The stopper is the least glamorous part of a wine bottle and among the most consequential. Its story runs from the bark of a Mediterranean oak to a strip of aluminum, and the argument is still going.

In one of the world's coolest wine countries, the rivers are not scenery. They are the reason the wine exists at all.

A small country holds one of wine's deepest benches, home to the world's oldest regulated vineyard and hundreds of grapes grown nowhere else. Port opened the door, but the whole house rewards a look inside.

A microscopic insect once brought the wine world to the edge of ruin. The way growers answered still lives in the roots of nearly every vine on earth.

Exploring the regional identities that make the Loire one of France’s most varied wine-producing areas.

From its ancient Eurasian origins to vineyards across six continents, Vitis vinifera defines much of what we understand as wine.

For three centuries these were the most valuable and widely traded wines on earth, engineered to cross oceans that destroyed everything else. The category never truly disappeared, and it is quietly finding its way back.

In a remote fold of Catalan mountains, monks planted vines, blight and poverty emptied the valleys, and a handful of outsiders rebuilt one of Europe's great red wines within a single generation. The soil did the rest.

For most of history, the world's greatest wines were sweet, and dry wine was the hard thing to make. The bottle you now take for granted is the product of a quiet revolution in science and taste.