I keep having a version of the same conversation. A distributor tells me their biggest priority is finding wines under a certain price point. A producer talks about launching an entry-level line. Another is experimenting with cans, cocktails, flavored beverages, something adjacent. At worst, some are shifting away from wine altogether in hopes of striking it rich or finding more volume in something else. The logic is easy enough to understand: consumption is down, inventory is up, the middle of the market feels slow, and cash flow matters. If consumers are buying less wine, the instinct is to meet them lower.

What concerns me isn’t that these ideas exist. Affordable wine has always had a place, and not every bottle needs to be profound. What concerns me is that I’m starting to hear the same solution from everyone. Whenever an industry converges on the same answer, it’s worth asking whether it’s answering the right question.

The reason I recognize the temptation is because I nearly got pulled into it myself.

Over the last two years I’ve spent a lot of time talking with producers, brokers, distributors, and négociants. The same opportunity kept presenting itself. Bordeaux is full of very good wine right now, in some cases, extraordinarily good wine from addresses consumers would immediately recognize, wine looking for a home. The strategy practically wrote itself: source excess wine from top flight respected properties, repackage it, tell a more modern Bordeaux story than Bordeaux has traditionally told, create an accessible entry point back into the category. The more conversations I had, the more sensible it sounded. The more spreadsheets I built, the more I could convince myself it was the opportunity hiding in plain sight.

So I kept chasing the numbers.

What became apparent was that the model didn’t really work until it reached a scale far larger than I was comfortable with. Hundreds of thousands of bottles. Infrastructure to support them. Inventory to finance. Distribution to maintain. Staff to justify.

And even then, growth wasn’t the reward. It was the requirement.

The whole thing depended on moving more wine next year than the year before, while somehow protecting a minuscule margin. That’s when I started recognizing the same thinking that had gotten Bordeaux into trouble in the first place.

Before moving here, Bordeaux existed in my mind primarily as a wine region (a famous one, obviously) but still just a place that made wine. The longer I spend here, the more I see it as a case study in what happens when a business model optimizes for growth long enough that it forgets how to do anything else.

For decades, Bordeaux responded to success the way most businesses would. Demand increased, so production increased. New markets opened, so more wine was made. Distribution expanded and volumes grew. The assumption was simple: if demand ever softened, lower prices, new markets, and more volume would eventually solve the problem.

And for a long time, they did. Until they didn’t.

The issue was never a single bad vintage. The issue was that an entire system became dependent on the assumption that yesterday’s demand would continue indefinitely. When it slowed, many producers didn’t become more selective. They became more dependent on the very tools that had driven the previous period of growth. More mechanization. More export markets. More discounting. More inventory moving through channels that were already struggling to differentiate one bottle from another.

The result wasn’t resilience. The result was dependence on growth. And the thing worth understanding is that this wasn’t bad luck or bad taste, the foundational mistake was that Bordeaux made a structural bet long before the market turned, that future demand would justify ever-increasing production. Everything that followed was a race to the bottom in order to keep that bet alive.

This is the lesson the rest of the wine world keeps missing, not that Bordeaux is old-fashioned or out of touch, but that a wine region can spend decades optimizing for growth and find itself completely exposed when the market changes direction. And yet here we are, running the same experiment in real time, this time with the entire industry.

Ultimately, I think the question most producers and industry folks are avoiding (because the answer is uncomfortable) is: what size does this business actually need to be? Not how much wine can we sell, but how much wine do we actually need to sell. Those aren’t the same questions.

For most of the past fifty years, success in wine was framed as growth: more cases, more markets, more placements, more production, more money. The investment world says it plainly on every prospectus: past performance is not indicative of future results. The wine industry has largely behaved as though that warning doesn’t apply. What if the period we’re leaving behind was the anomaly? What if wine was never supposed to function like a scalable consumer product in the first place?

People take comfort in the idea that wine has been around for thousands of years and isn't suddenly going to disappear. That's probably true. But the industry we know today (the distributor tiers, the export markets, the on-premise programs, the chase for placement and volume and points) that's not ancient. That's maybe fifty years old. What if that's the anomaly?

Look at what happened every time a major player tried to treat wine like a scalable consumer category. Soft drink companies, tobacco conglomerates, entertainment giants. Wine has a long history of attracting serious operators who believe it will eventually behave like every other consumer product. Most eventually discover the same thing: the value in wine doesn’t come from efficiency or scale. It comes from specificity.

In this sense wine resembles the art world far more than the beverage industry. Not just the auction houses and blue-chip collectors, but the broader ecosystem of galleries, artists, regional scenes, and collectors who sustain it. That world is fragmented by design. Its value comes from individual voices, from trust built over time, from the fact that what you’re buying reflects decisions made by a specific person in a specific place. You don’t see artists respond to success by buying printing presses, or galleries respond to demand by opening factories.

The work doesn’t scale because the whole point is that it can’t. The art world doesn’t expect one gallery to capture all the attention. It doesn’t expect one painter to own the category. Multiple creators can thrive simultaneously because the audience isn’t looking for one answer. They’re looking for discovery.

Wine, at its most meaningful, works the same way. I became obsessed with it because the wines come from somewhere, because they reflect decisions, because they connect to places and people and ideas that can’t be replicated at volume. The attention consumers give to wine hasn’t disappeared, it’s just distributed differently than it used to be. A generation ago, a serious wine drinker might have built their cellar around a handful of producers. Today they might buy from twenty or more. That’s not disengagement. That’s exploration. The challenge isn’t winning back the concentrated attention of a previous era. The challenge is building a business that doesn’t require it.

The question many producers should be asking then isn’t how to move more wine. It’s whether they should be making less of it in the first place. Every proposed solution assumes the wine already exists and therefore must be sold. The burden is always placed on demand to catch up with supply, rarely the other way around. Very few discussions begin with the possibility that the wine should never have been produced in the first place.

The future of wine may not belong to whoever grows the fastest. It may belong to those who figure out the minimum amount required to sustain a healthy, meaningful business… and have the discipline to stop there. It requires accepting that consumers may never behave like previous generations, that attention will remain fragmented, that demand cannot be taken for granted, and most of all that success and scale are not the same thing.

Bordeaux taught me that. The irony is the lesson only becomes visible after the growth stops. Which is why I worry when every conversation starts sounding the same. When distributors ask for lower price points and producers rush to provide them in the name of “attracting a new audience”, I can’t help wondering whether we’re solving the wrong problem.

The question isn’t whether we can find another way to push more wine into the market.
If the future really is smaller, then the most important question a winery may need to answer over the next decade is not how to grow, but what assumptions it is willing to abandon in order to remain independent.

From the inside it sits about six feet off the ground, but outside it’s right at dirt level. It was built decades ago as a poor man’s gravity-fed winery. Most vineyards around here are machine harvested. The machines move through the rows, fill up, then dump into large trailers with augers inside them run off the PTO of a tractor. The trailers back up to holes like mine and pump the fruit directly into the tanks. Efficient. Fast. The whole property picked in a day or two and safely fermenting before weather or rot can complicate things further.

I would be lying if I said there aren’t nights during harvest, as I’m shoveling hand-picked fruit into the destemmer one macrobin at a time, that I don’t quietly envy it.

Around the opening there are old stains from years of juice and fruit splatter, blackened into the limestone. Every vintage leaving a mark behind. I tell myself it’s harmless now, though that doesn’t stop me from scrubbing the cellar walls like a crazy person.

The hole makes the cellar too cold in winter and too warm in summer. Its old wooden slat door does almost nothing against the wind. Still, I prefer it to the constant hum of air conditioners I lived with in Texas. Winemakers like to talk about nature until they have to actually live with it.

The sensible thing would be to fill the hole in. But sensible things cost money, and right now most of that money is tied up in grafting vineyards, bottling wine and trying to finish a cellar renovation that always seems one invoice away from stopping completely.

The problem is that every unfinished thing has a way of feeling temporary, even when it isn’t. You stop seeing it clearly. It becomes the wallpaper… something you’ll deal with eventually, when there’s time, when there’s money, when the season changes. Which is another way of saying it becomes permanent.

At the same time, part of me looks at that wall and thinks about making the hole bigger instead. The building is already half buried into the hillside. It wouldn’t take much excavation to turn that side of the cellar underground. Naturally temperature controlled. Humid. Quiet. Utilitarian.

Not the kind of cellar people photograph. Or maybe exactly the kind, that’s where I keep getting lost.

There’s a version of that underground cellar that’s just agriculture. And there’s a version that’s a signal: carved limestone, the kind of place wine writers describe reverently while the winemaker tries to look appropriately modest. Horses in vineyards. Sheep grazing under the rows. Some of it is genuinely useful. Much of it is genuinely beautiful. But I’ve started to notice how difficult it’s become to find the line between the thing and the performance of the thing.

I say this fully aware that I’m not immune to it.

A few months ago I contacted a local shepherd about bringing sheep through the vineyard this winter. Not because I believed it would magically transform the wines, but because I figured if the sheep saved me a mowing pass or two, why not?

The quote came back at six hundred euros a hectare.

As someone who comes from a ranching family, the idea of renting the sheep instead of the land told me almost everything I needed to know.

And yet I still understand the appeal. Frost. Hail. Rot. Tiny yields. Old vines. Long odds. We romanticize all of it because, in small enough quantities, struggle itself becomes part of the value. The problem is that eventually every signal gets absorbed into aesthetics. Then repeated. Then expected. Then priced in at six hundred euros a hectare.

You start wondering whether people are tasting the wine or reading the set design around it. Then you start wondering which one you’re building.

Tomorrow morning I’ll walk back into that cellar and look at the hole in the wall. I’ll want to fill it in. I’ll want to make it bigger.

The rain finally backed off. The mildew pressure eased just enough that I stopped waking up with the forecast already running in my head. We spent the last stretch in the vineyard trying to protect what was there, slipping between rain windows, watching the sky, dodging hail as if dodging it were something a person could actually do.

Just north of us, a neighbor got hit.

In a few minutes, they lost something like seventy percent of their crop. I cannot imagine it. I keep trying, and I think what freaks me out is not the number, it is simply the way hail works. You are standing in your vineyard and it decides, with no apparent logic, which parcel it takes and which it leaves. Rain feels general. Wind feels general. Hail feels selected. And afterward everyone stands around trying not to say the thing that sits at the back of the mind: it feels personal, even when you know it isn’t. Even when you understand the meteorology. Even when you have talked yourself through the randomness of it a hundred times.

They will persevere. Growers do (what other option is there?) and most of them have been at this longer than I have and have absorbed worse. You walk the rows, count what is left, make whatever decisions can still be made, and keep going. But I know enough now to understand that perseverance does not make the loss less brutal. It only means the work continues after the part of you that wanted to believe in fairness has gone silent.

Things have settled now, at least for the moment, which is usually the best you get in farming. Next week we graft 1.5 hectares to Chenin and half a hectare to Savagnin.

I would be lying if I said I don’t have some unreasonable hope tucked inside those parcels. Some part of me wants to believe we might hit paydirt, that one of these varieties might show us a white wine that should have been here all along, a side of Bordeaux no one quite knew how to see.

I also know better.

It will take time. It may not happen at all. More likely, if anything profound comes from this, it will not come from one variety arriving like a star. It will come from a chorus: Chenin, Savagnin, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, maybe others, each carrying a different piece of the place, the way Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Cabernet Sauvignon have done in red Bordeaux for centuries.

Even writing that feels like counting chickens. But grafting is an act of counting chickens. You cut into the old wood because you believe the future is worth the wound.

Which is probably why I keep thinking about a bottle I opened last month outside San Antonio with my dad.

I was in town for a wine fair and a bit of market work, and we opened our 2014 Illegitimi Non Carborundum. My dad has held on to a lot of our old wines, which means visiting him can feel, at times, like walking through a storage unit version of my own past. There are bottles from Long Island, bottles from Texas, wines I remember clearly, wines I barely remember making, and a few I am almost afraid to open because I do not know which version of myself will come out with the cork.

We were cooking steaks (as one should in that part of the world) and I thought the 2014 might fit the bill. I was not trying to stage a revelation. I just wanted something interesting, with enough age, enough life, to sit on the table with smoke and beef and my father.

My dad is not a wine person in the way people usually mean. He doesn’t have opinions about appellations or vintages. What he has is a different kind of attention, he will drink something slowly and tell you what it reminds him of, which is usually something unexpected and usually right. We stood at the grill and I poured him a glass. He held it for a while before he said anything. He said it tasted like it had been waiting for us.

I thought about that.

What surprised me was not simply that the wine had survived. Plenty of wines survive. What surprised me was that it still had energy. It still had shape. It still felt like it was moving, not fading.

It had left the cellar at ten months. We bottled it when it was ready, which happened to be before most people in this part of the wine world would have been comfortable with. It got a 93 from Wine Enthusiast on release, one of two wines I have ever allowed to be rated. It was alive and complete and right. And now, more than a decade later, it was still all of those things, only less eager to prove it.

Same wine. Different expression.

This matters to me because the wine in the glass was tied to a decision made ten years earlier. Bottling it at ten months had not shortened its life. If anything, it had protected the kind of life it had.

Bordeaux has a way of making barrel time feel like moral seriousness. Eighteen months sounds respectable. Twenty-four sounds responsible. Ten sounds like you need to explain yourself… and for a while, I did.

Barrel time does real things. Tannins settle. Things that felt separate start to belong to each other. I am not arguing against it in principle. I am saying it does not do the same thing for every wine, and staying longer in oak does not make a wine more serious. It makes it more barrel-aged. Those are different things.

When I bottled the 2014 at ten months, I was reading the wine, not the calendar. At ten months it had reached a point where it felt like itself, not finished in the sense of being done changing, but resolved in the sense of being what it was going to be. More time in barrel would not have built something bigger. It would have taken something away. That can happen. Barrel time can take from a wine that has already found its shape.

The 2014 was precise, bright, built around energy rather than mass. You cannot barrel-age your way from one kind of wine to another. You can only hold it past its moment, or bottle it into one.

I bottled it into its moment.

I love young wines. I always have. I love their charge, their impatience, the way they can feel unfinished and more alive because of it. Some wines are most thrilling before they have learned manners, when everything is still close to the surface: fruit, weather, nerves, decisions, luck.

But I also love following a wine as it changes. Not because I believe there is one perfect moment, some narrow window when the bottle finally becomes what it was always meant to be. I do not really buy that. Wine does not reveal itself all at once. The young wine tells you one thing. Later it may tell you another. Sometimes it gets quieter. Sometimes stranger. Sometimes it becomes more itself by becoming less obvious.

I want access to both.

What I want to offer is the wine at release, and the chance to come back later and find something the first opening could not show. The 2014 was worth opening when it came out. It is worth opening now. The decision that made both of those things true was made at ten months, with attention, and it held.

Starting again in Bordeaux has given us a chance to rebuild with more memory than ambition. One thing I know now is that you cannot follow a wine’s life if you have sold all of it. So we are keeping bottles back, not as a collection, not ceremonially, but because we want to be able to come back and listen again, the way I did with my dad at the grill in San Antonio.

The wines will go out when they are ready, but not all at once. Each wine will have its first release, its first moment in the world, when it still carries the energy of the vintage and the immediacy of the cellar. Then a portion will remain with us. Some bottles will be opened here, with people who come to see what we are building. Some will go back out into the world as later releases. The point is to keep enough behind that the release is not the only version of the wine we ever get to know.

The same is true in the vineyard. Next week’s grafts will not answer anything quickly. They may take years to say something clear. Some may disappoint. Some may simply become useful. One or two, if we are lucky, may open a door we did not know was there.

That is the work now: not forcing the answer, not mistaking patience for passivity, not pretending the calendar is wisdom by itself. Just keeping enough wine, enough vines, enough attention, and enough nerve to let the place speak more than once.

The 2014 reminded me of this because it had not become some grander version of itself. It was still the same wine. Just older, with a touch more restraint, more willing to let you come to it.

That was enough.

The wines we are bottling now in Bordeaux will leave the cellar when they are ready, not when the calendar permits. Some will be ready young. That is the intention, not the compromise. The goal is for someone to open one in ten years and find that it kept its end of the bargain: still there, still moving, still worth the glass.

And maybe the grafts going in next week will do the same. Maybe Chenin and Savagnin will tell us something. Maybe they will not. Maybe the answer will come from one variety, or maybe it will come from the conversation between many of them. I do not know yet, and that is both the terror and the pleasure of it.

For now, that is enough. You make the cut. You protect what you can. You bottle when the wine asks for it. Hold some back. And then, if you are lucky, you get to come back later and listen again.

I’m surprised how much I think about this from time to time.

Not just the sentimental aspect, but how people understand their place in something larger, are a part of something that’s bigger than their part. Not every instrument carries a piece the same way, some hold a piece together, some shine through on their own and some only make sense after everything else is there.

I’ve always been drawn to this aspect of music composition. Not the idea of the composer as a genius imposing order, but the discipline of listening closely enough to know what each part is actually doing or could do (or shouldn’t).

Of course, this is how I think about wine.

Bordeaux has always made sense to me in this way. Its native language is blending, but not as a corrective act. Not as a way to hide flaws or chase some idea of balance, because at its best, blending is a way of understanding. Yet the best don’t start with the assumption that everything belongs together, instead you start by learning what each piece is capable of.

That means you need to work through a block instead of assuming it is one thing. Picking at different moments, playing with ripeness, tension, texture in order to let the season show itself in different ways across the same parcel. What starts out looking uniform at a distance starts to separate and you begin to see range, you start learning what each piece is capable of.

And once you see that range, the hierarchy shifts.

The component that feels richest on its own is not always the one you need most. Sometimes it’s too much. Sometimes what matters is the lot with more tension, or less weight, or a narrower expression that gives the rest of the wine its shape. Like instruments, some lots carry the wine, while others sharpen or hold things together and some only make sense once everything else is there.

Not everything deserves a solo.

There’s nothing wrong with a solo. Some wines must be heard on their own. I’m committed to finding out whether a single grape variety on a single site can stand convincingly on its own in our corner of Bordeaux, but I’m also skeptical of the current fixation on it. The solo has become a form of prestige that suggests purity and confidence.

That idea travels well and sells easily, but just because something can stand alone doesn’t mean it says the most on its own.

A single instrument can be arresting in the right situation. It can also become narrow, even exhausting… I’m looking at you saxophone. If every variety and block is forced to prove itself that way, you get a lot of noodling and navel gazing. I shudder to imagine a world made up entirely of solos. The problem isn’t the instrument, but rather it’s the insistence that it should stand alone in order to matter.

That has never fully matched my experience in the vineyard.

The vintage doesn’t express itself as a single voice, it’s much more complicated than that. In a hot, dry year, you feel its force in every corner of the estate, while in a cooler, wetter one, the expression tightens, becomes quieter, more restrained, but no less specific. Each parcel, each pass, each lot bears a distinctive version of each of those stories. The job is to hear that clearly enough to know what deserves to stand alone, what belongs in the conversation, and what only makes sense after it’s introduced.

I have a single barrel of Chardonnay from the first pass in the vineyard, mostly free run, that I never intended to bottle on its own. But it earned that outcome. It’s delicate, but not slight, much lighter on the palate than I expected from such a hot vintage. It feels like a solo line played clearly enough to stand on its own. The next barrels are different. More press fraction, more second pick, less soloist than section. And they matter just as much, maybe more, because they open up the larger question of what each part is for.

That has become especially clear to me with Rouge Clair, our clairet that is rose adjacent. There, the point of the wine is not purity but coherence. It exists as a snapshot of the vineyard right between the end point of whites ripening and the early beginnings of reds coming in. A solely brighter, earlier expression of red fruit on its own can be vivid, but it can also spin off into something thin or one-dimensional. What some of the later white components bring are lower tones, a kind of bass note, enough grounding to give that brightness shape and dimension without dulling it.

Will that always be part of the wine? I don’t know. It shouldn’t be there by rule. It should only be there when it makes sense. But that has always been my instinct for this cuvée: not as a fixed formula, and not as a simple rosé made by choosing one block, harvesting it early, and calling it done, but as a place where different parts of the vineyard can meet at a specific moment in the season and say something fuller together than they could apart.

The same is true of Le P’tit Rouge. I don’t think of this wine as secondary. I think of it as a smaller movement within the same body of work. It lets me hear the estate at different moments. In Le P’tit Rouge’s case: what happens when red fruit is picked earlier, where is ripening in each of our blocks, what sort of shifts can we expect after a few more days, what another week brings into focus or pushes too far. Those differences are not academic. They change the tone of the wine, its tension, its movement, its usefulness in the larger picture. In that sense, these wines are closer to chamber music than a full on symphony. More contained, more exposed, but no less serious.

What I learn there doesn’t stay there. It feeds back into everything else: later picks, broader blends, parcel decisions, the larger statement the vintage is capable of making. The line between one wine and the next is never fixed. Brightness leans into weight. Early decisions press into later ones.

The best wines I’ve made have been blends. I say that reluctantly, because blending doesn’t belong to the current fashion of what’s considered exciting or pure today. It doesn’t romanticize the idea that individuality is sacred. And yet, it’s the blends that have had more to say.

Or maybe it’s just that the vineyard keeps revealing itself, regardless of fashion. Sometimes a wine can stand alone and still say less.

I know what they need. Or at least I know what I see when I’m there, which is close enough to the same thing. The soils. The aspect. They could go on making red, when what they really ought to be making is white, and no one would notice. That’s what makes this annoying.

If they were obvious failures, the decision would be easy.

But they’re not failures.

So I walk them. I do the math. I think about what grafting costs, then I consider the years after that, the years where all you have is the decision and no proof yet that it was the right one. There are so many excuses not to invest, from shipping costs to the weak dollar. Oh and tariffs, if I want a really respectable excuse. It becomes easy to call waiting discipline.

The vineyard gives you plenty of practice in that kind of thinking. There is always a reason to wait. A reason to leave things as they are another year. A reason not to push too hard.

And that thinking has infiltrated the wine industry at exactly the moment it should be pressing harder, not flinching.

And it’s not collapse, per se, but more like recoil. Everyone speaking in hushed tones about contraction and softness and uncertainty, as if the only intelligent thing left to do is protect what you have and hope the weather changes.

I went to Chicago last week for Third Coast Soif.

I hadn’t poured wine in the US in a while and I showed up infected by that same mood. You absorb it after a while. Even if you don’t believe it entirely, you start expecting half-empty rooms. Polite interest. Fatigue.

Instead, the rooms were packed.

Not just busy. Packed. People shoulder to shoulder at the satellite events, at the after parties, the Sunday tasting, which felt like a detail that should have made it slower and didn’t. Young people too, not just drinking, but actually interested. Tasting with the kind of attention that still has some hunger in it.

What I saw in Chicago felt more alive than what’s being written. More open. Less exhausted. It sent me home thinking about belief.

Because the appetite is still there, at least more of it than we keep being told. What seems missing to me is belief from the people who used to act like the future belonged to them. Some of the younger winegrowers and distributors I met felt wide open right now, like they understood that this is still a moment to build. Meanwhile a lot of the old vanguard sounds like it is waiting for permission. Waiting for clearer signals. Waiting for the old map to start working again.

I understand the instinct. Institutions do that. People with something to protect usually do.

But grape growing has never really allowed for that kind of safety. You pick your parcel and plant what you think might work and then wait five years. And then, every year you place your bet. On the season. On the fruit. On whether the storm misses you or doesn’t. You lose sleep. Sometimes you lose crop. Then you go back out and do it again.

Which is why I have so little patience, in the end, for the voice that keeps offering me better reasons to wait on these two parcels.

It’s not dramatic, that voice. That’s the problem. It sounds adult and experienced, like someone who understands markets, timing and exposure.

It says:
“not now”
“you can always do it next year”
“don’t make yourself more vulnerable than you already are.”

That voice can be right, but so often it is just fear hiding behind a spreadsheet. And I know the difference, or at least I know enough not to pretend I don’t.

So the grafts go in.

Not because harvest is coming. Not because anyone is visiting. The winery doesn’t get visitors, not really, not yet anyway. I cleaned it because the cobwebs had taken over the corners and the leaves had slipped under the door and something that resembled a small civilization of bugs had established itself in a corner I have spent too much tmie pretending not to notice.

We’re still in that eternal 98% finished stage of construction, which means there’s always a reason not to clean. Always something more urgent. Always a better excuse for the mess.

But I cleaned it anyway. Scrubbed things back to zero.

It didn’t sell any wine. It didn’t make any wine. It felt better than both.

The vineyard, on the other hand, doesn’t really work like that. I prune, but the vine decides what it wants to do with that. The importer might love the wines or might not return the email. The buyer in London forms whatever opinion they form.

Most of the variables I care most about are the ones I have the least control over.

The winery floor is not one of those variables.

We built this place with oversized windows. I always do that. Transparency, bringing the vineyard inside. It matters to me in a way I can’t fully explain. Big enough that people comment on them sometimes, like the windows themselves are the statement.

But depending on which way the wind blows, they fill up with grime. The shades we use to protect them on the outside get torn up by the weather.

Windows aren’t supposed to be noticed. When they work, they disappear. When they’re dirty, they’re all you see.

I’ve learned if I keep the shades drawn tight, most of that doesn’t happen. And yet there’s nothing better than throwing them open.

It turns out Bordeaux is a strange place to choose if you care about attention. The systems and structure makes the region hard to read from the outside. It’s easier to tell a story about a tiny hillside in other parts of France than a place this large where everything is either anonymous or expensive. But that doesn’t mean the story isn’t there.

The temptation, of course, is to play the games. Scarcity. Unicorns. Prices that signal to groups that only understand the language of money.

I don’t blame the people who do it. Everyone is trying to survive the same weather.

But not me. What I chose was this: a place most people scroll past, an unassuming vineyard that still needs work.

Sometimes I look around and see other wineries or wine regions whose frames seem perfectly tended, photographs of sheep in spring vineyards and rows meticulously tended by horses. It’s beautiful. I admire it.

But vineyards aren’t pictures.

And I know what the sky looks like.

The floor gets dirty again. The windows cloud over. The leaves find their way under the door.

And every now and then I clean the place back to zero.

Not because it changes the weather.

Just because someone has to keep the windows clean.

When we opened our tasting room in Southold on Long Island, there was a question I learned to expect. It usually came early, somewhere between “Hello” and “Would you like to taste some wine?”

“Where are you from?”

“Texas,” I’d say.

There was always a pause. A small recalibration. Then the follow-up.

“Why are you here?”

I learned quickly that the answer mattered less than the relief it could provide. If I said that Carey grew up on Long Island, I could watch it happen in real time. Shoulders drop, faces soften.

“Ohhh.”

As if that single detail made my presence acceptable.

When we moved to Texas, the questions changed but the structure stayed the same. Carey would be asked where she was from.

“New York.”

The same pause. The same concern.

“What brought you here?”

And again, the relief only arrived once my Texan origin entered the story. Suddenly everything made sense. Suddenly no one needed to ask anything else.

France has been worse. Here, the questioning doesn’t resolve. It escalates.

“Your husband is French?”

No.

“You have family here?”

No.

“Your job moved you here?”

Not really.

“Wait, you have children too?”

Yes.

That only sharpens the discomfort.

“But why did you come here?”

I’ve tried every version of the answer. Farming. Climate. Soils. Wines we’ve been trying to make for years. A place that spoke to us in a way we understood. Eventually the conversation collapses into resignation.

“Well… French wine is the best wine”, they say.

Which is not what we said. And not why we came.

What’s strange is that it isn’t just the French. Friends, family, colleagues, people who know us well, still want a cleaner explanation. Something that resolves the unease. Something that makes the decision legible.

When we announced we were moving, rumors filled the gap we left open. The most common was that we were inheriting an old family estate. I admit I enjoyed that one. It would have made everything easier. It would have explained things. But there was no inheritance. No lineage. No inevitability anyone else could see. We chose the place.

The conversation shifts from discovery to justification. And once you’re justifying, you’ve already lost. Because justification assumes the default answer should be no. It assumes you need permission to be here. It assumes the burden of proof is yours to carry. What gets lost isn’t just the conversation. It’s the possibility that the work might speak for itself if anyone stayed curious long enough to listen.

I think about this often when I think about wine. In Texas, when we made Chardonnay from old vines, we learned quickly not to name it upfront. If we did, the conversation would end before the glass was lifted. Someone would explain why they didn’t like Chardonnay, and everyone else would quietly look for reasons not to like it either. If we waited, if we let the wine speak first, something else happened.

“I guess I do like Chardonnay.”

The wine hadn’t changed. Only the permission structure had.

Now it feels harder. Categories have hardened. People want “of course” before they want “tell me more.” They want the answer that lets them move on. And when they don’t get it, when a person, or a wine, or a place refuses to supply a clean reason, they grow uneasy.

There are exceptions. A few weeks ago, I asked someone I respect to try the wines. I sent samples. A week later, an email arrived. She’d opened both bottles on the same day. Tasted them. Set them aside. Came back the next day. And the next. “The magic thing,” she wrote, “is that as the week progressed both wines had a lot more to say for themselves.” By day four, they had transformed. What felt closed at first had opened. “By day 4 on both, they had transformed and both were immensely satisfying.”

She didn’t just try them. She gave them time. Not because I asked her to. Because she was curious enough to see what they might become. That’s the difference. Not talent or expertise, though she has both. Patience. The willingness to sit with something that doesn’t announce itself immediately.

This conversation felt different. It didn’t start with “why are you here?” It started with “what are you making?” And that shift, from needing permission to offering curiosity, changes everything.

I’ve been watching The Beatles Anthology with my kids. What struck me wasn’t their talent (though that’s undeniable) it was the time they had. Over a decade of playing Hamburg dive bars, honing their craft, working through what they were trying to become. They faced plenty of rejections. But they had an ecosystem that tolerated not-yet-legible work. Venues that would book them. Audiences willing to show up without knowing what they’d get. A structure that allowed slow burns.

I’m not sure that ecosystem exists anymore. Not in music. Not in wine.

The wine industry used to have space for this. Small producers making wines that didn’t fit categories. Patient importers willing to build stories over years. Customers who discovered things because someone they trusted said “try this” without needing to explain why it mattered first.

Now everyone needs the elevator pitch. The clean narrative. The explanation that fits in thirty seconds.

The elevator pitch strips texture in favor of expediency. It demands that complex work announce itself immediately or disappear. It turns discovery into triage.

What gets lost is everything interesting. The work that takes time to find itself. The wines that don’t fit existing categories. The producers who chose a place because it made sense to them, not because it made sense to everyone else.

I don’t have an answer for this. I can’t make the work legible faster. I can’t manufacture the lineage people want. All I can do is keep making it and hope someone stays curious long enough to see what it becomes.

Maybe this is what happens when uncertainty creeps in. When time feels scarce and people start protecting themselves by making safer choices.

Maybe this is what I’m coming to terms with myself. That I don’t actually have a clean answer yet. That I chose a place, and a way of working, without knowing exactly where it would land…and that might be the point.

But I keep thinking about those Beatles shows in Hamburg. About the people who showed up not knowing what they’d hear. About the patience required to let something become what it’s trying to become.

And I wonder what we’re missing now because we need to know “why” before we’re willing to ask “what if.”

During my time at Grey, an ad agency I worked at in the early 2000s, our alcohol clients would help put on a weekly happy hour every Thursday. They called it Dog and Pony because the ad world loves nothing more than to ironically celebrate itself. Of course it wasn’t a free-for-all (except for the Chex-mix according to Carey), or rather wasn’t supposed to be. You’d come in and someone would hand you two raffle tickets that would account for two drinks. But as a struggling ad guy in NYC, any path to cheaper—let alone free—booze was the right move. So you quickly got to know which colleagues didn’t drink but would happily go get their two tickets to give to you. Or you’d make friends with the ticket giver and your two would magically become four. Inevitably those evenings would devolve into venturing out to a bar.

It was one of those exact nights that I finally mustered up the nerve to talk to Carey. I knew there were multiple others who had similar intentions, and competition in that realm was something that never really interested me. And yet, a couple drinks in, I thought to myself: why the hell not. Liquid courage. It would be a week later, after the same event, that I would again muster up the courage to ask her out for the second time (maybe even the third… I try not to hold on to my failures). Without all of that, I am certain I would not be married to Carey.

Then this week a clip of Scott Galloway on Bill Maher slid across my feed:

“The risks to your 25-year-old liver are dwarfed by the risk of social isolation.”

And I felt something I didn’t want to admit, he was right, and it was embarrassing that it took a guy on HBO to articulate something anyone who’s ever lived a life already knows. Drinking didn’t just get us into trouble; it got us into each other’s lives. It cracked the shell. It widened the doorway. It made possibility tangible.

There’s another story this reminds me of. I had the joy of working at Grey during the height of the Mad Men glory days. I remember seeing John Slattery coming in and out of our offices because the dinosaurs who lived through those days were still there, and he was interviewing them for his character. One of my superiors and I got to talking about how great the show was and how much fun those times seemed to be, which led to: we should do one of those lunches. Which kind? A martini lunch, of course.

It just so happened our offices were next door to Smith & Wollensky. So she set the date and we showed up, maybe not in suits but definitely looking the part. As these things go, one martini turned into two, into three... you get the idea. I got to know a boss better than I had ever known a boss over that lunch. They literally had to pour us out of the restaurant. The kicker was that I had a telephone job interview later that afternoon for some fancy quant metric ad consultancy whatever (it may have actually been a good job). Midway through, Carey had walked outside (we’d only been dating for a month or so) but at that moment I had lost so much interest (and thread) in the interview that I basically thanked them and told them I wasn’t the right fit. Who knows where that job would have taken me. I don’t really care. I knew enough to know that I didn’t want to leave this soon.

I have so many stories like this. Being laid off and deciding to drive with three other friends that night from Dallas to New Orleans for Jazz Fest... chaos, joy, poor decisions I won’t recount publicly, and some of the best memories I have. A life lived without friction is sterile. A life lived without risk is forgettable.

I’m 40-something now. I can’t live like I did at 25, and I don’t want to. But that doesn’t mean the work is done. A few months ago, eight of us from our wine club here in Bordeaux managed to blow through 12+ bottles at dinner, then stumbled out to find the nearest bar that would still pour us a beer. Those nights are rarer now. Recovery takes longer. The piper takes his share. But they still matter.Last weekend I made a heroic effort on behalf of the gin industry and spent Sunday paying retail for it. And yes… worth it.

So I’m done apologizing. Not because drinking is virtuous. But because performative asceticism is boring.

What terrifies me isn’t the hangover, it’s the vigilance. The constant self-surveillance. We are so focused on engineering our bodies toward theoretical longevity that we’re forgetting how to actually be alive in the years we have. We track sleep. We optimize macros. We fear anything that might “cost us time.” But time isn’t a vault. It’s a currency. Unspent time is wasted time.

And let’s be honest: the wellness world always needs a villain. Sugar had its decade in the stocks. Then meat. Now protein’s getting side-eyed because fiber wants its turn on the podium. The enemy keeps changing because the machine requires a threat. But the threats are always convenient. Always numerical. Always monetizable.

One of my favorite memories of my mom, who died suddenly on a trip to Italy in 2017, was a dinner at Balthazar sometime in 2006-7. We went through at least three bottles of wine and closed down the restaurant. The laughing, hers especially, is something I can still feel. I didn’t know then it would become one of the memories I’d hold onto hardest. You never do.

The danger that actually matters isn’t the one we’re coached to fear.
Everyone is terrified of the wrong damage.
The liver heals. The missed decade doesn’t.
You can fix a hangover. You can’t fix the years you spent optimizing yourself into someone no one remembers… or even knows.

Yes, some nights cost you. I’ve lost friends to alcohol, car crashes, bad choices, slow erosion. I’m not romanticizing any of it. But I’ve also lost friends who didn’t drink, friends who died clean, careful, optimized. The human condition has a built-in ending. There is no hack.

The point isn’t to drink recklessly. The point is to recognize that not every risk worth taking shows up on a lab panel. Connection has a risk profile too. So does isolation. So does living a life without the occasional rupture.

Wine, at its core, is not a health product. It is not a supplement. It is not a delivery system for antioxidants or polyphenols or whatever else people pretend to care about when they don’t want to admit they’re lonely. Wine exists because humans needed a mechanism to soften the membrane between themselves and the world. A way to talk to the person you’re afraid to talk to. A way to turn Thursday into something luminous. A way to feel less alone. The kind of night where you meet your future wife. Where you bond a friendship that lasts. Where you have the conversation that changes everything.

The anti-alcohol movement isn’t wrong about everything. But it is deeply wrong about what a life is for.

If you’re 25 and terrified of wrecking your liver, you’re focused on the least interesting threat.
The real danger is the basement. The silence. The safety.
The years spent optimizing yourself out of the very relationships that would’ve given your life texture.
There’s no prize for reaching 105 with pristine organs and no stories.

I make wine for people who still understand that. For the ones who want the night that becomes lore. The conversation that shifts something in them. The dinner that turns strangers into something else entirely. Not for the metrics-obsessed, the drink-counters, the longevity chasers who will outlive everyone especially the people they wish they knew.

This isn’t about recklessness. It’s about choosing a life that isn’t antiseptic.
If that costs me a few years at the end, that’s math I understand.
What I won’t do is trade the years that matter, the electric ones, the connective ones, for a cleaner set of numbers on a blood test.

I’ll take the life I actually lived. Every time.

A cousin of mine posted this old newspaper clipping, from around 1989, yesterday. My great-grandfather, PS “Dud” Dudley, ninety-three years old, recalling what it was like to drill the first deep well at Spindletop. The headline calls him a “veteran oilman,” which makes him sound mythic, but the article reads like a man telling it as it was: didn’t have money, didn’t have much of a plan, just kept saying yes to the next place life pushed him.

At the end of the piece, my great-grandmother is quoted saying, “You can be happy anywhere.” We’ve all heard that line before, but seeing it in print made it real in a way lore never does. It wasn’t philosophy for her. It was a strategy. A way to survive a life that kept pulling them from place to place, town to town, job to job. You don’t say a line like that unless you’ve lived the days that tested it.

And that’s what struck me as we head into another Thanksgiving far from home, the fifth one I’ve missed in forty-six years. Not tragic, just strange. You feel the distance more on the days that used to anchor the year.

But this clipping reminded me of something other than loss. Something I forget: moving isn’t deviation. It’s continuation.

The pattern was already there long before Long Island, Texas, Bordeaux. My family has always been made up of people who start over when they need to, who change course because change is the only honest option. Not because they were restless, or noble, or brave, but because life asked it of them. And they said yes.

There’s comfort in that. A kind of warmth that doesn’t require pretending anything was easier than it was.

So on a day built around gathering, around tables, around places, around the idea of rootedness, it helps to remember that some families carry their roots differently. Some families inherit motion. Reinvention. The belief that you can make a life wherever you land, even if it takes a while to believe it yourself.

It doesn’t make the distance smaller, but it does make it make sense.

Wherever you are tomorrow, around a crowded table or just trying to improvise something that feels like a holiday in a country that doesn’t notice the date, I hope you find a little of that, too.

Not just cheer, but the recognition that the past doesn’t only hold you in place. Sometimes it clears the path for wherever you’re going next.

Happy Thanksgiving… from a place I never expected to call home, until it became one.

I’ve been sneaking tastes from the 2025 barrels. I know better. But there they are, just sitting there, and I keep thinking maybe this time I’ll catch a glimpse of what they’re becoming.

It’s too early. Way too early. The wines are still mid-sentence, fermentations settling, acids softening, everything half-formed. Tasting them now is like interrupting someone halfway through a thought and expecting a coherent answer.

A few days ago, one of the Merlot barrels was awful. I woke up in the middle of the night worried that I had a problem brewing. This morning I went back. Same barrel. Structured, clear, exactly what I’d hoped for. I am certain if I taste it in a day or so it’ll be back in no man’s land.

The wines don’t lie, but they don’t tell the truth either. They’re still working things out. One day they flash something brilliant, the next they retreat. And I keep looking for signs that the work is moving in the right direction.

It’s not just curiosity. It’s reassurance.

Some part of me still wants evidence that we’re building something real here. I tell myself I’m tracking evolution, but maybe I’m just looking for confirmation that all of this, the vineyard, the language, the risk, was worth it.

Before, in the USA, progress was proof of life. If things weren’t moving, I was falling behind. Here, it’s different. Wine doesn’t reward impatience. It evolves when it’s ready, and usually when I’ve stopped paying attention.

So I keep topping, week after week, filling what’s evaporated, pretending it’s just maintenance. But really it’s a kind of ritual: a way to stay close without interfering. The wines breathe, I wait.

Maybe that’s the real work now. Not chasing progress, but learning to sit inside the middle of things, to trust that stillness isn’t a pause between movements but part of the music.

Soon I’ll leave to introduce the 2024s in Texas. The finished wines, the ones that made it through this phase and came out the other side. Bottled, labeled, ready to be judged.

And I’ll stand there watching people taste them, reading faces, gauging reactions, looking for proof that it worked. That whole other kind of uncertainty.

But for now, the 2025s are still in barrel. Still changing. Still keeping their secrets.

And I’m not sure which place feels riskier.

Welcome. If you’re new here, this is your map.

This Substack follows the journey of Southold (from Long Island to Texas to Francs/Bordeaux) and the questions we’ve been asking along the way about place, identity, tradition, and what it means to farm with conviction.

Below, you’ll find the posts organized by theme. Pick what interests you most, or start at the beginning and see where it takes you.

New here? Start with these three:

Who we are: Part II: Not Everyone Creates. But Everyone Chooses. (February 11, 2025)
The moment you decide to stop selling stories and start living one.

Where and why we are: A Hundred Years Is Long Enough (October 15, 2025)
What we’re building. The story of Francs, a century in the wilderness, and why this place matters now.

How we are: The Wine Business is Dead. Long Live the Wine Business. (April 15, 2025)
This is the post that explains why we’re doing what we’re doing. It’s about connection over distribution, meaning over scale, and what wine becomes when you refuse to let it turn into background noise.

Our Story: The Journey from NY to TX to Bordeaux

These posts trace how we got here: the moves, the decisions, the reinventions.

A Side, B Side (January 28, 2025)
How music shaped the path to wine, and what both have in common.

Part I: Reinvention, Again and Again (December 10, 2024)
On leaving, rebuilding, and learning to let go.

Part II: Not Everyone Creates. But Everyone Chooses. (February 11, 2025)
Leaving advertising, finding wine, and deciding what matters.

Dust the Frames or Paint Something New (May 18, 2025)
The search for land in Bordeaux and what it taught us about inheritance vs. authorship.

On Francs: The Place We’re Building

Understanding where we are, what it was, and what it could become.

A loveletter to Cabernet Franc...in Francs (January 21, 2025)
Why we’re focusing on single-variety, single-site expression.

Bordeaux: The Weight of an Old Hierarchy (January 16, 2025)
Navigating tradition, classification, and the baggage of Bordeaux’s past.

Bordeaux is the place to be... (November 20, 2024)
Why we chose this region despite (or because of) its challenges.

On Legacy... (November 26, 2024)
What gets passed down, and what we choose to carry forward.

Vintage Report 2025: Learning Francs (October 9, 2025)
Our first full vintage in Bordeaux…what the land taught us.

Philosophy & Approach: How We Think About Wine

The principles that guide our work in the vineyard and cellar.

Natural Wine: A Personal Reckoning (April 1, 2025)
Wrestling with labels, movements, and what actually matters.

Pretty over Powerful (September 9, 2025)
Choosing elegance and precision over extraction and weight.

Varieties Are Vocabulary, Not Territory (September 19, 2024)
Why grapes are tools for expression, not rigid definitions of place.

What France Taught Me About Burgers, Tacos, and Breaking the Rules (February 18, 2025)
On tradition, innovation, and knowing when to respect boundaries.

The Mess Before the Clarity (March 18, 2025)
Embracing uncertainty and the nonlinear path to understanding.

The Shape of What’s to Come... (March 5, 2025)
Looking ahead at what we’re building and why.

On Farming & The Land

What it means to work with, not against, the vineyard.

What the Work Requires (June 24, 2025)
The honest labor behind every bottle.

The Smell of Ferment (August 26, 2025)
The sensory markers of transformation in the cellar.

We All Spill Wine (May 6, 2025)
On mistakes, mess, and the humanity of this work.

The System Isn’t Broken. It Was Built This Way. (August 12, 2025)
Understanding the structures that shape wine (and us).

The Seal Will Not Hold (June 30, 2025)
On change, inevitability, and letting old systems crack.

Waiting for Ignition (June 5, 2025)
The patience required before anything begins.

The Business of Wine: Scale, Connection & Meaning

Navigating commerce, distribution, and what actually sustains a winery.

The Wine Business is Dead. Long Live the Wine Business. (April 15, 2025)
On why scale killed meaning, and how to bring it back.

Scale Can’t Save You (April 29, 2025)
Why we’re choosing to stay small, deliberately.

When the Words Stop Working (September 24, 2024)
On storytelling, authenticity, and the limits of language.

Success Isn’t Always Upward (February 4, 2025)
Redefining what winning looks like.

Propane, Patience, and the Art of Getting Nothing Done... (December 17, 2024)
The slow, unglamorous work behind every vintage.

On Identity & Reinvention

Who we are, who we were, and who we’re becoming.

Part III: What We Leave Behind (February 25, 2025)
Letting go of what no longer serves the work.

Following the Dog, Even When You’re Lost (April 8, 2025)
Trusting instinct when the path isn’t clear.

Always Outsider (March 11, 2025)
On never quite fitting in, and being okay with that.

Altitude and The People We Meet on Mountains (March 24, 2025)
How elevation (literal and metaphorical) changes perspective.

Less, But Better: Finding Meaning in Wine, Life, and Everything Else (January 1, 2025)
The case for doing fewer things, more intentionally.

On Balance, Connection, and Finding Home (December 24, 2024)
Reflections on what grounds us.

On Time, Patience & Process

The long game. The waiting. The work between harvests.

A Hundred Years Is Long Enough (October 15, 2025)
How Francs spent a century in the wilderness, and what that means for us now.

The Art of Pacing (January 7, 2025)
Why rushing ruins wine (and everything else).

The Quiet Inheritance (April 22, 2025)
What gets passed down that isn’t land or vines.

Blocks and Silences (July 29, 2025)
On the spaces between words, vintages, decisions.

Don’t Leave A Message (July 15, 2025)
Why some things are better said in person, or not at all.

Wine Isn’t for Everyone Anymore, But It Still Needs to Be for Someone... (May 27, 2025)
On who wine is for, and why that matters.

About Southold

If you want to know more about what we’re doing, or support it, here’s how:

• Shop wines: southold.fr

• Follow along: This Substack updates every couple of weeks

• Get in touch: We read every message

Thanks for being here.

When people ask where our place is, I say “Francs” and watch the pause. The look that says they’re searching for it in their head and coming up empty. At a wine-bar opening in Montagne (a village just 15 minutes away), a woman leaned closer, convinced she’d misheard me. I said it again, slower this time. She frowned. Her friend finally said, “Ah, là-bas,” waving east as if she were pointing toward fog. The conversation moved on. There’s rarely anything more to discuss because no one knows anything about it.

When we sent our first launch emails, a few people wrote back, charming really, genuinely concerned we’d made a mistake. They thought I meant France but autocorrect was acting up. I don’t blame them. The distance between Francs and France can feel that wide.

Before Francs, we considered properties across France. The Loire, Beaujolais, the Rhône, even the Jura. All had what we wanted technically, but they also had their direction already set. Coming in after that has never interested me. Francs was different. No one outside the region was paying attention, and the people here wanted to see it succeed. That was permission.

A kilometer from our vines, a massive concrete shell rises below the actual town of Francs: the old cooperative. It’s hard to miss. The thing is enormous, a kind of agricultural cathedral that must have been something once, all gravity-fed efficiency and early-morning steam. Now it’s falling apart. I pass it twice a day unless I take a different way home. The roof is rusting through and pigeons nest in the rafters. When the wind swings east, a metal door slams shut again and again, as if the building refuses to admit it’s over.

That ruin is Francs in miniature, a place that survived despite being made invisible.

But invisible doesn’t mean absent or even wrong.

The region sits at the end of the Saint-Émilion limestone shelf, but the climate is something else entirely. Continental, not maritime. Higher, cooler, more wind. I leave Bordeaux at 7 a.m. in late summer and arrive an hour later needing a jacket. Not dramatic, just persistently, undeniably different. The machine harvesters further toward the Dordogne river rumble through their harvest in August heat while our fruit waits, deliberate, patient. The same cool nights that once made Francs seem late now keep it honest.

Most of Francs sits between 80 and 107 meters above sea level, the highest point in Bordeaux, on a broken line of east-facing slopes. Dig below the grass and you’ll find asteriated limestone capped by a thin layer of calcareous molasse the locals call “Agenais.” It fractures easily, drains fast, holds cold. When it rains, the water disappears. When it’s dry, the ground keeps its chill. Walk from one parcel to another and the shift happens underfoot: texture, color, the way the soil crumbles in your hand. This is a place that makes no sense as a monoculture, yet for decades that’s exactly what it was forced to become.

Before phylloxera, the records are vague. There were certainly vines everywhere out here, but little written about them, which might say as much about the hierarchy of attention as it does about the quality of the wines. When Cocks & Féret finally mentions Saint-Cibard in 1874, it’s already describing a landscape in recovery: a patchwork of re-planted vines, provisional choices, growers improvising with what they could save.

The entry praises the commune’s “dark, structured reds” sold into Belgium and Holland, not famous, but well regarded. What that really means is that even in crisis, Francs kept producing. While the better-known châteaux rebuilt their names, places like this rebuilt quietly, without fanfare, selling sturdy wine to the north. Survival became the measure of success.

Then came everything else. Before World War II, growers here made good livings selling their expressive wines as vin médecin to Saint-Émilion châteaux, who used them to improve their blends. After the war, that practice was outlawed. The big châteaux and négociants were no longer allowed to buy from Francs. Growers found themselves without clients overnight. Négociant prices collapsed. For twenty difficult years, they had no way to sell except through the bulk market at whatever price was offered. Many took bank loans against their wine, hoping to sell later. Some mortgaged their vineyards.

Then came the frost of ‘56, which devastated what remained. By the time the government paid growers to replant, ambition had been replaced by compliance. Plant Merlot, make “Bordeaux”, survive.

Bordeaux’s hierarchy has always depended on overlooked appellations producing cheap volume to keep the machine running. Price and prestige are not tied to quality, they are simply pre-ordained. The classified châteaux get the prestige and the margins. Places like Francs get to supply bulk wine at prices that guarantee they’ll never compete.

Survival creates its own gravity. You spend so long fighting to hold onto something that holding on becomes the point. The question shifts from “what should this be?” to “how do we keep what we have?” I know families here who spent five generations clawing back to stability. Rebuilding what was lost after the first war, buying back parcels that had been sold off, finally constructing their own chais so they could stop sending fruit to the co-op. When I ask growers about their vineyards now, the conversation usually turns to cost. How expensive grafting is. How expensive everything is. One neighbor keeps his vineyard invoices in a binder, each one tabbed and annotated. He knows the per-plant cost by heart.

Some have ideas. Chenin has been floated before, which felt like confirmation to me, but now’s not the time for experimentation when you’ve been here for the long haul.

The pride in surviving isn’t about the wine. It’s about surviving long enough to choose. Some have brought back Malbec, a nod to what was grown here before the wars. It’s a sign people know something was lost. But most stopped there, better to find safe ground.

That’s not failure. That’s what survival mode looks like when it becomes permanent. You get to safety and then safety becomes identity. The INAO later stamped Bordeaux–Côtes-de-Francs onto the paperwork, less a recognition than a filing.

Just across our small valley, Le Puy proved you could break that cycle in less than a generation. The Amoreau family had owned the property since 1610, but it was largely undistinguished until Jean-Pierre Amoreau took over in the 1990s. He went direct, stopped selling to négociants, and built the wines into what they are today through what observers called “extraordinary marketing” and international vision.

But one estate’s success doesn’t redefine a region, especially when the economic incentives push everyone else toward the negociants and the bulk market.

What Le Puy proved wasn’t new. It was always here. That difference, the continental logic in a maritime region, isn’t innovation but more of a correction. The elevation, the soils that shift every hundred meters, the cool nights that never let the fruit collapse into jammy anonymity: this place was always asking to be something other than what it was forced to become.

I brought our first wine, Rouge Clair, to a party full of Bordeaux négociants and industry types. They were confused that this would be the first wine we released. I understood the confusion. It doesn’t taste like the caricature Bordeaux has allowed itself to become. It has energy. Lift, tension, transparency. It tastes like Francs.

We’re grafting the estate over the next few years: Cabernet Franc, Chenin, Savagnin. When I mention it, people smile. Not hostile. Just a tired kind of amusement. There’s a fatigue around the whole question of what belongs here. Most here are too exhausted to argue about what’s possible.

What used to be the risk of a variable climate has become a prized asset in this warming climate. The same altitude that once made us late now keeps us precise. Whites on the lower slopes stay bright through October. Cabernet Franc, once the gamble, is now the surest bet. The world’s flipped, and Francs is still operating like it needs permission to exist.

Every time I file another form or walk the rows, I feel the weight of how little paperwork or pruning can change perception. Some evenings I drive past the old co-op and park for a minute. The air smells of chalk and woodsmoke from burning grubbed-up vine piles. The hills fade into blue shadow, the vines holding the last light. You can still hear that door slam in the wind. A steady, hollow sound that’s half memory, half defiance.

2025 moved fast from the start. Budbreak came early under mild conditions, and by late May flowering looked textbook. For a moment in June, past the mildew gauntlet of 2024, I thought we might catch a break.

Then August arrived.

By August 10th, the thermometer hit 41°C and stayed there. Not quite the panic of last year’s crisis, this was different. A slow realization that decisions I thought I’d have weeks to make might need to happen in days.

Le Pelan: The First Warning

Our estate Chardonnay, planted in the lowest part of Le Pelan, our lowest, wettest parcel, showed stress first. Leaves yellowing around the fruit zone, the vine shutting down to protect itself. Sugar levels that normally climb gradually over weeks jumped 2.5°Brix in seven days. Every morning felt like we were three hours too late or three weeks too early.

We picked August 15th at 13.1°Brix, pH 3.27. The crew started at 6 AM, headlamps cutting through pre-dawn darkness. By 10 AM the clusters were almost hot to the touch.

The yields were low. Really low. But this was Chardonnay in its second year of conversion, planted in a parcel that stays wet longer than it should. Maybe it was just the wrong variety in the wrong spot.

Then August cooled. September arrived with perfect ripening weather, and suddenly the panic I’d been carrying all month started to ease. The acids were holding. pH stayed in the 3.4s and 3.5s. The vines weren’t heading toward collapse… they were asking for patience.

Rouge Clair: The Pattern Begins

Late August, we moved into Rouge Clair, still in Le Pelan. The rows moved fast. Too fast. Not because the crew was working harder, but because there was less to pick.

This wasn’t just the Chardonnay. The pit in my stomach started to grow.

Le P’tit Rouge: The Decision

In a normal vintage, Le P’tit Rouge is my first-pick wine, a handful of rows from each block that gives me a read on the whole estate and makes for a delicious early wine. We started picking for it in the stressed section at the top of Couteau, where topsoil is thin and whatever rain does come runs off quickly.

As we moved through those rows, the math became clear: if I kept pulling fruit for Le P’tit Rouge from across the property, I wouldn’t have enough to make the individual parcel wines I actually wanted.

We made Le P’tit Rouge anyway, but it became something different this year, just the wine from that one block, not an expression of the whole place. A casualty of low yields and the choice to preserve the rest for their own cuvees.

Le Couteau: The Surprise

Then we picked the main section of Le Couteau, further down the slope. Different soil, different aspect, and suddenly the vines were loaded. Normal yields, healthy fruit, concentrated but not stressed.

I’d sized the wrong fermenter. I’d assumed the entire estate would match what we’d seen so far. We almost ran out of space.

Relief. And then immediate recalculation, what did this mean for everything else still hanging?

But the quality kept coming through. Phenolic ripeness without the sugars spiking. The kind of balance I’d been chasing since leaving Long Island.

The Rest of the Story

We moved through Le Pelan’s reds, then Le Turquet. The pattern held: 20-25 hL/ha across most blocks. Then we picked the oldest vines in Le Couteau, the field blend that’s supposed to be all Merlot. Except it’s not. Sixty-year-old vines planted with whatever budwood the farmer had on hand back then: Cabernet Sauvignon, Sémillon, who knows what else mixed in.

There’s something special in that. Not because it was some grand terroir insight, it was just practical farming back then, but because it gives the block a personality. Something to build on.

We finished September 17th. Early for most producers, but this was one of those vintages where just because you can keep hanging doesn’t mean you should. The vines had given us a window, and we took it.

4.5 hectoliters per hectare from the Chardonnay. 20-25 hL/ha across most reds in a region that averages 40-50. Thirty to forty percent down across the board.

This wasn’t just us. It was happening across the region, a combination of poor fruit set during flowering, looser clusters than usual, and smaller berries. In theory, that’s great if you have volume to back it up. We did not.

In the end, when you’re making 2,000 bottles instead of 12,000, every decision matters more.

Low Yields

The wines are showing a mid-palate density I haven’t had in years. Focused, precise, alive.

The 42°C heat that nearly stressed our vines also killed most pest pressure. The loose cluster structure that worried us about yields meant perfect air circulation. The lower yields forced the remaining fruit to concentrate everything the vine had to give.

The old-vine Merlot blocks that survived this heat are teaching us about deep roots and patient farming. The young Chardonnay that stressed early in Le Pelan is showing us exactly why we’re moving forward with grafting the lower blocks to Savagnin, Xarello (if we can find the budwood), and Chenin Blanc. I still believe this is fantastic ground for white varieties. 2025 confirmed it.

We’re continuing that field-blend approach too. Interplanting Castets, Fer Servadou, Manseng Noir, and Petit Manseng where the old vines are missing. Not because we’re trying to resurrect some lost golden age, but because mixed plantings actually work.

Even the grafts that didn’t take because of drought stress are data points for understanding what this place can support.

You can rage against what’s happening, or you can accept it and adapt. The fear never fully leaves, hail, runaway mildew, a single storm that takes everything. But stress doesn’t change the weather. You control what you can. Let go of the rest.

Why Francs?

2025 is in tank and barrel now. The Chardonnay is fermenting slowly in old wood, developing texture that only comes from extreme concentration. The reds show the dense, focused character of a vintage that demanded everything.

Two years in, I keep coming back to the same question: why should anyone care about 2,000 bottles of wine from a place they’ve never heard of?

Francs is special precisely because it’s been overlooked. Surrounded by forests instead of endless vineyard monoculture, too small to industrialize, too forgotten to chase the point-score wines of the ‘90s and ‘00s. Those wines don’t exist here, and I think that’s the point.

There’s something in this ground. Something that doesn’t reveal itself in the first year, or even the second, hell, probably not in a generation. Something that requires having more questions than answers.

What 2025 actually gave us, we’ll only know when these wines are opened years from now.

Right now, they taste alive. They taste like what we came to France to find.

I found some old wine descriptions while cleaning out files yesterday. Spring 2014. My first write up of our first vintage on Long Island, when I was still figuring out how to talk about wine.

"The palate is like slow grinding to Al Green's 'I Can't Get Next To You.'"

"It's a fun wine that will confound, which makes it more fun, like that crazy girl from high school everyone had a crush on."

"It packs a punch but won't napalm your palate."

"If you can grill it this wine will kill with it."

I wrote those. Ten years ago. I actually wrote them and then put them on a wine list and sent them to customers. I brought them to a tasting meeting at Eleven Madison Park.

Reading them now, I feel something I haven't felt in years: jealousy. Of myself. Of that person who could write "slow grinding to Al Green" and not immediately delete it. Who could compare wine to the crazy girl from high school and think, yes, this is exactly how to help people understand what they're about to drink.

I want to remember what that person knew.

Spring 2019, two vintages into Texas, I was still writing things like "Imagine cruising, windows down, on a wet dirt road just after a brief intense shower in an old leaky pickup truck full of super ripe tomatoes." Still fearless, still trusting my instincts.

And then the business got real. We needed distributors to sell more wine. Retailers needed descriptions that wouldn't confuse customers. The audience expanded beyond people who knew me, trusted me, got the joke. So I got careful. I got safe. I started writing for strangers instead of friends.

Now I sit with a glass of a new release and freeze, hands hovering over the keyboard. The wine in front of me eludes description, like my French vocabulary… and that’s exactly why I want to drink it

But here's what those old notes remind me: I never actually described what the wine tasted like. Not really. The Al Green chardonnay? I told you it was "rich and opulent" but "without oaky overtones," and that it "goes into Gewürztraminer land." The crazy girl frizzante? "Strawberry preserves and only gets to darker fruit, until you take a swig and it starts to dance."

That's not flavor mapping. That's not component analysis. That's trying to capture the experience of drinking the wine, the feeling it creates, the moment it belongs to.

The wine industry taught me that wasn't serious enough. That real professionals describe wines objectively, precisely, with authority. But what if that's exactly what killed the magic? What if the obsession with professional description is what made wine language feel hollow?

I look at those old notes and see someone who understood something I've forgotten: at best wine descriptions aren't scientific documents. They're invitations. They're attempts to translate one person's experience into words that might help another person decide if they want that experience too.

"This wine made itself," I wrote about a Cabernet Franc. It captured something true about how that wine felt to make, how it felt to drink, how it fit into the story I was trying to tell.

I used to know how to do that. I used to trust my own enthusiasm enough to write "if you can grill it this wine will kill with it" and believe that was more useful than any technical tasting note.

I want that fearlessness back. That willingness to sound ridiculous if it meant sounding true. That confidence that my job wasn't to be objective but to be honest about why these wines mattered to me, and why they might matter to you.

The stakes feel higher now. The audience is wider. The margin for error smaller. But I know that somewhere between professional respectability and authentic voice, I chose wrong.

So maybe that's where I start. Not with wacky tasting notes, but with remembering what those early ones knew: the best descriptions aren't scientific documents. They're invitations. Love letters. Stories about why this bottle, right now, with these people, might be exactly what you need.

Maybe it's time to trust that enthusiasm again.
Maybe it's time to risk sounding ridiculous again.

I heard knocking, not urgent, but persistent, as I was washing the punch-down tool. It echoed oddly through the cellar, bouncing off stainless steel. He’d circled around the building, trying doors until he found the right one.

“Bonjour,” he said when I finally came out. “Je suis votre voisin.”

We stood just outside the cellar, flipping between English and French. He was soft-spoken with roots in the Loire. Nice guy. We talked a bit about the harvest, what I was planning for the property.

I mentioned grafting Chenin over one of the Merlot blocks next spring. He paused for a beat, then said, not unkindly, but clearly:

“I think we should keep varieties in their places.”

It wasn’t a challenge exactly, but it stuck. The kind of thing someone says when they’re being careful not to sound dismissive, but already have.

Something in my face must’ve registered, because he quickly added, “Or maybe… Petit Manseng. That could work here too.”

I don’t think he meant it as a correction. More like a course adjustment. A soft landing, in case the Chenin comment didn’t fly.

I would’ve stayed in the conversation longer, but I had punch downs to finish and more Merlot fruit arriving before the end of the day. Still, the comment stuck with me, not just the words, but the instinct behind them.

I kept turning it over while I worked. The tone of it, more than the claim. As if grape varieties were bound to their place of origin unless granted some special visa.

The thing is, I've done the math on this. The climate data. The soil analysis. The pH, the drainage, the aspect. Chenin makes perfect sense here, more sense, actually, than the Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon that tradition says belong. Those varieties snap under heat; they don't bend, they’re also magnets for rot, which is why they did and still do make amazing sweet wines. Climate change isn't going to make them more forgiving.

And yet, he wasn't wrong, exactly. Chenin in the Loire is magical precisely because of that fit between grape and place. But that doesn't make the Loire the only place Chenin can find its voice.

Later, I realized I've been thinking about it wrong: this wasn’t really about Chenin. It was about how we talk about grape varieties at all, like they come with citizenship papers. But that’s never how I’ve seen them. To me, varieties aren’t identities. They’re vocabulary.

In Long Island, we planted Teroldego and Lagrein instead of riding the region’s Merlot wave. In Texas, we scattered nearly twenty varieties across different hillsides to see what the land would tell us. And now here in Francs, grafting away from Merlot toward varieties that can actually surprise and delight here.

None of it was about making something weird for weird's sake. Anyone who's tried to sell obscure varieties knows how hard they are to explain. But it wasn't throwing darts either. Each choice was calculated, what works in this climate, these soils, this exposure.

The problem with the "keep varieties in their places" mentality is that it confuses tradition with truth. Yes, Chenin made Loire famous. But that obviously doesn't make the Loire the only place Chenin can speak clearly. It's the same tyranny that says Pinot only works on limestone, or Syrah requires granite. Taking what worked in one place, under one set of conditions, and turning it into universal law. But those aren't rules, they're starting points, guides to help us understand the conversation, not end it

It's the same logic that drives the current obsession with forgotten varieties, the assumption that old equals authentic, that abandoned means overlooked. But varieties were often abandoned for good reason. Maybe that obscure grape couldn't ripen reliably in cooler times, or its yields make it economically impossible, or it is simply inferior to what replaced it. Going backward isn't inherently better than going forward.

All varieties have a toolset: disease resistance, heat tolerance, yield potential, flavor profile. The question isn't whether they're traditional or forgotten or fashionable. It's whether they match the place you're in, the climate (and climate trends) you're facing, the wines you want to make.

Sometimes I wonder if this place is using me…not the other way around. That it’s been waiting decades to say something no one’s let it say. And I’m just the one dumb enough to believe I can translate.

Here's what I've always felt: a grape variety isn't tied to place. It's a transmitter of place. When you plant Chenin in Francs, you're not challenging Vouvray's identity. You're asking Francs what it has to say through Chenin's voice.

And I admit, part of me wants that conversation to happen. Part of me gets a thrill from giving this place new words to work with, from proving that great wine doesn't need permission from tradition.

That's likely the contradiction I can't escape, claiming to listen to the land while I'm the one expanding its vocabulary. Am I listening, or am I imposing? Maybe both. Maybe that's the cost of doing this work.

Yet, for me, the land speaks first. The variety is just how it chooses to express itself. But you have to start somewhere, otherwise you’re farming a place for what it used to be, not what it is today.

I walk the block we'll graft to Chenin next spring. The old Merlot vines look fine, content with doing what they’ve done for 40+ years, honestly, too content. The soils underneath are patient, ready. The exposure is perfect. The rainfall patterns, the temperature swings, the length of the growing season, it all adds up to something that should work, that needs to work.

Because this place deserves better than varieties that fight it every vintage. And if it works, if Francs finds its voice through Chenin or Xarello or whatever words it chooses, then maybe the variety won't matter anymore. Perhaps the wine will just be itself, from this place, in this moment, without needing to explain its passport.

Maybe my neighbor was right about keeping varieties in their places. Maybe some places are ready for new conversations or maybe just new mistakes. But this place has had to repeat itself long enough.

It’s time to give it something new to say.

I'm told my neighbors make bets on how early I'll finish harvest. They see the fruit coming in while their rows are still full and laugh. Too soon. Too green. Too American. Maybe they're right… by their rules. But I suppose I didn't come here to play by their rules.

The thing about being the "poor stupid American" is that it gives you permission to take swings everyone else is too smart to attempt. Lower stakes for them, if I fail: they shrug it off as expected. If I hit something, even better: they have a new framework to consider. It's an oddly liberating position, this cultural dispensation to experiment.

This year I'm picking reds while some neighbors are still picking whites. It's been an early enough vintage to catch people off guard, but from what I'm tasting, I don't know that the fruit will find whatever it is everyone's waiting for. I read the vines, not the textbook markers, watching for that moment when they start winding down, yellow leaves creeping around the fruit zone. While others wait for brown seeds and soft skins, I'm asking different questions: What's happened this year? Have they had enough water, has there been too much heat?

The funny thing is, picking early doesn't make the work harder. It makes it easier. Crews that used to be impossible to find in other regions are suddenly available on demand. While not cheap, I can practically choose my day, move before what little rush might come. That’s the irony: I’m betting against conventional Bordeaux while relying on the very structures it built to keep machine harvest running smoothly. Resistance subsidized by the system I reject. Maybe it's because hand harvest still exists here in ways that surprise me, or maybe it's the luxury of working outside everyone else's timeline. Either way, it means I get to make decisions on my terms.

Those terms matter when what you're after isn't volume but voice. Our vines yield nowhere near what past harvest records show, part of transitioning to organic, part of learning to read this place differently. The vineyard looks a bit wild right now, not the buttoned-up aesthetic I've seen everywhere from Versailles-perfect Long Island rows to Texas cotton fields where farmers walk 200 yards just to pull a single weed. That kind of appearance has never been part of my concern. Health, yes. Magazine-ready, no.

Our property sits on a road enough off the beaten path that it always feels isolated. Passersby are noticeable events rather than background noise. Sometimes I worry the Radiohead blasting in the cellar carries across the valley, but mostly I appreciate the quiet. Maybe blasting Radiohead across the valley is my way of reminding myself I don’t entirely belong here. I can stand in one place and see all our blocks, which is comforting in ways I didn't expect.

What we're after is freshness and depth together, not glou-glou thinness and not blockbuster plushness. Francs has always been dinged for never quite "plushing out" its tannins. That sounds like a critique. To me, it's the opportunity. Maybe the question isn't how to ripen past the edge. Maybe the question is why we've been asking the wrong thing of this fruit in the first place.

The whites tell the same story. Bordeaux still clings to Sauvignon and Sémillon, ghosts from a time when sweet wine was the economy. They don't bend under heat; they snap. Climate change isn't going to make them more forgiving, and if the range of styles is already narrow, why pretend they're the future? We're grafting over to Chenin for the backbone this climate desperately needs, Xarello for structure that doesn't collapse, maybe Savagnin for complexity that can carry place through different expressions. Each vine we graft is a bet against the varieties that built this region's reputation, and against the market that still expects them.

I didn't come here to fix Bordeaux. I came because Bordeaux, in its overlooked corners, still makes it possible to work like this. To pick before anyone thinks you should, to bottle parcels on their own terms, to insist that complexity doesn't need permission from tradition.

There's no Plan B to any of this. We sold everything in Texas to come here, the winery we built after being forced out of Long Island, the reputation we earned starting over once already, the life we finally thought we'd settled into. If I'm wrong about freshness over power, about Chenin over Sauvignon Blanc, about people wanting grace instead of force, we don't just lose this Bordeaux experiment. We lose it all. The success we achieved twice before, every relationship, every lesson learned through years of Texas heat and Long Island bureaucracy. This is the third time we've bet everything on reading a place differently than everyone else thinks it should be read. That's not a philosophical position; it's the financial reality of someone who's already proven this approach can work, and is risking that proof on one more leap.

My neighbors might keep betting on how early I'll finish, but their bets aren't really about me. They're about who gets to decide what Bordeaux becomes next. Unlike the more successful regions, there's a dearth of younger generations taking up family estates here. I don't blame them, looking at it close up, it would seem like the weight of the world to take the helm of something struggling so mightily. But this moment feels to me like part of a larger shift back toward what Bordeaux was before it became a sea of Merlot, maybe even before 1956, possibly before phylloxera. A return to when this region had something to prove rather than something to protect. And that creates space, maybe even necessity, for outsiders to ask different questions. If the younger generations won’t take it on, who else is there to decide what Bordeaux becomes?

The biggest gamble isn't the early picking or the alternative varieties. It's trusting that there are people out there who want this from Bordeaux, who want Pretty wines instead of Powerful ones. Right now it doesn't feel like anyone's asking much of anything from this region, and that keeps me up at night. But I'm betting that when the dust settles, there's still room here for wines that prioritize grace over force. Whether that echoes across these quiet valleys or gets lost in the sound of Radiohead bouncing off limestone…that's not up to me. For now, I'll keep picking before anyone thinks I should, reading vines instead of calendars, and trusting that the fruit knows what it wants to become.

Maybe it works. Maybe I’m the punchline. Either way, this is the only Bordeaux I can live with.

The Chardonnay’s just started to ferment.

It’s in barrel, so the smell isn’t everywhere, but it’s there, sneaking out around the bungs, clinging to the air just above the floor. Yeasty, citrusy, a little volatile. The kind of smell that lingers in your clothes even after you’ve changed. The kind that tells you something is beginning.

And the kind that can time-travel you, whether you’re ready or not. This morning, it pulled up something I hadn’t thought about in years.

There’s a photo from our first harvest. Our daughter, Coralai, barely two months old, in her car seat, perched on a stack of barrels. I was working for someone else back then , renting cellar space for our project, still learning the ropes. Carey was in the city, balancing two jobs. When she wasn’t home, Coralai came to work with me. I’d clean bins, check ferments, do punchdowns with one hand while steadying the carrier with the other. No plan. No strategy. Just the three of us, Carey, Coralai, and me, trying to make it all fit.

And somehow, we did.

What I remember most about that time wasn’t the stress, though there was plenty of it. It was the weird sense of calm that came with having so little to prove. We weren’t building a brand. We weren’t chasing scale. We were just trying to make wine that felt honest, and a life that didn’t split us apart in the process.

I didn’t realize how much I had lost track of that until today.

Because in the years that followed, things sped up. We moved to Texas. Opened a tasting room. Built a restaurant. The stakes got higher, the decisions faster. And slowly, without noticing, I let the urgency creep in. Everything had to grow, more wine, more space, more people to manage. Somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like we were making something. It started feeling like we were managing something that already existed and trying not to break it.

That version of myself from the photo? He got buried. Not gone, just folded under years of doing what felt necessary.

But this morning, in the cellar, the smell of fermenting Chardonnay pulled me back.

That smell of that ferment pulled me back to that photo, the car seat on barrels, the calm of having nothing to prove. And for a moment, standing in the cellar, I want to believe I could find my way back to that version of myself. That if I just stripped away everything we've built since then, I'd find him waiting there.

But that's the seductive lie of nostalgia, isn't it? It makes the past look like a destination instead of what it really was: chaos, improvisation, luck (or lack there of). It edits out the sleepless nights, the financial terror, the fights about money we didn't have. It turns struggle into story, uncertainty into wisdom.

And maybe that's not just my trap. Maybe it's wine's too. We spend so much time eulogizing golden ages, how cheap Morgon used to be, how easy allocations once felt, when Burgundy was "still affordable." But what does that really get us? Beyond a parlor trick of memory, what do those laments prepare us for?

I know this. I know nostalgia is editing the past into something cleaner than it was. I know that photo doesn't contain a blueprint for how to live now.

But standing here in the cellar, with Coralai about to start French public school and our own grapes finally coming into their own, I can't help but feel some symmetry. Not as a map to follow, but as a reminder of something I don't want to lose again.

Because maybe the point isn't to resist the pull of that photo, but to let it remind me what I valued before I knew I was supposed to want more. The presence. The small scale. The weird calm that comes with having so little to prove.

We’re standing on the edge of something again, different stakes, different pressures, for sure, but the same choice about what matters.

And that photo doesn’t give me a map back. It doesn’t need to. What it gives me is a reminder: that the work felt clearest when there was nothing to prove. That smallness wasn’t a liability, it was clarity.

So maybe the point isn’t to romanticize the past, but to let it sharpen the present. To ask: what are we in danger of forgetting, and what’s worth carrying forward even when the stories we tell ourselves aren’t entirely true?

Three weeks ago, they took the press pan to the shop. “Two weeks, no problem”, they said.
It could be fixed by Friday. Or next month. Neither would surprise me.

That wouldn’t matter if the Chardonnay weren’t racing ahead in the heat. We’ve got maybe 48 hours of ‘cooler’ weather coming before the furnace switches back on. Every day over 35°C bleeds a little more out of the flavor, and once it’s gone, there’s no way to get it back.

I didn’t plant this block. It came with the property, a young block of Chardonnay in the wrong place for the variety, not yet producing when we bought it. I chose the land anyway. You don’t get to assemble vineyards like a shopping cart; you take them as they are and decide what to change, and when.

Now it’s producing, and it looks good, tastes good even, but the site will never be right for it. In a cooler, drier climate, maybe it could be something thrilling. Here, it’s too far on the edge. We’ll overgraft next year. Another high-stakes change. Another round of waiting.

Funny thing is, I’ve made Chardonnay in the first vintage of every place we’ve worked, Southold, then Texas, now here. Never was my intention. Somehow, it keeps finding me.

This morning, the vines were still in shadow when I walked the rows. The grass held the night’s damp just long enough to darken my boots. Then the sun broke over the ridge and the air shifted, sharp with the smell of dust warming, the heat already pulling at the berries. Even getting a clean read on the fruit is tricky now. Heat stress turns each sample into Schrödinger’s grape, perfect or collapsing, and you don’t know until you look. If I’m honest, I don’t want to look.

I can tell the fruit is getting ready because the raccoons have found it, the first two panels stripped bare overnight. It’s an uneasy feeling when your Chardonnay is likely the ripest thing in miles. High-acid raccoons. Maybe they’re onto something. But we still need more flavor development.

You can always tell it’s raccoons because they’re much neater than their feathered friends, whole clusters stripped clean, no mess of broken berries left to rot. Back in Southold, I once watched an old vineyard manager trap and kill over 40 of them in a season. His conscience got so bad he started driving them up-island. At least I don’t have to deal with that here.

The bigger problem is that most of the neighbors are away on holiday, and the equipment companies who might rent me a backup press if I need one are… also away on holiday. So if I can’t sort this out, the raccoons might as well take it all.

So I’m holding my breath for the press pan, the weather, the fruit. The whole thing feels fragile enough that one bad day could undo months of work… and the market wouldn’t blink. Out there, the bigger machine, the one that decides what Bordeaux is worth and for whom, keeps right on turning.

It doesn’t care if the heat scorches a year’s work in a weekend. It doesn’t care if you’re trying to make something worth drinking in a block no one asked to be planted. The hierarchy only needs a handful of winners to keep the story intact, and it’s been rehearsing that story for centuries.

People will tell you the problem with Bordeaux is climate change. Or shifting tastes. Or that Gen Z doesn’t like tannins. But the real problem is simpler: the hierarchy is doing exactly what it was built to do.

Classification. En primeur. The press (the writing kind, not the grape squishing kind). The pricing. All of it designed to tell most growers their work is worth less… unless someone higher up decides otherwise.

If a wine from Francs or Castillon gets a 92, it’s a fluke. If a Fifth Growth gets a 95, it’s proof of legacy. Growers on the edge are praised for “value” but never given value. And a Chardonnay from here? It doesn’t even fit the sentence.

Meanwhile, the big boys keep making bottles for the spreadsheet, not the table. The kind you don’t drink, you just admire as an asset, liquid real estate in glass. If that’s the game, you might as well buy a Rolex. At least it tells time.

Pricing wine is weird. Not just market-weird, but culturally weird. Everyone wants you to keep it low, keep it “accessible,” keep it where it’s always been. Which is to say: low enough that it’s impossible to actually live off it.

I can’t fix that. Not for everyone. But maybe I can help the neighbors hold the line on their own pricing. Maybe I can at least refuse to apologize for mine.

That’s where the rules come in. Not for Bordeaux, just for me.

Always name the place. Not necessarily the AOC on the paperwork, but the slope under my boots, the patch of earth that decides more about the wine than any classification ever will.

Don’t underprice it just to keep someone else comfortable. If it costs twenty euros to make and I sell it for nine, the system wins. Again.

Tell the story before someone else does. Tell it while I can still afford to.

Make fewer wines, but make them matter more.

And only work with people who believe in places, not pedigrees.

It’s not a revolution. It’s just a way of remembering what I’m doing out here when the heat spikes, when the press pan doesn’t come back at the right time, when the market wants me to play along.

I’ll still pick the Chardonnay. I’ll still make the wine. And when we decide what replaces it, you’ll know why, not because we uncovered some lost jewel the world forgot or “rescued” a grape from extinction, but because you watched it happen in real time, with all the waiting, doubt, and stubbornness it takes to turn a decision into a wine. The Chardonnay will be part of that legacy.

Maybe it’s fitting that I’ve started every new chapter in my winemaking life with Chardonnay, whether I meant to or not. It’s a stubborn variety that would rather be anywhere cooler, waiting out the weather, the raccoons, and the system… like me.

The system isn’t broken. But it’s worth pressing against, one stubborn wine at a time, even if it means standing in the heat with boots still damp, staring at the stripped clusters before opening Schrödinger’s Box.

There’s a small hole just past the vineyard that used to hold water. Not a real pond, more of a low spot that held on longer than it should’ve. For two years, it’s been there, murky and mosquito-ridden, until last week, when I noticed it had disappeared.

Nothing dramatic. No cracked earth or scorched reeds. Just… gone. A shallow bowl of silence where the water used to be.

The relief surprised me.

Last year, it rained so much we started talking about digging drains. The sort of “upgrades” you don’t want to pay for but might have to if the rows stay too wet. Back then, it wouldn’t stop raining. Now we’re in summer with dust in the air and vines already showing signs of water stress. The problem flipped. Whack-a-mole. I’m pretty sure I know which side I like more and no one around me seems concerned, so I don’t say anything, either.

Some days I catch myself squinting at the vines like they’ll finally say something back. A leaf curl here, a patch of yellowing tips there and suddenly I’m building a theory, pretending I’ve seen this before.

But I haven’t. Not really.
And I’m not going to fake it..

I watch how people talk around here and across the wine-growing world. The certainty, the shorthand, the way they gesture toward their blocks like old friends. Like everything’s under control. And I know some of it is theater. I know they’re guessing too.

I’ve always admired the ones who speak with that kind of clarity. The ones who come from somewhere, who inherit a way of doing things and carry it forward with spine.

But I’m skeptical, too. Especially when that same certainty comes from people like me…outsiders, unmoored, convinced anyway. I don’t trust it in myself. And maybe that’s healthy.

Because I’ve done the “anything goes” approach to wine-growing before. A grab-bag of grapes and methods. It’s freeing—until you realize freedom alone doesn’t point anywhere. If you can do anything, are you doing anything? Or are you just staying in motion because it’s easier than standing still and choosing?

Which is probably why I write this shit down instead of pretty instagram stories and pretending I’m ahead of the vineyard work this year.

Every block is its own dialect. One holds moisture like it’s hiding something. Another bakes dry in a week. One is more clay and makes your boots slid out if you’re not paying attention. I thought I’d learn it faster. That with enough walking, tasting, watching, I’d start to see the pattern. But the longer I’m here, the more what I thought I knew turns to guesswork. Just when I think I understand what a section needs, it shifts.

Last year, I got burned. I misread the mildew pressure and chose not to pivot from organics. I have never seen mildew spread so fast. I thought I caught it. Two days later, it had run the whole vineyard. I didn’t pivot because I thought I was standing for something.

That’s the danger of conviction when you’re new. You mistake it for integrity, when sometimes it’s just stubbornness in a language you haven’t fully learned yet.

But that loss opened a door I couldn’t have forced: my neighbor stepped in. Offered help. I might’ve lost a vintage, but I gained someone I trust. I’d trade for that again, even if I say otherwise in a bad week.

That doesn’t mean I’m steady.
It just means I’m still here. Still working.

And I know what this looks like.

Another American chasing a fantasy. Another soft-focus story with limestone buildings, old vines, all the right things to make it interesting. But the people who think that don’t know what it costs to stay once the honeymoon ends.

The truth is, we’ve already walked away once. Texas didn’t break us, but it didn’t keep us either. And I still think about that. About what it means to choose to try again. To build presence in a place that hasn’t asked for you. To walk into the vineyard each day knowing some people are still waiting to see if we flinch.

The vines here are older than any story I’ve earned the right to tell.
They don’t know my name yet.
Some of the neighbors don’t either. But I keep showing up anyway.

I don’t say that like it’s noble. It’s not. It’s just what’s required. Of anyone trying to build something from the ground up, in a place that hasn’t invited it. The vineyard doesn’t owe me anything. The land isn’t asking me to stay.

But I stay.

I used to think belonging was something you earned. A badge. A blessing. Now I think it’s something you live like it’s true… even when no one else sees it yet. Not to prove anything. Just because it’s the only way roots take.

Maybe the pond comes back. Maybe it doesn’t.

What I’m learning is that stillness doesn’t always mean rooted. That silence isn’t always absence. That conviction, if it’s worth anything, isn’t loud. It’s just what keeps you showing up when the rest disappears.

I’ve already made the bet. The vines are being grafted. The tanks are installed. The wines are bottled.

I keep walking the blocks.
Not looking for proof.
Just trying not to miss it.

A French man lives in my phone. He speaks for me when I’m too afraid.

He doesn’t say much, just that I’m not available, and please send a text instead of leaving a voicemail. His voice is even, formal, slightly aloof. You’d never guess he was hired by Google and scripted by me. You’d never guess I’m standing a few feet away, watching the call come in, deciding whether this is the moment I finally pick up.

At first, it was a joke. A placeholder until I could record something better. Two years later, he's become something else, part secretary, part shield. He handles the awkward silences, the fast-talking delivery guys, the municipal workers who don’t care if I don’t quite grasp “mise en conformité de la fosse septique.”

He never cracks. Never stutters.

Which is more than I can say.

There’s something humbling about this. Someone who used to get paid to talk, now hesitating at the sound of a ringtone. It's not just the language barrier; it's a kind of reset, an unfamiliarity with the systems that once made me legible.

I used to convey conviction effortlessly. Long emails, passionate arguments for dry farming, narratives about the honesty of the wine. Storytelling as scaffolding. If the wine was genuine and the narrative clear, people would believe in the work. That was the arrangement.

But belief, it turns out, is hard to scale. It gets lost in translation.

Now I’m relearning how to communicate. More silence, yes… but also patience. More listening. I tell myself it's about precision. That with the right words, a better grasp of grammar, I could handle these calls myself. But maybe it's simpler than that. Maybe it's about learning to accept that asking for help isn’t losing control. It’s collaboration. It's growth.

In this shifting understanding, wine storytelling becomes less about persuasion and more about connection. Yet even now, I hesitate to pick up the phone when the cork delivery is delayed for the third time. Three missed conversations, each nudging the bottling schedule deeper into anxiety and uncertainty. Each time, the same unknown number flashes on my screen, and I let the robot answer. I tell myself it’s spam. Most days, it is. But not that day. Not that week. The driver wasn’t listening to my assistant. He wasn’t leaving a message. And he certainly wasn’t texting back.

The robot logged every missed call, like a ledger of hesitation.

And while the robot is still there, a quiet fallback, he’s becoming less a shield and more a reminder now, a signpost marking how far I’ve come. Real fluency isn’t just grammar or vocabulary. It’s in the pauses, the willingness to admit uncertainty, the openness to let someone else guide you, even briefly.

The cellar doesn’t judge fluency. Mistakes are visible, fixable, mine. The work makes sense because it requires clarity of purpose, attention and care.

That’s why I lean into it. One task at a time, feeling less like I’m disappearing and more like I’m emerging into something new. If I can do this, I can navigate whatever else comes along, whether it’s another complicated phone call, paperwork, or simply another moment when I have to let someone help me.

It should be obvious that none of us can build a life alone. That you can't run a winery or live meaningfully through silence. Eventually, something breaks and a neighbor calls instead of texts. And when they do, I need to be the one who answers. Not the robot, not the label. Me, voice unsure but growing steadier, learning to trust myself again.

Sometimes the person on the other end slows down, switches to English, or just waits patiently. Other times, the call goes silent.

But I’ve started picking up anyway. Not because it’s easy, but because I’m realizing fluency is built one conversation at a time. Because this new place and this shifting industry don’t require perfection. They require presence. Real life can’t be lived at a distance, even if your voice shakes a bit.

The voicemail is still there. I haven’t replaced him yet.

But lately, I’ve been answering before he can.