Four times a year, we’ll assemble a set of bottles and artwork that celebrates unsung varieties and histories, maps the regions and communities growing wine’s future, and puts them in context.
Sign up for the winter shipment here.
What’s in the box?
- 6 bottles telling the whole story from start to finish – OR – a 3-bottle abridged pack.
- a signed & numbered watercolor print featuring the growers
- handwritten info cards for all of the wines
- a web page with pairing suggestions, map notes, and deeper context
- a quarterly virtual meetup for club members
Our holiday shipment maps
#3 TIME TRAVEL
Previous club shipments
#2 IMAGINARY WORLDS: the landscapes of middle earth
One of the reasons I started drawing maps in the first place was probably the books I was reading as a kid — the sort of books that had maps of imaginary worlds inside the front cover.
And years ago, when I started drawing maps to explain the natural winegrowers whose bottles I was opening and figure out where they were coming from, my maps ended up looking a lot like those books.
The weird result, though? When I look at maps of imaginary places — like Tolkein’s Middle Earth — I can just about see what vines would be in the ground, and what the wines might be like.
Would you like to see what I see?
From the rolling green hills and geopolitical isolation of the Shire to the fortified port city of the corsairs of Umbar, from the sad, bitter waters of Mordor’s Lake Núrnen to the rushing great river valley of the Anduin, and from the mists of the Grey Havens to the rain shadow of the Misty Mountains, we’ll map 6 wines made by growers reshaping their own regions onto the landscapes of Middle Earth.
In an ironic twist of fate, these growers often don’t have the right to put a place of origin on their own labels. Are you bottling dry chenin in the Layon tributary, or co-fermenting in Chianti, or making red wine in Jerez? Then for a lot of drinkers, your region might as well be imaginary, too.
Read the club notes here.
#1 the RHÔNE river
The Rhône is most famous for wind-buffeted, single-stake syrah clinging to the steep slopes of a valley carved through a granite plateau — or for magisterial, sun-soaked red blends from the soupstone-strewn vines surrounding a former papal palace.
But rivers invite continuity. They flow, they rush, they let us go tubing from one place to another. The Rhône doesn’t begin with Côte-Rôtie or end with Châteauneuf. It’s born in Alpine glaciers, and it ends in a delta that mingles with the Mediterranean.
What could we learn by following it from start to finish?
Read the club notes here.
Children's Atlas of Wine 
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