Bakhmut: The Sparkling Wine Cellar That Survived A City's Destruction

A 19th-century mine, millions of bottles, and a rescue carried out in stages while the city above it was fought over street by street.

Belgium: Not Just The Best Beer In The World

Everyone knows the beer. Belgium also quietly makes genuinely good cool-climate wine, and has done for long enough now to have its own appellations.

Tropical Wine Making: How Is It Even Possible?

Vines need a proper winter to rest. Growers near the equator, from Brazil to India to Thailand, just fake one instead.

Mosel River: Steep Slopes, Riesling and Sundials

Vines clinging to slate cliffs too steep for machinery, a grape that runs from bone-dry to lusciously sweet, and one of Europe's most underrated, most affordable serious wine regions.

Priorat: How A Ruined Monastery Region Became One Of Spain's Most Expensive Wines

Same bulk-wine reputation as Languedoc-Roussillon, same rough era of reinvention — solved by doing almost the exact opposite.

Retsina: The Wine Greece Never Stopped Making On Purpose

The reason Greek wine used to taste of pine disappeared centuries ago. Producers kept adding the pine anyway.

Carménère: The Grape Presumed Extinct For 100 Years

An entire country's wine industry was selling the wrong grape for over a century, and didn't find out until a DNA test said so.

Beaujolais Nouveau And The Wine Race That Took Over The World

The wine everyone treats as a marketing gimmick is actually made by a completely different fermentation method — and it's dragging serious Beaujolais down with it.

Wine On A Volcano: How Etna's Soil May Have Saved It From Phylloxera

Vines growing in the sandy soil of an active volcano turn out to be one of the rare European survivors of the pest that wiped out almost everyone else.

Vin Jaune: Jura's Wine Aged Under Its Own Living Skin

Left alone in barrel for six years with no top-ups, growing its own living layer of yeast for protection — Jura's most stubbornly independent wine.

Amarone And The Art Of Drying Grapes On Purpose

Same goal as botrytis — shrivel the grape, concentrate the juice — reached with a drying rack instead of a fungus.

Madeira: The Wine That's Nearly Impossible To Ruin

A wine that got cooked and shaken for months at sea by accident came back better — and producers have been deliberately recreating that disaster ever since.

Port And The Douro Valley: The World's Oldest Wine Region

One trick — stopping fermentation early with a shot of spirit — built an entire wine style, in a region that wrote wine law before almost anyone else bothered to.

Sherry: The Wine That Ages Itself

Everyone's nan had a bottle of the bad stuff. The actual production method — barrels that never fully empty, and a living yeast raft that decides how it turns out — deserves a lot more credit.

Wine From Scandinavia?

A warming climate, unusually long summer daylight, and a grape bred for exactly this problem — how Denmark, Sweden and Norway ended up making genuinely good wine.

Languedoc-Roussillon: The "New World" Wine Region Of France

France's old bulk-wine engine room reinvented itself with science and scale rather than tradition — the opposite instinct to Bordeaux and Burgundy, without leaving the country.

Better than Champagne? A Guide To English Sparkling Wines

Same chalk, same grapes, same method as Champagne — just a few hundred miles north, and only ripening properly since the climate warmed up.

Appellations and Wine Regions Explained

A name on a wine label is a legal claim, not a marketing flourish. Here is what it actually promises, from 1907 French riots to the loophole that created Super Tuscans.