The first thing you need to understand is that wine is not polite. Wine is a feral chemical circus dressed up in a silk suit, and most people are too intimidated by the suit to notice the circus. They swirl, they sniff, they mumble things about “stone fruit” and “forest floor” like they’re reciting lines from a hostage video, and then they nod solemnly as if they’ve just confirmed the existence of...

There are moments in human culture when something as simple as raising a glass becomes an act of quiet reverence. Wine tasting is one of those moments. It is not merely a matter of drinking; it is an intimate encounter with landscape, climate, geology, and time itself—distilled into a single, shimmering liquid. In that glass, the story of a year of sun and rain, of soil and stone, of human...