My wife Katie had spent the whole weekend painting our front room, a fiddly, detail-heavy nightmare of a job, which I escaped by going off for my Channel swim training. By Sunday she was flagging. She said, openly, that she was struggling and did not feel supported, and she had a point, because, one, I am hopeless at DIY and, two, the best I can offer is cleaning and fetching... or disappearing for a swim. You really do not want me near a paintbrush anyway. She eventually got the room finished, beaten about by the the finicky bits of the walls but victorious over them, and she was flat.

So I went to the fridge for the one bottle I had been saving. I had kept it there for months, nearly six, which in the Cellier house is a record, waiting for the right moment. She questioned me first. “I thought you were saving it for something special?” I nodded, and, handing her a glass full of life and bubbles, said: “’Special’ does not always mean a celebration.” She took one sip, looked at me, and said, “this is one of the nicest champagnes I have ever had.” Truly speaking, no glass of fizz fixes a hard day but a wine made with real purpose can lift you, and this one just did.

So what was it?

It was Paradoxe, from Champagne Chavost. And yes, before anyone sniffs, Chavost is a cooperative. I know exactly what that word does to people in the trade, and how little it means to everyone else actually drinking the stuff, and I went up to visit half expecting to have my prejudices confirmed. Instead I came down the hill five hours later having had one of the most inspiring afternoons in wine I can remember: two brothers who dragged the place back from the brink, a flat refusal to add sulphur or sugar, and a whole story I have written up separately, which I would genuinely love you to read, so I have dropped the link at the bottom of this note.

This piece, though, is about the bottle that turned Katie’s weekend around.

Paradoxe is made with no added sulphur and no dosage, meaning no sugar to round off the edges. If you have ever wondered what sulphur, or SO2, actually does in a wine, and why choosing to leave it out is such a bold move, I have let Jon, the drinc. man, explain it in the short clip below.

The champagne itself. It is 12.5% ABV, which, and you will have heard me go on about this, used to be an anomaly in Champagne and is steadily becoming the norm. Paradoxe is a blend of base wines from 2019 to 2023, Chardonnay and Meunier, with no dosage at all, so it is bone dry, and yet it never tastes tart, because the fruit underneath is so ripe and rich that sugar would only get in the way. This one was disgorged in December 2025, after around two years on the lees. There is a touch of brioche from that, but Chavost is not really about the toasty, autolytic side. It is fruit-forward: ripe green apple with a little whisper of oxidised apple, a mouthfeel that is textural and rich without being sweet, coating the palate, and then a sharp little flick of acidity at the very end that, with no sugar to round it off, simply makes you reach for the next sip. It is a champagne that calls for food, in our case a simple mix of cheese and charcuterie.

At home, I should say, champagne is never only for celebration. We drink it as an aperitif, as an everyday glass, to toast a birth and to see someone off at a funeral, we drink it when we eat, or not. We open it sometimes on a Monday or a Wednesday, and certainly on a Sunday. A drop was put on my lips the day I was born, so I had a head start. Opening Paradoxe did not “hurt”, nor was there any hesitation; it was simply another champagne moment, no different from any other. I know: “posh”, “privilege”… Call me what you want, it’s just wine, folks.

Now the label, because it is the first thing you notice. It is a striking, deep blue, all wave, and if it reminds you of something, it should: it is a clear nod to Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” the most famous wave in all of art. In Chavost’s version there is a little boat riding the swell, one of their characters aboard in red trousers, holding a bottle aloft and pushing straight into the storm. A pretty straight to the point message: we make our champagne differently, we are sailing against the current, and we are not afraid of the weather, which is to say, not afraid of how the market might react. And when I mentioned “a wine made with purpose”, it goes to the name itself, Paradoxe, which comes from para, against, and doxa, the common opinion.

I think they have nailed it, the wine and the branding both. It was comfortably my favourite of the whole range, which is saying something, because it is not even the entry-level bottle. I paid around 49 euros for it. If you love champagne, and you like the idea of backing a small cooperative that is genuinely on the rise, I would get a few bottles now, before demand does what demand does to the price. And if there is a Katie in your life, flat after a hard weekend, I can think of a few better things to open.

Links you might find useful

• Champagne Chavost complete visit:

• My thoughts on Champagne’s climbing alcohol by volume (the % alcohol):

Socials

Follow Jon, the drinc. man on Instagram

Charity

drinc. supports the work of SwimTayka, a charity that teaches survival swimming to children living near water. All profits from drinc. paid subscriptions go to the charity, and I cover the Substack fees myself so every penny reaches them. Make your reading count, subscribe now.

You can also read about my journey into swimming for SwimTayka, where I will be crossing the English Channel with my friends:

Eight of them, names you will know, Berry Bros. & Rudd, The Wine Society, Waitrose, Systembolaget and others, who between them shift something like 400 million bottles a year, have formed a group convened by the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation. The pledge is simple enough: to actively build demand for wines from vineyards farmed regeneratively, and to help the foundation reach its goal of having a tenth of the world’s vineyards farmed that way by 2035.

It is a huge target, and there are a few hurdles in the way.

Demand, or the lack of an obvious one

The article puts its finger on the biggest one: demand, or rather the lack of it. Producers and growers, it says, find little or no demand for regenerative wines. Nobody is asking for them, so nobody feels safe making the leap.

Imagine if Steve Jobs or Henry Ford had thought that way. No iPhone. No motor car. You do not wait for people to ask for the thing before you build it, you build it and show them why they wanted it all along.

Alright, not a perfect analogy, because the iPhone and the car did not exist before they hit the market, whereas regenerative viticulture is already here. It just needs to be more widely adopted. And that is exactly what the commitment from these behemoth buyers represents: a shift of attention, away from conventional and too often careless production, towards something that cares about the planet, cares about the future, and, more often than not, comes with sheep.

What is regenerative wine anyway?

Sheep, yes. We all love animals, don’t we? And the sheep are a clue to the whole idea.

Let’s start with the soil, after all it’s the actual main topic. “Organic” means no synthetic chemicals. “Biodynamic” adds the lunar calendar and the preparations. “Regenerative” focuses on the outcome: it is not about what we choose not to put on the land, but whether we are actively leaving it healthier than we found it.

In practice that means keeping the soil covered and alive all year round, rather than ploughing it bare. It means treating the vineyard as one living system rather than rows of vines stood in dirt, which is where the sheep come in, along with the cover crops, the hedges, the trees, and all the insects and birds they bring with them. You will hear it called “agro-forestry”, “permaculture”, “poly-culture”; they all point the same way.

David Pearson, the former Opus One boss now running Joseph Phelps in Napa, put it better than I could, in another The Drinks Business article on the subject. When he was shown a patch of vineyard farmed this way, he had, in his words, “an epiphany: there was dark, moist soil, full of earthworms, and it smelled good, and it clumped.” Boy, I am with you! Set that against the old habit of ploughing the cover crop back in and leaving the ground bare, “so it turns into dirt, which is the dry, lifeless thing.” Living soil against dead dirt, this is the picture you need to appreciate regenerative viticulture.

And it is already happening, in very different places. At Joseph Phelps, Pearson is replanting with rootstocks that drive one deep central root and four spreading layers to chase the water, with fruit trees between every fourth and fifth vine and hedges around the edges, building vines meant to crop for a hundred years rather than be torn out every fifteen. Over in Mendoza, Terrazas de los Andes has given half its vineyard area over to native vegetation, composts its own grape skins and stems, and turns recycled pallets into nest boxes so that insect-eating birds do the pest control. No matter where it’s applied the idea of regenerative viticulture is treating vineyards like living landscapes. It is becoming a movement, and it falls to us, the buyers, to carry its message more actively.

Should you care?

Yes. And not only for the sake of the wine, but for the sake of all of us.

Marissa Dineen, whose Washington estate I wrote about recently (link below), put it in a single sentence that has stayed with me ever since I heard it. “If tomorrow we were to leave, and the vines were to be removed, then no one would know we were here.” That is the whole philosophy in one breath. You farm so gently, so cleanly, that the land could forget you were ever on it. Healthy soils. No chemicals washing down into the water. An agriculture that hands the ground on in better shape than it found it, for whoever comes next.

That is worth caring about, whether or not you ever turn the bottle over to read the back label. And it is why a pledge from eight of the world’s biggest buyers to steer us gently towards these wines is not a dry piece of trade news. It is a small, genuine piece of good news.

Which is exactly why I wanted to share it.

Links you might find useful

I mentioned Dineen’s ethos. Read more here:

The Drinks Business

Here’s the article that moved me this week: https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2026/10/wine-buyers-pledge-to-drive-demand-for-regenerative-wine/

Socials

Follow Jon, the drinc. man on Instagram

Charity

drinc. supports the work of SwimTayka, a charity that teaches survival swimming to children living near water. All profits from drinc. paid subscriptions go to the charity, and I cover the Substack fees myself so every penny reaches them. Make your reading count, subscribe now.

You can also read about my journey into swimming for SwimTayka, where I will be crossing the English Channel with my friends:

It is called Divin, spelled D-I-V-I-N, which an English reader might say as “Divine.” A French de-alcoholised sparkling at 0.5% ABV, made from Chenin Blanc, the Loire’s great white grape, known as Steen down in South Africa. I bought it for sixteen pounds at the busy little Mark’s by my Elizabeth line stop in Woolwich. “Why” some of you may ask, well it’s because the bottle is beautiful. Warm brown glass, which I prefer to green, a long elegant neck, and the word Divin smart and modern, then, in a gorgeous hand-drawn font with “Grande Réserve” below it. Obviously this last touch sounds more like a marketing coup rather than an actual “touche spéciale” made. All that said, I buy with my eyes like most of us. Back home, we had gone three days without wine, rare in our house, and I fancied keeping the good behaviour going, so I thought, let’s try one without alcohol for once.

Then I opened it. The pressure was low, more frizzante than Champagne, which barely matters, and in the glass it looked real nice: a pretty pale gold with delicate bubble fizzing their way up to a light rim of delicate white mousse. I do understand the appeal of a drink that looks like what everyone else at the table is having. But the first taste was like licking freshly cut lemon wedges. Sharp as… You know the face you pull when you get that piece of lime after you shot the harsh cheap tequila on a College night? That was me, and Katie, my wife, without the party. There was an oxidative, bruised-apple note underneath, a touch savoury, almost umami, and none of it pulled together, the oxidation and the searing acidity heading in complete opposite directions. It is very rare that I pour a bottle away. It has to be properly off or faulty. This one was just terribly bad, and it went.

What frustrates me is that it was not made carelessly. The method is actually serious: it begins as a real Loire Chenin, and before any alcohol is removed, around 40% of the base wine is aged in oak. The alcohol then comes out not by the blunt reverse osmosis many producers use, but by gentle low-temperature vacuum distillation, which drops the boiling point so the alcohol lifts away without, in theory, wrecking the aromatics. The catch is what that does to balance. Take the alcohol out and the acidity shoots up, so producers add back a little concentrated grape must to soften it. Add too little and it is unbearable, as here. Add more and it tips too sweet. DIVIN, I think, was chasing that balance and awfully missed it.

If you have ever wondered how the alcohol gets into wine in the first place, and therefore what is being stripped back out, I have let Jon, the drinc. man, explain fermentation in the short clip below.

Being type 1 diabetic, I read back labels by habit, and, funnily enough this one reads like a food product with a complete table and all: 16 calories and 2.5 grams of sugar per 100ml, all of it from that added must. So what you are really sipping is lightly sweetened grape juice with bubbles, beautifully dressed. At sixteen pounds, more than a decent Prosecco, that is a lot to ask.

Now, I am not here to wage war on the whole category. Plenty of people have good reasons to skip the alcohol, and I would genuinely welcome more well-made options for them. My one plea is honesty. When you strip the alcohol out of wine, you have made something new, so give it its own name and its own shelf rather than borrowing wine’s. Call it what it is, price it for what it is, and I will happily support it.

As a wine buyer would I consider this bottle? No. Would I buy the “flacon”? Honestly, yes. Just put a good drop inside and you would have a killer brand, because the name and the packaging really are that good. But the liquid, this time, was a no-no.

And every single winemaker I have met in Washington State cares too. It matters more in Washington than almost anywhere, because out there there is barely any rain, and nearly everything depends on irrigation. So this part is about exactly that, the water and the sustainability, and it leads us up to one small, high-quality, sustainability-minded AVA that lives and breathes the subject: Rattlesnake Hills. But before we climb up there, we start lower down, at Airfield.

A full night’s sleep

The morning after the visit and dinner at Hedges, Katie and I woke up properly rested for the first time since we had landed in Washington. We had gone to bed around midnight, which by the standards of this trip was practically early, and, I will admit, a little drunk. Katie slept through to the 7am alarm. I woke naturally at six, which is about an hour after my usual time, except six here is not six in the UK, so a full six hours of deep sleep was a real gift. And the best of it: neither of us had the so dreaded post wine-session-party-headache. That, my friends, is what biodynamic and organic wine, plus a decent amount of water through the evening, does for you. It helped that we had been drinking some of the best wines of the whole trip, and when I say best I do not only mean the quality or the price tag, I mean the way they are made and what’s added, or rather not added in this instance, to it.

We checked out of the La Quinta, after another passable breakfast, and yet another coffee so sharp, it set my teeth on edge. There was not a single good hotel breakfast, nor coffee, on this entire trip so far, but at the prices we were paying, you take what you get. We then pointed the car at Prosser, about forty minutes away where we would meet the owner of Airfield, Marcus Miller.

Airfield Estate Winery

We arrived at 9am, half an hour earlier than expected, so we had a little drive around Prosser. It is a small town on the Yakima River, the seat of Benton County, sitting right in the heart of the Yakima Valley, the oldest AVA in the state. Prosser likes to call itself the birthplace of Washington wine, and it has a fair claim: this is where, back in the 1930s, a researcher called Walter Clore, later named by the state the Father of Washington Wine, began working out which grapes this irrigated desert could actually grow, eventually trialling well over a hundred varieties at the agricultural research station that has stood here since 1919. Water is written into the place. Lloyd Miller, the man behind the Airfield story and great-grand father of Marcus who we would meet shortly that day, helped found the local irrigation canal, and without schemes like it there would be no vines, likely no orchards of apple and cherry, no hops; basically nothing at all. Today the town is ringed by every bit of that, with about thirty wineries, and it even gathers a dozen of their tasting rooms into one walkable spot called Vintners Village.

Which, naturally, is where we went. Airfield has a big tasting room at Vintners Village, so that is what I had cheerfully typed into the sat nav. They, meanwhile, were expecting us at the actual winery. Classic me, after a night of one too many. A quick call to my contact, Alexandra, who manages the relationship with several of the Washington wineries Perfect Cellar imports, and we were redirected and back on track.

“BANG”

Being half an hour late, after arriving half an hour early, meant we just missed Marcus, who had a commitment with another group, from Arizona if I remember rightly, so the plan became to fold us in with them. But it turned out brilliantly, because waiting there for us was Brad. Brad was the very first person from Washington State I ever met, at Wine Paris in February 2026. I had turned up in my beloved throwback Seahawks cap, the old original franchise’s logo, and the night before we met, the Seahawks had won the Super Bowl. Perfect timing. We congratulated each other, and he was genuinely surprised to find a Frenchman living in London who followed the Seahawks, convinced nobody over there had even heard of them. Seeing Brad again at Airfield was like running into an old friend.

He walked us through the whole lineup Perfect Cellar imports, which spans two brands. One is Airfield Estates, the other is Lone Birch. Lone Birch is the more affordable range, six wines, all single varietal except for one red blend, honest, straightforward, properly good drinking wine. By the time you add shipping, ABV and duty, it still lands at just under twenty pounds a bottle, so not the cheapest, but worth every penny, and members get it for less. The name has a lovely story. There is a single birch tree standing alone in the middle of the vineyard, planted generations ago by the Miller family’s great-grandfather, a man who cared deeply about the land he acquired. Brad pointed it out to me in the distance as he told me, both of us holding a glass of the Cab. “That lone birch, there, is the one on the label.”

Then there is Airfield itself. The whole thing began in 1941, when Lloyd Miller leased part of his land to a company that was hunting for a spot in the Yakima Valley to build a flying school. Through the war it became a training field, where more than 500 Army Air Corps pilots learned to fly on open-cockpit biplanes, practising aerobatics and evasive manoeuvres before going off to war. When it was all over, the buildings were declared surplus and put up for auction, and Lloyd Miller, the only bidder, bought them back for a single dollar, turning the place into the family farm. The grapes came later: Don Miller planted the first wine vines around the old runways in 1968, his son Mike Miller founded Airfield Estates as a winery in 2005, and today it is run by Mike’s son Marcus. It is a big operation, one of the larger wineries Perfect Cellar brings into the UK, leaning towards an approachable, easy-to-love style, with a few serious, more expensive wines alongside. They import pretty much anything with the plane on the label, the single varietals above all, the Cabernets, the Merlots, the Chardonnay. Only the sparkling wine was left alone, because traditional method sparkling wine is a nightmare to sell into the UK, but the still wines are the point.

Brad told us these stories over a few glasses, then took us round the facilities. By now this was our fourth winery of the trip, and Katie, bless her, had reached her fill of cellars, so she wandered the grounds taking photos and videos while I geeked out and talked business with Brad. She has built a lot of the footage you have seen in these pieces, and I cannot thank her enough for that.

“BANG!”

After we waved goodbye to Brad and headed to Rattlesnake Hills, Katie asked me a question. “So,” she said, and she always opens an important question with a “so”, “we visited four wineries. They all have their own stories, but everything else is the same. Same press, same barrels, same way of making wine. How do you decide which ones to work with?”

I joked that the ones who send the best spreadsheet get my attention. For context, I need clear pricing and the key details fast, so I can gauge whether a wine has a place in the ruthless, busy UK market. Then comes the story: finding connections with UK culture, and brands that speak to its people. For example, the UK has a strong bond with wartime aviation, the Spitfire above all, and Airfield, through its history and branding, connects those dots. But also the people. Meet Brad once and you are sold.

I smiled and just said: “There is more to wine than wine.”

Up to Rattlesnake Hills

The drive up into Rattlesnake Hills starts dry, vines and scrub, but as you approach you start to see hops for the beer, as well as apple and cherry trees mixed in among the vineyards. The higher you go, the more vines and the fewer orchards, and the more “Sustainable WA” and “Salmon-Safe” signs you spot staked at the roadside. Dineen sits at about 365m (1,200 feet).

When you arrive, it is lovely, and it feels different from the grand places we had seen so far: traditional American farm buildings, smaller, more boutique and warmer. Two women were running the tasting room, setting it up for a coach load of tourists due in shortly, and they could not have been friendlier.

Dineen is a proper family story. It was started in 2001 by Pat and Lanie Dineen, on what had been an old apple orchard. Pat had grown up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and spent some forty years in banking, and when he retired he went back to his farming roots, pulling out the apple trees and planting vines in their place, the first block named Catherine’s Vineyard, after his mother. A year later they took on a bigger site, built the winery in 2003 and opened the tasting room in 2007, and today the estate runs to about a hundred acres on a hilltop near the town called Zillah, looking south towards Mount Adams and Mount Rainier. The whole place wears its history, right down to the label, which carries “Grandpa’s Black Truck,” a 1950 Chevrolet half-ton that was a fixture on that Wisconsin dairy farm, a nod to Pat’s father. And the very same truck sits parked on the estate, so the picture on the bottle is standing a few yards from where you taste.

Running it all now is Marissa Dineen, the founders’ daughter and the second generation here. Her own road took a detour first: she went into finance and lived in London for a long stretch before coming home to take over, becoming full owner in 2022. She has a hugely likeable way about her, warm on the spot, with an attention to detail you feel the moment you arrive. She greeted us, we chatted, and then we met Brian.

“BANG!”

Brian Mackey is Australian but I could not tell at first as his Aussie accent seemed to have dimmed a little and been replaced by a North American one. He is the winemaker at Dineen, recently arrived from the behemoth that is Chateau Ste. Michelle where he spent the last 7 years out of 13 as Red Wine Head Winemaker. He has gone from a place that pulls wine from vineyards all over the state, every grape, every style and every price point, to something tiny and exact, focused on Rattlesnake Hills with a few select corners of the wider Columbia Valley. He wanted the expression of one terroir, and we had some of the best conversations of the trip with him. With Marissa, meanwhile, has this wonderful knack for explaining the land, the altitude and their impact on winemaking in images anyone can picture, here’s a clip from our conversation.

Then we walked into the vineyard and met Patrick Rawn. Patrick is the brother of Matt Rawn, whom I met in Wine Paris, both of Two Mountain, and where Matt leans to the winery and sales side, Patrick is the pure farmer, and an astonishing well of knowledge. I could have stood in that vineyard listening to him for a very long time. Like Marissa, but with fewer analogies, he can take the genuinely complicated parts of growing grapes and the specifics of Rattlesnake Hills and make them land simply. What struck me most is how it all works: the Rawn brothers actually farm the grapes for Dineen. They buy fruit from one another, make their own wines, look after each other’s vineyards. As I keep saying, the essence of wine is the people, and the way they work together, and here it was, right in front of me, a real cohesion between neighbours.

“BANG!”

Water, carried down from the mountains

We spent a good while in the oldest block owned by the Rawns brothers, one among the first vines planted in this part of the region, and Patrick explained the trellising system they use and, more importantly, the water. Irrigation in Washington State is more than necessary, it is everything, as without it there wouldn’t be any orchards, hops or vines. There are two ways to carry water to the vineyards: you can either pump it from one of the rivers in the valleys, which is not exactly gentle on nature, or you can use gravity and get the melting ice waters down from the nearby Cascades Mountains. Standing there, then being driven in the vineyards by Patrick made a lot of sense on how the latter works.

“BANG!”

Long before vines went in, this whole valley was fruit-and-hops country, apples, cherries and the hop fields you still pass on the way up, and these very slopes were orchards before anyone thought to plant a vine. For instance, Dineen’s own hilltop was an apple orchard until Marissa’s father, Pat, replanted it to vines in 2001. The water itself comes from a system built during the New Deal, the program Roosevelt put in place to get America back to work after the 1929 crash, the same era that gave us the Bonneville Dam I wrote about in Part 3. Alongside the dams and the power lines, they built irrigation canals. Back then the pumps were too expensive to run, so the whole thing was designed around gravity instead, carrying water down from the Cascade Mountains, clean mountain meltwater, in reservoirs then spread in canals that run higher up, above the vineyards. Stand up there and look back and you can see it: the canals cut across the hillside, and above the water line nothing is planted, no vines at all, because the vineyards only begin below the canal. Where in the past turning the tap would be a manual task, Marissa told us she now runs an AI-assisted drip system that works out how much each vine needs and simply drips it in, mostly a boost after winter when the buds first show, then again around véraison, when the grapes turn and ripen and most importantly an intelligent way to avoid wasting water.

Now, if you wonder what “véraison” is, watch this:

And this is where sustainability stops being a sticker on a label. Dineen are Salmon-Safe, which means the chemicals they use, or rather do not use, never wash off into the water and down into the river. Remember from Part 2 and Part 3 how finely balanced the salmon are, how a small change in the water, its temperature, its chemistry, can wipe out a run. This is the same story, upstream. Patrick drove us along the canals in his enormous Ram pickup, the kind of truck I have gawped at all over this trip, higher than my old Volkswagen van and absurdly powerful, and from up there you look out over the whole of Rattlesnake Hills falling away beneath you. It is stunning. You understand at once why anyone would be happy to farm here, hard and dry as it is.

“BANG!”

I had to ask, and I bet you want to know too.

All through the vineyard there were these sudden, very loud bangs. We had heard them at Airfield, and now again up here on Rattlesnake Hills. They are propane cannons that scare the birds off the grapes. Patrick, with a little smile in the corner of his mouth, explained that you never quite know which row the cannon is hiding in, so, “when you hear the click, you have about five seconds to run.” Handy to know.

Two Mountain, and why importing two neighbours

After the vineyard we made a quick stop at Two Mountain, another winery we are delighted to be bringing into the UK, and yes, right next door to Dineen. The name comes from the two peaks that stand over this whole area, Mount Adams and Mount Rainier, both visible from up in the Rattlesnake Hills. Quite frankly, when I first came across the wines at Wine Paris, I assumed it was because Pat and Matt are two tall, imposing guys. I like both reasons for the name. Two Mountain is another proper family story, this time from a different angle. The land has been in the Schmidt family since 1951, when it was orchards, and the estate vineyard, Copeland Vineyard, named after the family matriarch, went in around 2000. These days the place is run by two brothers, Matt and Patrick Rawn, who took it on remarkably young after their uncle passed away, Matt making the wine and Patrick, the very man who just drove us along the canals, looking after the vineyards. Today the estate runs to more than two hundred acres, and in 2020 they became the first winery in all of Washington State to be certified under RULES for Sustainable Winegrowing.

Pat put it to me plainly, standing in the vineyard: “Sustainability for us, as Rattlesnake winemakers, is not a marketing exercise. We created the rules ourselves.” And you feel it. The growers here have banded together as The Hills, a community of family estates, Copeland, DuBrul, Dineen, Elephant Mountain, Sheridan and more, all sharing a single AVA and a single standard. Some of their vineyards were among the first in the whole state to be certified for sustainability, a few of them planted as far back as the seventies and eighties. The land itself does half the work: a rare bedrock called the Ellensburg Formation, millions of years older than the basalt that sits under most of Washington, shallow nitrogen-poor soils that force the vines to struggle, and a seam of calcium carbonate the locals call Caliche that keeps the acidity fresh late into the season. Up here, sustainability is not a sticker. It is written into the rock. They have also put together a thorough website describing the land and its diversity, with a cool interactive map that shows you just how close the estates sit to one another. I have left the link at the bottom of this article.

So why is Perfect Cellar bringing in both of them? Because they are two neighbours whose wines are completely different. If I had to compare Washington wines with a more familiar region, I would pick California, as it is the most obvious one. This is my own view, so bear with me, but I believe California gives you very little terroir expression. It is mostly a winery expression: the oak, the brightness of the fruit, the concentration, the punch-downs, all the tools used to shape a style, so that where the grapes actually come from matters less. You see it in the success of wines like Orin Swift or Robert Mondavi. Washington State is the opposite, a place where incredible care goes into nurturing healthy land, and into capturing the complex variations you find from one part of a hill to the next. So in the end, two neighbouring Rattlesnake Hills wineries can taste like two very different places, and that is the whole point I want to make here.

Lunch and the Seahawks bucket

We picked up a few bottles at Two Mountain for lunch and headed back to Dineen, where Marissa has a beautiful house her parents built, looking out over the valley. She had laid a lovely table, good colours, and then, in the middle of it, a bucket. A flashy green-and-blue Seattle Seahawks bucket as a spittoon, with that fierce bird staring out. She knew I was a fan, who doesn’t by now! But the plates also carried the London skyline, a wink to her time in London and, probably, to our visit. That is the attention to detail I mentioned earlier in this piece; she just knows how to treat people. The food was also carefully picked, proper sandwiches the Italian way with thick ciabatta bread and plenty of fresh ingredients inside, along with lovely home made salads. Besides Pat’s wines, she also made a small selection of hers.

Because wine is not everything, we talked a lot about the American culture and spent some time on sport; likely my favourite subject after fermented grape juice. Over lunch Katie and I discovered college football. They were all talking about the Washington Huskies game coming up on Sunday with such passion, and it turned out Katie and I were going. They described the tailgate parties, and then the sailgate parties, because you can arrive at the stadium by boat, and we were hooked. Husky Stadium, home of the Washington Huskies, holds around 70,000, bigger than the Emirates back home, and it sits right on the edge of Lake Washington, so fans moor their boats and party on the water before kick-off. In fact, we could even find Marissa over there. If you want a glimpse at the sail-gates, watch this:

The Washington State wine identity crisis

Until now I have not mentioned Brian much, even though he had been with us the whole time and proved a real source of knowledge, complementing Patrick’s and Marissa’s. Out in the vineyards, and later over lunch, he kept questioning whether Washington had an identity at all, and if so, what it could be.

Think about it. Virginia is pushing Cabernet Franc as its signature red. New York has made its choice and adopted the same grape. California long ago planted its flag in Cabernet Sauvignon. Oregon is Pinot Noir. Let’s not talk about Europe. So what is Washington’s grape? Most of the wines we tasted on this trip were single varietals, and every one of them was superb. So were the Bordeaux-style blends, the Super Tuscan-style blends, and even the Hermitaging blends (that’s Cab and Syrah). Take Merlot: Brad reckons it is the grape that shines brightest here, and having tasted Airfield’s Merlots, beautiful beasts, I cannot argue. Or Cabernet Sauvignon, except that California owns the word “Cab.” Or Syrah, on the same latitude as the Rhône, and the ones I tasted were spot on, often a gorgeous, violet-scented expression of the grape for roughly half the price you would pay in France, because that is what Washington does: excellent quality-to-price. It is also true that a few publications have leaned towards Syrah lately, including the July edition of Decanter, where both Hedges and Two Mountain got a mention. I will not dwell on the whites too much, but, surprisingly, Washington makes killer Rieslings and plays with residual sugar as masterfully as the Germans do. Abeja, too, has made an iconic Chardonnay, and I saw the grape pretty much everywhere we went, though always with a Grenache Blanc lurking nearby on the tasting flights.

At one point I paused, took a minute to bring back the last four days, all my mental tasting notes, all the knowledge gathered through the trip and the visits, and said, “What if your identity is simply that you can master anything?” I watched Brian’s eyes light up. This is a man who, thanks to all those years working with every grape under the sun, is about as close to a master of Washington as you will find, and he agreed completely. Why would Washington squeeze itself into one grape, and risk denying all the others, when it can make the whole lot superbly?

My own belief is that Washington’s identity is its versatility. Its refusal to be boxed into one grape or one style. These are different people, with different approaches, on different terroirs, all pulling towards a shared standard of quality and sustainability, and working together to get there. To hide all of that behind a single-varietal label would be one of the biggest mistakes they could make, because the market is evolving. I have written before that I believe the future of fine wine is in the US, with Washington at the top, then New York, Oregon and Virginia. I leave California out, because to me it is too European in its abundance, and I have yet to be convinced it can do small-plot, site-specific precision at a fair price. Like in Bordeaux, the little producers who care are often disregarded to the benefit of the larger Châteaux.

The single-varietal way of selling wine will not last. It will linger in supermarkets, and with the last of the drinkers who were trained to shop by grape. But the younger ones, the Millennials and Gen Z coming up behind, are looking for wines, and for the story and the people around them, not for varietals alone. The grape is one element, not the whole thing. You cannot define a winery, a winemaker, or a whole region by a single variety. And little by little, that is exactly what will fade. Perhaps, after all, the Europeans who manage to sell wine while hiding the monocépage they are confined to, bound as they are by restrictive rules and ageing traditions (yes, I am thinking of Burgundy here), will enjoy a massive comeback in the years to come; after all who knew there is Chardonnay in Chablis?

To me, Washington State, more than anywhere, can deliver what comes next. Because they can make the best of any other country’s styles, from the Rhône to the Barossa Valley via Mendoza. They have even mastered Riesling, and that is no easy fit. If anything, only one state can feel safe against the rise of Washington’s future dominance: Oregon.

“We simply can’t grow decent Pinot Noir here in Washington,” I was told more than once on this trip.

Back to Seattle, to settle

We arrived in western Seattle, in Queen Anne, where we parked the car and settled in for a few days. Visiting the city was marvellous: so dynamic, so wine-y, so sporty. Sadly, we never managed to find Marissa at the Huskies game towards the end of our holiday, which would have been a lovely way to round off the trip. That said, we met some lovely people, like Ryn, who runs the tastings at the Browne estate tasting room in Pioneer Square. Browne’s style is more opulent than what we tasted in the Hills or on Red Mountain. I could push it further and describe the Walla Walla style as punchier, fuller-bodied wines with higher alcohol, though always with that lovely primary-fruit expression kept in check by balanced oak. As I write this piece, Ryn is in Champagne, visiting for the first time. Call it luck, destiny or fate, but what are the odds she would meet a Champenois, of all people, in Seattle?

The flight back, thankfully, was less eventful than the journey out. I sat in the plane, my brain full of ideas and knowledge. I had lived what I had spent the past eighteen months reading, watching and learning. After meeting the people, understanding their struggles and discovering their ethos, after tasting their wines and sharing their meals, my conclusion stands firm: the State has a strong case to become a leading wine region in the years to come. My last note to all of them is this: keep it real, as you already do. Keep it simple, when you can. Keep it accessible, as you already are. Thank you for having us.

No cancellations, no chaos. Just unlimited, mass produced and conventional Champagne on the plane.

I surely would have preferred a biodynamic Washington State Cab.

Links you might find useful

Wine

• Airfield Estate: https://www.airfieldwines.com/

• Dineen Vineyards: https://dineenvineyards.com/

• Two Mountain Winery: https://www.twomountainwinery.com/

• The Rattlesnake Hills Collective: https://thehillswa.org/

• Browne Family Vineyards: https://www.brownefamilyvineyards.com/

Socials

Follow Jon, the drinc. man on Instagram

Charity

drinc. supports the work of SwimTayka, a charity that teaches survival swimming to children living near water. All profits from drinc. paid subscriptions go to the charity, and I cover the Substack fees myself so every penny reaches them. Make your reading count, subscribe now.

You can also read about my journey into supporting SwimTayka, where I will be crossing the English Channel with my friends:

If you missed the first days of this trip, you can catch up here:

I have been drinking the Upper Five Vineyard 2023 Tempranillo from Vincent Wine Company, in Oregon. Yes, you read that right: “Zee” great red grape of Spain, grown in the Willamette Valley. I can already hear the comment coming: why on earth are you drinking a Tempranillo from Oregon, and not a Pinot Noir? Keep reading, you’ll see.

As you may know, Tempranillo is the backbone of Spain’s two most famous reds, Rioja, which tends to be lighter, fresher and marked by its time in oak, and Ribera del Duero, which is bigger, riper and bolder, often with more alcohol and more muscle. Most of us drink one or the other and never think to look further. That habit, to my mind, is a very European way of consuming wine, and it is one the so-called New World happily ignores.

Subscribe now

That is what I love about this wine. In Europe, the appellation system tells you what you may plant and where, which is wonderful for tradition and terrible for curiosity. It is very likely part of what is driving the rise of wines made outside the appellations in Europe if you ask me; an aging system not in line with trends, demand and the will of our young winemakers to experiment. Thankfully, Oregon, like many producing regions outside Europe, has no such rules. So when Vincent, originally from California and shaped by a lot of travelling through Europe, found a grower willing to plant Tempranillo in the Willamette Valley, there was nothing to stop him making it. He does the same trick with his red Pinot Gris, which he calls “Rouge”, made the way they do it in Friuli, in northern Italy. The man follows the idea, not the rulebook. And thank goodness, because this wine is bloody good in its own right.

In the glass, it does something I did not expect. It has the lighter structure of a Rioja, at 13% ABV, but the flavour profile of a Ribera del Duero, which is a genuinely mind-bending combination. There is almost no oak showing, so instead of wood flavours you get graphite, that pencil-shavings note I love, then a gentle lift of black pepper that gives a little kick without any heat, and then a wall of fresh, forward fruit. It is dry, medium-bodied, and the winemaker’s hand is barely visible, because Vincent’s whole approach is to get out of the way and let the grapes speak. It helps that 2023 was a lovely year in the Willamette Valley: a cool, wet spring gave way to one of the warmest (the third warmest on record, I was told) and driest summers the valley has seen, ripening the fruit fully while keeping everything clean and healthy. The vintage is widely rated very good to exceptional, with ripe but balanced fruit and the acidity to keep it fresh, and you can taste exactly that here.

Then there is the bottle, Bordeaux-shaped, also found in Rioja and Ribera del Duero, with one of Vincent’s signature labels. Those flowers and mushrooms on the front are not there to tell you what is in the glass, but to tell you where it comes from. Every single one is a flower or fungus you would actually find growing in Oregon, and I think it is a lovely idea, a wine that carries Nature’s ledger on its label, and it makes the bottle a genuinely elegant gift.

It is not a cheap wine, selling for just under £50 on www.perfectcellar.com, but it is a small-production, single-plot bottle, and it is worth the attention. This is, hands down, my favourite red in Vincent’s range. If you are someone who loves Rioja and Ribera and thinks you know Tempranillo, this is the bottle that will make you look up from the glass and think for a while. Who knows, it could also be a conversation starter, a shared journey through taste and feeling, toying with your understanding of Tempranillo until it all makes sense. Because wine, in the end, is about exploration, not drinking the same thing forever. The last time I said that, I was telling you about an orange wine made by an American in Austria. This time it is a Spanish grape made by an American in Oregon. I promise there is a pattern here, and it is a good one.

The drive took about an hour. We arrived in Kennewick, which is, like everywhere we had been so far, a clean, low-slung, flat town with wide roads. We did not stay long; shortly after checking in, an Uber came to collect us. It had been arranged by Shea, the Global Brand Ambassador for Hedges Family Estate. I had met Shea in London a few months before the trip to WA, and my first question to him was, “How do I pronounce your first name?” I know, not glamorous, but as a Frenchman, not every name and sound comes naturally.

It is pronounced “Shay,” by the way.

We got on instantly. For a start, our shared love of Seattle, him having lived there for years, me having only dreamed of the city through books and films, got us talking with real energy and passion. We also share the same vision on the importance of sustainability in growing and making wine, though mine is tempered by my position as a buyer who has to cater to many kinds of consumer, while Shea is “all in.” Dare I say, a militant.

That zeal makes complete sense once you know who he speaks for. Hedges Family Estate was started in 1987 by Tom Hedges and his French wife, Anne-Marie, who hails from Champagne. They came at wine from an unusual direction, not as growers but as négociants, buying, blending and selling other people's wine around the world, Tom having come out of the international produce trade. They bought their land on Red Mountain in 1989, built the château-style winery and home that still crowns the slope in 1995, and somewhere along the way the family, now including their children Christophe and the winemaker Sarah Hedges Goedhart, decided that how they farmed mattered as much as what they bottled.

So in 2008 they began converting the estate to biodynamics, the most demanding form of organic farming there is, starting with the home vineyard and extending it across all five of their vineyards by 2019, until the whole estate was 100% certified by Demeter, the global authority on biodynamics, in 2021. In 2015 they had already released the first Demeter-certified biodynamic Cabernet Sauvignon in Washington. Biodynamic certification rules out synthetic fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides entirely, so the vineyard is farmed as a living system rather than sprayed into submission, and the estate calls itself, fittingly, a regenerative organic winery. It makes complete sense that Shea found his home at Hedges. Their wines are exactly the kind he believes in, and the estate gives him the perfect pulpit to shout, loud and proud, about the good this way of farming does and why we need more of it.

A quick word on biodynamics, since it comes up everywhere at Hedges. It is a way of farming set out in 1924 by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, which makes it older than the organic movement it is often confused with. Austrian in origin, it runs deep in that part of the world, where plenty of people still live by the same lunar calendar, timing even a haircut or a manicure to the moon; funnily enough, that’s also the case of Ursula, my Austrian born dog walker, here in London. The idea is simple, even if some of the practices sound mystical: you treat the whole farm as one living organism, use no synthetic chemicals at all, feed the soil with natural preparations, and work the vines by the rhythms of the moon and the seasons. It has its sceptics, but a striking number of the world’s finest estates now farm this way, convinced that living soils give healthier vines and wines that taste more vividly of where they come from.

Red Mountain AVA

Let me tell you a little about where we had landed, 20 minutes after boarding the Uber. Red Mountain is the warmest corner of Washington wine country, a single slope facing southwest, barely 1,600 hectares (4,000 acres) sitting inside the much bigger Yakima Valley just outside Benton City. It climbs gently from about 150 to 460 metres (500 to 1,500 feet), and just so you are aware, it is neither especially red nor remotely a mountain, so get your hiking boots back in the shoe cabinet. When it was granted its own AVA in 2001, the fifth in the state, it was also the smallest, a title it has since handed to its little neighbour Candy Mountain. But size is not the point in Washington State. The terroir is. What really is “Terroir”?, you ask. Here it is explained in a few seconds.

What the place has is light and heat, long scorching days, cold nights, and almost no rain, under seven inches a year. And then there is the ground itself, poor, stony, short on nutrients and high in pH, which sounds like a problem and is in fact the whole secret. Starved like that, the vines have to work harder. They rein themselves in, roots digging deeper, the berries come out far smaller than they should, and small berries mean more skin for less juice, which means more of everything that matters. Add the wind that scours the slope day after day, thickening the skins further, and you end up with tannins you can almost chew. This is why Red Mountain makes the most powerful reds in the state, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah and Merlot with real muscle and a backbone of tannin that will outlive most of us.

An evening on the mountain

The estate Tom and Anne-Marie built is incredible. With the warm sun, the architecture of the property reminded me of a Provençal villa, flowery gardens and canopies raised over a path that runs from the main house down to a patio with a breathtaking view over the Yakima River Valley.

They greeted us there with a glass of piquette, which said everything about the place before anyone had spoken a word. If you are French, or you know the wine culture of my home country, you are probably wondering what on earth it was doing in my glass. Piquette is the humblest drink in wine, and I mean that as a compliment. When a winery presses its grapes it is left with the pomace, the skins, pips and pulp, which most places simply throw away. For piquette you take that spent pomace, add a little water, and let it ferment again into something light, low in alcohol and gently fizzy. For centuries it was the everyday drink of the people who actually worked the vines, the thin, refreshing thing you drank in the fields rather than the good bottles you sold. It is having a real revival now, and for exactly the reasons Hedges would hand it to you on arrival: nothing wasted, easy on the alcohol, and genuinely reviving after an hour on the road. A biodynamic estate welcoming you with a glass made from what it would otherwise throw in the bin is simply the best demonstration of their belief. A most welcomed one in my opinion, for sure.

We walked around, then sat out there with the family, Tom, Anne-Marie, Sarah, Christophe, and Shea too, a mix of French and English drifting through conversations that ranged from wine to Washington, to France itself, to terroir, and to all the little things that turn a great evening into a memorable one. I will admit it threw me at first. I struggled to find my words, caught between the two languages, but eventually I settled into it and drank some of the best wines of the whole trip.

Christophe then opened one of my favourite wines in their whole range. It is not the most expensive, nor the most complex, nor the truest expression of Red Mountain. It is Litrovin. The name gives it away: Litrovin is a one-litre bottle of what the French call a “glou-glou” wine, easy-drinking, the sort of red you can even serve chilled. It is a field blend, give or take, of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Syrah, Grenache, Counoise and Mourvèdre, sourced 90% from the Hedges Estate Vineyard and 10% from Les Gosses Vineyard on Red Mountain. It rests only briefly in neutral vessels, stainless steel and old barrels, before being bottled in that larger-than-usual format, a wine that calls for a party, a day on the beach with the family, or a game of football with friends. The Hedges are masters at getting everything right, from the things you might write off as cheap and unimportant, the piquette and the Litrovin, all the way to the wines that are, and I am being bold here but I stand by it, true challengers to the best of Bordeaux and the Rhône.

At some point Sarah peeled off to show me around the winery. She is more reserved than her brother, though she is neither shy nor one to fade into the background. She built most of her experience in Sonoma, in California, before coming home, and today she runs the winery at Hedges. She took me around herself, introduced me to a few of the harvest team, and then we climbed the stairs to their lab. Not every winery has its own laboratory on site, and she was visibly proud to have one.

As the light faded, Sarah and her father Tom slipped away to rest. Harvest is the most tiring stretch of the year, and the two of them needed their sleep before the next day’s work began. The rest of us walked down to Christophe and Maggie’s own place, Domaine Magdalena, for dinner.

Christophe and Maggie had invited us along with Shea and his wife, Jen, Reid, the head of viticulture for both Hedges and Magdalena, and of course Christophe’s two sons and his mother, Anne-Marie. We were seated at a beautifully dressed table out on the patio, facing southwest, where we could watch the sun slowly set on the day. The orange light, heightened by the dramatic Washington landscape, made the whole scene look like something a surrealist painter might have dreamed up. Christophe kept reaching for magnums, aged Hedges Red Mountain alongside some of his own terrific Magdalena Cabernets, some of the finest things I drank on the whole trip. Christophe, like most of the company around that table, is a true wine thinker. Of course we talked about the wines, but mostly we talked about the possibility of wine bouncing back. “After all, smoking cigarettes is the new cool among young folks,” he claimed. I have no clue about this, I never smoked and never found it cool, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

And then there was Katie of course. Up to this point in the trip she had held back a little in these conversations, understandably, since she is not a wine person and does not speak the language the way we professionals do, so she often shies away from it. Not at Hedges. While I was still wrestling with my Frenglish, trying to work out which language to think in, Katie simply settled in and held her own. I felt awkward; she felt at home. Later on, she spent much of the dinner deep in conversation with Reid, and came away genuinely fascinated by the man. What captivated her most was his gift for taking something as dense as vineyard management and breaking it into blocks you could actually follow. “A passionate enthusiast on all things vines,” she told me afterwards, “able to turn the science of vineyard management into something genuinely fascinating, worthy of a TED talk.” He got into tending vines young, and I found him to be the same kind of man as Christophe, a dreamer, a thinker, a grafter. By the end of the night Katie had decided I should write a whole piece on Reid alone. That is exactly why I love her, she cares so much she always comes up with the best ideas.

And somewhere in that evening I learned the story of Domaine Magdalena. It is Christophe’s own place, a project he runs with Maggie, separate from the family label but born of the same conviction. When the two of them married in 2004 they skipped the honeymoon, put every penny they had into a small piece of Red Mountain, and planted it. 1.6 hectares (4 acres), nothing more, all Cabernet Sauvignon. They farmed it organically from the start, and biodynamically, Demeter-certified, since 2011. And the part that makes the philosophy real rather than theoretical is simple: they live in it. Christophe and Maggie are raising their two sons in the middle of those four acres, so farming without chemicals was never an abstract ideal for them, it was a decision about the ground their children play on. They have let the place grow almost wild around the vines, nitrogen-fixing locust trees humming with bees, native wildflowers and sage, with any manure coming from organic dairy farms down the road. When Christophe says you cannot enhance life by spraying death, he is not quoting a brochure. He is talking about his own front garden.

A night that felt normal

Late that night, Shea and Jen dropped us at the hotel before heading home to Benton City, where they live. For the first time since we had arrived in Washington State, we had a moment that felt almost normal. We felt like we were with friends, talking about life as much as wine. We shared a meal without talking too much business, and I got a nostalgic lift listening to Julian, the eldest of Christophe and Maggie’s sons, tell me about his ambitions as an aspiring chef and how he sees hospitality. But more than anything, it was an afternoon and a dinner where we weighed up the opportunities the present offers, because there are a few, and let ourselves dream about what the future might hold.

And that is despite the hard times so many US wine producers are living through: the global drop in wine consumption, and a souring perception of the US abroad. That last one is where it hurts Hedges most. The geopolitical storm their president is stirring up has all but closed the Canadian border to them, a market where their wines were well loved. And still, the family remains positive. Just as I am seeing now in Champagne and other parts of France, the smaller players seem to be riding out the storm better than the big brands that flooded the market.

As a buyer, whether for restaurants in my past or for a wine merchant now, I have always tried to put forward the small and mid-sized players: the ones who own their craft, who understand their land, who tend their vines with real passion, who have built a healthy ecosystem. They are often the very same people you find working the fairs and the salons themselves, travelling the world to promote the handful of bottles they make, while the big players send a marketing budget instead. Buying, though, usually means responding to demand, and demand is too often driven by expensive marketing that only a few conglomerates can afford. Am I right to feel we are finally entering an era where we, buyers, will have the genuine freedom to champion true, small, honest, sustainability-minded brands without being dismissed as niche, or as outcasts? I hope so, because it’s that diversity that makes wine so special. And diversity is precisely what Washington State wine is all about.

Something we’ll explore with Dineen, Two Mountain and Airfield, further west in the Yakima Valley, in part 6 of this journey.

Subscribe now

Links you might find useful

Wine

• Hedges: https://hedgesfamilyestate.com/

• Soon available on www.perfectcellar.com. You might want to consider becoming a member to get an instant 10% off on any of your orders, and receive an email once the WA wines are live.

Socials

Follow Jon, the drinc. man on Instagram

Charity

drinc. supports the work of SwimTayka, a charity that teaches survival swimming to children living near water. All profits from drinc. paid subscriptions go to the charity, and I cover the Substack fees myself so every penny reaches them. Make your reading count, subscribe now.

You can also read about my journey into supporting SwimTayka, where I will be crossing the English Channel with my friends:

If you missed the first days of this trip, you can catch up here:

The Gherkin.

Before I take you any further, it might be worth putting some architectural context here. The Gherkin got its name from its long, tapering shape and conical top. In the few years I spent there I heard plenty of other nicknames for it too: the bullet, the cucumber, the cornichon (fitting, since that is literally French for gherkin), and, inevitably, the dildo. The tower is 180m (591ft, doing the conversion for you, my dear US-based readers, you’re welcome) and has 40 floors, 41 if you count the mezzanine at the top.

Shortly after it officially opened in 2004, it unanimously won the RIBA Stirling Prize, the most prestigious architecture prize in the UK, the “best building of the year.” And it wasn’t won on looks alone. Its façade is a diagrid, a diagonal steel exoskeleton that leaves the interior largely column-free and gives the building its spiral shape. Fun fact: of the roughly 7,400 panes of glass, only one is curved, the lens right at the very top.

It’s a marvel.

Coffee at the top of London

If you drew the London skyline back then, you drew the Gherkin. It was one of those buildings that stood for the whole city. These days it has rather vanished behind taller, blunter neighbours, which I find a bit sad, but in 2011 it had almost nothing around it. There was the Heron Tower, and there was Tower 42, the old NatWest Tower, the first real skyscraper the city built. From the air, the footprint of Tower 42 traces the NatWest logo. Someone designed a building you can only truly read from a plane. I bet they wanted to be the first bank the aliens come to after they invade our planet. Clever.

I went up for an interview with Jérôme, the bar manager, and he took me right to the top, to the point of the dome, under an enormous round slab of glass so thick it looked like it was holding the whole structure together. I stood there drinking the coffee someone had handed me, watching a seagull hang in the air outside. After a moment it landed on the top window and dropped a poop, and the only thought in my head was: how on earth does anyone clean that window? I would find out later that it is a rather terrifying job, being a skyscraper window cleaner, and yes, they go all the way up to the very top.

The job was behind the bar, and I took it. Now, the Gherkin bar in those days was tiny, two people behind it and you were already in each other’s pockets, and the great secret of working there was that you made far more coffee than cocktails. The building was offices, not open to the public, so the clientele was the tenants, Standard Life, Sky, a few banks and insurers. I often opened up, which meant being ready at half seven in the morning, and the drink I made more than any other was the cappuccino. If you read Part 3, you will enjoy the symmetry: at the Champagne bar in St Pancras I poured more coffee than Champagne, and here I was at the top of the Gherkin doing exactly the same thing. We just can’t ignore the universe’s sense of humour.

I did not mind, though. I would get up there early, before anyone, make myself a coffee, and sit watching the sun come up over Canary Wharf to the east. London in 360 degrees. Some of the best mornings of my life were spent alone up there with a cappuccino I had made myself. It was also the best place to be on New Year’s Eve or Guy Fawkes Night, when the fireworks start lighting up the skyline in the dark. On those nights, no matter where you looked from the bar, there were pastels of colour flashing in the distance, turning the capital into a moving painting for a moment, before the darkness and the white lights of the city took their place back.

Work hard, party hard

The Gherkin was not just a bar and restaurant. By day it served lunch, and by four in the afternoon the whole floor could be struck and rebuilt into something else entirely within hours, a wedding, a staff party, a product launch. I learned fast how much muscle sits behind an elegant evening. We hauled vast, heavy tabletops through the corridors, terrified of scuffing a wall, turning tables of six into tables of ten, feeding everything into the service lifts. It ran like clockwork because everyone knew exactly what to do.

Some of the nights were surreal. A delegation arrived once, three or four coachloads, and the organisers had somehow produced a handful of footballers from the big clubs to go with it: Gareth Bale of Tottenham, Ashley Cole of Chelsea and Wojciech Szczęsny of Arsenal. There was the Patek Philippe launch night, with security crawling over every floor, because there might be a few million pounds of watches and jewellery in the building at once, single pieces worth fifty or seventy grand. I never knew the full choreography of those nights, because my world was the drinks: down in the stockroom on the thirty-seventh floor, filling great bins on wheels with ice and bottles, checking in deliveries, pre-mixing so service would be quick, lining up hundreds of glasses.

The team was the thing, though. The motto was work hard, party hard, and we lived it. The hours were brutal. I would sometimes cover a double, going from half seven in the morning to one the next, then be back at half seven again. But after almost every event the managers would crack open the beers and whatever wine was left standing, and we would sit in that beautiful building for an hour or two, talking, after resetting the room for the morning. Karim ran the restaurant, Jérôme the bar, and Danny was the general manager over the whole thing. Danny spent most of his time on the 38th floor, which was the private members’ club. He rightfully trusted Karim to run the show upstairs, popping up only now and then to lead a briefing before a service or an event. The members’ area was wrapped in LVMH brands, Glenmorangie mostly, private members paying by the year for the view and a calm place in the city to relax.

The Gherkin is where I found my people. Nicolas, Cedric, Flo, a big, warm French crowd. Just over a year in and I already felt like a veteran, watching “kids” barely three to five years younger than me turn up full of plans and leave again after about six months, back to France. That was the rhythm of it. I would say the average lifespan of a young French person in London in those years was roughly half a year, especially the ones who, like me, had arrived with nothing. The city does not hand you anything. You earn it or you go home.

And I was not going home. I was putting in every hour I could, partly because I wanted to, partly, if I am honest, because things with Lucie were coming to an end, and work was somewhere to pour myself into. I wanted to see more. And from behind the bar at night, in the reflection of those great curved windows, I could watch the buzz of the restaurant below.

This subscription will also give you access to all previously published articles, and I’ll send you a drinc. t-shirt to thank you for helping, wherever you are in the world.

The man in the red tie

That is where I first saw him. A man moving through the room in a beautiful silky red tie, black everything else, black shirt, black apron, black shoes, looking immaculate. He would run from table to table, have a quick chat then disappear. Shortly after, he would come back with a bottle, open it, take a small sip, talk to the guests, and repeat with another bottle, at another table. I genuinely did not know what I was looking at. I had never heard the word sommelier in my life.

That was Antoine I was watching, the sommelier. He was working with Mickaël, the head sommelier, and both were French. There was a huge French community in that building, so I asked Jérôme, also French, whether I could help downstairs if they were ever short. He said he would mention it, and then warned me. “Mickaël”, he said, “is a particular man. Very direct. Not what you would call friendly. He can be hard to work with.”

A few days later I am going up in the lift and Mickaël steps in. I do not get a “hello”. He looks at me and says, “So you want to be a sommelier?” I say yes, I am interested, I do not know much. “Right,” he says. “First thing. When you work with me, it is not the party you lot have upstairs.” And then: “You are going to have to learn a great deal, and the first thing you will learn is the seven Grands Crus of Chablis. Come to me tomorrow and tell me what they are. And if you know anything specific about them, you tell me that too.” Then he walked out of the lift. No “good day”, nothing. I stood there as the doors closed and the lift sank back down, thinking, what on earth just happened.

Adrenalin kicked in. I loved it.

The Wine Bible and a map of frogs

I was on an early shift that day, so I finished in the afternoon and went straight into town and bought my first ever wine book. The Wine Bible, by Karen MacNeil, which turns out to be the best-selling wine book in American history, over a million copies, written by a woman who has won just about every wine award going and an Emmy for a television show on top. Put simply, she’s the Jancis Robinson of the US, and I hope neither of them would mind me saying so. I did not know any of that at the time. I just knew I needed a book, and it felt like it was the one.

On the tube home I opened it, and the first place I turned to was Chablis. I read, and then I saw a map, and that was the hook, because I have always loved a map for the story it tells. The Grands Crus of Chablis sit together in one unbroken band on a single slope above the little river Serein, and running along it, northwest to southeast, they go: Bougros, Preuses, Vaudésir, Grenouilles, Valmur, Les Clos, Blanchot. Seven names on one hill. I kept reading and discovered that Chablis is made from Chardonnay. I stopped for a second, raised my head and looked into the void, thinking Chardonnay was only ever used to make Champagne, back home.

As I went through the pages, I discovered there were lots of grape varieties, and lots of wines made and sold under different names but using the same grapes. Confusion got the better of me, so I went straight back to Chablis. I had to be ready for tomorrow.

A few I kept for Mickaël, because he had asked for specifics. Grenouilles, which means frogs, is the smallest of the seven, sitting low and close to the river, giving rounder, riper wines. Les Clos, further along, is the giant and the benchmark, the most powerful and the longest-lived of them all, the one everyone measures the rest against. Blanchot sits right at the southeastern end, higher and steeper and more delicate. And then there is La Moutonne, which is not officially one of the seven at all but a little monopole straddling Vaudésir and Preuses, farmed by one house, an unofficial eighth that the appellation never quite got round to crowning. It sounds like an admin error that was never corrected.

Why could I swallow all of this in one tube journey? The reason still makes me smile. Before I ever touched wine, back in France, I drove an ambulance across the whole of Champagne, the kind that transports people who have already been seen to, which takes a lot of pressure off the emergency crews. This was the early 2000s, no real GPS, and a former colleague had handed me a home-made book with every village in the region mapped and printed. So I learned Champagne as a region the hard way, by road, left here, right there, this lane, that turn, until I could find anywhere by memory alone. I have come to believe there was a reason I did that job. It built a map of that whole region inside my head, and years later, when I looked at wine maps, the geography simply dropped into place.

And the thing that happened next changed how I think about wine entirely. As an ambulance driver I had already learned every Grand Cru and Premier Cru village of Champagne without meaning to, because I had driven through all of them, and nearly every single one had a story attached: a friend used to live there, we used to hide there to smoke as teenagers, in that one lived my first girlfriend. The crus of Champagne were not wine to me. They were my own life, mapped onto a hillside.

And then it landed. It is not wine we are talking about. It is who we are. When a winemaker makes their wine, for most of them it is a good job, yes, but I do not think it is ever only a chore. For them it is more like: this is my piece of the story of the village I come from, and this is me telling it. I am not a winemaker. But I have the stories that happened in those villages, and when I sit down with someone and we open a bottle, those stories come back to me and I have something to tell. The wine starts it. And that, I am convinced, is exactly what has gone missing in how the wine world talks to the people who drink what it makes.

So I came back the next day and found Mickaël waiting for a lift. “My turn,” I thought. I did not say hello. I just walked up and recited the seven Grands Crus of Chablis, with the specifics, in his own clipped, no-small-talk style, because I had worked out that a man that direct would respect being met the same way. He looked at me, and he smiled. “Good. Next: Gevrey-Chambertin.” You guessed it, Mickaël is from Burgundy. We played that game for weeks, him firing a region at me, me coming back with the answers, and I am certain now it was his way of preparing me to join his team. I threw myself at it. I started studying Champagne and other regions on my own and started to answer Mickaël’s questions on the spot. I sat the WSET Level 2 and passed it with distinction, which I put down almost entirely to the homework Mickaël kept setting me in lift shafts and during tabletop removals.

The “déclic”

I eventually got the red tie and joined the sommelier team, which meant I started running the floor, talking to guests, in the uniform I had admired from the bar. But there was one thing I had not yet felt, the thing everyone in this trade talks about, the moment it all falls into place. By then I had become a walking encyclopedia of wine, able to repeat the terms, picture and describe villages and plot locations, recite stories about the winemakers, and yet I could never convey the artistic, emotional side a wine brings. Perhaps I hadn’t tasted enough yet? Perhaps I wasn’t made for a career in wine after all?

After a few months, someone ordered a bottle of Jim Barry’s The Armagh, the 2006, a great Australian Shiraz. I fetched it, opened it, decanted it, and put my nose in the glass, and I swear I cannot fully tell you what happened next. It was like an explosion. Standing there, nose in the glass, I could suddenly separate every single component of the wine, cleanly, instantly. I looked up at the wall in front of me and the whole room went silent. It was just me and the wine. I tasted it, and I understood the structure of it without being able to put a word to any of it. The acidity, the ripe sweetness of the fruit, the tannins, I could not name them, but they made sense.

It was the exact feeling I had had once before, when I realised I had become bilingual: a day when I was not even watching the television and suddenly understood every word the newsreader was saying, without trying. The same thing. These days I call it the déclic. Because wine, I am certain, is a language as much as it is a drink, and if you set about learning that language, there comes a moment, the Eureka moment, when you simply get it. Mine came fast. I had done no formal sommelier qualifications, nothing, but from that night I called myself a sommelier, because I had the understanding, and the understanding is the thing. The knowledge I could build. So I started acting like one, and buying books, some of which Mickaël gave me from his own shelf, and it tipped over into obsession. I stopped drinking beer in bars. I wanted wine. Every wine bar I could find, I would set a budget and ask the waiter: “Pick me a glass, anything up to fifteen pounds, and let me taste without telling me what it is.”

Why the raspberry doesn’t matter to me

What the déclic really left me with, and the thing I have never let go of, is probably the reason I refuse to this day to talk about flavour notes. It was never the cherry or the tobacco. It was the structure.

I will keep this short, because I have gone into it properly before, and I will drop a link below for anyone who wants the long version. When you dissect a wine’s structure, you break the mouthfeel into its parts: acidity, alcohol, tannin, sweetness, body, length. The job of the taster, the critic or the buyer, is to weigh up how much of each there is and decide whether the whole thing is in balance. That is dissection, and I learned it largely through the WSET, which I am often rude about, by the way, because I think it stops people thinking for themselves, but which deserves real credit for the rigour of its approach to structure.

But what actually matters is simpler than all of that. When you are just drinking, you do not care about any of it. What you are after is a good mouthfeel. The wine feels ripe and complete and you want another glass. That is balance, and balance matters to me far more than flavour, because the flavours shift from wine to wine, but it is how a wine feels that makes you reach for it again. Buy a cheap wine and it is usually badly out of balance, and you decide you do not like wine, when really you just met a wine that was built wrong. Everything a good winemaker sweats over, the ripeness of the berries, the acidity, the extraction, is in service of that feeling, not of some note of tobacco. As a buyer, balance is the only thing I am chasing. The flavours come after.

It took me years to make peace with the flavour side, though, sitting in tasting courses silently disagreeing while a teacher called out cherry, raspberry, black fruit. I got there eventually. And because it took someone as obsessed as me that long, I completely understand why an ordinary drinker, who just wants a nice glass, has no interest in hearing about it. They cannot taste it, so it means nothing, and we wonder why they tune us out.

Becoming a baby somebody

So we are now heading to the end of 2013, and I had a bit more than a year, at the Gherkin. Hard days and good days, the way it always is, but mostly it was a gift: a team that became friends, a whole new direction, doors I did not know existed swinging open. With the good progress I made, I was then promoted to Head Sommelier at another venue in the same group, Searcys, which also ran the St Pancras bar and the Gherkin, among many other places. That restaurant, called SixtyOne, never made it. A poor location at the end of Oxford Street, near Marble Arch, inside a hotel that did little to advertise us. We were too often empty, and certainly bored.

And then, after a few months, I bumped into Karim, who was still at the Gherkin. He told me he had a friend at the then two-Michelin-starred Hélène Darroze, and that I should apply for a sommelier position that had just opened. I was gobsmacked. Me? I was nobody, and certainly not a “proper” sommelier. Needless to say, by then I knew exactly what two Michelin stars meant, and it was no joke. “You are ambitious,” he said. “This is your next step. I have no doubt you will make it. The manager there is a friend. I will put in a word.” I went for it anyway.

And that is the next part, my time at Hélène Darroze. No spoilers.

For now, I will leave it at the Gherkin and SixtyOne, where I walked in pouring cappuccinos and walked out, finally, as an unofficial sommelier. Not a great one yet. Not a knowledgeable one. But I had had the déclic, and I had earned the red tie, and I had become, as I like to put it, a baby somebody.

Ready for the next part? Don’t forget to subscribe.

If you missed the first parts of this series, you can catch up here:

I have been drinking Orange Crush 2025 from Kapital Zwei, a tiny producer whose name means something close to “second chapter” in German. It is an orange wine, 80% Riesling and 20% Müller-Thurgau, made with the lightest possible touch: hand-harvested, foot-stomped, nothing added. Just 246 bottles exist, that’s 245 now.

As you understood, an orange wine is made of white grapes (or pink-skinned ones like Pinot Gris) of which the skin remains in contact with the freshly crushed berries for anything between a few hours to several weeks, sometimes even months. As a result, the wine is slightly tinted to an orange-ish hue. The longer the maceration, the darker the orange.

The man behind it is Chris, originally from Brooklyn, who swapped New York, and a long career in tech at IBM, for a cellar in Austria. Everything about the way he works leans on nature rather than against it: the winery runs on solar power, the water comes from the rain he collects, and every job in the vineyard is done by hand. None of it is easy, and this year made it harder still, with drought gripping his corner of Austria. He shares the winery with the Feldtheorie crew, friends as much as colleagues, the same Feldtheorie I mentioned back in the Columbia Gorge (US) when a Grüner reminded me of them. You can feel the labour of love in all the wines they make.

You can read this story here, and if you havent yet, you can subscribe to this newsletter too:

Subscribe now

In the glass it is a pale orange, with a nose that is, fittingly, orange. Plus some citrus, a little floral like a lift of orange blossom. Then you taste it and it turns bone dry, with a flash of bitter apricot and marmalade and that orange-blossom note still hovering. It is delicate, and so easy to drink it is almost silky. It says 12% on the label and feels lighter than that. There is something terribly more-ish about this wine.

The other interesting point is the bottle. Black ceramic, genuinely beautiful and calling for a re-use of some sort. Put flowers in it, at the very least. It sells here in the UK for around £27 on www.perfectcellar.com, and just to be clear, it is a 500ml bottle. Chris believes in the smaller format, and I think he is onto something. People keep saying they want to drink less, and I don’t think they always mean less alcohol. Sometimes they just mean one good glass. You are paying for the juice and for the object, and there is real value in both.

For me Kapitel Zwei is terroir as people as much as terroir as place, one of the clearest examples I have come across: a minimalist wine made by someone who understands both winemaking and what people genuinely want to drink, and who arrived here from the tech world rather than a wine dynasty. There is almost none of Orange Crush, and the few bottles in the UK are starting to get noticed, so if it tempts you, do not wait around.

The Dalles itself is flat, a working fishing town more than a wine one, sitting on a bend of the Columbia at the eastern mouth of the Gorge, about 75 miles east of Portland. The name always makes me smile, because it is French. Les dalles, the flagstones, is what the French-Canadian fur traders called this stretch, after the way the river had carved the black basalt into slabs like paving. Needless to say, it took me a while to pronounce the name of this French-christened town in the Pacific Northwest correctly. It is not as straightforward as “Ze Daall” but more like “Ze Daallz”, definitely not French sounding, nor quite English either. Long before the French-Canadians came, though, this was one of the great gathering places of the Pacific Northwest. For more than ten thousand years the Indigenous peoples of the river met, traded and fished here, above all at Celilo Falls just upstream, a thundering run of rapids that was among the oldest continuously inhabited sites on the whole continent, until the dams drowned it in the 1950s. I could feel the weight of that everywhere we went after leaving Portland.

It was also, for the pioneers, the end of the line. The Oregon Trail ran out right here, and the families who had travelled two thousand miles faced one last brutal decision: load everything onto rafts and gamble down the wild Columbia through the Gorge, or haul the wagons overland on the rough Barlow Road that skirted the shoulder of Mount Hood. Neither was kind. And this is still salmon country, where you see people fishing the old way, standing on high wooden platforms built out over the river, lines dropping into water that looks like it is trying to tear itself apart. The hotel walls were covered in old photographs of the river in full fury, the men on their platforms perfectly calm above it. It is a strange and beautiful contrast, and I could have looked at those pictures for a long time.

A fun way to live out the Oregon Trail, and learn about it, is to play an old-fashioned game that was, funnily enough, built by student teachers in Minnesota back in 1971. I left the link at the bottom of this article. Sadly, I caught typhoid, Katie broke her arm, we lost all our oxen, and our dog Wowzy died after a rattlesnake bite. Next time, we'll go to Disneyland instead.

A motel, a Bible and a British woman with no kettle

Katie had booked a rather characterful motel for us to stay overnight. If you have seen the films where the receptionist could just as easily knock on your door at three in the morning with something sharp in his hand, you have seen our motel. Old decoration, an odd little hum to the place, an old Bible in the bedside drawer, an empty fridge, and a microwave. There is always a microwave. In every motel, every stop we made, there was a microwave and no kettle.

Now try explaining that to a British person. Katie needed a cup of tea, and I had to break the news that the only way to boil water was to microwave it. I know this borders on sacrilege in her homeland, and I braced for it, but she took it with her usual good grace. She had no choice, mind you. Same story with the coffee, my own sacrilege to live with, which came from a rustic little machine and was, across every place we stayed on this trip, including the Airbnbs, genuinely bad. You learn to lower your expectations and treat a decent cup as a lucky day, thankfully something I had once we got back to Seattle. Katie had to deal with the microwave until the end.

The motel came attached to a bar and restaurant, which mattered, because you will remember from Part 2 that we drove out of Oregon with a few bottles gifted to us by Vincent and by Saul. After a long day we fancied a small glass in the room, so I went down to the boot, picked a bottle, and came back up to find the obvious problem. No corkscrew… Yes, I could have checked that before going to get the bottle in the car park.

Failed negotiation

My first attempt at finding the St Graal of bottle openers led me to the local petrol station, on the off chance they sold one. They sold everything else, the little bathroom bits, the manicure sets, the odds and ends you never knew you needed, and no bottle opener. Baffling.

So down I go to the bar, where the lady behind it looks about as thrilled to see me as the red-trouser brigade would be if left at a natural wine fair. I ask: “Could I borrow a corkscrew, please? Just to open a bottle in my motel room, I’ll bring it straight back.” She looks at me with a total absence of emotion and drops: “It’s ten dollars.” Cold as the fridge in our room. Not for the wine, you understand. Ten dollars to borrow a corkscrew. Fine, I thought. Then, being me, I tried to warm things up. “Would you like a couple of glasses to taste, since I’m opening it anyway? For you later, off duty?” She fixed me with a look. “I’ve been sober for three years. I’m not interested in your wine.”

Well. That stopped me in my tracks, and I meant it when I apologised. I have worked behind a bar myself, and I know exactly how hard it is to stay sober when you are surrounded by the stuff all day, making cocktails, tasting as you go, a little sip here and there that adds up. She managed that for three years, on the front line. It is a real achievement, and I told her so and meant every word. She was having none of my French-accented charm.

In the end she offered to let me open it myself at the bar, with her ten-dollar corkscrew, and hand it back, which I did, and then she presented me with the tip screen on the card machine, as I was not going to pay cash on that one. Ten, twenty, twenty-five percent. On a corkscrew. I know these people are not paid nearly enough, and I tip well and gladly when there is something to tip for, but I could not bring myself to do that for the privilege of opening my own bottle. I paid the ten dollars, thanked her, and took my very hard-won, freshly opened bottle of wine back upstairs, where Katie, quite rightly, questioned me on my negotiation skills. We ate at the restaurant that night, had a good time, and laughed about the whole thing. It is funnier now than it was then. In fact, I still think the wine was slightly tainted by the experience.

Inch by inch

The next morning we took the road to Walla Walla, where we were expected for lunch the following day at a winery called Abeja. Saul had told us to watch the landscape as we drove east, and he was right. “It changes almost inch by inch”, as he put it himself.

You start in something close to Greenland, or how I imagine it, all conifers and tall firs, cool air, a green and folded country that is a joy to drive through. Then the tops of the mountains start to go bare. A little orange creeps in, then brown, the vegetation thinning out as you go. And by the time you reach the Walla Walla area it is desert. Full desert. I cannot recommend the drive enough. If you ever get the chance, take a car and let it happen to you. It is one of the most astonishing stretches of road I have ever driven.

For the record, Walla Walla is one of Washington State’s 22 AVAs, and one of only two that the state shares across a border. Walla Walla it shares with Oregon to the south, and the Lewis-Clark Valley it shares with Idaho to the east, though in that case most of the ground sits on the Idaho side and only a sliver falls in Washington. Walla Walla town itself is small, agricultural, deeply rural Washington, all big pickups and bigger farm machinery. It began as a grain-growing area, and despite the rise in fashion for wine, grain is still very much the leading crop there. Locals told us it was a real destination five years ago, humming with tourism, and that the last few years have brought a big drop in visitors.

We were visitors and we headed to Abeja, our first organised visit in Walla Walla.

Abeja

Abeja is spelled with a j and pronounced “ah-BAY-ha”. It is the Spanish word for bee, which is why a little bee turns up on the label, and it was founded in 2000 by Ken and Ginger Harrison on a farmstead that dates back to the early 1900s. It began, like so much around here, as a grain and cattle farm, and rather than tear the old buildings down they restored them, so the place still feels like the working homestead it once was, only with a beautiful villa, many of the side buildings now turned into rentable mini-houses (you can even sleep in what used to be the chicken coop), vineyards, and an enormous pond sitting in the middle of it all. In American country style, all warm colours and old timber, it is a genuinely lovely thing to arrive at.

They have turned part of the property into a retreat called The Inn, where you can rent the old restored buildings and simply stay a while, drive the valley, visit the wineries, eat well. It was fully booked when we were there, so much so that we barely saw another soul for a while. People come, settle in, and disappear into the landscape. We were told the entire estate can be rented, and that they host about six to eight weddings a year on the same formula. In a world where wine is struggling to find glasses to pour into, perhaps the answer is to turn the winery into a social place where the wine gets drunk? It works for Abeja, for sure.

Lunch was a surprise. A four-course menu, part-plated, part-shared and served at a level I can only describe as Michelin, matched with the estate’s own wines and its own touch. Abeja is not a cheap place, and it is not trying to be. One night in the main property, The Farmhouse, which has five double bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms and stunning views over the vineyards, comes in at $2,200 a night off-peak. The intriguing chicken coop is on a waiting-list basis only, and the Edison House, which once stored the farm’s enormous electric generator in its early days, hence the name, comes in at $450 a night for a two-bed mini-house. Then you can add little extras: a wine tasting, a tour of the winery, and time in the little shop to buy merch and wine.

Wine-wise, around 80 percent of the fruit is their own, with the rest bought in, and they are moving steadily towards more and more estate fruit even as they make a little less wine overall, because, like everyone, they are watching consumption fall and sales soften. Mark, the director of sales, told us that after a dip they had managed to hold last year roughly level with the year before, which in this climate he was rightly pleased with. He is a real believer, has known the estate since it started, knew the founding winemaker, and joining felt to him like the logical next step after years working for other wineries.

After a welcoming glass of their Blanc de Blancs traditional method, which is only available at The Inn or at their Walla Walla downtown tasting room, Mark took us through the range. Two so-called entry-level wines, though the quotation marks matter, because nothing here is entry-level in the ordinary sense, both called Beekeeper, a Chardonnay and a red blend. Above them sits what has become the flagship, their Walla Walla Chardonnay, and then a Cabernet Sauvignon, a great Merlot, and a single-vineyard Cab called Heather Hill. Prices run from around £38 up to roughly £100 for the top wine. In total we tasted seven.

The wines themselves made the case I keep making about Washington. There is a strong argument these days against Merlot, whose consumption has been sliding for years, and yet Washington makes a Merlot that tastes like Europe with a little more sound turned up. More broadly, and I will put my neck out here, Washington makes wines with a European structure: freshness, real acidity, layers, and lower alcohol than you might fear from a hot place. Do a like-for-like against the Rhône or Bordeaux and the point lands. The wines at Abeja were getting finer, more precise, more restrained, sitting around 14 percent at the very top, sometimes below. For contrast, the Loop de Loop reds we tasted back in the Gorge were nearer 11.5 to 12, and elsewhere in the valley we tried a producer called Grosgrain making featherweight, properly lo-fi Grenache, cool-fermented and very pure, the sort of thing Katie found a bit too light for her taste, since she leans towards the fuller wines Abeja does so well. We tasted the Grosgrain wines at their brand-new tasting room during our visit to Woodinville, near Seattle, later on this trip.

We then met cellar hand Lee, a homegrown talent, and caught the estate right at the start of harvest, the first fruit just in and everyone waiting on the next pick. It had been a complicated year. Fire nearby had not burned the vines, but the smoke had left its taint on the Syrah, and they had taken the hard decision not to make a Syrah that vintage at all. It is the kind of call the drinker never sees. You stand in front of a wall of wine in a shop and you have no idea what it took to grow the thing, how unforgiving grapes are, how much closer to the edge you live when you farm sustainably with the fewest possible chemicals, which is how almost everyone we met and almost everything we import from Washington is now made. The reward is fabulous fruit. The cost is a great deal of effort and the odd year when you walk away from a wine entirely.

Before leaving Abeja, here on the digital paper, there is one person who certainly deserves a mention. It is Sierra, who keeps the house in order. She manages the place, runs the Inn bookings, greets the guests, leads a team of lovely housekeepers, all of it, and she has been there a decade at least. She knows everything, the estate, the area, the other wineries she loves to go and visit on her own time, and she carries all of it with a generosity that was, frankly, one of the highlights of the whole visit. The people, I then noticed, started to open up around Walla Walla. A little chattier, a little warmer, a little more curious about us than the Gorge had been. Sierra was all of that, ten times over.

The essence of Washington State

We checked into our hotel, a good old Best Western, cheap and cheerful and full, it turned out, of retired couples on the kind of holiday where a few grumpy old men mutter about this and that in the lobby. It was funny, and it was fine, and we badly needed the rest, because the jet lag still had its hooks in us. We took an hour, got ourselves together, and headed out, at which point it started to rain. Actual drizzle, in Walla Walla, part of the seven-odd inches a year this desert corner gets. We felt honoured to witness such a rare event, and we rather enjoyed it.

Walking through downtown, we came upon the Marcus Whitman, the first proper hotel ever built in the town. It went up in 1928, thirteen floors of it, and the city was so taken with it that an ordinance was passed forbidding anyone from building anything taller, which is why to this day it stands alone above a town of one and two-storey buildings, looking for all the world like a European catholic cathedral dropped into the middle of the American West. The inside is one of the most beautiful I have seen, the kind of grand old interior you would expect at somewhere like Claridge’s. It has its own bar and restaurant, which we did not visit, and, opening onto the street, a set of tasting rooms.

One belonged to Abeja, closed at the time, though we had gone neither hungry nor thirsty there. The one next door belonged to L’École, and it was there we finally sat down, by the window, watching the rain come down properly while I worked through a tasting flight. Twenty-five dollars for six generous pours, real glasses, not the mean little measures you sometimes get. Katie was still feeling rough and stuck to one, so I took her share of the flight too, and I already knew before the first sip that we would love these wines. Extreme precision again, they chase purity and ripeness without heaviness, and it is for sure something close to a Washington signature.

Another truly Washingtonian trait is the togetherness between the different winemakers. As I was reading about L’École, I came across their Grenache Blanc “Loch Block”. “Hold on a minute,” I said. Katie did not flinch, lost in watching the people pass by. “Loch Block is Two Mountain’s and it’s in Rattlesnake Hills!” My Edison moment, light bulb at full brightness, and now I could properly connect the dots. At Abeja, Mark had asked us about the other visits we had planned, and had nothing but praise and good words for them. Then at the L’École tasting room, the lady asked me the same question, and reacted the same way. Both had personal stories to share about the places and the winemakers we were yet to visit. It seems, furthermore, that it is common for them all to work together, using one another’s fruit, sometimes for stylistic reasons, sometimes to cover a lost crop. Either way, it was sitting there, tasting in a tasting room and watching the rain fall, that I truly understood the essence of Washington State wines. And it has a great deal to do with the people.

Long Shadows

Up early the next morning, 3am courtesy of the jet lag, I got some work done in the little Best Western gym, keeping the momentum going for a Channel crossing that felt very far away, then found some actual boiling water at breakfast, which after days of the microwave felt like an upgrade to first class. We had a wander around Walla Walla, did a little window shopping, bought nothing, and then went to the visit I had been most looking forward to, Long Shadows.

Long Shadows was the very first winery I ever wanted to bring to the UK. I cannot now remember whether they have been represented here, or quite when I first came across them, but they lodged in my head years ago and never left. It was founded in 2002 by Allen Shoup, a hugely respected figure in Washington wine, and for good reason. Before Long Shadows he ran Chateau Ste. Michelle as its chief executive from 1984 to 2000, and Ste. Michelle is the giant of the state, the winery you can find all over the world, the one that more than anyone put Washington on the map.

Its story runs all the way back to Prohibition, to companies founded in 1933 that eventually merged into American Wine Growers, though the Ste. Michelle name itself only arrived in 1967, and the grand French-style chateau at Woodinville, just north-east of Seattle, opened its doors in 1976. It is a winery of two halves: the whites are made at that chateau on its handsome estate near the city, while the reds come from vineyards over the Cascades, more than 150 miles east in the warm Columbia Valley. It made its name, of all things, on Riesling, after its 1972 bottling won a celebrated Los Angeles Times blind tasting in 1974, and it is still one of the largest fine-Riesling producers on the planet. There is even a concert series on the lawns every summer, going since 1984, and after decades of being passed between corporate owners the place was finally bought by a local grape-growing family, the Wyckoffs, at the end of 2025. Millions of bottles a year, an operation on a scale that is hard to picture, and much of what carried the region out into the world came through it. Most telling of all, for what comes next, is that it was Shoup himself who taught this giant to collaborate, pairing Ste. Michelle with Piero Antinori of Tuscany to make Col Solare, and with Germany’s Ernst Loosen for the Eroica Riesling. Remember that, because it is the very idea he took with him out the door.

To give you a sense of the landscape around that giant: Washington has somewhere around a thousand wineries, and only a small share of them, well under ten percent, grow the grapes and make the wine themselves. Historically the small growers sold their fruit to the big producers, Ste. Michelle chief among them, and only slowly did supply start to flow the other way, towards smaller makers striking out on their own.

Shoup’s idea, the one he had always wanted to pursue and finally did in 2002, was different again. He would invite some of the greatest winemakers on earth to each make a single Washington wine in the grape they were most famous for, as partners rather than hired hands. And to hold it all together, to collaborate with every one of them from the first day, he brought in Gilles Nicault as director of winemaking and viticulture. I will come back to Gilles soon. First, let’s look at who he calls his mentors.

The roll call is extraordinary. John Duval, the man behind the success of Australia’s Penfolds Grange, makes the Syrah, called Sequel. The late Michel Rolland, the most famous winemaking consultant in the world, of Pomerol and the right bank, makes the Merlot-led Bordeaux blend, called Pedestal. Another legend, Randy Dunn of Napa, makes the Cabernet, called Feather. Armin Diel, one of Germany’s finest, makes the Riesling, called Poet’s Leap, which carries the faintest touch of sweetness held up by such vivid acidity that it comes across beautifully balanced rather than sweet at all. The Folonari family of Tuscany make a Super Tuscan-styled Sangiovese blend called Saggi. There is a Cabernet blend called Pirouette made with Philippe Melka and Agustin Huneeus. Each one a master of their grape, each making one wine with Gilles, all under one roof.

What struck me almost as much as the wines was the place itself and the people in it. Gilles walked us round with Karina, who seems to know every vintage of every wine and every variation between them, perfectly, off the top of her head, another of those hugely talented people I kept meeting on this trip who wear it so lightly you could mistake them for just anyone. Around the winery you find the traces of Gilles’s time in the US, a man who clearly loves his adopted country. Baseballs signed by players. A real American football helmet signed by the old Washington NFL team (the other Washington, not the state) from before they became the Commanders. And, framed in a corridor, three menus from White House dinners, with the Long Shadows wines listed among the pours. Pedestal, the Merlot Michel Rolland was so instrumental in making, was served when President Sarkozy of France visited President Obama.

There is also the Chihuly room, their tasting room, hung with the actual glass sculpture of Dale Chihuly, the Washington-born glass artist whose enormous, impossible, floating creatures you can see in his garden in Seattle, which sadly we did not manage to visit but which seems to be a wonder. Shoup was an aesthete himself, and heavily influenced the label designs, so there is a thread of one man’s taste running through the whole thing, from the glass on the wall to the paper on the bottle. People often say there is always a connection to be found in wine, and here it is Allen Shoup’s own eye and feeling, made visible.

The Frenchman who took a Greyhound to the moon

Now, Gilles. Gilles Nicault is one of those people you meet and immediately warm to, so grateful for the life he gets to live that it is almost infectious. He is, clearly, a born winemaker, but the way he got here is the part I want to tell you.

He comes from the southeast of France, and studied wine there in the 1990s. Being young and curious, he wanted to see what was happening outside Europe, ideally Australia, Argentina or California. The only internship open to him, though, was in a place he had never heard of. “My first reaction,” he told me, “was, where is Washington State?” There was no internet to look it up. So he went to the books, found it on a paper map, and started to dream over it, and made the move. He arrived in Seattle to rain and cold, got on a Greyhound bus, the American stand-in, he laughed, for a country with no real trains, and rode it out across the Cascades into the desert, where he stepped off into a landscape that, in his words, was like landing on the moon. Rolling bare hills, dirt, next to nothing, and grapes somehow growing out of it under drip irrigation he had never worked with before. It is a description I would hear again later from Anne-Marie Hedges, who said almost exactly the same thing about arriving in Red Mountain, but that is for the next part.

He never left. He worked here and there, eventually met Shoup, and Shoup hired him, I think, precisely because he wanted someone versatile, someone who spoke another language, French being useful with a cast of international winemakers, someone who could adapt to anyone. And adapt he has. He now makes all the Long Shadows wines himself, the consulting arrangement having wound down since Shoup's passing, and along the years the partner winemakers themselves were learning the Washington terroir as they went, discovering, for instance, that you manage a Riesling canopy very differently here than on the steep, sugar-starved slopes of Germany, where in Walla Walla the ripeness comes almost too easily. They came as masters and left, in some sense, as students of a new place, and Gilles absorbed all of it like a sponge.

Watch this clip of the chat we had, Gilles telling what Long Shadows is all about. The complete interview will be shared soon on drinc.

He also makes his own wine now, Côte Nicault, a Grenache, which is the one grape not used across the Long Shadows range, and which he loves. He kindly opened a bottle, and it was beautiful. I will spare you the tasting note, because you know how I feel about those, but structurally it was flawless, pure and fine and long, like silk. I asked him, half joking, whether he was trying to beat Château Rayas, the great Grenache of Châteauneuf. He did not laugh. "That's my target. It's what I always wanted to do." I was slightly stunned, and, having tasted the wine, not at all inclined to bet against him.

Why I do not want to tell you about the raspberry notes

Typing this piece today, I was reminded of the whole reason I write these pieces the way I do.

I am a wine nerd, to a point. I love to hear the technical detail. I just do not much like talking in it, because I am concerned readers will find it boring, and because I think it could slowly kill the thing I love. When you tell an ordinary, curious person that a wine has cherry and raspberry with a lick of mint and a whisper of tobacco and cedar and, oh, the minerality, they hear someone describing a milkshake in a language they cannot taste. They cannot connect the dots, so they switch off, and then we sit around wondering why people outside the trade are not interested in us.

Think about how Rick Stein does it on one of his food programmes. He does not stand over the plate reciting a paragraph of flavour compounds. He takes one honest bite, says something simple and human about the saltiness reminding him of his walk on a beach by the Atlantic Ocean, and then he tells you a story. About the ingredient, about the place it comes from, about the cook and why they do it this way and not another. That is how wine used to be told, and it is what I am aiming for, and I am still working my way towards it. I would rather amaze you with how a wine is made, where it comes from, what went wrong that year and what it cost to put it right, than bore you with how it tastes. You cannot taste my glass through a screen. But you can imagine the smoke drifting over the Syrah, and the decision not to make it. That, I can share.

Coming next

We left Gilles and Karina after a conversation I did not want to end, thoroughly smacked by the wines and the warmth, and drove northwest an hour to the Tri-Cities, checking into a La Quinta in Kennewick, which is essentially like a roofless shopping mall, shops and cafes and petrol stations and not much else. It was a staging post, nothing more, because the last visit of the day was still ahead of us, and it was the one I had been building towards the whole trip.

Red Mountain. Hedges. A landscape that a Frenchman and, it turns out, a Frenchwoman both compared to the surface of the moon. That is Part 5. Stay tuned, and drink well.

Links you might find useful

Wines

Abeja, Long Shadows and Hedges Family Estate, mentioned in this article, will soon be exclusively available to purchase in the UK on www.perfectcellar.com. You might want to consider becoming a member to get an instant 10% off on any of your orders, and receive an email once the WA wines are live.

Wineries

• Abeja: https://www.abeja.net/index.php

• Long Shadows: https://longshadows.com/

• Hedges: https://hedgesfamilyestate.com/

• L’École: https://www.lecole.com/

• Grosgrain: https://grosgrainvineyards.com/

• Chateau Ste Michelle: https://www.ste-michelle.com/

Fun

This Oregon Trail experience on a 1970s-style video game is fun and reminded me of my youth (I am not that old, but not far).

Socials

Follow Jon, the drinc. man on Instagram

Charity

drinc. supports the work of SwimTayka, a charity that teaches survival swimming to children living near water. All profits from drinc. paid subscriptions go to the charity, and I cover the Substack fees myself so every penny reaches them. Make your reading count, subscribe now.

Subscribe now

You can also read about my journey into supporting SwimTayka, where I will be crossing the English Channel with my friends:

If you missed the first days of this trip, you can catch up here:

There are two ways to drive the Gorge: the Washington side to the north, or the Oregon side to the south. Funnily enough, both Washingtonians and Oregonians told us the northern road was the more scenic. Even so, we split our trip to stop at a few particularly scenic and historic spots, the first two on the Oregon side and the third linking them.

First we stopped at Multnomah Falls, the tallest waterfall in Oregon, with a drop of 189 metres. Like many of the natural sites around here, the name comes from the Indigenous people who lived along this part of the Columbia. The place is breathtaking, evergreen, and it is faintly surreal to see the falls appear after a short walk from the highway, where the car park sits. A little further up the path you can stand on the Benson Bridge, built in 1914. It is strange to think our side of the world was tumbling into war while this bridge was going up, and that the whole site was handed to the city of Portland in 1915 by its owner, Simon Benson. If hiking and “visiting” waterfalls is your thing, by the way, this is the part of the world for you. There are around 90 in Oregon alone, and a “Waterfall Corridor” that hikers love. Not our thing, though. We had wines to find.

After a passable seven-dollar cappuccino, we drove further east to the Bonneville Dam. If you know your US history, you will have heard of the New Deal, the set of government programmes built to drag the country out of the Depression that followed the 1929 crash. Just picture it: by 1933, about a quarter of American adults had no work. The New Deal was about building infrastructure, all of it funded by the government, from schools and roads to bridges, power lines and dams.

The Bonneville Dam was funded by the Public Works Administration and was the first federal dam on the Columbia, with work starting in 1933 and finishing five years later. It was built by the Army Corps of Engineers and named after the French-born Benjamin Bonneville, known for exploring Oregon in the 1830s. The good thing about the dam is that it generates enough electricity to power most of the area, a welcome boost that helped develop the rural corners of the region through the 1930s and 40s. Among the many problems it also brought, pollution included, one in particular caught my attention, because it was something the winemakers I met at Wine Paris seven months ago kept coming back to.

Salmon

You are probably asking what salmon has to do with wine. You will see. But first, the fish’s history in the Columbia.

For more than ten thousand years, salmon were the heart of this river, the food, the trade and the spiritual centre of its peoples, many of whom still hold First Salmon ceremonies before a single fish is taken. When settlers discovered how rich the river was, they set up canneries and fishing moved to another level entirely. At the same time, they were reshaping the mountains up north with irrigation channels that changed the water itself, its chemistry, its temperature, and the wildlife living in and around it.

It all matters because it takes roughly 3,000 eggs to produce a single breeding pair, and those eggs are fragile: any change, in temperature, in the speed of the current, in the life around them, can wipe them out. One of those changes is the run-off of vineyard chemicals. The dam’s job has been to help the salmon on their natural migration, out to the ocean and back, through fish ladders, clever systems that let millions of fish pass, the young heading for the sea and the adults climbing back upstream to spawn. A fun, not-so-fun fact: salmon cannot eat on the way back, because their bodies change as they move from the salt water of the ocean into fresh water, so they swim to the spawning grounds without feeding, sometimes for months, before dying of starvation.

There were once 10 to 15 million of them in the Columbia. Now only a fraction return each year, which is why so many of the winemakers I met, the ones who care about the nature around them, do everything they can to earn the “Salmon-Safe” label on their back label.

American Viticultural Areas

After crossing the Bridge of the Gods, another engineering marvel from the 1920s and 30s, we made our way to White Salmon in Washington State. What struck me first, while we grabbed some lunch, was how unfriendly and rather rude the locals were, something we hadn’t run into on the trip until then. That said, we are not too precious about it, we live in London after all.

This was our first proper step into Washington wine country, and the Columbia Gorge is the first of the state’s AVAs we got to visit. There are 22 of them in all. If you are not sure what an AVA is, you should watch the short clip below before reading on.

Now that the term makes sense, a few specifics about Washington’s AVAs:

• The first two in the region were Yakima Valley and Walla Walla.

• Then came Columbia Valley, which covers close to 90% of the state’s vine-growing area and holds many smaller AVAs inside its borders, most of them added in a flurry through the 2000s.

• Three sit outside Columbia Valley: Puget Sound, closer to Seattle in the west; Lewis-Clark Valley, mostly in Idaho with only a sliver in Washington; and Columbia Gorge to the south, split with Oregon, which is exactly where we were standing.

Loop de Loop

Fed, happy and freshly briefed, we headed off to visit Loop de Loop, a small wine project perched on the Washington hills, facing the Gorge and Oregon beyond. The connection to the southern state runs deep: Julia Bailey started her career in Portland and made wine in the Willamette Valley before launching her own project in the Gorge with her husband, Scott Gulstine.

The drive to there climbs higher and higher on shoelace roads. Pines surround us, so tall and so close to the road that at times we cannot see the sky. After a few minutes we turn onto a small gravel track, rows of vineyards on either side, thick with cover crops and greenery. To our right, the Columbia River makes its calm way down to the Pacific. To our left, the vines sit behind fencing to keep the local wildlife off the berries, though realistically it only slows them down, since the rest of the property is fairly open. At the end of the track sits the winery, with the same kind of fermentation tanks we saw at Vincent’s, and a few barrels lined up outside. We park and make our way to the cellar door. It is just beautiful.

A high ceiling, decorated in a way that recalls the old days, set inside a modern architecture that pulls you back to the present. We are in September, wild flowers surround the place and reappear indoors in small vases, sparsely but deliberately arranged around the room. Everywhere you look, there is a kind of natural poetry. Stephanie greets us and talks us through the tasting flight, six pours for 25 dollars, waived if you buy any three bottles from it. I go for it. Katie is not feeling great, having caught the cold I picked up after my Channel-crossing training the weekend before we flew out, and I am still shaking it off myself.

We head out to the terrace. A patio gives way to a path through overgrown vegetation, mostly wild flowers, and we make for the farthest little patio, facing the vines and the mountains. Mount Hood stands not far in the distance. It is to Oregon what Mount Rainier is to Washington, the highest peak in the state and a major part of the Cascade Range, a volcano topping out at around 3,400 metres. It is simply stunning to watch, calm yet imposing, while you sip.

As you guessed, Loop de Loop makes what they call high-altitude wines, the vines sitting at around 400 metres on volcanic, ashy loam, farmed organically with regenerative viticulture at the heart of it. They grow the kind of grapes I would sooner expect on a cool European hillside than out here in the American West, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Riesling and Grüner Veltliner, and it all ferments on wild yeasts with as little meddling as they can get away with. The wines come out light, honest and place-driven, and the moment I tasted the Loop de Loop Grüner Veltliner it reminded me directly of what Austria’s Feldtheorie makes.

We lingered a while, recharging both our physical and mental batteries, before hitting the road again. We crossed yet another bridge and were back in Oregon, in Hood River, a town full of breweries. We settled on Ferment Brewing Company, on the recommendation of Shea from Hedges Family Estate, whom we would meet a few days later on the trip. Ferment makes beer, of course, but also cider, wine and kombucha, and the set-up is brilliant, built for lingering over a drink and some food. There is a cocktail bar wrapped around an enormous open fire pit that sits on the first floor, somewhere between inside and out, with the Gorge wide open in front of it. We could have stayed forever, but we had a motel to check into further east, in The Dalles.

The next day, we would push on to Walla Walla. That is Part 4. Stay tuned, and drink well.

Links you might find useful

Wines

• Loop de Loop: https://loopdeloopvintner.com/

Beers

• Ferment Brewing Co: https://fermentbrewing.com/

Socials

Follow Jon, the drinc. man on Instagram

Charity

drinc. supports the work of SwimTayka, a charity that teaches survival swimming to children living near water. All profits from drinc. paid subscriptions go to the charity, and I cover the Substack fees myself so every penny reaches them. Make your reading count, subscribe now.

Subscribe now

I used AI to confirm facts and to polish my Frenglish. Love it or hate it, everything here is my truth. I’m assisted by AI, not powered by it.

The skyline is breathtaking because it holds two completely contradictory things at once: grey, hard concrete and steel buildings climbing into the sky on one side, and on the other, calm, understated nature always keeping watch from the mountain ranges beyond. Even as the night takes over its shift, you can still see the two landscapes propping each other up to put on a spectacle worth travelling for.

Those mountain ranges matter enormously, because they are the barometers of the whole state. Picture Seattle sitting by the Pacific Ocean, to the west. On one side, floating out over the ocean, is the Olympic Mountain range, which works as the first barrier against the elements coming off the deep sea. Then, running north to south along the east of the city, are the well-known Cascade Mountains, higher and more imposing, acting as a second wall that keeps the clouds trapped over the city. You have guessed the effect.

Rain.

We were very lucky, because we had none of it during our stay in Seattle, quite the opposite. It was perfect, with cool air rolling in from the north-west and tempering the 20 to 27 degrees of the day. It is true that with somewhere around 900 to 1,000mm of average annual precipitation, the city sounds wet, roughly half as much again as London or Paris get. That said, Seattle’s rain is more of a constant drizzle than a downpour, and by the end of the year it actually rains more in New York City, at around 1,200mm.

What all of this also means is that the Cascades throw a shield across the state, holding back the moisture and keeping the eastern half dry. Imagine living somewhere with 300 days of sunshine a year. That is the reality in Washington State’s wine country. Have a look at the map and it will make sense. The other thing to notice is the wealth of rivers scarring the hills to the east, an important detail we will come back to in later parts.

Back in Seattle, we finally reach our hotel. It looks brilliant, young, dynamic, buzzing and… overbooked. A highly energetic and friendly receptionist greets us and tells us how busy the city is that night, partly because of the Hawks game, yes, we know, and partly because of a conference happening at the same time. Then she finishes with, “Oh, you’re a no-show in our system, and your room has been given to someone else.”

• Katie: “Yes, we missed last night and couldn’t check in because of the chaos in the UK, our flight was cancelled. We sent a message on Booking.com asking you to hold the room because we would arrive tonight.”

• The receptionist: “I’m so sorry about that. Booking isn’t great at passing things on to us and we never saw your message. Look, let me try to find you a room in one of our sister hotels nearby.”

We were handed two vouchers for a free drink. We had woken up about two hours earlier. It was night, and yet it felt like morning. I sat there exhausted when I should have been rested, looking at Katie, who was in exactly the same state. We looked at each other without speaking, both of us knowing what the other was thinking, which was: let’s grab a beer and think, because the receptionist is not going to find a room. It is amazing, by the way, how much time spent with someone hands you a kind of psychic power.

We looked at about a dozen hotels nearby. Nothing. Then I found one, around 350 dollars a night, with a single room available. I booked it a hurry and told Katie it was just round the corner. The confirmation email arrived. I had booked the next night, not tonight. I felt silly, cross with myself, and on a mission. “Let’s go to the hotel I’ve just booked and cancel it from there.” We made our way over and were greeted by a man who looked even more shattered than we were.

• The receptionist: “I’ve spent the whole evening telling people we’re overbooked.”

• “Overbooked?” I ask.

• “Yeah, the system just keeps taking bookings. What can I do for you?”

I apologised, as the Brit I am not would do, for being one more cancellation to deal with. Once that was done, we sat in the lobby and started hunting all over again. After what felt like an eternity, we found a room in a modest Hyatt, right by the iconic Space Needle and just round the corner from where we would pick up our car the next day. Things are starting to come together, I thought.

Portland, Oregon

Or Oregon, then Portland.

We left Seattle early the next morning, collected our silver Honda Accord with its automatic gearbox, which I am not used to, and after a short test drive around the underground car park, headed south to Vincent Wine Company near Amity, about three and a half hours away. The driving was mad, at first. There seems to be an unspoken agreement among everyone there that the speed limit is a suggestion. Understand that 60 miles an hour is really 75, and 70 is 85. Undertaking is as normal as overtaking, so if you are in one of the middle lanes, and there are several on a road five to eight lanes wide, you end up wedged between speeding pick-ups and trucks.

The trucks seem to have no speed limit, unlike in Europe, and some of them wore long, blade-like bolt covers on the wheels that made them look like they were off to audition for the next Mad Max film. They terrified me at first, and after a few days on the road they just made me chuckle. The pick-ups are taller than I am, and I am 6 foot 1, or 185cm. They are extraordinarily powerful, and when your Honda sits that low to the ground you feel like an ant at a picnic. Despite having been awake since 2:30am local time, thank you, jet lag, adrenaline carried me through Seattle. Once we were out of the madness of the city I simply dropped, and Katie had to take over. I slept the whole way to Vancouver, the last city in Washington State before Portland.

^{And these weren’t the longest “blades” we came across!}

Getting through Portland was far easier and far more civilised. It also reminded me of driving in Funchal, in Madeira, where bridges are built on top of one another. Both Seattle and Portland, and Funchal for that matter, are built on mountainsides, and those stunning layers of streets climbing upward, where multicoloured houses mingle with trees, give you something that looks nothing like a city. In all of them, nature is dominant, respected, and I would even say revered. Most of the locals are careful in how they act, looking after what is around them. The streets are clean, there are trees everywhere giving an evergreen feeling and natural shade for the hotter days. There is a genuine pleasure in walking along the busy roads, which sounds like a contradiction only nature could explain.

That sense of calm and mindfulness is even stronger up on the hills of the Willamette Valley, an hour south of Portland. We drove through rolling hills covered in vineyards and open fields, little houses with enormous red barns and hectares of land around them, exactly like the films I grew up watching in the nineties. Nothing has changed. Vincent Fritzsche was texting me as we got close, because his winery is remote enough to need a few extra directions on top of what Google Maps gives you. He was right to worry, and with his help we eventually made it to his small winery, perched on a hill higher than the ones we had driven through.

The last time we met was at Wine Paris in February 2026, and we had bumped into each other twice before that. That run of unplanned meetings is what led to us working together: he makes wonderful, honest wines, and Perfect Cellar gets them to UK wine lovers. You can discover and buy Vincent’s wines through the link at the end of this article. When we arrived we were greeted by the man himself, as open and generous as ever. I found him to be a bit of a poet when we first met, and that side of him only grows stronger at home.

Vincent showed us his facilities, which took all of standing still at the entrance. No huge doors, no mile-long driveway, no cellar door and no tasting room. Like his wines, everything at Vincent’s is minimalist. “I’m sorry folks, I’ve got visitors who booked a tasting in an hour. Still, we have time to sample some wine and chat.” As he got ready and told us to sit on the plastic garden chairs, we met Saul and Jess. Jess is Vincent’s cellar hand, from Nebraska originally, and she has spent about six years working on his wines. “Jess really gets it,” he explained as he poured his Pinot Blanc ‘Tardive’. “When we met and she asked to work with me, I had to tell her she would not learn what they teach in wine school. There is not much action, no fining, no adding anything to our wines here. Nature does the job.” Jess was a few metres away, washing a fermentation tank for the next day, when the critical time, that harvest is, would start. I could not feel a scrap of pressure anywhere, which is another of Vincent’s characteristics.

Sitting there, I noticed the light wind on us, faintly cold and persistent without being intrusive, a little like a fan on a summer night. Our host explained that two mountain ranges meet to the west, partly blocking the Pacific winds, but that the winery sits exactly in line with a gap between them. So they get wind where other parts of the valley do not, and once you feel it, it makes sense, and it explains where the wines get their natural tension. We tasted more, so I asked for a spittoon, since I was driving. I was the only one spitting, which has never bothered me, because I prefer wine to being tipsy, or to being the cause of a car crash. Vincent opened one of his Chardonnays, the Temperance Hill single vineyard.

What I love about his wines is their fruit-forwardness, and, as you have probably worked out, the minimal intervention means little oak, lees or malolactic influence. Do not misunderstand me, those things still happen, because wine is still a made thing, an artisan one in Vincent’s case, and it is crucial that the artist keeps his own style and mark. He also opened a bottle of the Gamay Noir, one of my favourites in his range, along with three different expressions of Willamette Pinot Noir. That last part was brilliant, because for once Katie was experiencing a tasting led by the winemaker himself, and a very articulate one. His words helped her find her way through the differences between the Pinots Noirs, and for the first time I heard her say something other than “It’s red.” A good thing too, as there are plenty more tastings to come.

Vincent’s guests arrived. He politely excused himself and went to greet them with that same natural warmth. We went over to Jess and Saul to say goodbye and ended up chatting with them for another twenty minutes. Saul, it turned out, is a winemaker in the making, as articulate as Vincent and genuinely knowledgeable about the region. A curious man, he asked how the UK sees Oregon wines, the kind of question I love to answer and that would take too long to type out here.

Saul Mutchnick started out on a wine-shop floor in college and never really looked back. In 2018, a decade after his first harvest and after a fairly winding road, he and his wife started Championship Bottle for roughly the price of a used car, making 250 cases in a corner of Vincent’s winery while he was still working at a wine shop in Portland. Having no investors has meant real creative freedom in the cellar, and a clear idea behind it all: to make fundamentally Willamette wines seen through the lens of Friuli, a region he feels his corner of Oregon has a lot in common with. If a grape does not grow in Friuli he will not work with it, which, happily, still leaves Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Noir and Blanc and the rest, and the range leans heavily towards whites. Saul also mentioned a few times he would be keen on growing Schioppettino in Oregon; I’d love that to happen! Everything he produces ferments on native yeasts and gets a longer élevage than most of Oregon, almost always eighteen months before bottling, all in search of whites with minerality and tension rather than easy fruit, wines built to age but kept affordable and approachable, a small rebellion after years watching serious wine get over-priced and over-dressed on shop floors.

He kindly gave us a bottle of his Hard Promises Pinot Blanc 2024, which we genuinely enjoyed, a wine with a long ageing in neutral oak that gives it a lovely softness and lightness. That does not mean it is weak, because I found real weight through the mid to back palate and a citrus-focused profile, and its structure could certainly carry some age. I left the link to Saul’s winery - Championship Bottle - at the bottom of this article.

Leaving Vincent’s place with a few bottles in the boot and a sense of calm infused by the winemaker and his people, as much as by the stunning surroundings we felt so lucky to have had for those sixty minutes, we came down out of the Amity hills and headed for Portland, the city so many people want to “keep weird.” The drive was quick, and we reached our lovely little Airbnb studio, time at last to rest.

We spent a couple of good days in Portland after that, none of it remotely wine-related, so I will spare you the details and let the city keep its secrets. That said, I’ll drop links to places we visited and think are worth a visit. After a couple of nights, we headed east towards the Columbia Gorge. Part 3 will be about our drive through the gorge to Walla Walla, stay tuned for more.

Links you might find useful:

Wines

• Vincent wines on Perfect Cellar: https://www.perfectcellar.com/collections/vincent-wine-company

• Saul’s winery, Championship Bottle: https://www.championshipbottle.com/

Portland

• Javelina Indigenous Dining: https://javelinapdx.com/

  • Chef Alexa Numkena-Anderson’s food draws on her Hopi, Yakama, Cree, and Skokomish heritage while pushing to revise what North American cuisine is understood to encompass.

• Jacqueline: https://jacquelinepdx.com/

  • Cracking seafood with an oyster happy hour - $1 / oyster.

• Powell’s City of Books: https://www.powells.com/bookstore/powells-city-of-books

  • The iconic bookstore with cafe that serve very good wines!

• Farmhouse Kitchen | Thai Cuisine: https://farmhousethai.com/pearl-district

  • Only using local ingredients. Also one of the best Thai food experience I had outside of Thailand.

Charity

drinc. supports the work of SwimTayka, a charity that teaches survival swimming to children living near water. All profits from drinc. paid subscriptions go to the charity, and I cover the Substack fees myself so every penny reaches them. Make your reading count, subscribe now.

Subscribe now

I used AI to confirm facts and to polish my Frenglish. Love it or hate it, everything here is my truth. I'm assisted by AI, not powered by it.

So I would spend hours reading, watching YouTube videos and scrolling through brands’ Instagram posts to work out where they are based, what kind of wines they make, and who they are aiming at with their own marketing. Quite often, becoming an extension of that marketing effort is enough on its own to open a new source of revenue with very little work. Orin Swift is my favourite example of this. When we added around four wines from their range, Perfect Cellar gained one of its strongest returning customer bases, generating six figures in revenue every year since.

But what I am truly interested in is the people behind the wines. The ones who plant and nurture the vines, the ones awake at two in the morning fighting the frost, the ones who spend hours in the winery during the harvest weeks making sure fermentation starts cleanly, and the ones who travel the world to find new markets for the wine so many people worked so hard to get into the bottle. And for that, you have to go and visit them where they are.

In this series, my focus is on Washington State, shortened by the locals to WA. Before I dive into why I chose this region, let me set some geographical context. Washington State, and always say it as a whole, otherwise folks picture D.C., is the westernmost state of the mainland United States. It is also the northernmost on the Pacific Coast, sitting between Canada to the north, Idaho to the east and Oregon to the south. Its capital is not Seattle, as many assume, but Olympia. Like most of you, I had no idea, and it was at the home of the Seattle Seahawks that I spent most of my time when I was not out in the wine country. In fact, I am typing this from my Airbnb in the leafy Western Queen Anne area, which feels like stepping into one of those American movies that show you what a perfect life could look like. The movies did not lie.

So why have Washington State wines held my attention for more than two years, in a fascination that began with deep research into geography, weather, styles, wineries and their reputations, the history of the state, even its sporting history, which is more of a hobby, really? For a start, I knew wine was made there, but it had never really landed with me. I had been drawn to Seattle because of the movies and the series, you know the ones, and visiting the city had been a dream for a long time. Then, separately, I started looking for wines with consistency in ripeness and phenolics that still held great acidity, kept a moderate body and moderate alcohol, and were of course excellent quality, wines that show off their vintage variations and the differences in relief, soils, or whatever you want to call terroir. And not only that. I wanted a place where every style is made, and made well.

You get it. I was looking for a climate-change-proof region.

Now, this series is not about claiming that other wine regions will die or are unfit to adapt. Some will and some are, though, and the two often go together. This write-up is about Washington State wines and the people who make them. It is about the state itself and its people, whether they come from the wine industry or not. It is about my experience here, as a European visitor who lives inside British culture but has strong French roots. Every story and description will carry opinions, thoughts and reflections that are mine. I hope we disagree and discuss them. I hope we agree and discuss them.

Chaos

It is the 8th of September and I am buzzing. We have just dropped our Mini Schnauzer at the dog hotel, I know, so posh, and we are driving to Heathrow for our flight to Seattle. The drive is smooth and uneventful, we are winning the M25 game with no accident and no roadworks to slow us down. At Heathrow we leave the car at the valet park and make our way to check-in.

“There’s barely anyone here,” I say. “That’s because we’re on Fast Track and Speedy Check-in,” Katie answers. Katie is my wife. She knows nothing about wine and has no intention of learning. At this point in the trip, I am a little worried she might regret letting me turn the first half of our holiday into a tour of Oregon and Washington wine country.

We had saved Amex points and used the so-called Companion Voucher to get cheap return flights to Seattle, in Business Class. We had never flown Business. We “bought” the tickets last year, and for the past twelve months I had been dreaming of it, watching videos of what it would be like on YouTube and Instagram.

The first little friction in the experience: my cabin bag is pulled aside by security. After five minutes of waiting, it is my turn.

• Officer: Do I have authorization to check inside your bag?

• Me thinking: Do I have a choice? | Me saying: Yes, Sir.

• Officer: Can you open it for me?

• Me thinking: Well, you already have your hands on it, do it yourself. | Me saying: Sure thing.

• Officer (taking a little blue bag out of the bigger one): What is this?

• Me thinking: A blue bag, Sir. | Me saying: That’s my insulin bag.

• Officer: Can you explain what it does?

• Me thinking: It keeps me alive, mostly. No, silly me, I just thought it would be fun to carry insulin I don’t need. | Me saying: It’s to manage my Type 1 Diabetes.

• Officer: I’ve never come across anything like this before, can I open one?

• Me thinking: I can inject you a cheeky 15 units if you like? | Me saying: Sure you can.

It took him about five minutes to decide I was not a threat. Then again, he should see me when my blood sugars are sky high, I would frighten the Hulk. Good thing he let me keep my insulin.

We made it to the lounge. If you read this and you subscribed, you have probably seen my Notes on Substack where I document my lounge tasting. The wines are good, Whispering Angel is everywhere, and Mentzendorff, the distributor, clearly has the right contacts at British Airways. The food is good too, a bit beige and simple, hot dogs, nachos, sausage rolls, but also salads and some rice cooked the Thai way. All well made, no complaints.

Subscribe now

Around 3:30pm I start wondering when our gate will show. At 3:45pm we are sent to Gate B43, which is great, it is literally just below us. We hurry down and are among the very first there. More people arrive, I see Seahawks caps coming through, and my sense of belonging grows with them, since I am wearing one myself. I always do. After about ten minutes, a man makes an announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, our apologies, but the departure of flight number such-and-such is not going to happen from Gate B43. I have no idea why you were sent here, and I apologise for the inconvenience. As it stands, there is no gate announced for your flight. If you have lounge access, please go back to the lounge you came from and wait for information.”

We all look at each other for a moment. A few dramatic heads drop into hands, a few smiles say they are not remotely surprised. We go back to the lounge and manage to find a seat despite the crowd, because it seems the same announcement went out to other gates too. I sit there typing a Substack article and looking around to calibrate my thoughts. For a moment I forget where I am, the joy of writing, the escape. The place is now heaving. I look at the two TVs standing side by side. The one on the left says: “Breaking News: Heathrow Airport is experiencing technical issues, all planes grounded.” The one on the right says: “Breaking News: The UK puts sanctions on Israel and will not trade products made in settlement areas.” I am sorry to say it made me think exactly what you are thinking now, given how much of the UK’s cyber security is tied up with Israeli firms. If you do not believe me, read this: https://techtime.news/2025/03/30/cybertech/.

Anyway, it was just a coincidence. I heard other theories for the glitch too: Russian hackers, of course, and even Air Force One flying nearby, as President Trump was making his way to Ireland. All three about equally plausible. That day, thousands of people had their flights cancelled. That means thousands of people scrambling to find their suitcases, book hotel rooms, and get on a flight the next day.

Groundhog Day

We were automatically rebooked for Thursday the 10th. On that exact day we were supposed to check into an Airbnb in Portland, Oregon, and visit a winery in the Willamette Valley. It would also mean missing the Seahawks game on the 9th, the opening game of the 2026 season and a Super Bowl rematch against the Patriots. Something that matters to me, at least. Anyway, we took the Lizzie line and got home, about an hour from Heathrow. Once there, Katie called BA: “If there’s any chance we make the game, we’ll take it.” Best wife ever. After hours on the phone, waiting for a BA agent to pick up, and probably sitting at number 3,000 in a queue of 10,000, at around 6am on the 9th, someone said, “Hello?”

After an incredible masterclass in negotiation and niceness, Katie got us onto a same-day flight. We would land at 6:30pm local time. The game would be on, and even one quarter would do. The plan was to run straight into a taxi and get to Lumen Field. Katie had already booked the Uber in Seattle. Perfect plan.

So we do the same journey we did less than twelve hours earlier, only in reverse. Lizzie line to Heathrow, check-in, security, the same blue-bag story all over again, back to the same lounge, eating and drinking the same food and the same wines. I look around and I see the same people. The feeling is wonderfully strange. Having travelled a fair bit this year, you never see the same faces at airports. That day, in the lounge, everyone was the same, most of them even in the same clothes. The one thing that told us apart was the tired faces, marked by the hours spent hunting for our belongings the night before. Some had slept on the airport floor, others in their cars. We were the lucky ones who could go home, shower and sleep in our own bed.

This time the gate is announced properly. Back to normal. We make our way to the plane and find our business class seats. So much space and comfort, it is ridiculous, and I have not even mentioned the service, which was spot on and so attentive. The odd part was that the lower classes had to walk through the business cabin to reach their seats. The looks were strange, a mix of envy and something close to contempt. I felt deeply uncomfortable, I do not belong where I am sitting, this was just the result of some financial cleverness, not us being able to afford these tickets. I looked out of the window for a moment, then was asked whether I would like orange juice or a glass of Champagne while we waited for take-off. You know the answer to that.

The Nicolas Feuillatte Réserve Exclusive NV, a supermarket wine mass-produced by the largest cooperative in Champagne, was not pleasant. The other sparkling option for later was the Gusbourne “Airbourne Reserve” 2021, which was lovely. Over the flight I tasted the Sophie Schaal Riesling 2024 from Alsace, and the Ventisquero Grey Glacier Single Block Pinot Noir, Las Terrazas Vineyard 2024, why such a long name, from Chile. In the end I stuck with the Robert Oatley “Finisterre” Cabernet 2023. All in all the wines were good without being outstanding. Perhaps BA should consider some Washington State wines. You will see why in the write-ups to come.

We landed nicely and were off the plane in no time. Did we make it to the game? Of course not. The baggage belt crawled, coughing up suitcases one at a time, and it took us over forty-five minutes to get ours back. It felt like Heathrow all over again. Groundhog Day, right down to the last bag, and that is how we finally, actually, arrived in Washington State.

I used AI to confirm facts and to polish my Frenglish. Love it or hate it, everything here is my truth. I'm assisted by AI, not powered by it.

Caroline Henry, who writes the excellent Terroir Champagne, has had to correct the record twice now, and she did the useful thing of tracing exactly where the confusion was born. It came, rather wonderfully, straight out of the Comité Champagne’s own press conference. When a journalist asked whether the derogation to make wines above 13% had been approved, Maxime Toubart of the SGV confirmed it and then, with nobody forcing him to, wandered off into the detail that the appellation had asked to unlock its 13% ceiling and go up to 15%, which is the limit that applies everywhere else in France. He did try to add that barely anyone would be affected, that the regional average sits around 12%, and that blending exists precisely to keep things fresh, but by then the damage was done. As Henry tells it, all the AFP journalist in the room took away was that Champagne could now go to 15%, and that is the line that went round the planet. Bunch of idiots, if you ask me.

Truth is, you cannot actually make a sparkling wine at 15% alcohol, for the simple reason that the yeast which carries out the second fermentation dies long before it gets anywhere near that. As Caroline lays out, the practical ceiling for the still base wine (that’s the first fermentation result, before the second one in the bottle starts) is somewhere around 12% if you want a normal six-bar fizz, and even with the clever workarounds, a gentler second fermentation or using grape must instead of added sugar, the finished 2026 champagnes will come out between roughly 13 and 13.5%, and 14% at the very outside. Not one bottle is arriving at 15%, whatever your weather app told you. Henry, who is never one to be gentle about this sort of thing, borrows a phrase from Donald Trump and calls the whole affair a hoax.

The harvest sitting underneath all this noise deserves far better press than it got. As Patrick Schmitt reported for The Drinks Business, 2026 was the earliest harvest in Champagne’s history and one of the healthiest in fifty years, with the Comité comparing the young wines to legends like 1921, 1947 and 1959. The catch was the size of the crop, because growers brought in around 7,000 kilos a hectare against nearly 9,900 the year before, and it was exactly that tiny, concentrated yield that drove the sugars, and therefore the potential alcohol, upwards. Charles Philipponnat told the magazine that his own vineyards averaged about 12.6% potential alcohol, with his prized Clos des Goisses coming in at roughly half its usual yield, and he was clear that the fruit was extraordinary rather than overcooked. The derogation, in other words, is a piece of administrative housekeeping for a handful of producers in the ripest corners of the region, and nothing like the manifesto it has been made out to be.

So that is the honest picture, and now I will tell you what I actually think.

The Champagne region and its leaders - brands and people - are masters at PR and communication. The world forgot that for a moment, it seems. The 15% story is perfect, almost suspiciously so, because it lets everyone get loudly furious about a number that will never appear on a label while the real change slips past more or less unremarked. And the real change is this, in my opinion: Champagne’s alcohol has been climbing for twenty years and it is settling into a new, higher normal that is not coming back down, for the plain reason that the climate which produced it is not coming back down either. I can date the shift myself. When I left Champagne in 2011, pretty much everything was at 12%, and having worked a fair few harvests and been around plenty of very different productions, the struggle I remember was the exact opposite of today’s, because back then we were forever trying to coax the fruit ripe enough to even begin fermentation. Then, as the years went by, I kept noticing 12.5% creeping onto more and more labels, and my honest reaction at the time was to say out loud that we were heading for a 13% wine and that it would cause a backlash. Well, here we are, and the backlash has turned up wearing fancy dress, a one-off 15% derogation that keeps everyone busy and outraged while 13% moves in as the new floor.

It reminds me, and you will forgive the detour, of the way we keep being told that the small boats crossing the Channel are the thing wrecking Britain. Point everyone’s anger at the loud, dramatic, made-for-headlines version of a problem, and the slower, more obvious, more inconvenient truth underneath gets to carry on completely undisturbed. Focus on the noise, forget the fact.

None of this, I should say, is a dig at the Champenois, who are certainly not sitting around plotting stronger wine. If anything they are pulling hard in the other direction, exploring lower and no-alcohol styles, replanting for freshness, and dusting off old high-acidity varieties like Arbanne for a warmer future. Caroline Henry is even hosting the grape DNA specialist José Vouillamoz to talk about how the region’s varieties, hybrids included, might cope with all of this, and that is the conversation worth having, far more interesting than a strength figure that was essentially invented by accident in a press room.

The story was never 15%. The story is that the wine I grew up around at 12% is turning into a 13% wine right in front of us, and that we would all be better off looking at that honestly than at the shiny distraction somebody dropped in front of it.

This piece was written in Frenglish and polished into English by AI. Love it or hate it, the message and the personal stories remain my truth.

^{For the love of 12% abv Champagne.}

It’s a Saturday and we are in Dover. The water is a balmy 21 degrees, which for the Channel in September is practically a hot bath. We are blessed with blue sky, a bit of cloud here and there and a not too hot, not too cold temperature. A lovely British Summer day.

Five of us, out of six, Kyriakos was in Greece, which is where he is from, so I will allow it. Then there is Will, Lara, Helena, Alex and me. It’s day one of our training for something that is still ten months away and yet has already been in my head for years.

We arrived late. Not our fault, or not entirely. There was a march. ‘Stop the boats”,: balaclavas, black clothing, the police out in numbers, the whole miserable pantomime. People so sure of their convictions they have to hide when they trouble the local neighboorhood… Pathetic. So here we are, sat in traffic behind a crowd of men furious about people crossing the Channel, on our way to train to cross the Channel, to raise money for a charity that teaches children not to drown. There is some kind of irony in the situation already…

We got in at 10:15 for a ten o’clock meet. Others arrived much later but nobody really minded; the day and the occasion were too beautiful to be spoilt by racist thugs having a middle-age crisis.

The people

We were twelve of us, maybe fifteen, maybe eighteen, it kept changing throughout the day. Everyone was in that in-between state of trying to look relaxed in a tiny speedo or a swimming costume on a pebble beach at ten in the morning.

We met Bryan, who founded the charity and organises all of this. Bryan is himself a serious swimmer: the Channel, and others besides, a proper ultra-marathon man in swimming terms. He started SwimTayka because he noticed something that should be obvious and somehow is not: there are children living within sight of water who cannot swim, and they are drowning. So he sends volunteer swimmers and instructors out for a season, three or four months, to teach free lessons. Places varies from Peru, Indonesia, Uganda, …

Next year there will be fourteen crossings under the SwimTayka flag. Two solos and twelve relays. Ours is one of them.

Also present was Bryan’s dog, Poppy. She’s a lovely Black labrador and I have never in my life seen an dog swim that much. She was in the water more than most of us.

And then Steve. Steve has attempted the Channel as part of a team four times and made it twice. Not the fastest swimmer on that beach. Easily one of the best people on it. Four attempts, two crossings. He tells you his stories so casually, it’s like having a small talk in a lift.

The test

To start with, 200 metres. Out from the beach, parallel to the shore, round the point and back. Bryan was watching. On the way back he gave us the thumbs up, which meant we were cleared for the loop; the second test.

The small loop is 750 metres. Out to that same point, then further into the harbour where it gets deeper - and it gets properly deep, which is the best part, obviously - round a red buoy, round a green one, back to the beach.

We swam it as a pack with the team. Will was at the front because Will is always at the front. He’s by far the most powerful of us 6. Then me, then the others, and we stopped at each buoy to let everyone regroup. We chatted, we laughed. We took the mickey out of each other, because that’s waht we do all the time. We also agreed loudly that we were all obviously built for this. So loudly that Bryan told us he could hear everything we were saying even from the distance… oops.

He also asked if we fancied another loop. We did another one, no need to beg for that!

In that first round of tests, I did not want to get out. I keep trying to find a better way of saying this and I cannot: that water is my happy place. I would have stayed in it all day, swimming miles without caring about the world and its madness.

^{Can you spot Poppy swimming amongst us?}

The boats

After the swim we walked round to the marina to see the pilot boats. Four of them. High Hopes. Anastasia. Pegasus. And a fourth whose name I have completely lost.

Each one carries a small dinghy on the back. That is the boat that goes in with the final swimmer, because the big one cannot follow you into shallow water. Underneath, there are three double beds, a shower, a little kitchen, a fridge. It genuinely is more civilised than I expected.

Then something extremely rare happened. A pilot came out to talk to us; Tom. We were told this basically never happens, and we asked him about nine hundred questions, and he answered all of them.

Part of the folks there that day is going on the following Wednesday. They were meant to go Monday - cancelled. Then today - cancelled, weather turning. That is the whole thing in one sentence. It is not you who decides when you swim the Channel. It is the Channel who decides when you can swim.

Our window is between 16 and 22 August 2027. The pilot can call us with as little as two hours’ notice. Which means likely a week in Dover, an Airbnb for six people and a lot of kit, waiting for a phone to ring. My phone, since I am the designated cap’tain of the crew. We will have to be fifteen minutes before our slot at the assembly point, packed and ready to go. It’s both exciting and frightening, I won’t lie.

How a relay actually works

Two to six swimmers, six maximum. We swim one hour each, in rotation. You swim your hour, then you sit on the boat for five.

The order is fixed and cannot be changed. That’s right, once decided, that is the order, forever, no swapping. If on the day someone pulls out, the entire crossing is over. Also, you cannot touch another swimmer and they cannot help you. You cannot touch the boat either when in the water. You have to wear minimal gear: Speedos, cap, goggles, earplugs if you want them - that’s it. No neoprene, no fins, nothing. Nothing that helps. It’s about you and the water, as minimal as it gets.

As we know now, Will goes first. He is the quickest of us, and the first hour is the one that has to punch you out of the tide. Because you do not swim in a straight line - the current drags you north from the moment you leave the beach, and somebody has to spend their hour fighting that so everyone else gets a steady one.

The end is the hard part. The current on the French side is brutal, and there are stories - plenty of them - of swimmers who could see the beach, could see people standing on it, a kilometre out after thirty-odd kilometres, and had to stop. That is what I think about.

If you’re not quite sure what these currents mean to us, swimmers, have look at the map of the last year swimmers’ paths… No straight line whatsoever.

The afternoon

We had a 45 minute lunch break. I was starving so I stuffed myself with M&S anchivies in vinegar, mini saucisson secs with cheddar cheese and falafels. Alex also gave me a vegan cookie after she realised I was still too low in blood sugar for the afternoon swim. That’s how much of a great team we are, we care for each other even if we pretend we don’t.

And yes, I am also a type 1 diabetic. That’s another story though.

The water was a bit choppy, nothing dramatic in my book. Just enough to play with. I messed about with my breathing: three, then five, then four, then two, just to see. To the left, to the right, change, hold, … move with the water and its caprice. Ultimately, this means I also played with my stroke, because I have two. The wide one, arms fully open, going around the waves as I recover, for when it is real rough. And the elbow-up recovery, hand down, almost sliding along the surface, for when it is flat. That second one is the proper swimmer’s stroke. The pretty looking one.

And then the tide arrived, and this is the bit I loved the most.

When swimming in a pool, nothing happens. You look at the black line at the bottom, you go straight without thinking because the line goes past. Here I was swimming towards the beach and being pushed toward my right with headwinds and waves but also pulled backwards at the same time, and for a while I was simply not going anywhere… I adored it. Then I go it. I understood what the rythm of the sea was at that time and I adjusted: a wave would come from behind and push, and if I timed it well. If my stroke lands right and I give it one small go with my arms, I would then stop fighting the drag and surf it instead. I went faster and I rested at the same time. Pure gold of a swim.

I know. It’s deep geeky swimmer content going on. I am not sorry, it’s likely the thing I love doing the most in life.

After three loops, the swim was over. Time to dry off and chat more, and then it was over for a day I wanted to last forever.

What Bryan said

At the end he came over and told us we were a strong group. Good swimmers, all of us.

He also said that Will and I could handle the long loop, and likely the solo crossing if we wanted to. Hell yes, I want it! There is an etiquette to training in Dover, the long loop is for people training for a solo, and relay swimmers are asked to stick to the small one. There is a stretch of it near the harbour wall where the water gets trapped and turns into a washing machine, a whirlpool, and it takes real work to get out of. Even for us, he said, it would be hard.

I want to do it enormously.

Yes, I want the solo. Not next year, next year is the relay, and the relay is the point. But I want to cross a few times first. Get to know the water. I want to get stung by jellyfish, get frightened by something that turns out to be a fish, learn what the Channel does at three in the morning, in a pitch black August night. And then, once we understand each other, I’ll ask it properly.

Not yet though. First step is 16 August 2027, or likely somewhere after during that week.

We will be six swimmers, two thousand pounds each raised for SwimTayka. We will be enjoying, likely crying too. There are 100% chances one one of us will be sea sick, 90% chance all of us will be sea sick. But we will continue, the mission is bigger than us.

Your contribution

Until the Channel crossing happens, I turn my Substack paid subscriptions to a fundraising page.

Every penny I receive from drinc. subscriptions goes to SwimTayka. Substack and Stripe take their cut before it reaches me - I will recover them from my own pocket so everything you donate through the sub lands with the charity.

And you still get a drinc. t-shirt to say thank you!

SwimTayka exists because of something that should be obvious and somehow isn’t: there are children who live within sight of water and cannot swim in it. So they drown. Bryan, who founded it, sends volunteer instructors out for two to four month seasons - to Peru, Indonesia, Uganda - and they teach, for free, until those kids can swim.

That’s what I’m swimming for. That’s what my crew is swimming for.

Subscribe now. You will get the whole journey: the training, the cold-water tests, the 24-hour relay Alex and I are about to attempt with only the two of us, in October, and whatever the Channel does to me on the way. Just take the annual sub’ and I’ll send you a tee on top. That’s £80 donation.

Go founding. £240, or more if you’re feeling it. You’ll get the same tee, the same newsletter but your impact will be considerably more important.

Or just donate here: https://www.justgiving.com/page/saxon-crown-crusaders-take-on-the-channel. There won’t be any newsletter, no tee, no obligation to read a word I write.

Any of the three works. Doing nothing also works, but it teaches nobody to swim.

Merci 🪼

A bright blue lorry swings in, reverses until the back of its tank kisses the edge of quai number two, and I clumsily climb up on top of it. Once up there, I feel a tad dizzy; I'm not used to being at this kind of height. But the September sun reflecting on the steel and the wasps flying everywhere bring me back to focus. I open the hatches one by one and draw a sample from each. Then I'm off, down and across to the little lab behind the deck, dropping the samples on the bench. I say: "Montgeux, compartments one, two, three." They check the juice's density, give me the "C'est bon!", and only then do we send it down into the massive belly of the winery. And repeat: sample, lab, "C'est bon!", pump, next lorry. A few thousand times over about two and a half weeks. That, more or less, is a harvest inside one of the biggest wineries in Champagne.

I bet it's not the harvest you're picturing. There are no baskets, no pretty rows, no secateurs in the morning mist. By the time the raw material reached me it had already been picked and pressed out in the villages and driven in by the tankful. On hot days, some of it was even fermenting already by the time it arrived. As you've probably gathered by now, my job sat at the next stage, the unglamorous one nobody photographs: getting that juice off the truck, past the lab, and into the right fermenting tank.

Let me back up, because how I ended up on that deck is half the story.

You're reading the fourth instalment of a twelve-part series. If you like this true story, subscribe and receive all future episodes directly in your inbox. Easy peasy.

Subscribe now

Back to Champagne

At the end of Part 3 I did something that looked quite insane. Two months after deciding my whole future was in London, I quit. There was a harvest about to start in Champagne. One month of it paid what two or three months in a freezing station bar did, and the bar wouldn't give me the time off. I bet on the harvest, obviously.

The Maison I went to was then one of the biggest in the region, the second largest at the time, in fact. In this part, I’m keeping names out, because some of what I’m about to tell you could land real people in trouble, and they don’t deserve that for the sake of a personal article. What matters is this: my dad worked there. He had spent most of his life inside that place. I was about to spend two months working right beside him.

So I went for one month and stayed for two, because I worked hard and they asked me to. I did the harvest, then the soutirage (racking), then watched the first wines head off towards tirage and the extended rest in the cellar. In Champagne the law makes you wait at least fifteen months before a non-vintage can leave, and three years for a vintage. As a producer, you spend the money now and you sometimes get it back half a decade later. It’s quite a gamble. I’d even say it’s a brutal way to run a business, and nobody in that courtyard seemed to think about it for a second. Neither did I; we had trucks to empty.

Junior

My name lasted about a morning. By lunch on day one I was “Junior,” and Junior I stayed, to most of my dad’s colleagues, even to this day.

I loved it more than I can properly explain. My mum and dad split when I was young, and after that I saw him on the every-other-weekend rota that French separations run on. He was a wonderful dad and a gloriously forgetful one, the sort who, a few times, left me at the swimming pool after a late waterpolo match and had me walking half my teammates home through the dark before I walked myself back. It’s funny how I never really got mad at him. “It’s just how he is,” I would say, and still say! So to be beside him all day, every day, for two months, to be introduced around as his son, to watch a whole winery greet him like a favourite, that was worth more than the wage.

And he was liked. Everywhere he went, a nod, a joke, a hand on the shoulder. Being Junior meant the doors he’d spent thirty years opening swung open for me too. I was in the middle of everything from the first hour: summer holiday stories, anecdotes, and even some bromance ones.

The broom

My first real lesson had nothing to do with wine.

We were on the deck on the very first, very slow morning of the harvest, with everything cleaned and ready. No trucks yet, though. So I stood by my dad, who lit a cigarette, and I put my hands in my pockets. My dad instantly told me to take them out. “You’re a contractor,” he said. “Even if you’re my son. If they decide you look idle, they’ll find a reason to let you go.” Then he took a puff, handed me a broom, and told me to sweep a corner that did not need sweeping, and to keep sweeping until a lorry came.

I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard, and part of me still does. Look busy or be gone. It’s a very French idea, maybe a very European one. Fifteen years in Britain have taught me the opposite reflex, that if there’s genuinely nothing to do you don’t insult everyone by miming it. But I’ve never forgotten that broom, because it was the first time I understood that the son of a top employee and the man on a two-month contract were, to the company, the same disposable thing.

The good side of a factory

Despite that, I won't pretend it was hard living. The pay was excellent, better than anything I'd touched by then. So far my experience had been stacking cans in a large supermarket, lifeguarding at a summer swimming pool, or stacking parcels in a chicken slaughterhouse. By contrast, working for a large Maison in Champagne comes with incredible benefits compared to the amount of work required. On top of a very decent salary come the bonuses, a thirteenth month, a fourteenth, sometimes a fifteenth, so people walk out in December with something close to four months' wages at once. I'd come from the other end of the working world, from those grim shifts (I'll spare you the details), and here I was earning twice that in a spotless winery.

And the rhythm was not the rhythm of a traditional factory, not like a previous summer job that had me shifting heavy piles of cartons for eight hours, either morning, evening or at night, at a pace I found inhuman back then. It's more like the rhythm of a school. Workers wait outside the factory, smoking cigarettes, talking about a football match or a punch-up someone got into over the weekend. Then the morning bell, to tell them to start their day. A bell to break at 11:30am. A bell back to work at 1:30pm, yes, a two-hour break, and a bell to send you home at 5pm. And like at school, some are already waiting by the door five minutes before the last bell of the day. Grown men and women moving on the ring, every day, and I remember thinking they were a little like pupils who had never been let out. Slaves to the bell. I could tell this way of working suited the majority of them just fine. The school system had worked nicely here. That said, this is not a criticism. I totally get why people want a steady job that pays well and lets them switch off at five. It just frightened me a little.

The joy

But harvest is different. It’s the happy month. After a year of feeding labelling machines or stacking pallets, a select few get pulled into one loud, physical, shared effort, and the place comes alive. That select few are always eager to meet again at harvest, in the winery. They are colleagues, but for most of the year they only see each other in the locker room, in the morning or before leaving. Harvest brings them together, and that is where a camaraderie à la “Band of Brothers” starts. All united, focused, happy. And there is the champagne…

This will surprise nobody and I won't pretend otherwise. A few of them kept a small glass, a blida, in their front pocket, over their heart, which can tell you a lot. Every so often through the day, someone would say "Lapin," nearly whispering it, then pretend he hadn't said a thing if you didn't know what a rabbit had to do with the day's work. It was the code to say Champagne was available to sample. Hidden behind a large vat, hidden in the staff-room toilets, hidden inside a cement vat, far from the main action, always. Cheeky, somewhat harmless, part of the fun.

That said, there is a dark side to this. There is a recognised alcohol-addiction problem in Champagne, in pretty much any Maison, large or small, and it exists in other regions too. In a place surrounded by open wine, all day, every day, some people don’t stop at cheeky. I worked alongside men back then who were fighting something they never beat, and a few of them are gone now. It is an easy trap to fall into in wine, in beer, in spirits, anywhere the product is always at your elbow and always free. The harvest is a party, but for a few people it was also the loudest edge of a problem, and I’d rather say that plainly than just hand you a rosy little picture.

Haven’t subscribed yet, hey? Here’s your chance. It’s not everywhere you’ll get to read true stories like this harvest in Champagne.

Subscribe now

Curiosity

Other than transferring must to fermenting tanks, there are other jobs happening in the winery during harvest, and right after it.

One day I was told to pour a thick sweet syrup into some of the tanks, the ones where the juice was greenest, suggesting grapes weren’t quite ripe enough. I did it, then asked the Maison employee next to me what it was. “Sugar”, he said. I taste it and find it rather nice. Why are we putting sugar in wine? He didn’t know. “I do it because they ask me to. That’s the job.”

That answer bothered me. So I went and knocked on the boss’s office and asked him instead. It’s the liqueur for chaptalisation, he said, sugar to give the fermentation enough to work with when the grapes haven’t ripened enough on their own. I went home that night and read everything I could find, met a Frenchman named Chaptal on the page, and discovered the method is banned across much of the wine world and allowed in some cool corners like Champagne, where full ripeness has always been a gamble. Less of a gamble now, chaptalisation is less and less used in Champagne which is another proof something is going wrong with climate… But that’s another piece to write in itself.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot. We were two men doing the same task, one had done it for years and never once asked why. How is that even possible? The other couldn’t rest until he knew. Curiosity really, more than any wine, is the difference that made me. There were other new words that autumn, for me. Like Bentonite, a sort of clay you drop into the wine before bottling to pull it clear, an astonishing amount of it was used. We were pouring, tank by tank, tick the box on the “to-do” list, move on. Factory Champagne at its finest.

The day we lost five hundred litres

There was a tank mid-fermentation that had gone still on top, though the temperature said it was very much alive. A pocket of carbon dioxide had formed inside it, big enough to wall off part of the wine from the rest, and, left alone, the whole tank could turn. The fix is a sort of “push-under”: draw the wine from the top, push it back in at the bottom, and force the pocket up in the process.

A colleague showed me how, and told me to film it but never share it. His exact warning: there are two ways this goes, perfectly, or catastrophically. We got catastrophically. The pocket must have been enormous, because when it went, it went like a geyser, firing fermenting juice straight up against gravity for a good ninety seconds, over the top, over us, over everything. The noise was absurd and the smell filled the cellar. We put about five hundred litres on the floor that day, and it was an exercise we, thankfully, never had to repeat.

What struck me the most that day wasn't the sheer amount of unfinished wine being wasted; it was the reaction of the band. Before we even began, colleagues called each other over as if it were some attraction they shouldn't miss; it felt like they wanted the catastrophic outcome more than the perfect one. As the geyser kept vomiting wine over everything, I looked around and saw a bunch of men, in silence, smiling, some with their hands in their pockets. The noise of the flying juice was so loud that no one even tried to talk over it. Instead we watched. I was surprised and amazed; the veteran seemed satisfied.

The opportunity I declined

I went back again, and one autumn my dad slipped on his first day, turned his knee badly, and was carried off to hospital. The manager was discussing with some veterans, they seemed to disagree. At some point, he made a decision that seemed to not land with the committee. He opened the little sash window that separated his lab from quay two and said: “Junior, you’re taking the dispatch and quai two.” And just like that I was running the busiest corner of the deck, the one my dad had run for years, deciding which juice went to which tank across the whole map of the cellar and I became, for a fortnight, the chief. I loved every minute.

Which is why the question they asked me stung. Would I stay full time? A real job, the good pay, the bonuses, the four-day weeks when things go slow. I said no, without much of a pause.

Because a month of harvest is a month of harvest. It is not twelve months of it. The other eleven are the labelling line, the pallets, the bell, and I already knew that would hollow me out. Some people are built for the steady rhythm and are honestly happy in it, and good for them. I am not. I need a problem to chew on. I need to make something. Standing at a machine feeding it bottles, I make nothing, and something in me goes quiet. The money was better than hospitality by a mile. I still chose hospitality, and the city, and the harder, stranger life. I think I already knew I would.

The party and the money

Harvest ends the way it should, with a feast. The Maison sat us all down, including all the lorry drivers, fed us, poured for us, and we drank until we couldn’t remember our names. The first year we ended up at somebody’s house until four in the morning. The end-of-harvest party is called the “cochelet.” It happens everywhere in Champagne, but at different times. It always amused me how all these Maisons, vignerons and growers would do the same work, sometimes finish harvest on the same day, in the same town or village, and then not party together. It’s not one cochelet; it’s hundreds, if not thousands, of them happening within the same few days.

My brother Alexis does this for a living at the moment, chasing harvests around the planet, one hemisphere then the other, a French cellar one month and Margaret River the next. As I type this he is in Provence, working at Château d’Esclans, the maker of Whispering Angel. He took our youngest brother, Mathis, with him this time. Later this year the two of them will head to Australia, likely to Margaret River, which Alexis had just come back from in July. I did two autumns of it and knew it wasn’t my road, but I understand completely why he loves it, and I wish I’d had the chance to do one harvest alongside the two of them.

And for the money, it did what I needed it to. The two months of my first harvest paid roughly what four in London would have, and Lucie and I badly needed it. We were living mostly on my wage by then, both stuck in jobs that matched our shaky English rather than our ambitions. The cash was a lifeline. It could not fix the other thing, which was that the two of us were slowly, gently coming apart, and we had both started to know it.

And then, up

That was my last harvest at the winery, in fact, it was my last harvest altogether. It was also the most formative, the one that taught me leadership: standing up for what I believed was right, and knowing when to admit that my older colleagues’ experience was worth listening to and considering. That last harvest made me want to lead a team, to create my own band of brothers (and sisters, obviously!), and to build something. It helped me a lot in my career in London, something I’ll touch on later in this series.

So I came back to London with a fuller pocket and an emptier idea of what came next. I stopped by the old station bar to say a proper sorry for vanishing, and there were no hard feelings, they’d replaced me weeks before. But someone there knew someone, and pointed me towards a bar and restaurant with, he promised, a view I would not believe.

I went to find the address, stood at the foot of the building, and looked up. And up. About a hundred and eighty metres of it, with the bar right at the top.

That’s Part 5. See you at the top of the Gherkin.

^{Early August 2011, my birthday on the Tube. No winery photos exist, I was there to work, so this will have to do.}

Read more

Read more

And at more or less the same moment, somewhere in those same dry hills, I would put money on a grower sitting through a sales call, being sold an AI platform that promises to cut his vineyard’s water use by a fifth.

What I find fascinating? The rep is actually telling the truth.

The good news, and it is r…

Read more

It turns out I meant it more than I knew.

February 2011. I am standing near a glass box on a mezzanine at St Pancras International, a cloth in one hand and a champagne flute in the other, and it is about five degrees celsius. Not in a fridge. In the station. St Pancras i…

Read more

I didn’t. And the bit that throws people: I didn’t even look at the prices.

Not because price doesn’t matter. It matters enormously, and it has its own letter in how I work, the C in SCALE, for Cost. Just not today, and not at this stage. When a sample lands, the bottle is the product. The liquid comes later. So today it’s the other four letters, SALE, and the price list stays in the drawer where it can’t sway me.

This is how I actually work through a box like this.

S is for Source and Segment. These are all Rioja, and Rioja is already everywhere in UK online and physical retail, which sets the bar high. So the first question isn’t “is this nice,” it’s “where would this even sit next to the fifty Riojas already on the shelf.” The encouraging part is that this box mostly isn’t more of the same. There’s a traditional-method sparkling Rioja, four whites including a nine-variety field blend off vines planted in 1900, a varietal Graciano, and a run of single-vineyard reds. Sparkling and white Rioja, and these Viñedo Singular bottlings, are exactly the corners that are growing and under-represented here. That’s far more interesting to me than another oak-heavy Reserva.

A is for Appeal and Aesthetics. Now I pick each bottle up, and this is the part I actually filmed. The label first, and the question I ask is whether a British drinker could remember the name after one glass. Half of these are a mouthful: Jusan Valdelana Viticultor Artesano, Marqués de Vargas Sección Privada Viñedo Singular Pradolagar, Fernández de Piérola. Gorgeous on the bottle, but a name nobody can hold onto is a name nobody reorders. There’s a lot of craft on show too. Seven of the twelve are individually numbered, five are dipped in wax, one has a hand-painted label of old vines, another has its name embossed into what looks like wood. All lovely.

And then, because I spent a whole series on exactly this, I can’t unsee the last thing. They are heavy - something I am not touching on in the video.

I weighed all twelve, full, and worked back to the glass. The average empty bottle in this box lands around 685 grams. The lightest is about 490. The heaviest, a red called Monte Real El Bagazo, is a little over 900 grams of glass wrapped around the same 750ml of wine as everyone else. For reference, the industry average is roughly 550 grams, and the Sustainable Wine Roundtable wants the average still-wine bottle under 420 by the end of 2026. Every single bottle in this box is over that target. Most are half again as heavy, and a couple are more than double.

I’ll forgive exactly one, the sparkling, because a traditional-method wine has real pressure inside and needs the glass. The other eleven don’t have that excuse. They are heavy because heavy feels expensive, and that instinct is going to cost these producers on carbon, on the truck, and now on the UK packaging fees I wrote about not long ago. None of it makes the wine taste better.

You can read the first 4 parts of my series on sustainable wines here. You can also subscribe for free 👇🏼

Subscribe now

L is for Look-ups. Then I go digging. A few of these names I know, Marqués de Vargas, Matarromera, Franco-Españolas, Monte Real, so my first job is checking whether they are already represented here, because if they are, the gap I’m looking for has already been filled. The ones I don’t recognise, Ostara, Magadi, El Belisario, Montecano, are the ones that make me sit up: little or no UK footprint, which is either a problem or an opening.

E is for Experience. Last, the crowd; you. Vivino, CellarTracker, the odd Reddit thread, for a read on whether real drinkers, and not just the trade, have warmed to wines like these. It certainly is not gospel, but a signal when I read things like: “I would definitely buy again” or “I wish I’d ordered cases of it” (real quotes by the way).

Only once all of that is done do I let myself think about a corkscrew. Some importers bring wines in because they like them. I bring them in because I want to establish the brand and sell it. Research, research, research. Then taste, maybe.

That last “maybe” is doing a lot of work, and it’s exactly why I filmed the whole thing.

More of these to come, make sure you subscribe to drinc. (and don’t forget the dot).