Today, we add the final layer: grape variety. It’s often the first thing people learn (“I like Pinot Noir,” “I don’t like Chardonnay”), but it’s rarely situated in the larger system. Variety isn’t the whole story—but it’s a crucial piece of it.

Grape Variety: DNA and Signatures

Most wine grapes are cultivated varieties of Vitis vinifera, each with their own genetic code. Those genes determine key traits: when in the season the vine buds and ripens, how much sugar and acid it accumulates, how thick its skins are, what kind of aromatic compounds it produces, and how it responds to stress. These traits set the parameters of style before climate or technique ever enter the picture.

For example:

• Pinot Noir is thin-skinned, early-ripening, and highly transparent to site.

• Riesling is late-budding, high in acid, intensely aromatic, thriving in cool climates.

• Cabernet Sauvignon ripens late, has thick skins and firm tannins, and performs best where warmth is reliable.

Modern DNA analysis has also revealed family trees. Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Franc gave us Cabernet Sauvignon. Pinot Noir and Gouais Blanc produced Chardonnay. These relationships explain shared structural traits and aromatic echoes across varieties.

Variety provides the baseline signature. Climate, viticulture, technique, and human philosophy determine how that signature is interpreted.

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Sauvignon Blanc: A Case Study

Sauvignon Blanc is a useful lens because its characteristics are so distinct: early ripening, high natural acidity, and those unmistakable green, herbaceous aromatics (pyrazines). Its core identity doesn’t change, but how it’s expressed depends entirely on where it’s grown and how it’s made.

Loire Valley (Sancerre, Pouilly-Fumé)

• Climate: Cool continental; chalky soils; early picking to preserve acidity.

• Viticulture: Low yields, hand harvesting, careful canopy management.

• Cellar: Cool stainless fermentation, minimal intervention.

• Style: Crisp, mineral, citrus-driven wines with tension and herbal precision.

This is Sauvignon Blanc at its most linear and high-definition—everything turned up, nothing smoothed over.

Marlborough, New Zealand

• Climate: Sunny, dry, long daylight hours.

• Viticulture: Machine harvesting common; canopy work to control pyrazines.

• Cellar: Cool stainless fermentation, often with cultured yeasts chosen for aromatic intensity.

• Style: Gooseberry, passionfruit, grass; piercing aromatics; high acidity dialed up to 11.

The same DNA meets different conditions and technique, and the result is vivid, distinctive, instantly recognizable.

Bordeaux and California

• Climate: Warmer, more sunshine, riper fruit.

• Viticulture: Often blended with Sémillon.

• Cellar: Barrel fermentation and aging, lees stirring, sometimes malolactic conversion.

• Style: Richer, rounder, textural wines with softened acidity and subtle oak inflection.

Here, Sauvignon sheds some of its angularity, taking on a layered, savory shape that’s stylistically distant from Sancerre, yet genetically identical.

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Over the past few days, we’ve been layering the pieces: vine, cellar, place. Variety sits within that system as the starting conditions, not the final product. Knowing a grape’s genetic tendencies tells you what it wants to do—when it ripens, how much acid it holds, what kinds of flavors it can produce. But what you actually taste depends on how those tendencies meet the realities of farming, climate, and winemaking.

This is why learning variety in isolation can be misleading. Sauvignon Blanc will always have high acidity and those green aromatics—but whether it ends up taut and mineral, flamboyantly tropical, or broad and textural depends on everything that happens around it. Fluency comes from seeing how those factors interact, not treating variety as a shortcut.

How to Read a Wine

This is where all of these layers come together in the real world. For all their legal and bureaucratic clutter, wine labels (at least the traditional ones) contain a lot of useful information. If you know how to decode them, they tell you generally what to expect.

Think of it like reading a recipe title once you understand cooking: “Grilled Sardines with Lemon and Herbs with Toasted Bread” conjures flavor, technique, and even a cultural signature. A wine label does the same thing—for those who know how to read it.

The simplest way to approach any wine is to move through four questions:

1. Where was it grown?

   Climate, soil, slope, and viticulture shape the raw material. Cool vs. warm climates, marginal vs. generous conditions—these all change structure and flavor.

2. How was it made?

   Fermentation method, vessel, aging, and intervention shape texture, aroma, and structure. Stainless vs. oak, native vs. inoculated yeast, short vs. long aging—these choices are stylistic levers.

3. What is it made from?

   Variety provides a genetic baseline. Knowing how Pinot behaves differently from Sauvignon Blanc, or Cabernet from Riesling, gives you a starting template.

4. Who made it?

   Producer philosophy, scale, and tradition matter. Two winemakers working side by side in the same vineyard can create radically different wines.

Answering these doesn’t require encyclopedic knowledge. Even sketching your way through them shifts you from helpless consumer to active investigator. You stop guessing what something will taste like and start reasoning it out. When you understand the main factors at play, wine becomes legible, even when your experiential knowledge is limited. Will you get things wrong or be surprised? Definitely.

That’s the fun part.

That’s the foundation. Starting next week, Founding Members will get a new Wine School post every Monday, plus the usual Wednesday roundups and Friday essays. You’ll also get full access to the complete Wine School course when it drops soon—everything from this week, expanded, structured, and easy to revisit.

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But beneath all that mystique, Burgundy is built on something simple: place matters here more than almost anywhere else. If you understand how climate, soil, human history, and winemaking fit together, it starts to make a bit more sense. You don’t need to memorize hundreds of names—you need a map, a few key ideas, and the confidence to read a label.

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A Marginal Climate, Perfectly Situated

Burgundy sits in eastern France, between the 46th and 48th parallels—roughly the same latitude as Montreal. Its cool continental climate means cold winters, warm summers, and real seasonal swings. Frost and hail are constant threats. Summers can be warm but rarely hot.

This matters because Burgundy grows Pinot Noir (for reds) and Chardonnay (for whites), both thin-skinned, transparent varieties. They act like amplifiers: tiny shifts in temperature, slope, or soil composition register as real differences in the glass. In warmer regions, site variation can get blurred; in Burgundy, it’s the entire point.

The best vineyards line a narrow limestone escarpment called the Côte d’Or—literally, the “golden slope.” Here, gentle east and southeast exposures give vines morning sun and protection from harsh western winds. Drainage is excellent, and the soils are laced with limestone and clay in different proportions. All of this creates a delicate balance of ripeness, acidity, and flavor development—many of the factors we talked about in viticulture.

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Naming the Land: Appellations and “Climats”

Over centuries, Burgundy’s farmers and monks noticed that some plots consistently produced better wine than others. They gave each site a name and began to treat them as distinct entities. These named vineyard sites are called climats (pronounced klee-mah). A climat can be as small as part of a hillside or as large as an entire vineyard—it’s basically a precisely defined patch of land with its own geological and climatic identity.

In the 20th century, France’s appellation system codified this accumulated local knowledge. Burgundy ended up with a hierarchy of appellations that still structures the region today:

• Regional appellations (e.g., Bourgogne Rouge): grapes can come from anywhere in Burgundy.

• Village appellations (e.g., Meursault, Volnay): grapes must come from a single commune, often showing more distinct site character.

• Premier Cru: named climats within villages that have historically produced especially good wine. These appear on the label alongside the village name (e.g., Meursault ‘Charmes’ or Volnay ‘Taillepieds’).

• Grand Cru: the top sites—exceptional climats that earned their own standalone appellations.

Unlike Bordeaux, which is organized around châteaux (estates), Burgundy’s hierarchy is organized around parcels of land. Ownership is secondary to place.

Fragmentation: The Human Tangle

Here’s where things get tricky. For centuries, many of Burgundy’s best vineyards were owned by the Church. After the French Revolution, those lands were seized and sold off. Then Napoleon’s inheritance laws ended primogeniture (where the eldest inherits everything), requiring land to be divided equally among heirs.

Over generations, vineyard holdings fractured into ever smaller pieces. Today, a single climat can have dozens of owners. One famous example: Clos de Vougeot, a walled Grand Cru vineyard once owned by monks, now has more than 80 different proprietors. Each farms and vinifies their tiny slice separately. Some growers own a single row in a vineyard, or even just a few plants.

This explains why Burgundy labels list not just the vineyard but the producer. Two bottles from the same Grand Cru can taste wildly different depending on who made them. Place sets the stage; people shape the performance.

Technique: Framing Place, Not Erasing It

In the cellar, most Burgundian winemaking is designed to frame site expression rather than overwrite it. Pinot Noir is typically handled gently, fermented in open-top vats, and aged in mostly neutral or lightly toasted oak to preserve nuance. Chardonnay often ferments and ages in barrel, sometimes with lees stirring for texture, but without the heavy-handed manipulation you might see elsewhere.

Of course, styles vary. Some producers pick riper and use more new oak, others favor restraint and precision. But the overarching ethos is: let the vineyard speak.

How to Read a Burgundy Label

When you pick up a bottle, keep three questions in mind:

1. What’s the classification? Regional, Village, Premier Cru, or Grand Cru. This gives you a broad sense of quality and specificity.

2. Where is it from? Which village, slope, or climat? Warmer sites tend to produce richer wines; cooler sites lean taut and mineral.

3. Who made it? Because of fragmentation, producer philosophy matters as much as the vineyard.

With those three data points, you can navigate Burgundy without drowning in trivia.

Burgundy can feel bottomless, and in a way it is—but not because it’s unknowable. It’s because place, people, and history are layered so finely that the closer you look, the more there is to see. Once you grasp the logic, it stops being intimidating and starts being exhilarating.

Tomorrow, we’ll finish the week by zooming out again—connecting grapes, styles, and everything we’ve covered to the bottles you actually encounter on lists and shelves.

Burgundy is a topic people love to get tangled in—so let’s untangle it together. If there’s a vineyard, village, or label that’s always confused you, hit reply or drop it in the comments.

And if you’re ready to have all of this organized in one structured, sequenced place, that’s what the Wine School digital course will offer. Upgrade to Founding to get full access as it rolls out.

Wine School posts are also a preview of a digital course I’m building. Founding Members get full access to the structured version as it rolls out, plus everything else I publish. Upgrade to the Founding Tier to get it all in one place.

Next week, we’ll return to regularly scheduled programming: essays on wine and the performance of taste, the politics and aesthetics of appreciation, affect and performativity, and what’s unfolding across New York’s hospitality scene. For now, class continues.

If viticulture is the process of translating place into fruit, winemaking is the process of translating fruit into wine. Grapes come into the cellar full of potential; what happens next determines whether that potential is amplified, manipulated, or occasionally… completely ruined!

At its core, winemaking revolves around one extraordinary natural process: fermentation

Sugar + Yeast → Alcohol + CO₂

That’s it. Fermentation is a metabolic miracle—yeast consumes sugar, produces alcohol and carbon dioxide, and in the process generates hundreds of aromatic compounds that give wine its character. Everything winemakers do either sets the stage for, guides, or reacts to this transformation.

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How Grapes Arrive

Before fermentation even begins, winemakers make a series of important decisions:

• Whole cluster vs. destemming: Using whole bunches (including stems) can add structure and herbal complexity; destemming gives a cleaner, more fruit-focused expression.

• Crushing vs. pressing: Red wines typically get crushed to release juice and start fermenting on the skins; white grapes are usually pressed immediately to separate juice from skins.

• Sorting: In higher-quality production, grapes are sorted to remove underripe or damaged fruit.

These choices set the baseline texture and flavor framework before fermentation begins.

Fermentation Choices

Fermentation can happen spontaneously, using the ambient yeasts present on the grapes and in the cellar, or through inoculation with cultured yeast strains. Each path has stylistic implications:

• Spontaneous (native) fermentations are often slower, more variable, and can produce complex, distinctive flavors.

• Inoculated fermentations are faster, more predictable, and allow winemakers to target specific flavor profiles or ensure reliability in large-scale production.

Temperature matters, too:

• Cool fermentations preserve delicate aromatics (common in whites and sparkling bases).

• Warmer fermentations extract more color and tannin (important for reds), and can lead to riper, bolder flavors.

Some producers guide the process closely: they agitate the mixture during fermentation to keep the skins and juice well-integrated, carefully manage temperature to control extraction and aromatic development, and sometimes add nutrients like nitrogen compounds or amino acids to keep the yeast healthy and fermentation on track.

Others take a lighter hand, letting the process unfold on its own with minimal interference. Both approaches are deliberate aesthetic and philosophical choices.

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Post-Fermentation Decisions

Once fermentation is complete, the toolbox expands. A few key examples:

• Malolactic conversion (MLF): A secondary bacterial process that softens acidity by converting sharp-tasting malic (like in a Granny Smith apple) acid into creamy lactic acid (like in sour cream). Common in most reds and many fuller-bodied whites (e.g., classic white Burgundy, California Chardonnay).

• Lees contact: Leaving wine on the dead yeast cells (aka the lees) adds texture, savory complexity, and sometimes a subtle silkiness of texture.

• Oak vs. steel vs. concrete: Aging vessels influence flavor and texture—oak adds structure and spice; steel preserves freshness; concrete offers neutrality with gentle micro-oxygenation.

• Clarification and stabilization: Choices about fining, filtration, and sulfur additions affect clarity, shelf stability, and stylistic positioning (from squeaky-clean to unapologetically cloudy).

Each of these is a lever that shapes the wine’s final expression.

Winemaking as Philosophy

Two wines from the same grapes can taste completely different depending on the approach in the cellar. Some winemakers see themselves as minimal translators, intervening only to guide the process gently. Others see winemaking as a craft in its own right, with the cellar as a creative laboratory.

This is where style comes into focus: not just what the wine is, but how it’s made. And once you learn to recognize these choices, tasting becomes a way to investigate a complex matrix of creative decisions. Not to mention, you’ll have an easier time understanding your local wine merchant if they decide to speak only in industry jargon.

Tomorrow, we’ll take this system and apply it to a specific place—Burgundy—to show how environment and technique combine into a coherent style.

Do you have more questions about how what winemakers do? Drop them in the comments or hit reply. I’ll work some of your questions into future lessons.

And if you’re ready for the full thing—structured, sequenced, and free of gatekeeping—upgrade to Founding and get access to the complete Wine School as it rolls out.

Viticulture is the craft of shaping that translation. It’s the set of choices that determine how the vine mediates between place and grape, long before a winemaker does anything. Everything downstream—alcohol, acidity, flavor, structure—is basically a record of what the vine experienced, and how humans guided it.

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The Growing Environment

Grapes respond acutely to their surroundings. Heat, light, and water availability determine how quickly they ripen, how much sugar they accumulate, how acids degrade, and how flavors develop. If it’s too hot, sugars spike before flavors develop and acids find balance; too cool, and the grapes may never fully ripen, leaving green, leafy flavors and razor sharp acidity.

Viticulture describes these conditions in three nested layers:

• Macroclimate: the broad regional pattern (Burgundy vs. Sonoma).

• Mesoclimate: the site itself (hillside vs. valley floor, proximity to bodies of water, wind exposure).

• Microclimate: the immediate environment around the vine—how the canopy is trained, how much sunlight clusters receive, how air circulates between leaves and fruit.

Each layer influences ripening in different ways, and together they define the baseline character of a wine. This is what we talk about when we talk about terroir; it’s the sum of these environmental factors and how the vine interprets them.

Ripeness Is a Choice

One of the most consequential decisions in winegrowing is when to pick.

As grapes approach their maturity, three things happen simultaneously:

• Sugar levels rise, increasing potential alcohol.

• Acidity drops, changing the wine’s structure and freshness.

• Flavors evolve, moving from green and herbaceous to ripe and sometimes overripe, depending on the variety and climate.

Harvest too early and the wine will be lean, tart, maybe a bit green. Harvest too late and you’ll get higher alcohol, lower acidity, and riper, sometimes jammy flavors. The ideal picking window—the “sweet spot”—is where sugar, acid, and flavor development align, but where that point falls depends on the producer’s philosophy, the region, and the intended style.

Soil, Slope, and Canopy

While climate and picking decisions do most of the heavy lifting, vineyard variables fine-tune the outcome:

• Soils influence drainage, water retention, and heat. Rocky soils warm quickly and drain well; clay retains water and stays cooler.

• Slope and aspect determine sunlight and air movement—south-facing slopes in the Northern Hemisphere, for example, promote faster ripening.

• Canopy management (how leaves are trained and pruned) affects how much light and air reach the clusters, which impacts both ripening and disease pressure.

None of these elements matter in isolation. Viticulture is about how they’re balanced together to shape the raw material.

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The Role of Vintage

Because vines are so responsive to their environment, every growing season tells a different story. A sudden rain, a heat spike, or a cool harvest can shift the balance dramatically. When people insist on talking about vintage variation, it can sound performative and snobbish; and sometimes, it surely is. But those who really understand wine, understand that nature is a co-author of what’s in the glass. The same vineyard can yield radically different wines from one year to the next.

Viticulture is the part of wine knowledge that almost never gets explained clearly outside of certification courses, but it’s a powerful lens for understanding style. Once you start seeing wine through the vine—its environment, its ripening arc, and the choices guiding it—everything else starts to click.

Tomorrow, we move into winemaking: what happens when those grapes hit the cellar, and how human technique shapes everything from fizz to funk.

If there’s a part of the vineyard story you’ve always found confusing—or a bit of received wisdom you’ve never been sure you actually believe—hit reply or drop a comment. I’ll weave some of your questions into future lessons.

And if you’re already wishing all of this lived in one clear, structured place: that’s exactly what the Wine School course will be. Founding Members get full access as it rolls out.

Ask ten people to explain what matters most in understanding a bottle, and you’ll get ten completely different answers—soil, vintage, producer, variety, style, aesthetics, politics. Each answer reflects a partial system, a fragment of a much larger whole. And because wine culture has evolved as a patchwork of trade language, folk wisdom, and marketing copy, there’s rarely a shared foundation that allows conversations to build coherently.

That’s why learning about wine can feel disorienting. You’re either dropped into the middle of Burgundy with no map, expected to already grasp centuries of classification and subtlety—or handed a flashcard that flattens complexity into “Pinot Noir: light-bodied, red fruit.” Most education lives at one of those extremes: gatekept trade knowledge or generic consumer fluff. Neither equips you to think fluently.

When I started working in restaurants, the real education happened informally. You absorbed knowledge through proximity: half-heard tasting notes during lineup, a manager making you blind taste something on a slow night, a distributor explaining soil types at 10:30 a.m. with a cigarette in one hand and a corkscrew in the other. It was apprenticeship by osmosis. Romantic, yes—but fundamentally unstructured, and inaccessible to anyone outside the inner circle.

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For everyone else, “wine education” tends to mean piecing together scattered articles, recycled tasting notes, or paying thousands for certification programs designed for people chasing credentials, not understanding. The result is a landscape where genuine fluency—the ability to connect viticulture, winemaking, place, and style into a meaningful mental map—remains rare, even among professionals.

That’s what Wine School is designed to change.

It’s a structured framework for understanding wine that brings everyone onto the same page: viticulture, winemaking, regions, varieties, styles—the stuff that professionals rely on, but presented with clarity, context, and a contemporary voice. It’s for curious drinkers who want to get past the buzzwords, for industry people who never got a proper foundation, and for anyone tired of pretending they know what “minerality” means at a dinner party.

All this week, I’m giving you a taste of what that looks like.

Each day, I’ll post a short lesson covering one essential piece of the puzzle—the way I wish someone had explained it to me: clearly, without condescension, and with enough cultural and historical texture to actually stick.

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If you’ve ever wished wine felt less like a secret language and more like a shared conversation, the Wine School course is built for you. Founding Members will get full access to the complete digital version: structured, sequenced, and designed to make you not just familiar with wine, but fluent.

Tomorrow, we begin where everything does: the vineyard.

That’s the plan. Over the next few days, I’ll give you a taste of what Wine School will cover—real, structured wine knowledge, as clear and fun as I can possibly make it. If you’re excited to learn hit reply or leave a comment and tell me what parts of wine still feel fuzzy for you. And if you want the full digital course—organized, sequenced, and packed with everything I’ve never seen taught clearly—you can become a Founding Member today and get access as it rolls out.