift that is easy to feel and hard to define. There is a growing appetite for wines that are transparent, lifted, and drinkable. Wines with depth, but not weight. Many professionals, especially in fast tasting contexts, also tend to taste increasingly with the nose. Aromatic clarity becomes the headline, and the mouth becomes an afterthought.

But the consumer doesn’t drink with a notebook. The consumer drinks with food, with conversation, with repetition. And when you drink that way, tannin stops being a technical subject and becomes an emotional one: it’s the difference between a wine that accompanies life and a wine that demands endurance. The market isn’t asking us to remove structure. It’s asking us to make structure pleasurable.

So here is the question I keep returning to, especially as an Italian: How do we use tannin management to meet this demand without stripping wines of their sense of place—without losing Italianità?

Because Italian wine, more than most, is built on variety and nuance. We have grapes where tannin is not just present; it is part of the dialect. To neutralise tannin indiscriminately is to remove accent. The wine may become easier, but it also becomes harder to recognize.

The danger is not modernity, it is sameness

The temptation is to answer the market with a single solution: “Make it softer.” But softness is not a style. It is a sensation. And sensations can be manufactured.

Italy cannot afford to confuse “elegance” with “generic.” If we shape every wine toward the same smooth silhouette, we may produce bottles that are immediately agreeable—and quietly anonymous. The most damaging form of homogenization is the one that feels like progress.

Italianity, for me, is not heaviness. It is not rusticity. It is not aggression. It is the choreography of balance. How fruit, acidity, and texture work together so that a wine belongs at the table and still carries the clarity of its origin. Tannin is one of the main ways that choreography becomes physical.

A method, not a manifesto

This is why I prefer to speak about method rather than ideology. I am not here to defend tannin as a tradition. I am here to defend meaning.

When we say “tannins,” we often speak as if the word describes one thing. It doesn’t. If we want to manage tannin without losing identity, we need to separate what we feel into components we can actually use.

Quantity: Volume and Density

There is volume, how intense the tannin sensation is. And there is density, how concentrated and tight that sensation feels. A wine can have modest volume and still feel tightly built; it can feel loud but not truly structured. This distinction matters because the market often reacts against volume when what it really resists is density that feels static and drying.

Quality: Structure and Form

Then there is structure, whether tannin is simple and linear or complex, with depth and dimension. And there is form, the tactile identity: silky, powdery, sandy, adhesive, abrasive, prickly, drying, raw. This is not poetic decoration. It is precision. If we can’t name the tannin, we can’t shape it without erasing it.

A wine doesn’t need to be tannic to be serious. But if it is tannic, it needs to be intelligible. The goal is not “less.” The goal is “right.”

Dynamics: Does It Move?

One of the great misunderstandings of tannin is that we treat it as static. In reality, the most important question may be: does it move? Some tannins arrive and lock the mouth; they amplify dryness and mute everything after. Others travel, hook, release, and return. A dynamic tannin can be present and still be pleasurable. A static tannin can be moderate and still be exhausting.

Time: Unripe, Ripe, Evolving

Finally, tannin has its own maturity arc. We often talk about ripeness only in fruit. But tannin can be unripe, ripe, or evolving. Those stages change how a wine reads as “fresh” or “hard,” “precise” or “severe.” Without that time dimension, we confuse youth with flaw and restraint with absence.

Where Management Becomes Culture

Yes, tannin can be managed in the vineyard and the cellar: selection, ripeness, extraction choices, pressing, oxygen, élevage. But for me, tannin management is also a cultural act. It is a choice about what kind of pleasure we believe in.

If you want wines that live at the table, then tannin must be shaped to support that life. That does not mean sanding a wine into neutrality. It means building a tannin that frames fruit without bitterness, that holds length without harshness, that keeps the wine legible as a place.

And it means remembering that service is part of respect: temperature, glass, time open. These are not cosmetic. They can reveal tannin’s movement, soften its edges, and return a wine to its intended posture.

The Future is Not Tannin-less. It is More Articulate.

The market is teaching us something useful: people want clarity. They want authenticity. They want wines that don’t perform.

But clarity is not achieved by subtraction alone. Sometimes clarity is achieved by better architecture. A wine with no resistance can be charming. But also forgettable. A wine with the right resistance can be both pleasurable and unforgettable, because it carries its origin in the mouth, not just in the story.

So when I stand between two tanks, tasting two possible futures, I don’t ask which one has less tannin. I ask which one will still taste like itself in five years, and which one will still taste like itself in the world.

That is the work: to meet the demand for drinkability without surrendering identity. To make wines that are lighter, yes, but not emptied. Wines that are precise, yes, but not anonymous.

In Italy, we have a word for that kind of precision with soul.

We call it Italianity.

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That’s not an insult. It’s the bargain the grape makes with California: sun, ripeness, volume, swagger. In the best versions, that swagger turns into charisma with wildberry perfume, peppery lift, and a kind of joyful excess. In the worst versions, it becomes a mask: heat posing as intensity, sweetness posing as generosity, oak posing as seriousness. You can usually spot Zin in a blind tasting because it announces itself before it says anything interesting.

But this week, at a blind tasting study session, a 2022 old-vine Zinfandel did the opposite.

It didn’t arrive with the usual megaphone. It was a light-touch wine, remarkably composed, yet it kept unfolding. Its complexity revealed fruit in motion, lifted structure, and a clear, reflective finish. It felt like the structure had been built into the wine long before anyone touched a pump, a sorting table, or a barrel regimen.

It made me ask a question that’s been nagging at me for years, but that we don’t say out loud often enough in California: What if a big chunk of what we call “quality” is actually just control? And what if control is the thing that routinely strips wine of the very complexity we claim to chase?

I’d already heard an answer to that question. I just hadn’t tasted it this clearly until that blind wine—a Zinfandel. I was undone. It turns out the wine was from Bedrock Wine Company in Sonoma, the brainchild of celebrated winemaker Morgan Twain-Peterson, MW. I should have known. As I sipped that last ounce or so of the wine—this time savoring it, rather than spitting and analyzing it—I remembered a conversation with Twain-Peterson on the podcast Another Bottle Down, which I co-host with colleague Mark Rashap. I went back to that recording from December 2024, between Mark and Morgan and there I found the answer to my questions…

That 2022 Zin didn’t just remind me of Twain-Peterson because he’s associated with heritage vineyards and California history. It reminded me because the wine moved like his mind: skeptical of dogma, allergic to cosmetics, and deeply invested in the idea that the most modern things we can do in California might look suspiciously like the past—field blends, wide spacing, living soils, earlier picking, and a refusal to sort the world into neat categories.

What follows is not a tasting note. It’s closer to a field report. Because what Twain-Peterson is really talking about—beneath the romance of “old vines”—is how complexity survives. And why it so often doesn’t.

Heritage isn’t nostalgia. It’s surviving evidence.

Twain-Peterson uses the word heritage deliberately, and the distinction matters. “Old vines” can turn into a fetish. A marketing badge. But in truth, “heritage” implies a responsibility—something inherited that you can either keep alive or squander.

One of Twain-Peterson’s most useful reminders is that California’s “New World” label is true and also simplistic. The Old World is old, but let’s not forget that it also got reset at about the same time the New World was getting started. When phylloxera tore through Europe in the late 19th century, vineyards were decimated and replanted. California has its own vineyard history, and because of our climate—aridity, lower disease pressure, certain pockets of sandy soils—we’ve kept living material that is also old in global terms. In fact, some of the vineyards Twain-Peterson works with date to the 1880s, which puts them in the same age conversation as the oldest post-phylloxera replantings across much of Europe.

When researching for his Master of Wine final paper, Twain-Peterson went back through state records, nursery logs, and period writings. It was to prove that California plantings had intention—that they weren’t scattershot. We tend to see the modern story that those vineyards were a chaotic grab bag of grapes. But he found the more interesting reality: there was intent. There were theories. There was international awareness. People were reading, traveling, importing, trialing, recording. California wasn’t a provincial backwater in the 1880s; it was looking at Europe’s crisis and seeing an opening. In truth, it was building a vineyard future with surprising deliberateness.

And as Twain-Peterson would find, those vineyards, in some cases, are still here.

What makes this heritage material genuinely thrilling isn’t the Instagram-ready “old vine” narrative. It’s the genetic strangeness: vineyards interplanted with 30, sometimes 35 varieties—some of them now rare in Europe, some extinct where they originated, some with no matching genetic fingerprint. This is Indiana Jones material. It’s biological archaeology.

In the United States, we tend to talk about wine like it’s a product category. Twain-Peterson talks about it like it’s a surviving record of agricultural imagination.

The economics of forgetting

Twain-Peterson has no illusion of how California old vines have disappeared over the years. The path is very clear. They became economically inconvenient. His map of pressures is blunt: housing pressures, rising labor costs in regions where old-vine farming can’t be automated easily, and the simple gravitational pull of Cabernet economics in Napa. A grower can do everything right and still find themselves squeezed by the reality that “even kind of bad Cabernet” can command prices that outperform heritage varieties.

But Twain-Peterson also points to something more human and more fixable: deferred maintenance and extractive farming.

There’s a widespread myth that old vines inevitably yield almost nothing. Twain-Peterson agrees that yields become more balanced as vines age, but he also argues that many “failing” old vineyards are failing because they’ve been treated like mines: take crop, don’t replenish soil, don’t interplant missing vines, run heavy tractors through the rows repeatedly, till too much, break soil structure, compact clay, erode topsoil, drain life from the system. Eventually the conclusion feels natural: rip it out. And importantly, the vines at risk here aren’t hypothetical “ancients”—they’re often vineyards 50 years old and beyond, where yields are still viable if the system hasn’t been stripped.

But he argues that the vineyard didn’t “die.” It was simply exhausted.

This is where “heritage” stops being a pretty word and becomes an indictment. If a vineyard is a living archive, the tragedy isn’t merely losing old vines; it’s losing them because we couldn’t be bothered to maintain the conditions that allow them to continue being alive.

Twain-Peterson’s first step, when he enters these situations, isn’t a new clone or a shiny technology. It’s a question that feels oddly old-fashioned now.

If you want the philosophical center of Twain-Peterson’s approach, it’s here:

“Every single time you till, you break up soil structure.”

That one sentence is doing a lot of work. It’s agronomy, yes, but it’s also a worldview.

Modern viticulture often treats the vineyard like a controlled environment. We engineer. We tidy. We clean. We sterilize. We manage variability out of the system. We try to make the vineyard predictable, and then we try to make the wine precise.

Twain-Peterson’s critique isn’t that precision is bad. It’s that a lot of our “precision” is actually destruction disguised as management, particularly when it comes to soil.

Tillage has been leaned on heavily, including by many organic programs, because it’s a way to manage weeds without herbicides. But Twain-Peterson calls out the hidden cost: you’re breaking structure, burning carbon, exposing microbes to UV, and repeatedly interrupting the very cycles that create resilience. In a place like California, with intense sun and long dry seasons, those interruptions add up.

So what does he do instead?

He describes a sequence that sounds simple until you realize how much time it demands. It starts with compost, sometimes laced with biochar, because certain sites need a real jump start before anything else can take hold. Mechanical intervention comes next, but only when it’s necessary: deep spading as a one-time move to break up soil that’s effectively turned to concrete, when roots have no pathway and nothing living can penetrate. After that, the real foundation is roots in the ground—and not just the vines, but a deliberately diverse cover-crop community, a spectrum of five to six plant families returned year after year.

From there, the work becomes almost radical in its patience: shifting toward no-till systems, bringing in sheep for high-density mob grazing early in the season, letting the cover crops regrow, and then crimping them down into a thick, protective thatch that slowly creates topsoil, builds organic matter, shades and cools the ground, and improves infiltration. This is where the conversation crosses from “good farming” into climate adaptation, because it changes what the vineyard can actually endure—especially for the truly old sites dating back to the late 1800s, where longevity is inseparable from how the system is cared for.

Twain-Peterson talks about soil organic matter as a metric for whether the vineyard can hold water, buffer heat, sustain life without constant outside inputs. According to him, each one percent increase in soil organic matter can meaningfully increase water holding capacity per acre. In a state like California, where water defines everything, that’s a crucial point.

Field blends: complexity by design, not accident

If soil work is the foundation, Twain-Peterson’s other central obsession is what those old vineyards look like when you stop trying to convert them into something simpler—especially the interplanted heritage sites, some planted in the 1880s, that still contain dozens of varieties in a single vineyard.

Most of us are trained, culturally, to treat wine like a recipe. Americans love to know the blend percentages. We cling to the knowledge of whether a wine is 67% or 72% Cabernet, 12% or 9% Merlot as if it will somehow give us some better understanding of everything involved in getting the wine to the glass. We talk about varietal makeup as if it’s a blueprint for flavor.

Twain-Peterson leans into the Old World ways, where the wine is the site, the producer is the voice, the blend is a tool, not a headline. Vieux Télégraphe is Vieux Télégraphe. Beaucastel is Beaucastel. They carry their identity as places, not as math problems.

“I find that a lot of times… complexity has been sorted out of the wine… all the complexity is found on the margins.”

Read that carefully. It’s not just a jab at optical sorting. It’s a warning about a whole mentality.

To Twain-Peterson, when you sort relentlessly, you aren’t merely removing rot and MOG. You are often narrowing the wine toward the safest middle… toward fruit that behaves, chemistry that’s predictable, phenolics that match expectations. You’re editing out the oddities, the small imperfections, the grapes that don’t fit the model. And in doing so, you can remove the very things that create layers—co-pigmentation dynamics, aromatic precursor interactions, subtle structural contrasts.

Twain-Peterson points to research comparing co-fermented field blends versus separately vinified varieties later blended. The molecular fingerprint differs. Complexity can’t always be reconstructed like Lego. Sometimes it has to be grown and fermented together to exist.

Even the Ridge example he mentions—pure Zin blocks failing to make the final cut while interplanted blocks show complexity early—functions as a real-world rebuke to the “single-variety purity” myth. It’s not that pure Zinfandel can’t be great. It’s that the old-vine field blend model can generate a kind of complexity that is not easily engineered after the fact.

This is where the 2022 blind wine snaps into focus for me. The quiet complexity of that glass didn’t feel like a polished product. It felt like an ecosystem speaking.

The winery: early picks, large wood, and oak you don’t “see”

It would be easy to paint Twain-Peterson as a “natural wine” partisan, but it’s more accurate to say he’s explicit about being non-dogmatic. He believes in progressive agroecology and soil science, and he doesn’t feel the need to borrow mysticism to justify it.

In the cellar, his baseline tenets amount to pragmatic restraint: minimal inoculation, favoring native ferments whenever possible, with exceptions only when conditions truly demand it, along with native malolactic when feasible. He also picks earlier to preserve freshness and avoid the high-octane caricature the Zin category has earned. He notes this can also support healthier fermentations and reduce the need for later “rescue” operations. And when it comes to élevage, he keeps a generally light hand with oak, using wood as a quiet structural tool rather than a dominant signature.

He makes a point that every serious winemaker recognizes but few say plainly: In California, it’s easy to make big wines. The harder thing is to build balance, grace, and what he calls ballast—a sense of weight without heaviness, presence without heat.

His oak choices follow that goal. For Zinfandel-based wines, he leans toward larger vessels—puncheons, demi-muids, foudres—tools that can add oxygen management and textural polish without drowning the wine in flavor.

“The best oak is oak that you don’t see.”

What I heard underneath the words

In short, Twain-Peterson’s stance is that complexity is not something you can demand from nature with force. It’s something you cultivate by creating conditions where complexity is allowed to emerge—and then by resisting the urge to over-edit it out of existence.

That stance has consequences.

It means you can’t talk about “heritage vineyards” without talking about economics, labor, and the temptation to tear them out. It means you can’t talk about “light-touch Zinfandel” without talking about farming systems that change water retention and soil temperature. It means you can’t talk about “terroir expression” while ignoring the industrial impulse to sort, sanitize, and standardize.

It also suggests something that California is only beginning to admit: the future may require us to abandon some of our proudest modern habits. Wider spacing. Less bonsai viticulture. More shade. More biological diversity. Field blends not as novelty, but as strategy. A reorientation from control to resilience.

That 2022 old-vine Zinfandel—quiet, complex, remarkably composed—felt like a preview of that future. Not because it was trendy or nostalgic, but because it was structurally sane. It tasted like truth.

In the end, that’s why the wine brought me back to this conversation. Twain-Peterson is trying to keep a set of living records alive—some of them planted in the late 1800s—and to farm them in a way that makes them more viable in the world we’re heading into.

And maybe that’s the real point: California doesn’t just need more great Zinfandel. It needs more people willing to defend complexity as a value—especially when complexity is inconvenient, unscalable, and resistant to neat narratives.

Because if complexity truly lives on the margins, then the question isn’t whether we can taste it. The question is whether we can afford to keep it.

I was minoring in French and had studied it for six years, but living in Texas wasn’t doing much for my fluency. So I opted for a study-abroad program in Strasbourg, which included a political internship (my major) and, more importantly, almost guaranteed I’d have to rely on speaking French—unlike Paris, where you can try all you want and still be answered in English.

I lived with a lovely woman named Michelle, the quintessential Alsatian grandmother. She cooked regional dishes every night for dinner, and I never had the same thing twice. Cheese was always the last course—one reason I gained a few pounds during my tenure—and she always served wine, poured from a traditional clay carafe. It was a white blend that seemed to go with everything she put on the table. I’d later learn it was a simple Edelzwicker, a blend of the noble white grapes of Alsace.

I loved how the wine was just there, part of the table every night. Nothing fancy, nothing for show, just something we splashed into simple glass tumblers to sip alongside our food. If you’d told me then that I would eventually make wine part of my career, I would have laughed. If you’d also told me I was living in one of the regions with the most diverse soils in the world, one where vineyards sat in the crosshairs of military fire during two world wars, and whose wines from this culturally rich French–German borderland would become some of the most recognizable in the world, I would have paid better attention.

I’ve returned to Alsace a few times since living there in my youth. Each time I feel a pang of nostalgia, coupled with a twinge of guilt for not having taken better advantage of my extended stay there. If only I had known.

My appreciation for Alsace doesn’t begin with wine, though. It begins with the food, the half-timbered architecture, the people who welcomed a Texan student into their kitchens and cellars.

Still, if you’re going to go back and incorporate wine into the mix, here’s how I would do it.

I’m not going to hand you a blow-by-blow itinerary for a week in Alsace. But I will give you a few things you can’t miss. It’s easy enough to get there: fly into Paris, then catch a TGV high-speed train to Strasbourg, which sits at the northern tip of the wine region—and from there, the story really starts.

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Some ideas take time to declare. They live in a person first—circling, sharpening, pressing for language—until the right moment brings them into the open. That’s how Italianity first came to me: I watched Andrea Lonardi give it a name. I met Andrea in Montalcino while visiting for an interview that I assumed would be about vineyards and cellar choices. Instead, I found myself listening to a man carrying a bigger vision with real urgency. He kept returning to the same conviction: Italian wine carries an identity you can feel across the peninsula—held in landscape, in ritual, in hospitality, in the social life around the table.

Andrea was born into a farming life, grew into an agronomist, then a winemaker, before stepping into boardrooms to navigate global markets. It was a route marked by returns and reinventions. It forged the clarity and urgency behind what he calls Italianity.

I saw that same insistence again later in Valpolicella, Andrea’s home region, during an Amarone deep-dive that moved from vines to harvest decisions to the fruttai—the drying rooms where grapes rest and concentrate before becoming Amarone. He guided a team of sommeliers and journalists through the work with restless conviction, always asking what the land could say if we listened more closely. Over lunch one afternoon, with tortellini in brodo, charcuterie, and hand-rolled pasta in ragù scattered around the table, the conversation widened into the future. With climate change shifting old limits of ripeness, Andrea began to imagine a new register for Valpolicella Classico and Superiore: wines of transparency and tension, built on indigenous grapes—Corvina, Corvinone, Rondinella—capable of the lift and contour of Pinot Noir, but with a distinctly Italian signature. He had coined a word for this idea as well, Pinosophy. The idea exemplifies Italianity in motion, Italian wine’s signature, tuned to what’s next.

“You have a book in you,” I told him after lunch. “You clearly have something to say with this idea of Italianity.”

He looked up, and I could feel the gearshift. The book started there: I didn’t supply the idea—I offered to help it become legible, build its scaffolding, and guide it toward readers.

In Italy, italianità has long meant more than citizenship or geography. It’s a lived philosophy—an instinct for beauty, a devotion to craft, a flair for ritual, a way of moving through the world with conviction and grace. It shows up in design and gesture, in how lunch stretches into late afternoon, in the way a city square becomes a stage. In wine, that same sensibility becomes Italianity: a shared imprint of color, aroma, and texture that seems to travel from the Alps to the islands, no matter how different the dialects, landscapes, and grapes may be.

You can taste it most clearly in Italian reds: the pale ruby transparency that somehow holds its spine with age; the bittersweet lift on the nose—chinotto, orange peel, bergamot, alpine and Mediterranean herbs—that feels less like a list of descriptors than a memory of aperitivo hour; the tension on the palate where tannin, acidity, and savoriness don’t compete so much as harmonize. And then there’s what Andrea calls il gancio, “the hook.” It’s that familiar, satisfying motion across the palate that doesn’t just finish, but rises and grabs you as it hits the back of the tongue. Wines with il gancio seem to arc forward and upward, pulling you into the next sip. It’s something you recognize once you’ve felt it.

Italianity is that recognition. And it’s the animating idea behind our book.

Why Make a Book Out of a Feeling?

Because Italian wine is often explained as a patchwork: hundreds of grapes, dozens of regions, a thousand micro-stories. That’s all very true. And it’s part of what makes it irresistible. But Andrea kept returning to a different truth: beneath the mosaic lies connective tissue. A family resemblance. A national signature that announces itself before the details do.

A book is the right format for that kind of exploration because Italianity isn’t a checklist—it’s a journey. It’s a story, memory, argument, or conversation. It needs room to breathe.

To be clear, this book is not meant to replace the region-by-region guides that so many of us love. Those books are essential, and we point readers to them. But Italianity is interested in something adjacent: the soul behind the facts. The shared character that links Nebbiolo to Nerello Mascalese, Sangiovese to the borderland varieties of the north; the cultural rhythms that shape how Italians grow grapes, make wine, and gather at the table.

What Italianity Means to Andrea

Andrea’s relationship to Italianity began as a hard lesson, learned far from home.

At 29, despite his academic degrees and his roots in a vigneron family in Valpolicella, his first real education came on the sidewalks of New York. He was selling Italian wine for Frederick Wildman with a bag of samples and a head full of technical knowledge. And he was failing. Until a veteran salesman named Maurizio took him aside and changed everything.

“Put it away,” Maurizio told him, looking at the wine bag. “Today, we are Italian.”

They didn’t open a single bottle. They drank espresso, ate pasta, talked about football and fashion, and leafed through the Gazzetta dello Sport. And by the end of the day, Andrea had sold more wine than he had all month. That day, he learned that Italian wine wasn’t just a product. It was culture, carried in the body. Represented through hospitality, taste, ease, and connection.

That lesson followed him back to Italy as he moved through the country’s wine landscape—Valpolicella to Sicily to Tuscany to Piedmont—always resisting the temptation to “copy and paste” someone else’s map.

Italianity, for Andrea, is a promise to stay faithful to place while still pushing forward: innovation that serves tradition without replacing it. It’s also personal. A way of describing what he carries with him, even when he’s not in Italy. The deeper meaning of being Italian, expressed through wine.

What Italianity Means to Me

I’m not Italian. Which is exactly why this project grabbed me.

My role in this book is to be both witness and translator. To ask the questions an insider might not think to ask. To notice the details an Italian might no longer see because they’re embedded in daily life. To stand beside Andrea, sometimes riding shotgun, sometimes pressing him: Okay, but what does that actually mean? Why does it matter?

Italianity, to me, is an invitation: to move beyond tasting notes and into context—landscape, history, economics, ritual, identity. It’s the “why” behind the flavors we love.

Who Italianity is For

This book is for anyone who already loves Italian wine—or feels curious about why it gets under your skin.

It’s for collectors and casual drinkers. Sommeliers and winemakers. Travelers who chase trattorias and mountain light. Readers who want the culture with the Cabernet (or rather, the culture with the Sangiovese). It’s also for the next generation—people who don’t want to be talked down to, but do want to be welcomed in. If you’ve ever felt that Italian wine carries a kind of emotional voltage—beauty plus grit, history plus immediacy—this is for you.

We hope readers take away a clearer sense of what makes Italian wine Italian. You’ll meet people who embody the culture behind the wines: growers, winemakers, thinkers, builders, caretakers of tradition, and catalysts for change. You’ll taste Italy as a lived place, rather than routes on a map.

From this Substack pillar, you’ll get something different, namely, behind-the-scenes insights and new ideas from Andrea. Field notes, quick portraits, extra tastings, cultural detours, scenes that didn’t fit the manuscript but belong to the journey. We’ll explore Italianity as it shows up in the glass—yes—but also in the gestures around it: the aperitivo hour, the architecture of a hillside town, the stubbornness and tenderness of regional identity, the ways Italy resists being flattened into a single story.

In the first months of 2026, as we count down to the book’s release in Italy in April and the U.S. in May, my goal is simple: to whet your appetite. To give you a felt sense of what we’ve been building. To offer Italian wine enthusiasts more than just a preview, but something you can read alongside the wines you’re already drinking, and the places you’re already longing to return to.

Because Italianity isn’t only a concept. It’s a pattern you begin to recognize. A hook you begin to chase. And once you feel it, it’s hard to taste anything else the same way again.

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But I will say this: I can still picture the early days—me trying to understand Texas wine well enough to write about it with integrity, and Chris building the dream: a Texas winery, William Chris Vineyards, out in the Hill Country town of Hye, that would grow into one of the state’s more influential brands. Different jobs. Same instinct: this place matters, and it can be better than people think.

This edition of Direct to Press sits within what I’m calling a “Back to My Roots” pillar—pieces that return to the subjects I’ve lived with the longest and still care about the most. Texas wine is one of those subjects. Yes, it may read as niche. But the questions that Texas is wrestling with right now—standards, identity, distribution, hospitality, staffing, and how to turn attention into durable momentum—aren’t unique to Texas. They’re the same questions every growing wine region faces the moment it starts getting noticed.

Somewhere along the way, Chris gave me a framework I’ve adopted and used ever since—at dinner tables, in my family, and in debriefs after long days on the road:

What was your rose?
What was your thorn?
What was your seed?

He liked it so much he turned it into an actual wine, Rose, Thorn, Seed: a red blend from La Pradera Vineyard in the Texas High Plains.

So when we sat down on stage earlier this week at the Texas Hill Country Wine Symposium for a one-on-one interview—one that was meant to pull back the curtain behind the curtain on business—it felt right to use that same framework as a way to talk about where Texas wine stands right now.

Because Texas is getting national attention, and at an increasing rate over the past few years. Attention is a funny thing in wine: it’s flattering, sure. But it’s also clarifying. It tells you where the ceiling is. And it shows you, very quickly, what’s working—and what isn’t—through an outside lens.

Texas wine is at a bit of a crossroads. Having covered it for nearly two decades, I’ve watched it grow in exponential ways. Winery licenses have increased. Vineyard plantings have expanded. And, most importantly, quality has risen, even if not always at the same rate as the category’s growth.

Along the way, Texas has earned real national visibility: coverage from publications ranging from Wine Enthusiast and Imbibe to Food & Wine and Decanter. Critics including JamesSuckling.com and Jonathan Cristaldi of Cristaldi & Co have visited, tasted, and released reports that include genuinely high-scoring wines. Texas Monthly now publishes an annual evaluation of top Texas wines based on blind tastings with Master Sommeliers. And competitions—from San Francisco International to TEXSOM to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo—continue to award Texas wines across a wide range of categories and styles.

But it’s one thing to receive attention. The more consequential question is: what do you do with it?

What follows is a recap of that interview that shines a light on how William Chris Vineyards has charted its path through standards, systems, hospitality, and an unrelenting focus on farming and relationships. And at the end, I’ll add a few follow-up points pulled from recent critic and sommelier feedback to reinforce where Chris’s perspective aligns with what the broader market is rewarding right now, and where Texas still has an opportunity to tighten the screws to keep this momentum.

The Roses
Chris’s rose is a world-class mindset that shows up in unglamorous places and never disappears when things get busy. When you ask him for William Chris’s values, he answers with an acronym that sounds like a cowboy cussword but operates like a compass: WOFUC.

World Class. Own It. Fun. Unity. Courage. “World class,” in his definition, isn’t a vibe. It’s the cumulative force of standards and systems that hold under pressure: the glass door without fingerprints, the bathrooms without chipped paint, the parking lot without trash, the case carried to the car every time. None of it is complicated. That’s the point. The small things compound into trust—and trust turns into return visits, club sign-ups, and guests who tell the story for you.

That philosophy dovetails with Texas wine’s real advantage right now: proximity and hospitality. Outside tasters have said versions of the same thing lately—Texas is close to major cities with an affluent weekend audience, and the wine-country experience is improving fast. Chris has built William Chris as if that advantage is sacred. He measures great days in the most human metric possible: the moments when guests are moved enough to say, sometimes with tears, “this was one of the best days.” Because wine isn’t only what’s in the glass. It’s what people attach to the glass.

And then there’s the deeper rose that anchors all the rest: Chris’s “farmer first” identity, and the grower story as the main story. Years ago, I once joined him on a restaurant sales visit, and he introduced himself as a farmer. It revealed his worldview and how he weighs the importance of what’s in the glass. It’s consistent with how he talks about the hardest part of the chain: not winemaking, not even selling, but farming high-quality grapes consistently despite adversity.

That’s why William Chris grades growers and blocks, and why they’ll walk away from a site or variety that can’t deliver long-term, even if the grower is working their tail off. Because if Texas is going to be legible year after year on a national stage, the wines can’t be engineered to impress; they have to read as true. And “true,” in his framing, starts in the vineyard, when the land is doing the talking, and the cellar has the restraint to let it.

The Thorns
For Chris, the thorns begin with story discipline. He has little patience for the narrative Texas wine still defaults to: it’s so hard to grow grapes here. Hail, tornadoes, late freezes, heat. Yes, it’s hard. But it’s hard to grow grapes everywhere. In his mind, leading with hardship isn’t a useful identity or marketing frame, it’s a distraction from the more interesting and more powerful story: place. If you only get a handful of minutes with press, buyers, or visitors, why spend them on adversity when you could be building desire?

What he wants in its place is a terroir-forward story told with the confidence of a serious region—and ideally in more unified language. High-elevation winegrowing in the Texas High Plains. The ancient seabeds of the Llano Uplift. The Pedernales River basin. This should be the foundation for why the wines taste the way they do and why the place matters. Texas has great terroir. The region should talk like it believes it.

Then comes the harder internal thorn: if you’re committed to a relentless pursuit of excellence, you have to accept that growth is a series of jumps—and not everyone makes every jump with you. He uses a football analogy for a reason. Some people thrive at the high school or college level; very few make the NFL. Texas wine, as a whole, is entering a clarity era where the gap between serious programs and casual programs becomes more visible. That can feel uncomfortable in a tight community, but it’s also what happens when a region begins to be taken seriously: the bar stops being theoretical and becomes practical.

And finally, his most modern thorn is attention management in insignificant domains such as social media. He’s not concerned that people are negative online—he’s concerned that it’s shockingly easy to waste your best energy on things that don’t matter: petty posts, bad takes, jealous spirals, or criticism that doesn’t improve the work. His rule is simple: if it doesn’t move the business forward, it doesn’t get mind-share. Texas wine needs its best energy for execution.

The Seeds
Chris’s “seed” is essentially one idea with three expressions: investment that turns excellence into something repeatable and shareable. Not the kind of investment that sounds nice in a meeting, but the kind that costs money, time, and repetition.

At William Chris, that starts with education. They’ve built training into the bones of the company, embedding wine knowledge into onboarding through WSET certifications and expecting baseline fluency early. Chris doesn’t treat hospitality and wine fluency as separate tracks. In his mind, they’re the same form of trust. When a guest feels cared for, guided, and understood, they buy, they return, they join clubs, they bring friends, they become advocates. When the person pouring wine doesn’t know—or doesn’t seem to care—the sale doesn’t crash loudly. It just fades away quietly.

But education alone isn’t the point. Systems are what keep standards from collapsing the moment the weekends get slammed: checklists, communication tools, centralized knowledge, and the kind of rituals that make “world class” a habit instead of a lucky day. Chris is candid that he’s not naturally a systems guy, he’s an expectations guy. The systems are what allow those expectations to survive growth, scale, and human variability.

He also employs what he calls the “Disneyland theory.” Disneyland isn’t Disneyland because it has one great ride; it’s a destination because it has a whole day of great rides. A wine region becomes a destination the same way—when the experience works across multiple stops. That requires neighbor love and ecosystem thinking: wineries recommending other wineries, restaurants that know how to sell Texas wine, hotels that guide visitors well, and staff throughout the region who can turn a good tasting into a great day. Texas wine doesn’t win only at the tasting-room threshold. It wins when it’s embedded in the broader experience web.

Which is also why he’s unapologetic about wholesale into restaurants and retail. He knows full well the tasting room is the profit center, but restaurant lists and retail shelves are the visibility engine. More and more, consumers find wineries backwards now: they drink a wine by the glass at a restaurant, then they look it up, then they visit.

“Wholesale is how you meet people before they know they’re looking for you,” he says.

It requires discipline. You have to build relationships, learn who the buyer is, show up at the right time, understand the program, tailor the offer, follow up, and keep showing up. Not only to sell, but to participate as a patron in the local economy you’re asking to support you. Over time, the effort pays off.

Where the Momentum Meets the Market
In the past months, Texas has been showing up more frequently in national review culture: reports, scores, regional snapshots. And whether you love that world or roll your eyes at it, it’s unquestionably a useful external mirror. It reflects what’s landing through a lens that isn’t obligated to be sentimental. That can be a gift if you’re willing to treat it as information, not insult.

I’ve spoken to sommeliers, journalists, and reviewers who have recently tasted through a wide cross-section of Texas wines and they all kept circling back to the same conclusions. The encouraging news is that the best wines are arriving with real authority: ripeness paired with appetizing balance—not just sugar ripeness, but genuine drinkability—along with concentration and complexity that reads as globally competitive at their level. There’s also a noticeable shift in confidence: less guesswork, more intention, and more clarity about what a wine is trying to express.

Where the feedback turns into opportunity is on consistency and precision—especially once price enters the conversation. A handful of recurring issues still show up often enough to distract from what the region does well, and they tend to cluster around the same themes: cleanliness and stability in the glass, freshness and lift, and restraint with structure and oak. None of that is said to diminish the progress. It’s said because the progress is real, and because the market is increasingly rewarding wines that feel complete, energetic, and transparent about place.

One of the perks of covering Texas wine for as long as I have is that I can say this with confidence: the progress is real. The talent is real. The attention is real. And so is the opportunity.

This is the moment Texas wine has been working toward, more visibility, more visitors, more national context. Which means the work changes. The rose is that the ceiling is higher than it’s ever been. The thorn is that inconsistency is more visible than it’s ever been. The seed is that the next era will belong to the producers who build repeatable excellence, through farming, hospitality, and systems that hold up when it’s busy.

In the current market, the most persuasive wines aren’t the loudest ones. They’re the ones that feel balanced, energetic, and true to place. That kind of clarity doesn’t come from last-minute fixes; it comes from decisions made early and reinforced often, from vineyard to pick to transport to cellar restraint. If Texas wants to stop “emerging” and simply be, the assignment is straightforward: tell the place story, raise the standards, and make it repeatable.

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Part of that is personal. In my family, Southern Living wasn’t just a magazine. It was a presence. The monthly issues were combed for recipes, folded open on kitchen counters, and dog-eared like working documents. The annual compilation cookbooks weren’t “extras”—they were proudly displayed on the bookshelves, pulled down constantly, and treated with the quiet respect reserved for things that reliably make a house feel like home.

So when Southern Living came looking to solidify Texas as part of its region, it landed with weight. A little backstory there: Texas is sometimes considered part of the South—think history. It’s sometimes considered part of the Southwest—think history. But if you’re a Texan, you honestly just consider Texas as a state and culture that stands on its own—think history.

Or, more specifically: Texas is sometimes considered part of the South—think the old plantation belt stretching into East Texas, the Civil War, and the Confederacy’s stamp on the region. It’s sometimes considered part of the Southwest—think Spain and Mexico, the mission trail, cattle drives, and the long shadow of the borderlands. But if you’re a Texan, you honestly just consider Texas as a state and culture that stands on its own—born as an independent republic, annexed on its own terms, and still operating with a separate set of instincts.

In this case, Southern Living wanted to celebrate its unique culinary culture and was looking for an insider to do it.

How did I come into the mix? It helped that I’d been a recipe tester for Texas Monthly for years—and you can’t get more Texan than that. I’d also written local cookbooks for Austin institutions with real gravity: Uchi, the James Beard–winning restaurant that helped redefine modern Japanese dining in America; The Salt Lick, the legendary Driftwood barbecue pilgrimage where smoke and patience do the talking; and Jack Allen’s Kitchen, the beloved Hill Country standard-bearer for seasonal Texas cooking and warm, come-as-you-are hospitality.

The original idea was straightforward: they wanted a Texas cookbook, and they originally suggested, perhaps, a book on Texas barbecue. It seemed a fair enough association. Texas is known for its barbecue (beef brisket as the star). But I countered with a thought…

We could cover Texas barbecue, but what about Tex-Mex? And what about the fact that East Texas makes barbecue much differently than it is made in Central Texas and West Texas. And even Tex-Mex has its variations from East to West and definitely on its own southern border with Mexico. The real way to cover Texas, I suggested, was to understand how it was settled. Its history reveals its flavor.

For instance, East Texas barbecue is reminiscent of Southern heritage to the east. Dallas serves as the western border of the South. But as soon as you get to Fort Worth, that’s the gateway to the West. Barbecue in Central Texas is influenced by Czech and German immigration and cooking styles—large pits, dry rubs. Not that gloppy sweet stuff you see in Memphis. Case-in-point: go to any of the top BBQ establishments in Lockhart and ask for barbecue sauce. They may give you some, but they won’t do it with a smile. It’s like asking for ketchup at a steak restaurant.

Equally, Tex-Mex along the border is much different than it is in East Texas, where spicy heat is a little more subdued and flour tortillas are more favored than corn. The thing is, Texas is bigger than the entire country of France. And using France as an example, the food you find in Bordeaux is significantly different than what you find in Alsace and along the Mediterranean coast. We’re talking a vast difference in the use of butter versus olive oil. Beef compared to fish compared to sausage.

To have a book of Texas cuisine meant having a book that reflected its culture. So instead of organizing it in the typical way—appetizers, salads, entrées, desserts—we organized it based on regions: East, Central, West, Coastal, and South. The result was a journey I was honored to take into the history of my home state, a home which I love dearly, and share it with others through flavor and recipe.

The best part? Many of those recipes came straight off the hand-written, stained, dog-eared notecards of my grandmothers, my mother, aunts, cousins, in-laws—and a few iconic Texas chefs I’d come to know along the way. A lot of people spend years trying to recapture the flavors of family and heritage. I didn’t have to chase them—I had them in my hands. And yes, most of the barbecue in the book comes from my dad. It’s a legacy unfolded in measurements, seasonings, and little notes in the margins. And here, somehow, I got the rare privilege of putting it all in one place—and sharing it with the world.

This, I will always consider one of my greatest achievements. Not because it’s mine. But because it’s my family, my home, and, as many Texans are wont to do, a shared experience, inviting others in.

I’ve often wanted to crack open this book with others and share some of the behind-the-scenes stories of how some of these recipes came to be. It seems this Substack, Direct to Press, is my opportunity.

When it comes to recipes, there’s a lot to choose from. But I’ve made the choosing simple for my first with the recipe I made for New Year’s: shrimp and andouille sausage gumbo.

To be fair, I didn’t come from Louisiana. My family is mainly from Houston. Which has its own interpretation of gumbo. My grandmother made a shrimp and okra gumbo that does not rely on roux, but on the flavor of fresh vegetables and the sea. (It’s in the book and a very different interpretation of the Louisiana style.)

But as you’ll see, my last name is Dupuy, a gift received when marrying into my husband’s family. His father’s family hails from Monroe and Baton Rouge, a nice balance of northern and southern Louisiana, which has its own culinary distinctions. My father-in-law was not a cook. (Trust me, it would have been a bad idea.) But his wife, Fritzi, was a master home cook. She was from Central Texas—Waco, actually. And though she didn’t grow up with the Cajun culture, when she married into the Dupuy family, she quickly learned that gumbo was a sure way to marital bliss.

So she learned the recipe of her mother-in-law. And wrote it down for her family to keep.

Funnily enough, when you read her recipe, very little of it includes actual measurements. It’s really more a list of suggestions. The most important instruction was the time you give to make the roux. It was my job, in writing the cookbook, to translate the soul and give the precision.

In her prime, Fritzi was a force—equal parts humor, wit, and generosity. Her love language was feeding you, and she did it in every way that mattered: from the kitchen, yes, but also by making you laugh until your sides hurt, or by landing a blush-inducing compliment at exactly the moment you didn’t know you needed it. She was beautiful. And goodness, I was lucky to have had a piece of her in this life. The best I can do to share her with you now is through this recipe.

The thing about gumbo is you really have nowhere to hide if you make the fatal mistake of overcooking or undercooking your roux. It is the thing you absolutely cannot walk away from.

Risotto, they say, should be stirred and nurtured. Whatever. It’s rice.

Roux is part flour, (a lot) part butter, time, and deep deep soul. You cannot fake it.

If you get it right, the reward is the silence around a New Year’s table. The clanking of spoons scraping the bowl. The crushing of saltine crackers skimming the top of the gumbo. The occasional assertive dashing of Tabasco sauce (with younger kids, I’ve always made my gumbo more mild in spice. You can always add it at the table.) When people get up for seconds. I know I’ve done my job.

And so, on this 10-year anniversary of United Tastes of Texas, it feels right to return to the page the same way we return to the table—hungry, hopeful, and ready for something that tastes like home. I hope you make this gumbo. I hope you give the roux the time it deserves. I hope it earns you that first quiet stretch after the bowls are served.

And if you do make it, I’d love to hear how it goes. Better yet: tell me what you want next.

Because this book has a lot of stories baked into it. Some were scribbled in the margins, some were handed down on stained notecards, some were learned the hard way, and some were borrowed from the people who fed me before I ever had the words to describe why it mattered. If there’s a recipe from United Tastes of Texas you’d like to see here—or a corner of Texas cooking you want me to dig into—say the word. I’ve been wanting to crack this book open with you for a long time.

Andouille Sausage and Smoked Chicken (or Fresh Shrimp) Gumbo:

Makes 6 servings · Hands-on 1 hour · Total 1 hour, 40 min., plus chicken

2/3 cup butter, divided
1/2 lb. andouille sausage, halved lengthwise and cut into 1/4-inch-thick slices
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 green bell pepper, finely chopped
1 large onion, finely chopped
3 celery ribs, finely chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp. table salt
1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
4 cups chicken broth
1 (14.5-oz.) can diced tomatoes
1 tsp. dried oregano
1 tsp. dried thyme
2 bay leaves
2 1/2 cups shredded Smoked Chicken

Note: Substitute large, shelled and deveined raw shrimp for chicken. Cook in gumbo for 4-5 minutes before serving.

1. Melt 1 Tbsp. butter in a Dutch oven over medium heat. Cook sausage 6 minutes or until browned; remove sausage with a slotted spoon, and drain on paper towels, reserving drippings in Dutch oven. Add remaining butter to Dutch oven. Gradually whisk in flour; cook, whisking constantly, until flour is a milk chocolate color (about 25 minutes).

2. Stir in bell pepper and next 5 ingredients; cook, stirring constantly, 15 minutes or until vegetables are tender. Gradually add broth, stirring until combined. Add tomatoes, oregano, thyme, and bay leaves. Bring to a light bowl; reduce heat to low, and simmer, stirring occasionally, 30 minutes or until slightly thickened.

3. Return sausage to pan; simmer, stirring occasionally, 15 minutes. Stir in chicken (or shrimp). Remove and discard bay leaves before serving.

Serve with rice, Saltine crackers, Tabasco.

United Tastes of Texas

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It felt fitting. Not only for the occasion, but because the wine itself marked one of my personal highlights. It took me back to a cold retreat in March, when I spent a couple of days with Fabio Sireci and Melissa Muller of Feudo Montoni.

Before the summer sun had baked Sicily’s interior into its familiar golden glow, the landscape was astonishingly green. Rolling hills unfurled for miles in every direction, their wheat fields swaying like an emerald sea in the wind. It was a vision of Sicily most never see: raw, quiet, deeply alive. The time I spent there was more than just a winery visit—it was an initiation into what it means to be Sicilian.

Fabio, rooted in the land as firmly as the vines he tends, is the third generation of his family to farm Montoni. Melissa, born in New York, followed the thread of her grandmother’s memory back to Sicily, and found not only a home but a calling. She fell in love with Montoni as deeply as she did with her husband. Together, they’ve created something truly special. They taught me about Sicilian food, culture, soul. About how in Sicily, trust is built slowly, through quiet observation, shared meals, and showing up over time.

Founded in 1469 by the noble Abatellis family of Aragonese origin, Feudo Montoni is one of Sicily’s oldest continually cultivated estates. Its roots run centuries deep, first as a feudal landholding—feudo—and later as a center of community life and agriculture. When Fabio’s grandfather Rosario purchased the estate from the Cardinal of Catania in the late 19th century, he recognized not just the potential of the old, pre-phylloxera vines growing there, but the spirit of the land itself. The land was part of a living, breathing ecosystem of self-sufficiency.

Even today, Montoni remains more than a vineyard. It is a working farm, a garden, and a sanctuary. Alongside the ancient vines grow heirloom legumes, fava beans, olives, and durum wheat—crops tended by hand and harvested in season. Much of what is grown ends up in the kitchen, where Melissa brings it to life in simple, soulful Sicilian dishes. Meals at Montoni are expressions of the land, the weather, the moment. To sit at their table is to understand Sicily not just through wine, but through everything else the earth offers up when tended with care.

This week night at our New Year’s table, the Lagnusa was passed around and poured, and I watched the surprise flicker across my friends’ faces. This wasn’t the Nero d’Avola they expected. Not big, broad, or boisterous. It was lifted, earthy, and light. A wine that spoke not in volume but in tone.

It brought me back to that early spring visit, when the air in Sicily’s interior still holds winter’s edge. It reminded me of sitting with Fabio near the hearth of their home, the smell of burning olive wood. Of his grounded connection to the building’s old stone walls. Of the way Melissa spoke of tradition not as something behind us, but something to be carried forward.

Montoni’s Nero d’Avola doesn’t conform to the world’s expectations. It doesn’t fill out the usual mold of what Sicilian wine is supposed to be. Instead, it carves out its own quiet path that is graceful, sinewy, and full of memory all at once.

As we moved around my dinner table on New Year’s Eve, each person sharing their meaningful memory, I realized that the bottle I’d chosen wasn’t just delicious, it was emblematic. It was a year of hard work, cultural inspiration, and deepened friendships. And the wine spoke of a place in the heart of Sicily, where old vines still whisper their secrets through the wind.

Indeed, it was the perfect way to close out 2025. I can’t think of a better way to start a new one than with a wine like this—grown with care, made with purpose, and shaped by people who are deeply connected to their land. It doesn’t just mark a moment, it gave it meaning.

More stories like this will be unfolding in Italianity—coming this spring—a book that traces the land, people, and spirit behind Italy’s wines, one vineyard at a time.

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Earlier this month I put together my yearly wine-and-spirits book roundup for Forbes. But there’s really so much more to read. Here, I’m zooming in on the journalism—articles and essays from national publications, trade outlets, and personal blogs that sharpened my thinking and kept me curious all year.

And because it helps if you can actually read the thing, I’ve tried to stick to stories that aren’t tucked behind a paywall.

“The Micropolitan Wine Boom” — Wine Enthusiast ()

As a Texan, I’ve long waved the flag for key markets here—and across the so-called flyover states—to get more attention. These are big opportunity markets for producers trying to find a space in the U.S., and they need to stop thinking with a NY-only mentality.

argues that some of the most exciting, destination-worthy wine programs right now are being built in “micropolitan” or so-called secondary/tertiary U.S. markets—places like Rogers, Arkansas and Jackson, Mississippi—by beverage directors who refuse the idea that great lists only belong on the coasts. She highlights how these communities often have highly educated, well-traveled drinkers and collectors who recognize serious producers and are eager to explore, even if the scene lacks big-city “cool factor.”

The piece also makes the business case: as global wine consumption has softened, producers and distributors ignoring these markets are leaving loyalty (and real volume) on the table—especially since wine can become a “handshake” brand people proudly champion over years. But building those lists is harder: supply chains are clunky, allocations skew coastal, and control-state rules create cost and timing hurdles that demand extra education and relationship-building. Ultimately, Dingwall frames the boom as a respect story—when the trade shows up and invests in these markets, the enthusiasm and return can be outsized, because “underserved” doesn’t mean “undeserving.”

“What Does the Wine Industry Actually Need Right Now? 9 Experts Weigh In.” — VinePair ()

No one has a crystal ball to predict the future, but it’s clear that the “sky is falling” mentality doesn’t help anyone. doesn’t pretend anyone has all the answers—she frames the current downturn as real, multi-factor pressure (health messaging, shifting social habits, oversupply, and policy uncertainty), then asks a better question: what can the trade actually do next?

Her format includes nine smart voices across writing, hospitality, retail, and production that offer concrete, sometimes conflicting prescriptions—make wine fun again, tell better stories, fix regressive shipping and three-tier constraints, get less precious, and meet consumers where they are (including formats and occasions that fit real life).

The collective takeaway lands exactly where you’re pointing: the “sky is falling” mindset is not helpful—momentum comes from clarity, creativity, and a willingness to retool without losing the soul of the product. If you want one link to send a colleague who’s spiraling (or a producer who still thinks the answer is another earnest tasting note), this is it.

“Is The New Prohibition Winning?” — ()

Dave McIntyre's WineLine

Is The New Prohibition Winning?

A new Gallup poll released this week shows the percentage of U.S. adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest since Gallup starting asking the question in 1939…

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8 months ago · 14 likes · 5 comments · Dave McIntyre

is a veteran U.S. wine journalist and longtime voice at The Washington Post, where he wrote the paper’s weekly wine column for more than 16 years before moving to his Substack, . He’s especially strong when the story isn’t a bottle but the forces around it—policy, public health messaging, and the cultural narratives that quietly rewire consumer behavior.

McIntyre’s core point isn’t “people are drinking less”—it’s that a specific moralized health narrative around alcohol is gaining cultural power, and it’s reshaping the default assumptions the public holds about drinking. He frames this as a “New Prohibition”: not laws and raids, but a sustained push—through headlines, institutional messaging, and social pressure—to collapse all consumption into risk, and to treat abstinence as the only rational position. What makes his piece worth reading is that he’s not arguing against moderation; he’s arguing for better thinking—more precise language, less fear-based absolutism, and more honesty about how questions get framed and how perceptions get manufactured.

The takeaway for readers in the trade is blunt: this isn’t a passing vibe shift—it’s a narrative battle that will keep influencing purchasing, regulation, and how younger consumers talk about alcohol, and McIntyre is one of the few who keeps following it with a reporter’s memory.

“No Prize for the Bedpan” — ( Meador)

Letters from Southold

No Prize for the Bedpan

During my time at Grey, an ad agency I worked at in the early 2000s, our alcohol clients would help put on a weekly happy hour every Thursday. They called it Dog and Pony because the ad world loves nothing more than to ironically celebrate itself. Of course it wasn’t a free-for-all (except for the Chex-mix according to Car…

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4 months ago · 37 likes · 12 comments · Reeegan

To follow up ’s insights, I found this rally cry from Regan Meador refreshing in the way only the best essays are—sharp, a little nostalgic, and appropriately biting. It’s the kind of piece that makes you mutter, yes, exactly, and immediately want to send it to three people.

Meador’s thesis is simple and forceful: the anti-alcohol drumbeat isn’t just about health—it’s about shrinking life down to lab values, and he’s not interested in living inside that spreadsheet.

He puts it bluntly: “So I’m done apologizing… performative asceticism is boring. What terrifies me isn’t the hangover, it’s the vigilance.”

From there he skewers the whole optimization-industrial complex—constant self-surveillance, the myth of “banking” time, and the way wellness culture always needs a rotating villain to keep the machine profitable. What makes it land is that he’s not romanticizing damage; he’s arguing that connection, joy, and the nights that become lore have value too—and that a life engineered for theoretical longevity can still end up sterile. If you’re building a philosophy for 2026 (personal or professional), this is the kind of essay you pin to the top of the folder and revisit whenever the discourse starts sounding bloodless.

(Context: Regan Meador is the co-lead behind Southold / Southold Farm & Cellar, now based in France (Bordeaux), and he writes this Substack as part personal essay, part wine-world philosophy.)

“An Introduction to Sake Rice” — GuildSomm (Jim Clarke)

I’ll admit, I don’t know as much about sake as I’d like. I’ve always loved it, and I’ve found more and more reasons to incorporate it into my daily wine pairings well beyond sushi and Japanese fare.

If you’ve ever felt like sake turns opaque the moment someone says “rice polishing,” Jim Clarke clears the fog by starting where the drink actually begins: the grain. He explains why “rice wine” is a misnomer—sake is brewed like beer—and why rice variety is a real driver of style, with more bottles now naming specific cultivars and even tying them to regional identity and Japan’s GI framework. From there, he gets wonderfully tactile: how rice is grown (wetland cultivation, seasonal rhythms, and how heat at grain-filling shapes yield and starch character), then what separates sake rice from table rice—bigger grains, taller stalks, higher cost, and that crucial shinpaku (“white heart”) of concentrated starch that helps koji do its work cleanly.

He also connects the nerdy details to what you taste, showing how variety traits and milling practicality can nudge producers toward lighter, brisker profiles or deeper, broader expressions—and why some grains are riskier to mill to ginjo/daiginjo levels without cracking. And because this is a primer built for working pros, he zooms out to the market realities (how little Japanese rice is truly “sake rice”) and even flags U.S. cultivation—helpful context if you’re pouring sake beyond sushi and want language that makes the category feel intuitive at the table.

“The Science of Aging Wine Under Screw Cap” — SevenFifty Daily (Caitlin A. Miller)

I really love SevenFifty Daily’s “The Science of…” series. I learn a lot from it, and it’s helped make otherwise heady topics more approachable—without dumbing them down.

Caitlin Miller takes on the question that refuses to die—can fine wine age under screwcap?—and makes a quietly persuasive case that the answer is yes, when you understand the closure science rather than the stigma. She walks readers through how modern screwcaps (and, crucially, their liners) offer very low and highly consistent oxygen transmission, which is exactly why producers who want precision and bottle-to-bottle reliability are increasingly comfortable betting their cellar-worthiness on them.

She also doesn’t dodge the classic knock: ultra-tight seals can tilt some wines toward reduction—but the article shows how winemaking choices and newer liner options (including variable-OTR approaches) have turned that into a manageable technical issue rather than a deal-breaker. And when you weigh that control against the ongoing reality of cork-related faults and variability, the “romance” argument starts to look like nostalgia—not a quality strategy.

If you’ve ever hesitated when a serious bottle hits the table under screwcap, this piece is the smartest, most confidence-building reset I’ve read on why the trade’s long-term argument is shifting.

“BAROLO VINTAGE REPORT: 2019” — Quench (Michaela Morris)

I’ve taken a much deeper interest in vintage reports lately—not just as score-adjacent intel, but for what they reveal about a growing season and how producers are responding to it (in the vineyard, the cellar, and in how the wines are ultimately shaped). Michaela Morris offers a terrific snapshot of Barolo 2019, a year growers described as “classic” and even “normal” after two uniquely challenging vintages.

She walks you through a season that was largely stress-free—long and dry winter, replenishing April rains, a cool wet spring running behind, then brief heat spikes—before the biggest drama arrived via localized hail on September 5. The payoff is a vintage defined by balance: dry, diurnal autumn conditions helped deliver ripe tannins and structure without the excesses of an overly warm year, plus notably contained alcohol and lower pH (read: more lift and aging promise). If you want a vintage report that reads like a clear-eyed field guide—grounded in producer quotes, real tasting breadth, and practical takeaways—this one’s a smart bookmark.

“What’s the Difference Between a $15 and $150 Bottle of Wine?” — Food & Wine ()

I’m often asked why wine is so expensive—and whether you can really taste the difference between a cheap bottle and a pricier one. answers with the most useful kind of clarity: price is usually less about “mystique” and more about time, farming, and materials—years of upfront investment before a winery sells a single bottle, plus choices like lower yields (including fruit dropping), higher-cost vineyards/regions, and labor-intensive farming that all raise the per-bottle math.

She then tracks the costs that stack up after harvest: extended aging (especially in new French oak), the simple expense of cellaring anything longer, and even packaging—where closures, labels, and heavier glass can represent a meaningful share of total cost. Willcox doesn’t ignore the uncomfortable part: our brains do get influenced by price and other “extrinsic cues,” and she points to research showing that higher prices can measurably change perceived pleasure.

The smart takeaway isn’t “expensive is always better,” but that when the difference is real, it’s often because you’re tasting decisions (and constraints) that cost money—while still leaving room for the occasional great “porch pounder.”

In Sum
If you read something this year that cracked open a category, reframed a familiar argument, or simply made you want to do your job better, I want to hear about it. Drop your favorite wine-and-spirits reads (articles, essays, newsletters—anything) in the comments or send them my way, and I’ll keep a running list for later. I’m also kicking around the idea of doing a companion podcast roundup—the episodes and series worth bookmarking for road trips, flights, and long walks—so if you’ve got favorites there, I’m all ears. Consider this a living list: the best part of publishing is that the conversation doesn’t have to end when the post goes live.

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While we wait for the book to print, ship, and find its way into your hands, I’m sharing elements of Italianity along the way (from both myself and Andrea), beginning with this piece I wrote a few years ago but never published. It was something I wrote the first time I actually felt what Italianity was long before I’d ever heard the word or even met Andrea Lonardi.

It’s a vignette from my first visit to Montepulciano, when I felt, almost unexpectedly, what it means for a town to feed you not just at the table, but in the soul. It was an effortless warmth that, for the first time in this Tuscan town, I felt the strange click of belonging…

Travel has a way of thinning you out. You live out of a suitcase, early morning call times transition to late-night dinners, you lose track of what day it is, you pick up just enough of the language to understand what you’re missing. And then, sometimes—without warning—you step into a place that doesn’t ask you to perform belonging. It simply offers it.

My first trip to Montepulciano did that for me.

I’d been invited to the medieval hilltop town in southern Tuscany, a place of Renaissance façades and steep, cobbled alleys, known in the wine world as the home of Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. The wine, made primarily from Sangiovese, known locally as Prugnolo Gentile, arrives with pedigree: one of Italy’s first DOCG designations, long poured in rooms where power and poetry once overlapped. But what struck me most on that first visit wasn’t prestige. It was intimacy.

For years, Vino Nobile has lived in the shadow of its Tuscan siblings. Chianti Classico and Brunello di Montalcino travel with cleaner, more confident narratives abroad. Montepulciano’s story has been harder to translate: a wider spectrum of styles, a reputation that hasn’t always matched the town’s beauty or its potential. Lately, though, the region has been doing something quietly radical: turning back toward itself.

The introduction of the “Pieve” classification is part of that recalibration. Named for ancient parish churches that once divided the countryside, the designated Pievi focus attention on distinct zones and reinforce a stricter sense of origin with estate-grown fruit, native varieties, a higher percentage of Sangiovese. It feels less like a marketing invention than a renewed vow: to make Vino Nobile legible through place, and place legible through people.

That connection between wine and community is what I felt most vividly when I first visited. But it wasn’t through a standard cellar tasting, it was at the table.

I was there to help judge A Tavola con il Nobile, a local culinary competition held in the days leading up to Montepulciano’s Bravìo delle Botti, the raucous barrel-rolling race that turns the town’s winding streets into a spectacle. The contest celebrates the eight contrade (districts) through traditional dishes, each centered on a specific ingredient. That year, the spotlight was on pici: hand-rolled pasta, thicker than spaghetti, with a rustic chew built for serious sauces.

Over two sweltering summer days, our small jury of American journalists—led by Italian food writer Bruno Gambacorta—moved from pop-up kitchen to pop-up kitchen, set in cloisters, courtyards, cantine. Each contrada served its pici with quiet pride: guinea fowl and white wine; all’aglione with an unapologetic garlic punch; lake perch; even hemp pici with tomato and guanciale.

But what lingered wasn’t only the pasta. It was the choreography around it. Men at the grill with sleeves rolled up, trading jokes. Women stirring massive pots with the ease of inherited knowledge. Teenagers ferrying trays, kids scattering flower petals onto tables as if that were the obvious finishing touch. The scene felt ancient and immediate at once—like something that had always existed, and still mattered.

One contrada in particular stayed with me: Talosa. After our eighth pasta dish of the day, we arrived breathless and full and were greeted by a petite elderly woman with a cast on her wrist and a spark in her eyes. Her name was Vittoria, and she’d already won the competition three times. She couldn’t cook that year because of her broken wrist, but her son and granddaughter stood beside her, rolling dough under her watchful gaze. Through translation, she apologized for not cooking for us herself. We needed no apology.

Her dish—pici with a sugo of local beef, guanciale, and Pecorino—landed like a kind of crescendo: earthy, rich, deeply Tuscan. Vittoria watched us eat as if she could feel the food traveling through the room. She beamed, flipped through a scrapbook of past victories, offered second helpings, told stories I couldn’t fully understand. I caught only fragments of her words. But I understood the message. Welcome. Pride. Come closer.

Vittoria won again that year for her contrada.

When she stood on the stage at Teatro Poliziano and lifted her fourth plaque, I felt an absurd, immediate swell of happiness—like I belonged to her contrada, her kitchen, her story. I’d known her for only hours. And yet I left that night tethered.

In wine, we argue endlessly about terroir—where it begins and where it ends. Soil, climate, exposure. Or, depending on who’s speaking, a romantic flourish. But Montepulciano offered me a definition I can’t unlearn: terroir is also human. It’s a broken wrist and a granddaughter’s concentration to make her grandmother proud. It’s flour-dusted hands and a grillman’s laugh. It’s the view toward Cortona in golden light, and the shared conviction that feeding people is a form of identity.

As the Pieve system takes root, it signals something more than stricter rules or better bottles. It’s a recognition that Vino Nobile’s strength isn’t only in expressing Sangiovese with greater clarity, but in expressing Montepulciano—its habits, its pride, its communal heart.

To say I left with a deeper appreciation for Montepulciano would be too small. I left with a new definition of terroir. And with the smile of a woman named Vittoria etched into memory, I left feeling—quite simply—at home.

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Every Christmas, my grandparents in Houston brought out the same punch bowl: thick white milk glass with matching handled cups, each elaborately etched with raised patterns that caught the light in the kitchen. Milk glass was a thing back then—a popular mid-century trend, sturdy and opaque, made to look fancy but built like a tractor. It had presence.

My uncle was always the designated Eggnog maker. He’d arrive with a mysterious brown bottle wrapped in a paper bag tucked under his arm—deep amber, perfectly transparent—and he guarded it like a secret treasure. I had no idea what it was, only that it was “grown-up stuff.” When I’d ask if I could try it, he’d smirk and say:

“No honey, this has hooch in it. We’ll make some for the kids too. But this is for the adults.”

For years, “hooch” and “eggnog” were inseparable words in my mind. And funny enough, the “kid” version was always a special treat. My cousins and I would pour a ladle from the smaller, less fancy bowl into standard coffee cups. I would watch the creamy, pale-gold liquid pour into those heavy cups, dusted with nutmeg and carrying that holiday perfume of spice.

Later I learned that my uncle and my dad were bourbon-only Eggnog purists. They’d accept no substitute. Meanwhile, my grandparents—lifelong teetotalers—allowed themselves precisely one glass of spiked Eggnog every Christmas. My grandmother would take a sip, giggle, and say something like:

“Oh that’s really good.”

It was the one time they broke the rule. You could feel the joy of it.

And I’ll never forget tasting my first sip from my dad’s cup. Cool. Smooth. Sweet. A little custard-like richness. And then, just at the end, a gentle warmth in the stomach. I remember thinking: Yum… I get it now.

That was the moment Eggnog became a grown-up drink in my imagination.

From Medieval Medicine to American Holiday Ritual

What we now call Eggnog began its journey many centuries before anyone in Texas poured Kentucky whiskey into a milk glass bowl.

It starts in medieval England with a drink called posset—warm milk curdled with wine or ale, sweetened with honey, flavored with nutmeg or cinnamon. Originally, it had more in common with cold medicine than Christmas cheer. But over time, the wealthy began fortifying it with eggs, cream, imported spices, and fortified wine such as sherry or Madiera, transforming posset from mere medicine into pure celebration.

When the drink crossed the Atlantic during American colonization, the New World gave it two gifts that cemented its place: lots of fresh dairy and cheap Caribbean rum. (Keep in mind, there were also colonies further south than the original 13 we tend to think about that were running a profitable rum trade in the Caribbean.)

Rum replaced the sherry and Madeira of Europe. Later, whiskey joined the party in Appalachia (the Scots and Irish). Soon, Eggnog became the holiday punch of the colonies—rich, indulgent, and communal. By the 19th century, it was firmly rooted in American holiday culture, with the boozy version thriving as a kind of liquid hospitality—something passed around generously, something to gather around.

But Eggnog isn’t just one drink. It’s many, depending on where you grew up.

The South & Texas
Rum is welcome, but bourbon reigns. And the line between Eggnog and cold milk punch is thin. It’s sweet, strong, custardy, and celebratory, as likely to appear in etched milk glass bowls as in the back fridge of a barbecue joint.

New England & Mid-Atlantic
Historically rum-forward, sometimes mixed with brandy or whiskey. The classic Christmas punch bowl.

The Midwest & Upper Midwest
This is Tom & Jerry country. A warm, frothy, meringue-like batter ladled into a mug with hot milk and rum/brandy. Forget cartons—this is winter in a cup.

Puerto Rican and Latinx Communities
Enter coquito—a coconut-based cousin of Eggnog, rich with rum and spices. It lives on the same shelf of the mind as Eggnog, even when it contains no egg.

The Modern Revival: People Are Getting Nerdy About It Again

We’re living in a golden age of craft Eggnog. Some bars age their nog for months at a time; others clarify it until it pours crystal clear, more consommé than Christmas punch. A few lean into full Victorian nostalgia with antique punchbowls and 19th-century proportions. But one of the most thoughtful modern perspectives comes from Houston, courtesy of Morgan Weber—cocktail specialist, co-founder of Agricole Hospitality, and owner of Marfa Spirit Co mentioned in my first cocktail dispatch on the Margarita.

Weber swears by Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s batched method, but he emphasizes that good Eggnog is ultimately a matter of ratios, not rigid rules: the interplay of sugar, eggs, cream, milk, and spirit must be in balance, especially if you’re making it for a crowd. Past that structural foundation, he treats the choice of spirit as a place for personal expression. Rum-based nog, for example, becomes far more interesting when layered—pairing a dark or blackstrap rum with a splash of funky Jamaican for depth, and swapping white sugar for Demerara to echo the rum’s molasses backbone. If he leans toward bourbon, he’ll often sweeten with maple or sorghum, which complement the whiskey’s natural warmth. And he insists on using bold, high-proof spirits—anything north of 100 proof—because once all the dairy is added, delicate or premium spirits simply disappear.

Even the dairy itself becomes a creative tool in his hands. He’s experimented with split bases, combining heavy milk and buttermilk with cream to adjust the tang, texture, and weight. In one particularly inventive trial at Coltivare, he built an Eggnog around mellow corn whiskey and infused his simple syrup with corn husks, the kind used for tamales, to echo the whiskey’s corn grain profile.

What emerges from Weber’s approach is a philosophy of Eggnog as structured freedom: a drink grounded in classical ratios yet open to curiosity, improvisation, and place.

For me, it’s that heavy milk glass bowl in Houston, my uncle with the “hooch,” and my grandparents laughing over their once-a-year indulgence.

YOAKUM EGG NOG

Egg Nog itself doesn’t exactly belong to one region—its origins date back as far as medieval England. But when it comes to what exactly to put in egg nog, that’s where the regionality begins to take hold. Rum was the front runner for the Atlantic Coast, particularly before the Revolution. But brandy and rye also took a particular strong hold until Bourbon entered the scene in the late 1870s. When it comes to modern times, the preference is really up to you. This is an adaptation of a family recipe served in South Central Texas from Houston-based Morgan Weber restaurateur and beverage director of Agricole Hospitality.

5 eggs
2 cups bourbon
1 cup buttermilk
1 cup heavy cream
2 oz. sorghum vinegar (2:1 ratio Muddy Pond Sorghum and Steen’s Cane Vinegar)
2 oz. corn husk simple syrup*
Nutmeg to garnish

Be sure to chill all ingredients well before making. In a large bowl, beat eggs. Whisk in remaining ingredients until frosty. Pour into a pitcher and serve with a dash of nutmeg.

*Corn Husk Simple Syrup

Dissolve 2 cups of sugar into 1 cup of hot water in a sauce pan over medium heat to make a rich simple syrup. Remove from heat. Set a dozen dried corn husks into the pan and let steep for thirty minutes. Remove husks and discard. Add 1 tablespoon of Everclear. Chill simple syrup in refrigerator; will keep indefinitely.

I joined Jason Wise on the SOMM TV Podcast this week to dive deeper into Eggnog. Listen to our conversation here.

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This piece is part of my “Western Spirit” pillar—an ongoing love letter to both the spirits and spirit of American West and the culture that grows up around them. If there’s a cocktail that captures the West-in-a-glass it’s the Margarita.

Ask ten bartenders where the Margarita came from and you’ll get at least four different answers. Some will point to Carlos “Danny” Herrera, who in 1938 supposedly mixed tequila, lime, and sugar for showgirl Marjorie King at Rancho La Gloria because she was “allergic” to every spirit but tequila. Others will swear by Margarita Sames, the wealthy Acapulco hostess who claims she created it at a 1948 Christmas party with tequila, Cointreau, and lime—then watched it spread after Tommy Hilton put it on hotel menus. You’ll also hear about Francisco “Pancho” Morales, the Ciudad Juárez bartender who said he improvised it in 1942 when a customer ordered a drink he didn’t recognize, and Danny Negrete, who traced it back to 1936 at the Hotel Garci Crespo in Tehuacán, supposedly in honor of a girlfriend who loved salt on everything. All of these are plausible. None of them feel definitive. At its core, the Margarita is just a three-ingredient sour: tequila, orange liqueur, lime. It’s not hard to imagine that versions of it were being shaken up along the U.S.–Mexico border long before anyone bothered to name it. Which brings us to my favorite explanation.

Before there was the Margarita, there was the Daisy—a classic formula of spirit + citrus + sweetener. During Prohibition, thirsty Americans slipped across the border and ordered the drinks they knew: sours, daisies, highballs. Mexican bartenders, working with what they had, subbed in tequila for brandy. “Daisy” in Spanish is margarita. At some point, the tequila daisy stopped being a translation and became a proper noun. The drink got a name. The border got a cocktail.

Which story is the truth? I don’t know. But this is where the Western ethos comes in for me. The Margarita isn’t a salon drink from New York or a hotel-lobby creation from London. It’s a border-town improvisation—born of constraint, curiosity, and a specific stretch of land where cultures overlap and rules get blurry. Affluent Americans escaping dry laws, Mexican bartenders adapting on the fly, tequila running freely where the law looked the other way.

How We Broke the Margarita (and Then Fixed It)

Fast forward a few decades and the Margarita becomes America’s sweetheart… and then its victim. By the late seventies, the drink was largely unrecognizable: neon-green mixes, frozen slush machines, sugar bombs with a splash of cheap tequila hiding somewhere under a mountain of ice.

But the West had a way of pulling it back to itself.

In Austin, the Mexican Martini showed up at places like the Cedar Door in the early eighties—a salty, bracing, tequila-forward cousin that felt more like a proper border-town drink than a spring-break smoothie. In the nineties, tequila started to “premiumize.” Better distillates demanded better cocktails. In the cocktail renaissance that followed, bartenders went back to basics: three ingredients, fresh lime, real orange liqueur, salt used thoughtfully. By then, it might have seemed like the Margarita had been fully solved. How much more could you do with tequila, orange, and lime?

That’s where my friend Morgan Weber comes in.

Weber has spent years thinking deeply about how flavor, place, and spirits intersect. I’ve long joked that he’s a kind of cocktail shaman: quietly obsessive, unshowy, but relentlessly tuned in to what a drink wants to be. He’s never really been a front barman sporting a vintage vest and a finely twirled mustache. That’s not his role. If you dig a little deeper, you’ll find he’s the mastermind behind some of Texas’ best cocktail concepts.

He’s the Beverage Director and a Co-Owner of Agricole Hospitality, whose Houston concepts include Coltivare, Eight Row Flint, EZ’s Liquor Lounge, and the former Revival Market, Vinny’s, Miss Carousel, and Indianola. He was also a founding partner at Houston’s iconic Anvil Bar and Refuge with Bobby Heugel and Kevin Floyd, one of the bars that helped set the standard for serious cocktails in Texas.

He also owns Marfa Spirit Co, a distillery crafting everything from sotol spirits to gin, rum, and bourbon. You can taste some of his team’s creations at the distillery’s bar, housed in the old Godbold Feed and Supply building in Far West Texas. Weber may not be a spotlight guy, but he’s the one you want conceptualizing your cocktails.

For Weber, balance and flavor are non-negotiable. I don’t mean that as a throwaway nod to bartender clichés. He’s almost doctrinal about it. Sit next to him when a bad cocktail hits the table and you’ll get a full procession: a brief history lesson, a point-by-point argument, and a final verdict. If the drink isn’t balanced, and the flavor isn’t turned up to the proper register, his feeling is simple: you should’ve just ordered a beer.

If you’re Morgan, “good enough” is never quite enough. You don’t stop at “balanced.” You take the flavor, and the booze, to 11. (Yes, that’s a Spinal Tap reference. No, he would not disagree.)

His Margarita recipe (as well as many others) has been published in numerous outlets, from Texas Monthly to Garden & Gun, the Houston Chronicle, and Bon Appétit—so it’s nothing new to include it here. But it is, I think, one of the clearest expressions of what a Margarita can be.

It starts with one decision that instantly shifts the whole experience: Overproof tequila.

Most Margaritas are built on 80-proof tequila—perfectly serviceable, but easy to smother under lime, liqueur, and ice. Overproof simply means the spirit hasn’t been diluted as much after distillation. More flavor, more structure, more backbone.

When you do that, the Margarita stops being a “lime drink with some tequila in it” and becomes a tequila drink that happens to be a Margarita.

Morgan’s house Margarita at Eight Row Flint in Houston feels like a master class in restraint and intention. A few noteworthy elements are the lime oleo saccharum and salt tincture. Both boost the flavor significantly. Plus, the right amount of lime juice is key. It’s somewhere between 0.75 and 1 ounce—or, as Weber says, a “scant 1 oz.” If you really need a hard measure, use the metric system (like the rest of the modern world) and go with 25 ml. According to Weber, you really can’t get enough acidity or that quenching bite of salt without them.

It doesn’t look wild on paper, but every choice is deliberate:

Ingredients

1½ ounces 110-proof silver tequila
¾ ounce orange curaçao
Scant 1 ounce fresh-squeezed lime juice (25 ml)
½ ounce lime oleo saccharum*
drop pasteurized egg white
2 dashes salt tincture**

Directions

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker and shake vigorously with ice to chill. Strain onto fresh ice in a highball glass. Garnish with a lime wheel.

* Lime Oleo Saccharum
In a bowl, muddle 1 cup of packed lime peels with 2 cups sugar. Cover and infuse in the refrigerator overnight. Add 1 cup water to the infused sugar and stir to dissolve. Strain and store in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.

** Salt Tincture
Stir ⅓ cup salt into ⅓ cup warm water until salt is dissolved.

The overproof tequila carries through the dilution. The oleo saccharum adds depth without cloying sweetness. The salt tincture distributes salinity through the drink, instead of leaving you with one obnoxious mouthful of salt from the rim. The tiny amount of egg white softens the edges, nodding to classic sour technique.

The result isn’t a “fancy Margarita.” It’s brighter, leaner, more sure of itself. It tastes less like beach-bar escapism and more like truth: a Western cocktail with an unmistakably Texan drawl.

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First up: Porto and the Douro Valley—a trip I made in late October, just after harvest, when the air still smelled faintly of fermenting must and the first streaks of autumn were starting to flare across the terraced hillsides. It felt like catching the region in that quiet, exhale moment between the chaos of picking and the hush of winter.

If you spend enough time in wine, certain places stop feeling like “destinations” and start feeling like long-term relationships. Porto is one of those.

The city’s name is almost too on-the-nose for a wine story. The Romans called this harbor Portus Cale, or “port of Cale,” at the mouth of the Douro River. Over time, Portus Cale evolved into Portugal, while the city itself kept the shortened form, Porto. A country and a city, both named for a port.

Today, Porto has quietly become one of Europe’s most compelling city breaks: compact, walkable, stitched together by steep cobbled streets and azulejo-clad churches, and always, somewhere in the frame, the silver ribbon of the Douro. The historic center is UNESCO-listed, and many of the big hits—São Bento train station with its blue-and-white tile panels, the Gothic bones and Baroque swagger of Igreja de São Francisco, the 19th-century Palácio da Bolsa—sit within a few hilly kilometers of each other.

But to really understand Porto, you have to start with the fact that it is never just one place.

A Tale of Two Cities, Linked By One River

Stand on the upper deck of the Dom Luís I Bridge at sunset and the whole story is laid out. On the north bank, Porto’s orange roofs tumble toward the river, punctuated by bell towers and tiled facades. On the south bank, the neighboring city of Vila Nova de Gaia steps down to the water in long, low warehouses painted with familiar names—Taylor’s, Graham’s, Ferreira, Kopke—Port lodges stacked like punctuation along the quay.

On the north side, Porto is your backdrop of churches, tiled stations, and unapologetically vertical streets. This is where you step into aforementioned train station, São Bento and read Portuguese history in blue and white tile; where you move on to Palácio da Bolsa, with its famously over-the-top Arab Room; and where you duck into Igreja de São Francisco, a Gothic shell hiding an almost impossibly gilded interior. It’s also where you wander the lanes of Ribeira, let yourself get a little lost, and eventually spill out onto the riverfront with a glass of something cold in hand.

Across the water, Vila Nova de Gaia feels different from the first step. This is the working cellar side of the river, now polished around the edges but still defined by the long, low lodges of the main Port houses where the aging and storage of the hallowed fortified wines takes place. Woven in among them are newer cultural and wine-museum projects—most notably the WOW complex—built into converted warehouses that once held casks. Higher up the hill, terraces and rooftop bars give you that postcard view of Porto’s roofs cascading into the river, the city you were just walking through now turned into scenery.

The two halves are stitched together by several bridges, but the one you’ll remember is the Dom Luís I: a double-decked, iron-framed span that carries trams and cars on one level, pedestrians on the other, and seems to collect photographers at golden hour as reliably as it collects traffic.

Why the Douro River matters to the city (and vice versa)

This is the first thing most travelers don’t realize: Port, as in the fortified wine, has a split personality. The grapes grow in one place; the wines are raised and sold in another.

Head upriver in your mind for a moment. Beyond the last city bridges, the Douro tightens into a series of bends and canyons. Vines climb brutally steep slopes, supported by dry-stone terraces built over generations. This is where the grapes are grown and the base wines are made in one of the world’s oldest demarcated wine regions, officially delimited in the mid-18th century.

For centuries, barrels traveled down the river on flat-bottomed barcos rabelos from the valley to the coast. Vila Nova de Gaia is where those young fortified wines have traditionally been aged, blended, and shipped in the cooler maritime climate. The wine took its commercial identity from the seaport—Porto—even though the lodges sat technically on the Gaia side. This is harsh country in summer—hot, dry, unforgiving—which is exactly why shippers historically sent young fortified wine out of the valley to age; Gaia’s cooler, humid air let Port evolve more gracefully.

The vineyards and valley are one half of the story and the twin cities at the river mouth are the other. The trade itself was shaped by outsiders. By the 17th and 18th centuries, British and other northern European merchants had established lodges along the Gaia waterfront and were exporting fortified Douro wine back home, helped by treaties that favored Portuguese wine when French wine was politically complicated. Many of the names painted across the rooftops still reflect that Anglo influence: Taylor’s, Graham’s, Dow’s, Warre’s, and others.

But this isn’t solely a British saga. Native Portuguese houses like Ferreira—founded in 1751 and long steered by the formidable Dona Antónia Adelaide Ferreira—are just as central to the region’s identity. Ferreira is often cited as the first major Port house that was fully Portuguese-owned, and its story reads as a counterweight to the foreign merchant narrative.

Then there’s Kopke. Founded in 1638 by Nicolau Kopke, a German merchant, it’s often cited as the oldest Port house, best known today for long-aged tawnies and whites that feel like time capsules in a glass.

Where to Stay

Historically, you might have known Kopke only as a label on a shelf and a doorway on the Gaia riverfront. Now it’s also somewhere you can actually live in the story for a few days.

Read more

First in Austin, then across Texas, and slowly, beyond. My earliest assignments sent me chasing brisket in Lockhart, tamales in San Antonio, and the best bowls of queso from West Texas to East. That path shaped the way I see the world: curious, hungry, and always listening.

So when food-centric holidays like Thanksgiving roll around, I go full tilt. I don’t just cook—I dig in. I pull out old recipe cards from my grandmother, dog-eared cookbooks (including a few I’ve written), and a rotating batch of screenshots I’ve saved all year. It’s not chaos; it’s ritual. And the menu always starts with a few sacred, non-negotiable dishes.

First: the Smoked Turkey from Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto. It’s not a step-by-step recipe so much as a philosophy. Barbecue, after all, is both art and science. You’ll need an offset smoker—nothing else will do. We usually opt for post oak, but pecan wood adds a rounder sweetness I love. The best part? The four sticks of butter tucked artfully into the bird toward the end of the smoke. It’s like smoked turkey confit, and I’d argue it’s the reason no one reaches for gravy.

On the starter table, always: Queso (or Chile con Queso for non-Texans). Not optional. Years ago, when food blogs were having their moment, Lisa Fain—aka The Homesick Texan—was living in New York, keeping her Lone Star spirit alive with stories and recipes from home. Her books are essentials, but Queso! is a masterpiece in devotion: a love letter to the sacred Tex-Mex dip in all its melty forms. We make her Austin Diner Queso, inspired by the bowl served at Kerbey Lane Café—an iconic post–Friday Night Football hangout for me and my friends when I was in high school.

No turkey meal is complete without cranberries in some form. Growing up, our table featured everything from a classic homemade cranberry-orange relish to that jiggly, canned Ocean Spray cylinder (no shame—especially when it lands in a next-day turkey sandwich). But years ago, a cousin introduced me to a fresh cranberry salsa with jalapeño, and I’ve never looked back. You’ll find it in my United Tastes of Texas cookbook, along with an entire Thanksgiving menu in the back. I included PDFs of this recipe and a classic Seelbach cocktail from my United Tastes of the South cookbook at the end of this post.

Another mainstay from that book is my Aunt Jamie’s bourbon sweet potatoes—a souffle-style dish that could easily double as dessert. Sweet, spiced, and very bourbon-forward. (Consider yourself warned.)

When it comes to green beans, I tend to serve them fresh and snappy with a little bacon crumbled on top. But when nostalgia calls the shots, we make Aunt Nancy’s Southern-style green beans, simmered until tender in water, onion, and bacon. It’s simple, soulful, and yields a prized byproduct: potlikker (that savory, vitamin-rich cooking liquid often found in greens and beans). When we want a little family history on the table, this dish shows up. You’ll find it in my United Tastes of the South cookbook under Kentucky Green Beans and Potlikker.

I don’t always crave mac and cheese—except on Thanksgiving. My brother-in-law makes a version that hits all the right notes: creamy and rich, yes, but with a tangy backbone thanks to yellow mustard and Worcestershire sauce. It’s the sleeper hit of the whole meal. You’ll find it in the United Tastes of the South under Grandma Dorothy’s Mac n Cheese

And dessert? I love a classic pecan pie—especially my Aunt Susan’s version with a flaky homemade crust (also in United Tastes of Texas). But if I had to choose, I’ll usually lean toward a fruit crisp or crumble. Something buttery, oaty, with a brown sugar crunch. This year, I’m eyeing a cranberry-pear crisp from the new Perini Ranch Steakhouse cookbook—an iconic West Texas outpost with deep roots and serious flavor.

So now I’m curious: What are your Thanksgiving non-negotiables? Do you stick to tradition or switch it up every year? And which cookbooks do you return to again and again?

I’m always looking to add to my collection—and maybe to the table.

Fresh Cranberry Salsa Recipe

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Seelbach Cocktail Recipe

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