I am embarrassed to admit that I am obsessed with appearances. I spend a dreadful amount of energy wondering how I’m perceived. This is SO shameful, and I should NOT be telling you this!! But I can’t hang up now.

I don’t know when this all started, but I do know that running several popular and public-facing wine businesses in an era when social media exploded and when likes and follows directly correlated with your success and income probably contributed something to this rat’s nest I find myself in.

To be popular and get follows, everyone knows, you have to show up shiny (but not too shiny) and turn every “oops” into a cute, I-can-laugh-at-myself blooper. In other words, you have to get it perfect, and perfect today is defined as the perfect amount of not-quite-perfect, perfectly imperfectly executed to show that you are not actually perfect, but mostly. You follow?

It is so exhausting. What I would pay to see is the part where somebody fabulous low-key fouls it all up and therefore proves that they, too, are only average — and human, vulnerable, subjectively flawed — thereby relieving me from feeling that I am the only one. Maybe this is why tabloids are so popular. We feel the greatest sense of belonging when we’re in the humble company of others looking ugly and messing shit up, too.

On which note: I have a story like that about my dinner last Wednesday night.

I’m a pretty phenomenal cook, if I do say so myself. And I excel at wine pairings! It’s kind of (literally) my job. And what I should be doing is sharing all my home-run recipes and fabulous wine pairings with you — that shit sells, and I have a lot of them! But I am here to offer you something different instead. I am here to tell you that sometimes I make food that even I am disappointed with. And the wine pairing sucks.

It happened Wednesday, with these peach-jam-marinated chicken thighs and a potato salad situation. My hand-written menu (in my trim, bubbly handwriting) said, specifically:

Jammy-mustardy BBQ chicken thighs
Crushed baby potatoes with wilted greens and soft herbs
Baguette and chèvre

I write these terribly cute menus for the week every week, and I post them in my house so my family knows what’s coming without having to ask. Bonus points because when friends come to dinner they see my posted menu and are impressed at how thoughtful and put-together I am! My kid will reference the menu while I’m cooking to decide if they want extra snacks beforehand, and Josiah will glance at it before pulling an appropriate bottle from the cellar. Sometimes he’ll ask, “Any wine requests?” and my answer on a night like this will be, “A rosé! Something juicy to pair with the barbecue.”

Josiah returned with a bottle of Sicilian rosé from COS, which, oddly since we own an Italian restaurant and have been drinking COS wines for 20+ years, I had never seen! Even their own website doesn’t list a rosé on it! Their importer, however, explained that COS Rosa di Lupo is from the Nero d’Avola grape, fermented on its skins in concrete tank, same biodynamic farming and native yeast fermentation and low-to-no sulfur use as is the case across all COS wines. Beautiful.

Oooh, and the wine was yummy! So gulpable! I drank a half-glass quickly while the chicken smoked to perfection. It was magenta-toned in a flamboyant, Lisa Frank kind of way, and really popped visually next to those glossy-charred amber chicken thighs, their saucy juices pooling enticingly in the shallow bowl we plated them in.

But then we sat down.

And now — sniff, swirl, sip, swish… what’s this?? — the wine was emitting a… hmmmm… stealthily funky finish. I did the little cliché tongue movement one does when they’re really trying to figure out what they’re tasting. Wine professionals don’t actually do this miam-miam-miam motion (they’re much smoother, rolling the wine around in their mouth and gently aerating it), but I did it anyway, making a point to call attention to my displeasure.

The wine tasted like a mouse, creeping subtly at first, as it often does, just a whisker poking out from around the corner. Ohhh, nooooo! Mousiness! I always notice it sooner than others — something to do with the unique pH of my saliva interacting with the microbial activity in the wine that could have been avoided with another skosh of sulfur before bottling. Mousiness will get worse the longer the wine sits open, and this bottle was headed there on a highway, with a finish reminiscent of a family-size bag of stale Fritos, so I knew we had to drink fast before all those yummy cranberry-cocktail-at-sea vibes were decimated by this rogue animal rustling up its old shredded cedar bedding.

But the wine wasn’t the only problem. The chicken was off, too. Probably too much mustard for our family’s taste… although honestly the jar’s “best by” date was over two (okay FOUR) years ago. “Mustard doesn’t go bad, right?” I remember thinking as I sniffed its contents, deemed it properly mustardy if slightly separated, then stirred it well and slathered it all over the chicken alongside an extra big spoonful of golden peach jam.

Fully cooked and gorgeously golden, the chicken wasn’t poisonous, but let’s just say we weren’t exactly oohing or ahhing after each bite.

And then there were the potatoes. And the wilted greens with soft herbs. Ugh. Have you ever had a corked baby potato?!?! If you’re in the wine industry, and you buy baby potatoes on the regular, you definitely have. They taste like 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole, the potent compound that causes cork taint and moldy cardboard flavors in a wine. You’ve tasted corked baby carrots, too, but those are common, whereas corked baby potatoes are more of a surprise dinner guest. Uninvited! Something to do with the way they were washed and stored at the store. Woof, Whole Foods. Woof.

Even more disappointing was that I dumped the potatoes, still warm, over my mixed greens and soft herbs to gently wilt them, creating a dish I’d planned would be elegant but turned out foul. To back up for a second: Ninety-eight percent of the time, I am that girl. The one who buys all the beautiful heads of various heirloom lettuces — frilly purple mizuna, crunchy verdant little gems, pink-veined bel fiore radicchio — from the farmer’s market or Hudson Greens, the über chic greengrocer in Napa’s Oxbow market. But this week, I was short on time and cut myself some slack and went to damn Whole Foods and purchased one of those Organic Girl plastic clamshells of pre-washed mixed greens, so I wouldn’t have to wash and painstakingly dry and store my bespoke salad mix like always. This was a bad choice. Turns out, I’ve ruined us!!! We are spoilt children, all three of us. Our entire family immediately noticed the inferior, lightly musty and bland flavor of these lowly commercial greens, and it didn’t help that they were now dismally wilted after their exposure to corked hot potatoes.

Last but not least, my child, apparently as of this week, now dislikes tarragon and chervil — even when grown in our OWN. GARDEN! OF ALL THINGS!

Rude.

When Josiah opted out of the goat cheese and baguette, made PB&Js and dumped the second half of the COS bottle down the drain, I knew we’d lost.

I tend to play the victim well, and my first thought was: This sucks. I suck.

My second thought was: Damn. These are exactly the types of “failures” I wish other people who seem to be all shiny all the time actually shared, because then I wouldn’t feel so bad about myself. Show me the tabloids!

My third thought was: Maybe if I share more of these types of failures with my child and my husband and my readers and don’t let myself get down on myself the way my first thought did, then I will be building up the kind of world I’d like to see, where we can be more human and vulnerable and stop holding ourselves as well as each other to impossible standards. And so: I will share this story. I will share this wine pairing. I will tell you not to try it.

My fourth thought was: I still wish people would use more sulfur so there were no more mousy wines ever.

My fifth thought is: I hope COS doesn’t get mad at me for calling out their wine as mousy. I still love COS, but not the 2025 Rosa di Lupo. Too bad.

And my sixth thought is: I should really throw out that old jar of mustard. Maybe tomorrow.

Have you had a recent train-wreck of a dinner or beverage pairing? Pray tell. Leave me a voicemail message (or put it in the comments). Make me feel better about myself, please and thank you.

I am beside myself, send help.

I have ardently scraped free, and then diligently, obediently, fastidiously re-seasoned this Mother at least three times in the past as many months. Here I will outline my exact process, and then you shall provide insights. Clearly I am doing something wrong!!!!

1. I start with a cold, clean wok. I set it on the burner, crank it up to high (it’s literally called a “POWER BURNER” so the thing rips), wait for the wok to smoke. She’s super hotsy totsy.

2. I add oil (peanut, or canola, or vegetable — I’ve tried them all) and swirl to coat. The oil is shimmering, just like it’s supposed to be!

3. Vegetables stir-fried in oil are fine. The problems arise with proteins and starches. Also sometimes… soy sauce?!

4. I add the protein (or the rice, or the noodles), and I stir like a banshee…

Read more

Because, basically, I don’t really care why you’re calling; I just want to know what you’re having for dinner. I am 98% likely to find your menu immeasurably more interesting than whatever business you intended to discuss with me.

Strangely, in light of how obsessed I am with food and wine pairings, and the fact that I literally started my career as a food writer, I’ve persistently avoided writing about these because, ugh, it’s so cliché. Baby girl hates being a cliché. I don’t even want to be known as a wine writer because THAT is cliché! A wine writer who writes about wine pairings?! Kill me.

Welp.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Happy 2026!

I have officially unofficially and unceremoniously maybe temporarily until forever decided that I am now going to dedicate some of my posts to food (and mood and weather and company and energy of the universe) and wine pairings. Because, even if it is cliché, it’s pretty much all I think about. My family teases me because I’m part of that strange slice of humanity who wakes up thinking about what’s for dinner tonight. At dinner, I think about tomorrow’s breakfast and lunch. At lunch, I lick my forefinger and hold it to the air in front of me to get a gauge of what’s vibing all around me, and then I contemplate what wine matches today’s mood. I pick a wine that makes me salivate just thinking about it, something made in a place I’d like to be right now or whose energy feels aligned, or something crafted by someone who inspires me and whose nudge I could use today. I drink wine because it grounds and connects me to all of this, because it reminds me of my place in the context of our whole broader global community.

Part of the reason I don’t usually like reading about wine and food pairings is that they miss most of this. They focus over-intensely on flavor profiles and structural components that, frankly, stress non-wine-industry readers out. They make them feel like “it won’t be good” and the bottle will be wasted if you don’t have that exact, ideal pairing. There’s enough that’s already plenty intimidating about the way we’ve sold wine for the past fifty years; I don’t need to contribute an ounce more to this. Not to mention, even basic food preparation is intimidating and overwhelming for most of my non-industry friends! One of my besties won’t even cook a steak by herself because… how?!

Most food and wine pairing recommendations lack context around the things I mentioned previously: mood and weather and company and energy of the universe as well as, quite simply, what you like or what you’ve been poured. A few weeks ago some non-wine friends brought over a beautiful and very kind bottle of a certain big, Napa red blend, and I was making us tuna confit over a frisée and citrus salad. Did I open and adore that bottle? You bet your sweet ass I did, because that wine pairs gorgeously with generous gestures and scruffy hospitality, and its powerful tannin structure was a perfect match with the powerful honor it was for me to be in their warm company on an otherwise cold and damp winter night. I opened a fun Kamptal Grüner for us, too, and yeah, it tasted good together; but my own spiritual refreshment and reinvigoration was all thanks to that gift bottle of big red.

So, suffice it to say, I won’t be writing about food and wine pairings in quite those “familiar” ways. I’ll be sharing with you either what I’m eating and drinking tonight and why (basically leaving you my own voicemail) or talking about what I had last night and how it all went.

For the record, last night I made pizza beans, and I paired it with a leftover glass of Istine Chianti Classico. Pizza beans are Royal Corona beans (they’re huge, cooking up to the size of half-dollars that melt like mashed potatoes in your mouth — obsesssssssed) that I simmer with onions, garlic, bay leaf and Aleppo pepper. Then you pour them, juices and all, into a big oven crock (Josiah got me this amazing, legit-French cassoulet dish that makes beans look absolutely regal and which causes me to positively wiggle every time I get to use it). You add crushed tomatoes, lots of fresh oregano, a sprinkle of feta cheese and an overzealous glug of good olive oil, and you bake the whole thing at 400°F for, like, an hour maybe, or until it’s all bubbly and golden and you cannot handle the incredible smell in your house anymore and your child has hangry eyes and is screaming at you I’M STARVING!!! and right as you’ve finally finished putting away the Christmas decorations so now your house looks lonely and depressing but smells the opposite, thank God, you pull the beans out and dig a fat spoon in. You hopefully serve it with some leftover crusty bread you toasted up in the warm oven, plus a green salad made up of the only torn leaves left in your fridge, doused with lemon juice, olive oil, Maldon salt and black pepper.

Istine Chianti is made by Angela Fronti, a gemstone human I once got to meet at a woman winemaker’s lunch. She struck me as proud, confident, yet humble, diplomatic, deeply convicted about organic farming but never haughty, just helpful. Eric Asimov wrote a wonderful story about her and a handful of other fabulous women winemakers and estate-owners in Chianti. Because I was so inspired by Angela at that lunch and because Sangiovese, the main red grape in the area of Chianti, is my FAVORITE RED, I have come over the years to depend on Istine Chianti as a kind of “house wine.” I drink it almost weekly, because its bloody-ish balsamic taste and sticky tannins, wrapped around sour red cherries and just-picked rosemary, is always a little assertive and unapologetic — a characteristic of myself, too, that I remember isn’t for everyone but is who I am, anyway. I love the wine, and it reminds me to love myself, and I need that reminder often, indeed almost weekly (at least).

Plus, those tannins with these pizza beans — yowza! They pull for another bite of creamy beans, they beg for another burst of tomato and salty goat cheese, a sop up of olive oil by this nugget of bread. My mood brightens: a swell of joy that’s surprisingly large, like the size of these Royal Coronas and my gratitude for this humble but everything moment with my family on a quiet night in the middle of winter.

Voicemail Messages is what I’m loosely naming this “column” of Resilient Wine… at least for now. It doesn’t make sense unless you read this first post, but oh well, I like it. And everything is subject to change — here and everywhere, always, anyway. Voicemail Messages is a distinct departure from the rest of my writing on this Substack, which is about resiliency practices for the wine industry (and, ahem, world!) at large. But what I’ve been realizing is that my own resiliency seems to quite closely mirror the notion of resiliency for wine… and the notion of resiliency for the world. And one of the major ways I’ve built back my own resiliency is by really allowing myself to savor and enjoy and indulge in things that bring me a sense of serenity, slowness, joy, grounding, community and connection. Wine is absolutely one of those things (okay, it’s the MAIN thing for me), and the ways I think about wine pairings and what I want to drink to bolster my resiliency on any given day seem to be relevant, here, somehow.

I’m going to put future Voicemail Messages posts behind the paywall because they’re inherently personal but also, mostly, because I spend a lot of time on these posts, and resiliency also means making a living, it turns out. If you liked reading this, or my recent post on Tom Ka soup, or you’re interested in ideas for what to make for dinner and funny instructions on how to make it, or you want to hear about wines paired with a mood to integrate into your own messy, roller-coaster-y, trying-to-figure-it-all-out life, please become a paid subscriber. $8 a month is basically like you bought me a half-glass of wine when we went out to happy hour together. And I’ll make you this deal, too: If you’re a paid subscriber and you drop me a line so we actually can go out to happy hour together, I’ll buy — indeed I’ll buy us a whole bottle to share. And then we can go back to my place for dinner. I’m cooking for you.

Thanks sincerely for reading along and being a part of this.