Through the Grapevine #66
Wine news and just a smidge of commentary for Aug. 6, 2025
Life Among the Vines
Lately I’ve been watching my way through “And Just Like That,” the HBO follow-up series to “Sex and the City.” SATC was the show in my early 20s and accompanied me and many of my contemporaries as we took our first steps into adulthood. Granted, it was perhaps an unexpected choice given that my first steps into adulthood took place in seminary and as a pastor, not as a free-wheeling New York single gal. I learned a great number of mostly useless things from that show: the names of shoe and handbag designers I’ll never dream of affording, a host of then-scandalous sexual practices that don’t raise an eyebrow in 2025, and how to have dysfunctional relationships with all manner of people. I learned one very useful thing: how important brunch with friends can be.
“And Just Like That” has lost most of the brunches and most of the charm of the original series. Nothing is really all that scandalous anymore, even for the conservative Christians who would have gasped at SATC but now support a president with a highly questionable history even apart from what may be in the Epstein files, should they ever materialize. Women in their 50s and 60s being just as neurotic and self-destructive as they were in their 30s isn’t cute. I’m watching mostly out of nostalgia and to reflect on how much I actually have changed in twenty years. The one thing the show does get right is the name. You blink, and suddenly two decades has passed, and you’re the same person but also not at all. The same is true of my time in California; it’s been nearly a year and a half now, and while in many ways it seems like I’ve lived here for ages, I also can’t figure out where the time has gone. The vines were just budding and now the Cabernet is suddenly deep purple and racing toward ripeness. And while my own life is progressing more in fits and starts than in a smooth arc toward a foregone conclusion, it progresses nonetheless, and hopefully will eventually reach ripeness. And now that I’ve beaten that metaphor to a pulp, on to the news.
The Grape News
The EU has suspended counter-tariffs for six months, so we all have at least a brief reprieve and can live to buy Champagne another day. But not all U.S. wine producers are agreed about the affects of tariffs, and we’re not all affected the same way. Wineries that export, for example, are suffering right now while those that rely on the American market may sell more wine if consumers turn to domestic wines to avoid tariffs.
If you are a buyer of Champagne, there will likely be less of it out there in the future thanks to restricted yields, now set at the lowest of the century aside from 2020, when lockdowns forced lower production.
An association of Italian and Slovenian winemakers and a bar to try their wines, and perhaps even have them poured by the winemakers themselves:
Contrast this with the recent proposed Sonoma Wine Improvement District, which involves adding a fee to local wines to pay for…something? Undefined marketing. The proposal is not going over smoothly.
A discussion about “epiphany bottles” at Dave McIntyre’s WineLine:
I’m not sharing mine because this month the Wine Conversations bunch is also embarking on a writing challenge to post about how we fell in love with wine, and my epiphany bottle plays a role in that story.
Read Dave Baxter’s kickoff to the challenge here:
David Mastro Scheidt opened up a conversation about the evolution of tasting rooms, and we all puzzled over what a tasting room is even supposed to be these days:
This conversation with the actor who played a somm on “The Bear” and the actual somm who helped him learn some of the skills and then played herself on the show was super fun.
I also loved hearing Alycia Mondavi on The Winemakers podcast. Among other things, it was a reminder that we can’t assume things about well-known winery kids’ career trajectories, or about how their mass-produced wines are sourced or made. Spoiler alert: it was a pleasant surprise. I’m now on a hunt for CK Mondavi Chenin Blanc.
Vineyard Maintenance
Last week I launched a series on Wine Fundamentals which will be continuing over the next couple of months, this week with a post on terroir. I know some of you don’t need the Wine 101, so if you don’t want to receive these posts but do want to continue receiving my other articles, I’ve put it under a different section heading, and you can simply opt out in your subscription preferences. Special thanks this week to a few new and upgraded paid subscribers. Please know that both the emotional and financial support of these subscriptions means the world to me, and goes toward the continuing education and wine required to keep up this work, as well as keeping Val in the lifestyle to which she is accustomed. Happy dog, happy blog. Paid subscribers will find a couple of special features below the paywall which are my thank you to you. Thanks also to all of you who engage here by reading, liking, commenting, and sharing.
The Best Thing I Drank This Week
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