Terroir Review

Terroir Review is a publication that explores the connections between nature, culture, food, and the places they come from. It was established by Meg Houston Maker, a celebrated writer known for her work in food, wine, and cultural topics.

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An Afternoon with Francesca Vaira of G.D. Vajra

3 weeks ago | terroirreview.com | Meg Maker

Francesca Vaira fetched me from my hotel in Alba, her infant son, Giuseppe, asleep in the back seat. It was a Sunday afternoon in early February, the sun brilliant after a sodden week that I’d spent in tasting rooms and lecture halls. Sunday is family day in Italy, but Francesca made the time. First she toured me around the Barolo hills, rising into the medieval town itself and stopping next to vineyards to survey the scene: vines upon vines.
A Second-Place Finish in the 2025 World Food Photography Awards

4 weeks ago | terroirreview.com | Meg Maker

Earlier this month, the World Food Photography Award winners were announced, and I was pleased to take Second Place in the category Errazuriz Wine Photographer of the Year – Places. I captured that photo, “Barrel Stencils in Cockburn’s Workshop” (above), during a visit and tour of their port lodge in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal. Like many of their peers, Symington Family Estates, which owns Cockburn’s, maintains in-house wood shops to care for barrel stocks.
The Wine Comes First, and Always

2 months ago | terroirreview.com | Meg Maker

I was collected at the Florence airport by a stocky man in his late fifties. “Parla inglese, signore?” I asked, as he slung my bag into the trunk. He smiled. “No — a leetle.”I apologized for my own meagre Italian. “Il mio italiano è molto semplice.”“Va bene!” he boomed, unconvinced. My accent is better than my vocabulary. Once we’d made our way out of the airport’s labyrinth, I tried to make small talk.
The Wine Comes First

2 months ago | terroirreview.com | Meg Maker

I was collected at the Florence airport by a stocky man in his late fifties. “Parla inglese, signore?” I asked, as he slung my bag into the trunk. He smiled. “No — a leetle.”I apologized for my own meagre Italian. “Il mio italiano è molto semplice.”“Va bene!” he boomed, unconvinced. My accent is better than my vocabulary. Once we’d made our way out of the airport’s labyrinth, I tried to make small talk.
Meg Maker Shortlisted for World Food Photography Awards

2 months ago | terroirreview.com | Meg Maker

I’m thrilled to share that two of my photographs have been shortlisted for the World Food Photography Awards 2025. For fifteen years, I’ve had privileged access to scenes of wine and food making all over Europe and North and South America. I always carry a camera, to document for my own learning and to share with others in articles and online. I’m not principally a photographer, but I try to put my visual and aesthetic training to work when focusing my lens on makers and their spaces.
An Apologia for Terroir in an Era of Tribalism

2 months ago | terroirreview.com | Meg Maker

Terroir writ small is land, geology. Terroir writ large is people, geography. Terroir writ large is about customs, traditions, and what the people of a land can pull forth from it. Food evolves to suit the landscape, the landscape evolves to suit the food. A dialectic. Terroir writ small is concrete (soil, grapes, wine). Terroir writ large is abstract (taste, culture, norms ). Abstractions are unsettling. Terroir is dismissed as elitist, bandied by wine writers to make their work sound important.
An Apologia for Terroir in an Era of Tribalism

Mar 23, 2025 | terroirreview.com | Meg Maker

Terroir writ small is land, geology. Terroir writ large is people, geography. Terroir writ large is about customs, traditions, and what the people of a land can pull forth from it. Food evolves to suit the landscape, the landscape evolves to suit the food. A dialectic. Terroir writ small is concrete (soil, grapes, wine). Terroir writ large is abstract (taste, culture, norms ). Abstractions are unsettling. Terroir is dismissed as elitist, bandied by wine writers to make their work sound important.
The Piedmont Diaries

Mar 16, 2025 | terroirreview.com | Meg Maker

On the plane, Boston > JFK > Milan. My first trip to Piemonte. Not my first trip to Italy. During college I spent a semester in Florence, venturing to Rome, Lazio, Campania, wending my way down to Capo Rizzuto, in Calabria, in a tiny car with friends. Later I visited Veneto, Trentino, Emilia Romagna, Umbria, Marche, Abruzzo, Apulia, Basilicata, Sicily. Not Sardegna, Liguria, Valle d’Aosta, Molise, Lombardia or, to the point at hand, Piemonte. What did I want from this visit?
Corinne Woodland and Nathalie Caumette

Feb 22, 2025 | terroirreview.com | Meg Maker

The territory of Faugères yields an astonishing variety of still red, white, and rosé wines, plus an aged brandy called Fine de Faugères. But the region is best known for its red blends, principally of Grenache, Syrah, Mourvèdre, and Carignan, which earn earthiness and savoriness from the schist terroir. Toward the end of my weeklong tour of Languedoc in June 2024, our large group of journalists gathered with an even larger group of Faugères producers for a grand plein-air picnic for seventy-five.
Charlotte de Béarn

Feb 22, 2025 | terroirreview.com | Meg Maker

The historic estate of Château de Jonquières, in Terrasses du Larzac, has been farmed continuously by the same family for 900 years. Documents held in the archives from the 13th century describe the suitability of its soils for viticulture. It’s likely the oldest continuously producing wine estate in Languedoc. In the 1960s, the family owners pivoted from making wine to selling their fruit to the co-op.