Wine & Travel
Places close to home and around the world, and the wine that runs through them.
Wineries, hotels, inns and the food worth the drive, plus what's worth stopping for along the way, like a powwow, a small-town museum or a ghost town. Maps, a quiz, the bottles worth hunting down, the winemakers in their own words, and a newsletter every other Friday. No scores, no homework.
Free. Unsubscribe whenever.
The Friday edition
Every other Friday: a place worth the drive with a map, a bottle with what to eat alongside it, five quiz questions, and a Meet the Winemakers interview.
Subscribe freeEarlier issues ran under the name Pour Story Society. Browse every issue.
Wine maps
One region at a time, with every stop written out and the drive between them.
The Vianarra Wine Quiz
Ten questions, two from each corner of the wine world. Tap an answer to see how you did.
Stories
The places worth the drive, close to home and abroad, the winemakers in their own words, and the people pouring when you get there.
Loading stories…
The bottle shelf
Wines worth looking for, with what's in the glass and where I found them.
Sparkling Syrah · Dry Creek Valley
Amista Sparkling Syrah, Morningsong Vineyards
Cherry, black currant, cranberry, toasted bread
The first time I tasted it I was in one of the chairs out back at Amista, facing the fields, with a bowl of their seasoned popcorn going around and two people I had met twenty minutes earlier, Ron and Leslie. We went to dinner that night, and they have been at a lot of our tables since. Sold at the winery on Dry Creek Road and on the Amista website. Serve it well chilled with the whole Thanksgiving plate, cranberries included.
Meet the Winemakers
An oral history series with winemakers around the world, well known and lesser known, in their own words. Each Friday edition features an interview that hasn't run in the newsletter yet.
Why this exists
Most wine writing is either a score out of a hundred or a list of fruits somebody claims to taste. Neither one tells you anything about the place the wine came from or the person who made it.
A bottle is the end of a long argument between weather, ground, and somebody's judgment. That is the part worth reading about, and it is the part that almost never gets written down.