Are older women white wines better than young ones? My latest piece for Everyday Drinking has the answer.

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Did Benjamin Franklin really say, “In all your amours, prefer old women to young ones”? That’s what Stephen Vizinczey suggests in the opening of In Praise of Older Women, where he argues that “modern culture—American culture—glorifies the young; on the lost continent of old Europe it was the affair of the young man and his older mistress that had the glamour of perfection.”

Substitute mistress with white wine, and you’ll have the point of this essay. And, of course, I want to pique everyone’s interest in the merits of older white wines. I suspect, however, that the more experienced among us already know the pleasures they offer, while the younger ones have yet to discover them.

It turns out that white wines would very much like us to believe they can age gracefully. Well, I say white wines, but what I really mean is the Italian wine consortiums and the like. Their job is to convince people like me, who in turn try to convince people like you, that mature white wines can offer the kind of pleasure to the discerning collector that was once thought to be the exclusive preserve of structured reds.

This charm offensive has meant that, over the past three years, I’ve been invited to a number of events designed to showcase the aging potential of Gavi, tocai friulano, sauvignon blanc and, most recently, Lugana. As a result, I’ve tasted some truly fabulous older white wines—sometimes in even more fabulous locations, lucky me!—and had the chance to reflect on why so many white wines capable of aging remain wines we almost always drink young.

The premise of every event has been the same: people usually drink Lugana/Gavi /sauvignon blanc…while they’re young. But here are some older bottles. Aren’t they great?

And the premise holds true not only for wines with a reputation for being easy-drinking whites, such as Lugana, but also for wines with an established reputation for longevity, such as top white Burgundy. Octavian Wine, one of the world’s leading bonded fine wine storage providers, with more than £2 billion worth of wine under management, shared some striking data when I asked: What is the average age of a wine when it leaves your warehouse and is delivered to a customer’s home address (presumably to be drunk)?

Of course, Octavian caters to collectors, and the wines stored there are, by definition, collectible.

Yet even in this setting, the contrast between white and red wines is striking. The overwhelming majority (78 percent) of white wines shipped to customers came from the previous six vintages, whereas only 40 percent of red wines fell into the same age bracket, with the remainder distributed much more evenly across older vintages. At the other end of the spectrum, just 2.5 percent of white wines delivered were more than 20 years old, compared with 10 percent of reds. In other words, even among serious collectors, white wines are consumed far earlier than reds.

So, can we say that white wines have a reputation problem? (Isn’t it a bit like the old belief that men get better with age, while women, well… they don’t?) Could part of it still be a legacy of the premature oxidation (“premox”) crisis that emerged in white Burgundy in the early 2000s?

The problem known as “premox”—the imperfectly understood phenomenon of white Burgundies aging far more quickly than they should, with some bottles becoming completely oxidized—began to emerge in wines from the 1995 vintage and affected many wines produced through the mid-2000s. Even great Puligny-Montrachet and Meursault, including bottles from some of Burgundy’s finest producers, were not spared. It spread through the region like the plague. Corks, sulphur dioxide, and a host of other factors were blamed. Yet, despite years of research, there is still no consensus on what caused the problem in the first place—or, perhaps more intriguingly, why it seems to have largely disappeared.

While that may well have scared collectors into favoring younger Burgundies, I’d argue that—particularly in Italy—we’re dealing with something different, something more of a chicken-and-egg problem. Italian producers tend to rush their white wines to market rather than holding back stocks for later release. As a result, consumers rarely encounter mature bottles, very few people are systematically tasting mature vintages, and there is little opportunity to build confidence in how these wines age. When invited on press trips producers pour superb older vintages, and in most cases they come from the family’s personal cellar, giving critics the chance to experience and write about just how well some of these wines can evolve, but only anecdotally rather than in any systematic way. These wines almost never reach the market, they exist as demonstrations rather than products. While critics may leave convinced, consumers remain unconvinced because without those experiences, confidence in the wines’ longevity never becomes firmly established.

This, I think, is the heart of the issue. A wine’s ability to age and its reputation for aging are two different things.

The first is determined by the wine itself—its acidity, concentration and balance. On this front, research is advancing along two complementary lines.

One seeks to establish whether a grape variety possesses intrinsic aging potential by identifying its reservoir of aroma precursors and understanding how these evolve over time—whether they generate new layers of complexity during ageing or simply fade as the wine oxidizes. For example, the team at the University of Verona, led by Professor Maurizio Ugliano, has been mapping the volatile compounds and aroma precursors of dozens of Italian grape varieties (including turbiana, the grape of Lugana) to understand how each develops its own distinctive aromatic signature with age.

The other line of research seeks to answer a more practical question: what do producers need to do in the vineyard and the winery to craft wines that age well? While Chardonnay’s capacity for aging is well established, the Burgundy Wine Board (BIVB), perhaps prompted by the lingering shadow of the premox crisis, sponsored a six-year study (VOLTA) to investigate how vineyard and winemaking practices influence the longevity of white Burgundy. The study concluded that much of a wine’s ageing potential is built during pressing and élevage, rather than being determined by the grape variety alone.

Yet aging potential alone is not enough to create a reputation for longevity. That reputation is built by the market. A region only earns a reputation for longevity when producers keep back stock, critics regularly taste mature vintages (as they do with features such as “Bordeaux 10 Years On”) merchants sell them and consumers learn what those wines become with time. Without that ecosystem, even genuinely age-worthy wines continue to be treated as wines to drink young.

Only two of the Lugana producers I visited in my recent press trip hold back stock. And even then, the quantities they retain don’t seem sufficient to create a meaningful secondary market or establish a culture of drinking mature vintages. There is, of course, an obvious reason for this. Holding back wine requires producers to sacrifice current cash flow while investing in additional storage capacity—whether barrels, tanks or bottle aging—in the hope of selling the wine later at a higher price. I recently tried to estimate what aging actually costs a producer (calculations from Credible Signals):

A good barrique costs around €1,000 and can be used new or seasoned. Assume it’s used once: after losses you get 200 liters of wine, so the barrel cost is €5 per liter. Labour and electricity add €0.40 per liter. Storage costs €6 per month per barrique — about €0.40 per liter per year. Financing adds another €0.30 per liter if you borrow at 5% on €5.80 (barrel + handling + storage). That’s roughly €6 per liter, or €4.50 per bottle. If you use the barrique three times, the additional cost drops below €2 per bottle.

Bottle aging is cheaper but still significant. Storage might cost €6 per month per pallet (600 bottles), or €0.12 per bottle per year. The real cost is the so-called opportunity cost: if a wine could sell now for €10 but doesn’t, the producer must finance that cash flow, adding roughly €0.50 per bottle in interest. The total cost for an extra year in bottle is around €0.62 per bottle.

Depending on the aging method, every extra year can cost a producer anywhere from around $0.77 to $5.14 per bottle before any additional profit is realized. Building a reputation for longevity requires producers to sacrifice that cash flow in exchange for uncertain future returns.

For collectors, however, that scarcity creates an unusual opportunity. Because relatively few mature white wines reach the market, the category remains underdeveloped. Prices often reflect how these wines are consumed rather than how well they actually perform with age.

I realize this may sound a little far-fetched, but indulge me for a moment. Imagine collecting Meursault in the 1970s or 1980s. On a recent trip to Burgundy, the president of the Comité Bourgogne told me that many Meursault producers in those days barely made ends meet because the wines simply weren’t in fashion. (I can’t help wondering whether the dominance of Robert Parker’s Bordeaux-centric era played some part in that...) Those who bought and cellared Meursault back then weren’t following trends but instead investing in something before the rest of the market caught on. Looking back today, it’s hard not to envy them. They were able to buy extraordinary wines at prices that seem unimaginable now.

I’m not predicting that Lugana, Gavi, or Soave will become the next Meursault. That’s beside the point. Every great collecting category was once obscure. The excitement of collecting lies in the possibility of discovering tomorrow’s classics before everyone else does. Mature Italian white wines feel like one of those rare corners of the wine world where there is still genuine room for exploration.

Unlike Bordeaux or Burgundy, where decades of criticism have established fairly clear hierarchies, many Italian white wines remain largely unexplored territory. We don’t yet know which producers will prove the most age-worthy, which vintages will shine brightest or which wines will ultimately define their regions. We simply don’t have enough evidence yet. And perhaps that’s precisely what makes this journey so fun. The reality is that many producers themselves are still discovering the ageing potential of their own wines.

But things are turning. From tasting a number of Lugana, I can say that some are genuinely age-worthy and compelling, while others are less convincing. In some of the less successful examples, the oak dominates, overwhelming rather than complementing the grape’s delicate aromatics. More broadly, I think Lugana—and some other emerging fine wine regions—is still searching for its signature style. By that, I mean that producers are still working out which winemaking techniques best express the region and its native grape. The balance between oak, lees aging, texture, freshness and fruit purity has yet to reach the level of consensus and refinement seen in more established fine wine regions.

That impression was echoed by Davide Slaghenaufi, an oenologist and biotechnologist at the University of Verona, where he is part of the team studying the aging potential of turbiana in Lugana. Having also trained in Bordeaux under Denis Dubourdieu, he believes that Italian producers, particularly when working with the country’s many indigenous grape varieties, still have much to learn about the use of oak from their French counterparts.

Yet the progress already made is remarkable. Some producers have demonstrated just how extraordinary mature Lugana can become. Zenato’s Lugana Riserva ‘Sergio Zenato’ 2005 was one of the finest mature white wines I tasted on these trips, offering a glimpse of what the region is capable of when terroir, viticulture and winemaking come together.

Elsewhere, there are producers trying to build a reputation for age-worthy white wines almost single-handedly. Villa Bogdano, for example, is championing the little-known Lison DOCG, investing in research, innovation and a deeper understanding of tocai friulano, despite the financial incentives that often favour uprooting old vineyards rather than preserving them. Changing perceptions of an obscure appellation is a slow and expensive undertaking.

That may sound like a limitation, but I increasingly see it as an opportunity. Collectors often dream of discovering great wines before everyone else does and that’s why mature Italian white wines are exciting.

They are not a finished story. They are a story still being written.

I recall a conversation I had with one of the new people I met when I first moved to Madrid. She’d found out that I worked in wine. “In wine?” she said in excitement. “There’s a great wine bar in Lavapiés you must try! They sell natural wines, it’s really good.” I took out my phone, pinned it on the map, noted in parenthesis that it's a natural wine bar. In the two years since, I haven't been once.

I don’t know what the rest of the wine industry thinks of the natural wine movement, and I don’t speak for anyone else, but as for me, well, what is an un-natural wine anyway? Where do we draw the line? Does the vine itself need to crush its grapes and bottle its own juice?

Perhaps my scepticism stems as much from the movement’s nebulous definition as it does from the foul wine I was served in a trendy wine bar in Shoreditch, or from the sommelier insisting that it was supposed to taste like that, that there was nothing wrong with the wine. The implication, of course, was that there was something wrong with me, my palate, that I simply didn't understand natural wine. It was ten years ago. Since then, natural wines have become cleaner, or so I'm told, and it's no longer natural wine; it's low-intervention wine.

And you'd be wrong to think this is a piece to disparage natural wine. Quite the opposite. Despite my personal prejudice, I've discovered that some of the finest wines I've tasted have been marketed as natural—Gravner being an obvious example—and there are many others I'm eager to try, among them Chris Boiling's Crazy Experimental Wines, which we'll come back to shortly.

This is an exploration of natural wine's remarkable success, and whether some of the factors behind that success can be applied to the rest of the wine world.

In fact, natural wine not only is the leading opportunity in wine according to IWSR’s Opportunity Index—which measures the strongest market opportunities for alternative wine categories, weighted by the size of each country’s wine-drinking population—but it is also one of the industry’s fastest-growing segments. Estimates from DataIntelo Consulting suggest the global natural wine market is expanding at around 13% annually, an impressive feat at a time when the broader wine market is struggling to grow.

The evidence extends beyond bottles produced. Natural wine bars continue to proliferate across major cities in Europe (Paris alone has 600, according to French app Raisin), North America and Asia, signalling that the movement has firmly entered the mainstream.

And perhaps most remarkably, natural wine has achieved what much of the wine industry has struggled to do: capture the imagination of the notoriously elusive Gen Z consumer.

As I've already hinted, what natural wine actually is remains surprisingly ill-defined. Perhaps that's part of its appeal. An idea is often more powerful when different people can project different meanings onto it. Even Georgia, one of the first countries to legislate a definition of natural wine, defines it vaguely as “wine produced through the spontaneous fermentation of organically grown grape must” without “the use of oenological practices and substances otherwise permitted under general winemaking regulations, with the exception of sulfur dioxide, which must be limited to a maximum concentration of 40 mg/l.”

Ah! Sulfur dioxide—the Enemy, with a capital E, that the natural wine movement has set out to slay. In the public imagination, mild wine intolerance is often blamed on sulfur dioxide, a belief reinforced by plenty of anecdotal evidence but very little scientific support.

In her Master of Wine research paper, What is the Relationship Between the Use of Sulphur Dioxide and Biogenic Amine Levels in Wine?, Sophie Parker-Thomson MW argues that the likely culprit behind adverse reactions in some wine drinkers is a group of compounds known as biogenic amines (BAs), which are naturally present in all fermented foods and beverages. Her findings turn the sulfur dioxide narrative on its head. Wines with no added SO₂—or with sulfur added only late in the winemaking process—were found to contain the highest levels of biogenic amines. Unsurprisingly, those conclusions caused no small amount of discomfort among supporters of natural wine, yet they did little to challenge the sulfur dioxide myth, as the research never made its way into the public consciousness.

So, sulfur aside, if there is no formal definition, how do you identify a natural wine when browsing the shelves of a wine shop or supermarket? As former United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of obscenity, "I know it when I see it"—the same could be said of natural wine.

In fact, while wine professionals continue to argue over what natural wine is and isn't—or what low-intervention wine really means—the movement has succeeded in capturing the imagination of the average wine consumer. Why is that? Is it the places where it’s sold? The people behind it? The labels? The messaging? Probably all of the above.

Orwell wrote of his job reviewing books that most of them are so bad that, in nine cases out of ten, the only honest review would be: “This book is worthless.” It made me think that in wine, the opposite is true. “This wine is good” likely describes 90% of the wines, which arguably makes the job of a wine critic even harder than that of a book critic. What is there to say when a wine is good? Good, but not great. Good, but not particularly interesting. Well-made, sound, solid, like all the rest... What is there to object to? Nothing — other than, perhaps, that in a sea of identical wines, it's just really hard to sell.

The final step in wine production is the first from the consumer's point of view: the packaging.

Natural wines have cool names like Seggs with My Eggs, Kisi me slowly, gently or Potatoland. Their labels feature geishas, riot scenes, make reference to Playboy and other bold, artistic imagery. They’re colourful, vibrant, modern, and beautifully designed. Sometimes they give you almost no information; other times, they give you every little detail. They’re often bottled in clear glass to show off the wine’s hue, sealed with crown caps or other quirky closures, or dipped in brightly coloured wax. Of course I’d pick that over Château Boring.

Maybe all the money saved in the winery is simply spent on branding instead?

I put that question to Neil Tully MW, founder of Amphora Design, a wine branding and design agency based in Bath. His answer was no, they don’t spend more, with one important caveat: the design proposals tend to be bolder, and the branding decisions are far more intentional.

(As it turns out, making natural wine isn’t necessarily cheaper.)

Tully also suggested that winemakers in more ‘serious’ wine regions may not feel they have the same freedom, especially when it comes to the judgement of their peers. Perhaps natural wine producers aren’t as burdened by the need to be taken seriously—to make a “serious” wine capable of earning high scores. Perhaps it reflects the personalities of the winemakers themselves: people who are rule-breakers. I think it’s all of the above—and more.

A beautifully plated dish from a Michelin-starred restaurant immediately looks more desirable than a rustic plate of pasta. We eat with our eyes first. But wine is different. Pour a glass of a great wine beside a glass of good wine and, in identical glasses, they will look much the same. The quality cannot be seen. That's why, before the cork is pulled, the label has already done most of the selling.

And it doesn’t even have to be a “radical” label. When I was selling wine online in China, we put this to the test. We sold exactly the same Côtes du Rhône AOC from the same domaine, the same vintage, and the same wine—only the label was different. One bottle carried the producer’s regular label; the other featured a special “Centenary” label. Guess which one sold twice as much? We ran a similar experiment with Riesling. These weren’t identical wines, but they were comparable in quality, provenance, and style—both were off-dry Rieslings, but one had a blue bottle. Our blue-bottle Riesling outsold the other by three to one. These are only small examples from a very small business, so I wouldn’t pretend they’re scientifically rigorous. But they illustrate something that anyone who has sold wine to consumers already knows: design matters more than the liquid that’s inside the bottle. Sad? Perhaps. True? Yes.

We discussed sulfites already, but there's a broader point here: the word natural does a great deal of work on its own. Type "natural wine" into Google and one of the first suggested searches is, "Is natural wine actually better for you?" Whether we like it or not, natural carries a promise—the rejection of "harsh chemicals", the halo of sustainable viticulture—that resonates with consumers. If it's natural, the logic goes, it must be good for me, or at least better for me. Well—see sulfites above. But even if consumers have been misguided (by whom is a discussion for another day), that doesn't mean the rest of the wine industry should ignore the message. Consumers are telling us what they want: wines they perceive to be more sustainable, less industrial and, above all, healthier.

Speaking to Chris Boiling — a winemaker who only makes what his labels literally call "Crazy Experimental Wines," in very small batches across Slovenia, Hungary, Georgia and Austria (soon Albania too) — told me he named one of his wines Oh, Natural! because, yes, he expected it to attract more interest from the market. Not to mention that his labels (done by the team at Amphora Design) go all out on radical transparency, letting you in on every step of the winemaking process — and even some of the viticulture — which I find refreshing, when all you're normally given is the usual boilerplate story that adds little value to the end consumer.

As we've seen, the word natural can be interpreted as a move away from ultra-processed wine, in keeping with the wider health and sustainability discourse. It can also signal a move away from large corporations in favour of smaller, more thoughtful producers. And this isn't unique to wine. We've seen the same trend in craft beer and gin. Inventive, original labels stand in stark contrast to the corporate branding of Stella Artois or Heineken, inviting consumers to choose something that feels small-batch, independent and distinctive—even if many of those brands have, in fact, been quietly hoovered up by multinationals. The lesson isn't that we should mislead consumers, but that, once again, they've spoken. They've voted against the perceived sameness of big brands and the industrialisation of food and drink, and in favour of products that feel independent, distinctive and full of personality.

The places where these beers, wines and gins are sold also tend to be younger, more welcoming and more relaxed than those where you'll typically find more traditional wines. If I were to stereotype, a classic wine bar is where you might take a date; a natural wine bar is where you'd meet your mates. Perhaps it's simply the sort of environment that's more conducive to relaxing around wine.

Another topic I discussed with Neil Tully: he feels that, even in the way labels are designed, natural wine places more emphasis on the wine itself than on the denomination. Having recently been in Burgundy, a traditional producer mentioned that on their Grand Cru wines, the appellation and the climat would be written in a larger font than the producer's logo, because much of the wine's identity is owed to the terroir , which in fact seems to support Tully's point.

The last thing I want to mention is taste and smell. This is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder whether the kombucha-like flavours so often associated with natural wines reinforce their perceived healthiness through flavour associations alone. Even though, like Chris Boiling or Gravner, many natural winemakers place great emphasis on producing clean wines (sometimes using small amounts of sulfur dioxide to achieve that), those savoury, fermented aromas may subconsciously signal "natural", "alive" or "healthy" to consumers. I also wonder whether their more pungent, distinctive aromas—rather like unpasteurised cheese—give less wine-experienced drinkers the confidence that they're actually tasting something, that they're participating in the ritual of wine tasting. Faced with a more subtle wine, perhaps they wouldn't feel quite so sure?

Of course, slapping a two-finger salute on the label of a fifth-generation family estate won't translate well, if at all. But the lesson isn't to imitate natural wine; it's to understand what it has understood about consumers. They want clarity over jargon, transparency over marketing clichés, personality over corporate polish, and a clearer sense of what a wine will actually offer them before they buy it—not afterwards. Above all, they want wine to feel less intimidating and more enjoyable. If the rest of the wine industry can embrace those lessons without abandoning its own identity, it may have a better chance of persuading the next generation to drink wine at all.

Here’s yet another wine writer taking Robert Parker’s name in vain.

In my second piece for Everyday Drinking, I explore the question of taste: how much of what we like is truly our own, and how much has been shaped by critics, restaurateurs, importers, geography, taxation, and the bottles we’re offered in the first place? Along the way, we encounter Dallas steakhouses, London wine bars, Immanuel Kant, and, inevitably, Robert Parker.

Also, I would like to thank WineLabs for providing the data that made this analysis possible.

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A trendy Barolo grower who had just returned from a work trip to the US told me that “people in Dallas don’t drink what we drink.” Their tastes are different, he said, they want different wines. From what he had observed, Americans gravitated towards richer, more powerful wines with riper fruit, while the lighter, more savory expressions prized in Europe were largely absent.

Beyond the obvious observation that restaurant wine lists differ from place to place, what intrigues me is the idea that taste is somehow of a place: that people develop preferences so deeply rooted in culture that they become difficult to translate across borders. A bit like the butter-versus-olive-oil divide: you are either an olive oil person or a butter person. Or, worse still, a margarine person. We tend to speak of such preferences as though they were innate rather than acquired.

His assertion also seemed straightforward enough to test. With WineLabs, I analyzed more than 172,000 wine listings from 501 restaurants and wine bars in Dallas and 1,310 venues in London.

At first glance, comparing Dallas with London may seem unfair. But I wanted to avoid skewing the results by choosing a wine-producing capital such as Paris or Milan, where domestic wines would naturally dominate restaurant lists. London, by contrast, combines an unusually international wine trade with comparatively limited domestic production, making it a more neutral benchmark against which to assess whether tastes really do differ across cultures.

According to the data, my Barolo-producing friend isn’t wrong.

In its restaurants and wine bars, Dallas serves wines with average alcohol levels around one percentage point higher than those in London (14.9 percent versus 13.8 percent ABV). The difference is driven almost entirely by the cities’ red wine selections. Nearly 60 percent of the wines on offer in Dallas are red, compared with less than half in London. Meanwhile, London offers a greater share of sparkling and dessert wines.

London is resolutely Old World: nearly 70 percent of the wines listed originate from France, Italy, and Spain. Dallas, by contrast, looks westward, with wines from California accounting for around 23 percent of all listings. French wines alone make up 46 percent of London’s wine lists, while Dallas offers a broader mix of New World regions, including Oregon, Mendoza, Marlborough, and Washington State. The difference is equally evident at the regional level. Burgundy and the Loire Valley feature prominently in London, whereas Napa Valley occupies a much larger place on Dallas wine lists.

Interestingly, Italian wines feature prominently in both cities, although preferences diverge at the regional level. London appears to favor Piedmont, home to Barolo and Barbaresco, whereas Dallas shows a stronger preference for Tuscany and Veneto.

The average London wine list spans seven countries and 20 regions, while Dallas typically draws from just four countries and 10 regions. The two cities also diverge sharply in their red wine preferences: cabernet sauvignon and Bordeaux blends account for 35 percent of the red wines offered in Dallas, compared with just 18 percent in London, where pinot noir reigns supreme. White wines, however, reveal an unexpected point of agreement. Chardonnay dominates in both cities, accounting for roughly 30 percent of their selections. Sparkling wines once again expose the divide, with London favoring traditional-method Champagne and Dallas showing a stronger preference for Prosecco.

For the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, judgments of taste rest on a paradox. Taste is subjective, grounded in feelings of pleasure or displeasure rather than objective truths. Yet judgments of taste also claim universal validity. When we describe something as beautiful, we do not simply state a preference; we imply that others ought to see it that way too.

We Europeans like to think that taste is our birthright, dismissing any departure from them as a failure of taste itself. When it comes to the creation of luxury goods, for instance, it is true that Western Europe dominates. France, Italy, and Switzerland produce more than 60 percent of the world’s personal luxury goods by value. With wine, Italy, France, and Spain account for around half of global production. This only reinforces the prejudice of European taste, though quantifying it is difficult because no universally accepted definition exists.

Yet while luxury goods are still largely produced in Europe, the market for them is global. Asia accounts for roughly a third of luxury purchases, North America for another third. Europe represents around only a quarter of consumption, although many of those purchases are made by tourists rather than local consumers.

In a recent piece for Bon Appétit, Maryam Ahmed argued that American wine drinkers are offered too many of the same wines—often ones that are rarely local. It is an observation I have made about Michelin-starred restaurants too. Ahmed exhorts consumers to take control and choose local wines instead.

But how much control do consumers actually have? If I walk into a restaurant, I can only choose from what is on the wine list. The act of choosing is constrained by the options that have already been selected for me. So, are wine lists reflecting or shaping demand?

If you’ve seen the first Devil Wears Prada, you’ll remember the scene in which Miranda Priestly—the editor-in-chief of Runway, a thinly veiled version of Anna Wintour at Vogue—scolds her new, unfashionable assistant for mocking a discussion about two belts that appeared to her almost identical. Miranda’s point is that even the assistant’s tragic choice of a blue sweater is the result of decisionsmade by a handful of influential people in fashion. Taste, she argues, is shaped by the few tastemakers in that very room.

If Anna Wintour had a counterpart in the wine world, it was Robert Parker. Perhaps the most influential wine critic in recent history, I needn’t tell you what a “Parkerized” wine tastes like. Suffice it to say that it tastes almost exactly the opposite of what we traditionally think an Old World wine should taste like. Yet, for all the complaints that European winemakers supposedly have for him, it’s hard to deny that many of them catered to his palate in pursuit of a coveted 100-point score, or something close to it, and the economic gains that came with it. Which means that one wine critic helped shape both the supply of wine and the demand for it according to his personal taste.

This is precisely what the WSET teaches students to avoid. The aim is to assess whether a wine is good or outstanding on its own terms, rather than according to whether you happen to enjoy it. It is an exercise that irritates me every time I do it. Perhaps that is because—despite, once upon a time, knowing very little about wine—I rather recklessly set up a business selling it and simply chose bottles I liked drinking. I had little interest in abstract quality assessments divorced from my own pleasure—my own idea of what made a wine good. In that sense, I empathize with Parker. He scored wines according to his conception of good taste.

The problem was not that Parker had preferences but that his preferences carried such extraordinary weight that they moved markets. Producers adapted their wines to suit his palate, while those that did not align with it were overlooked. One man’s taste became, for a time, the market’s definition of quality.

Which brings me to this question: Did Robert Parker like big, bold, jammy wines because he is American, or did Americans come to like big, bold, jammy wines because Robert Parker said they should?

When I first started exploring the Chinese wine market in 2018, there was a clear idea of what “Chinese people liked” when it came to wine: big Bordeaux reds. And that’s what was imported and sold. I once brought a Prosecco to a tasting with a group of Chinese importers in Guangzhou. They all agreed it was a good wine, but insisted that nobody would buy it. “Chinese people don’t drink sparkling wine,” they told me.

“What do you mean?!” I asked. Prosecco is the most popular wine appellation in the world, bar none (660 million bottles sold versus 500 million of Bordeaux). Were Chinese people somehow immune to its charm? I didn’t think so. So I imported it myself and sold it online and quickly became our best-selling wine. Today, Vino Joy reports that sparkling wine sales in China are growing at double-digit rates while sales for still wine are falling.

Now, I’m not telling you this because I want to take credit for the boom of sparkling wine in China. Rather, to illustrate how quickly supposedly fixed preferences can change. And if anything, what changed perceptions was a major Champagne marketing push between 2020 and 2022. I know because every influencer we worked with seemed to be invited to lavish hotel stays and caviar-and-Champagne dinners.

Again, taste isn’t fixed, it can be changed. With the right amount of marketing budget, that is.

That even Kant’s attempt to reconcile the paradox of taste remains contested is, in a way, reassuring. This piece is an argument against the idea that preferences are immutable; that people in London are fundamentally different from those in Dallas; or that today’s wine lists merely reflect what consumers have always wanted.

Perhaps people in Dallas would happily embrace lighter, lower-alcohol whites, just as Londoners might develop a taste for higher-alcohol cabernet sauvignon. But that requires people willing to challenge convention. Critics, importers, restaurateurs and retailers do more than respond to taste: they create it.

It has to be said that, while Dallas appears to have different tastes in wine, geography and price may explain much of the apparent gap.

London’s proximity to northern France means French wines reach British shores more easily than they do Dallas, where bottles must cross an ocean and navigate a complex supply chain, often at a significantly higher cost. As ever, choices ultimately come down to price—or rather, value for money. The median bottle on a Dallas wine list costs $36, compared with $86 in London.

Supporting this argument, rather than the idea that Dallas simply has a preference for warm-climate wines, is the city’s emphasis on other cool-climate regions, such as Oregon and Washington. These wines feature prominently on Dallas wine lists but are largely absent from London’s—or perhaps simply drowned out in a sea of French choices.

London’s apparent preference for lighter wines may also reflect policy rather than taste. In the UK, alcohol duties are linked to alcohol by volume (ABV), creating a financial incentive for restaurants to stock lower-alcohol wines.

The occasion on which wine is consumed may also play a role. Dallas has a strong tradition of steakhouse dining and casual upscale restaurants, where wine is expected to complement richer, meat-based dishes. The popularity of cabernet sauvignon in Dallas may therefore say less about a city’s willingness to experiment and more about the role wine is expected to play at the table.

In other words, wine lists may reflect not only what people like to drink, but also the occasions on which they drink it.

Perhaps the real lesson is that wine lists reveal less about what people inherently like and more about the choices available to them. Taste is shaped not only by culture and preference, but also geography, taxation, economics and social ritual. Which city has “better” taste depends, perhaps, on whether one believes taste correlates with price. But the more interesting question is not whether London or Dallas has better taste, but how different systems produce different expressions of it.

Exciting news! Jason Wilson invited me to write a monthly column for his very trendy Everyday Drinking, where I’ll be looking at wine through a more analytical lens — that’s to say, taking some of the emotion out of wine.

Then, if that wasn’t exciting enough, I finally get to publish the result of five months of work with start-up WineLabs and its founder, Ilias Miraoui: what is probably the largest analysis ever conducted of wine lists from 1,063 Michelin-starred restaurants worldwide.

Read what I found out.

“All you have to do is write one true sentence,” Ernest Hemingway would say to himself, to combat his writer’s block. “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

Can that be applied to data? It’s worth trying, as I’ve been stuck on this analysis for what feels like forever.

For the past six months, I’ve worked with a start-up, WineLabs, and its founder, Ilias Miraoui, to build what is the largest analysis of wine lists from 1,063 Michelin-starred restaurants worldwide. The idea was simple: if these are the best restaurants, with the best sommeliers and the deepest cellars, what do they actually serve? My hypothesis was that we would uncover niche wine markets—hidden gems known only to insiders. But that’s not what we found.

The truest sentence I know is this:

After six months of cleaning data, Ilias and I found that Krug and Dom Pérignon appear on 42 percent of all Michelin wine lists.

Among the most represented producers, beyond these two Champagne houses, the pattern is equally conventional: Château d’Yquem, Gaja, Bollinger, Louis Roederer, Sassicaia, Château Margaux, Ruinart, Domaine Leflaive, Château Mouton Rothschild, Vega Sicilia, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and Château Haut-Brion.

Hopefully, that is not where the story ends, but it is where it starts. It starts with a question: are wine choices at the top end of the market homogeneous— homogeneous to the point of being boring?

The data suggests they are. Around 60 percent of wine lists are dominated by French regions, primarily Burgundy, Bordeaux and Champagne, with smaller contributions from the Rhône and the Loire. Italy is a distant second, accounting for roughly 10 to 20 percent of listings.

This concentration is not entirely organic. On the topic of Champagne, Michelin-starred restaurants sometimes have exclusivity agreements with certain houses, whereby a glass is served on arrival and bottles are available at a more favourable price. “However,” a sommelier at one such restaurant told me, “it becomes difficult to sell anything else sparkling.”

Another equally predictable finding: median bottle prices increase with star level, US$197 for one-star, US$325 for two-star, and US$446 for three-star Michelin restaurants. A quarter of two-star and a third of a 3-star menus are comprised of bottles above $1,000. Meanwhile, only 6 percent of the menus consist of bottles less than $100.

For context, the median price of the most expensive tasting menus is US$165, US$256 and US$356 for one-, two- and three-star restaurants, respectively¹. Given that a tasting menu usually lasts between two and four hours, it is not unreasonable to assume that at least one bottle of wine will be consumed per person. Those bottles of wine will each be priced 18 percent to 27 percent above the most expensive tasting menu.

Having spoken to sommeliers, low- and no-alcohol pairings are becoming increasingly popular. Alternatives—low- and no-alcohol beverages, cocktails, and, not least, water—come in at way less than half the price of wine.

Does this mean that fine wine is pricing itself out of, arguably, the only establishments that can realistically sell bottles above $1,000—and where wine producers themselves want to be present—all in the pursuit of status and high prices for their own sake? Is status what’s killing fine wine?

I keep seeing statements like “alcohol is in structural decline due to changing youth culture and GLP-1s dampening consumption” presented as fact—but they are assumptions, not facts. I disagree; I think the decline is primarily driven by price, and more importantly by the availability of better value-for-money alternatives.

I can’t untangle which came first: fine wine producers raising prices to excess, or high-end restaurants treating wine as a cash cow. What starts as positioning becomes pricing. What starts as pricing becomes expectation. And what starts as expectation becomes a system that is very hard to unwind. But the outcome of this vicious cycle is clear—the lack of fine wine at reasonable prices is what puts consumers off.

One sommelier told me that when they started working at a Michelin-starred restaurant, they saw the same wine they had sold in a shop priced at eight times as much. “The ambience, the food and the scenography of a Michelin-star restaurant do a lot to elevate the wine.”

I find it infuriating myself: going to a restaurant—admittedly rarely a Michelin-starred one—where the choice is between an expensive glass of Veuve Clicquot or a non-descript “wine from Chile” at an excessive price. More often than not, I just get a beer.

In other words, consumers are not necessarily drinking less—they are substituting. And in that substitution, wine is losing.

Academic research points in the same direction. A recently published study by Riccardo Saracino, Stefano Corsi and Chiara Mazzocchi, “The STAR WARS of Michelin Guide restaurants: a wine list perspective — a case study from Italy,” analyzes the factors influencing restaurant ratings, including wine lists. “It turns out that,” they write, “wine list characteristics play a significant role in shaping customer satisfaction.”

Evidence suggests that customers appreciate wine lists offering a balance between affordable and premium-priced wines, suggesting that price diversity is a valued feature. While higher prices can increase customer satisfaction, this effect reverses beyond a certain point. In the case of wine, lower median prices are associated with higher ratings, suggesting that customers are sensitive not just to price, but to value.

At the same time, wine lists that are too narrow—whether overly local or overly conventional—tend to perform worse.

In other words, consumers are not rejecting wine; they are rejecting overpriced and predictable wine—which, incidentally, is what these menus increasingly offer.

The question is whether Michelin’s methodology, which clearly rewards a certain way of delivering excellence in food, is also painting the world of food and wine “beige.” A kind of “beigification”, technically flawless, globally consistent, but lacking distinction. And that is exactly what the data reflects: not a lack of quality, but a convergence of choices.

On YouTube, I came across an urban architect showing images of new builds and asking: “Why does this look like it could be anywhere, while these”—showing Amsterdam, Santorini and Brooklyn—“are clearly from a specific place?”

He explains it through the idea of a “sense of place,” the elements that make a location distinctive. Brooklyn’s brownstones come from locally available stone; Dutch brick architecture reflects an abundance of clay and a lack of natural stone; Santorini’s white houses are designed to reflect heat. These places are memorable because they respond to their environment.

There are faint signs of this in wine lists—South America leaning towards Mendoza, North America towards Napa Valley. But broadly, the “sense of place,” or terroir, so central to the production of wine itself, does not seem to carry through to the top end of dining. The result is carefully constructed, technically excellent—and increasingly forgettable—wine experiences. In a category built on terroir, the disappearance of place at the point of consumption is a striking contradiction.

Menu depth appears to increase with the number of stars: the median one-star restaurant lists 77 unique estates, while a three-star lists 184. But as the share of French wines rises alongside this, it raises the question: are three-star restaurants simply adding more of the same names? The data would suggest so. Depth is increasing, but differentiation is not.

This led me to ask a few questions: is there a written—or unwritten—rule about what wines are expected, either by the Michelin Guide inspector or by the restaurant-goer? Another hypothesis is that fine dining guests expect to find the rarest wines, rather than niche or good-value ones. That may well be. For all the emphasis sommeliers place on how wine can elevate food (and vice versa), it is also true that the Michelin Guide does not include the wine list in its scoring.

Some of these dynamics are reinforced structurally. For example, the Court of Master Sommeliers explicitly references “traditional” producers within regions, effectively establishing a canon. Many of those building wine lists treat these producers as the gold standard—names that must be present. The presence of these names on a list does not mean they are actually bought. Anecdotal evidence from several sommeliers suggests they account for as little as 5 percent of wine sales. More niche or interesting choices are often confined to pairing menus, which are narrower by design.

At the same time, the typical Michelin guest is a mix of price-sensitive and not particularly knowledgeable about wine, which makes recognizable brands easier to sell.

Only a handful of restaurants approach food and wine as a true pairing, where one is conceived alongside the other. In most cases, they remain separate worlds, where the business of hospitality takes precedence over more interesting, and potentially more coherent, choices.

And that may be the core issue. Not that fine wine has lost relevance—but that, in the places where it should matter most, it has become predictable, overpriced, and disconnected from the experience it is meant to elevate.

My “New Year New Me” goal for 2026 is to stop using my phone. Of course, this may be the single hardest resolution, even harder than losing the baby weight — for that, there’s now Ozempic, right?

The great thing about phones is that even calling them smartphones is reductive — I am completely submissive to it. I realised that when my phone’s battery blew up in December after being absolutely fine the day before. Beyond the obvious — people couldn’t call me — what I realised is that I didn’t have music for the commute. More, I didn’t even know what time it was! I couldn’t even read, as my Kindle app and news apps are on my phone. When I got to the office, I couldn’t write down my notes, and I couldn’t buy myself coffee because I only use Apple Pay. So far, my phone is a phone, a watch (and an alarm), a book and magazines, a notepad and a pen, a music player and a bank card. I could go on and on and on about all the things that are inherently attached to my phone — and there are many.

That’s why, when one reaches for it (144 times a day), it feels justified.

Oh, I almost forgot: it’s a camera and social media too.

It’s true that I used to have to carry all those things with me when I went out. Now, I just carry my phone. (Somehow, my bag is still very heavy — why?) But while that may relieve some people of the weight they used to carry on their back or shoulder, it doesn’t relieve them of stress. Watch people at the airport: with low battery, we end up tethered to charging points just so we can pull up our boarding passes.

When everything we do is connected to our phone, what happens when our phone doesn’t work? I can tell you what happens. We become a completely useless member of this society. The only thing one can do is walk oneself to the nearest shop and buy a new phone.

Another event in 2025 made me reflect on my phone use: “El Gran Apagón”, the Iberian blackout in April 2025. I couldn’t use my phone — not even as a phone — because the signal wasn’t working, not to mention that it ran out of battery sometime in the early afternoon. Not only that, but I couldn’t buy anything from the shop because my card was on my phone; and even if I’d had a physical card, supermarket card machines started running out of battery by early afternoon too. I panicked. I had no cash, and my online delivery was due the following day (if it was delivered — we didn’t know at that point), so I had little grocery left and no way to buy anything. Of course, Boomers shone, with a few emergency thousands euros stashed at home, under the mattress or wherever.

Aside from this, I spent a blissful sunny afternoon reading half a book and napping — something I haven’t done since I can’t remember when.

Reading is the other collateral damage of my addiction to my phone. I have to confront the harsh truth that I read only 13 books for pleasure in 2025 — a number so low by my standards that I can’t believe it. But it’s true. Someone told me, around 10 years ago, when the Kindle became the thing to have, that our children will look at our houses stuffed full of books and find it absurd, because all books will exist only in digital, Kindle-like formats.

That thought, though logical, is a typically purely utilitarian argument.

The benefit — the only benefit — of books is that we transfer what’s written in them into our heads. That’s it. There is no accounting for any other value. The value of having people come to your house and browse, the value of the book’s journey, where it was bought and when, and with whom, the notes on the margins, … all of that amounts to zero when compared with the benefits of space and not having to dust them.

, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, gives another example of this way of thinking: the doorman example. A hotel replaces a human doorman with automatic doors. They are cheaper and consistent. Utilitarian win. But what you lose is the point. A doorman isn’t just a mechanism for opening a door. They provide reassurance, status, social proof, and a sense of safety, they notice things and make the place feel looked after, and clients seen. Those benefits are hard to quantify, so they get treated as “zero” in the spreadsheet, even though they’re the reason people may like the hotel in the first place.

One book I failed to read is called “Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation”, which supposedly argues that bubbles aren’t all that bad because large funding, poor accountability and a unified vision are, in fact, the engine that allows breakthrough technologies to thrive. A topical book, arriving at a moment when a nervous investment community kept asking itself: “Is the AI bubble bursting yet?” “And now?” “Now?!” Everyone looked at OpenAI pulling in a total of $58bn, and then looked at the Fed and other central bankers. Powell famously said no; the BoE said yes. The Bank of England claimed that yes, there are signs of a bubble, while Powell suggested that we’re talking about profitable companies — which is different from the late 1990s landscape.

All that seems to attract investors’ attention is technology, AI or other buzzwords — a digital world that is outpacing the real one.

As a case in point, the S&P 500 is a US-based index comprised of the 500 (the number flactuates) largest American businesses. The top 10 — all tech companies except Berkshire Hathaway (though it owns 238 million shares of Apple) — represent 40% of the total index. The top 10 names returned 26% in 2025, while the remaining returned 12.5% — a staggering gap of 13% in one year.

If all the money in the world is set to go to giant tech firms, who then invest billions in keeping people addicted to their phones, and in turning basic communication tools into intelligent companions that learn from user behaviour and perform complex tasks autonomously, making them more interesting every day — what’s the point of anything else? And where will it end?

Of course, I wrote this piece to talk about wine, not AI.

We’ll get to wine. But first, I want you to understand that the phone is at the centre of this point — and that everything is useless except for it. If you wanted to live a minimalist life, all you need is a phone.

Everything leads to the phone.

The digital life we live in makes our analogue lives redundant.

“We all know that what we do is totally pointless,” says Swiss watchmaker Max Büsser, founder of MB&F. “A mechanical watch is totally pointless today.” He’s referring to the simple fact that mechanical watches became technologically obsolete once more accurate quartz watches, powered by a battery and a vibrating crystal, arrived.

That shift triggered the so-called Quartz Crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, when cheaper quartz watches flooded the market and the traditional Swiss industry went into steep decline. By 1984, the market for mechanical watches had shrunk to roughly a third of its size a decade earlier. However, over the four decades that followed, Swiss makers pulled off a remarkable repositioning and mechanical watches moved from functional, daily tools to luxury objects, closer to art than utility.

Büsser argues that the point of a mechanical watch is “emotional art and artisanship.” And that change in framing is precisely what has allowed the category to expand again — with forecasts projecting growth from $45.52 billion in 2025 to $101.16 billion by 2032.

If all the investment in the world goes to AI, tech… our analogue life will slowly become redundant. The digital is seamless and frictionless; our analogue life is clunky and, ultimately… useless.

, one of the most interesting Gen Z economists, explained this point so well on the occasion of the protests against ICE’s actions in June 2025:

We are increasingly caught between a future promised and the present we’re living through. We have apps that can summon autonomous vehicles in minutes while we have ICE raids escalating across the country. AI evangelists talk about dancing in fields of daisies now that robots will do all the work while National Guard troops sleep on concrete floors without water (and their service members boo state governors).

If you wanted a perfect image of this contradictions (we are a visual first society after all), I think the burning Waymos in LA are pretty searing. People used the frictionless Waymo app and the seamless user experience that the company spent billions perfecting to summon an autonomous vehicle to their exact location, and burnt it.

In this world, the reality people live in is, ultimately, the hallucination.

It’s a hallucination to think that Ozempic will give you the perfect body without creating other problems. It’s a hallucination to think that the US and its allies export democracy purely for the good of the people, or that watching people workout on YouTube will make you fit and healthy. It’s a hallucination to think that pouring all the money — and all the faith — in the world into AI and technology, whatever that means, will fix our labour market and, with it, poverty and everything else promised in Sam Altman’s “The Gentle Singularity” essay. It’s a hallucination to think that carbs and wine are the enemy, and it’s a hallucination to think that the perfect eight-hour-sleep is within reach. It isn’t. It’s a hallucination to think that trains or planes can run without infrastructure investment. They can’t. It’s a hallucination to think that movie stars are interesting. It’s a hallucination to think we can live a happy, lonely life as a unit of one — perfectly optimised beings. It’s a hallucination to think that what social media feeds us is anything but opium for the masses. It is opium. We are the masses.

There will come a point when this perfect digital life we are living — eating perfectly placed Michelin-starred food on perfectly white tablecloths, served by perfectly smiling waiters; our perfect smile, perfect Ozempic body, the perfect picture we can take with perfect cameras and instantly publish on our perfect social media feed — will crack. This mirror of perfection, this black mirror, will break into thousands of pieces, and we will need to stop the hallucination.

I’d hate for you to take away from this piece that I am anti-AI or anti-technology. Merely, I am of the opinion that, to put in the words of Henry David Thoreau in Walden we should stop becoming the tools of our tools. In such a world, the need of humanity comes first, the solution or tool second, and not the other way around.

So what is the need of humanity? Wine? Watches?

It would be absurd to suggest that humanity needs wine. Of course it doesn’t, does it?

“The wine does most of my writing,” Charles Bukowski once said, a line that sits in stark contrast to today’s “ChatGPT does most of my writing!” Am I arguing that all investment should simply flow into the pockets of wine producers instead? Of course not — though I know which kind of writing I’d rather read.

Humanity doesn’t need wine, but in my view, it stands for everything that is real, and everything that refuses to be justified by a purely utilitarian argument. It is poisonous, fattening, addictive, and shortens our days; we know what it means to battle with it, and sometimes lose. And yet, it is life-enhancing, it brings us closer to the earth, brings people together, and sits at the centre of great conversations. Wine is at once wonderful and problematic, two polar opposites, and it obeys the first rule of toxicology, as Paracelsus wrote in 1538:

“All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.”

In the real life we actually live, there is room for these contradictions. Our digital life, by contrast, is increasingly intolerant of them, and the range of human expression is narrowing as a result, much as the adoption of political parties have narrowed our ability to think critically about social, economic and political issues.

We’ve reached a moment where, I think, the pendulum has swung too far towards investing in a world that isn’t our reality. Or, as Scanlon notes it in her essay:

There is something relatively poignant about using the infrastructure of the promised future to reject that future and to also the refusal to keep pretending that this future arriving through our screens has anything to do with the reality people are living in.

Even Bret Taylor, co-founder of the AI start-up Sierra and chairman of OpenAI, said that AI “probably” is a bubble, drawing both “smart money” and “dumb money” into funding competitors at every layer of the tech stack. Maybe I’m early with this call, but this black mirror may be already breaking.

Australia’s social media ban for under-16s is one timid sign of institutional and government action. Many people, like me, have started their own individual battle. While Luddites were a movement in 19th-century England of those who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery, modern day Luddite teens instead profess a lifestyle of self-liberation from social media and technology.

It would certainly be unwise to sell your shares in companies that profit from addictive substances, whether tobacco or social media, especially given that, as of today, 20th January, I’ve already failed at quitting my phone.

But you know what they say: if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again…

For once, I’ve written a philosophical piece — about Bolgheri and its place in the world of wine. I spent a few days at Argentiera in Tuscany, where Leonardo Raspini (MD of Argentiera) and the team kindly humoured my questions.

Why does it matter? I’ve written about Bolgheri before — One for the Cellar, A Tuscan Estate to Watch — but this time I wanted to take the long view on a Tuscan appellation built on international grape varieties, at a moment when the wine world seems more interested than ever in autochthonous grapes.

I can’t predict the future — no one can — but this is my take on Bolgheri. (Don’t worry, a numbers piece is coming next.)

Read this piece on timatkin.com

I started writing this as a piece about Bolgheri, and ended up writing about myself, but perhaps you will see that as we go along. As in, we talk about wine, but really, we just talk about ourselves, our taste, our palate and our stories.

And this piece, the piece about Bolgheri, wasn’t even supposed to be about Bolgheri, but that doesn’t matter now. This piece is about Bolgheri and its place in the world of wine.

Its place in Italy is in Tuscany, in the northern Maremma, a land that stretches, in the words of Dante Alighieri, from Cecina to Tarquinia, now a beautiful bucolic seaside forest which was once home to Etruscan and Roman settlements, key to coin and arms metalwork, and later an abandoned malaria-riddled swamp until very recently.

Its place in the world of wine is more recent still, long after Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany started its reclamation in the early 1800s, later completed by Mussolini. I skip over thousands of years of history, which I am sure would be interesting to some, to get to when the Maremma was ultimately ready to be cropped. Grain was the chosen crop in the self-sufficiency attempt of every dictator, until the Marquis Mario Incisa della Rocchetta decided to plant Cabernet Sauvignon in 1944 on his wife’s Tenuta San Guido estate. While wine had been produced for the family since then, the 1968 vintage was the first to be released to the public under the name Sassicaia as a vino da tavola, and by the mid-1970s it was already a cult wine.

Whether the Marquis really saw the potential in the Bolgheri terroir to craft a great wine that could age, or merely wanted to make wines that he liked, not those light and pale Sangioveses (an objective I could perfectly understand), it doesn’t really matter, as one’s experiment led to a flurry of other foreigners (the Marquis himself was from Piemonte) joining in the quest. Piermario Meletti Cavallari, a former restaurateur from Bergamo, founded Grattamacco. Michele Satta arrived in Bolgheri around 1982 from Varese. Ludovico Antinori of Florence founded Tenuta dell’Ornellaia (and then Masseto) and his elder brother Piero Antinori, Tenuta Guado al Tasso. The only exception was Le Macchiole, founded by Eugenio Campolmi, a rare Bolgheri native, and his wife Cinzia Merli. Later, big names of the Italian wine world also flocked to Bolgheri — Piemonte’s Gaja (with Ca’ Marcanda) and Veneto’s Allegrini (Poggio al Tesoro).

In the decades that followed, by attracting outside capital and expertise, the physical boundaries of Bolgheri, and those of its taste, expanded. (In a similar fashion, perhaps, to what we are currently witnessing with English Sparkling wine.)

I said this piece wasn’t about Bolgheri. In truth, it was meant to be about English sparkling wine, TrentoDOC, and Franciacorta. But then I found myself on a press trip in Bolgheri, visiting Argentiera, where Leonardo Raspini and his team humoured me as I questioned their very existence.

Or perhaps this piece isn’t about any of these places, and a place is just an excuse to talk about why on earth a Tuscan appellation uses international grapes. This is why I came to question its place in the world of wine—fine wine, even. Part of what I want to tell you is how a vino da tavola that uses international grape varieties came to be a place in the world of wine where its 73 producers can charge an average price three times higher than the average Italian DOC, and twice that of Barolo, Barbaresco, and Brunello di Montalcino; wines we think of as quintessentially Italian.

Restaurants’ menus are littered with generic, cheap ‘Merlot’ from Chile or ‘Sauvignon Blanc’ from Italy because at the lower end of the quality scale, people don’t really care about anything but price. Producing cheap wines with international grapes is in fact the norm.

But the opposite is true at the top end of the quality scale.

There are a lot of words to indicate a similar concept. Autochthonous. Native. Indigenous. Local. But also: quintessential, genuine, traditional, authentic, ancestral, historic, endemic, vernacular, rooted, terroir-driven, original, pure, artisanal, region-specific, emblematic, true-to-place. In this case, adjectives for grape varieties and wines made with them. But the original concept of autochthonous comes from classical Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, during the city’s imperial height. Athenians proudly claimed to be an autochthonous people, born of their own land and never having migrated elsewhere. In their mythology, autochthones were mortals who sprang from the very soil, rocks, and trees—rooted eternally to their native ground.

We are seeing a revival of autochthonous grape varieties at the moment. Italy is said to have more than 350 and some go so far as to say 700. (Perhaps this reflects Italy’s history: while many families made wine for themselves, the big push on clonal selection and quality came much more recently.) That’s to say, a renewed interest in autochthonous grape varieties means a renewed interest in Italian wines and their diversity. And in this context I question Bolgheri’s point, that is, in the context of today’s trends.

Leonardo Raspini told me that the OIV defines an autochthonous grape variety as one that has been in a place for more than 50 years. While I couldn’t substantiate this definition, it raises a fair question — when does a grape become native? Fifty years? More? One hundred years? In the Athenians’ case, one could never become autochthonous. But in the case of Grenache, Garnacha and Cannonau it seems that seven centuries or so suffice. Does it need to be longer than the memory of the people who write about it and who drink it? That is what it is all about? Time?

Or is it about the name? Do we feel that Pinot Grigio is quintessentially more Italian, more Venetian, than, say Cabernet Sauvignon is Bolgherese? Or else, is it that the quality of the average Pinot Grigio is so low it feels divorced from Pinot Gris?

When I spoke to Nelson Pari (who, along with Federico Moccia, organises the annual Bolgheri tasting in London) about this topic, he reminded me that Italy is only 164 years old. If, after all that time, and in my own lifetime of being Italian, I still feel infinitely more Venetian than Italian, beyond any politicised separatist argument, it’s because borders are a mere construct. They can’t capture the fragmented nature of this land, nor the constant interchange of rulers, ideas, goods, and merchants that has defined the Mediterranean for millennia. We think our world is globalised. So was the Mediterranean. And while the Athenians idea of autochthonous is very nice and simple, and the idea of autochthonous grape varieties is very nice and simple, it denies our history and the history of wine itself. Just looking at Italy’s border regions: Trentino Alto-Adige and Fruili Venezia Giulia count a wealth of international grapes among their wines. Is Ribolla Gialla more Italian than Sauvignon? Other examples brought up by Pari: Sauvignon Blanc in Modigliana, Pinot Noir in Focara and Pinot Nero in Oltrepò Pavese, Syrah in Cortona.

Nicolò Carrara, Argentiera’s enologist, expanded on the topic of globalisation—but in reference to vineyard management and winemaking techniques. Agronomists and enologists may study in one place, but the techniques they learn are no longer purely local; knowledge about vine and wine is increasingly shared across the globe. This is even more true in Bolgheri, where collaboration and ambition seem to go hand in hand.

Returning to what makes a grape variety truly autochthonous: surely producing some of the world’s greatest wines should count as one criterion? Is there really something wrong with making exceptional wines from international grapes? And if these grapes thrive so well in a place, aren’t they, in some sense, already at home there? Or, better said in the words of Elena Pozzolini, enologist and MD of Tenuta dei Sette Cieli: “The grape variety is the instrument, but it’s the land that gives it a voice. The soil, the microclimate, the light from the sea, the altitude, the winds—all contribute to creating a unique profile. A Cabernet grown in Bolgheri is not a Californian or Bordeaux Cabernet. I believe that a wine’s identity lies not so much in the grape variety it’s made from, but in how that grape manages to tell the story of the place it comes from. And if the result is credible, coherent, and sincere, then yes, even an international variety can become autochthonous in spirit.”

Bolgheri’s story is one of innovation and internationalisation, in a region unburdened by Tuscany’s or even Italy’s stricter traditions. Perhaps it is precisely this break from tradition that makes Bolgheri a centre for innovation and a place in constant pursuit of excellence—much like universities are (or should be) for free thought.

The question of where one grape variety, or one person, comes from seems to matter, but does it need to define one’s future? Origin is certainly important to some, grapes or people, and less so to others. And yet, as the world learns to care less about where people come from, the world of wine seems ever more obsessed with where a grape does. When I first moved to the UK, in the aftermath of the biggest economic crisis of the last century, the country was recovering faster than much of Europe and the rest of the world. Like me, many foreigners were arriving, fuelling the simmering sentiment behind UKIP’s rise. A defiant post circulating on social media at the time, aimed at responding to that sentiment, put it bluntly: “If someone who doesn’t speak the language, with no contacts or money, steals your job, then immigrants aren’t your biggest problem.”

Couldn’t something similar be said of grapes?

Jancis Robinson says every “wine-producing country should proceed in its efforts and research in finding out about its origins and traditions,” but may I add that we should also discard the parts of tradition that don’t really work—no matter how well they can be marketed?

Perhaps the point of Bolgheri, whether or not one understands or even likes its wines, is to show us—as Tom Hewson writes—that you can’t legislate wine quality, and that flows of ideas, talent, and capital (don’t ask me in which order or proportions) are as essential as grapes, earth, and sky in making excellent wine.

Read on timatkin.com

Someone recently told me that my saying “a bottle of wine is worth whatever the consumer is willing to pay for it” was a lazy, throwaway comment.

But it’s the reality! I protest.

In fact:

Supply is the total quantity of wine available in the market; demand is the total quantity that consumers are willing and able to purchase at various prices; price is the point at which supply and demand intersect, in a precarious and ever-changing equilibrium; utility is the satisfaction a consumer derives from drinking the wine; willingness to pay is the maximum amount a consumer is prepared to spend for that satisfaction.

And a bottle of wine’s worth — its value — is the story we tell about that equilibrium.

But at this moment in time, we’re well into the third consecutive year of falling wine prices or, the longest sustained down market since the 1970s. If price reflects the point where supply meets demand, then where is that equilibrium now?

It’s a frightening thing, to invest time, land, labour, and capital into a product, only to be told it’s worth less than the sum of its parts. It’s scary because value is not intrinsic; it’s determined by what someone else is willing to pay for it.

Some might rightly argue that the real value of a bottle must be based on fundamentals, on production costs. What are those costs? Land, labour, electricity, tax, and so on. Equipment, fuel, fertiliser, packaging, water, bottles, corks, labels, marketing, insurance, logistics, certification, compliance, warehousing, sales and distribution, ...

On top of these costs, a premium is added for margin and prestige. And we tend to think that this premium (for wine) is always large — and often is.

But if I’m to believe what a Champagne grower once told me — that if you buy a bottle of Champagne in a UK supermarket for under £15 (at the time of writing, Sainsbury's has two and Waitore one), it likely means the grower behind it has lost money — then it’s clear there are some market dynamics pushing prices below that fundamental floor.

That’s not sustainable, on either end.

Over time, selling wine below cost of production isn’t viable. If the alleged benefits of supermarket partnerships don’t eventually outweigh the losses, those businesses won’t survive.

On the other hand — and perhaps this is where we are now? — excessively high prestige premiums added on top of that fundamental floor can damage the market in a different way. They tend to erode consumer trust, and buyers become sceptical and then they stop buying altogether.

But in such market conditions, when prices decline for this long, what is wine’s fair value?

Marie Antoinette’s “qu'ils mangent de la brioche” is often cited to mock an out-of-touch luxury thinking. In this analogy, wine is the brioche. Brioche is to bread what wine is to water. That’s to say: wine isn’t essential to life. Tim Atkin readers might disagree — but generally speaking, it’s not medicine. For a diabetic, there’s no price too high to pay for insulin. Thankfully, in Europe, we rarely test this economic theory known as inelastic demand. But in other parts of the world, where healthcare isn’t public, people know exactly what it means.

In my original comment: a bottle of wine is worth what someone is willing to pay for it and that’s because it’s not priced on need, but on desire.

And desire changes.

It shifts with taste, personal circumstances — typically, as people age and expect to earn more, their willingness to spend increases. Also, in debt-driven economies, we experience credit booms and busts that expand and contract consumer appetite, depending on whether interest rates are falling or rising. Other factors — extraordinary events like lockdowns or tariffs — can also drive demand up or down.

This matters because if we price wine beyond what consumers are prepared to spend for the satisfaction it offers, at a specific point in time, we risk exceeding their willingness to pay for it. We’re at one such point now. It’s no use saying, “but my wine was flying off the shelf at twice today’s price only three years ago!”

The fact that this is the third consecutive year of declining prices shows just how difficult it has become to be in the business of selling wine. In many cases, there doesn’t even seem to be a price point low enough to satisfy consumers.

So, are we nearing a true floor? Are producers at risk because prices have fallen below the cost of production — or is that threshold still some way off, with more pain currently borne elsewhere in the chain?

Which brings us to the age-old dilemma: can producers lower prices without tarnishing their luxury image?

You’ll find a million and one papers advising luxury brands against lowering prices in a downturn, as it erodes status. Instead, they recommend launching lower-priced lines, telling better stories, cutting volumes, going green. And to be fair, the wine world has tried all of that.

But wine sits in a category of luxury that follows its own rules. It is produced every year. Its quality and quantity are often dictated not by business decisions, but by the weather. And your neighbours are producing it too.

A counterintuitive pricing strategy known as scarcity pricing was the focus of a recent study by researchers at Washington State University, examining wineries in Washington, Oregon, and California. Scarcity pricing doesn’t aim to maximise short-term profits. Instead, it deliberately sets prices below the market value in order to create excess demand and stimulate desire. In simple terms: more people wanted to buy the wines because they were perceived as bargains. This imbalance — demand outweighing supply — created a sense of scarcity in the eyes of consumers. Over time, the study found, this strategy increased demand for those wines.

There are caveats, of course: the wine has to be good. And producers must face proportionate capacity constraints. But the point is this: when consumers fall into a dormant state of non-spending, it might take a jolt — a perceptual bargain, a rare find — to wake them up.

Of course, this won’t apply to every wine or producer. But one thing is clear — recycling economic clichés won’t work now. So if the question “What is a bottle of wine worth?” feels too charged, maybe the better one is: “What will it take to make people buy wine again?”

The Drinks Business reports that Felton Road, one of Central Otago’s top wineries, is stepping away from the fine wine label, rejecting what owner Nigel Greening calls its “over-priced snobbery.”

In my latest piece for Tim Atkin, I argue that we need the opposite.

While I certainly disagree with the notion that fine wine is only for snobs, I believe it’s crucial to preserve what makes wine truly unique—its ability to age.

If I buy an Hermès Birkin, a car, or a watch, its value may rise due to rarity or status, but its quality doesn’t improve. Once it leaves the factory, it can only deteriorate.

Wine is different. Some dismiss it as just alcoholic grape juice, but it has a rare, almost alchemical ability to evolve—becoming more than it was.

So why are we making wines more approachable?

I argue that this shift isn’t driven by younger generations preferring easy-drinking wines—it’s an economic issue. Rising release prices and the cost of ageing have made it financially unviable to store wine, and we are at risk of destroying what makes wine, well, wine.

Read the full article at timatkin.com.

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Contrary to popular belief, the Chinese don’t mix Bordeaux with Coke.

Yet, between November 2017 and September 2018, I lost count of how many times I was told this, along with countless other myths surrounding China. Many of these were drilled into me during those 10 months leading up to my business launch in China, where I eventually opened three online shops.

Everyone, whether they had experience in the Chinese market or not, had an opinion on what the average wine buyer wanted.

And yet, in the six years that followed, not one of those myths turned out to be true. If anything, the average Chinese wine buyer not only doesn’t drink Figeac with Coke but is often more educated on wine than the average European consumer.

But I’m not here to talk about China. I want to talk about another myth—one that has been circulating in the wine industry for years and is changing the way wine is made and consumed.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, writes Joan Didion. The same applies to business. We turn fragments of truth into a narrative that “fits,” but we don’t want to hear how it ends.

There’s a myth in the wine industry, and it goes like this:

Young people prefer approachable wines. They must prefer approachable wines. They always have. We tell ourselves this story: that younger generations don’t drink, that they don’t appreciate wines that age, that they don’t want to wait. That they are impatient. That they can’t afford a house, let alone a wine cellar. That they have no space, no time, no inclination. And so, naturally, they must prefer drinking young wines—light, fresh, and easy.

And so, winemakers have started making them that way. I keep hearing about how wines are becoming more “approachable,” more drinkable, more immediate.

And that worries me.

Not because I dislike elegant, drinkable wines. Quite the opposite. God knows how much wine was Parkerised to please one man and one country. A reversal from those excessively oaked, overly tannic styles is welcome.

But in making wines more “approachable,” are we eroding the very essence of what makes wine, wine?

And that is: wine’s ability to age.

Fine wine improves over time for no additional investment. A just-bottled fine wine can be unpleasant, closed, undrinkable—but left alone, it softens, opens, and transforms.

If I buy a handbag, even an Hermès Birkin, or a car, a watch—its price may rise due to rarity, status, or exclusivity, but its quality doesn’t improve. Once it leaves the factory, it can only deteriorate.

Wine is different. While some dismiss it as just alcoholic grape juice, it possesses a rare, almost alchemical ability to evolve—to become more than it was.

And yet, as we strip wine of its core, we need to know where this story ends.

It will end in a race against Coca-Cola.

While younger generations are drinking less, socialising online, and leaning toward easier wines, I’ve started to question the premise of this narrative.

How many people have actually had the chance to taste older Barolos, Bordeaux, …?

And how often?

Just the simple fact that most people don’t know how good an aged Champagne can be, says it all. Everywhere wine is poured—restaurants, tastings, wine bars—it’s almost always about the newest vintage.

And while I may have introduced this myth as a philosophical problem, let’s be clear:

This is an economics problem.

The real issue is the structural underpricing of storage costs.

Restaurants don’t have the space. Merchants—once stockholders invested in winemakers, much like art galleries—now function more like brokers, flipping inventory before it even reaches their warehouses. Consumers, while they may lack the space or inclination to store wine, might actually want to drink older wines—if they had access.

But before we can get younger generations to drink older vintages, we need to fix the economics of ageing wine.

I hate to bring up interest rates, but we need to talk about interest rates.

With the reemergence of positive interest rates, the cost of storing wine now sits at around 10% per year. And that means that a 10-year-old wine must more than double in price just to break even.

A merchant who bought a Barolo for £50 in 2015 must sell it for £130 in 2025 just to cover these costs.

A private investor who bought Bordeaux En Primeur for £50 in 2015 must sell it for £130 in 2025—not to make a profit, but simply to break even.

This isn’t a theory. This is the maths.

And here’s the catch: if I can buy the 2014 vintage of an unnamed Bordeaux wine for £110 today (which I can), then the 2024 En Primeur must be released at a maximum of £42 for it to make financial sense.

This is why people aren’t buying wine. This is why merchants aren’t storing wine anymore. And that’s why winemakers are making wine that’s drinkable now.

Because at today’s release prices, neither businesses nor individuals can justify the economic trade-off. It’s easier to sell a wine that’s ready to drink.

The work that goes into making fine wine that can age is immense. But the cost of ageing wine must be rewarded too. It requires patience, investment, and long-term vision. The real cost of not ageing wine is the loss of what makes wine magical in the first place.

If we strip that away, what’s left? Just an alcoholic grape juice.

The myth that younger generations prefer approachable wines is just that—a myth, a cover-up for the fact that release prices of wines built to age are simply too high, making long-term storage economically unviable for both merchants and consumers. There’s no incentive to wait.

There are many myths in the wine industry.

But myths are just that—myths. And the truth of this one lies at the end of a simple maths equation.

Read on timatkin.com

Of course, I stole the title of this article from Monty Python. One reason I did so lies in its absurdity. After all, wine merchants in the UK have played a crucial role over centuries in making London one of the most important hubs of wine trading in the world. Their legacy is undeniable.

But here’s the grain of truth: their foundation risks collapsing from a lack of innovation.

In this two-year wine market downturn, blame for the lack of customers’ thirst for wine has been laid on everything and everyone. The usual suspects include younger generations drinking less, the economy, inflated release prices, rising interest rates, taxes, market oversupply, and even neo-prohibitionism … But what if the wine merchants themselves bear some of the responsibility?

Consider Jaguar, the carmaker. This may seem like a digression, but bear with me. Its recent rebranding campaign—complete with neon-bright visuals, moody Gen Z Martians, and depressing quotes like “live vivid”—sparked widespread ridicule. Jaguar discarded its iconic leaping cat logo and a century of heritage in a bid to appeal to younger consumers.

Bold? Perhaps.

Desperate? Definitely.

Which brings us back to wine merchants.

Both Jaguar and traditional wine merchants share a common issue: their once-loyal customer base—wealthy, white, middle-aged men—is shrinking. These customers already have more cars and wine than they need. The younger generation, who spend differently and drink less, might as well be aliens for all the industry seems to understand them.

For years, wine merchants—like Jaguar—relied on their legacy instead of innovating.

Wine merchants were once indispensable. They imported wine, bottled it under their own labels, and offered a curated selection, built on trust and relationships with producers and buyers. Their role was steeped in tradition—golfing, cigars, fine dining, and plenty of drinking, of course. Access to the world’s finest wines often depended on who you knew and how much you spent.

But times have changed.

The younger, tech-savvy consumer prioritises convenience, transparency, and honesty. Most would prefer to avoid interacting with a salesperson altogether.

The truth is, today’s buyers still want much of what merchants offer. It’s not all doom and gloom—systems like in-bond sales and broad access to fine wines continue to hold value.

But the days of opaque allocation systems, insider privileges, and exclusivity are numbered. Sorry to be so blunt, but that’s quite true.

Where Merchants Have Fallen Short

A blatant example of their aversion to innovation is e-commerce, ignored by the wine industry until the pandemic forced its hand. Before then, many resisted the shift to online sales, arguing it was incompatible with wine's traditional appeal. Then the world shut down, and suddenly, online platforms became essential.

Some merchants seized the opportunity to adapt. Most did so reluctantly, building clunky e-commerce sites and waiting for things to “go back to normal.” But normal never returned. Now, as the industry grapples with a downturn, it is clear that the old ways no longer suffice.

While I don’t believe that the decline in consumer demand is entirely the merchants’ fault—economic factors play a significant role—I do believe that wine merchants, like Jaguar, have failed to evolve alongside their ever-changing clients. When businesses lose touch with their customers by not keeping pace with their needs, they risk falling behind. And as Jaguar’s radical rebranding shows, catching up all at once is far more difficult—and often more costly—and requires bold, desperate measures.

This market dip has exposed these cracks.

Access to unique wines, historically a strength of the UK market, increasingly feels stale. The past decade has seen a surge of exciting producers from emerging regions, many of whom bring fresh ideas and diverse experiences. Yet UK merchants continue to treat Bordeaux En Primeur as their main event, even as inflated release prices erode customer interest. It’s not that Bordeaux should be forgotten—far from it. But consumers want to hear about the next great producer, the rockstars in the making. Some mid-sized merchants have filled this gap, but larger, more bureaucratic players remain stuck in the past.

Beyond their outdated focus on Bordeaux, merchants face criticism for sales practices that alienate clients, while, historically, relationships were a cornerstone of the business—built on trust, exclusivity, and mutual respect. Today, however, these relationships often feel more transactional than personal.

Take my first experience with a merchant: I was told I would only gain access to offers for top wines if I spent a significant amount of money. It felt less like an invitation and more like a threat. The opaque world of allocations, where access to the most sought-after bottles depends on vague spending thresholds and criteria, resembles a dystopian maze rather than a transparent service.

Then there’s the relentless barrage of emails. Once on a merchant’s mailing list, expect to be spammed—daily, if not more frequently. The sheer volume of recommendations gives the impression that clearing inventory is the priority. Instead of fostering loyalty, these practices erode trust, leaving buyers feeling like targets rather than valued partners.

A quick look at my inbox, highlights some very misleading claims. Phrases like “[Wine X] available at its original price” appear even when the wine has lost value since release. Critics’ scores are cherry-picked, leaving buyers without consistent benchmarks. Incessant vague promises of “investment-grade” wines, “DRC of …” or “best-ever” vintages… However, tools like Wine-Searcher now empower buyers to fact-check these claims. The result is an increasingly sceptical customer that no longer takes merchants’ promises at face value.

Merchants must understand that while wine lovers are passionate about buying, collecting, and drinking wine, their enthusiasm is tempered by the need for financial rationale. What might have worked in the past—opaque pricing, cherry-picked scores, and vague promises—no longer holds in a world where buyers have the tools and resources to conduct their own analysis.

Operational basics lag behind consumer expectations. Moving a bottle of wine between the same bonded warehouse in London takes three weeks and costs £11—a delay and expense that feels absurd in the age of Amazon Prime. Merchants seem blind to the value of robust after-sales services, clinging to outdated notions that logistics are beneath them.

Innovate or Die

The wine industry’s value chain, stretching from producer to consumer, is undergoing a profound transformation. Buyers are increasingly empowered by independent information sources, such as Wine-Searcher (or In the mood for wine!), which provide price transparency and analysis and erode the traditional role of merchants as gatekeepers. Digital marketplaces now offer unprecedented visibility, allowing consumers to compare prices and make informed decisions with ease.

At the same time, portfolio management tools have emerged, enabling collectors to track their holdings, assess value, and even trade wines—all without the need for merchant expertise.

In this new world of self-directed investment, collection, and trading, the client is progressively empowered and the merchants are gradually impoverished.

The fine wine industry stands at a crossroads remarkably similar to the stock broking world in the late 1990s. The advent of online platforms revolutionised trading, empowering individual investors, lowering barriers to entry, and democratising access to financial markets.

Wine merchants face a clear choice: adapt or risk irrelevance. Innovation is no longer optional—it demands transparency, streamlined logistics, and value-added services that transcend mere transactions. Merchants must acknowledge that wine is both a passion and an asset, demanding expertise and efficiency in equal measure.

Not every merchant fits this picture. Some will dismiss this analysis as unwarranted criticism. But the undeniable truth is that the wine trade is undergoing a transformation, one that won’t leave the industry unscathed.

There will be losers, but there will be winners too.