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.

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.

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.

Why Are Wine Bottles 750ml?

Not a litre, not a pint, not a tidy fraction of anything obvious. Three competing explanations, and all three probably played a part.

Georgia: The Cradle of Wine

Eight thousand years, buried clay vessels, and five hundred native grapes most of the wine world has never heard of.

Is Orange Wine Just A Hipster Trend?

Orange wine is not a trend that started in a natural wine bar. It started in Georgia, roughly eight thousand years earlier.