Highlights

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...