The Culinary Orbit

  In 2019, a small estate in Bordeaux's Graves region released its 2015 vintage at €30,000 a bottle — the most expensive release price in wine history, more than a full case of Pétrus. The estate was barely a decade old, had no classification, and the wine could not even call itself Bordeaux: its label reads, humbly, "Vin de France." The estate is Liber Pater, and its founder, Loïc Pasquet, argues the price is fair for something money can usually not buy at all — a taste of Bordeaux as it was before the phylloxera plague rewrote the vineyards of Europe. Recreating 1855 in a Vineyard Almost every vine in Bordeaux today is grafted onto American rootstock, a survival measure adopted after phylloxera destroyed Europe's vineyards in the late 1800s. Pasquet planted his gravel plot at Podensac the way it would have been planted before the plague: ungrafted vines, on their own roots, at the old density of 20,000 vines per hectare. Stranger still are the grape varieties — n...

  The biggest name in American sparkling wine just popped a bottle with almost nothing in it — alcohol-wise, at least. On October 28, 2026, La Marca announced La Marca Non-Alcoholic Sparkling, the first non-alcoholic product in the brand's history. It is crafted in Italy from carbonated de-alcoholized wine at less than 0.5% ABV, priced at a suggested $18.99, and rolled out nationwide just as the holiday party season begins. Why This Launch Matters La Marca is not a niche label experimenting at the margins. It is America's #1 sparkling wine brand, the light-blue label that anchors supermarket Prosecco shelves from coast to coast, and it has been growing — up 4.5% to about 3.5 million cases in the U.S. last year, according to Impact Databank figures reported by Shanken News Daily. When the category leader decides that an alcohol-free sparkler belongs in the line, it is a statement about where celebration drinking is heading. The brand's own math tells the story: more than...

  Most celebrity drinks are invented by publicists. Tupac's was invented by Tupac. The Thug Passion started as a title and a toast on All Eyez on Me in 1996, built on Alizé and Hennessy — and two decades later it appeared on an actual cocktail menu in New York, mixed the way his own notebook-era ideas suggested, ice and all. The Drink in the Song "Thug Passion" paired two bottles that defined 1990s hip-hop luxury: Alizé, the French passion-fruit cognac liqueur, and Hennessy. The combination was sweet, golden and unapologetically flashy — a drink designed for a toast, not a tasting menu. It became one of the era's signature pours simply because the song put it in everyone's hand. The Drink on the Menu When Powamekka Café — the restaurant Tupac sketched in his notebooks — opened as a pop-up at New York's Sweet Chick in April 2017, the bar program reached into his own ideas. The Thugz Passion served there was a bartender's build on his theme: gin, Alizé,...

  In 1979, Belgian wine merchant Jacques Thienpont bought a single hectare of vines in Pomerol for about a million francs — modest money, for a plot whose only landmark was a lone pine tree. He named the wine after that tree: Le Pin. Within a decade it was being mentioned in the same breath as Pétrus, the most famous wine in Pomerol, and within two it was sometimes outselling it. Today the estate has crept up to just 2.7 hectares, makes roughly 600 to 800 cases a year, and averages around $3,500 a bottle. The Garage Wine Before Garage Wines Le Pin was a "garage wine" before the term existed: a tiny property, no château grandeur, and absolute obsession concentrated into a few barrels. The wine is essentially pure Merlot, grown on gravel and clay a short walk from Pétrus, picked ripe and handled in minute detail. Where the great Médoc estates make tens of thousands of cases, Thienpont made hundreds — and let scarcity do the marketing. 1982 and the Making of a Myth The 1982 ...

  Every wine lover has had the same frustration: a legendary bottle costs a fortune, and no restaurant will open it for a single glass. In St James's, London, a private club was built to delete that frustration. At 67 Pall Mall, more than 1,000 wines are available by the glass — including mature Bordeaux and Burgundy that most people only ever read about. A Bank Turned Into a Temple of Wine The club opened in December 2015 in the former Hambros Bank building on Pall Mall, in the heart of clubland. Its founder, Grant Ashton, was a former banker and wine collector who wanted a place where people like him could drink great wine without the usual restaurant mark-ups. The building's banking bones turned out to be perfect: the old vault in the basement, once used for gold and documents, now stores members' private wine collections at perfect cellar temperature. Membership is the price of entry. This is a private members' club, not a walk-in bar — though the club runs publ...

  If Domaine Leroy is Lalou Bize-Leroy's public empire, Domaine d'Auvenay is her private garden. Hidden in the hills above Auxey-Duresses, the estate covers under four hectares scattered across some of Burgundy's humblest village appellations — plus a sliver of the grand cru Chevalier-Montrachet. From that sliver she makes a white wine in quantities of a few hundred bottles, which now trades for five figures and is spoken of by sommeliers the way birdwatchers speak of a species seen once in a lifetime. A Farm, Not a Brand Lalou bought the Auvenay property with her husband Marcel in the 1980s, long before the wines became mythical. There is no visitor center, no marketing department and effectively no public face. The vineyards are farmed biodynamically and plowed by horse; the cellar work is minimal; the yields are as punishingly low as at Leroy. Much of the production goes to a short list of loyal buyers who have stood by the domaine for decades, which is why bottles so ...

  Musigny is one of Burgundy's most storied grand cru vineyards, and Domaine Leroy owns just 0.27 hectares of it — a few rows of vines above the village of Chambolle-Musigny. In a generous year, that sliver of limestone produces only a few hundred bottles. The market's answer to that arithmetic is brutal: on average price lists, Leroy's Musigny regularly sits at or near the very top of the world's most expensive wines, averaging over $30,000 a bottle, ahead of even Romanée-Conti. The Woman Burgundy Could Not Contain Lalou Bize-Leroy co-owned and co-ran Domaine de la Romanée-Conti from 1974 to 1992, then left after a bitter dispute with her fellow shareholders. Most people would have retired on the legend. Instead she bought vineyards, founded Domaine Leroy in 1988, and set out to prove her way was better. She converted the domaine to biodynamics almost immediately, slashed yields to levels neighbors called insane, and refused fining and filtration. The wines were so ...

  Above the grand cru of Richebourg in Vosne-Romanée sits a single hectare of vines that, after the Second World War, the locals considered worthless. The soil was thin, rocky and cold, and the plot was given over to artichokes and pasture. Henri Jayer disagreed. He spent decades clearing the stones by hand, convinced the site had the same bones as its famous neighbor below — and the wine he made from it, Cros-Parantoux, became one of the most expensive bottles on Earth, routinely selling for five figures despite carrying only a premier cru label. The Winemaker They Called the Godfather Henri Jayer (1922–2006) farmed other people's vines for most of his career, working as a sharecropper for the Méo-Camuzet estate while quietly building a reputation that would outgrow every château in Burgundy. His methods were radical for their time and are now textbook: fully destemmed fruit when neighbors left stems in, a cold soak before fermentation that is still called the Jayer method, no ...

Every artist in this series has a cocktail. Norah Jones has something better documented: a palate. The singer whose Come Away With Me became the defining dinner-party album of its century never developed a signature mixed drink — instead, across interviews with Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast, she has described a genuine, dinner-first love of wine that eventually made her the co-owner of a French winery. This is that story, told from the record. A Palate Built at the Dinner Table "I Developed a Taste for Good Wine" "I'm certainly no wine expert, but over the years I've learned what I like and what tastes good to me," Jones told Wine Spectator. "In my mid-20s, I had managers take me out to dinner and order wines and I had no clue what they were, but I developed a taste for good wine." Decades of European touring sharpened it further, in the food-and-wine cultures of Italy and France. Her stated go-tos are precise: crisp, dry whites — Grüner ...