Wine belongs to everyone. So does understanding it.

You can love a wine without knowing anything about it, and that’s fine. But there comes a moment when you want to know why: why this red from the Jura is so pale and yet so intense, why this white from the Loire seems to taste of wet stone, why this sparkling wine is cloudy and alive. This section is made for that moment.

No lectures here, and no insider jargon. We start from three doorways, which are also the three forces that make a wine.

🍇 The plant: ampelography

Before the wine there is the vine, and before the vine there are grape varieties. Each one has a history, a family, a character. Ampelography is the art of recognising them, describing them and tracing how they are related. A leaf, a bunch, a bud already tell you a great deal.

→ Read: Ampelography, or the art of recognising the vine

🪨 The place: terroir

The same grape variety does not make the same wine on granite as on limestone, in full sun as on a cool hillside. Terroir is where a soil, a climate, a landscape and the people who have lived there for a long time meet.

→ Read: Terroir, what the land tells the wine

🤲 The hand: methods

Finally, there is the human hand, in the vineyard and in the cellar. Ploughing or letting the grass grow, picking by hand, letting the grapes’ own yeasts do the work, adding sulphites or not, ageing the wine in amphora or in an old foudre… Every choice leaves a mark.

→ Read: Methods, from vineyard to cellar

---

A section that grows with you

These pages are a starting point. Over time they will grow with grape variety profiles, portraits of terroirs and winegrowers’ stories. If you are a winegrower, a wine merchant or simply curious, and you want to correct, add to or tell something, write to us: knowledge about living wine is collective, or it is nothing.