Vinotheca
prijat'lji, vince nam sladko,
ki nam oživlja žile,
srce razjasni in oko,
ki utopi vse skrbi, v potrtih prsih up budi.
And here sweet wine makes, once again,
Sad eyes and hearts recover,
Puts fire into every vein.
Drowns dull care Everywhere And summons hope out of despair.
kozarce zase vzdignimo,
ki smo zato se zbrat'li,
ker dobro v srcu mislimo;
dókaj dni naj živí vsak, kar nas dobrih je ljudi!
To us the toast! Let it resound,
Since in this gay communion
By thoughts of brotherhood we're bound.
May joyful cheer Ne'er disappear From all good hearts now gathered here.
Wine rewards close attention. A bottle is a piece of geography, a piece of history, and a personal opinion about taste — and the more ways you can look at it, the more it gives back.
The wine world is full of scores and full of prose, but surprisingly short of works that help you see patterns and find connections. The works collected here try to fill that gap. Each one answers a specific question a wine-curious person asks: where are the great sites for the grape I love; which lesser-known varieties are likely to win me over next; why do some regions on opposite sides of the world feel like cousins; which shared traits of character link winemakers across continents?
The Library is the public work — Maps that locate the wine world, Inquiries that pair an instrument with the study behind it, and Correspondence, which answers a word or a feeling with a small offering in return. The two books that follow are private. The Chronicle keeps one person's experience as it accumulates: of wines tasted, and of winemakers met. The Book of Friends, forthcoming, keeps a third record, in a hand not the owner's: of the people met over wine. A map where a map helps, a chart where a chart helps, and language where neither will do.
The Library
Maps
The Maker Atlas ↗
A global atlas of wine estates across the principal producing regions. Balanced for geographic and grape coverage, and presented as a world map with a companion volume. A curated reference, not a ranking — the sister volume to the Vineyard Atlas, organised by place rather than by grape.
Open the atlas →The Vineyard Atlas ↗
Monte Bello for Cabernet. Cannubi for Nebbiolo. Clos Saint-Urbain for Gewürztraminer. An illustrated atlas of the sites that set the standard — grouped not by country or appellation but by the grape they happen to make most beautifully. Browse by variety, download the full volume, or simply wander.
Open the atlas →Inquiries
The two faces of an Inquiry are the same question turned over twice. The Tool lets you move through the structure; the Study makes the argument that the structure is real. Each Inquiry shares its supporting documents across both faces.
The Body of Wine
If Nebbiolo is a fixed point on your map, what else should you be exploring? If you love the floral aromatics, which lesser-known grapes carry the same signature? The Tool plots wine varieties as a network — each grape a node, each connection a shared sensory signature — and lets you wander the natural neighbourhoods that emerge: the floral aromatics, the dark structural reds, the mineral whites, and three others. The Study reads the resulting structure: which grapes sit at its gravitational centre, which sit at its edge, and which families cross the boundaries the trade has drawn. Built on the TasteRank algorithm, a careful measure of how each variety's sensory character compares to every other.
The Soul of Wine
Alsace and Santa Barbara grow some of the same grapes on cool slopes near cool water, yet they could not feel more different: one rooted in centuries of inheritance and tradition, the other young, inventive, still writing its own story. The Tool offers fifty-nine wine regions across two independent classification systems — identity and terroir — side by side; hover any region to see its kin in both systems light up at once. The Study makes the argument behind the surface: that the two systems do not agree, that the map is not the soul, and that the disagreement is where the good wine stories live.
The Hand of Wine
Some winemakers who have never met, work with different grapes, and live on different continents share a worldview — a way of talking about craft, terroir, tradition, and risk that marks them as quiet kin. The Tool lets a visitor pick a figure and see who stands close to them in character, with the textual evidence that puts them near each other. The Study reads the words winemakers and careful observers use, and surfaces the small communities of shared character that run beneath the map of regions and grapes.
Winemaker Affinities
The Hand of Wine
Correspondence
Correspondence tools are not search engines and not recommenders. They give back fewer answers than you might expect, and they pause to let you decide whether the answer fits.
Grape Resonances ↗
Grape Resonances asks what a feeling would taste like. Type a word, a phrase, a situation — brotherhood, falling deeply in love, deciding whether to move across the country — and receive one to four grapes whose character carries the same weather. It listens through the temperaments of fifty-nine wine regions, reaching the grape by way of the places that shaped it, and it answers sparingly — a few grapes offered with care, not a long list to wade through.
Open the resonances →Region Resonances ↗
If a region's identity is a single word — Burgundy as devotion, Tokaj as melancholy, Santorini as survival — then the question turns naturally inward: what is your word, and where does it live? Bring a feeling — say, "old soul" or "stubborn quiet" — and Region Resonances answers with the regions whose own character already carries it. The felt companion to Region Affinities: where Affinities draws the map, Resonances finds the kin.
Open the resonances →Winemaker Resonances
Where Region Resonances answers a feeling with places, Winemaker Resonances answers it with people. Bring a state rather than a question — I am feeling exploratory; I am homesick; I am about to make a difficult decision; I want to be reminded what care looks like — and receive one to three winemakers whose disposition answers it, with their wines as the thing you can then go and drink. A winemaker is a person, and so carries character directly: this leaf listens to the makers themselves rather than reaching them through the temperament of a region. The response stays small by design — three names at most, and the reasons left short.
The Chronicle
Codex Vini ↗
A working end of the library. A living record of every wine tasted, with filters for country, grape, color, and rating. The atlases of vineyards and estates, the affinities of grapes and winemakers, the studies of souls and hands — and the book of what was shared in company, among good hearts gathered.
Open the codex →Codex Vinitorum ↗
The other working end of the library. A living record of winemakers encountered in person, with their lineage, their estates, and three quiet signals. A sister volume to Codex Vini: where that book records what was tasted, this one records who was met.
Open the codex →The Book of Friends
Album Amicorum
A traveller carried a blank book, and at each meeting the other party inscribed it — a motto, a dedication, the place and the date — in a hand not the owner's, and so beyond later revision. What accumulated was not a list of acquaintances but a sequence of fixed occasions, each attested by the person who was there. This book keeps that, and sets aside the one part of it that has not aged: the old albums reserved their finest leaves for the eminent, and here there is no order of precedence.
The objective is practical. Each entry records an acquaintance met in person, the place and date of the meeting, and the subject they spoke about with interest. Entries are kept by that subject rather than by name, so that an occasion in prospect — a dinner, a tasting, an introduction — can be matched to the people it suits.