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Last weekend I was trying to wrap my brain around a flight of palomino wines—one gorgeously textured table wine and two sherries of different ages—when something pulled my attention away from the glass. The bartender was mid-presentation on something to do with solera aging when a young man walked in with his mother. This young lion was maybe fourteen years old. He was wearing a Geese T-shirt and a pair of untinted goggles perched on his forehead. He looked insane, and also just a little bit cool, in a way I didn’t fully understand.

I am, at best, begrudgingly aware of the band Geese. I have resisted the discourse as a matter of principle. I do not listen to them, and I do not observe hot takes about them—especially from those who want to question their fame based on just having learned how social media marketing works. As a child of Leonard Cohen- and Talking Heads–listening parents, and a survivor of the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah mania of the 2000s, I want absolutely nothing to do with them. I don’t fault others for feeling differently, but I am here for the oxidized pleasures of amontillado, not a referendum on indie rock legitimacy.

Still, the move was too precise and too weird to ignore. The shirt, as a basically utilitarian object, makes sense. You buy it at a show, you wear it later, and the garment does a small amount of social work on your behalf. It is quotidian clothing with an added layer of meaning, which is to say it is exactly what clothing has always been. It is a small but meaningful gesture of affinity.

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The goggles are something else. Outside of an aquatic environment, they serve no practical purpose, and it seems like their uselessness is the point. The message is no longer “I like this band,” but “I am willing to look kind of ridiculous to make that affinity legible.” The shirt states a preference; the goggles insist on it. They push the whole thing a step past coherence and into a kind of performative surplus.

One of the founding premises of this newsletter is that identity, as it moves through public space, is assembled out of consumer choices that double as performative statements. A purchase is never just a purchase; it is a small speculative bet on how an object might render you readable to others, a projection of meaning tied to—borrowing from Lauren Berlant—a “cluster of promises” that may or may not ever resolve.

The performance travels outward; the interpretation comes back altered, partial, sometimes completely wrong. Misrecognition is a precondition of legibility itself. As put it to me recently, that gap is simply “the price of doing business,” as a soul inside a body, or really as any subject, trying to express anything at all.

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One response to the inevitability of misrecognition could loosely be named the “anti-aesthetic.” The anti-aesthetic emerges as a kind of defensive posture: a refusal to play at full intensity, a dialing-down of signal in the hope that neutrality might offer some relief. Normcore was the cleanest articulation of this impulse, but its logic has persisted ever since, in more ambient forms, most of which orbit the idea that taste is best expressed by appearing not to have any.

The problem is that this move is almost instantly co-optable. The moment you decide that the safest position is to opt out of signaling, that decision itself becomes a signal—one that is incredibly easy to reproduce. We seen it in the hollow vibe of the unbranded dad hat with arbitrary sans-serif text.

recently argued in their broadside against “dumb dad hats,” is that this low-voltage mode has become the easiest aesthetic for brands to reproduce at scale. The anti-aesthetic, once framed as a rejection of excess, now functions as a kind of stylistic autopilot. Minimal design, vague messaging, just enough texture to imply taste without committing to anything that might actually mean anything. The result is not restraint but glut: a landscape crowded with mass-produced objects that are technically inoffensive and spiritually empty, each one asking very little of its maker or its wearer.

Against that backdrop, the urge to make a slightly incorrect, possibly embarrassing, or needlessly specific choice looks compelling. Not because it restores authenticity in any grand sense, but because it reintroduces stakes. It forces a bit of commitment back into the system.

Thirst Behavior’s inaugural essay, “Kill Sancerre” was borne of this impulse. The original piece was written out of a familiar service frustration: the way Sancerre functions as a default order, a kind of conversational shortcut that allows everyone involved to bypass decision-making. It dominates by being broadly acceptable, easy to pronounce, and just obscure enough to make people feel fancy, which in practice means that it crowds out more interesting wines, inflates the price, and lowers the quality of the wine.

It is not a bad wine; it is a bad habit.

The secondary effect of writing that essay, and then continuing to write under its shadow, is that Sancerre has attached itself to my own legibility in ways that are both predictable and slightly absurd. Friends now treat it as a conversational tripwire. Bottles appear at tables with a level of theatricality that suggests they are either a gift or a provocation. Entire interactions bend around the question of whether I will acknowledge it, reject it, or pretend not to see it at all. None of this was part of the plan, but it tracks with the basic mechanics: you make a claim, the claim becomes a signal, and the signal loops back into your life with added noise. Misrecognition is the price of doing business.

At this point, I should probably mention that I’m writing today to try to sell you a dumb dad hat that says “Kill Sancerre.”

I am aware that making Thirst Behavior merch is, on its face, a slightly ridiculous thing to do, especially when the object in question is a dad hat, the very form currently under indictment. The original version existed as a private joke, realized as a birthday gift by my wife, and perhaps it should have stayed there. Instead, it now exists as a purchasable object, ready to circulate through the same compromised channels of meaning/production as everything else.

What I find compelling about it has less to do with the statement itself and more to do with the form it takes as it moves through the world. The phrase “Kill Sancerre” is too blunt to function as a literal position, which frees it up to operate as something else: a gesture of affinity.

I see this as a bit closer to what ’s The Cut called Zizmorcore: a mode of wearable pride for a niche cognoscenti. In that case, the object—a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a dermatologist seen in subway ads—turns a hyper-specific allegiance into a kind of social signal that is legible only to certain audiences and faintly absurd to everyone else. The point is not universal clarity but selective recognition, the small thrill of being understood by the right people and misunderstood by everyone else.

The hat works, if it works at all, in a similar register. It is not a clean statement of taste, and it does not resolve the problems it points toward. It is a slightly overcommitted gesture, a way of saying, with a degree of intentional exaggeration, that you are willing to take a position even when the position is unstable, porous, or open to misreading. It is, in other words, closer to the goggles than the T-shirt.

You do not need the hat. No one does. But if you find yourself wanting it, I would suggest that the desire has less to do with Sancerre than with the appeal of making a slightly unnecessary choice and seeing what it does to your own legibility. It is a small experiment in how much signal you can introduce before the message slips, mutates, or comes back to you in a form you did not anticipate. As an example, one of the first times I wore the prototype out in public, I found myself in an argument about capitalism and terroir with the manager of a 7-Eleven in Manorville, Long Island.

The kid at Mirador had already run that experiment. He walked into a wine bar wearing a Geese T-shirt and a pair of goggles that served no purpose other than to insist on his own preferences a little too loudly. The result was not perfect clarity; it was something stranger and more interesting, a signal that exceeded its own usefulness and became, in the process, impossible to ignore. And that’s not a bad place to land.

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You can find my most recent feature here.

Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

Those who know me know that I LOVE to consume information. I have a real kink for how-to explainers and easy taxonomies. If you knew how much time I’ve spent on YouTube tutorials for niche musical genres I’ll never make, you’d be genuinely disturbed. I can also name an alarming number of weasel species, for reasons I can only trace back to my childhood interest in one them: the North American river otter. Unfortunately in my professional life, answers to my most burning questions are never so neat, or easy to come by.

I write about how restaurants use wine to create meaningful experiences, and I consult on wine programs, which means I’m constantly circling the same set of questions: how do you make a small, wine-focused restaurant actually work—financially, operationally, aesthetically, rhetorically—in a city that seems designed to make that outcome unlikely?

Some of this thinking has made its way into a couple of recent pieces I wrote for —one on pricing, and one on access. A while back I also tried my hand at a how-to explainer for entering the somm trade.

This piece is an attempt to distill what I’ve learned from a handful of wine directors and operators I consider the best in the business, and translate it into something usable. It’s not a single strategy so much as a set of overlapping priorities—some of which build on each other, some run counter to others.

They tend to orbit some common questions: how quickly money moves through a program; how a list signals approachability; the importance of being a neighborhood staple; when a wine is ready to drink, as opposed to merely available; and, increasingly, how all of this gets communicated beyond the dining room, to people who may encounter the idea of a place long before they ever sit down in it.

Taken together, they start to look like a philosophy. This is, admittedly, one for the nerds—the people who care about list architecture, by-the-glass rotation and optimal drinking windows—but I’ll do my best to keep it moving.

Let’s get into it.

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1. Liquidity matters more than margin

—who owns King, Lei, Jupiter, and now Dean’s in Soho—talks about pricing in a way that most wine programs, frankly, avoid. Restaurants love clean percentages, applied consistently, as if the goal were to preserve a ratio rather than run a business. But wine is one of the only parts of the operation that can reliably turn back into cash—if you let it—and what matters is not how much you make per bottle, but how quickly you get your money back.

The faster a program turns over, the more liquid the business becomes. Cash returns to the system, covering labor, absorbing rising food costs, underwriting the next order. A list full of slow-moving, perfectly marked-up bottles may look disciplined on paper, but it locks up capital. This is where percentage-based pricing is not totally adequate, especially at the higher end, where holding the line on margin often means pricing wines into a zone where they simply don’t move. Once they stop moving, the logic collapses: you’re not protecting margin, you’re freezing cash.

Shi’s approach is more pragmatic, and less comfortable. Price the wine to sell. Go further than you think you need to. Accept less on the bottle—especially the expensive ones—if it means the bottle leaves the building.

2. Use the wine list to communicate value

If Shi’s model is about how money moves, —partner in Claud, Penny, and now Stars—is concerned with how it feels. He understands the wine list in terms of information design, and attends to the emotional aspects of wine pricing. He asks, “how does this [price] feel to the guest?” This requires a weekly meeting with each of his wine directors, where they reprice the list based on everything that could affect that emotional reading: competitors’ pricing, retail value, secondary markets overseas, all of it.

Structure matters. What appears first, what is emphasized, what is made legible without effort—these decisions shape how a guest reads the room. A list can signal generosity, or it can signal extraction. At Stars, that signal is intentional: affordable wines are not buried but foregrounded, establishing immediately that someone can drink well without spending excessively.

This does more than drive sales at the lower end, though it does that too. It resets the emotional baseline. Once a guest feels a place “has their back,” the rest of the list opens up; a four-figure bottle no longer reads as a trap, but as an option. Sinzer describes this as building a base: if people know they can participate comfortably, they stop scanning for signs of exploitation. The defensive posture drops, and with it, the friction around spending.

3. Serve your neighborhood

These first two principles—liquidity and legibility—find their most durable expression in restaurants built not around destination dining, but around return visits. Mike Patricola, who runs the wine program at Chez Ma Tante, understands this intuitively. Over the better part of a decade, the restaurant has settled into its role as a neighborhood anchor on the Greenpoint waterfront, and the list reflects that stability without becoming static.

Here, the goal is not to impress once, but to be used repeatedly. That requires a precise calibration of audience: millennial professionals who care about what they’re drinking but also need to function the next morning, guests who come often enough to notice patterns, and, increasingly, their parents—who appear over time and often pick up the bill. The list responds accordingly. It is natural-leaning but not doctrinaire, serious but legible—a natural wine list for grown-ups.

Pricing reinforces this. The ceiling is kept in check, while the middle of the list is dense with bottles that feel like easy decisions rather than negotiations. In-demand producers appear, but are priced to be opened, not admired. Familiarity and reliability are not concessions; they are the conditions of return.

The engine behind this is programming. Patricola buys shallow and rotates frequently, especially by the glass, ensuring that the list remains alive without becoming disorienting. Wines move quickly enough to reward repeat visits, but not so quickly that regulars lose their footing. The result is a list that holds together multiple logics at once—recognition and discovery, consistency and change.

To serve your neighborhood, in this sense, is not simply to reflect it, but to study it, respond to it, and build a system that people can re-enter without recalibration. In a city organized around novelty, that capacity—to hold attention over time—is what allows a restaurant to survive.

4. Not all value is visible on the price

If liquidity is the starting point, it also defines the constraint under which more ambitious strategies operate. Jack Murphy, who runs programs across San Francisco and New Orleans, builds his lists around time—but only after accounting for the realities of liquidity. You cannot hold inventory if you have not first learned how to move it.

Restaurants excel at signaling access—allocations, cult producers, recognizable labels—but are less consistent about whether those wines are actually ready to drink. The current release becomes the default not because it’s delicious, but because it is available.

Murphy’s thinking reframes this. Most great wines are not complete on release; they are structurally unresolved, their components—tannin, acid, CO₂, oak—present but often unintegrated. Given time, these elements settle into balance. Without it, the guest pays for the idea of the wine without receiving the experience it promises.

The difficulty, of course, is operational. Storage is expensive, space is limited, and cash is tied up in bottles that are not yet generating revenue. So most programs release wines early. Murphy does not. He buys when he can, but holds what matters, tasting and tracking bottles until they are ready to show.

The effect is subtle but decisive. A wine with real age, priced in line with—or even below—younger counterparts elsewhere, signals not just access but real care. You are not paying for the idea of the wine, but for a real wine that is drinking the way it should. Over time, the cellar becomes less a static asset than a reservoir, allowing the list to evolve without depending entirely on what is new.

5. The wine list doesn’t stop at the table

If the first four principles govern how a list functions internally, the final one addresses how it circulates externally. Nikkita Malhotra treats the wine program at as an editorial project, extending its logic beyond the dining room into a broader system of communication.

The list itself moves in themes—Riesling, Grenache, Champagne—each iteration reflecting a specific line of inquiry. It reads less like inventory than like an issue. Through the Zine, that thinking expands into essays, interviews, and dispatches from members of the team in different positions, translating what would once have been tacit knowledge into a distributed form.

This is not content for its own sake, but a way of making taste legible over time. One medium distills, the other elaborates; together they create coherence.

A similar logic appears at With Others in Williamsburg, where Nasiri’s Wine School turns the program into something participatory. Classes and tastings function as extensions of the list, allowing guests to engage with its values directly.

In both cases, the underlying problem is the same: a point of view must be communicated to exist. A wine program without one is just a list of options; a point of view without channels is invisible. My old friend has been speaking about the importance of knowing who the list is for, in order to know what the list is supposed to do. The restaurants that succeed here build systems—languages, and multiple ways of speaking them—meeting their audience across formats, before and beyond the table.

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Running a restaurant in New York is, by most accounts, a losing game that people continue to play anyway. Rent is too high, labor is expensive, and costs move faster than menus can adjust; for most operators, alcohol—wine especially—remains one of the only places where the math still has a chance of working.

It is therefore tempting to treat the wine list as a margin engine: price aggressively, protect the spread, and let the rest of the business sort itself out. The logic is clean, even defensible, but it tends to produce something brittle—programs that extract efficiently in the short term and undermine the conditions that would allow them to last.

The operators considered here are making a different kind of bet. They turn their inventory faster, even if it means taking less on each bottle; they design lists that make people feel comfortable spending money rather than daring them to; they build programs that reward repeat visits instead of one-time splurges; they hold wines until they are actually ready, even when that ties up cash; and increasingly, they find ways to communicate all of this beyond the room itself, extending their point of view across multiple channels.

None of these decisions maximize profit in the immediate sense. Most, in fact, introduce friction—more work, more attention, more risk. But taken together, they produce something more durable: trust, not as an abstract virtue but as a pattern of behavior—the decision to return next week, the willingness to order another bottle without hesitation, the sense that, whatever one spends, one is not being taken for a ride.

This is the real revenue model: not extraction, but accumulation; not the highest possible margin on a single night, but the gradual construction of a place people return to, and bring others into. In a city that makes this kind of patience feel almost irrational, it is also the only strategy that works.

You can find my most recent feature here.

Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

My friend recently sent me a set of questions about the ‘nature of taste’—what it is, how it develops, whether it can be taught—which, on the surface, felt straightforward enough. I used to think I was going to be a contemporary art philosopher, so I’ve attempted at various times in my life to seriously grapple with these ideas. But in thinking through them in relation to wine, things get more interesting. The word itself is already unstable. In English, “taste” refers both to a literal, bodily sensation and to something more abstract: a capacity for judgment, the assignment of value to aesthetic experience, a set of preferences that are fundamentally personal and also socially legible. The more I tried to pin it down, the less clear it became where the boundary lay between sensation and interpretation, instinct and evaluation.

Also clattering in my head is ’s piece for the about the sudden fixation on “taste” in tech circles, where it’s being recast—somewhat optimistically—as the last defensible human advantage in an AI-saturated landscape. If machines can now produce text, images, music, code—more or less anything—on demand, then the scarce resource is no longer creation but selection. The person who can sift through the expanding field of generated content and identify what matters begins to look, from a certain angle, like the most valuable actor in the system. Taste, in this formulation, becomes a kind of filter: a way of imposing order on an ever-expanding abundance of slop.

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As usual, our philosopher of broken-brain millenial psychology has arrived at a conclusion painfully obvious for those of us already living inside this moment. Recommendation engines, algorithmic playlists, endlessly refreshing feeds—these are all attempts, in one form or another, to formalize preference, to translate something that feels intuitive and subjective into a set of patterns that can be modeled, predicted, and, crucially, monetized. If you liked this, you will like that. If people who resemble you tend to choose X, then X can be surfaced again, and again, and again. Taste, flattened into preference, becomes legible as data. YouTube and Spotify have proven that recommendation algorithms are the key to monetizing taste in the age of information overabundance. And all other industries, wine included, are clamoring to reproduce this kind of success.

But something gets lost in that translation, and it’s not a minor detail. It is, I would say, the entire point.

To say that taste is what you like is true, but insufficient. Taste is also how you make that liking intelligible to someone else. It is not only a private orientation toward the world, but a public act of communication—an attempt to render a subjective experience legible, persuasive, even contagious. When we talk about someone having “good taste,” we are rarely referring to a static list of approved objects. We are responding to a way of moving between objects, a way of noticing, a way of drawing connections and assigning significance. Taste, in other words, is not just selection. It is articulation.

This becomes especially clear in fields where taste is supposed to function as a form of expertise. As a sommelier, I am, in theory, tasked with knowing which wines are “good,” but that knowledge, on its own, is inert. A bottle does not declare its own value in any meaningful sense. It has to be positioned, described, related to something else. It has to be made to make sense within a particular moment, for a particular person, at a particular table. The work is less about identifying the right object than about constructing the conditions under which that object will be experienced as meaningful. The same is true, in a different register, of deejaying, where the track itself matters far less than the sequence, the timing, the way it lands in a room that is already in motion. In both cases, what we call taste is inseparable from performance.

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This is precisely the dimension that resists abstraction, and therefore the one most likely to be ignored. What gets captured instead is the residue—the list, the recommendation, the output of a process that is far more contingent and relational than it appears from the outside. Chayka describes a version of this dynamic in his essay, pointing to what he calls “taste-washing”: the attempt to confer a veneer of human sensitivity onto systems that are, at base, incapable of having an experience. The machine does not taste anything; it recognizes patterns in the traces left behind by those who do.

When taste is reframed as a set of preferences that can be modeled, it becomes tempting to treat it as a problem of optimization. Better inputs, better outputs. More data, more accurate predictions. But this assumes that the goal of taste is to reliably produce satisfaction, to deliver more of what one already likes with increasing efficiency. And while that may be a reasonable description of consumer behavior, it is a poor account of taste as such. Taste, if it is to remain interesting, depends on its own instability. It evolves, contradicts itself, encounters things it cannot immediately process. It is shaped as much by misrecognition as by recognition, by moments of friction as much as by moments of ease.

There is also, perhaps uncomfortably, the question of value. If taste is now being positioned as a monetizable skill—the ability to extract signal from noise, to curate, to recommend—then it is worth asking what, exactly, is being sold. In my own case, Thirst Behavior could easily be read as attempts to package and distribute taste: a set of preferences, a sensibility, a guide to what is worth paying attention to. And that’s exactly what this poject is! But that framing is, at best, incomplete, and at worst, a kind of misdirection.

Because the thing itself—the wine, the restaurant, the song—is rarely the point. What is being produced, more often, is a set of communicational and affective strategies that allow those things to take on meaning in the first place. The recommendation is a device; the object is a vehicle. What matters is the way value is constructed, how it circulates, how it becomes persuasive within a given social field. To write about taste is not simply to rank or endorse, but to participate in that process, to make visible the mechanisms by which something comes to feel significant at all.

From this perspective, the current attempt to systematize taste begins to look slightly misplaced. It is not that machines will never be able to approximate preference—they already do, and with increasing precision—but that preference is only one component of a much larger, messier phenomenon. The part that remains difficult to automate is not the selection of objects, but the translation of experience: the leap from sensation to meaning, from private response to shared understanding.

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If taste is going to become valuable again, it won’t be because it can be cleanly extracted and monetized, reduced to a set of preferences and optimized outputs. It will be because it continues to resist that kind of reduction—because it operates less as a system of discernment than as a performative strategy. Something enacted in real time, in relation to other people, shaped as much by misfires and adjustments as by certainty. Moments of friction, moments of play—these are not bugs in the system, but the very conditions that make taste function as a social mechanism at all.

This is the part of taste that resists automation—not the identification of the thing, but the negotiation around it. The small, human adjustments that turn a preference into a moment, and a moment into something that feels, however briefly, like meaning.

This raises a slightly uncomfortable possibility: that what’s being monetized here is not the object, exactly, but the ability to make the object matter in the first place. To frame it, to position it, to move it through a network of references and associations until it takes on weight. This is true of wine, obviously, but it’s just as true of music, of art, of anything that circulates as culture.

In that sense, the current fixation on taste is not entirely misguided. It’s just misnamed, because the thing being valued is not taste itself, but the capacity to fake it. If people would rather feed photos of my wine list into ChatGPT than ask me what to drink, what exactly is my job supposed to be?

Maybe the answer is that it changes. Taste-makers have to lean harder into the parts of perception that don’t quite resolve—to hold competing impulses at once, to organize and destabilize, to introduce a few bugs into their own systems of meaning making.

Effective communication in the recommendation economy will look less like expertise and more like performance. Humor, play, and, occasionally, the willingness to create confrontation; just enough to remind people that having the right answer was never the point in the first place.

You can find my most recent feature here.

Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

There is, at Vato, a kind of burrito that makes you realize how long you have been eating the wrong ones.

Not bad ones, necessarily, but wrong in the sense that, while technically satisfying, they still miss the point. The burritos at Vato are not especially large. They are not engineered to impress you with their weight or their tensile strength. They arrive slightly open at the ends, as if unwilling to fully seal themselves off, and they are built on flour tortillas that are so soft and warm they feel like an event in themselves—the reason the burrito exists.

The room is clean, breezy, and friendly. There are pastries—beautiful, almost distractingly so—that suggest a parallel universe in which you might abandon the burrito entirely and devote yourself to laminated dough. But the burritos hold. They insist.

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Vato is the casual, daytime offshoot of Corima, the Michelin-starred restaurant from chef Fidel Caballero, where the flour tortillas—sourdough-leaning, faintly tangy, unusually supple—have already achieved cult status. Here, in Park Slope, those tortillas are given a different role: not as an accompaniment, but as the organizing principle of a small menu of burritos, each composed in advance, each built around just a few elements. Vato operates, during the day, as a kind of tortilleria-bakery hybrid, counter service, pastries up front, burritos emerging from a separate station in the back, with a short list that tends to hover around a handful of options—pollo en mole, a verde with braised pork, a breakfast burrito with smoky burnt ends and eggs, and incredibly, the simple bean and cheese—variations that draw from the Northern Mexican culinary idiom of Chihuahua.

To call these burritos humble would be underselling them, but they are not spectacular either. They’re just honest and confident.

For years, the burrito here has functioned primarily as a delivery system: a loosely Mexican-adjacent cylinder designed to accommodate maximal input—rice, beans, protein, salsa, dairy, different beans, hotter salsa, a last-minute reconsideration. You do not order a burrito so much as assemble one, moving down a line and making a series of small declarations about yourself.

This is the enduring legacy of Chipotle Mexican Grill, which did not invent the burrito so much as reorganize it around the logic of choice. The early restaurants, modeled loosely on San Francisco’s Mission-style burritos, translated a regional, already hybridized form into a national interface. The burrito became a platform: adjustable, legible, and—crucially—yours.

But in reorganizing the burrito around preference, something has been lost. The burrito stopped arriving as a finished thought and began presenting itself as a personality test. It became less a dish than a process—one that mirrors the broader conditions of contemporary eating, where food is expected to accommodate the eater completely: optimized, modular, frictionless, and increasingly detached from any particular place or logic beyond your own.

I mostly grew up in Texas, where burritos were not a subject of debate or identity but simply a fact of the menu. The flour tortilla was standard and abundant—freshly made and stacked high in any H-E-B—and deeply pleasurable: soft, sometimes faintly elastic, occasionally carrying a fine dust of flour that would linger on your hands for hours if you didn’t bother to wash it off. The smell of it—warm, faintly fatty, almost sweet—was the smell of eating without thinking too hard about it.

In Colorado, where I also spent time as a child, the burrito took on a slightly different accent. There were often green hatch chiles involved, and a willingness, at times, to deep-fry the whole enterprise into a chimichanga, which felt like an unhinged regional flourish, though dazzling at times. Covered in a warm, tangy green sauce, this would be fully a fork-and-knife affair. These were not small burritos, nor were they austere, but they retained a sense of themselves as complete objects.

Even the more exuberant expressions of Mexican American vernacular cuisine—the Southern California variants stuffed with french fries, for instance, which have their militant devotees—operate within this same logic. The addition of fries is not an invitation to endless modification; it is a declaration. A regional habit. A point of view. If anything, it reinforces the idea that burritos, like wines, have terroir: not in the soil-bound sense, but in the looser, more human one—the accumulation of local preferences, histories, and available materials that give a thing its shape before you ever encounter it.

You are not meant to redesign it. You are meant to meet it where it is.

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I did not fully understand this until a night in Los Angeles, under conditions that were, in retrospect, almost too perfect.

I had been on an elimination diet—no grains, no sugar, no dairy, no pleasures to speak of—and had failed, on that particular day, to plan what I was eating in accordance with my insane dietary protocol. By eleven o’clock, driving back toward a rented apartment in Boyle Heights, the situation had become untenable. I had not eaten all day and the city was closing around me.

So I swerved my rental car into the parking lot of a church, where there was a burrito stand. Tents, folding tables, and propane burners were set up with the ad hoc expertise of a longtime family operation. There was no branding, not even signage. But the regular trickle of neighborhood customers, even at this hour, was evidence enough that this place knew what it was doing.

I ordered one with everything, both salsas, to go. Whole30 be damned.

I remember standing there for a moment longer than necessary, watching them wrap it—foil pulled tight, a practiced fold at the base, the whole thing handed over unceremoniously, as if they’d done this a thousand times already that day.

Back at the apartment, I unwrapped it and encountered, on paper, nothing especially remarkable: rice, pinto beans, finely chopped carne asada, bright with lime, threaded with cilantro. The usual assemblage. Even to name the ingredients of this burrito misses the point. Because what those ingredients were doing together—held in tension, wrapped tightly in an impossibly elastic twelve-inch tortilla—was, in all seriousness, the most spiritually complete meal I have ever had. Everything was in proportion. Nothing dominated. Each element seemed less like a choice than like a necessity.

Hunger, certainly, sharpened the experience, but hunger did not invent it. The force of it came from somewhere else—from the fact that the burrito did not depend on me to complete it. It had already decided what it was. I had not designed it. I had submitted to it.

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This is what I recognized again, years later in Park Slope.

At Vato, the burrito reasserts itself as something like a closed system, though, ironically, the ends themselves are not sealed. You can choose among a small number of variations, but the terms are set in advance. The proportions are considered. You are not asked what you want. You are asked which version of the idea you’re willing to accept. The tortilla—the actual, physical medium through which all of this is experienced—is treated not as a neutral container but as the defining element.

It is tempting to describe this as a return to authenticity, but that word is both overused and insufficient. Vato is not a time machine. It is a stylish, well-lit Brooklyn establishment with excellent pastries and a line out the door. It is, inevitably, part of the same culture that made its correction necessary. And yet the correction is real.

What feels new about these burritos is, paradoxically, their refusal to be new. They do not innovate so much as insist. To walk up to a space like this and order a straight up, honest-to-god, bean and cheese burrito from a Mexican dude with a mustache, decked in tasteful streetwear and plugs in his ears, felt like an emotional return to a version of home that was never quite this curated.

I still think about that burrito in Los Angeles, though I would be hard-pressed to find it again. It exists, for me, as a moment in which appetite, circumstance, and form aligned to give this otherwise ordinary experience the status of mythic exceptionality.

The burritos at Vato do not require quite so much deprivation. You can eat them in broad daylight. They do not overfeed you (one and a half is good for lunch unless pastries are involved, in which case you’re on your own). And you can take a leisurely stroll around the neighborhood afterwards without needing a nap.

But they gesture toward the same idea, which is easy to miss: that not every good thing improves under your supervision.

You can find my most recent feature here.

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On a recent night at Le Dive, I did the thing I always tell people not to do.

I did not read the by-the-glass list with the wary concentration of someone about to spend $19 on five ounces of a stranger’s sensibility. I did not ask who made the wine, where it was from, what grape was involved, or how long it had rested on its skins in whatever vessel currently signals seriousness—steel, old wood, buried clay. I did not even ask to see the bottle.

Instead, I asked a question that pretends to be about wine but is usually about identity.

“Do you have an orange wine by the glass?”

“Yes,” the bartender said.

“Great, I’ll have one,” I replied, with a relief that should have embarrassed me.

The wine was not delicious.

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There are nights when I am not a wine writer, nor even an especially attentive diner. I am simply catching up with an old friend. I do not feel like pausing to scrutinize the list. I want to keep the evening moving. I still do not know what that wine was, and I do not fault the restaurant for pouring it. But I know this: I ordered a color as if it were a guarantee. I treated a method like a credential. I allowed a word, heavy with cultural meaning, to stand in for judgment. The disappointment was predictable. I had approached the list the way a tourist approaches a neighborhood—with a hunger for atmosphere and no appetite for specificity.

Orange wine has been coded far beyond its technical meaning. It is rarely permitted to be simply wine. It is asked to perform. In some rooms it signals fluency, ease, an understanding of the vibe. In others it is invoked as proof of decline—evidence in a broader indictment of natural wine, urban taste, or the erosion of standards.

The dominant narratives are not about how these wines taste. They are about what they signify. In the first, orange wine functions as a passive shibboleth of watered-down hipster culture—an amber accessory deployed as lifestyle décor. It has been memed to exhaustion: orange wine beside anchovy toast, orange wine in recycled stemware, orange wine as shorthand for downtown credibility, or innumerable nods to the ‘performative male.’ In that frame, the wine’s structure is irrelevant. What matters is that it reads correctly in the room or on the feed.

In the second narrative, orange wine becomes a symbol of dishonesty and mediocrity in contemporary wine culture. A recent piece in Vanity Fair, pointedly titled “The Case Against Orange Wine,” Byron Houdayer treats the category not as a spectrum but as a symptom. The article argues that wine “doesn’t need to be reinvented. Or orange,” and suggests that low-intervention styles undermine one of wine’s central virtues: harmony with food. The tone was less evaluative than prosecutorial. A handful of flawed examples were asked to represent an entire method. For all its rhetorical sparkle, it remains one of the dumbest pieces of wine writing I’ve ever encountered.

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The problem with that framing is not that orange wine is beyond critique. It is that caricature is not criticism. To encounter several disappointing bottles and conclude that a technique itself is unserious is to mistake anecdote for argument. It is also to forget that mediocrity is hardly unique to skin-contact whites; it is evenly distributed across the wine world.

, in Everyday Drinking, responded. His rebuttal did not canonize orange wine as virtuous. It made a simpler point. One can dislike certain wines without declaring war on an entire method. One can acknowledge the social theater surrounding a category without confusing that theater for the thing in the glass.

What these two positions share—hipster shorthand and cultural indictment—is a refusal to grant the category variation. In one narrative, orange wine signals inclusion; in the other, it signals corruption and, somehow, civilizational decline. Both reduce it to a cipher. Both flatten its range.

Stripped of its cultural charge, orange wine is straightforward. It is white wine made with skin contact. White grapes are typically pressed off their skins quickly; red grapes ferment with them. Orange wine treats white grapes like red ones. The skins remain in contact with the juice for hours, days, or months. The result is deeper color, added tannin, textural grip, and an expanded aromatic spectrum—citrus peel, herbs, resin, dried fruit, black tea, dead flowers, baking spice. Beyond that, everything depends on decisions: duration of maceration, oxygen management, cleanliness in the cellar, sulfur choices, intention.

There is no single flavor of “orange wine.” There is only technique applied well or poorly.

The modern revival that shaped American perceptions runs through Friuli and Slovenia, though the method itself is geographically and historically expansive. , in his book Amber Revolution, has documented that revival with the seriousness it deserves, treating skin-contact wines as a global subject rather than a passing urban mood. That framing is important because it restores scale. It situates orange wine within craft and geography instead of trend and backlash.

The easiest way to recode orange wine is to insist on difference. Gravner and Radikon, both in Friuli, pursue radically distinct expressions of skin contact—one austere and architectural, the other more kinetic and aromatic. Paolo Bea in Umbria integrates skin contact into a broader traditional vocabulary of time and oxygen. Even within a single region, the range is substantial. Once you speak in terms of producers and structure rather than color, the abstraction dissolves. You are back to tasting wine.

The binary persists because it is convenient. If you love orange wine, you can order it blindly and feel aligned. If you hate it, you can dismiss it wholesale. Both positions spare you the effort of discernment. But no winemaking method can be reduced to its worst examples any more than red wine can be reduced to tepid Kirkland Merlot, or plonky, glou-glou hipster-juice. When a skin-contact wine disappoints, it is not evidence of conspiracy. It is evidence that someone made a wine you did not enjoy, and perhaps, they’re trading on a trend.

So I suggest you clear your head of everything you think you know about orange wine and start over. Go to Kafana, a Serbian restaurant and wine bar whose list folds skin-contact wines into a broader Eastern European idiom. There, orange is not an obligatory subsection. It appears alongside other regional expressions as one method among many. You order by grape, by place, by producer, and only incidentally by color. In that context, the abstraction dissolves. Skin contact ceases to be a signal and returns to being a choice.

Do not do as I did. What I remember most from that night at Le Dive is the relief I felt when the bartender said yes. The word “orange” had become a shortcut, a way of avoiding the small vulnerability of reading a list and admitting uncertainty. It functioned as social insulation. It allowed me to feel aligned without having to think.

Wine rewards the opposite reflex. It rewards attention. It rewards curiosity about grape, place, and process. It rewards the willingness to ask a slightly nerdy question in exchange for a better glass.

Orange wine does not need to be redeemed or condemned. It needs to be recoded. It is a technique with history, variation, and uneven results, like every other technique in wine. The distortion begins when color replaces discernment. The correction is simple: treat it with the same specificity you would grant any serious category, and most of the noise recedes.

You can find my most recent feature here.

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The masculine urge to perform mastery in the world of wine is usually easy to spot from across the room. Sometimes it arrives as a man ordering the biggest Napa Cabernet on the list with the pleased finality of someone selecting a watch from his dealer’s case. Sometimes it is a man asking, with a tone of almost erotic discretion, whether there happens to be any old-school Volnay hiding off-list. Sometimes it is a man in a mesh cap requesting “whatever skin-contact thing you’re excited about,” as though the very phrase skin-contact were proof of emotional availability. There are many such men. I have been, at one point or another, at least two of them.

Wine is especially useful for masculine self-invention because it allows one to project authority while pretending merely to have preferences. A cocktail is over too quickly; beer is too blunt an instrument; whiskey still carries too much obvious freight. Wine permits a man to appear sensitive, knowledgeable, worldly, expensive, ironic, democratic, anti-corporate, old world, new world, anti-snob, hyper-snob, or “just curious,” sometimes all in the same glass. It is one of the few consumer categories in which a person can try on an entire moral and aesthetic identity before the appetizer arrives.

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Lately, this has produced a small taxonomy of male wine types. , writing for Case by Case, has given us the Cab Bro and the Pinot Bro. The Cab Bro is not difficult to imagine: he likes power, extract, confidence, clear labels, declarative pleasures – the wine equivalent of a large black SUV. The Pinot Bro is subtler but no less legible. He prefers nuance, fragility, old wood, unnecessary specificity, and a conversational posture that suggests he has suffered on purpose in order to become interesting. Elsewhere, the natural wine version has been under observation for years: the man who wants the cloudy thing, the Jura thing, the skin-contact thing, the bottle whose label looks like it was designed by a drummer who got really into risograph. Each of these figures is ridiculous in his own way, and each is also real enough to sting.

Before we settle in for the easy pleasures of mockery, it is worth noting that “bro” is itself becoming a slightly exhausted instrument. Dan Brooks wrote recently in The Atlantic that the construction has become a lazy way of elevating pet peeves into social diagnosis. This is basically true. The term is often less a meaningful category than a shortcut – a way of saying: here is a guy who likes something too visibly, too confidently, and in a manner I find spiritually irritating.

Still, the stereotype survives because it names something real. What interests me is not whether the Cab Bro or the Natty Bro is annoying – of course he is – but why wine, of all things, so reliably draws men into performances of aesthetic authority.

Wine presents a special problem for masculinity. Traditional masculinity prefers domains where authority can be made obvious: money, power, size, force, winning, knowing in ways that feel indisputable. Wine does not work like that. It is a field of taste – interpretive, full of soft words and unstable judgments. It asks the drinker to distinguish between elegant and dilute, rustic and flawed, mineral and merely severe. It demands attention, sensitivity, memory, self-doubt, and the willingness to say things that sound frankly absurd in other contexts: cherry skin, wet stones, pool toy, white flowers, tension, lift. Aesthetic judgment is one of the few forms of authority that cannot be asserted by force alone, because it is fundamentally subjective. It has to be performed.

Once taste becomes a form of authority, the desire to appear authoritative starts shaping taste itself. You do not simply order what you like; you order what will position you correctly in the social field. This is where Bourdieu is still maddeningly useful. Taste, he argued, is never just personal preference – it is social distinction disguised as instinct. What feels natural has usually been trained, absorbed, inherited, or performed. Wine makes this unusually visible because every bottle arrives wrapped in available meanings: class, region, education, expense, tradition, rebellion, rarity, access. To order wine in public is to place yourself in relation to those meanings – and those meanings are unevenly legible to the perceivers. A display that reads as humble curiosity to one person might appear monumentally pretentious to another.

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The Cab Bro solves the problem of aesthetic authority by importing older, sturdier masculine codes into the wine world. His wines are large, expensive, legible, score-friendly. They announce themselves with ripe fruit, firm tannin, and oaky smoothness. They dominate the table. If wine, as a category, risks feminizing the male consumer through its demands for subtlety, the Cab Bro restores equilibrium by choosing wines that still feel like conquest. The bottle says what the man would perhaps prefer not to say outright: I am decisive, I am serious, I know value when I see it, and I would like no further questions.

The Pinot Bro handles the same anxiety differently. He does not reject subtlety; he colonizes it. Authority comes not from obvious power but from calibrated perception. He knows that the wine is not “big”—it is transparent. He knows that red fruit is not enough; one must specify pomegranate, blood orange, autumn leaves, the haunted floorboards of some drafty Burgundian cellar. If the Cab Bro wants the room to see his watch, the Pinot Bro wants the room to notice that he has read Sebald. Different aesthetic strategies, same basic problem: how to appear authoritative in a domain where direct assertions of authority can feel vulgar.

The natural wine version performs a third solution. He does not want to look powerful or even traditionally knowledgeable; he wants to look culturally fluent. Natural wine offered an appealing set of values – freshness, immediacy, conviviality, anti-pretension, skepticism toward hierarchy – and all of these were, inevitably, available for reuse as style. Before long the natural wine guy had developed his own repertoire of authority signals: esoteric producers, low-intervention pieties, ironic anti-luxury luxury, a theatrical refusal of obvious prestige. He may claim not to care about status, which is precisely why he cares so much about possessing the correct low-status object. David Brooks’s “bourgeois bohemian” framework still feels weirdly alive here. The natty male does not flaunt conventional capital; he converts cultural capital into a more flattering moral image of himself.

The temptation now is to declare one of these men worse than the others. The easy version of the essay would make the Cab Bro the villain and the natural wine guy the enlightened alternative, or vice versa depending on one’s preferred irritant. This is exactly the trap. The differences are real but cosmetic. The Cab Bro, the Pinot Bro, and the Natty Bro all use wine the same way: as a medium through which to stabilize the self in public. The man who orders cult Napa is performing. The man who orders old-school Volnay is performing. The man who requests a lightly chilled Trousseau from an importer with excellent graphic design is performing. One of them may be better company. One may have more interesting politics or even better taste. But all three are engaged in the same basic exercise: translating preference into identity, and identity into authority.

Restaurants are uniquely good at staging this drama because they are already theaters of controlled self-presentation. Dining out is not merely consumption; it is public character work. One reveals oneself through confidence, hesitation, appetite, fluency, over-explanation, under-explanation, generosity, fussiness, how one addresses the server, how one pretends not to care. The wine order is one especially compressed scene within this larger performance – it can make someone seem expansive, stingy, provincial, adventurous, controlling, or exhausting in under thirty seconds. It is almost unfair, really, how much psychic material a bottle can be made to carry.

I should say clearly that I am not writing from outside this system. I have spent too many years in dining rooms, too many hours around lists and producers and all the little internal weather systems of hospitality, to pretend otherwise. I know what it is to order a bottle partly because I want it, partly because it fits the moment, and partly because I know what it says about me to the people at the table. I know the small thrill of being understood through taste, and the equal thrill of being slightly misread in an interesting direction. I also know how easy it is to mistake one’s own performance for sincerity, especially when the performance is built from things one genuinely loves. This is what makes wine socially dangerous. It allows authenticity and theater to blur until even the drinker cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.

Maybe that is why men keep getting weird in wine. It asks for vulnerability in disguise – for preference, discrimination, revelation. It invites expertise, but expertise of an unusually unstable and aesthetic sort. For a certain kind of man, this creates a low-level crisis. If he cannot dominate the field directly, he learns to dominate its codes. If he cannot simply be powerful, he becomes tasteful. And if taste feels too soft, too uncertain, he compensates by performing it with just a little too much conviction.

The bottle changes. The performance remains.

What an absolute nightmare.

You can find my most recent feature here.

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On a recent trip to New Orleans, I ran into Jake Laugle in the middle of a hyper-specific pre–Mardi Gras ritual: Hannah Hayes’s Ham Parade. This is a small affair, a “parade” in the loosest sense of the word—really more of a stroll around the block in the Bywater for about twenty people. A friend of ours—also in the wine business, dressed fully in drag—was parading a leg of Benton’s cured ham down a residential block on a tricycle festooned with crocheted fruit and metallic fringe, while a small brass band trailed behind, playing familiar songs rewritten to include lyrics about ham. I mention this event as context because, how could I not? Jake and I fell into step behind the trike.

I’ve known him for years as an earnest evangelist of natural wine. By the time I tried to recruit him to join the wine program at Saint Germain, he had already accepted the sommelier role at Melissa Martin’s Mosquito Supper Club, where he has since become a defining voice in the city’s natural wine scene. Between Mosquito and his nonprofit pop-up series, Delicious and Harmless, Jake has built a real reputation—part educator, part tastemaker, part community organizer.

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We were catching up when he mentioned that, in addition to Mosquito and the pop-up, he has been picking up shifts at Pluck, a wine bar in the CBD that doesn’t get nearly the credit it deserves. Pluck is not ironic about wine. It is not anti-canon. It is a place for grown-up drinkers with real curiosity. You can find serious classics—wines that require context and patience—alongside something like a Matthiasson pét-nat co-fermented with peaches. The bottles are presented without theatrics but with intention, and staff education is central to what they do.

Jake told me he’d started working there because he wanted more experience with traditional benchmarks—wines he didn’t have access to in his other roles. He wanted to round out his palate. Build references. Strengthen the technical scaffolding. The band struck up another ham-themed refrain: “I wanna hold your haaaam.”

It felt like a small sentence that contained an entire era.

For the last decade, it has been completely possible—totally legitimate, even admirable—to build an entire career in wine while largely riding the natural wave. You could become a respected buyer, a respected sommelier, a respected tastemaker, a person with real authority, without ever needing to spend much time on the old world scaffolding that used to be treated as the price of admission. I’m thinking of Amanda Smeltz, who gave the wine program at Roberta’s its character in the early days; Jorge Riera, who made his name at Contra and Wildair before establishing programs at Frenchette and Le Veau d’Or; and even Pascaline Lepeltier, who has ascended to Master Sommelier but still works mostly with natural wines. You did not need to be fluent in the canon in order to develop a point of view. In some corners, fluency in the canon was treated as actively suspicious, like you were showing up to a hardcore show in a blazer.

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Natural wine made the wine world less stiff. It introduced drinkers to the idea that “good” could mean something other than expensive, pedigreed, and validated by a single, centralized critical apparatus. It re-centered farming, labor, and ethics, sometimes in a way that bordered on sanctimony, but still forced the broader industry to reckon with how little most consumers know about what goes into a bottle. It made “taste” feel less like a test you had to pass and more like a conversation you could join. It brought artists and cooks and young hospitality people into wine, as a language they could speak in public.

It also, inevitably, became its own kind of snobbery.

To claim that natural wine democratized access to wine and also reified a new language of snobbery is complicated, and even as I write those words, I worry that I sound like one of two deeply annoying people: either the bitter traditionalist who thinks natural wine is a scam invented by Brooklyn and evidence of civilizational decline, or the newly enlightened former natural wine fan who has decided to pivot into Respectability and now wants to lecture you about sulphur politics.

In truth, I contain elements of both people. But beyond that, I’m interested in how the discourse appears to be growing up, even as those two annoying archetypes still crowd the comments section.

Natural wine began, in its popular mythology, as anti-snob wine. In the classic telling, it was punk, it was acid house, it was a rebellion against points, against the legacy critic class, against the idea that good taste should be delivered from on high by a handful of gatekeepers with European accents. It was wine for people who were tired of being told they were drinking incorrectly. It was wine that promised to be alive, uncorrected, unfiltered, more like an expression than a product.

Then, as multiple writers have pointed out over the years, “natural” became something else: a symbol of virtuous consumption. If a certain era of wine snobbery was built around the performance of knowledge—regions, producers, vintages, classifications—natural wine offered a different performance: ethics, intimacy, proximity to the producer, proximity to the farm, proximity to authenticity. It replaced old-world hierarchy with a new kind of moral-aesthetic hierarchy.

The natural wine drinker did not need to know the difference between Puligny and Chassagne to feel superior. They simply needed to know that their wine was “clean,” “alive,” “raw,” “farm-driven,” “without bullshit,” and that someone else’s wine was “industrial,” “manipulated,” “dead.” This is a well-worn discursive move that we’ve all made at some point, often with the best intentions and the worst tone.

The discourse got funnier and meaner as it proliferated.

Orange wine, for a time, became the symbolic front line of this culture war, a category onto which both evangelists and skeptics projected their anxieties. In The New Yorker, Troy Patterson described it as a “delicious assault on pleasure,” capturing the peculiar dynamic whereby endurance becomes evidence of discernment. The tannin, the volatility, the haze—these were no longer merely sensory attributes but markers of seriousness. To appreciate orange wine was to prove oneself willing to withstand difficulty in the name of authenticity. What began as a rejection of snobbery risked becoming a different form of gatekeeping: if you did not enjoy it, perhaps you simply did not belong.

If Patterson’s essay approached orange wine with amused skepticism from within the culture, Byron Houdayer’s recent broadside in Vanity Fair, “The Case Against Orange Wine,” adopts a more theatrical posture. Houdayer casts the category as cultish and self-serious, beloved by urban aesthetes who mistake volatility for virtue, and treats its aesthetic codes as ripe for puncturing. The piece is less a technical critique than a social one; orange wine becomes shorthand for a certain kind of taste performance, and that performance is the real target. That such a takedown now feels legible in a glossy magazine is not incidental. It suggests that natural wine, once insurgent, has matured into something stable enough to satirize without explanation.

The mainstream press began to notice the same thing that restaurant people notice first: once something becomes a marker of cool, it attracts people who want to be seen being cool. At a certain point, you start watching “natural wine” move through the world the way certain sneakers move through the world. It becomes legible at a distance. You can recognize it on a table before you see the label. You can recognize it in the shape of the bottle, the typography, the import sticker, and in the slightly knowing way someone says “natty.”

At some point, even natural wine people started complaining about natural wine people (which, I realize, is what I’m currently doing).

We got the “natty fratty” discourse, which is really a story about dilution and translation: what happens when a subculture becomes a commodity, when the wine that signaled rebellion becomes a uniform, and when an aesthetic migrates into a broader lifestyle marketplace so that you can be a finance bro drinking Meinklang and still feel as though you are participating in something anti-establishment.

This is not unique to wine. This is what happens to everything with an identity attached to it. The thing that begins as a refusal becomes a template; the template becomes an industry; the industry becomes a job ladder; the job ladder becomes a résumé line; the movement becomes a vibe. The aesthetics of resistance are always eventually absorbed by the culture industry; with wine, the absorption happens quickly, perhaps because taste itself is so pliable.

The early shorthand had been glou-glou: chillable reds, crunchy gamay, bottles that felt like juice boxes for adults with strong opinions about farming. Bright labels. Light tannin. A sense that wine could be playful without being unserious. It was a mood as much as a category. And then something shifted. The bottles got darker. The labels got weirder. The pours got moodier. Wines once celebrated for their easy charm began to look, to certain corners of the scene, almost naïve. If everyone could do glou-glou, then glou-glou was no longer a signal. The insiders needed a new edge.

This is what PUNCH memorably called natural wine’s “goth phase.” The turn toward austerity, toward stranger ferments and more severe expressions, toward wines that felt less like a backyard hang and more like a dimly lit record store where the clerk judges you silently while flipping a twelve-inch.

The goth phase was about differentiation. It was the moment a subculture, having gone mainstream, had to reassert its seriousness. It was natural wine chic turning inward, away from its own accessibility, in search of a new frontier of taste.

This brings me back to Jake working at Pluck. When you build your education primarily inside the natural wine universe, you are building it inside a world with fewer constants. That is both the beauty and the limitation.

Classical wine is full of guardrails, for better and worse. Appellation laws. Varietal rules. Aging requirements. Traditions that are sometimes restrictive and sometimes genuinely clarifying. A Bordeaux is a Bordeaux because a dense historical and regulatory apparatus insists that it behave a certain way. A Barolo is in conversation with Barolo as an idea and a historical tradition. Champagne isn’t just an appellation and a style; it is an entire legal structure designed to produce continuity.

Natural wine, especially in its more unregulated expressions—Vin de France bottlings, experimental Loire micro-cuvées, unfiltered one-offs—has fewer of those guardrails. The wine can shift drastically year to year. The same producer can release wildly different expressions under the same label. The variables are not hidden; they are foregrounded. The wine is an event. Sometimes it is a good event, and sometimes it is a confusing event, and sometimes it is an event you politely lie about because the producer seems earnest and you do not want to be the person who says the wine tastes like a hamster cage.

When everything is allowed, you gain freedom, but you lose a shared reference system. You lose the friction that produces calibration. You can only go so deep, intellectually, if every bottle is a new set of rules. You can become extraordinarily fluent in the scene—its importers, its producers, its gestures, its arguments—without becoming equally fluent in evaluation beyond the scene’s own moral-aesthetic, even spiritual, language.

And that makes the matter of quality increasingly difficult to assess.

Of course, “quality” is a loaded term here. It has been used as a weapon by gatekeepers who confuse pedigree with merit and price with truth. But “quality” is also what you are trying to discern when you are deciding whether a wine is expressive or merely messy, whether it is unusual because it is intentional or unusual because it is unstable, and whether a fault is a feature or simply a fault.

If your only tools for judgment are “I like this” and “the producer is doing the right things,” then you are operating with a limited vocabulary. That vocabulary may be culturally powerful, but it is not always technically satisfying. It is also, frankly, not always helpful in service, where guests are not trying to join your politics club. They are trying to drink something that tastes good with their food and that does not have the aftertaste of corn chips or pennies.

A while back I wrote a piece called “It’s OK to Hate Natural Wine,” which a lot of people seemed to like, though many of them seemed to take it the wrong way. It was, in fact, a defense of the enjoyment of natural wine, aimed at someone who understands the slipperiness of vibe creation in a different aesthetic practice.

It is okay to hate natural wine, because some natural wine is flawed, and because the scene has sometimes insisted that you pretend flaws are virtues in order to maintain your membership card. It is also okay to love natural wine, because a lot of it is beautiful, and because the movement created space for genuinely thrilling expressions that would not have survived under older regimes of correction and standardization.

The problem is not the wines. The problem is when the term “natural wine” becomes a totalizing identity, a badge that collapses a wide range of practices and outcomes into a single moral category and then asks you to perform allegiance rather than judgment.

Jake isn’t abandoning natural wine. He is seeking new benchmarks. He is seeking a vocabulary that does not require him to treat every bottle like a sacred exception. He is acknowledging, in a pragmatic way, that the classics are not just museum pieces but useful texts.

In my own career, I did something like the inverse. I started in a world where “classic” was treated as the default, and then I moved deeper into natural wine when I built the program at Saint Germain. That shift was liberating. It expanded my sense of what wine could be, what service could be, and what a list could communicate. It created a space where I could be a bit more myself, rather than a gatekeeper of aristocratic dining culture, as I had been in New York. It also taught me, over time, that rebellion is not a stable foundation for an education. Eventually you need something more than refusal. Eventually you need integration.

This is where I think we are headed, whether we admit it or not: the term “natural wine” is going to be abandoned. It has outlived its usefulness. It did the work it needed to do as a rallying cry, and now it is mostly a blunt instrument that produces unnecessary heat and very dumb arguments. That is okay.

Whatever we call it next—maybe “living wine,” as Noble Rot’s Dan Keeling has suggested—will hopefully carry more nuance. It is not that we stop caring about farming, labor, additives, or integrity. The next phase is that we talk about those things with precision, and only when they are relevant.

We talk about sulfur levels when they matter to what is in the glass. We talk about filtration when it affects stability. We talk about farming practices because they shape flavor and because they shape the lives of the people doing the work. We talk about a producer’s politics if those politics are central to the story we are telling, not as a blanket excuse for mediocrity and not as a purity test for the drinker. We stop using “natural” as a vibe synonym and start using actual language again.

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This is, in a way, the most flattering outcome for the movement. If natural wine becomes normal wine—if its best ideas get absorbed into broader practice and its worst habits get mocked into retirement—then it has succeeded. It has changed the culture.

The goth phase will pass. The glou-glou era will be remembered fondly and then periodically revived like a band reunion tour. The finance bros will move on to something else once it stops signaling anything. The haters will keep hating, which is their sacred calling. But the serious people—the ones actually trying to learn, to taste, to serve, to build lists that mean something—will keep doing what Jake is doing: expanding their references, deepening their vocabulary, and pushing the discourse to evolve past the terms that once felt indispensable.

And if you have ever made “natural wine” your whole personality, you can relax. You are allowed to mature. You are allowed to drink a good bottle of Rioja without acting like you are betraying your friends. You are allowed to admit that a wine is faulty, and you are allowed to like it anyway. You are allowed to want benchmarks. You are allowed to want structure—structure in the glass, in the form of tannin and acid that hold a wine upright, and structure in your education, in the form of references that hold your judgment steady. You are even allowed to be curious about the classics.

The most anti-snob move is not refusing the canon, but knowing it well enough to refuse it selectively, with taste.

You can find my most recent feature here.

Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

I have spent the past few years working in two American laboratories of excess: the Hamptons and New Orleans. They could not be less alike aesthetically and culturally. One is linen and liquidity; the other is glitter ground into sidewalk cracks. But they share one trait: both are places where people arrive determined to behave badly, and where those of us paid to remain calm get an unusually clear view of what power looks like after two drinks too many.

Mardi Gras is not just a party. It is ritualized ego dissolution — costume, inversion, the temporary suspension of hierarchy. Which makes it a particularly unforgiving place to test whether your celebrity will override established custom.

Shia LaBeouf appears to have recently tried.

According to police reports, officers were called around 12:45 a.m. near Royal Street Inn & R Bar in the Marigny after LaBeouf was described as “increasingly aggressive.” Court documents allege that when a bar manager attempted to escort him out, he tried to strike the manager; a scuffle followed, and two men were punched, one’s nose was broken. He was restrained by bystanders, transported to a hospital, and booked on two counts of simple battery before being released later that day.

By evening, he was back on Bourbon Street telling cameras, “Mardi Gras is amazing!” Which, in fairness, is absolutely correct.

The episode would already qualify as standard-issue celebrity spiral were it not for what the two men involved have publicly alleged. Jeffrey Damnit and Nathan Thomas Reed have both said that LaBeouf repeatedly shouted the f-slur at them during and after the confrontation. Reed, who is queer, stated plainly: “I want it to be known that he was calling people f**got.”

There is also the detail — too ornate to ignore — that as he was being taken away in the back of a cop car, LaBeouf allegedly shouted: “These f**gots put me in jail — I’m a Catholic.” I’m still wondering what exactly he meant by that. Let me try to unpack.

Mardi Gras is Catholic excess before Lenten restraint. Carnival precedes Ash Wednesday. In the Marigny, queerness is not remotely aberrant. Men in lace collars and eyeliner can be found throughout the year. Beards festooned with glitter and tulle do not need seasonal permission to appear at the bar. You can tell the politics of the place from the porch flags. (I, personally, witnessed a semi public handjob mere blocks from the site of this altercation later that day!)

On Carnival weekend, even the few men who identify as straight are likely in some form of drag — sequined, powdered, or at least temporarily unburdened by whatever they thought masculinity required of them the week before. You cannot throw a pebble in downtown New Orleans without hitting some performance of gayness, earnest or temporarily authorized. To scream homophobic slurs there is not just cruel; it is geographically illiterate, rhetorically incoherent. It suggests a man who wandered into a masquerade ball and was offended by the masks.

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I’m not surprised by this Catholic’s word choice. I know many of my ambiguous-presenting colleagues in the service industry recognize this move, too. It arrives when a powerful man is told no. No, you’ve had enough. No, there are other people waiting. No, that’s not how this works. The word appears the moment deference is withdrawn. It is a move — a quick attempt to reassert hierarchy when your privilege has failed to get you what you want.

The two queer men who LaBeouf physically and verbally assaulted were stepping in to help a bar manager deal with an out-of-control guest. In other words, they were participating in the most basic function of service work: enforcing limits. For those of us who present in ways not always legible to straight power, that enforcement often comes with a predictable consequence. When a powerful man is denied something by someone he considers beneath him, humiliation looks for a shortcut. It tends to find the same word.

Mardi Gras is ritualized ego dissolution. It asks everyone — banker, bartender, tourist, local — to become temporarily anonymous, masked, decentered. Celebrity, by contrast, is ego consolidation. It is built on recognition, hierarchy, and the assumption that the room will reorganize itself around you. When consolidation walks into dissolution and refuses to dissolve, friction is inevitable.

Earlier in the weekend, at Ms. Mae’s on Magazine Street, staff reportedly asked LaBeouf to leave after he attempted to “be a celebrity bartender.” A bartender told local press that he repeatedly tried to use a credit card in a bar famous for being cash only, a fact communicated by an almost devotional number of “Cash Only” signs. She reportedly told him to go back to digging holes. Purple beads crushed into the gutter, plastic cups sweating in February, a movie star arguing with a laminated “Cash Only” sign. This feels like an image straight out of LaBeouf’s own auto-fiction.

Honey Boy, the film he wrote as a therapeutic exercise from inpatient rehab, is a tale of unmoderated ego and an appetite for affirmation that demands spotlight. He cast himself as his own abusive father — writing the confession and then stepping into the role of the domineering parent who humiliates and demands devotion in the same breath. The movie wasn’t just a performance of masculine fragility; it was a fantasy of control. In New Orleans, there was no audience obliged to sympathize.

The internet, of course, did what it always does. Within hours, Reddit had reopened the Dark Shia archive — a sprawling folklore of previous reigns of terror, complete with every cannibal joke you can imagine. One commenter resurfaced his 2017 arrest at a Chicago Walgreens on the Magnificent Mile, where he allegedly refused to leave in the middle of the night and asked, “Do you know who I am?” The response, according to the retelling: “Yes. Please leave.”

I was also reminded of the 2020 lawsuit filed by (my absolute queen) FKA Twigs alleging coercive and abusive behavior — choking, control tactics, and, most bizarrely, a strict daily “affection quota” she was required to meet. The details were so granular they bordered on administrative. The throughline was not just emotional manipulation but total domination: a need to measure devotion, to audit intimacy, to be affirmed on schedule.

After his release, LaBeouf tweeted “Free me” at 4:30 a.m. on Ash Wednesday — hours after bailing himself out of jail and reentering Bourbon Street. Even the most committed local partiers, the men in sequined bishop hats who have been pacing themselves since Twelfth Night, have eaten their frozen pizza and are happily horizontal by then. To be arrested in a bar fight on the night before Mardi Gras, spend the morning in jail, bail yourself out, party all day, and still be awake and tweeting about your own martyrdom at 4:30 a.m. speaks of astronomical delusion — a martyr without a cause, awake at an hour normally reserved for bakers and penitents, relitigating a case he already lost to an audience of zero.

New Orleans will indulge spectacle. It will reward excess. It will absorb an astonishing amount of your bullshit. What it will not do — even on the most feral evening of the year — is reorganize itself around the bruised ego of a former child actor who was told no.

It has better things to do.

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You can find my most recent feature here.

Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately writing about why wine in New York restaurants is so expensive, and what—if anything—can realistically be done about it.

There are the obvious explanations, which everyone in the business knows well: post-pandemic instability, rising wholesale prices, tariffs, and the general cost of operating a restaurant in New York, where rent alone has become all but prohibitive for anything resembling a small business. Wine, increasingly, is where the math gets solved. It’s shelf-stable, luxury-coded, and emotionally elastic enough that restaurants can push prices higher without immediately scaring people off the way they would with entrée prices—though New York’s current wave of new steakhouses and bistros seems eager to treat the absurd cost of shrimp cocktail as a new kind of badge of honor.

None of this is new. What does feel newly intensified—at least to me—is the growing sense that wine pricing has become something people want to look at almost more than they want to participate in. Not just complain about, or begrudgingly accept, but actively observe. Compare. Track. Argue over. A kind of non-participatory expertise has taken hold: fluency without purchase, discernment without action, a way of staying adjacent to taste even when full participation is off the table.

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Wine, in this context, is just another contested field of information.

Last week, I found a new form of internet time-wasting and vicarious living: spying on New York City wine lists without walking into the restaurants themselves, or even pulling up their menu PDFs.

The tool enabling this behavior is Vinolist NYC, a free website that aggregates and indexes wine lists from a growing number of New York restaurants—thirty-seven at last count—and lets you search across them by producer, restaurant, vintage, cru, and basic attributes like color. When you land on the homepage, you’re greeted by a map of the city dotted with small, glowing red pins: Eleven Madison Park, Red Hook Tavern, Carbone, The Four Horsemen. Mostly familiar names. Each dot represents a wine list you can now browse at leisure, without asking for a table or making eye contact with a host.

You can type in a producer’s name and see where they appear across the city. You can filter by vintage and watch the results narrow. You can see—at least within this early beta sample of wine-serious restaurants—who has what, and what they charge for it.

I spoke briefly with the site’s creator, Jack Murphy, who described the project in refreshingly un-spectacular terms. It started, he told me, because it “felt like a fun project,” and because while there are countless tools for wine enthusiasts—cellar trackers, tasting-note apps, educational platforms—there wasn’t much that dealt specifically with restaurants and the way wine lists function inside them. Vinolist runs on an automated script that periodically checks whether a restaurant’s list has been updated, parses the PDF for producers, vintages, and prices, and updates the database accordingly. Growth is constrained less by ambition than by logistics: some lists aren’t online, some don’t list prices, some are formatted so idiosyncratically that they’re nearly impossible to parse reliably. Each organizational structure might demand its own interpretive script.

As Murphy—a noted Benjamin Leroux head—put it, every wine director’s personality shows up not just in what they choose, but in how the list itself is organized.

That personality remains largely invisible to the Vinolist user, which, in a way, is part of the appeal. The site doesn’t editorialize. It doesn’t tell you what’s good or where to go. It just lets the data sit next to itself, waiting to be explored and compared.

I ran a few searches for wines I usually have to hunt for manually—bottles that require page-flipping and a certain performative restraint. I queried the site for Didier Fornerol, whose wines have taken on an almost folkloric status among New York’s vino-cognoscenti. Vinolist showed me that there’s a magnum of Rue des Foins 2021 sitting at Parcelle in Greenwich Village for $550. In the context of New York wine pricing, this is… honestly not that bad. I’m aware of how deranged that sounds.

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But the pleasure wasn’t in the hypothetical purchase. It was in the confirmation. In seeing the number. In knowing exactly where this bottle was sitting in the city, like a pin dropped on a private mental map. Nothing had changed materially, but my sense of orientation had. The satisfaction came from legibility, not consumption.

That’s the behavior Vinolist seems to enable: looking without intent. Comparison divorced from action. It reminded me of other corners of the internet where this kind of non-participatory expertise thrives. People scrolling Zillow listings in cities they have no intention of moving to. Cruising Letterboxd reviews of films they haven’t seen, and may never see. Sports fans who can tell you exactly why a player’s contract is bad without having watched a full game all season. Expertise floats free of participation. Taste becomes something you demonstrate rather than exercise.

Wine fits into this pattern, particularly at a moment when so many people—often younger, often highly literate—care deeply about it but are priced out of full participation. If you can’t afford to drink widely, you can still stay adjacent. You can track where things are, who has access, and how much it costs. You can argue with the homies over a bottle of Lauer Barrel X about whether Altro Paradiso is gouging on that bottle of ’09 Gravner Pinot Sivi. Vinolist doesn’t solve the problem of expensive wine, but it does make pricing legible in a way that’s hard to unsee once you’ve started looking. (The catch, of course, is that the reader still has to know what a good price actually is.)

There’s also something funny about the story the site tells in its current form. If you didn’t know better, you might come away with the impression that Penny holds an outsized share of the city’s good wine. This could be an artifact of early-stage data. It could reflect which lists are easiest to parse. It could also simply be that the site aligns extremely well with my own tastes, which is an obvious—if humbling—realization. This, too, is a kind of cartography: not just of bottles, but of biases.

I’ve been thinking about Vinolist alongside other list-driven projects gaining traction right now, like David Choe’s Platform Postcard, which lets users publish and monetize public recommendations. Obviously, a tool like this feels tailor-made for someone like me, who is professionally invested in the making and selling of “taste.” And yet I was dismayed to find on there a public list from Deuxmoi cataloguing celebrity-frequented restaurants. Nearly everywhere I’ve ever worked in New York was on that list, including places that are permanently closed.

The impulse to organize insider information isn’t new, but the tools for doing so have become more efficient, more visible, and more gamified. Being “in the know” increasingly means having access to the list, not the experience itself. Possession replaces presence. The list becomes the unit of cultural authority.

You can see the same logic everywhere. The Super Bowl is this weekend, and millions of dollars will change hands betting not on the game itself, but on wardrobe malfunctions, prop outcomes, and the color of the Gatorade shower. Mini versions of Super Bowl commercials roll out on social before the Super Bowl, in order to promote…I guess, the promotion. The thing becomes secondary to the discourse around the thing. The spectacle isn’t the event—it’s the metadata.

Vinolist is a relatively gentle expression of this impulse. It doesn’t chase clout. It doesn’t monetize attention. It doesn’t tell you where to go or what to order. It simply lets you look. But even that small shift—from the wine list as a situational object handed to you at a table, to a document you can browse alongside dozens of others—feels consequential. Once they’re mapped, taste starts to look spatial. And after enough scrolling, you may realize that the act of looking has become its own form of participation.

Whether that’s a good thing or not remains unclear. For now, Vinolist mostly just makes visible a condition that already exists: a city where wine is expensive, curiosity is high, and many of us are increasingly content to stay adjacent—peering in, taking notes, and keeping score, without necessarily ordering a bottle.

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The lighting is forgiving, candlelight softening edges as it glints off glassware, your water refilled before you realize it’s low. Someone appears at your elbow exactly when you need them and disappears exactly when you don’t, and for an hour or two you’re suspended in a small, carefully arranged fantasy—front and back of house moving in concert so you can pretend that none of this took any effort at all. You didn’t cook, you won’t clean, and nothing is asked of you except appetite; desire is anticipated, and whatever mess preceded your arrival has already been cleared away.

That ease—the feeling that everything has already been taken care of, that you have been expertly cared for—depends on a system that only works as long as some of the people doing the work remain invisible.

What we are seeing now is what happens when an industry built on invisibility is forced—suddenly and publicly—to confront the collision between its aesthetic ideals and its labor realities.

Over the past several weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted what it calls Operation Metro Surge—a coordinated campaign of raids, checkpoints, and arrests targeting undocumented immigrants in major American cities. The effects have rippled through industries that depend on immigrant labor, but nowhere more visibly than in restaurants.

In Minneapolis, the response has shown what hospitality looks like when it stops pretending to be neutral.

Modern Times Cafe—a neighborhood institution near Powderhorn Park—switched to a donation-based model, refusing to charge customers and therefore refusing to collect sales tax. Owner Dylan Alverson, who witnessed federal agents shoot and kill both Renee Good and Alex Pretti—American citizens who died trying to protect others—and was tear-gassed alongside his neighbors, renamed his restaurant “Post Modern Times” and announced it would offer free food to anyone except ICE agents “until the occupation of Minneapolis is over.” Staff agreed to work as volunteers, paid through shared tips and community donations.

The message was explicit: we will not generate revenue for a government that publicly executes civilians in broad daylight.

Other restaurants closed their doors entirely—some because employees were too terrified to leave their homes, others as an act of solidarity. At Manny’s Tortas in Midtown Global Market, four of ten employees stopped showing up. The owner now delivers supplies to former workers sheltering in place. El Rodeo, Brasa St. Paul, and The Donut Connection went dark. One restaurant drew its blinds, locked its doors, and posted a volunteer at the entrance to screen who could enter.

What’s happening there is happening everywhere. The difference is that Minneapolis has been forced to show us what the industry looks like when business as usual is no longer an option—when restaurants have to decide, in real time, whether hospitality is merely a service or something closer to a civic obligation.

What it’s choosing to reckon with is this: the American restaurant industry doesn’t just rely on undocumented labor. It depends on the idea that this labor can remain indefinitely informal, indefinitely out of frame.

After nearly two decades working in New York restaurants—long enough to see every role from the inside—I can say this with certainty: most of the people who shaped my understanding of hospitality are immigrants, many of them undocumented.

They are the best cooks I know. The most reliable prep workers. The ones who show up early, stay late, work overnight. Who remember exactly how you set up your station. Who cover your shift when you’re hungover. They model a level of consistency and professionalism that the industry depends on.

But there’s another thing about New York restaurants and immigrant labor that’s mentioned less often. It’s not only that the work is brutal, or that immigrant workers are underpaid and undervalued—though both are true. It’s the incomparable level of skill.

In New York, restaurants don’t just use immigrant labor. They fully depend on it. The pasta you waited two months to have the privilege of eating, the risotto that tastes exactly like it did last time, the perfect sauce presented exactly as it looks in the magazine—those don’t make it to your plate because the chef with their name on the door is back there every night. It’s because the line cooks and prep cooks are that good.

This is practiced, embodied knowledge, built through repetition and time—through years on the same stations, under the same pressure. When we celebrate New York’s restaurant culture—when we post the plates, chase the reservations, publish the lists, hand out the stars—we are celebrating that work, even if we rarely acknowledge where it comes from.

The undocumented workers I know understand the system. They have no illusions about the industry loving them back. The terms of the deal are well understood: work hard, stay invisible, hope nothing breaks. The work is exploitative at times, and it is never truly safe. But within those constraints, skill can translate into something like mobility. Being very good at the work matters. Experience accumulates. Reputations travel. People move up, move on, send money home, build lives in one of the world’s most expensive cities.

We’ve seen effective and genuinely inspiring responses from the industry in Minneapolis, and other cities should take notice. Even before Minneapolis, some of the fiercest defenses of undocumented immigrants I’ve encountered have come from restaurant owners. I’ve also seen absolute indifference. Of the people and places I’ve worked for, I don’t think you’d be able to guess who falls into which category.

At this moment, what we owe each other isn’t a single prescription, but clarity—about what kind of industry restaurants already are, and what it means to participate in them, whether you’re cooking, serving, or eating.

When you’re in a restaurant, sometimes you can see through the dining room into the kitchen. There’s a line—the station where tickets hang and plates come up and cooks move in a rhythm they’ve practiced a thousand times. This is the line where the food we eat is transformed from the product of labor to a vessel of aesthetic significance. The people working that line are the reason you get to eat. Some of them were born here. Some of them weren’t. Some of them are hidden. Some of them are trying to stay that way.

That’s the other line. The one between what we acknowledge and what we pretend not to see.

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Dry January arrives and suddenly the drinks internet fills with think pieces insisting that abstinence is either fake, harmful, or secretly judgmental. Dry January, we’re told, is virtue signaling. Or it’s shaming people who still drink. Or it doesn’t “work,” because a month off doesn’t statistically lower annual alcohol consumption. Or worse: it causes binge behavior in February.

The proposed alternative is almost always moderate and intentional consumption — a position so obvious it barely qualifies as an argument. Moderation talk is also, notably, absent from the avalanche of holiday drinks messaging that dominates the two months leading up to January, when excess is marketed as celebration and restraint is nowhere to be found.

What’s revealing is not that Dry January has critics. It’s the intensity of the response. A few weeks of people opting out of alcohol is treated not as a predictable seasonal downturn, but as a cultural crisis—an affront to pleasure, culture, and personal freedom itself.

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Dry January™ is a Psy-Op

Launched in 2013 by Alcohol Change UK, Dry January™ was designed as a public-health intervention: a time-limited behavioral reset meant to prompt reflection around drinking, supported by apps, surveys, and follow-up data. Participation generates information that can then be used to advocate for alcohol-related policy changes, including advertising restrictions and taxation. None of this is especially sinister. This is, more or less, how contemporary public health messaging functions.

It’s true that some critics have noted the resemblance between this playbook and earlier anti-tobacco strategies: normalize abstention, reframe risk, collect population-level data, apply policy pressure. That comparison isn’t totally wrong. It’s also where the discourse tends to go off the rails.

Tobacco and alcohol are not the same product. Wine is agricultural, cultural, and social, embedded in hospitality in ways cigarettes never were. Treating Dry January as the opening salvo of a prohibitionist war misunderstands both the campaign itself and the culture it’s operating within.

At the same time, pretending Dry January is a purely organic, apolitical self-care ritual is equally naïve. It can be both a personal choice and an institutional strategy — and the scale of its adoption is really just evidence that it’s a well-designed, well-timed campaign doing exactly what it was meant to do.

Did you know, for example, that Taco Tuesday™ was once owned by a Tex-Mex restaurant in New Jersey? The term was only made legally available to the public in 2023 (though obviously it’s been widely adopted by other businesses, and consumers the whole time). As a Texan-born devotee of tacos — and a known hater of alliterated slogans, ESPECIALLY those involving days of the week — I can hold space for this complexity. I’m not out here screaming that Taco Tuesday is evidence of a radical cabal of Jersey-based Tex-Mex appropriators...though I do have some questions.

The problem is not that Dry January™ exists. The problem is how the industry responds.

What the Research Actually Shows

One of the loudest critiques of Dry January is the claim that taking a month off doesn’t meaningfully change long-term drinking behavior, or that it produces rebound “binge February” drinking.

The empirical support for that claim is weak. Longitudinal studies and follow-ups from Alcohol Change UK and independent researchers suggest that for many participants, Dry January functions as a diagnostic exercise rather than a cure: people report improved sleep, mood, and energy, along with greater awareness of their habits. A meaningful subset continues drinking less or more intentionally months later. The specter of rebound bingeing appears in a relatively small minority of cases.

Dry January doesn’t claim to be the cure for anything, but it is a way for public health advocates (whatever you think of their agenda) to collect data. It’s a behavioral moment worth examining, not exiling.

And even if Dry January were entirely neutral in its long-term effects, that would still not justify the industry’s panicked reaction. We do not typically marshal listicles and moral arguments to protect people from a calendar month. We understand that there are seasonal fluxuations in business that are out of our control. Wine, of all industries, should grasp this intuitively. Grapevines spend months each year dormant, unproductive, conserving energy for what comes next. It’s simply priced into the way we figure out our annual production and revenues.

When an industry feels compelled to argue that people should drink — rather than explaining why drinking a certain thing might be meaningful — something has gone wrong.

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The Anxiety Behind the Backlash

Our industry is under genuine pressure, and I don’t want to minimize that: rising costs, tariff instability, climate volatility, and softer on-premise business across the board. At the same time, the cultural monopoly alcohol once held over social life is eroding.

Younger drinkers are more selective. Many people now “zebra stripe,” alternating between drinking and not drinking without making a scene of it. Weed beverages are filling casual social niches once reserved for beer or wine. GLP-1 drugs are are being used to help impulse control, curbing addictive behaviors around alcohol (I know, bummer, right?).

None of this really has anything to do with Dry January. But it does make the industry’s insistence that it is actively harmful feel kind of insane.

Instead of addressing these shifts with curiosity or creativity, parts of the industry have responded with a kind of manic insistence that alcohol is being unfairly maligned. We now see earnest lists enumerating the “benefits” of drinking alcohol, as if wine needs a wellness pamphlet. We see — in a desperate, boomerish attempt to appeal to a younger drinking audience — calls to “swipe left” on Dry January, to resist it, to reject it, to refuse participation as an act of cultural loyalty or a political assertion of one’s imperiled bodily autonomy. The tone is less hospitality and more embattled interest group.

To be clear: none of this is an argument against drinking wine. It’s an argument against defending wine badly.

Alcohol Is Not a Wellness Product

Another source of tension in the Dry January discourse is the growing clarity around alcohol’s health risks. Public-health authorities have become more explicit about alcohol’s links to cancer and other long-term harms, and the industry has responded with aggressive lobbying to soften language and resist stronger warnings. This is understandable, but it’s also misguided.

Alcohol is not health food. It never has been. Pretending otherwise has always been the weakest possible defense of wine. Wine does not need to be justified on biomedical grounds. Its value has never been about optimization.

Wine matters because it is agricultural, cultural, and social. Because it is tied to place and labor. Because it slows time rather than hacking it. Wine lives in the culture of conviviality, and the unproductive, unoptimized enjoyment of life, not a wellness spreadsheet.

Wine can sometimes facilitate human connection — in the form of what we call ‘fun’ — which matters in a culture increasingly defined by loneliness. But that doesn’t make alcohol, or drinking, good for you

Acknowledging risk does not require moral panic, and it certainly doesn’t require pretending those risks don’t exist. Trying to rehabilitate alcohol as “actually good for you” cheapens it. It collapses something complex and human into a wellness argument it cannot win.

Hospitality Should Be a Home for Everyone

If someone wants to take a month off from drinking, that’s fine. If they want a weed soda instead of a glass of red, also fine. And if they take to social media to tell us about it in a way that we find annoying, that’s actually fine too. Nobody owes the wine industry a drinking habit. What the industry does need is a different posture.

It needs to stop arguing people into consumption and start making the case for value. That means investing in hospitality culture, not just sales strategies. It means education that invites curiosity rather than defensiveness. It means advocating for wages and working conditions that make wine a viable long-term profession, not a burnout pipeline.

And it means respecting that alcohol is an addictive substance whose abuse carries real occupational hazards for those who have constant free access to it. Wine Enthusiast recently posted a profile of Abe Zárate, a working sommelier who chose sobriety without leaving the trade — a development I find structurally important, even if I remain aesthetically unconvinced. As with Taco Tuesday™, I can hold space for this complexity…though I do have some questions.

But I do feel strongly that hospitality should remain a safe place for those who choose to abstain — temporarily, permanently, or somewhere in between — for whatever reason they want, without being accused of doing “free marketing” for UK interest groups. That is the kind of environment the drinks world should be championing.

Fewer people drinking better wine is not a crisis. It’s an opportunity — if the industry can resist the urge to panic. Wine will exist as long as grapes can grow, which, given the climate, may not be forever. If it’s going to matter in the years ahead, it won’t be because we bullied people out of their January resolutions. It will be because we made wine worth choosing, on its own terms.

After about a decade-long hiatus, I’m returning to jeans. I recently bought a charcoal gray knit turtleneck from Quince and found it genuinely thrilling. I own a pair of fur-lined L.L. Bean loafers. I am, now in the twilight of my thirties, beginning to dress my age.

This is not a declaration of aesthetic surrender. I am not renouncing taste, nor retreating into dadcore. When I say boring, I mean boring in the sense of not wanting my clothes to say very much at all.

That desire—to wear something solid, competent, and quiet—turns out to be less trivial than it sounds. It points to a broader shift in how clothes function, at least for men my age. This isn’t a shift away from caring how we look, exactly, but a shift away from asking clothing to perform so much symbolic labor on our behalf.

I’m not entirely sure what’s driving it. It could be that my lifelong struggle with masculine gender presentation has reached a point of soft, unceremonious resolution. It could be the ambient fatigue of having lived through several complete cycles of men discovering trousers. It could be the psychic shock of watching my fifteen-year-old nephew post photos of himself wearing JNCOs, which somehow look both aggressively current and historically recursive at the same time. Whatever the cause, the effect is consistent: for the first time in my life, I’m looking to look more basic.

So, I’m very hyped on this sunwashed crewneck sweatshirt from Hanover. It is one hundred percent cotton, made in America, garment-dyed, pre-washed, logo-free, and under a hundred dollars. I don’t love it because it signals good taste. I love it because it signals nothing in particular. I want it not because it promises to make me look interesting, but because it promises to stop asking me to perform interestingness with a sweatshirt.

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Dressing Your Age, Dressing at All

Dressing your age has less to do with your age than with how long you’ve been trying things on. It’s not about conservatism, nor about abandoning style in favor of respectability. It’s about recognizing when clothes stop being a place to prove something new about yourself. To dress your age, in this sense, is to understand when the audition is over.

For millennial men, menswear once functioned as a kind of ongoing tryout. You dressed to demonstrate that you were paying attention, that you understood the references, that you had internalized the right lessons about fit, proportion, silhouette and restraint. The ideal outcome was to look fluent without seeming desperate.

That posture made sense when access to taste was uneven—when knowing how to dress still implied knowing where to look and who to listen to. Menswear circulated through stores, magazines, forums, and scenes that required time and proximity to enter. In that context, dressing well really did function as evidence that attention had been paid. Coolness, at least provisionally, felt earned.

But at a certain point, continuing to dress as if you’re still auditioning starts to read like insecurity. You can feel it in outfits that seem over-resolved, assembled with the clear expectation of being decoded. The clothes arrive already anticipating commentary—he knows who Evan Kinori is, and he can afford to put that sh*t on—and in doing so, they flatten the person wearing them.

Dressing your age isn’t necessarily about toning it down. It’s about withdrawing from the performance loop. It’s the decision to stop using clothes to certify your belonging, because belonging is no longer the question at hand. The interesting work has moved elsewhere.

When Taste Gets Too Easy

Everyone now knows what to buy, how to wear it, and what it is supposed to signal. And yet the outfit rarely explains much about the person wearing it beyond the fact that they know how to dress. Taste, in clothes as in any other realm, has become frictionless.

You can learn it by scrolling. You can absorb it through archive accounts that collapse decades of differentiation into moodboards. You can acquire it through resale platforms that flatten access while preserving the appearance of discernment. Knowledge is no longer something you earn slowly, through proximity and context. It’s something you download in an afternoon with just a few smartphone apps.

When taste can be executed step by step, it stops doing the work it once did. Clothes no longer hint at interior life so much as confirm procedural competence. The result isn’t bad dressing, but correct dressing—outfits that, at their best, scan perfectly, but still say very little.

This is why hyper-articulated aesthetic choices increasingly read as just that: aesthetic choices. They’re not expressions of curiosity or contradiction, but demonstrations of fluency within a system that no longer withholds anything. The consumer decisions speak fluently. The person underneath remains curiously unexamined.

I think about the guys who get tattooed instead of cultivating interesting perspectives. Your friend’s boyfriend who shows up to the party with a liter of skin-contact Gulp/Hablo like it’s a flex. Tech founders swapping Patagonia vests for Palm Angels tracksuits and Chrome Hearts tees. Meanwhile, Jonathan Anderson—someone with unimpeachable fashion credentials—shows up to public appearances in normal-looking jeans, tennis shoes, and a plain sweater. He is masterfully underdressed, not because he lacks taste, but because he no longer needs his clothes to perform it for him.

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Taste Goes Private

In a recent i-D piece, wrote, “your taste should be private.” Her argument is that the most interesting functions of taste may no longer be public-facing. In a fully optimized recommendation economy—where every preference can be surfaced, categorized, ranked, and monetized—public taste flattens. It becomes instrumental. It turns into a dataset.

What survives is personal taste: quieter, harder to translate, uninterested in recognition. Taste that shows up in repetition rather than declaration. As an example, she points to The Errands Show, an Instagram project that documents what people wear while running everyday errands, when they’re not performing a curated consumer identity. A young woman goes to get a dress taken in and notices the weed leaf on the pulled-up sock of her tailor. You know, amazing stuff like that. It’s absolutely mundane—and somehow more interesting than ninety percent of reels on Instagram. It shows us taste operating at a low frequency, embedded in daily life rather than staged for attention. The outfit is chosen, but it isn’t addressed outward. It doesn’t ask to be decoded. It doesn’t care who’s watching. Some people look effortlessly good, others don’t!

The intrigue of the show, and Rips’ argument about the interiorization of taste, is the flip side of my current menswear malaise. The work clothes once did—signaling intelligence, curiosity, interiority—has moved into smaller, less visible decisions, like how someone speaks, what they repeat and what they reach for when they’re not trying to be seen.

Normcore, After the Fact

Is all of this a normcore renaissance? No. The silhouettes overlap. The materials feel familiar. The affect is similarly muted. But the resemblance is misleading.

When K-Hole published Youth Mode in 2013, normcore wasn’t a retreat from meaning but a reorientation of it. It emerged as a response to what they called Mass Indie: a culture in which difference had become so finely specified, so relentlessly curated, that it collapsed into exhaustion. Identity had become a high-resolution problem. Everything mattered, all the time.

Normcore proposed sameness as a way out. By opting into the middle—into clothing that refused distinction—it offered a strategy for connection. If Mass Indie was about proving difference, normcore was about suspending that proof. The sameness was outward-facing. It was an invitation.

What we’re seeing now feels like the aftermath of that strategy rather than its continuation. The plain sweatshirt today doesn’t read as adaptive or generous. It reads as a boundary. It isn’t “I can be with anyone.” It’s “I don’t want to be read too closely.”

Normcore was sameness as openness. This moment is sameness as withdrawal from the constant demand that clothes perform legibility, relevance, and self-knowledge. The goal isn’t connection through neutrality, but privacy through opacity.

After the Signal

The creative force behind Hanover is , and he is not a person lacking taste, nor someone retreating from fashion out of disinterest. He is one half of the podcast How Long Gone, a longtime columnist at GQ, and a creative advisor to major menswear brands, like J.Crew. He has spent years inside the machinery of taste—watching how meaning gets produced, circulated, and eventually exhausted. If anyone understands how easily even restraint can harden into posture, it’s him.

This is why Hanover’s blandness—or, let’s say, refusal to perform—feels intentional, and compelling. It isn’t saying this is what cool looks like now. It’s saying cool no longer needs to live here.

I spotted Chris recently on a weekend upstate. He was wearing a puffer jacket and athletic shorts, walking to get coffee. If you didn’t know who he was, you might have written him off instantly. Another basic rich city guy wearing overpriced athleisure on vacation. But the moment he opened his mouth, I realized who he was. The voice gave him away.

This is how it should be.

Hanover doesn’t mourn the collapse of menswear’s signaling function, and it doesn’t try to resurrect it through irony or archive, it doesn’t re-imbue the crewneck with cultural significance. It accepts that the work clothes once performed has migrated elsewhere—into the low-frequency decisions that don’t scale well or screenshot cleanly.

Dressing boring now means accepting the possibility of being misread. It means letting go of the idea that your clothes should preemptively explain you. If someone is paying attention, they’ll figure it out. If they’re not, that’s no longer your problem.

And not just the song, but everything around it: the room, the light, the air, the state of their life at that exact moment. The music hits with such force that every other detail of the scene comes into vivid relief, like the background suddenly snapping into focus.

You don’t remember because you were paying attention. You remember because something rearranged you. I can tell you exactly where I was the first time I heard Leon Vynehall’s album, Nothing Is Still, because it rewired my brain for a kind of pleasure I didn’t yet know existed.

It was the morning after one of many lively dinner parties that defined a certain post-Covid moment in 2022, when socializing felt newly possible again and therefore basically mandatory. There was no official cause for celebration, other than that celebration itself was allowed again. About ten people came over and we gathered around the long table in the carport at our old house in New Orleans for dinner. We grilled a couple big steaks and served them with smashed roasted potatoes and smoked pimentón aioli. There was kale salad with anchovy vinaigrette, pecorino and radishes, as was customary.

The next day I woke up in a mild hangover daze and started cleaning the carport. Picking up empty bottles. Someone had brought a bottle of Alice and Olivier de Moor Vau de Vey Chablis. Another friend showed up with a bottle of Domaine Bachelet vieilles vignes Gevrey-Chambertin. A few veladoras remained at the long table under the carport, having been used for sipping mezcal after dinner. I was sweeping the concrete with my earbuds in when the song “Birds on the Tarmac” came on after whatever I had been listening to before.

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I stopped what I was doing and made sure to start the album from the beginning, then I kept sweeping. Built from drifting rhythmic cells, blurred melodic fragments, and a low, persistent sense of forward motion, the tracks on this album refuse climax in favor of duration, asking you to stay with them long enough for perception itself to change. I let the album wash over me while dust collected into neat gray lines on the concrete. The music didn’t announce itself as revelatory. It didn’t ask for attention. It simply arrived and stayed, patiently, until I realized—somewhere between one pass of the broom and the next—that my internal sense of pleasure had expanded. There was now a room in my viscera for a kind of aesthetic experience I hadn’t known existed.

I remember all of this with embarrassing clarity: the food, the wine, the weather, the exact moment—not because I tried to remember it, but because the experience carried enough force to reorganize everything around it. That’s how it usually works.

I thought about this moment as I read and Terry Theise’s conversation, “A Defense of Wine Writing”, from the latest issue of World of Fine Wine. It’s a generous, clear-eyed exchange between two veteran wine writers that articulates a shared unease many of us have felt for years: that much of contemporary wine writing—especially tasting-note culture—has become unproductive, aesthetically deadening, and strangely dishonest about what it’s actually doing.

Maker and Theise are skeptical of wine writing that pretends toward objectivity, that treats tasting as a catechism, that flattens lived experience into laundry lists of flavor descriptors and numerical scores. They argue instead for experiential, contextual, literary accounts of wine—writing that is worth keeping, not merely useful to a consumer. They want writing that understands wine not as a static object to be evaluated, but as something encountered in time, through a body, under conditions that matter. And each of their writing styles respectively are great examples of wine writing worth keeping.

I agree with them. And I also think their argument opens onto a slightly deeper question, one that wine culture tends to dodge: where does wine experience actually live, cognitively? How do we hold it? How does it change us? And why do tasting notes—flawed as they are—keep getting written anyway?

I think the tasting note recurs with such persistence because it’s attached to something important: memory, learning, and the desire to hold onto an experience that refuses to hold still.

Credentialed wine programs—Court of Master Sommeliers, WSET, and their cousins—lean heavily on memorization. Varieties, regions, soils, classifications, processes. Tasting grids. Structured recall. There’s a reason for this, and it’s not evil. Memorization is a powerful technology. The memory palace works. Humans are remarkably good at storing information when it’s scaffolded, spatialized, ritualized.

But memorization is often mistaken for experience, or worse, offered as a substitute for it. The grid becomes the thing itself. Correct recall masquerades as understanding. The pleasure of recognition eclipses the messier, more complex, more contingent pleasure of encounter.

Maker and Theise push back against this by allowing wine memory to remain mobile, experiential, even spiritual—less about storing facts and more about recording what happened to you. Their preferred mode of remembering is lived and narrative rather than architectural and fixed. (You may remember how, in an era of deep reconning failure-ridden relationship history, High Fidelity’s protagonist, Rob Gordon, reorganizes his record collection autobiographically.)

Somewhere between these two positions—rote memorization and purely experiential recall—I’d like to propose a loose theory of my own: the matrix.

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This concept is borrowed from mathematics, but I don’t mean anything too mathematical. A matrix describes a total field of interrelated data, expressed as a grid. Now, rather than numbers, the data we accumulate over time can take various forms: sensory impressions, emotional states, contextual details, cultural knowledge, social dynamics, personal history. Every wine you drink enters this matrix as a small data set. Flavor, aroma, and texture, yes—but also where you were, who you were with, what you knew at the time, what you were hoping for, what you were avoiding, how open you were to being moved.

The key thing about matrices—mathematically and experientially—is that new data doesn’t simply add information. It changes the relationships among all the existing data.

When your matrix is small, each new experience carries enormous weight. Early wine experiences feel seismic not necessarily because the wines are better, but because there’s less else to compare them to. (I know this because I was that person, briefly convinced I had reached the end of the map because I passed my certification exam.) A single bottle can rearrange the entire field of data. Later, as the matrix grows, experiences tend to register relationally rather than absolutely. You don’t feel less. You feel differently. And your conviction that you ‘know’ anything at all, more or less evaporates.

This is why people often confuse development with loss. The first time something hits you—music, wine, art—it can feel total. Later encounters may feel subtler, quieter, less destabilizing. Not because you’ve become jaded, but because your internal structure has become more complex. Knowledge doesn’t kill pleasure. It redistributes it. Memorization expands the matrix. Experience fills it. Neither is sufficient on its own, and neither needs to cancel the other out. You don’t need to memorize your own life experience—you already know it, simply by having lived it attentively.

I thought about this again watching Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret. It’s a film that feels almost perversely resistant to summary—not because it’s opaque, but because it insists on being relational. Trauma unfolds sideways. Moral certainty collapses into contradiction. The camera refuses to tell you where to stand, or whom to side with, or when to feel resolved. The most indelible moments are awkward, unresolved, even faintly humorous in their absurdity: Allison Janney bleeding out on the street in a stranger’s arms; Anna Paquin’s painfully misjudged sex scene with Kieran Culkin; J. Smith-Cameron’s portrayal of a mother whose brittle need for her daughter’s affection leads her to lash out in ways that feel inappropriate and totally understandable.

What makes Margaret so demanding is not its subject matter, but its refusal to simplify experience into a single emotional register. Grief does not ennoble. Righteousness does not clarify. Suffering does not arrive with instructions. The film asks the viewer to hold competing truths at once: the protagonist’s pain and her self-absorption, her ethical seriousness and her adolescent sanctimony, the quiet exhaustion of the adults around her, the way a single traumatic event radiates outward into lives that did not consent to carry it.

I probably would not have loved this film when it came out in 2011. Having experienced significant trauma at roughly the same age as Anna Paquin’s character, I don’t think I would have had the distance, or the internal fortitude to see the film clearly. I would have latched onto one perspective and mistaken it for the whole. I would have wanted the movie to take a side.

Watching it now, I didn’t need it to. I could see how meaning emerged not from resolution, but from accumulation: scene layered onto scene, reaction onto reaction, each encounter subtly altering the emotional math of the last. The film hits hard because it hits wide.

What I like most about Maker and Theise’s conversation is that their critique of tasting notes is not theoretical; it’s procedural. They are (obviously) not saying don’t taste carefully. They are saying: change the conditions under which tasting happens.

Again and again, they return to the problem of comparative overload—the professional ritual of tasting forty or fifty wines in a row and pretending this produces meaningful knowledge. Theise is blunt about it: once you pass fifteen or twenty wines, he describes the situation as “false.” The human palate and mind, he contends, simply aren’t built for that kind of abstraction. At that point, you’re no longer encountering wines; you’re watching them perform under contrived conditions.

What they propose instead looks a lot like a practical application of the matrix, even if they never use the word.

Theise talks about tasting the same wine three times over several days, under different circumstances, sometimes even from the same bottle, acknowledging openly that each encounter is partial and contingent. Maker echoes this, saying she wants to live with a wine, to taste it again later, to see how it behaves outside the artificial drama of the comparative tasting lineup. The point is not to triangulate some final truth, but to develop a relationship.

This matters, because you are not the same person across those tastings.

Three or four years apart, your matrix is larger. You have more reference points, more memories, more disappointments, more pleasures, more quiet calibrations you didn’t consciously log. Even three or four hours apart, you’re a different taster: fed or hungry, open or tired, drunk or sober, stimulated or flat. The wine is changing too—opening, softening, tightening, falling apart, pulling itself back together. And even then, as they both note, bottles vary. The same wine, same vintage, same producer can show differently because material reality is not as obedient as our taxonomies would like it to be.

What Maker and Theise are really advocating for, beneath the surface, is a shift away from taxonomy and toward attention over time. Not the accumulation of descriptors, but the accumulation of encounters. Not mastery through classification, but familiarity through repetition. You don’t know a wine because you can name it correctly. You know it because you’ve spent time with it—long enough for both of you to change.

Seen this way, their skepticism toward tasting notes isn’t a rejection of memory or even memorization; it’s a rejection of the fantasy that memory can be flattened into a single, authoritative account. The matrix doesn’t just grow between bottles. It also grows between encounters with the same bottle.

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This is where tasting notes start to make more sense to me—not as descriptions of wine, but as timestamps of consciousness. They are not maps. They are artifacts. Evidence that attention happened. Proof that, at a specific moment, something passed through you and left a mark.

They are also factually worthless in the way all memory is factually worthless: subjective, partial, unrepeatable, contaminated by context. The wine changed. You changed. The conditions changed. Accuracy was never on the table. And yet we keep writing them because they’re the only way to prove we were there, in that space of encounter.

Tasting notes can never tell the truth about wine, but they can tell the truth about having been there. Because they mark a moment when the matrix shifted—sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes all at once. Wine doesn’t hold still long enough to be described, and neither do we.

The only stable unit is the encounter. As Leon Vynehall reminds us: nothing is still.

I’m interested in the notion of least accessible because it’s become one of the only aesthetic judgments people feel comfortable making in public. It sounds neutral and democratic, like a report from the field, but it smuggles in a whole theory of listening: what music is for, how it should arrive, how quickly it should pay out, and what kind of attention it’s allowed to ask from anyone living inside the algorithmic present.

In his excellent recent essay, Rosalía and the Meaning of Sauvignon Blanc, quotes Rosalía saying exactly that. In a New York Times interview, she explains she’s absolutely asking a lot—because “the more we are in the era of dopamine, the more I want the opposite… the desire of being something that pulls you to be focused for hopefully an hour.”

That feels like a very contemporary thing for a pop star to say out loud: not here are some more bangers, but I want to build a room you can stay inside.

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Before LUX turns into a morality play about “challenging art,” it’s worth clarifying something: the album isn’t difficult in any absolute sense. It’s unoptimized only relative to a very specific and very recent set of listening conditions—conditions that have trained the public ear to accept (and prefer) music that is: aggressively leveled and over-compressed; calibrated for phone speakers and cheap Bluetooth cylinders; excerptable into a fifteen-second vertical video clip; and instantly legible at low volume while doing something else.

Against that baseline, LUX can feel frictious. But it may be optimized—carefully, even ruthlessly—for other values: human affect; dynamic range; audible breath; the strange elasticity of time that emerges when phrasing is allowed to drag, bloom, hesitate, and unfurl into scribbly microtonal ornaments. Wilson calls it Rosalía’s operatic world: the album’s scale, its ritual confidence, its willingness to build intensity slowly instead of rushing to the hook like some palliative lullaby. The album is intricate, expansive, generous and—aside from Yves Tumor’s bizarre intervention—rapturously beautiful.

Pitchfork puts it bluntly: it’s “not a dopamine machine like MOTOMAMI,” and it “rewards listeners who ache for more… more feeling, more risk.” While I don’t remember MOTOMAMI as quite so streamlined (it had plenty of dissonance and difficulty), it’s clear that LUX assumes a listener who still believes a pop album can be longer than a scroll.

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Jonah from published a year-end essay this week that playfully promises to “save literacy.” It’s hilarious, panicked, and achieves the rare feat of philosophical revelation by way of autobiographical humiliation. He describes a creeping confusion between the world and the screen: a fog rolling over a hillside, followed by the genuine question—am I looking at a screen right now?—because the body has been trained to see in posts, grids, stories.

The essay turns when Jonah realizes he’s been treating Swann’s Way as a prop for content rather than a work to be read. So he actually reads it—slowly, stubbornly, like retraining a muscle. Proust, he discovers, isn’t punishingly difficult. He just moves at his own speed. If you decelerate and lock in, the difficulty resolves into pleasure.

This is the most convincing defense of “inaccessible” art I know: it isn’t inaccessible; it’s indifferent to the speed of the feed.

Wilson’s reading of the Rosalía’s song “Sauvignon Blanc” is thrilling because it refuses the usual pop-star wine script. The song is a renunciation narrative—burning the Rolls-Royce, tossing the Jimmy Choos, letting the porcelain crumble—but the one thing Rosalía won’t give up is sauvignon blanc. As you can imagine, hearing this, I am triggered.

Wilson contrasts this with the familiar lyrical deployment of wine as status—Drake’s moscato, Jay-Z’s Cristal, the whole catalog of “I drink this because I am expensive.” Rosalía’s sauvignon blanc is the opposite: not a flex, but an everyday, bodily anchor—“plentifully, for the soul,” as Wilson puts it. He’s also right that wine almost never appears this way in pop music at all. It’s not just a name-check; it’s a refusal of connoisseurship.

As a quick side note, I would love it if our popstars could innovate a little more with their beverage shout-outs. There’s a world where Travis Scott yells “Radikon!” into his cavernous void of ad-libs. Imagine with me, how delicious it would be to hear Lil’ Yachty murmur something about Clos Rougeard over James Blake beat punctuated with that little motor boat sound he makes with his mouth.

Anyway, in a different Sauvignon Blanc-focused article, Jason Wilson argues:

No one in the wine bubble ever evangelized for Sancerre. It’s not a darling of the natural wine movement, or collectors, or influencers. Nor, to be fair, has it become a caricature or gained a vaguely trashy reputation, like pinot grigio or Prosecco. Sancerre just sort of exists. It’s generally crisp and refreshing and—as French words go—it’s relatively easy for Americans to pronounce. Normal people just like it.

In my life, “Sancerre” is not just a region. It’s a mandatory checkbox, a piece of messaging infrastructure. A lot of wine programs—especially those that live under the tyranny of “crowd-pleasing whites”—treat it like a required utility: if you don’t have Sancerre by the glass, you need a Sauvignon Blanc that can stand in for the idea of Sancerre, so the ordering moment remains frictionless. No, we don’t have a Sancerre, but there’s a sauvignon blanc that should do the trick. It’s Gascogne blanc, or Menetou-Salon, or Pouilly-Fumé. In this case, functionally equivalent—just harder to pronounce.

This is where “Kill Sancerre” originally came from: not hatred of the wine, but irritation at how easily the name becomes an interpretive shortcut—how quickly it ends the tasting conversation before it begins. And how all that leads to a market inundated with gross, commodity-level sauvignon blanc from very expensive land in the Loire Valley.

So when Wilson frames sauvignon blanc as undersignifying—humble, spiritual, a route to uncomplicated pleasure—I believe him, and I also want to point out that sauvignon blanc is, in many contexts, the opposite of undersignifying. It’s hyper-visible.

George Civeris just put out his first standup special and Sancerre makes an appearance as the preferred libation of his older self and his chic (and imaginary) adult daughter, Amy. Sancerre is a stand-in for Amy’s overall good taste. Why do I feel the need to take this as a personal attack, you ask? I do not know.

I am only saying that sauvignon blanc is densely coded. It’s one of those phenomena that has been memed and repeated and overexposed into a kind of cultural utility—which means it is an easy site for projection.

In this information environment, almost no one shares the same field of reference anymore—not fully. Each of us is walking around with a personalized archive of associations, algorithms, jokes, traumas, aesthetic dogmas, and private histories. We encounter the same objects—an album, a wine, a word like “accessible”—and we bring wildly different baggage to the encounter.

Jonah from Spyplane describes this in the register of psycho-technology: the phone sticking to the mind like a facehugger, training perception itself. Rosalía describes it in the register of attention: the craving for the opposite of dopamine, the desire for an hour of focus. In my life, sauvignon blanc is often doing a different job entirely: it is a socially sanctioned way to order a white wine without having to think about wine. None of these readings are “wrong.” They just aren’t commensurable. They don’t click into a single stable meaning. They circulate, becoming a new distortion with every iteration.

This is why sauvignon blanc is such an interesting hinge for a pop song: it’s famous enough to be instantly legible, and slippery enough to carry contradictory messages without collapsing.

I have to believe that Rosalía is, at least in some way, aware of this. One of the many perverse figurations that flow forth from Sancerre and sauvignon blanc is what we might call the “basic white girl.” Wilson even notes that Taylor Swift is “also a Sancerre fan,” almost as a throwaway, but it’s not nothing, considering how these symbols circulate within our shared imagination.

If Rosalía is a serious, culturally fluent artist—an artist who knows exactly what her symbols drag behind them—then there’s no way she is unaware of this reputation. Which is part of what makes the line interesting. “Sauvignon Blanc” works both as sincere pleasure and as a kind of knowing provocation: keeping the supposedly “basic” thing, refusing to renounce it, letting it remain bodily and beloved rather than embarrassing.

Seen in the broader context of this album, Rosalía’s prayer to sauvignon blanc casts in her a striking bipolarity, as both art diva and basic chica.

If Rosalía can say she wants to pull listeners out of the dopamine trance for an hour, it’s tempting to ask the parallel question in wine: what would it look like to ask for a more durable attention span from drinkers? Not as a scold, but as an invitation.

Wine has its own dopamine machines: the default order, the meme bottle, the region-name shibboleth, the glass that arrives cold and familiar and ends the story before it begins. Sometimes that’s exactly what a person wants. Sometimes a person has earned it.

But sometimes someone wants to be pulled into presence—wants the wine to behave less like a product and more like an encounter. That’s what LUX is doing, too: not becoming inaccessible, but becoming worth sustained attention.

When I was in wine school, I worked nights as a cellar manager and wine runner at the Waverly Inn. I would go to long lectures in the mornings, getting there early to set up the room with glassware for the rest of the class. Then I would go to work early to get started on receiving deliveries and organizing the cellar. Then service—opening bottles, running wine, tasting as much as I could, observing the room, helping the somm. It was an education by immersion, and it made my head feel both sharper and more exhausted than I knew was possible.

After work, I’d sometimes walk to the Corner Bistro and order a glass of white wine. It was Yellowtail Sauvignon Blanc from a magnum that had been open for an unknowable amount of time. Ice cold. Narrow little bistro glass. Flamboyantly floral, a crispy sweetness, loud tropical notes—the kind of engineered pleasure that would never be confused for terroir. It was not a good wine.

And I loved it in that moment because it didn’t taste like work.

It didn’t ask me to evaluate anything. It didn’t ask me to prove what I knew. It didn’t ask me to be a person with a palate and a framework and an opinion. It simply arrived as uncomplicated pleasure at the precise moment when my capacity for interpretation had been used up.

We can appreciate things for reasons other than expansive beauty. Sometimes it’s just efficacy, or directness. But the enjoyment of something simple, or engineered for your easy consumption, hits just a little harder when you’ve had the opportunity to be immersed in something that really asks for your presence.

As technology continues to mediate how we consume nearly everything, unmediated sensory pleasure becomes both rarer and more charged. Wine still resists frictionless consumption. It insists on presence, slowness, and complex interpretation. The risk is not that wine becomes inaccessible; it’s that the way we talk about it collapses into either trivia or atmosphere, bland information on one end and lifestyle noise on the other.

I’m also in the process of building a digital course that lays out how I think wine education should look as we move toward 2026. The essay that follows is contained within that project, but it stands on its own as a position: an argument that wine communication matters precisely because it sits at the intersection of sensation, culture, and personal language.

This is not a manifesto, and it’s not a corrective for bad taste. It’s an attempt to articulate what feels worth preserving—and worth rethinking—about how we talk about wine in a moment when knowledge is cheap, but experience is not.

The essay begins there.

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I didn’t become a somm because I had some preternaturally refined palate or an intuitive grasp of every grape on earth. I became a somm because I liked trying to describe things I couldn’t quite name, and I thought I could make more money and be more professionally valuable than just a server. Long before wine, that instinct showed up in music, in art history seminars, in late-night conversations about a song, or a celebrity’s outfit, or a film would become an attempt to articulate something about desire, status, or whatever cultural mood lingered just beyond my comprehension. Wine offered that impulse a professional context. And if there is one lesson that has carried me from the floor to writing this newsletter to building a digital course, it’s that talking about wine begins not with authority but with humility and curiosity. Expertise is useful, but it’s rarely the reason someone listens. What people respond to is the sense that you are discovering something with them, not performing to prove you already know.

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Every sommelier knows this central paradox: sensory experience is private, yet communicating it is public. You are trying to build shared meaning out of something only you can taste. Accuracy, therefore, becomes less important than resonance. The best wine language recognizes this and and goes beyond formulaic, book report-style tasting notes. You may want to acknowledge the realities of flavor profiles, body weights, aromatic components and extrapolate from there about things like the grape variety or the region where the wine is from. But wine communication, at it’s best, goes further. It leans into metaphor, analogy and autobiography. It borrows vocabulary from culture because culture is where shared meaning lives. If I were to liken a German riesling to, say, a Bauhaus chair—engineered efficiency, effortlessly precise, sleek and direct—I’m not trying to be clever; I’m trying to bridge your world and mine. When I describe a skin-contact Pinot Gris as feeling sun-bleached and tactile, like linen that’s been washed too many times, or a Loire Gamay as having the kind of casual charm that makes you linger longer than you planned, I’m doing what all wine communicators ultimately do: using the familiar to illuminate the unfamiliar.

Curiosity should be the operative method. Because so much traditional wine education is built around memorization, we often mistake not knowing something for failure. But the truth is that wine is vast, and even the most seasoned professionals are constantly looking things up, relearning, and revising what they thought they knew. I think the opposite is healthier and far more effective: you should rewire your relationship to not-knowing so that it becomes energizing rather than embarrassing. A good somm doesn’t pretend omniscience; a good somm models inquiry. They admit gaps, chase answers, and bring people along for the search. When you say, “I’m not sure, but let’s find out together,” you’re not diminishing your credibility; you’re expanding the room. Humility is the best methodology. It keeps your palate open, your ego light, and your capacity for lifelong learning intact.

The other necessary shift is really understanding the value of your direct personal experience. Your palate is shaped by everything you’ve eaten, everywhere you’ve lived, and every cultural reference lodged in your brain. Sensory experience will never be objective, so your job is not to offer the definitive account of a wine; your job is to offer an honest one. One exercise is to begin not with what the wine tastes like, but with what it reminds them of that has nothing to do with taste at all: a place, a song, a fabric, a photograph, a season. These associations are not sentimental diversions—they’re working tools. They activate memory and cultural knowledge to create meaning. Wine becomes a portal to something larger: climate, agriculture, labor, class, taste-making ecosystems, the politics of dining out, the nostalgia of the internet, the precarious ambitions of creative communities. When you understand wine as a cultural medium rather than a technical puzzle, communication becomes richer, more honest, and more fun.

This matters especially now, because wine is caught between two exhausted modes of communication: the gatekept expert voice and the airbrushed lifestyle voice. One speaks only to insiders; the other speaks so broadly it speaks to no one at all. A third mode—which I take seriously in Thirst Behavior and hope to foster in this course—is to treat wine as something like film or fashion or music: a sensory language embedded in cultural life. The best communicators today aren’t simply telling you whether a bottle is “good”; they’re interpreting where it sits in the larger flow of taste and what it might indicate about the moment we’re living through. To do this well, you need three things: sensory articulation, cultural literacy, and personal narrative. Technique, context, and honesty.

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Which brings me to the larger point: learning to talk about wine is learning to talk about yourself—not in a confessional way, but in a way that acknowledges that communication always begins from a particular vantage point. The work is not to master the canon and then deliver it with perfect recall and objectivity. The work is to bring your own history, senses, and curiosity into contact with the wine in front of you, and let that meeting generate meaning. Some days that meaning will be technical; other days it will be philosophical; most days it will be a bit of both. But if you can stand inside that spectrum—humble, curious, attentive, culturally awake—you will become not only a better sommelier or wine writer, but a better observer, listener, and participant in the social worlds where wine actually lives.

Because at the end of the day, talking about wine is simply talking about being human: porous and subjective, unfinished and in process, trying your best to make sense of what’s in the glass and offer that sense-making to someone else. If you can do that, consistently and with sincerity, the rest—the grapes, regions, soils, vintages—tends to fall into place.

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In the background of the usual discourse about $60 cheeseburgers and the latest crown-jewel opening, something structural is happening. A new ecosystem is forming atop a platform that once looked like aughts-era blogs — has become the new dining section, distributed not by newspapers but by inboxes. The shift is quiet enough to miss if you’re just searching “where should we go tonight?”, but loud enough that within a year or two, it may determine who has authority, who is read, and who gets to define taste.

And crucially: it may change how restaurants talk to diners, how wine writing sounds, and what we consider “food media” at all.

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The Architecture of the Shift

A decade ago, the arc was predictable: work for an institution, fight for column inches, perhaps write a book. If you left, the audience stayed with the brand. Now, talent is walking out the front door — and bringing readers with them.

Eater’s layoffs this year are just one visible crack in a slow-moving fracture. Longtime New York critic now publishes Robert Sietsema’s New York three times a week, reading like an underground zine with better writing — cheap eats, deep dives, outer-borough wanderings no glossy publication would greenlight for traffic reasons.

On the wine side, the migration is even more explicit. moved Maker’s Table to Substack to spend less time wrestling Wordpress and more time writing. ’s Simon J. Woolf, author of Amber Revolution, now publishes primarily through Substack, arguing that generalist wine content is a dead category — the future belongs to obsessive voices with a point of view.

Even establishment figures are moonlighting outside the walls. Times wine critic is lending his philosophical wine-dad wisdom to zillennial-focused wine media brand, . His first essay for the new platform is a manifesto about wine’s enduring value in our lives: it connects us to food, culture, history, community, memory and the natural world.

And it’s not only individuals turning newsletters into livelihoods — entire solo media brands are growing out of them. ’s Feed Me has scaled from a newsletter into a full media property, complete with a small staff, a nightlife etiquette column, live events, and now a food-and-hospitality podcast, Expense Account, produced in partnership with Substack itself. Ten years ago that move required a newsroom, an editor, and a budget. Now it requires a writer with a voice and a readership who cares.

Writers Are Taking the Room With Them

The old model went like this: critics, columnists, and beat reporters worked inside institutions. They filed copy, maybe wrote a book, and became a recognizable byline attached to a masthead. When they left, they often disappeared from view, because the audience technically belonged to the publication.

Substack reverses that ownership. When a writer brings their readers into a newsletter, they can leave and take them along. It sounds like a boring infrastructure detail, but it changes the social contract. Robert Sietsema doesn’t have to hope someone else will care about a Guyanese steam-table spot in Queens or a Yemeni coffee shop in Bay Ridge; he can write about it directly for people who have chosen to pay for exactly that kind of nerdery.

Meg Maker can send out a long, meditative piece about fog in vineyard valleys without worrying whether it justifies a banner ad. Simon Woolf can obsess over skin-contact field blends with a few thousand people who would rather read one excellent, idiosyncratic thing than a hundred SEO-optimized “best orange wines under $25” lists.

You start to see a pattern: the work doesn’t become less serious when it leaves institutions; it often becomes more serious, because the writer no longer has to justify their curiosity to editors who are worried about traffic. Instead, they’re justifying it to you.

For readers, this means your information diet becomes more intimate and more fragmented. Instead of one big dining section telling you what matters, you might have Sietsema for bargain-hunting, a wine newsletter for what to drink with delivery, and a business-of-hospitality stack to explain why your favorite bar just introduced a $28 “martini experience.” It’s like building your own magazine from individual departments.

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Restaurants Are Becoming Publishers

The other half of the story is happening inside the dining room itself. Restaurants have always produced media — they just called it menus, playlists, chalkboards, uniforms, the way the host says your name. But over the past year, more and more of them have begun producing media in the literal sense: newsletters, mini-essays, recipe dispatches, and behind-the-line field notes that feel less like marketing and more like house culture translated into text.

Emily Sundberg recently pointed to this shift, noting how King’s Substack functions almost like hyperlocal restaurant news — a space for regulars to stay close, even when they’re not in the room. And she’s right. A Nibble & A Glass of Wine reads like a conversation between co-owners Jess Shadbolt and Annie Shi that you get to overhear: seasonal recipes written plainly and beautifully, wine notes, little vignettes from service. It isn’t trying to go viral or optimize for discovery. It’s King on paper — warm, restrained, gently European. A restaurant newsletter as emotional continuity.

Smithereens Zine takes the idea further, treating Substack like a contemporary zine: it seems, the whole staff of this East Village contemporary seafood joint participates as occasional contributors. Sometimes, it’s travel diaries, sometimes recipes, or Q&A’s with people in their community. It’s a wide-open approach to creating business lore that feels absolutely at once intimate, and editorial.

Together they gesture toward something new: restaurants publishing not to grow an audience, but to tend a community. Regulars become readers. The room extends into the inbox. You no longer have to be in New York to be “in the room.”

Will every restaurant start a Substack? Probably not — nor should they. But the ones with a strong inner world, a recognizable tone, a point of view beyond the plate, suddenly have a medium that can hold it. The dining room stops at the door; the voice doesn’t have to.

A Different Algorithm = A Different Culture

Most social platforms are built on an advertising model, which means their core job is to keep you scrolling past as many ads as possible. The algorithm’s goal is not “show you the things you love,” it’s “show you whatever will keep you in the building.” This is why Twitter feels like a casino and Instagram feels like a mall food court where every store is playing louder music than the last.

Substack doesn’t run on ads. Its business model is very simple: if you pay writers, Substack gets a cut. If you don’t, they don’t. The whole system is optimized around getting you to subscribe to people whose work you actually want, and then—if it makes sense for your life and budget—to pay them.

This matters because of what it does to the feed. ’s “Notes” feature, which is their version of a social timeline, is designed to help you find writers whose work you’ll subscribe to, not posts you’ll mindlessly engage with. The head of machine learning literally described the algorithm’s job as helping readers “discover, subscribe, and ideally pay,” and the growth numbers they share—tens of millions of new free subscriptions and hundreds of thousands of new paid subs in a few months, largely driven by the app and Notes—back that up.

For hospitality media, this is accidentally perfect. Restaurants and wine are already subscription-adjacent categories in the real world. You don’t fall in love with a restaurant because of one viral post; you fall in love because it becomes part of your routine. You don’t become obsessed with cru Beaujolais because of one meme; you become obsessed because one person keeps explaining it in a way that makes sense to you.

Substack’s feed logic—favoring consistency, adjacency, and genuine affinity over pure virality—maps onto that reality. A critic who writes three times a week about outer-borough restaurants, a bartender who writes monthly about cocktail pricing, a wine writer who sends a Sunday letter about soil and tariffs: those people do well here, not because they hack the algorithm, but because the algorithm is looking for exactly what they naturally produce—repeatable signals of trust.

The Future Isn’t Centralized — It’s Weird, Local, and Lateral

Look closely and the silhouette sharpens. Critics are splintering into micro-publications. Writers are operating like magazines. Restaurants are publishing house diaries, half recipes and half poetry. These aren’t separate trends — they’re the same story told from three angles. The ecosystem is decentralizing. Authority is fracturing. Power is moving laterally, not downward.

For readers, the shift shows up as a change in how we learn where to eat and what to drink. Instead of one masthead telling you what matters this month, you assemble a constellation of voices: a critic you trust for openings and cheap eats, a wine writer for Sunday philosophy, someone else for labor politics, cocktail economics, or deep dives into skin-contact Chenin. It starts to feel less like “journalism you consume” and more like taste you curate. Less table of contents. More playlist.

The upside is specificity — writing that feels human, intimate, close-range. The downside is that no single publication filters the culture anymore. Consensus weakens. Taste becomes personal, maybe even partisan. You build your own canon the way you build a cellar: bottle by bottle, voice by voice.

This isn’t collapse. It’s redistribution. And it’s already touching the real-world mechanics of hospitality.

Media used to function like a pipeline: PR → publication → article → reservation. Now it loops. A restaurant might be introduced in a Substack dispatch, discussed in Notes, unpacked on a podcast, then framed with context by a wine writer. The “review” isn’t the final word — it’s one input in an ongoing, many-voiced conversation. A restaurant no longer needs a critic’s blessing to matter; it needs a readership’s attention.

And this reorders leverage. A 28-seat wine bar without a Times review can still sell out a winemaker dinner through 900 email subscribers. A chef uninterested in glossy photography can gather loyalists through ideas instead. A wine writer with 3,500 true fans might shift taste more than one with 300,000 passive impressions. Influence used to trickle from the top of the masthead down; now it travels sideways like bottle recommendations traded among friends.

Taste isn’t declared anymore. It spreads. Inbox to inbox. Table to table. Post-service note to Sunday essay.

The Magazine as Playlist

If the migration continues — critics decamping from newsrooms, restaurants speaking directly to regulars, wine writers building mini-publics of their own — then we are drifting toward something that looks like the return of the magazine, but inverted. Not one centralized publication telling us what to think, but hundreds of micro-publications arranged by the reader into a personalized periodical. The dining section becomes modular. The magazine becomes a playlist.

This model favors intimacy over scale. It privileges depth, continuity, and eccentric expertise over newsiness. It rewards the writers willing to go narrower, stranger, more obsessive. And it creates room — finally — for the kind of wine and restaurant writing that rarely survives inside ad-supported media: meditations on oxidation, menus as literature, field notes from a pastry kitchen, dispatches from a dive bar’s Wednesday night.

It will be messier. It will be weirder. It will probably be better.

Thirst Behavior

Thirst Behavior has always been interested in the culture around the glass — not just which wines matter, but how they enter the conversation in the first place. It feels appropriate to write some platform meta-commentary right now, because if is indeed becoming the central nervous system for food and wine media, then understanding its logic isn’t merely industry analysis. It’s part of understanding taste as a social and cultural project.

The most interesting writing this year will likely come from the people who treat their publication like a living room rather than a broadcast channel — building reader communities with the intimacy of regulars, publishing like restaurants, thinking like critics, and using digital tools for something very un-social media: slowing down, going deeper, and telling the truth about what’s happening in the room.

I’ll be tracking the shift as it unfolds.

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The food is not the point. Not really. For some people, Thanksgiving is just the annual family summit—an intergenerational potluck of personalities. For others, it’s a giant dinner party with friends, performed under the banner of tradition but powered by the same social electricity as any other night when you get people you love (or merely tolerate) around a crowded table.

Chelsea and I hosted Thanksgiving at our house in New Orleans for years, and they remain some of the most lit holiday dinners I’ve ever experienced. Our circle then was almost entirely industry people—servers, chefs, bakers, bartenders, distributor friends with bottomless backpacks of samples. People would trickle in during the early afternoon straight from the racetrack, where they’d been betting on races, playing the slots, drinking Bloody Marys, and wandering around in flamboyant outfits high on mushrooms. We did it open-house style: a long table, doors open, guest list fluid, people coming and going as they pleased. There was always enough to drink, and the food was always—if memory serves—interesting.

We were not Thanksgiving purists. Both of us are allergic to the American culinary idiom—roasted turkey, weird casseroles, the mandatory sweetness of savory things (never mind the flavors of colonial violence and historical revisionism). But we are extremely down to host a dope dinner party with lots of wine. So we used to freak the format a bit and let other culinary traditions in, keeping the core ingredients traditional. Here are some highlights from our Thanksgiving parties of the New Orleans era:

We both have an enduring passion for Mexican food, and Mexican year was absolute fire: turkey breast oven-roasted with crispy skin, dark meat folded into a rich, herby, peppery green pozole. The supporting cast of side dishes included roasted carrots with pepitas, avocado, and salsa macha, plus fresh-pressed masa tortillas with hoja santa leaves printed into them. All of that was great, and we had the triumph of being able to put out chips and guac for apero hour without having to apologize for being thematically out of step with the meal.

We also did some Chinese-ish experiments: the fried rice thing, where confit turkey, chestnuts, and broccoli got wok-sautéed with wild rice; a bok choy side with a “brown sauce” gravy and crispy garlic; handmade turkey dumplings; and a super slappy cold app of wood ear mushrooms dressed in toasted sesame. This is also where I discovered the incredible pairing that is Krug Grande Cuvée and eggrolls (more on that some other time).

For the Middle Eastern-leaning year, we brought back the shaved-raw-Brussels-sprout salad I used to make with Molly Baz in college: apple cider vinaigrette, candied pine nuts, and fresh pomegranate seeds for that fruity pop. I remember ending this night with my friend Breanne Kostyk (who now owns the world’s best bagel shop, Flour Moon, in New Orleans). She came after dinner with a bottle of 2009 Château Musar blanc, a blend of two native varieties from the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. She somehow intuited that this is one of my forever wines, responsible for multiple epiphanies over the course of my life, some wine-related, some not. It’s really got it all: oxidative funk, slippery texture, intellectual density, spiritual heft. I could go on.

Another year, at a friend’s Anglo-pub-style Thanksgiving, we contributed roasted radishes over horseradish-scented whipped ricotta, a dish that turned some heads in both good and bad ways.

What I’m trying to say is that if you can cook, you can make Thanksgiving food that is actually good. And if you’re even mildly curious, letting other culinary idioms guide your treatment of the “traditional” ingredients is one of the great joys of the holiday.

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So what about wine?

The real answer is: it doesn’t matter. Thanksgiving is never about nailing food and wine pairings. It’s about making sure you—and more importantly everyone else—are having a good time.

Yes, of course Burgundy is great: it has the cranberry top notes, the mushroom-forest funkiness, the whole roasted-bird symphony. Loire Cab Franc is a bit spicier and more piquant but no less correct. Well-aged Bordeaux goes with everything on the table and looks handsome doing it. Southern Rhône blends are built for rich, herbaceous, slightly chaotic plates. And if the food is lighter or your crowd is thirsty, young Beaujolais or Loire Gamay function beautifully as table wine in the original sense—bright, juicy, hydrating, unbossy.

This is also one of the few days of the year when richer Rhône whites—Châteauneuf blanc, Marsanne/Roussanne blends, even a rounded-out, fatty lil’ Viognier—really go off. Of course white Burgundy works (it rarely doesn’t); start with an Aligoté from Chablis to wake everyone up and save the Meursault or Puligny for when the table is humming.

Darker rosés deserve more respect at this time of year. They bring berry fruit, a cool temperature, and just enough tannin to keep pace with all the brown stuff at the table.

I, personally, try to mostly drink bubbles all day. Opening something special with your sweetheart at 2 p.m. while you prep is the best part of Thanksgiving. Your brain still works, you’re cooking (literally and spiritually), and the day hasn’t gotten weird yet. This is the moment for the really special bottles if you’ve got them: Egly-Ouriet, Doyard, Selosse (Jacques, obviously). Having a little glass of super classy Champagne while you prep for your loved ones is the best gratitude lesson you’ll have all day. It’ll also refresh the palate between tastes of your celery root velouté.

But once guests start arriving, I pivot to Champagnes that outperform their price point without demanding attention. Think Pierre Gimonnet, Gaston Chiquet, Lafalise-Froissart—the “why is this so good?” tier. They’re crisp, energetic, and correct with basically everything on the snack table. And if Champagne isn’t what you want to pour all afternoon, clean pét-nats, Alsatian crémants, and sparkling Rieslings all do the same job beautifully: acid, refreshment, energy, and enough lift to keep your palate awake through a very long, very beige meal.

Here are a few operational notes from someone who’s done some TG hosting:

1. Create a wine station — and satellites.

Your wine station should have a few easygoing bottles already open and as many wine keys as you can spare, all in plain sight. And critically, it should live outside the kitchen. Thanksgiving has a centrifugal force problem: people migrate to whatever room feels busiest. If the wine is in the kitchen, that room becomes Grand Central Station, and suddenly you’re trying to baste a turkey while twelve people perform small talk directly behind you. Putting the wine elsewhere—and placing satellite bottles around the house like decoys—pulls the center of gravity away from the stove. It keeps the cooks sane and the room moving.

2. Let guests participate.

When someone arrives with a bottle, walk them to the wine station, hand them a wine key, and encourage them to pop it open and pour a splash for whoever looks empty. It’s a simple sleight of hand: guests feel useful, they’re immediately folded into the social fabric, and—crucially—they’re no longer clogging the kitchen doorway asking if they can help.

It’s distraction, delegation, and hospitality all at once. The whole party becomes self-sustaining, which is exactly what you want on a day with this much emotional entropy.

3. Your glassware system should be user-friendly.

This doesn’t mean fancy. It means obvious. Glasses should be as grab-and-go as napkins. A crate, a tote, a bar cart, a cardboard box lined with a dish towel—anything works as long as people don’t have to interrupt you mid-sauté to ask where the stems are. Thanksgiving is a high-entropy holiday; eliminate as many friction points as you can.

4. Resist the urge to explain anything.

Every host knows this moment: someone pours themselves a glass of something and asks a casual question like “What’s this?” If you answer with more than one sentence, congratulations—you’ve started a wine seminar. Now you’re talking about semi-carbonic Valencian Bobal to a person who thought they were just being polite. Let the wine speak for itself. If someone wants a deep dive, they’ll stay after dinner and ask.

5. Have a digestif on hand.

One of the best Thanksgiving hosting moves I’ve ever seen was at a post-Covid outdoor edition of Thanksgiving. Someone showed up with Del Maguey Vida mezcal and Amaro Sfumato, mixed them 1:1, and started handing out tiny digestif shots toward the end of the meal. It was perfect—smoky, bitter, medicinal—the exact jolt people needed to stand up from the table and remember how their bodies worked.

Wine, at its best on Thanksgiving, is not the event—it’s the support. It keeps the day buoyant. It buys you space. It distributes the crowd. And nothing—absolutely nothing—should be too precious to open.

If the food is good and the company is interesting, the wine will find its place.

If the food is weird and the company is chaotic, the wine will save you.

Either way, you’re covered.

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Francie, which holds a Michelin star, doesn’t operate that way. Like most restaurants at this level, its menu is the result of careful planning—inventory, prep work, station capacity, plating, timing, and cost. Francie isn’t an experimental workshop; it’s a high-level system with a number of constraints: product, labor, pacing, consistency. A tasting menu isn’t a suggestion; it’s a design. A refusal isn’t hostility; it ’s the only way the machine works. Yet diners increasingly interpret boundaries as betrayal, as if a Michelin star entitled them to re-author the culinary program.

Winterman’s guest later wrote a complaint that began, “Maybe I’ve watched too many episodes of The Bear but…”

We’ve entered the era of mainstream servicecore—the mass emotionalization of dining-room labor. It began with Bourdain, was sanctified (in my life) by Jason Wise’s Somm films, and canonized by The Bear. For restaurant workers, this visibility came as a moment of rare recognition. Watching The Bear felt, for many of us, like being taken seriously for the first time on screen: the claustrophobia of a slammed service, the impossible labor of managing grief and guests at the same time, the exquisite absurdity of loving a profession that eats its own.

For about five minutes, it felt like being seen. Then came the stranger sensation: watching the mainstream watch us feel seen. The spectacle turned back on itself, and the feeling evaporated. If you’ve ever watched someone attempt empathy using a script they learned from television, you know the hollow sound it makes.

Once your labor becomes entertainment, the boundary between guest and spectator gets blurry. Diners no longer arrive as visitors—they arrive as informed participants, fluent in the vocabulary of trauma and mise en place, convinced that knowing the iconography, or back of house jargon, grants access to the system. The result is a new, oddly polite category of entitlement. People speak to servers as if they’re characters they’ve studied. And then, having established their sophistication, they ask the restaurant to reconfigure itself around their preferences.

A lot of this confusion comes from how people have interpreted The Bear, and one episode in particular has taken on a life of its own. In the now-mythologized “Forks” episode, Richie stages at a fictional Chicago three-star modeled loosely on Alinea. His entire job, at first, is polishing forks. And in the repetition of that task—the humility of doing something small for the sake of something large—he begins to understand the real engine of fine dining: discipline, alignment, and the collective intelligence of a team moving as one.

Richie overhears a table reminiscing about their trip to Chicago—how much they’ve loved it, how the only thing they didn’t get around to was trying a deep-dish pie. Richie tells his captain, and the restaurant, decides to act. He’s dispatched to a nearby pizza shop. The chef plates the pie in the style of the restaurant and Richie gets to serve it as a surprise course near the end of the tasting menu.

It’s a beautiful moment. It is also, critically, not a response to a demand.

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This is what tends to get lost when people cite the episode as justification for any request they want to make. The gesture works because it is unsolicited. Because the system is so well-designed that it can support an act of generosity without compromising itself. Because the team chooses to do it, together. In no universe would that scene have featured a guest asking for a deep-dish pizza during a three-star tasting menu and the restaurant scrambling to comply.

What some diners absorbed, though, was a different message: a fantasy of hospitality as infinite accommodation. A belief that the magic of fine dining comes from bending the system to the will of the guest, rather than protecting the system so that moments like this can happen at all. Richie’s revelation is alignment with the restaurant’s logic, not exemption from it. Yet many viewers saw the grace and assumed it was proof of their own centrality.

As restaurant work has become more visible, diners have become more convinced they understand how restaurants actually function. But what many people carry into the dining room is not comprehension — it’s a stylized projection of their own empathy. The problem isn’t The Bear itself. It gets a lot right: the economics, the labor, the exhaustion, the fragile choreography that holds a restaurant together. The problem is how viewers metabolize it. They watch Carmen and Sydney fight for precision and conclude that the point of that discipline is to grant them more freedom. They see Richie learn the language of grace and treat it as evidence that hospitality should mean endless flexibility.

The lesson was never that the restaurant exists to fulfill every request. It was that order — the repetition, the choreography, the refusal to bend — is what allows beauty to exist in the first place. Yet many diners have taken the opposite message. They’ve turned a story about structure into permission for exception.

This is the paradox of service culture going mainstream: people see us more clearly than ever, but understand us less. Instead of mystery, they project knowledge. Instead of curiosity, they bring demands. The more beautifully the work is portrayed, the more they believe they’re part of it.

I remember feeling a similar tension after the first Somm documentary came out. For a few months, strangers seemed genuinely curious about what I did for a living. Then the questions changed. People began asking what “level” I was, what I had to do to become a sommelier, why I looked so young, where I was from. The work had suddenly been made visible to them through a handful of personal narratives (none of which I could relate to at all), and now they wanted to participate in that visibility.

They weren’t really looking for help choosing wine; they wanted a performance — something resembling the cinematic version of a sommelier they’d seen on screen. The conversation became a feedback loop: guests said the lines that would prompt me to deliver mine. They wanted to witness the ritual more than experience the result. In that way the job became newly glamorous and newly hollow at once — I was being seen, but only through someone else’s story.

And this is the crux of it: the mainstream wants the romance of hospitality, not the reality of it. They want the catharsis of Richie’s transformation, the tenderness of that perfect omelette with potato chips crumbled on top, the poetry of grief in the walk-in. What they do not want are the limits that make restaurants work: fixed menus, timing constraints, substitutions that break the dish, or the simple fact that a kitchen cannot be remade for every emotional request. Those limits are, paradoxically, the most human part of the whole enterprise.

Hospitality does not require infinite flexibility. Boundaries are not a rejection of care, but an expression of it. The choreography of a dining room is a delicate balance of art, labor, and constraint. A restaurant can be gracious, generous, and breathtakingly thoughtful — and still say no.

Most people do not want to empathize with restaurants. They want restaurants to empathize with them. The culture has decided that hospitality is a feeling to be experienced, not a craft to be respected. But the craft is the feeling. The limits are what make the experience possible. The menu is the menu not because the chef is stubborn, but because the design is deliberate.

The fantasy of being “in on it” is flattering. It makes diners feel sophisticated, attuned, benevolent. But the reality is simpler: if you admire hospitality, let it function. Appreciate the choreography. Enjoy the framework someone devoted their life to building. Stop treating the dining room like a set where you’ve been cast as the lead.

Respect the room. Respect the work. And once in a while, trust that the people feeding you know what they’re doing.

If you’ve seen your own version of this shift—whether as a diner, a cook, a server, or someone who’s simply watched The Bear a few too many times—I’d genuinely love to hear about it. The cultural script around restaurants is changing faster than the industry itself can keep up, and the lived experience on the ground is always more interesting than the narrative. Hit reply and tell me what you’ve witnessed: the unexpected grace notes, the strange misinterpretations, the moments when someone tried to be “in on it” and got the whole thing backward. I’m collecting stories.

At Ops in Bushwick, this worked nicely. Their by-the-glass program has always been small and intentional and curated with care. You ask what’s good tonight, and someone tells you, easily and without pretense. It feels like a conversation rather than a transaction. For a neighborhood pizza joint, that kind of theater makes sense. It adds a charming touch of mystery to something otherwise humble—a small dose of interactive performance to keep us entertained.

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A few years later, my friend DJ Piazza pulled off a version of the same idea at Margot’s in New Orleans. The bottles were lined up on the back bar, prices scribbled in wax crayon—the kind that wine shops use to look French. The setup invited curiosity rather than anxiety. You could see the entire scope of the program because the bottles were on display, and if you wanted to know more, DJ would grab one and walk you through it. The exchange was verbal, but the information was visible. It was personal and casual, but also fair. You weren’t guessing what anything cost. You could see the whole ecology of the place from your seat. Like Ops, this was a neighborhood pizza restaurant, and a touch of orchestrated interaction like that elevated the simple rhythm of ordering pizza, salad, and wine.

Recently I went to Lei in Chinatown and had a similar experience. By all accounts, Lei is excellent. It serves refined Chinese American small plates in a tiny, beautiful room with eight tables and a few bar seats. Their wine director, Annie Shi (of King fame), has curated what feels like a perfect wine bar wine list: cult producers like Raveneau, Laherte Frères, Thierry Allemand, and Marnes Blanches; a deep bench of grower Champagnes; a traditional Super Tuscan and a vertical of Cappellano Barolo for the finance bros coming over from Tribeca; and plenty of great Burgundies. There are bottles in the several thousands of dollars, but you can also get a delicious Langhe Nebbiolo from Stefano Occhetti for eighty-five bucks.

The list itself is printed, but the by-the-glass program is verbal. We didn’t have time for a whole bottle—nor the time to thoroughly peruse their thirty-something-page wine list—so we asked about a sparkling wine by the glass. There were only two: one, from what I could tell, was a Cava; the other, a traditional-method German Riesling. The server—clearly good at his job—seemed to really like the German one, and it sounded interesting, so we went with it. It was bright, detailed, and taut with a tart, pointed acidity enveloped in fine, mousse-like bubbles.

The wine was great, the sale frictionless, and we ordered a second glass to share as we finished our chilled celtuce with red vinegar and sesame shao bing. This wine—and I still don’t know the producer or appellation—was thirty dollars a glass. Now, this didn’t bother, or even surprise me; I just realized how much the entire exchange depended on tone. Without a list, the cues shift from facts to vibes. You’re not comparing vintages or prices; you’re reading confidence, cadence, and intent. When that fluency exists—when both sides share a language of taste and trust—the no-list model can be wonderful. When it doesn’t, it’s a lot of guesswork for everyone involved.

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For guests, the appeal of this setup is obvious. It removes a moment of friction. Most people don’t want to read a wine list—they want a good glass of wine and to return to their conversation. Even I, a list obsessive, sometimes skip it if the pace of the evening doesn’t allow for focus. If a server is hovering, if I’m catching up with friends, if the restaurant feels quick and social, I’ll order a martini and treat the wine list as post-meal entertainment instead.

For small restaurants with competent staff, there are practical upsides too. It allows for flexibility and improvisation. You can open bottles you’re excited about without reprinting menus or erasing chalkboards midway through service. You can move inventory that needs to move. You’re not beholden to a five-case drop of something you don’t believe in just to guarantee weekend supply. It lets the people who serve the wine treat it as part of a larger hospitality strategy, not just an inventory puzzle. When done well, the verbal program becomes a live system—responsive, adaptable, and expressive of a restaurant’s daily rhythm.

The ideal situation, for both guest and restaurant, is the same: the right bottle, arriving at the right time, with as little friction as possible. But friction is what makes good information design matter, whether it’s printed or spoken. The challenge isn’t removing it—it’s shaping it gracefully.

Critics like John Sumners in Wine Enthusiast (“Not Having a Written Wine List Is Trendy—and a Bad Idea”) and (“No Wine List? No Way”) have called the no-list trend opaque, arguing that it privileges insiders and confuses everyone else. They’re not wrong, but I think they miss the nuance. The verbal model isn’t about withholding information; it’s about building intimacy. It’s an attempt to make wine feel alive again—to invite conversation, to guide guests toward something they might not find on their own.

When I’m working the floor, someone inevitably slides the wine book back across the table, untouched, and says, “I’m in your hands, bro.” It’s nice to hear, but rarely true. What they usually mean is, I don’t want to think about this right now. Fair enough: dinner is about pleasure, not homework. But I often slide the list back and say, “I’ll give you another moment.” I need them to have a general sense of the program’s regional focus and median price before I pull a recommendation out of the ether. When I return, they’ve usually at least glanced at the list and they say something like, “Okay, I want a great bottle, but not the five-thousand-dollar Château Margaux.” That’s a start. Or they’ve realized I don’t have Shiraz, and we end up talking about Rhône reds instead.

A printed list gives everyone a map. A verbal list asks us to build one together. When it works, that collaboration is beautiful; when it doesn’t, it’s awkward. Most guests aren’t trained to describe what they like, and most sommeliers aren’t trained to listen closely enough to translate it—or to interpret the other behavioral cues. The exchange only succeeds when both sides have an anchor. A good somm reads your tone, your appetite for risk, the mood of the evening, and meets you there. They undersell before they oversell. They make the choice feel mutual. A bad one performs confidence without context—they talk at you, not with you. The difference is subtle but seismic.

A note for the guests: you have to participate. Give real clues. Tell me what you’ve liked before, even if you think it sounds gauche. Offer a price window, not a ceiling. Be curious, but don’t surrender responsibility. “I trust you” only works if you mean it. And trust that I’m gleaning more valuable information from how you communicate about wine than what you say.

Share Thirst Behavior

The all-verbal list can be a brilliant expression of a restaurant’s personality—provided it’s rooted in mastery, not opacity. Ops works because it’s simple and low-stakes. Margot’s works because it’s visible. Lei didn’t work because there was no anchoring information about the wines by the glass, and the experience didn’t feel thoughtful. If you’re going to ditch the paper, fine. But what replaces it can’t just be charm; it has to be competence.

I’m always interested in the ways people want to innovate with wine service. The goal isn’t to defend a single format but to keep experimenting with how wine arrives at the table. There should be room for multiple moods and methods. If the flow of service allowed for it, I’d love nothing more than for a sommelier to take me into the cellar and talk through bottles the way a chef might walk you through a garden. Another model I’ve imagined for years (though not my idea originally): every wine is the same price, so the recommendation is really guided purely by taste. It would take clever menu engineering to make it viable, but it’s hardly impossible.

A verbal wine program has to make sense within the system it lives in. It should be designed with intention and serve the larger project of hospitality. Otherwise, what feels like intimacy starts to look like laziness—or worse, manipulation. The best service, no matter the format, rests on generosity, transparency, and skill. We all want the sense that someone, somewhere, has already thought it through. The best lists, spoken or printed, just let us believe for a moment that hospitality is effortless. It never is. But it’s lovely when it feels that way.

If you’ve seen a version of this done beautifully—or disastrously—hit reply. I’m collecting stories.

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I often laugh to myself when guests ask, “Where did you discover your passion for wine?” I did not have a passion for wine. I got into wine because a manager told me that if I learned enough about it, I could get a raise. That was the entire pitch. I was twenty-two, broke, and ambitious enough to take the deal. Wine wasn’t a calling; it was an opportunity for professional advancement. And for a kid from a working-class, single-parent home, I knew I had no choice but to take it.

The Waverly Inn, where I was working, paid for my first certification course and the exam that followed. It felt like I was being offered a gift—and also a long-term contract. In 2012, young wine people were hard to come by, and it was highly advantageous for a restaurant to train from within. Because I’d studied art history, the memorization, the vocabulary, and the aesthetic evaluation came naturally. Having grown up speaking Spanish and studied French in college, the pronunciations didn’t scare me either. I could describe a glass of Volnay the way I’d once described a nude by Girodet: form, texture, tension, balance, tonality.

Though I hadn’t escaped hourly work, something had shifted. I was doing, at least partly, knowledge work—the kind that lives in language, gesture, and the illusion of refinement. What looked like taste was actually labor. I was memorizing appellations the way a carpenter might memorize joinery or a sailor might learn knots.

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The Culture of Work, the Work of Culture

I often write about taste as culture—how the language of wine encodes class, how drinking habits reveal ideology. But this time I want to write about wine as work—labor disguised as cultural fluency. Because understanding the culture you’re part of is a job in itself. It’s unpaid, unacknowledged, but essential to moving up.

Wine knowledge in restaurants isn’t usually a matter of passion; it’s leverage. It’s one of the few currencies in hospitality that reliably converts to upward mobility. Learn enough about soil types and growing regions, and suddenly you’re not polishing glassware anymore—you’re leading service, running pre-shift, helping to train your colleagues. It’s not about becoming a connoisseur. It’s about becoming legible to power.

I’d never worn a suit before my first day on the floor as a somm at the Waverly Inn. I’d saved to buy a bespoke suit from Sebastian Grey shortly after it launched its New York showroom, but my mom ultimately footed the bill as a wine school graduation gift. After a few months working the floor in a suit, I was a natural candidate when a manager position freed up—partly because I already looked the part. That’s just how it works.

My education, my language skills, even my ease with aesthetic judgment—all of it conspired to make me seem competent long before I truly was. It’s absurd, in hindsight, to think that someone who’d never heard of Puligny-Montrachet a year earlier was now being trusted with bottles worth more than his weekly rent. But that’s how quickly proximity to taste can become a substitute for experience.

Meanwhile, I was scrambling to catch up to my credentials. I tried desperately to understand whatever David Kamp or Glenn O’Brien were talking about in that month’s Vanity Fair, or why Thom Browne’s suits looked like they were made for overgrown schoolchildren, or why, in the middle of a historic recession, everyone who came into the restaurant seemed to have infinite money.

I was also walking through the produce section at the Union Square Whole Foods trying to train my nose: could I smell the difference between a navel orange, a cara cara, a tangerine, a satsuma? What about between a Granny Smith and a Golden Delicious? Ripe pear versus underripe pear? Cardamom, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, star anise, the whole gamut of baking spices—did I actually know what those things smelled like, or did I just recognize the words from tasting notes?

Still, I was aware that I was a natural fit for this system in a way others weren’t.

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Who Gets to Study Wine

The official paths to advancement—WSET, the Court of Master Sommeliers, American Sommelier, the course I took—remain stubbornly out of reach for the people who would most benefit. The exams are expensive, the study materials full of structural biases, and, most of all, they demand time that many busy restaurant workers simply don’t have. They reward people who already know how to study, not those who are still learning how to survive.

I was lucky. My employer paid for my certification. I had the vocabulary of art criticism and the confidence of someone who already spoke the right languages—literally and socially. (Not to mention that I was willing and able to show up early and carry boxes up and down the stairs before my shift started.) But most restaurant workers will never get that kind of institutional validation. Their skill remains invisible, even as they use it every night.

Imagine if every restaurant treated wine education as a shared resource, not a management perk. Picture the glass polisher quietly memorizing the regions on a back label, the busser who asks to taste the leftover Barolo after service. Imagine giving them structure, mentorship, and access to the same world-class education executives write off on their corporate cards as a hobby.

I’ve seen what happens when access opens up. One of the kids I mentored had fled gang violence in Guatemala. When we met, he was polishing glassware six days a week, sending most of his paycheck home. He learned fast. Now he runs the beverage programs at [REDACTED]. Then there’s the Dominican kid who worked his way up from backwaiter to sommelier at [REDACTED]. A lifelong New York Mets fan, he applied the same brain that obsessively memorized baseball stats to Burgundy crus and Champagne growers.

If you’ve worked in New York restaurants, you know a hundred characters like these. They’re the ones who make the industry hum—its muscle, its memory, its rhythm—even if you don’t see them interviewed by influencers at wine fairs.

Mobility can happen anywhere—line cooks become sous chefs, runners become managers—but there’s something especially wild about seeing it in wine. Because wine is supposed to be the province of privilege. And yet, some of the most passionate, disciplined, and intuitive tasters I’ve ever met are people who grew up nowhere near a vineyard. They learned because they had to.

Education as Labor Activism

I recently came across Wine Empowered, a nonprofit offering comprehensive wine education, free of charge, to women and minorities. It was founded by three accomplished professionals, among them , Beverage Director of Côte and Coqodaq, and author of the Restaurants, Wine, and People Substack. James has long been outspoken about the industry’s darker side—especially its treatment of young women—having chronicled her early years in wine with a candor that made a lot of powerful men uncomfortable.

For decades, the professional wine world has been ruled by a peculiar breed of man—part drill sergeant, part football coach, part theater kid. The kind who confuses command with charisma, who treats service like a stage and education like an initiation rite. You can picture him: navy suit, tight smile, gesturing too broadly in the dining room, his confidence just a little too loud. These are the men who turned tasting into a full contact sport and mentorship into a contest of obedience. The Court of Master Sommeliers codified the type—its rituals half both monastic and militaristic—presided over by figures like Fred Dame, whose eventual fall from grace only confirmed what many already knew: that too often, the power these men wielded over the culture of wine had less to do with knowledge than with control.

What James and her collaborators are doing with Wine Empowered is a structural correction. They’re taking the most valuable resources in the business—knowledge and network—and putting them back in the hands of the people who actually make restaurants work. This is why I’ve come to think of accessible wine education as a form of labor activism. When the people who touch the product understand it as deeply as the people who sell it, hierarchy starts to lose its edge, and wine culture gets more interesting.

The New York restaurant industry has always run on imbalance: knowledge climbs the ladder while credit stays put. Affordable education shifts the balance. It makes understanding what you serve a condition of the job, not a privilege. The goal isn’t exactly to mint more sommeliers, but to distribute wine literacy more widely.

From Trade to Culture

What changed my life wasn’t a single wine, but the realization that the supposed markers of taste—vocabulary, confidence, cultural literacy—were just another form of work. Hard work. Work that anyone could do if they needed it badly enough.

No matter who you are, engaging with wine is a kind of performance of belonging. But the best performances come from the people who weren’t supposed to be onstage in the first place—the ones who learned the script while bussing tables, who carry the map of Burgundy in their heads the way others memorize subway lines. You can see it in how they move, how they pour, how they talk about a bottle without showing off. They didn’t arrive by lineage or leisure, but by necessity—and that necessity made them better. The unlikely ones are almost always the ones performing at the highest level, because they never forget what the work costs.