Most American homes pour red wine too warm and white wine too cold. The fix isn't a better bottle — it's twenty minutes and knowing where the old "room temperature" rule went wrong.

Most Sherry is bone-dry — and most people who'd love it have never knowingly tasted it. Six label words, one fridge, and a bag of salted almonds will fix that.

Grapes rotting on California vines. Tankers of Australian and Chilean wine arriving at the port. And a label that can say "American" on wine that's 25% foreign. New Tasting Truths: why local growers are losing, and how your next bottle can help.

The pop of a cork is wine's best sound effect — and it tells you almost nothing about the wine. What screw caps and corks actually do, and why the twist-off deserves your trust.

Skip the Napa crowds for a day. Suisun Valley packs three very different wineries into one small valley — and all three are betting on Petite Sirah, the grape everyone mislabeled for a century. Here's how to run the flight yourself, fees, hours, and the questions worth asking.

Turkey is actually a wine-friendly protein. The cranberry sauce, sweet potato casserole, and sausage stuffing are another matter entirely. Here's how to pick the right bottle for the hardest pairing table of the year.

The finest bottle produced in Italy in 1980 was labeled “table wine.” That wasn’t a mistake — it was a declaration. Here’s what Super Tuscans actually are, and how to buy them.

The most temperamental major grape in wine — and the most compelling when everything clicks. Your field guide to buying Pinot Noir without losing your mind or your wallet.

Champagne's most famous story starts with a monk who never said the words. The labels on every bottle are full of information most buyers walk right past. Here's how to read them.

Port arrives in a small glass at the end of dinner. Most people stop there. Here's the full argument for why that's the wrong place to stop.

Burgundy's labels look like a logic puzzle. They're not — once you know the one idea that unlocks all of it.

The world's most planted red grape has a “father”. He charges $20 a bottle in the Loire Valley and keeps getting overlooked. Time to fix that.

One grape. Two radically different wines. The Loire gives you flint and minerality; Marlborough gives you grapefruit and passionfruit. Here’s why—and how to buy both.

The "Anything But Chardonnay" crowd had the right complaint and the wrong target. The butter was never the grape's idea.

A wine writer tours Lydgate Farms on Kauai and discovers craft chocolate is made almost exactly like fine wine — same yeast-to-bacteria fermentation, same obsession with terroir and variety. Here's the overlap, where the analogy breaks, and how to buy and taste chocolate like you already buy wine.

The last stop: Margaux, where the producer matters more than anywhere in the Médoc. A 1855 Fourth Growth that Thomas Jefferson flagged in 1787, a twelfth-century estate rescued from seven hectares of ruin, a guide worth every euro — and everything five stops on a river taught us about Bordeaux.

Stop four: the region that rots its grapes on purpose. How the Ciron's fog machine works, why real Sauternes is the most labor-expensive wine in Bordeaux, and a visit with Laure de Lambert Compeyrot — the sixth-generation scientist reinventing a Premier Cru without selling the jewel.

Stop three: the gravel aristocracy. What actually separates Saint-Estèphe, Saint-Julien, and Pauillac, why the 1855 classification is a floor and not a ceiling, and two château visits that prove the famous Médoc is still in motion.

Stop two: the side of the estuary the marketing budget forgot. Roman-era vines, a UNESCO fortress, a Cabernet grown inside the town walls that the appellation system doesn't know how to file, and an afternoon at the Maison des Vins that turned into a party.

Stop one of our Bordeaux cruise: the Right Bank, where Merlot runs the show. The town built from its own vineyard rock, the appellation that never bothered with rankings, the underdog that once outsold them all — and three châteaux worth knowing.