Issue 11 · August 05, 2026 Collecting sunsets Thirty months. That's how long the average wine club member stays now. Golden Gate Bridge. The sun going down behind the Marin Headlands. In Maine, summer arrives like a rumor. You get mud season first, then black flies and no-see-ums so thick you can taste them, then a random morning of snow flurries in June just to remind you who's in charge. Then summer, briefly, ferociously, and then September with its first frosts before anyone was ready....
11 days ago • 4 min read
Issue 10 · July 29, 2026 The Tikis Nobody Straightened A 1964 motel on the south end of Palm Springs, 105 degrees, and nothing on the walls to explain any of it. The one bar at the Palm Springs airport had no air conditioning the day we arrived. An HVAC problem, somebody said. I had two hours to wait there for Lori's flight, because we had booked separately, because the trip was being paid for in miles. By the time she landed I had sweated through a shirt without going anywhere or doing...
18 days ago • 8 min read
Issue 9 · July 22, 2026 Thirty Feet from the Answer Barcelona Wine Bar, Atlanta. Just off the BeltLine. She had the guest for the length of the room. Forty feet, maybe, from the barrel racks to the door, and a glass of the estate red still working on him. He liked it. He said so twice. Then he set the glass down, thanked her, and walked out with nothing, and she turned to the next pour without seeming to notice that a sale had just left through the front door. I thought about her a few weeks...
25 days ago • 5 min read
Issue 8 · July 15, 2026 Somebody Has to Be Here A one-bottle Malbec run at a Healdsburg winery, and the story a good winery knows how to tell. The garden at De La Montanya, apple trees in bloom. The umbrellas go up when the heat arrives. I went to De La Montanya for one bottle. My daughter's partner likes Malbec, probably owing to his Ecuadorian roots, and on a hot Tuesday at the end of June I stopped in to pick one up. Jarod looked up from the only other table he was working and said my name...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Issue 7 · July 8, 2026 The Fourth of July had run hot all day, and by the time the heat finally let go I had the backyard to myself in Sparks. The firepit lit, the last of the daylight going out of the yard, nobody around but me. The bottle was the Ruxton Sands Rosé from Croix Estate, pulled cold from the refrigerator because on a day like that nothing else sounded right. I wasn't working. There was no tasting room, no line at the door, nobody to convert into anything. And still, somewhere...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Issue 6 · July 1, 2026 The Long Way Around A Viator tour to Châteauneuf-du-Pape, four strangers in a courtyard, and the discovery that the world is smaller than it pretends to be. September 2025. The estate sits up off the road, gravel courtyard, vines visible in every direction. Working winery, not a destination polished for the camera. We arrived first and waited for the other two couples to show up. Fifteen minutes maybe. The dog was somewhere out of sight. The sun was already heavy on the...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Issue 5 · June 24, 2026 The Ghost in the Architecture Virginia City in the heat of the day, an Edgar Allan Poe speakeasy, and a bar that was exactly what Paul said it would be. We took the Subaru. The road from Sparks to Virginia City doesn't ease you in — it climbs out of the valley on a series of switchbacks, sheds the subdivisions fast, opens across high desert with views that run fifty miles on a clear day, and then tips over the Comstock and drops you into 1859. Twenty-six miles from our...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Issue #4 Vianarra The Slow Climb to an Easy Afternoon A convertible Beetle, a mountain pass, and an afternoon you have to earn. The Beetle climbed Kingsbury Grade the way it does everything — slowly, deliberately, in no hurry to be anywhere. We've come to Tahoe plenty of times, almost always over the Mt. Rose Highway, where the lake announces itself from on high — one big blue reveal before you've even started down. Kingsbury isn't like that. We worked up the pass top down, easing past...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Issue #3 Vianarra The Night the Room Was Already Alive Our friends had beaten us there. By the time Lori and I walked into Marcolino's Italia on Saturday night they were already at the table — drinks in hand, settled into their seats with the particular ease of people who had made a good decision and knew it. The room was packed. Every table full. The bar three deep. The kind of Saturday night energy that either holds together beautifully or fractures under its own weight. You can tell within...
2 months ago • 4 min read