There’s a certain romance in imagining Europe’s wine market: sunburned hills, old men in berets, dusty cellars, and bottles that taste like history. But romance doesn’t pay the bills. Behind every glass of Burgundy, Prosecco, or supermarket Rioja is a brutal, unromantic reality: people deciding how much they’re willing to pay—and what they’re willing to pretend that price says about them. This is...

There’s an old saying that “wine is bottled geography.” But in our time, it has become something more: bottled economics, bottled politics, and bottled globalization. When a glass of Malbec from Argentina meets a dinner table in Tokyo, or a crisp Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand is poured in a New York rooftop bar, there’s an invisible web of ships, currencies, treaties, and human labor stretching...