What is the Children’s Atlas of Wine?

A project founded by James Sligh that maps the people and places growing wine’s future.

What do you do?

We teach classes to empower curious drinkers and train aspiring wine professionals.

We ship a wine club nationwide that includes artwork, a zine, and a set of bottles exploring place and time.

We host a growing library of study materials, wine education activities, , powered by our Patreon.

And we draw and paint maps of all of it! You can find our art hanging on walls or illustrating wine lists at places like Maine & Loire in Portland; Clos Wine Shop in San Diego; Lita in Aberdeen Township, NJ; Paradis Books & Bread in Miami; and Domestique in Washington, D.C. Sometimes, we make t-shirts.

Why is it called the ‘Children’s Atlas’?

Where are these natural winegrowers James started to fall in love with as a baby wine professional?

Sometimes it’s difficult to tell. They’re in out of the way places, or they’re working against the grain in classic regions, the bottles just say “table wine.”

James knew how to draw four shapes (cartoon house; cartoon tree; mountain; river). He had an $8 set of children’s watercolors.

The result (when you’re trying to, say, figure out where a bunch of your favorite Loire chenin producers are) looked like this, in roughly 2019:

And suddenly, it was clear that those wild Loire chenin producers weren’t just Loire chenin producers, they were all in a little region of their own, on a slope backed by forest overlooking a tributary called the Layon, and you could understand what they were planting and why!

After a couple of years of practice, the same place looked more like this:

In summer 2026, as an informational resource for a paint n’ sip class, it looked like this:

There are a lot of reasons to draw a map, and a lot of right ways to do it.

Our goal is to understand regions in context, to look beyond appellation blobs and borders to where the grower’s we’re excited about are working, and to explain their work by illustrating where the water flows and where the ground changes.

They’re not wine maps for children; we’re the kids.

Who is James?

James Sligh is a Brooklyn-based wine person. He came up through some of New York’s deepest (and long-gone) cellars: cellar rat turned floor sommelier at Pearl & Ash, part of the opening team at Rouge Tomate, etc etc.

He’s been the wine director of one of 2023’s best bars in America per Esquire (a ceramics studio in Bed-Stuy, or, per that magazine, “a natural wine bar, sure, but more like a waystation for forward-thinking often restaurant-less sommeliers—all welcomed by magnificently mustaschio’ed James Sligh.”)

He was the interim wine director at Bridges, in Chinatown, in summer 2025. (“Manhattan’s hottest restaurant doesn’t play it safe,” Grub Street.)

He helps out on the floor at Kabawa, a tribute to the Caribbean in the East Village named best restaurant in the city by the New York Times and the best restaurant in America by Food & Wine.

In addition to opening very fancy bottles of wine and kicking around the second wave of NYC’s natural wine movement, there were other experiences, equally formative — maybe more so?

The first time he had to give a tasting note was cupping coffee as a cook at a D.C. café (shout out to Big Bear Café circa summer 2011!)

The first time he got to see wine embedded in community was working at the wine store a ten minute walk from his house and seeing the neighborhood come through. (Shout-out to Vine Wine circa 2013!)

The first time he learned that teaching was more than talking at people was leading interactive English as a foreign language activities for public school kids and working adults in Spain and Poland (and for almost everybody, wine is just another foreign language).

With Jirka Jireh, he co-founded Industry Sessions, a natural wine study for BIPOC beverage professionals that grew out of the pandemic and the industry reckoning following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. (‘How one woman is diversifying the wine industry, one Zoom at a time,’ Los Angeles Times, Nov. 4, 2020).

He is the education lead for [ABV] Ferments, a traveling wine summit celebrating hybrid and native grapes and local fruit fermentations, founded in 2022 by Jahdé Marley.

(Keep in touch, or go home.)