• Sparkling On Site: Four Great Vineyards
Of the world’s great sparkling wines, only a few are based on single vineyards. Leave out Champagne, and single-site sparklers are rarer still. Vintners tend to craft great sparkling wine through blending.

• Pedaling the coast: A Terroir Ride Through Western Sonoma
Earlier this year, 15 California wineries banded together to form an organization called West Sonoma Coast Vintners. The founding roster of Bohème, Chasseur, Failla, Flowers, Fort Ross, Freeman, Freestone, Hawk Hill, Hirsch, Littorai, Patz & Hall, Peay, Ramey, Red Car and Small Vines includes many well-regarded names—not surprisingly, given that over the past ten or 15 years, the Sonoma coast has emerged as the source of some of America’s best pinot noir, chardonnay and syrah.

• One-Half Volcano: Variations on a Theme of Santorini
“When I was young, all of Santorini was a vineyard—the vines reached nearly all the way to the top of the caldera,” says Paris Sigalas. We’re sitting in the tasting room of Sigalas’s winery in Baxedes drinking his Assyrtiko–Athiri, a bright, floral, unusually tame take on Santorini’s signature white. The blend, he finds, “makes the sort of wine you can
drink all day long.”

• The New Vinho Verde with the Old Portuguese Cuisine
One dusk, about 30 years ago, I walked into my first-ever bar in Portugal—in Porto—where I had some insanely delicious fried and sautéed fish at the counter. It was October. The guy poured me a glass of something I’d never experienced before: crackly, nervy, electric, bone-dry, just-made fizz that merrily rolled over my tongue like converted lemon juice, echoing and resonating with the fish like nobody’s business.