In this moment, is it appropriate to write about wine? The answer is likely different for every writer. Part of my work requires me to skim the climate news every morning, as it relates to wine and agriculture. One of the more distressing things happening in U.S. climate news right now is that the Colorado River, which 40 million people rely on, is at risk of running dry in the coming years. What will happen when the loss of water destabilizes these communities? We don’t have to wonder; Octavia Butler has already answered this question.

Is the wine industry—or any industry in its present state—poised for a sustainable future? I think it’s possible that the word sustainable has been used so many times that we’ve forgotten what it means: that in its present state, it supports our and future generations’ survival and access to necessary resources. Is the wine industry—squeezed by supply chain issues, water rights, trade regulations, rising fuel costs, wildfires, and increasingly frugal consumers—playing a sustainable role in our lives?

My answer? The industry isn’t. But the wine is. If we remove the industry from the wine industry, what is the wine like?

This isn’t meant to single out wine above all other products; I think that everyone should be questioning the role their respective industry plays in a sustainable future and whether its existence is justified in the face of environmental risk. Perhaps it’s not that said industry shouldn’t exist, but that it shouldn’t exist in its present state. The cool thing about wine is that we know it flourishes in our lives without industrialization. What other things did we hold dear before it was mass-produced? In other words, looking back at history, what do we know will continue to exist without the incentive to hoard money?

To be clear: this newsletter isn’t ending, but lately I’m not able to enthusiastically abide by a content calendar, and frankly, I’m not making enough money to justify the time I devote to it. I hope that by removing the paywall, I free myself up to write whatever wine—and other worldly—stories come next. Just like wine, I was a writer before there was an option to make money doing it. Thanks for being a reader

.

So, to the dancefloor I went. DJ sets, line dancing, salsa classes, you name it. Turns out, I needed to sing too. I joined a local beer choir and can now be found singing Irish sea shanties and pub tunes at breweries around town. Like my life depends on it.

How am I supposed to write about wine when a paramilitary organization made up of masked Call of Duty cosplayers is running unaccountably through my country, kidnapping and murdering people? And where is the outcry from the major players in my industry, whose product would be growing nowhere and served alongside no food were it not for migrant labor?

How does a bartender run the dishwasher in an increasingly alarming water crisis during the rise of AI, whose data centers are reliant on the consumption of up to 5 million gallons of water a day? If wine is a canary in the coal mine of the environmental crisis and our marketing execs are building decks on how to make Gen Z want to drink wine…where does that leave the very sensitive poets of this world?

Line dancing and singing sea shanties, as it turns out.

If this is a case study in the psychological impact of imperialism (is it?), those experts in marketing and economics may be interested to know that my desire to drink wine has prevailed through this existential turnaround. Yes, I’m still imbibing, and it’s bubbles and rosé that my distraught heart wants. Give me the 1 liter and let’s dance.

Another balm for my heart is the mountains I live on, which I’m starting to regard as a really big animal I walk and sleep on. Is this what it’s like to be friends with a really big elephant? Pouring wine at Addison Farms Winery a couple of times a week, a small family farm with a team I’ve come to love, is doing more than its part to counter the despair I feel.

I got to be a fly on the wall at the local winemakers’ roundtable, where about twenty N.C. winemakers poured wines from their 2025 vintage, transparently sharing their biggest struggles and triumphs of the last season, then workshopping their problems together. My biggest delight was hearing the range of things that impacted their winemaking choices - from pH to needing to not work straight through the weekend…again.

This is the reality of what makes a wine: it’s hard, and in addition to romantic, mysterious influences like fog, sunlight, and stone, you also have an overworked, news-exposed person negotiating their devotion to a single agricultural product with their desire to fuck off at the local brewery. The interesting part is when those moments of crying “uncle” inform the wine too. This element of human ambition and limitation is terroir if I’ve ever heard it.

Another win for my fragile, dainty heart: I enjoyed a wine dinner at Asheville’s newest Italian eatery, Finest. A three-course meal made by Chef Brooke was paired with ciders by Botanist & Barrel. I’ve known B&B co-owners Lyndon and Amie for a few years now, have written about their muscadine, but it wasn’t until now, sipping a pet-nat cider and chomping on stracciatella toast with broccoli, that a light went off in my head–cider! Cider is amazing. I’ll let you know when I learn more than that.

In times like these, a cultural emphasis on pleasure, fun, and play tends to make a comeback. We learn the very serious role that goofing off plays in our survival. I hope you’re finding time to get out and do fun things in your community; the hidden function is that your community becomes a little more fortified than it was.

Power to the people, fuck ICE and chin chin.

Last year I drove to Surry Community College in Dobson, North Carolina for the Southeastern United Grape & Wine Symposium for my first time—their twelfth. This year, I’m coming back for the 13th Symposium and I’d love to see you there. Click here to get your ticket.

One of the biggest challenges of growing any wine region is getting everyone in a room together. For farmers to get off their farm and buyers to leave their brick-and-mortar is no easy feat. In addition to being essential to relationship building and the exchange of knowledge, I think these events are good for morale—and we are all really underestimating the value of morale in our business plans.

For me, the trip was worth the moment when David Bower, Enology Instructor at Surry CC, pulled out a bottle of hot pink pet nat made from a new varietal of Muscadine called RazzMaTazz. I’d heard of the varietal, developed by Jeff Bloodworth, but hadn’t encountered it yet so it was a treat to share a bottle made by Bower and his students with other attendees.

This year’s symposium is on November 20th from 9 AM to 7 PM and features three keynote speakers, breakout sessions, networking in the winery featuring tastes of more special projects by SCC, and a grand wine tasting featuring 10 Southeastern wineries and cideries. Keynote speakers will explore topics like utilizing storytelling as a business asset, growing the next generation of winemakers, and breeding new grape varieties for the Southeast. I’m told there will also be a firepit and small bites at the end of the day...I’ll be there, I’ll be caffeinated. I hope to see you.

Online registration is now open. General admission is $125 or the Grand Wine Tasting Only is $50. Click here to get your ticket.

2025 Schedule: November 20th 9 AM - 7 PM

See the full schedule description here.

8 AM Doors open for registration, breakfast, and meeting with sponsors

8:30 AM Vendor display floor opens

9:15 AM Keynote #1: Paul Wagner, Instructor, Viticulture & Winery Technology Department at Napa Valley College

11 AM Keynote #2: Jodi Songer Driedger, Director of Undergraduate Programs for North Carolina State University Horticultural Science Department

1:30 PM Keynote #3: Dr. Sarah Lowder, Extension Viticulture Specialist and Assistant Professor of Horticulture for the University of Georgia’s College of Ag & Environmental Sciences & Dr. Drew Harner, Assistant Professor of Viticulture and Extension Specialist for Virginia Tech’s School of Plant and Environmental Sciences

3 PM Educational Breakout Sessions

4:15 PM Industry Networking with sampling of Surry Cellars wine

5-7 PM Grand Wine Tasting

Surry Community College’s Shelton-Badgett Center for Viticulture & Enology

The Shelton-Badgett Center for Viticulture & Enology serves the grape and wine industry throughout the Southeast by providing workforce training and industry support. The SBVE opened in 2009 alongside an on-campus five-acre teaching vineyard, a bonded winery, a lab facility, and a fully equipped classroom.

The Symposium is the Southeast’s premier educational gathering for winegrowing professionals, created to meet the evolving needs of the grape and wine industry in our region. Representing more than 50 wineries and vineyards, our attendees include business owners, growers, winemakers, marketers, students, tourism professionals, and sales representatives. This diverse and collaborative audience offers an exceptional opportunity to connect with key voices shaping the future of wine and viticulture of the Southeast.

Learn more about the Symposium and purchase tickets here.

Subscribe now

The wine isn’t destined for the shelf of your nearest wine bar. Instead, this batch is a case study. “This is about the North Carolina wine industry and the Southeast more generally getting to taste a new grape,” Greene told me as I followed her around the cellar at Addison Farms Winery, where her 5-gallon carboy has almost finished fermenting.

Aravelle is a hybrid descending from Riesling, a versatile European grape and Cayuga White, a hybrid fit for Sauvvy B girlies everywhere. Crossing Cayuga with Riesling offers the best of two worlds: a beloved aromatic profile and an innate resistance to rot, a viticultural problem that plagues humid climates like North Carolina’s. The grape was developed at Cornell and released only two years ago.

Greene harvested the Aravelle under the Blood Moon “in the spirit of fun”—and in a nod to biodynamic winemaking, pitched a Champagne yeast to start the fermentation, with intentions of keeping the flavor profile neutral and letting the grape’s character come to the forefront. “At one point it smelled like straight up peach purée,” Greene told me as she handed me a small pour of cloudy, happy smelling wine. Today, it smells like lemon and green apple and reminds me of the moodiness of a warm-climate Chardonnay.

We’ll have to wait until Spring to taste the final product, but who knows? Maybe Aravelle will become a household name in the state. Either way, it’s these kinds of wines—the ones that are made in an attempt to answer a question—that make a wine region what it is. The kind of history we obtain certifications on is happening, not just in North Carolina, but all over the country.

I’m happy to report many sightings of the elusive millennials-in-wine in the Piedmont region of North Carolina this month, and in an official harvest report: grapes are being toted to and fro, pressed and pumped, and you can open the door to any winery and be hit with a waft of juicy alchemy. Happy harvest.

Subscribe now

It’s a joy to be handed a glass of cloudy, peculiar juice pulled from a tank just a week or so into fermentation—lift it to your nose, and try to make sense of the smells. This is the ritual that winemakers all over the state will perform again and again until bottling, coaching their noses over the years to anticipate where a wine might be headed, and how they may want to respond. Elizabeth Higley, millennial sighting number one and winemaker at Windsor Run Cellars, expressed relief upon hearing our enthusiasm for how good the custom crush facility, where many brands are making wine under one roof, smelled. She told me that you can tell when a wine is happy, and you can definitely tell when a wine is upset by how it smells. I was left with a visual of an angry woman farting around for days.

My car companions (millenials two and three) and I had driven up I-77 into the Swan Creek AVA, conveniently trailing a delivery of Dornfelder that Higley, winemaker Kevin Elder (millennial four), and Chuck Johnson, winery owner, would process. After being pointed up the catwalk bordered by hissing tanks, we watched from above as they dumped the purple fruit into the crusher/destemmer and pumped the juice into the chillers below our feet. Then, Higley guided us through tanks of Seyval Blanc, all of which had been treated slightly differently, and we tried to tune our noses to the slight but mighty differences. We tasted Cayuga, Chambourcin, and Chardonnay all en route to becoming wine and followed along as Higley predicted where the wine might be heading based on how it smelled and tasted.

Keep your eyes on Higley—she launched her own wine label this year: Demarcation Wine Co. with a Chambourcin-blueberry sparkling coferment and a vermouth made with Valvin Muscat.

Next, we were off to Wilkesboro to meet millennial number six: Erick Hurtado, production manager at Stardust Cellars, a sustainable meadery in what used to be a locally notorious nightclub—the walls were monologuing the entire time we were there. Stardust Cellars utilizes spontaneous fermentation in their meads, a familiar concept in wine that’s a little trickier to accomplish in mead. In wine, spontaneous fermentation means that rather than adding yeast to kickstart fermentation, a winemaker will wait for the already-existing yeast on the grape skins to begin the transformation into wine. Historically, this is how wine was made: the grapes were crushed, and whatever yeast was available on the skins, in the vessel, or on the people, would ferment the juice. As it turns out, honey, which is combined with water to make mead, also contains naturally occurring yeast.

Spontaneous fermentation is a little trickier in that there’s less control over the process on the side of the winemaker—the yeast might not begin fermenting for days, and you can’t predict how hard it will work or when it will decide to give up. For this reason, it’s less common in commercial practice. But I’ve found that many sustainable winemakers prefer relinquishing this control and enjoying the truth about wine: that at its core, it exists outside of a production schedule. Rather than a product, wine is a natural process, and we’re just a character in its story.

Keep your eye on Stardust Cellars, owned by Nicolas Hogrefe, millennial seven. They are officially a Demeter-certified meadery and winery, and are in the process of growing a biodynamic Muscadine vineyard.

Last week, he let me foot tread some Traminette—every wine consumer’s dream come true—and press the on and off button on the pump that carried royal purple Tempranillo juice from the basket press into barrels. Then my friend and emerging winemaker, Taylor Greene, arrived to teach me how to measure the sugar levels and pH of fermenting grape juice.

It’s certainly a change in environment, scope, and resources. But Denesha expressed enthusiasm at the challenge of working under new constraints and cheerfully chatted about everything from the Odyssey to Sabrina Carpenter as he worked. As for me, I was excited to be able to see the first steps of making wine for the first time, and I hope hospitality professionals all over North Carolina will be reminded that they need not go far to get knee deep in harvest activities.

Here are a few things I learned from Denesha, Greene, and Alex Kendall, winemaker at Addison Farms Winery.

First things first, weigh your grapes.

These are half-ton bins, and you want to weigh them for your books, paying growers, etc.

Then, you might foot tread the grapes.

Denesha told me that this is the gentlest way to crush the grapes—and when you want aromatic nuance, you need to be gentle. First, you step into a series of buckets filled with stuff to sanitize your feet, and then, rather than drive your leg all the way to the bottom, do a kind of pitter-patter back and forth along the surface and make your way down, layer by layer.

Measure the Brix and the pH, write it on the bin.

Take out your scary math wand (also known as a hydrometer) and calculate the Brix (sugar levels) in the juice. Then measure the temperature and pH. This will be done again and again over time, and will allow the winemakers to track when fermentation begins, how it’s going, as well as acidity levels.

Press the grapes and put ‘em somewhere to alchemize.

Now it’s time to let the yeast transform the sugars into alcohol and develop a whole different aromatic aesthetic. The Traminette will be pressed and put into tanks. The Tempranillo went through the basket press into oak barrels. How long will it take? Only Sabrina Carpenter knows.

Subscribe now

Yes, harvest has begun in North Carolina and over the coming months I’ll share with you what winemakers generously share with me through texts, photos, and voice memos. In what, perhaps, could be a new genre of ASMR, I’ve already been promised one of Elizabeth Higley of Windsor Run Cellars shrieking. You heard it here first, folks.

Speaking of Higley, here’s a photo she sent of the Seyval Blanc that marks the start of their harvest in the Swan Creek AVA.

Seyval Blanc is cool climate grape and an early ripener–hence the jump off to harvest. The fruit in the photo is destined to become still wine, but Seyval Blanc and its relative, Vidal Blanc, are often used to make sparkling wines in North Carolina. “I think it’s kind of just assumed that sparkling wine bases should be flavorless because Champagne said so—and that’s what they have to work with—but I think the aromatic varieties are a little more fun for sparkling,” Higley told me. “We gotta live a little!” No signs of shrieking yet—keep it up, Elizabeth.

At Parker-Binns in the highly anticipated Tryon Foothills AVA, vineyard manager Cory Lillberg let me know that their Chardonnay and Muscat have arrived at the crush pad. Soon to come: Merlot, Tannat, and Vidal Blanc…wonder if they’ll make a sparkling wine with that.

If you’re making wine in North Carolina and want to send me updates, email me at wineisconfusing@gmail.com.

Why? Even though the vine is dated to around the time the Lost Colony arrived, it’s not clear that they cultivated the vine. Roanoke Island was inhabited and cultivated by coastal, native tribes whose presence in the area dates to 14000 B.C. On the week of July 4th, I drove down Route 64 to visit the Mother Vine to try and make sense of the narrative connection. I brought with me my favorite witch to travel with, my friend Kennedy, and my BIL (best-friend-in-law), Emily.

We maneuver beach chairs, towels, snacks, wine, books, and journals into our car and drive through the North Carolina backcountry. Past 18th-century churches, flowering tobacco plants, and a nauseating number of American flags—some of them turned upside down—a reminder that it’s the week of July 4th. Finally, we begin to taste the salt of the Atlantic, where Tropical Storm Chantel is bringing her brew to a simmer. We pull over at the Scuppernong River, my first sign of local wine history, and walk along its boardwalk under the shade of old-growth cypress trees.

On the beach, sand is lifted like a blanket being shaken out. It pelts our skin and swirls annoyingly around our faces. The wind heaves our umbrella out of the sand and throws it into the ocean, and I go screaming behind it as our neighbors watch from their beach chairs. The rain and lightning come, we run in; it goes, we run out. We spend a stormy afternoon thrifting, and in the dressing room, shirtless, my eyes land on a flyer taped to the wall reminding me that fetuses are people too, with a number to a fake pregnancy clinic. I get dressed in a hurry.

The next day is clear, wet, and hot. In the morning, we drive to the front lawn of the late Jack and Estelle Wilson, where the Mother Vine sits about 200 feet from the Roanoke Sound. We crawl under her quarter-acre canopy, supported by a massive arbor. The air is cool from the cover of foliage and hard berries not yet filled with water and color. Aerial roots stretch down, seeking ground. In the center of it all, the deeply grooved trunk twists around itself.

When Jack and Estelle Wilson purchased the land in 1957, the Mother Vine covered two acres, and they were undiscerning in how they cut it back to make room for their house. When they discovered they had done some damage to the vine, they brought in experts, who taught them how to prune the vine with care. In addition to committing to a lifetime of stewarding the vine, they planted a sign in their yard that reads “Mother Vine”, paved a parking area beside their driveway, and invited whoever wants to come to visit their front yard. This is a valuable teaching about what it means to be human living on land. One, that a plant’s illness or health can be an oracle, pointing to what we’re doing right or wrong. And two, if we listen, we will be transformed and so will our community.

So close to the water, the Mother Vine could have been one of those that prompted early European expeditionists to describe the land as “so full of grapes as the very beating and surge of the seas overflowed them.” This image seemed to go viral throughout Europe, prompting people like those in the Lost Colony to agree to board a ship for four months and move to a wilderness that everyone before them had died trying to get to. On one hand, this seems impossible to understand. On the other, we needn’t look further than the modern-day obsession with colonizing Mars to make it make sense.

Another viral moment for our Mother Vine: Before Prohibition, North Carolina was the most commercially successful winemaking region in the U.S. thanks to a bottle of Scuppernong (a variety of Muscadine) that fell into such high demand that the winemakers were forced to blend in bulk juice from California and New York. The bottle was named Virginia Dare, and part of the promotion of the wine was the telling of the myth of The White Doe. In this story, Virginia Dare rejects a male suitor. Seeing no other option but to curse her for rejecting him, he turns her into a depressed, white deer that roams the island. Her birth, dated and recorded on August 18, 1587, is estimated to be close to the date that the Mother Vine is aged to.

But Virginia Dare was no miracle; she was fundamental to the strategy of establishing an English colony in North America. In 1584, Queen Elizabeth commissioned her bestie, Sir Walter Raleigh, to get an English outpost established within six years. In her book, “Searching For Virginia Dare,” Marjorie Hudson writes, “the purpose of the voyage was to seal, for once and for all, Raleigh’s rights in the New World, by populating the land with English children.” Painted as a noble mission to bring Christianity and civilization to these Indigenous lands, the project instead brought disease, ethnic cleansing, and environmental degradation, the consequences of which we’re living with today. As the current administration’s aggressive attack on birthright citizenship proceeds, we can use Virginia Dare’s story to understand what being born on this land really means from a colonizer’s perspective. And as the aftermath of Roe v. Wade being overturned continues to push women towards forced birth and marriage, we might view the lore and deification of Virginia Dare through a more critical lens.

Fast forward the tape from 1587, and you’ll see a couple of centuries of not-so-lost-but-still-suffering colonies trying and failing to make wine. They didn’t have the botanical knowledge to understand that North American vines aren’t the same as European vines, and that the vines they cultivated back home would respond differently to this climate. This seems obvious today, but we can look back and witness the human capacity to wildly overestimate ourselves, to move with ignorance, and to ignore the signs that nature gives back to us. This is still going on today, and you don’t have to drive far from the Mother Vine to notice it—the signs in people’s yards leading up to Mother Vineyard Road protesting overdevelopment of the island, or the local tasting room that features European rather than local varietals.

Will we learn? Time will tell.

Subscribe now

Another update: I was accepted into the Bâtonnage Forum, a mentorship program for women and wine! I’m so grateful to have an opportunity to share everything I’m doing and thinking with someone who has been in this industry much longer than me. If you’re a woman in wine, you should apply. And eat 1.5 cups of grapes daily.

As a result of one meeting with my mentor, I’m feeling energized to dive into my most personal projects: this newsletter and my forthcoming print publication, Foxy Wine Review. Foxy will be devoted to wine in Appalachia and the South, and I’ve decided to launch it without a social media presence. I want to ask: can’t an analog project find its audience without social media? Can we create an example of peeling ourselves away from the digital wasteland of social media? Can our stories do something other than line the wallets of tech billionaires? And I want to give writers an opportunity not to have their art scraped. Maybe I’ll print 3 issues, maybe it will change the world. We’ll see.

Paying subscribers, you’ll get a zine with details soon. In the meantime, here’s a refresher on the subscription tiers of this newsletter and what you’ll get:

Free Subscribers (free free)

• Occasional educational articles, bottle reviews

• Paywalled articles will unlock after 7 months and be sent to ya

Paying Subscribers ($5/mo or $50/yr)

• Free subscriber benefits +

• More articles and essays

• Subject matter will dive into more nuanced aspects of wine, history, and the political moment

• Exclusive reporting on North Carolina and other under-the-radar wine regions

• Bonus features: photos, interviews, and raw notes from articles after they publish

Founding Members ($100/yr)

• Paid subscriber benefits +

• Postcards from my wine travels containing wine secrets

• Complimentary copies of Foxy Wine Review as it comes out

Subscribe now

Thanks for being with me, readers. There are over 900 of you now! What an honor. Have you noticed I have been writing and talking about Muscadine a lot lately? Yeah, I keep trying to publish pieces but then the story keeps growing. Yikes! Speaking of growing out of control, here I am shaking the hand of a 400+ year old Muscadine vine on Roanoke Island. She covers about a quarter acre.

First, it’s wildly low in alcohol (as low as 4% in some cases), meaning you can sip and sip and sip without poisoning yourself…yes! Plus, it’s lightly sparkling and easygoing—a true morale boost for the overworked and overwhelmed.

Piquette’s origins belong to an exploited working class of medieval France, the farmhands. It’s made from the pomace—pulp, skins, and seeds—leftover from making wine. Like an underfed server grabbing a slice of untouched pizza off the stand her table left behind, farmhands would add water so the remaining yeast would relent one last fermentation, resulting in a light, session wine that could be consumed all the live long day. Modern winemakers will often add some sugar to encourage a stronger fermentation, and because piquette is sold rather than drunk in the sun with lunch, they also stabilize it so that it’s not spoiled by the time it reaches the consumer.

And so, Piquette joins the endless scroll of peasant foods that find their way into the artisanal, hip corners of food. Next stop is usually fine dining; I don’t know if that will happen with our offensively plain Piquette, but who knows?That list, if you didn’t know, includes caviar, lobster, oysters, quinoa, foie gras, oxtail, sushi, and skirt steak, to start.

I fell in love with a peasant dish called aquacotta on a recent trip to Maremma (southern Tuscany) with my friend Kennedy. Aquacotta gives me the same comfort that chili and chilequillas do: it’s affordable to make, hearty, filling, and perfect for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

The dish makes use of stale bread, tossing a slice into the bottom of a bowl and adding simmered tomatoes, onions, and a poached egg. There are variations of it throughout Italy, and in keeping with peasant cuisine, whatever else you might have on hand can be added: garlic, potatoes, celery, or foraged herbs and edibles.

I’d pair this dish with Bellatrix, a Piquette made from Chardonel and Chambourcin, weighing in at 10% ABV from Addison Farms Winery in North Carolina. Light bodied, fizzy, berry-flavored, and slightly tannic, the mood of this wine is undistracted and satisfied. It’s a need-meeting wine that balances relaxation with focus, and doesn’t drift too far into either state.

As the war on today’s working class ramps up and foraging for discarded pizza becomes a thing again, I wonder what kinds of inventions necessity will come to mother. Perhaps our innate creativity will lead us to answering questions like: How can we organize within our restaurant industry so that people who want to put their bodies on the front lines of the resistance can do it without jeopardizing their livelihood?

Can we cover for each other? When our industry professionals are detained by ICE outside church, chased through fields at work, or kidnapped by unidentified, masked men, can we raise funds to bail out the people who are in the streets fighting to defend them?

People are mobilizing for a general strike. Research shows that the movement needs 3.5% of the population to be successful. You might have some coworkers or employees on your team who want to participate. How can we restructure our workplaces so that anyone wanting to run toward the fire can be empowered and supported?

Often, planned rallies are scheduled for weekends, ie. during service industry shifts. Who can step in and carry extra weight to cover for an employee who wants to show up? Can the owner agree to pay them (to some degree) and can the team tip them out anyway? If you’re not working under supportive leadership, can you and your work friends cover each other and occasionally split your tips for the day, meal share, or be on standby to ensure that you return safely from a rally?

If none of that works for your specific situation, can you meet with work friends over a bowl of peasant-conjured food and a bottle of Piquette and brainstorm how to creatively organize in a way that does?

Asking for a friend.

In weeks, I’ve gone from curious onlooker to apprentice-land-steward under the tutelage of my neighbor. Yes, the flower-admirer to chained-to-a-tree pipeline moves swiftly in such a biodiverse region as this. I’m now protecting groves of rare trees, a butterfly habitat, and have started a garden. Meanwhile, neighbors around me are working to restore the banks of our shared creek so it can recover from the damage it sustained during Helene.

One day, my neighbor pointed out a wild grapevine growing in the backyard. Did I cry? I’m trying to remember; I think I blacked out. Laughing at me, my neighbor told me that it was actually quite common. She’s not wrong; I’ve spotted five or six more vines in the relatively undeveloped land on which we both rent.

When we found the grapevine creeping along the floor of the meadow behind our houses, my neighbor suggested that since we’ve got five cats between the two of us, we should put up a garden arch so the birds don’t have to swoop down to the ground for food as often. Listening to her gardening philosophy has compelled me to challenge my impulse to ask, “what’s that good for?” anytime I encounter something new, and instead begin my life as a gardener with offerings to the ecosystem—Jo Pye Weed, Wingstem, Daisy, and Wild Grape.

Many days of the week, I’m pulling oriental bittersweet, honeysuckle, and multiflora from the native plants they’ve overtaken in my area. It’s a daunting task, and for some reason, I love doing it? Who is this person? Maybe because I don’t own the land, I feel fully removed from the end result and am instead devoted to the process itself. My friend who works in land conservancy in New York (and therefore has more accountability to the end result) recently wondered in conversation if doing remediation even matters. In some ways, I’ve accepted that we may have gone past the point of no return with our environment and with each other, and I want to spend my time as living proof of the human capacity for care and discernment. Perhaps this is a form of escapism, too. Whatever the reason, as my community faces the loss of SNAP benefits, I see learning to cultivate food as one of the best ways to spend my time.

But first: the birds. A recent study shows that 3/4 of species are in decline. The berries of grapevines are specifically made for them, and it’s interesting that we humans have such an ancient practice of using them to make wine for ourselves. The practice is so fundamental to cultures across the world that scientists have wondered if the impulse to make wine is somehow biological. But for the vines, grapes are a backup plan, a Plan B for if things start to go south. A little stress indicates to the plant to produce some sugary, colorful berries, which the birds will not be able to resist, and after indulging, will drop seeds wherever they fly.

As for what species of Vitis these vines are, I’m happy to report that I’m more confused than ever. A few things I have going against me: grapevines are difficult to distinguish from each other, it’s still only May, and I’ve never done this before. I have at least narrowed it down. They could both be Vitis riparia, a common grapevine also known as Riverbank Grape and Frost Grape. Confusingly, Vitis vulpina also goes by Frost Grape, in addition to chicken grape, because it tastes like chicken—joking.

Vitis riparia is known for having reddish bark and red stems, which checks out for our younger, backyard find. Then there’s the one climbing the Tulip Poplar down the road—it’s older and leaning more green at the stem, so I’m leaning toward V. vulpina for this one. I should know more in the fall, so stay tuned. If the berries are covered in a white bloom, then they’re likely V. riparia. If they aren’t, they’re probably V. vulpina.

And the wild card is that my not-always-correct plant identifying app insists that the backyard vine is Vitis aestivalis, ancestor of Norton, but I’m not convinced.

Here’s a breakdown of some wild grape species that we have in Western North Carolina, along with a few popular winemaking varietals that have come from canoodling with European grapes (Vitis vinifera).

Vitis riparia (Riverbank Grape, Frost Grape)

• Marechal Foch

• Frontenac

• Baco Noir

Vitis aestivalis (Summer Grape, Pigeon Grape)

• Norton

Vitis labrusca (Fox Grape)

• Catawba

• Cayuga

• Concord

• Niagara

Subscribe now

On Mt. Etna, wine is spoken of in terms of time as much as it is place; the active volcano is still shifting in shape and height today. When it last erupted and where the lava flowed have defined agriculture and life for centuries. On a trip to the Northern slope of the D.O.C., I followed Patricia Tóth and her brother through Planeta’s vines of Nerello Mascalese and Carricante as they told funny stories about their family, egging each other on. We walked down to the site where lava once flowed through the property in the eruption of 1614. That was the beginning of a ten-year-long eruption for the volcano, an era that has become a big part of the region's lore.

We stopped at an unassuming stone wall on the edge of their vineyard, and Tóth pointed to a red layer of soil running horizontally along the lower part of the wall. “Here was the original agricultural soil,” she said, then pointed to a vein of purple directly above it. “These were stuck in the lava, and got pushed down here from another area.” Eventually, plants and lichen dug into the wall and are still moving and shifting the earth. “This is still a very active slice of the eruption,” she said as a few rocks tumbled down behind her. Tóth remembered the first time someone pointed this portion of the wall out to her, teaching her how to track the timeline of soil and movement. “Do you know what this is?” he had asked her, to which she replied, “rocks?” and erupted in laughter.

Our day had started at another winery in the north, Antichi Vinai 1877. Squinting into the fierce Ionian wind, we passed rows of unbothered vines trained into freestanding mini-trees, an ancient training system known as albarello. Winemaker Viviana Gangemi told me that the term sciara is Sicilian, borrowed from the Arabic term, ‘Sahraa’—desert. Throughout antiquity, Sicily had been the target of conquest from a dizzying number of empires: the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Spanish Bourbons, French Angevin, and German Hohenstaufen have all been here at one point.

But most notably, after the fall of Rome, the island was under Islamic rule for almost two centuries. And while winemaking came to a halt during this time, grapes were cultivated for food, and innovative farming techniques from the Arab tradition made a permanent mark on agriculture, cuisine, and language throughout Sicily. “We call sciara what remains after a lava eruption,” said Gangemi. “Simplifying it is lava solidified: a large amount of lava basalt, lapilli, and ash”.

Sciara is completely infertile; grapevines can’t grow in it. “We would need to wait at least 400 years until the lava transforms itself into fertile terrain,” Gangemi told me. Her family’s vineyard is one of the first in the region—so old that the first few generations charged visitors by the hour rather than by the glass. But their site had been covered by the lava twice—once in 1614 and then again in 1879. Not willing to wait 400 years, they worked the soil from both eruptions to bring life to their vines. “First, we removed the 1879 lava, then we dug up the already fertile 1614 lava,” Gangemi told me. “Then we put down the stone from the 1879 lava for drainage and covered everything with a thick layer of the 1614 lavic soil.” Their last touch was to add organic fertilizer.

Mt. Etna is the largest volcano in Europe and the most active in the world—two weeks before I arrived, it had erupted quietly and unremarkably to locals. The island began as an underwater volcano 500,000 years ago, and as it erupted over time, it added layers, eventually emerging as an island in the Mediterranean Sea. Etna D.O.C. was the first delineated winemaking region in Sicily; it hugs the eastern, southern, and northern slopes of the volcano in a half-moon shape. Most of the vines are indigenous to the region and are grown to make high-acid, aromatic reds, whites, rosatos, and sparkling wines.

The white wines go by the name of Etna Bianco. Made from 100% Carricante (and sometimes a dash or two of local Catarratto), they have off-the-charts acidity, lemon, starfruit, apple, flowers, and a common saltiness. The rosatos, made from Nerello Mascalese, often have a spicy bite with roses, lavender, peach, apricot, and a wildness that feels innate, like the garrigue of the Rhone. Etna Rosso, the region’s red wine, is also made from Nerello Mascalese, sometimes blended with local Nerello Cappuccio. These wines are bright and earthy with cranberry, pomegranate, cola, date, black pepper, bark, and a minerality that I spent my entire three days there trying to describe.

For this aroma, I don’t think a descriptor exists. I haven’t encountered it outside the world of wine, and with no reference point, I found myself conjuring images of mythical monsters, sea creatures, and often, Hexxus from Fern Gully. Other times, it felt like a plume of volcanic ash rising from the glass. Is that from the sciara? The sea influence? The vines old enough to be my great-grandmother? Or all of the above? The mystery of minerality as an aroma is just that—a question for which we still don’t have all the answers.

After walking the steep Planeta vineyards, we shuffled over to their gazebo for a beautiful lunch of local sausage, onions, and provisions. Beside me sat Giusi Calcagno, a winemaker studying under her father and uncle, farming six hectares and naming their bottles after the flora and fauna that grow in the peculiar volcanic soil. Tastes of aromatic, mineral-y Calcagno bottles were poured alongside Planeta’s pops of citrus and earth as Calcagno showed me pictures of her life teaching Italian to Syrian refugees and carrying her family’s tradition into the new age of Sicilian winemaking.

In the early 20th century, a disease that was making its way throughout the world’s wine regions, phylloxera, arrived in Sicily. Two World Wars plunged the whole of Southern Italy into an economic crisis, and people abandoned their vineyards and left in search of work. As is often the case, at the end of the 20th century, a few charismatic winemakers returned to revive the tradition, and since then, many younger generations have returned, and the region has flourished again.

The second part of this story we know well: curious outsiders have started buying land as the new wave of winemaking has reached international waters. Speaking with Calcagno, I sensed a pride in existing at the convergence of many cultures as well as a resolve to protect the identity of Etna during this growth spurt. She told me more about the origins of sciara and other elements of Arabic influence that have found their rightful place in Sicilian life, like cinnamon saffron rice. “We have always accepted elements from other places, from ingredients to the workmanship,” she told me.

She listed other words rooted in the Arab tradition: the Alcantara, the river that extends between the cities of Messine and Catania, derives from al-qantar, which means bridge or arch. Etna is also known as Mongibello, from the Arabic word jebel: mountain. Zibibbo comes from zãbib, raisin. “Food is the real link with this culture because of its role in the construction and maintenance of identity,” Calcagno told me, “and for the fact that it allows us to understand the process of transformation and adaptation and the ability to integrate new experiences.”

Subscribe now

As usual, your guests will belly up to your bar or collapse onto your vintage couch, ready to talk about what’s happening now. This week it will be tariffs. Many of them will want your insight as a person who works in the industry. If they do, it’s an opportunity to begin with tariffs and end up somewhere more poignant. Of course, staff members have to follow company policies around talking politics (unless you’re ready to risk it all, and maybe you are?). But leadership should consider the position of narrative power they wield in their community, and if the current policy is to avoid politics, maybe they should imagine what life could be like if they let the people on the front lines of their business tell your guests how they really feel.

Either way, there are ways to politely approach the glaring fact that this administration is working to make us all poorer. This piece in Wine Searcher is a good one to share with guests who want to understand how this will affect wine, and it’s an excellent segue into how our farmers are already hurting—bad. You could talk about how climate change is making it harder to make wine, and watching this, we can understand what’s happening to our food systems. Now that’s scary.

You can talk about how deportation scare tactics and kidnappings are terrorizing our agricultural workforce, making it harder for them to organize for their rights—let alone show up for work.

You can talk about how yes, local wine matters, but there’s no framing this in a way that American wine wins. Our local farmers will now pay more to import equipment and glass bottles, and to stay afloat, they’ll have to transfer that cost to the consumer. Raising the prices of imported wines won’t convince people to instead pay $35 for that local bottle of wine when we’ve spent the last several decades insisting that it’s just not as good as a $20 European wine. Tablas Creek does a better job of explaining how this will hurt the local industry than I can, so you can share this with your guests if you’re not allowed to go on a political rant on the clock.

Here is some more reading to share with anyone who wants to understand how the wine tariffs work and who they serve.

• What are tariffs on wine and how do they work?

• The New Wine Crisis: Why Prices Are About to Surge

• Thread: Tariffs are a means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief

• Trump tariffs: the full list

Staying neutral isn’t helping you connect to your consumers.

During Trump’s first term, I worked in a restaurant with a strict no-talking-politics policy, but the owner openly talked about how tariffs were hurting him. When Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was at another wine bar in the only neighborhood in my city with any counter-culture left, one that was quickly gentrifying. Several of us on staff bought matching shirts that read:

pro-scuitto& pro-choice& pro-secco

When I tell you the guests went crazy for these shirts! It was very live-laugh-love but edgier. None of us worked a single shift where several women didn’t ask where to buy one. But one day, an older white man came in, and he didn’t like the shirt. He took to Yelp to complain about being personally attacked by our hyper-political shirts, and the owner of the bar made sure we didn’t wear them again. It was a missed opportunity for someone who had only, in the last few years, moved into a notoriously rebellious neighborhood to open his business. Our manager, who organized the purchase of our shirts, didn’t even try to suggest that maybe the owner, who had a young daughter, might not want to let this Yelp reviewer silence his staff on the topic of reproductive autonomy.

Don’t be like these dudes. Take a stance. Just look at Bernie and AOC’s “Fight the Oligarchy” tour for proof of concept that people want to be inspired out of this mess. These tariffs aren’t about preserving our local industry, they’re about making the poor poorer so the rich can become richer. If you don’t see that, study. If you do, tell your people.

I shook it like my life depended on it. The little red berry is a Muscadine varietal called Noble, and the winemaker at Addison Farms Winery, Alex Kendall, was letting me buzz around asking questions and observing him beginning to process the berries. I shook and shook, but this grape is no Magic 8 Ball. It stared blankly back at me, a little disappointed that I was reducing its prowess to a mass-produced plastic ball filled with dyed-blue alcohol. Child’s play.

It’s true what you’ve heard (in the first paragraph of this piece)—I’m upgrading the hand-folded zine to a print magazine devoted to wine in Appalachia, the South, and the East Coast. It’s my dream to dedicate space in each issue to mutual aid and community care throughout each region. It’s my dream to get people excited about wine whose vines they can drive to. As is the legacy of wine, the variable of this project is its economic viability.

In order to test these waters, I’ll be assembling the first issue of Foxy Wine Review over the next few months. I’ll pass copies out to wine professionals and wine lovers to find out if it’s a good idea or not. Since the Muscadine didn’t want to talk to me, I’m hoping you will.

If you’re a Founding Member of this newsletter ($100/year) you’ll receive the first issue in the mail at no charge—and I hope you’ll tell me what you think.

Paying subscribers and friends-in-wine, my intention is to send you complimentary copies too, and that will depend on how many copies I can afford to print. I am (unsurprisingly) all questions and no answers right now, so stay tuned.

If you’d like to help fund the printing of the first issue, consider upgrading to a Founding Member. In the meantime, follow @foxywinereview on Instagram and look for my updates here.

My approach to visiting wine country has become much more spontaneous and exploratory–I like to figure out where I’m going after I have a chance to speak to some locals. I encourage you to go beyond what’s recommended online and leave plenty of room for local discoveries in your itinerary, too. This will make your trip one of a kind.

There was one winery I really wanted to visit but wasn’t able to: Lady of the Sunshine. Add her to your list and visit for me, would ya?

Tablas Creek Vineyard

Only a year younger than me, Tablas Creek has been organic from day one. They are dry-farmed (meaning, they’re farming in California without irrigating), and they’ve been biodynamic since 2010. This should be everyone’s introduction to natural wine; their wines are proof that the natural stuff need not sacrifice complexity or quality. There are some wines that you know are natural as soon as you taste them. I prefer the ones that I can’t tell—these wines are that.

If you go, be sure to take the vineyard tour, we got a grafting demo on ours.

Desparada Wines

Desparada Wines sources from iconic vineyards throughout the Central Coast and produces their wine at the very cool campus-like urban wine community, Tin City. You can spend days here, and you should. The first wine I tried, a Sauvignon Blanc, really surprised me in how…not obvious it was? I wrote: minerality, diamond elegance, lemon-ey with the fat trimmed.

Union Sacré

While you’re in Tin City, hop over to Union Sacré, an Alsace-inspired project that really tastes more quintessentially Californian than it does Alsace—to me at least. The wines are bright and friendly with lots of flower power. They are the Mamas and The Papas to Desparada’s Florence and the Machine—I don’t how else to explain it.

Nix

Our last stop at Tin City was Nix, a newer winery whose owners come from Chicago. My mom had their Sauvignon Blanc, which again tasted not-obvious to us—and after discovering it had gone through malolactic fermentation, we were pleasantly surprised. I had the Grenache Blanc aged in amphora which had a nice round finish to follow the minerality.

Ulloa Cellars

I think the picture explains it pretty well. Nancy Ulloa is well-known in Tin City, and in recent years, she moved out into the wild world of Paso where she has created a tasting experience like none other. Crystalline, feminist, and dripping with divinity, this is the perfect winery to visit with your coven. I loved the Semillon and the affirmation board.

Clairborne & Churchill

Sustainable architecture enthusiasts will love Clairborne & Churchill. Started in 1983, the winery is one of the oldest in the valley, and the building, which was built in 1993, is insulated with hay. Once a dairy farm, the building was built in 1995 to become the first commercial straw bale building in California. In place of wood studs, fiberglass, and central cooling/heating, they used fibrous dead stalk from the Sacramento delta, threw three layers of stucco on it and bam. Moderated temperature.

Chamisal Vineyards

Favorite rosé of the trip goes to Chamisal Vineyard. The Malene, made from Carignan is the wine version of biting into a grapefruit—just a delightful experience to have. I also adored their Grenache and the opportunity to taste the wines and stare longingly at the jars of soil, to match.

Soil types from the elt are: Salinas clay/loam, Tierra loam, and Chamise shale/loam.

Back in the summer of 2024, I was riding high on a 4-year, hyper-ambitious honeymoon phase with wine writing. All I wanted to do was work, and that I did. I even used it to mentally check out of a bad relationship! Yes, I went full My Octopus Teacher on my ex, and once I was single I stepped on the gas. I was running on inspiration, but I knew it wouldn’t last forever.

Subscribe now

As other loves of my life have taught me, at some point this insatiable feeling would end and I would need to fill in the blanks with discipline, my new form of devotion, if I wanted to keep the flame alive.

I think it was the flood that knocked my newbie fervor out of place. It obliged like a loose tooth and I found myself in a restful, ethereal emotional state. Since then, the phrase “new normal” has been uttered through the hills like an incantation, then through the nation following the election. For me, the spell that was cast is that I just want to write poems and hand them out for free—not conducive to paying my bills. But also not totally off brand for me.

Having planned a quick excursion down the Central Coast of California following the Unified Grape & Wine Symposium in Sacramento, I knew I needed to turn this work trip into more of a break. A la I Dream Of Jeanie, I blinked my tweed blazer into a loose linen pant and called up the person who raised me to love thy beach and keep thy wine close—my mom—and fashioned myself a girlie trip to San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles.

This is the gift of working in wine. You can use it to craft answers to your biggest existential questions or you can simply dissociate—there’s a built-in function for that. The trick is being able to discern which it’s going to be: weapon or tool?

My biggest takeaway is that SLO and Paso have their wine communication together. Their tasting rooms are womanned with people who know and love their stuff, and everyone knew how to tweak their consumer spiel into something slightly nerdier after detecting that I worked in wine.

And in the wake of my honeymoon love glow, I was reminded that before a wine professional, I am a devoted consumer, a listener. Me and my mom got a kick out of all of the characters we met and some of our most memorable moments are learning about the region through their eyes.

We were charmed by Margaret at Claiborne & Churchhill Winery who, in the middle of pouring, was brought back to her childhood when a blimp materialized over the Santa Lucia Mountains—prompting her to fill us in on the order in which each winery had opened since her earliest days in SLO.

We were entertained by Tim, who directed us around the map of the Chamisal vineyard like it was a baseball field and introduced us to his Monday crowd, a loyal group of fellow-boomer-regulars who made the quaint tasting room feel like the bar from Cheers.

We sat and basked in Christian’s telling of Desparada Wines and the tight-knit community at Tin City, a concentrated community of urban wineries in Paso Robles. We smelled the tutti frutti note that Emma pulled from Union Sacré’s “Symphonie”, a Pinot Blanc/Pinot Gris skin contact, and we happily followed Dustin off course the morning tour at Tablas Creek Vineyard in search of miners’ grass, a local edible and cover crop, and to see their biochar pit.

I really enjoyed being a regular wine girlie in SLO and Paso Robles, and if you too, are a regular wine girlie (please note that any gender qualifies for this personality trait) you might like it too.

In Part 2, I’ll share which wineries we stopped in and what we drank over our three days on the Central Coast. I’m happy to report that I came home with a reignited spark; sometimes a trip is all you need.

Subscribe now

Following through on the plans I’d made to continue “seeing for myself” what was happening in the wine regions near me, I loaded up a case of goodies from Botanist & Barrel and hit the road. I do my best thinking on solo road trips, and I needed to comb my entire life to make sure that my work as a writer was in line with community organizing.

I had wine appointments in the Hudson Valley and the Shenandoah Valley, a perfect halfway point for my drive. The people I met patiently and (even enthusiastically) humored my more existential questions which I peppered into my wine ones.

The Shenandoah Valley

In Virginia, The Shenandoah Valley is a part of a 1,200-mile chain of valleys that runs through the center of the Appalachian Mountain Range. My first stop was Commonwealth Crush in Waynesboro.

I met Reggie Leonard II there, who recently released his first wine label, Parallax Project, with Lance Lemon under guidance at the custom crush facility. I also met with writer Sydney Love, who recently wrote this awesome piece, Call of the Loire. I met Roshi, artist and tasting room manager who painted big, beautiful red flowers on one of the tanks in the cellar (below) and tasted a vast lineup of wines.

The wines, made from different grapes and several different people, all had a thread of unison running through them—they were as focused as they were expansive, like a collection of punctation-less poems asserting clear ideas with boundless language. They were great.

I also stopped at Artemisia Farm to meet with Kelly Allen, who, in a move that never ceases to bring a tear to my eye, welcomed me into the home where she and partner Andrew Napier make botanical wines. Their wines, often made with fortified Traminette, are incredibly uplifting Appalachian contributions to the vast world of aromatized wines.

Theirs feature locally foraged and farmed ingredients like gentian, American walnut, and cardoon, wild cousin of the artichoke.

The Catskills

Just over the ridge of the Hudson Valley, the Catskill Mountains are a part of the Appalachian Plateaus. Driving up the sudden escarpment, I was reminded of my drive from the Piedmont in N.C. to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The first thing Alfie Alcántara, co-owner of dear native grapes, showed me was the book that inspired him and his wife Deanna Urciuoli. They came across The Grapes of New York in a used bookstore, and before moving from the city to start their farm, traveled through the U.S. to visit wineries who were keeping the history of pre-prohibition American grapes alive. I recently wrote about my visit to dear native grapes, and my first taste of Delaware, here.

The Hudson Valley

The Hudson Valley stretches from just 30 minutes north of New York City up to Albany. Winemakers are spread out geographically and stylistically—and they don’t see each other often. When I visited someone, I usually gave them either a zine or a bottle I had picked up, and sometimes they gave me a bottle in return. This exchange felt important; it seemed to be tugging at my inner compass—like it wanted me to know that these moments were hinting at an answer to my bigger questions.

After poking around the Hudson Valley for several days, it became clear that people loved Rose Hill Farm for its beauty and abundance of ferments, from cider to wine. It was a cold and rainy day when I drove there, and the winemaker immediately chucked me down the stairs of the cellar where some local wine people were tasting through barrels.

Sam, the assistant winemaker who had recently moved from California, flipped open a barrel of “just because” wine, a smorgasbord of grapes that she combined to satisfy her curiosity. These are sometimes the best wines.

When I inquired around town who was making interesting wine, one answer I got again and again was natural winemaker Malou Despoux. Her label, Accordion Wines, is a garage potion with dreams of expanding to an estate and perhaps a co-op. Despoux, who is from Roussillon, invited me to her home where we navigated cats and babies, tasting wines made from grapes I’d never encountered before like DeChaunal, Cayuga, and Noiret. I’m personally really excited to watch Despoux grow and hope I get to continue to write about her throughout my career.

My first clothing swap

My long-time friend who hosted me, Miranda, scheduled her annual clothing swap for the week that I was there—what a gal. For about 5 hours, ladies and femmes opened the front door, large totes flung behind them.

The totes were then turned upside down over the growing pile of clothes in the center of Miranda’s living room and we ping-ponged back and forth between that and the snack table. Next to the popcorn and labneh, I placed a few bottles from my local winery visits. I poured tastes for everyone and we moved around the central pile of clothes, which offered a social flow that reminded me of a bonfire.

Clothing swaps are an awesome form of mutual aid. They keep clothes out of landfills, boost morale, and strengthen friendships. I drove back to N.C. with a contractor bag full of new stuff.

Being able to add the element of local wines to this communal moment felt magical and during the swap, my inner compass was dropping hints again. This year you can catch me chasing that feeling.

This discriminatory movement which is born from Christian extremism is not a demonstration of a misunderstanding of how my safety is achieved or how gender is defined. Instead, it is a glaringly obvious demonstration of a pattern that has existed throughout history: that for oppressive regimes to succeed in controlling a population, those in power have to convince an entire demographic that they are not safe and that the group that they wish to exploit, enslave, or eradicate is a threat to them.

They do this through propaganda which dehumanizes the demographic they wish to “other” and often use pseudo-science as a tool. As women who grew up in a generation with books and endless educational content about gender, sex, and extremist movements, we have the capacity to know this and see it for what it is. In other words, we do not have to be trans to understand.

Understanding this keeps us safe. Gender is a social construct, and there are more than two. This is a fascinating topic to study, and doing so will teach you things you probably didn’t know about your body. Transphobia and misogyny are two sides of the same coin, and we are all less safe in a society that gives cis men power, control, and unchecked wealth. There are plenty of cis men who understand this; it isn’t an admission of fault to acknowledge it, but rather a step towards accountability.

Want to learn? Here are some resources, articles, and books.

• What is intersex?

• Trump executive order declaring only ‘two sexes’ gets the biology wrong, scientists say

• Trump’s ‘Biological Truth’ Executive Order is Not Based in Biology or Truth

• The gender-binary cycle: the perpetual relations between a biological-essentialist view of gender, gender ideology, and gender-labelling and sorting

• What is Transmisogyny?

• Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

• Beyond The Gender Binary

• Understanding Nonbinary People: How to Be Respectful and Supportive

As a white woman with U.S. citizenship, I am not made safer by the deportation of undocumented people in my community. It has been shown again and again that immigrants in the U.S. commit fewer crimes than those born here. I’m scared for the undocumented people who work in my industry and live in my community.

I’m proud that my country is often a place where people can seek refuge and it’s one of the few things I love about living here. I can’t imagine the nightmare it would take to make me actually leave my country and I hope I never have to know what that’s like. For so many people around the world who do know what that’s like, I’m happy to have them in my neighborhood and in my industry.

The predominant narrative in ag media right now, that our already-fragile food system will cripple in the wake of mass deportations, is true, and it points to another major issue: our food system relies on an exploited workforce that only the most desperate are willing to enter and endure. In agriculture and the restaurant industry, our undocumented workforce deserves protections beyond the threat of deportation.

There are more knowledgeable writers speaking on this than me, but I want to make this statement so that my readers understand that this is a part of Wine Is Confusing. There is no scenario where violence on marginalized communities makes me safer. Yesterday a bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, asked in the softest, kindest voice possible for the president to have mercy on LGBTQIA+ communities and undocumented communities and he took to Twitter to accuse her of using a “nasty tone”. Every woman should recognize what’s happening there because we’ve all been accused of attacking a man for speaking firmly or even politely after bringing attention to a problematic issue. Shortly after, Rep. Mike Collins tweeted that Budde, who was born in New Jersey, should be deported.

So just so we’re clear, not in this lady’s name.

This tripped-up parent trap of a fact is pervasive in wine. It’s the kind of thing that makes sommeliers rip their hair out—a long history of making and naming wine combined with naming and then conquering and then renaming land has resulted in the most gnarled family tree—one would have to be at least a little crazy to climb it. Luckily, there’s a breathtaking view at the top. Names are irreversibly tied to place, as we are. They are the keeper of our histories, the mantle on which our story is dusted, and like the slightest slope, even the small differences are significant.

I was reminded of this sitting in the winery and future tasting room of dear native grapes, in the Catskill Mountains with Alfie Alcántara, who started the winery with his wife, Deanna Urciuoli in 2019. I was holding a glass of my first-ever taste of Delaware, which Alcántara had pulled from a stainless steel barrel. After taking a sip of the golden potion, my mind thought of Alsace, France, and I snapped a photo telling Alcántara, “I will remember this wine for the rest of my life.”

Sometimes, upon tasting a wine, my mind will curve any food-related descriptors and instead pull up memories of a feeling I had when drinking wine in the past. I can’t say the Delaware tasted much like the wines of Alsace, but it sure did bring up the mood. I only wrote a few words in my notebook, bright, elegant, orange…Alsace. The wine, still in the midst of fermentation, felt complete. Even Alcántara was surprised by it.

The grape, being new to me, prompted a flood of questions: was Delaware first found in Delaware? I asked Alcántara. No. Was it named for the Delaware River, which begins just 30 minutes south of where we’re sitting? No. Is the river named for the state? No. It became clear I had happened upon some grist for the Wine Is Confusing mill.

In his book, Grapes Of The Hudson Valley, J. Stephen Casscles, local grape historian and Alcántara’s mentor, documents Delaware and notes some remaining questions and debate around its parentage. This is common for wine grapes, which breed like bunnies in the field, on a train, or a plane—they’ll do it anywhere. Early colonizers brought plenty of European grapevines with them to the East Coast, and their grapes crossed with the many native grapes here, and then their offspring crossed with each other, leading us to this very gnarly family tree I’m about to hoist you up.

There are a handful of theories about Delaware’s origins, but the consensus is that the grape itself was named after the town of Delaware, Ohio. This isn’t necessarily where it originated, but it is where the first person tried to figure out what it was. Before then, it was also known as Heath or Powell throughout Ohio. The city and county of Delaware, Ohio are named for the Delaware Tribe of Indians, although the city’s location is actually on the ancestral lands of the Mingo people.

To climb a little higher up this tree (the fire department is on its way), the Delaware people are arguably more accurately referred to as the Lenape people, although the name is used interchangeably and often without protest. Delaware was the name given to the Lenape by early colonists, who apparently couldn’t understand what their actual name was—their historical territory covers the state of Delaware, eastern Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Delaware the state was named for the Delaware Bay, which was named for an early governor of the Colony of Virginia, Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr.

The Delaware River’s original name is given by the Lenape: “Lenape Wihittuck,” which means “the rapid stream of the Lenape” and the Delaware Bay was called “Poutaxat.” British explorers and colonists went on to call the Delaware Bay “Saint Christopher’s Bay”, “Niew Port May”, and “Godyns Bay” until it was given its present name by De La Warr in the 16th century. As for the grape, we know it’s a labrusca hybrid, which tells us it has roots in North America, but the jury is still out on whether it has European parentage, too.

Alcántara poured me a second wine from Delaware. This one was a salmon color and floral, and reminded me a little of Muscadine from North Carolina. Later, I followed Alcántara through his vineyard to see the 2 and 5-year-old Delaware vines—most of them not yielding fruit yet. Just over the Hudson Valley in the Catskills, the climate is significantly colder, the growing season shorter, and the soil is made up of glacial till that melted and carved the Catskills in the last ice age.

The dear native grapes, project is about keeping history alive, and so their vineyard is planted to antique heirloom grapes that were more commonly found before Prohibition as well as more recent hybrids like Petit Pearl, Itaska, and of course, Delaware. There are 168 acres of Delaware in New York and their vineyard makes up about 2 of those acres.

In the U.S., names are irreversibly tied to place. When those names shift, as they have many times all over the country, the name takes on a new responsibility for keeping our history alive, as do we for knowing them. I’m no authority on Native American history, but when I ask a simple question about the wine in my glass and end up at an important story about where I live and how I got here, I see how wine can be a teacher of history—it’s powers reach beyond the ability to give a good buzz.

The adage goes that “history is written by the victors,” and those of us raised in the United States should be aware that growing up within the boundaries of a global superpower means we’re sometimes subjected to history that has been re-written. Names play a major role in this rewriting. But there are little keepers of the truth all around us, unassuming stones waiting to be unturned that we can pick up and unpack the truth. And when that gets to be too much, you can just take a sip.

Technically I was already in wine country, but my move to the mountains from the Piedmont region of North Carolina was a deliberate move towards studying and researching N.C. wine—plus I managed to work full-time as a writer this year. By August, Wine Enthusiast let me write a travel guide to North Carolina’s wineries—it looks like I’m onto something! (Thank god).

Read more