Meg Maker, Author at Circle of Wine Writers

Nebbiolo, Dialect, and Dinner: Notes from Alba

Posted on March 26, 2025 by Meg Maker

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From the Chair: In praise of editors

Posted on March 26, 2025March 26, 2025 by Meg Maker

In this month’s column, Circle Chair Meg Maker reflects on why a skilled editor is one of a writer’s most valuable collaborators — especially in today’s fast-moving world of digital media. “Every smart person wants to be corrected, not admired.” —Marvin Minsky I’ve recently completed two large wine media projects. The first was a series of naturalistic portraits of women who...

From the Chair: To become a taste expert, move from specific to holistic

Posted on February 28, 2025 by Meg Maker

Circle Chair Meg Maker takes notes from a recent research paper and explores why narrative and imagery might make more of an impact in wine tasting than facts and figures. Wine enthusiasts who want to become better tasters should abandon their keyboards and pick up their crayons. That’s the conclusion of researchers Kathryn Latour and John Deighton in their 2018 Harvard Business School Working Pa...

From the Chair: Texture is the new flavour

Posted on January 26, 2025January 31, 2025 by Meg Maker

Meg Maker explores the second sense in wine — texture. For a few days last week, a rhinovirus gripped my system. My normally prismatic sensorium went dark. Flavours were reduced to the basics: salty, sweet, bitter, sour, savory. My morning tea was hot, astringent, wet but curiously drying. A segment of orange was cold and juicy, sweet and sour. Cheese seemed sticky, fatty, salty. Bread was spong...

From the Chair: Critical thinking skills

Posted on December 23, 2024February 5, 2025 by Meg Maker

Meg Maker defends the right to drink and enjoy cheap fizz, even as an esteemed wine writer, in her column this month. I’ve just returned from London, where I used the excuse of the Circle’s annual Festive Party to justify a week of ogling art, meandering markets, visiting old haunts, and eating and drinking across a wet and windy city. My spouse and I had the good fortune to have a friend’s fla...

From the Chair: Cheap and expensive wine words

Posted on November 30, 2024February 5, 2025 by Meg Maker

Are we all subconscious marketers? Meg Maker poses the question in her column this month. Making fun of wine tasting notes is not a new sport; recall Thurber’s 1937 cartoon about the “naïve domestic Burgundy.” But academic research about wine tasting notes is much newer, and it’s being done not only by linguists but also by mathematicians, economists, statisticians, and AI modelers. Such quant...

From the Chair: Why keep writing about about wine?

Posted on October 29, 2024February 5, 2025 by Meg Maker

Circle Chair Meg Maker ponders on what it means to be a 'wine writer' today, in an increasingly challenging professional environment. The Circle is a guild of professionals who’ve earned the moniker ‘wine writer.’ That writing may appear in the form of article, blog, or book, or may be in service of podcast, broadcast, social post, lecture, or curriculum. (And yes, we do have photographers; they ...

From the Chair: Ask three questions

Posted on October 1, 2024February 5, 2025 by Meg Maker

Circle Chair Meg Maker shares a simple technique to prompt good storytelling for her column this month. Readers want stories. But how do we, as interviewers and interpreters, tease stories from people who aren’t natural storytellers? Before speaking with a producer, we arm ourselves with facts, the essentials of their biography. We pore over their website for details about family, place, wines, ...

From the Chair: What’s in a name?

Posted on August 28, 2024February 5, 2025 by Meg Maker

Circle Chair Meg Maker explores the extremely diverse composition of the Circle of Wine Writers' membership base, which has reached far beyond the realms of both wine and writing, as well as geographically, from its initial UK base. In 1960, journalist, social historian, and wine commentator Cyril Ray convened a handful of British wine writing colleagues to form a new association. At the time, t...

From the Chair: Wine writing reimagined

Posted on July 30, 2024February 5, 2025 by Meg Maker

Circle Chair Meg Maker reflects on the changing world of wine writing in her inaugural column for The Circular. Wine and spirits writers are a creative lot. We’re cultural commentators, observers who tap into the shape-shifting zeitgeist, so we can frame the product in ways that connect. We imagine new words to meet the moment, modifying or inventing language to say what we mean. All languages...