Highlights Archives - Circle of Wine Writers

From the Chair: Help another wine writer in 2026

Posted on December 23, 2025December 23, 2025 by Meg Maker

In her column this month, Circle Chair Meg Maker encourage members to help and mentor colleagues as their New Year’s resolution for 2026. Wine as a category is experiencing myriad existential threats: climatic, meteorological, social, cultural, financial. It’s a destabilising time, but as wine commentators our role is to help make sense of it all, prying apart false and shaky claims, dismantling ...

The Mythology of Etna

Posted on December 22, 2025 by Kevin Day

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Perusing Planeta’s broad and colourful palette of Sicilian wines

Posted on December 21, 2025December 23, 2025 by Robert Smyth

Robert Smyth takes a tour through Sicily’s wine regions while visiting Planeta, a prolific producer with vines and wines spanning the large Italian island. After having long enjoyed Planeta’s wines from afar, it was a wonderful to finally get the opportunity to visit them in Sicily, and also catch up with their Hungarian winemaker Patricia Tóth. Driving up the winding roads to Planeta’s winery ...

Substack for wine writers

Posted on November 30, 2025 by Meg Maker

CWW Chair Meg Maker shares her experiences on Substack and talks to other wine writers migrating to the online platform. Five months ago I migrated my wine publication, Maker’s Table, from WordPress to Substack. I was sick of the infrastructure demands and expense of WordPress and eager to take advantage of tools baked into the Substack platform. Those include text and video posts, newsletter ema...

Shared expressions of the Turbiana grape

Posted on November 30, 2025 by Robin Goldsmith

From the southern shores of Lake Garda, Italy’s largest lake, Robin Goldsmith loads up on Lugana and savours a tantalising trio of tannins, acidity and salinity, served up with freshness and clarity. A version of this article was originally published on The Write Taste. Lugana DOC, which encompasses five municipalities, lies on the southern shores of Lake Garda, the largest lake in Italy. It's on...

Chinese wine condensed

Posted on October 31, 2025 by Janet Wang

Unapologetically British

Posted on October 31, 2025 by Robin Goldsmith

Robin Goldsmith heads on down to Hattingley Valley, where he digs deep to uncover the past, present and future of this Hampshire diamond. Peter Ustinov once famously described English wine as his "idea of hell". Yet, this once laughed-at industry is now the UK's fastest growing agricultural sector and wine tourism is gathering speed, too. Latest figures show that there are 1,104 vineyards in the ...

From the Chair: Curiosity is the Writer’s Currency

Posted on October 31, 2025 by Meg Maker

Circle Chair Meg Maker reflects on how humility and curiosity — not expertise alone — make the finest wine writers. There’s a nonprofit in my town (Lyme, New Hampshire; population 1,730) dedicated to education about the forests of northeastern America. They create materials about forest ecology, conservation, and stewardship, publishing a print quarterly called Northern Woodlands along with a blo...

Sicily: Beyond the Volcano

Posted on September 30, 2025 by Robin Goldsmith

Robin Goldsmith explores the Grillo and Nero d'Avola wines of Sicily, beyond the famed volanic region of Etna, while visiting Sicilia En Primeur. A shorter version of this article was originally published by Académie du Vin and the full version is available on The Write Taste. Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean, covering over 25,000km2. Most of the island is hilly or mount...

From the Chair: “Where should I start?”

Posted on September 30, 2025 by Meg Maker

Circle Chair Meg Maker asks perhaps the most important questions that we all face as a wine writer... Where should I start? I ended my last column with advice to budding wine writers. I said, in essence, that it’s fine but not essential to earn formal wine credentials, because if your primary motive is to share your insights with others, the most important thing is to learn to write, and to pract...