As a writer, editor, publisher, and human being with concern for the environment and for humanity, I will never support AI. I will never invest my time or money in anything related to AI. I don’t use chat GPT. I honestly wouldn’t even know how to use Claude or any kind of generative AI. The times when I’ve used AI in Canva or Google, I’ve cringed and regretted it.

We are so much better than this.

And we don’t need more data centers. We, as a society, already have millenia-old data systems. Why would we need to rely on a new system, created by stealing our intellectual property and regurgitating it back to us in a less-capable form that reduces our independent-thinking skills and brain elasticity?

These are the only data centers in which I bestow my trust:

• The genetics contained in a grapevine: Each plant has its own DNA coding, which allow it to follow its annual cycle of sleep, awakening, flowering, and fruiting with its particular varietal characteristics, so that we can enjoy its fermented form.

• Ampelography books: For years, scientists have studied grape lineage—yes, grapes have family trees—analyzing them in terms of their relatives, crossings, and how they have become the contemporary wines we love today. Wine Grapes, a tome by Jancis Robinson and others, is the gold standard publication on this.

• Cookbooks: In a well-written cookbook, you have a wealth of data around each recipe—its origin; details about its ingredients; the cultural story behind it. In one recipe, you can understand so much about human political and environmental history. How we eat and what we cook are determined by social factors, and preserving a recipe in a cookbook is a way of sharing this data through storytelling and tactile experience.

  

• The aging couple who runs that tiny restaurant in Paris where you can only get a booking by calling one week ahead of time, and there’s no wine list—only the owners’ personal recommendations from their underground cellar: Yes, they seem antiquated or snobby. Yes, you only can access their knowledge if you have the time and means to fly to Paris. But this kind of couple (I’m thinking specifically of the owners of Le Baratin, a legendary Paris bistro in the Belleville neighborhood, but they’re not the only ones) are a data center in their own right: Of wine. They personally know the producers who started the natural wine revolution. They were there at the beginning—the remember the wonder, the marvel. They watched producers struggle to convert to organics and learn how to make wine without sulfites. They’ve seen the second wave of winemakers emerge from the influence of the first ones—and then the third wave. To be in the presence of these people is a master-class in what wine culture is—authentic wine, real wine. To drink from their wine cellar is an experience that takes you into the heart of a different moment that forever changed the course of wine and dining.

• Importers: The reason we have good wine (that’s not from our own country) is because of importers. These are people who spend weeks or months of the years visiting winemakers, tasting the current vintage and current release. They know winemakers so well, they can talk about the age of their vines, the name of their dogs and children, and what barrel they aged the Chenin Blanc in. Importer websites and Instagrams are a wealth of information—this is the data we need to learn about wine. You can also email them for more information and they’ll respond as best they can.

• The somm at your fave wine bar: People whose job it is to sell wine, are data goldmines. They are constantly working to have as much information as possible about winemaking around the world—including particularities of the recent vintages; climate change-related factors; generational handovers at wineries; fun facts about the winery like that it was founded five hundred years ago or that it is the only vineyard with one rare grape. If the somm at your wine bar isn’t busy, talk to them! Get the stories, get the details about the wines you love.

• That winemaker who wakes up every morning, puts on boots, lights a cigarette, and goes out to their vineyard ready to work the land: So much incredible knowledge of farming was nearly lost when post-WWII modern techniques took over, but people fought to go back to the older ways—organics, working by hand, embracing natural approaches to fighting disease. But the data was never erased because humans are the best data centers there are. I know established winemakers who are now experimenting with planting new vineyards in the old “contadino” style, where vines grow amongst fruit and nut trees, more like a garden than a crop field—they are returning to this pre-modern system.

• Books on wine! Publishers and authors work hard to write books that deliver knowledge in an entertaining, accessible way. My new book, HOW TO DRINK NATURAL WINE, is a compilation of every question I’ve ever been asked about natural wine—answered for you, so you can explore the genre with ease.

Artificial intelligence not only uses energy-intensive data centers to survive—it cannot tell what information is good or not, and so it often gets things wrong. AI might tell you that a certain wine is rosé when it’s red, for example. It isn’t smart or nuanced enough to fully understand a complex thing like wine.

No to data centers. Yes to human knowledge, passed down through generations, shared through in-person relationships or via communication, treasured because it comes from people who actually care about wine, about the environment, about society.

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FURTHER READING:

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But its origins are in France, specifically in the Beaujolais region of Central France. Though it’s nearly always spoken about as an independent region, Beaujolais is technically southern Burgundy.

Let’s go back to the 14th century. While much of Europe endured the Black Death (a flea-borne plague), wiping out around 1/3 of the population (25 million lives), France also waged the Hundred Years’ War with England. Meanwhile, its aristocrats were fussing over the question of which grapes should be grown where.

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I am fifteen. He is nineteen. We met through a friend.

On weekends, he picks me up in his BMW. It is souped up, and he drives very fast on t…

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An incredibly kind invitation had come to me from mid-coast Maine—a place I’d never been and never dreamed of hosting an event for a natural wine book, but apparently the post-pandemic landscape had brought the natural wine lovers to the cold, rainy northernmost Atlantic shores.

Our host, Joanna, an accomplished French translator who had opened the most adorable wine bar—then, in the garage space of her beautiful, old cottage (yes, absolutely as charming and romantic as it sounds)—had not only invited friends from all around the state to attend this event, she also offered a room in her lovely house.

An author lives for their readers—we want to know that our work has touched people, that it means something. We crave connection. My book had come out during the pandemic, and I’d been unable to go anywhere or do anything to promote or celebrate it. A year and a half later, I was finally on something resembling a book tour, making these dreams come true.

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In the end, I found the meds too strong and left them and my diagnosis behind as I trudged forward into post-university adulthood.

Looking back, I see now how my problems with attention and dopamine colored all the highs and lows of my twenties, especially in my career but also most intensely, in my relationships.

But I’m a believer that things happen as they should, and I don’t regret the struggles of my early adult years—especially because they ultimately led me to natural wine. It’s only when I found wine that I was able to finally ground my ever-wandering attention on something. Wine, too, prompted me to park myself in one relationship and commit to it—and so, I went from a string of situationships and toxic love straight into marriage with an Australian winemaker!

It hasn’t been easy, making that transition (If you’ve read my first book, you know that story. If you’ve read my ebook that I published here earlier this year, you know the whole story) but this week is our seven-year wedding anniversary.

They say there’s a seven-year-itch with marriage.

But I felt that itch first, with wine.

Not long after my first book had come out, I stopped making wine and stopped publishing my magazine. I didn’t speak publicly much about the reason, in part because it was so had to talk about: I was experiencing debilitating post-partum anxiety and depression, and overall fatigue. I slowly got a grip on my mental health, but when I emerged from the anxiety and depression I was facing a new problem: Overwhelm and overstimulation, alternating with loneliness and boredom, every single day.

Even though I’d cut out some of my professional activities, my hypersensitivity would not retreat. At the same time, my desire for dopamine only grew. There was never enough supply, until there was suddenly too much and in the wrong ways.

New dialogue around ADHD points to the way that it presents itself more intensely in women as hormones fluctuate, edging closer to middle-age, and especially with the onset of perimenopause (whose symptoms can hit ADHD women much harder).

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And I was high as a kite.

Not on drugs—on serotonin. On pure joy, happiness.

Pinch me, is this my life? Am I actually getting paid to take people to some of Italy’s most incredible vineyards and drink wines with their makers?

This feeling is the reason why I have, again and again, gotten on a plane, hired a driver or rented a car myself, and escorted people to wineries were some of the most passionate people I’ve ever met are fermenting some of the most beautiful things I’ve ever drunk. (More info: here!)

And that feeling is rooted in a Japanese concept called Ikigai.

Most of this post is free! Below, for premium subscribers there’s additional reading, including notes on a Japanese natural wine I opened while writing this post, plus more details about my Italian wine tours.

Ikigai is the meeting-point where four things come together:

• What you’re good at

• What you love

• What society needs

• What you can be paid for

Your ikigai may be hidden… until you find it

Let me tell you, it has been an emotional roller-coaster realizing that writing is not my Ikigai. At least, not right now. Organizing wine tours is my Ikigai—because it’s more financially rewarding, because it benefits the people who join me as well as the winemakers who participate, and because I love it and I’m good at it.

But for years, I believed that writing was the only thing I wanted to focus on. This, despite the fact that I was hardly making ends meet, and even when I started publishing books, those were too far-apart to really make it a reliable enterprise.

I only found my ikigai because a friend asked me back in 2019 if I wanted to lead a wine tour in the Slovenia-Italy nexus with her, and I said yes. It was an incredible experience—but then I had to wait for the pandemic to end to lead the next one, in 2023. Since then, I haven’t looked back—and this year I’ve organized Italian natural wine experiences for around 30 people!

“Ikigai” is literally translated as “to be worthwhile.” Ask yourself, have you found the thing at the center of the above venn diagram, which to you and to society is truly “worthwhile”? If not, how could you find it?

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Why ikigai is the key to a long, healthy life

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Are you guys still going out and buying fun wines, with surging fuel prices and economic uncertainty?

Even I—author of TWO books about natural wine, and maker of the stuff—am trying to be cautious about spending right now, and that means less splurging on wines.1

But I don’t want you all to have to entirely cut out delicious wine from your lives, despite this economy—which is why I’ve brainstormed some helpful ways you can drink great wine without spending money. Yes, without spending money.

It's OK to enjoy stuff

Read on—this one is unpaywalled, but at the end there’s a fun little treat for paid subscribers ‘cause you guys keep this thing going.

If you want to upgrade your subscription, you can do so in the Substack app, or if you open this in a web browser it will give you options.

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Fun Ways to Drink Wine Without Spending Any Money

1. Get a part-time job at a wine shop

Do you have 2 afternoons or nights free during the week, and a thirst for learning about wine? Why not see if your favorite local wine shop can you give you a few shifts?

Working wine retail is a demanding job—you’ll need to know a little bit about every kind of wine (and wine region) in the shop, and you’ll be on your feet for several hours—and the pay isn’t amazing.

But the main perk is that you can typically purchase wine at a very low price, sometimes even “at cost” (the price the wine shop pays).

If drinking great wine is your favorite hobby, why not get paid for it and have access to all the goods you can possibly desire?

2. Trade or barter with a winery

Do you have a skill that might be useful to a winery? Consider reaching out to one of your favorite local or regional wineries, and offering them an exchange.

This could be a digital offering—website development, logo design, digital marketing, social media copywriting—or, if you actually live near a winery you like, it could be physical, such as helping with simple winery jobs like bottling or labeling. If you’re not up for winery work, what about gardening, landscaping, or sending them your homemade ceramics? You get the idea.

Speaking for my family winery, we love trading wine for useful things—a common one is that we are always desperately in need of wood chips (weed management), and so we are more than happy to trade a 12-pack of wine for a wood chip drop.

A very large winery probably won’t be into the idea—but a small, family-run winery might take the bait. It could even lead to an ongoing friendship.

3. Form a tasting group

Maybe you can only afford to purchase wine once a month. But if you team up with 3 or 4 other wine lovers who are also on a budget, you could form a tasting group where you drink together. To ease pressure on your wallets, either take turns supplying your meet-ups, or simply pool a certain amount together each week and see what it gets you.

One fun idea would be to send $20 each to one person, who can then order the wines without telling the others what they are—yes, I’m talking about a blind tasting.

By drinking together in this way, you can try things you would otherwise not be able to afford, while learning about wine through each other’s knowledge.

How to blind taste wine

“Ten Things I Hate About Natural Wine”

I’m not sure where this idea came to me, but perhaps I’ve been secretly waiting, all these years, to find a way to reference that too-perfect rom-com movie title.

And here it is! A short, punchy ebook—designed to be read while commuting, or when you have a few minutes alone with your morning coffee. Or read it with your wine-tasting group as a discussion prompt.

I decided to put it together as a fun little PDF for premium subscribers; I think you guys will appreciate the mixture of cheekiness and serious issues.

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That’s when I call on friends! I’m very lucky to have…

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Friends who “don’t read the news.” Friends who insist on posting about their vacations, while tragedies unfold on our screens or in our communities. The question here is about people who we liked perfectly well until a horrific event was live-streamed, and then we we, gutted inside, noticed that they didn’t have a word to say about it.

The global event changes how we see this friend, and we’re not sure what to do about it.

Columnist Alison P. Davis is extremely generous in her response: How do you know, she queries, that they aren’t secretly donating to progressive organizations, even if they don’t virtue-signal on social media? She also suggests that some people are simply “Hot Tub Friends,” as in: “hanging out with them is akin to sliding into a hot tub and totally relaxing.”

I think Davis has really hit on something there: “Hot Tub Friends” can be a panacea to the constant flow of negative news all around us.

But while I wish I could get on board, I guess I’m at a time in my life where I’m not that excited about soaking in a hot tub for hours on end.

Maybe a sauna, for 30 minutes, to maintain health. But a hot tub? The luxurious bubbles, the vacation vibes, the ooey-gooey brain. I get it. It’s just not where I am right now.

But isn’t wine supposed to be all about pleasure? About escape? About transporting us to a happy, problem-free vineyard steeped in nature?

Are wine pals—people you know who share your love of wine, or maybe work in the industry—equivalent in any way to The Cut’s “hot tub friends”? Does wine itself fulfill that function?

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This week, the owners of both restaurants—N&S, still open in Kreutzberg, while nomaLA has kicked off this week amidst highly publicized scandal—made speeches on social media that I want to look at here.

One is an example of a world ruled by gaslighting, blame-shifting, and violence. The other reveals the potential of self-reflection, of being open to change.

We need to ultimately ask why more natural wine professionals—who purport to be part of an ethical movement—aren’t speaking out more, and haven’t been, for all these years.

To rewind a bit:

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The Choc Chunk Cookies That Made Me A Baker

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Another well-known Ocasio, the artist Bad Bunny, holds the title of Arts Minister—a position created when Federal judges ruled that all those named within the Epstein files were subject to fines related to the level of the egregiousness of their acts. Those billions of dollars in fines were then used to create an Arts Ministry.

You and I have met up at our favorite wine bar in New York, to share a bottle. Our children are happily enjoying state-subsidized childcare, and we don’t know where our partners are, because traditional relationships have been passé for years. We are all cross-dressing polyamorists, now.

I still write books about natural wine, and you have successfully established your handmade Korean vermouth business, thanks in part to funding from Bad Bunny’s Arts Ministry, which issues thousands of grants each year to support artisanal traditions.

Your vermouth thrives, as well, because people have been shopping like crazy at small neighborhood businesses, ever since Jeff Bezos took his wife and Elon Musk up in space in a rocket ship that mysteriously, evaporated into a black hole. Nobody knows how they got misdirected and nobody cares. All former Amazon workers have been issued five years of dance therapy in a tropical island commune, to help rehabilitate their nervous systems.

Since nice wine, decent cookware, and properly made shoes have become more accessible, a strange thing has happened—people have become surprisingly content. They don’t experience want as much, and don’t find themselves swimming in cheap products that they ordered late-night and which eventually pile up in landfills abroad (the people who used to live around those landfills can now breathe the air and grow food, by the way). Instead of buying things all the time, people seem to be enjoying what they have more. Like us, with our friendship and our wine.

After our wine, we have plans to see a top-tier performance, because art is now affordable thanks to Bad Bunny’s Arts Ministry. Ever since Donal* Tr*mp passed away and his former cabinet retreated to form a colony on an island in the Arctic in order to avoid prosecution by the Hague, the arts have been enjoying an unprecedented renaissance.

There are many more actors, musicians, and creative technicians, thanks in part to the universal humanities curriculum that AOC and Bad Bunny launched in their first term, but also largely because Artificial Intelligence was outlawed after a robot went rogue and took over a data center, charting it from one mansion to another until every single tech overlord had been converted into pixie dust along with all our data, which was condensed into a giant capsule that the robot then swallowed, causing it to die, along with all Artificial Intelligence.

Now, the big question: What should we order?

We’re flush with cash, nobody’s in a rush to be anywhere, and our only problem is a paradox of choice. Even better: We have reclaimed joy. We have found self-love. We don’t doomscroll anymore. We have strong, supportive communities all around us.

There’s a lot to celebrate. Here are my picks for these wonderful times:

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Are you familiar with qvevri [kweh-vree]?

Perhaps you’ve heard about how Georgian wine—invisible to the Western eye for so many years during Soviet occupation—gradually entered onto the global market, and then in recent years, has developed a cult following. It turns out that Georgian growers maintained hundreds of forbidden grape varieties, despite Soviet prohibitions, and simultaneously kept alive the world’s oldest winemaking traditions.

And part of that is the qvevri—the signature Georgian fermenting vessel.

About Georgian wine

Why do winemakers love qvevri—enough to import these large, heavy clay items to a remote island like Sicily? I’ll elucidate on that along with the history of qvevri winemaking—and finally, tell you how this red wine was!

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Using various citizen science-driven Facebook groups, I was able to locate a campsite near a beach (goals: fishing and swimming) where the algae bloom has not yet taken over the water.

We packed a tent, a cooler full of food, fishing poles, and three wines for this trip.

It didn’t quite go as expected, but fortunately, the wines absolutely sparkled.

Instead of delivering you staid “tasting notes,” I made simple watercolors depiciting the wines (all of which are from the Adelaide Hills, where I live) and the moments they marked during our camping trip, to try to express the intermingling of wine and life and experience all at once.

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My therapist, howeve…

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The previous owners had used chemicals—herbicide and fungicide, and fertilizers—which meant that the vines, when Gino took over, were “at the surface,” he explained. They were limited in their growth and in their potential to produce excellent grapes, because they depended on outside input.

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But maybe this photo also helps?

That’s from Bonnes Blanches, a vineyard that Domaine Mosse farms in the Anjou region of the Loire Valley, France. Look at her! She is beauty, she is grace.

That’s a 50+ year-old vine, and her fruits are so lovely (even the bit of rot—it can add character; or it can be trimmed out of the cluster, depending on the winemaker’s intent).

Chenin Blanc is one of the varieties that seems to do really well in New World regions. It thrives in parts of South Africa, Australia, Oregon, and California.

Jauma Wines 2024 “LULU”

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Rosato is the Italian version of rosé—and typically it’s much darker and layered than the French counterpart.

Over the weekend I enjoyed a vibrant and complex 2019 rosato from the estate vineyard of Massa Vecchia farm in the Maremma, a less-traveled coastal region of Tuscany.

This was a blend of Merlot, Malvasia Nero (red Malvasia), and Cabernet Sauvignon, reflecting the Tuscan trend of planting French varieties in the 90s. It’s almost a light red, with ample tannin and acidity, and was beautiful alongside hand-made ravioli with some friends.

I’ve never been to the Maremma and I’ve always wanted to visit Massa Vecchia and learn how they make their wines. Perhaps I’ll get there on my next trip to Italy, coming up later this month…

In case you missed it, I recently shared that I’m hosting a retreat at Pācina natural wine farm in Tuscany, in May 2026. Get in touch if you’d like to learn more.

MASSA VECCHIA, 2019 “Rosato di Toscana”

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