Part Three: Have You Ever Tasted a Wine From Gaiole?
Imagine walking into a wine shop and being asked:
What kind of wine are you looking for?
Red or white?
Cabernet or Pinot Noir?
Something light? Something full-bodied?
Natural? Orange? Skin-contact?
All perfectly reasonable questions.
But here's one you probably haven't heard in a very long time:
Have you ever tasted a wine from Gaiole?
Gaiole is a small town in Tuscany, in the heart of Chianti Classico. And asking that question changes the conversation completely.
Because now we're not talking primarily about what the wine tastes like. We're talking about where it takes you.
Welcome to By Place.
Three reasons to drink wine
In Part One of How to Read Wine, we introduced a different way of looking at wine.
Instead of beginning with red, white, rosé or sparkling, ask a more fundamental question:
What drives this wine?
At Wine Stop, we divide wines into three Drivers:
By Grape. By Process. By Place.
These are not quality levels.
There is no progression from By Grape to By Process to By Place. There is no equivalent of good, better, best. No Driver outranks another.
All three are equal.
They simply give us different reasons to drink wine—and different things to discover.
By Grape teaches us how to enjoy and understand wine through the grape.
This is where wine drinking often begins. You discover Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, Sangiovese, Pinot Noir, Merlot, Verdejo or Carménère. You learn what you enjoy. You begin recognizing differences between grapes and styles, dry and sweet, light and full, crisp and rich.
And eventually you discover something even more important: the difference between a wine that was crafted and one that was merely produced.
There is nothing lesser about a By Grape wine. A delicious, carefully crafted varietal wine has accomplished exactly what it was intended to accomplish.
By Process teaches us how wine is made.
What happens when grapes spend extended time on their skins? What does an amphora do? What does barrel aging do? What happens during carbonic maceration? What creates the bubbles during secondary fermentation? What does controlled oxidation contribute?
Process turns winemaking itself into part of the discovery.
And then there is By Place.
By Place teaches us where wine comes from.
Wine used to take us places
Something fascinating happened to wine over the past few decades.
Before the turn of this century, much of the wine business was implicitly about Place.
We didn't necessarily call it that.
We sold Burgundy. Bordeaux. Barolo. Rioja. Chianti Classico. Mosel. Chablis. Sancerre.
And within those places were other places.
You discovered Burgundy. Then you discovered the Côte de Nuits. Then a village. Then a vineyard.
You discovered Chianti. Then Chianti Classico. Then perhaps Gaiole.
One bottle led naturally to another.
Wine was a map.
Over time, however, the conversation changed.
Grape varieties became easier for consumers to recognize than places. Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc became a universal language. Brands became increasingly important.
There was nothing wrong with that.
Learning wine through grapes is one of the great ways into wine. That's precisely why By Grape is one of our three Drivers.
The problem wasn't that consumers learned to ask for Chardonnay instead of Chablis.
The problem was that too often we stopped giving them the next destination.
Then another powerful movement entered the consumer vocabulary. Wine drinkers became fascinated by how wines were made.
Natural. Orange. Pét-nat. Amphora. Skin-contact. Carbonic.
Process became part of the conversation.
Again, that's a good thing. Understanding how wine is made gives us another way to understand what's in our glass.
But somewhere along the way, we stopped talking nearly as much about where we're going.
That's what we may have lost
The decline in wine consumption has many causes. Economics, demographics, changing health attitudes, competition from other beverages and changing lifestyles all play a role.
It would be far too simple to blame it on one thing.
But perhaps there is another question worth asking:
Did we remove some of the discovery from drinking wine?
If wine becomes primarily another good-tasting beverage, it has to compete as another good-tasting beverage.
There are plenty of those.
Wine has something else.
It can take you somewhere.
A bottle can introduce you to a village you've never visited, a food you've never eaten, a grape you've never heard of, a landscape you've never seen and a history you knew nothing about.
And then it can make you curious about the village next door.
That is a very different form of drinking.
So, have you ever tasted a wine from Gaiole?
Let's go back to our original question.
Suppose the answer is no.
Wonderful.
Now we have somewhere to go.
Gaiole is not simply a word on a wine label.
It's a destination.
Why is Sangiovese grown there? What does the landscape look like? What do people eat there? How does Gaiole differ from other parts of Chianti Classico? What happened there historically? What are its traditions? And what happens to the wines as you move through the surrounding countryside?
Suddenly the bottle isn't the end of the experience.
It's the beginning.
This is what By Place can restore to wine drinking.
Food. Culture. History. Geography. Agriculture.
Destination.
By Place doesn't mean better
This is important.
A wine doesn't become superior simply because it expresses a place.
That would turn the Drivers into another hierarchy—the very thing they are designed not to be.
By Grape. By Process. By Place.
All three are equal.
They simply ask different things of the wine.
With By Grape, the grape leads the experience. We want to discover what Cabernet Sauvignon, Riesling, Verdejo or another variety can give us when it is carefully crafted into wine.
With By Process, we may want the winemaker's decisions to become visible. Skin contact might be central to the wine. Carbonic maceration might define it. An amphora may fundamentally shape its expression.
With By Place, the objective changes.
We want the place to remain legible.
That doesn't mean abandoning the wine in a vineyard and hoping for the best.
Quite the opposite.
By Place can require enormous human interaction: farming, pruning, canopy management, picking, sorting, fermentation decisions and constant attention in the cellar.
As little unnecessary interference as possible. As much human interaction as necessary to produce an excellent wine.
The goal isn't to remove the winemaker.
The goal is to prevent the winemaking from drowning out the place.
But places change
And here's where By Place becomes even more interesting.
Climate changes.
Rainfall changes. Temperatures change. Harvest dates change. Farming changes. What grows successfully in a particular location may eventually change.
Does that mean the place has disappeared?
No.
Place is place. Even if it changed.
A wine from Gaiole doesn't have to reproduce the Gaiole of 1985, 2005 or 2025 forever.
Its job is to express Gaiole now.
In fact, if climate change alters a region and increasingly aggressive winemaking becomes necessary to make its wines taste exactly as they did decades earlier, we should ask what we're actually preserving.
The place?
Or a style associated with the place?
Those aren't necessarily the same thing.
Place is alive.
The destination matters again
Perhaps that's the part of wine we've stopped celebrating enough.
Not terroir as a marketing buzzword.
Not appellations as quality rankings.
Not memorizing maps so we can demonstrate how much we know.
Going somewhere.
By Grape teaches us to enjoy and understand wine through the grape.
By Process teaches us how wine is made.
By Place teaches us where wine comes from.
None is more important than another.
Together, however, they give wine something much larger than a shelf full of bottles.
They give us reasons to keep exploring.
So the next time you're looking for a bottle, don't just ask:
What do I feel like drinking?
Every once in a while, ask something different:
Where do I want to go?
And if you've never tasted a wine from Gaiole?
There's a destination waiting for you.
Part One | Part Two
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