If you have trouble with the link, message me here. Meanwhile, start lacing up your walking shoes if you’re in the US.

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Spring weather is unpredictable, and so, itching to start hiking, I’ve decided to stay close to my home in Valais until April and explore my mountainside. I’m hiking every marked trail, even the smallest, to get a better understanding of how they hook up. New local treasures, sometimes visual, often new information, are my reward as I track the bisse irrigation systems that water the vineyards during droughts and the underground sources of our local drinking water. This is Fendant and Pinot Noir country par excellence; point A on my map below is just above Cave Germanier’s (Vétroz) Lapon vines, an award-winning Pinot Noir.

If you want wilderness hikes, you’ll have to wait, since we’re expecting more snow this week, but if you’re happy learning more about how we depend on nature, here’s a good March start in the Sierre region. I highly recommend using Switzerland Mobility Plus if you’re doing this kind of walking anywhere in Switzerland.

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I’d previously done several hikes around Venthône, above Sierre, often east along the popular Bisse Neuf (Bénou in patois) over to the vineyards of Salgesch/Salquenen. Last week I branched off west of Venthône to climb above the vineyards, at 800m, through the protected nature area of Maressouey up along the old transhumance paths to the church of St. Maurice de Laques in Mollens, which is a newer version of an important 750-year-old church with surprising stained glass windows by artistAlexandre Cingria.

On a bit higher, for a climb of 320m. I saw almost no one, a very peaceful morning out, a 1.5 hour hike that can be done more quickly if you don’t keep taking photos, as I do. Later that day I followed a slightly different and much steeper path down, to pick up my little electric car at the garage, for a total of 8km on foot.

Note that if you’re interested in hiking these trails, there’s bus service between Sierre train station and Crans-Montana, as well as a funicular (fewer stops). There are plenty of options for walking loops. The vineyards are an easy walk, either mostly flat or follow them as they rise from Sierre, at 450m to 900m in Venthône. From there the wooded walks begin; if you’re ambitious carry on to Aminona or Montana (1400-1500m), keeping in mind that some of the paths are very steep but there are always alternative routes.

An additional tool on my hikes this spring and summer will be my little cloud identifier disk from the Cloud Appreciation Society. I finally joined after receiving their newsletter and daily cloud for years. I’m looking at my thousands of cloud photos (you’ll be seeing more here) with a new eye to understanding them. Hikers all: learning to recognize clouds and what they mean is a smart move. If I can add some bird knowledge (workin’ on it!), I’ll be one happy hiker.

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Do not miss this exhibit! This is the first Cezanne show organized by the Beyeler, although he is one of the most important artists in the museum’s collection. The focus, says the Beyeler, is on the “last and most significant phase” of his painting career, 80 paintings and watercolours, that “bring to life Cezanne’s groundbreaking work as regards form, light and colour.” A note if you’re considering a visit, the museum’s layout and organisation of the show allow you to view the paintings without feeling crowded. It is beautifully curated and the building designed by Renzo Piano, which sits in a park, is a fine contemporary cradle for work like this from earlier periods.

Allow half a day and don’t forget to pause and look out the windows at the nearby vineyards; Basel has limited Swiss wine, but what it has is very good. You can also take advantage of a little workshop area to do some painting yourself - the day I was there it was buzzing with old and young artists picking up tips from the staff.

For a writer, the whites in Cezanne’s paintings in the Basel exhibit are a lesson in what a story should include or leave out, and how the visual arts can guide artists who are working in other forms.

With that in mind, a flash fiction story to whet your art-viewing appetite.

Cezanne’s violinist

Two new pairs of spectacles, one tortoise framed, the other with wire, were delivered by the Swiss post Friday. Saturday he put them away. Sunday he couldn’t find them. Monday he said to hell with it I have the tickets I’m going anyway.

At eleven he stepped into his jacket, the one he wore for this annual cultural visit; it rendered him visible for a change. The Green Basel tram pulled up just as he arrived at the stop; he was pleased that the conductor spotted him.

At noon, standing in an open space at the Beyeler he studied The Gardener Vallier, all versions, last was best. By one he asked (not aloud) why The Bathers were all nude but one, who wore white underpants, same design as his own. By two he was in love with the The Bend in the Road. At two-ten he was still there, trying to see why you knew the road went down, not up. By two-fifteen the road was going up.

He leaned in close. The boys in black didn’t stop him but they drifted nearer. Vertical appley greens brushed, darker greens brushed, greens with blues and blues with - rust. Rust. And white. Closer yet, a shame about the spectacles (and even the old monocle! why had he not thought of that?) left at home. Blue verging on gray - holy smokes, there’s no paint dabbed there, just canvas! No paint?

Easy enough to settle the road question first, just look at it upside down.

No touching the canvas, of course, so he did a handstand and held it. His balance was flawless.

“Sir? Please be upright.” There was a nervous edge to the voice.

Thus spoke the burghers of Basel, he said (not aloud). He inverted himself and the boys in black relaxed. He was grateful they’d noticed him.

By two-thirty he was alone with his secret discovery and happy. He caught the tram to the city centre. He sat immobile, unmoving but not unmoved. Babies strollered in pink, trees grew on brown trunks, doors opened and closed to the rhythm of green and red lights, a cumulus cloud punctuated a blue sky.

Cezanne was a seer! It wasn’t a winding road at all! It was a clown playing a violin, wearing a green tie, and a small human in a red jacket was listening carefully. The song was The Long and Winding Road. Cezanne was a seer!

Carnaval drums throbbed through the streets, reverberating through the green tram. It came to a halt for the parade. Donald Trump and the gods of war marched past, grimacing and larger than life and every few minutes falling down, then a sign about Pride would pop up, and he laughed, aloud, having prepared for Carnaval’s themes this year. A giant clown wearing a long green tie marched past, playing a violin, and a small, empty red jacket marched alongside. He hopped down from the tram and in one stroke he stepped into the red jacket, for he’d left his own at the Beyeler. Every year he left it somewhere and every year it reappeared in the parade. Carnaval had another few hours to go and when it was over he would fade away, as he did each year, had done every year for more than a century now. Every year another artist taught him something new and then he marched in the parade and he saw what the burghers of Basel were mocking, and those were two methods for getting up to snuff about the ways of the world.

Cezanne was a seer! He was a genius at hiding things with his brush strokes, including art from the future. Humans were geniuses at understanding that pride goes before a fall, Donald (he said aloud) - and at understanding great art, Paul!

2026 was worth the visit.

Holy smokes!

Paul Cezanne, when I first met him long ago, impressed but failed to charm me. Impressionists - with whom he painted and in a few instances exhibited - were easier to understand, bright colours and scenes that made sense. Even now, I can slip into his world most easily if I start with a painting like The Gardener, where I spot a hat and feet and a man surrounded by plants and tools. Or The Card Players, with their decks and felt hats. My storyteller’s mind can conjure up tales from these details.

Slowly, over the years and thanks to exhibits like the 2024 Gianadda show, Croisés Cézanne-Renoir, (the Beyeler drops the accent in his name, as the artist himself did) I came to see his bold, strong paintings as a rich source of inspiration.

Writers must read, to learn their craft and stretch their artistic muscle, but they also need to learn to dance on their toes and sing in another register and settle down surrounded by what writer Camilla Grudova calls the furniture of life - for this, we need to learn from the other arts. Some writers turn to music, but many of us go first to the visual arts for prompts. I photograph incessantly for this reason. You don’t need to call yourself an artist to do this. Art, when we pay attention to it, obliges all of us reconsider life, the whole shebang or one shard of it at a time.

Before I move on to the things that are missing - the “un"-”, the negative - that Cezanne experimented with in his later works, here is a reminder from the Beyeler exhibit: he played a significant role as a bridge between the Impressionists and Modernists, especially Cubists. Brush strokes made him famous, revered by other artists like Picasso, who called Cezanne “the father of us all.”

Normally I let myself float away on Cezanne’s colour schemes (those greens and russets and port wine red and oh, the celestial blues that are brought to Earth!). Flowing with the small crowd the second day of the Basel show, I came to La Route Tournante (The Bend in the Road). Had he missed a spot? Unlikely. Where are the daubs of paint, or several, and the famous linear vertical strokes, at this point where the road is white? I don’t recall ever seeing a painting of his like this.

Later, I find an article by Harry Cooper in ArtForum magazine about an important 2000 show in Vienna and at the Kuntshaus in Zurich, “Cézanne - Unfinished, Finished”:

By the time of his death in 1906, the most important color on his palette was bare canvas or (in the watercolors) bare paper, an unmark that made the marks around it shiver into life.

With Cézanne ‘a form exists only by virtue of the neighboring forms,’ R.P. Rivière and J.F. Schnerb noted in 1907. Corollary: A blank can be a form. This demonstration of the equal semiotic rights of unworked, unmarked areas made everything possible in modern art, from Pollock’s use of bare canvas to Cage’s manipulation of silence to perhaps even Duchamp’s readymades.

Cooper goes on to say that while Cezanne’s oeuvre is scattered with unfinished works, “It is difficult to see them as anything other than finished masterworks containing the history of twentieth-century art in embryo.” As the artist became more financially independent, with less pressure to complete and thus sell canvases, the more works we find that are incomplete or that have unpainted areas.

His words, written 26 years ago, found their echo for me this week in a Granta Magazine writers’ workshop I’m taking part in. We read an excerpt, “Stillness”, from American fiction writer and essayist Charles Baxter, from his collection Burning Down the House. The essay focuses on the often overlooked role of silence "and its parent”, stillness, in fiction.

I’m all ears for Baxter’s writing wisdom - I’ve written one-third of a trilogy, an action-packed historic crime novella with a main character who is mute.

We often think of silence as being a blank, a null set, or of all silences being similar, expressing the same thing, the same nothing. We may not actually need John Cage, however, to show us that silence is an intensifier - that it strengthens whatever stands on either side of it. Directed in this way, silence takes on a different emotion, a different colour, for whatever it flows through or flows between.

Peter Stohler wrote for the Kunsthaus Cezanne exhibit in 2000 that

According to the art dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt, these ‘unfinished’ works were considered to be of inferior quality until the post-war period but had already been held in high esteem by Matisse and Picasso. In 2000, the Kunsthaus devoted a wide-ranging exhibition to the question of finishing the work in the case of Cézanne. When is a work intentionally, when accidentally unfinished?

Silence in fiction, unmarked areas in paintings: I turn back to Cezanne in Basel to lean close into his unpainted whiteness, considered inferior when his brushes skipped over part of the canvas, but now considered non-strokes of genius. At the same time, I hear in my head Ben Lerner reading his story “The Polish Rider” for a New Yorker podcast, about an unfinished version of the famous Rembrandt painting, and the comment of one of my fellow workshop writers “about how writing can interact with other art mediums.”

Cooper, in ArtForum, points out that it’s hopeless to try to understand Cezanne’s attitude towards finishing or leaving blank spaces.

The juxtaposition of two late sous-bois pictures (each showing a road bending beneath trees) brings the question home. In Forest Path, 1900–02, a tissue of blanks allows the picture to breathe as if through pores; in Bend in the Forest Road, 1902–06, on the other hand, everything is magisterially sealed.

The sous-bois, or forest underbrush paintings in the Basel show were among my favourites. Comparing them gives us a deeper sense of the artist at work, questioning what he is doing, how well it works, when it is finished, or if there is or should be such a moment. For writers, who struggle to know how much to add, what length is just right for a given story, or where to cut, seeing Cezanne at work is heartening. Writers don’t write into a void: we hope to connect with readers, who must participate in a story. Cezanne showed us the way. From the Beyeler catalog:

The exhibition attempts to show how Cezanne made visible the structures of his pictures, thereby inviting viewers to engage with and participate in his painting process. This is especially true of the works that appear unfinished, in which the artist took the liberty of leaving parts of the canvas unpainted, achieving a new form of harmony. These compositions are characterized by a kind of open-endedness, allowing the engaged viewer to mentally continue and complete them in their imagination.

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A final note, which veers away a bit from the Cezanne show. Given the warlike activities of the past few days, essayist Charles Baxter’s words on Americans and stillness are haunting my thoughts. He’s talking about Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, that all-American masterpiece character, when he refers to “something of a rhapsody, [a] beautiful sentence in his book, and, I think, one of the most beautiful sentences in American literature.

Near the beginning of chapter nineteen of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the sentence is therefore in close proximity to the death, by gunshot, of Huck’s friend Buck Grangerford in chapter eighteen, and the death, also by gunshot, of Boggs, by Colonel Sherburn, in chapter twenty-one.

It is as if Americans typically have their moments of stillness when those moments are framed on both sides by violence. It is a peculiarly American form of Zen enlightenment, when stillness can only justify itself by planting itself amid uproar.

“All kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out,” said Huck.

Twain also wrote The War Prayer, in 1904-05, a satire on American imperialism that bears reading again.

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Forty years ago, in 1985, I met a dirty, noisy, poor city named Beijing. I’d been riding a bike across China for several weeks and was used to dirt and poverty, but with 8 million people packed into the country’s capital, such problems were amplified. Only 6% of the city’s traffic was cars; more than 60% was bicycles, and riding on boulevards where they were 20 deep in each direction took real courage.

I returned to Beijing in September 2025, as I began work on a memoir about that long-ago bike trip. I’d been back several times, but this year the greening of Beijing was startling. Electric vehicles are the norm, and the result is lower pollution—blue skies—and quieter streets. Just as impressive: the 5,000 km of parks and greenbelts (no cars, no scooters) planned for the next 10 years, with more than 1,000 km completed. No place is perfect, but Beijing is setting a standard for what urban good might look like. Urban dwellers, urban planners, take heed.

Beijing’s greenways

Lined with plants, used by citizens, where even water is getting cleaner

Lifestyle (for those who can afford it)

Poverty hasn’t gone away, but shops and restaurants have food in 2025. People have pets and houseplants, none of this part of Beijing life 40 years ago. Tai chi in the park was and remains part of city life, but no one is wearing a Mao cap today.

Architecture

The end of the 20th century brought whimsical and cluttered new architecture to Beijing. Today’s new corporate buildings are sleek, more sophisticated—and surrounded by greenery. Apartment blocks, as everywhere in the world, are mostly boxy and boring, and in Beijing, continually being repaired or renovated, it seems.

And greener it gets

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What was the last novel you read, and when? Did you talk to anyone else about it?

If the answer is a mumbled can’t remember/don’t know/a few years, you are not alone. I want to convince you to change that, mainly by suggesting how. If you don’t want to read why, scroll down to How to pick up a book. My friends who used to read and who no longer do—they admit it when I say another book-loving friend stopped reading a while ago—suggest they might have forgotten the tricks they once knew. Or their eyesight is poorer. Or their concentration weaker. Or: they’ve forgotten how.

The state of the reading crisis

The gloomy news last week that Americans are reading less and less often for pleasure, meaning fiction, made me sit up. Americans aren’t the only growing fiction ignorami (you can also say ignoramuses). We writers, who try to make a living off of tempting you to read stories, clearly are unsettled by information on the

• unhealthy state of much of the publishing industry, particularly non-profits, “Now, publishers are staring down an uncertain future with no federal funding and limited support from the states. It’s possible that cities, philanthropic organizations, and crowdfunding campaigns will step in to fill the void…But it’s unclear how the nonprofit literary arts ecosystem would adapt to the complete elimination of the NEA. “The chaos and confusion of it,” Evans said, “seems part of the point.”

• the loss of ownership of writers’ work through AI abuses

• the uncertain future but also current budgets of public libraries, with American Libraries concluding a tortuous explanation of congressional funding with,

Frankly, almost anything is on the table. Government shutdowns, extreme budget cuts, agency closures, and wide-ranging censorship are all possibilities. ALA is working at breakneck speed to proactively defend libraries and related programs while judiciously calling on our advocates to respond with speed when needed.

• the decline in children’s reading skills

• coupled with book bans in many US states and

• the strangulation of small presses, with the Independent Book Publishers Association noting in a May 2025 report,

The recent moves to terminate NEA literary grants and the proposed elimination of key cultural institutions such as the NEA, NEH, and IMLS present a seismic shift in the publishing ecosystem. For non-traditional publishers and independent authors, these developments aren't abstract policy battles in Washington, D.C.; they are existential threats…a contraction in the broader literary field eventually ripples upward: fewer small presses surviving means fewer new literary talents to acquire, fewer experimental projects to adapt for larger markets, and fewer voices enriching the landscape that sustains book sales and cultural relevance.

• not to mention cultural sluggery (a word I just made up, but ChatGPT says, in a flash of honesty, that AI uses it sometimes when it hasn’t worked out the appropriate real word). The abrupt de-funding by Trump’s government of the National Endowment for the Arts, resulted in an announcement that its famed 60-year-old creative writing fellowships, with 2025 awards due to be announced, are cancelled.

If you’re keen to decide for yourself who is right, free-marketers who believe art can survive without federal funding or NEA backers who argue that without it, the infrastructure that helps give birth to books is gone, here are two remarks.

The NEA is the only organization to fund the literary arts in every U.S. state, and many of its initiatives—such as NEA Big Read, a partnership with Arts Midwest that funds community-focused reading programs—brought books and book events into underserved, often rural areas. If the Trump administration sees through its plans to kill the agency, it would result in the decimation of arts funding at the state level, too, as the NEA underwrites a large number of state arts councils. State arts councils often provide more direct funding to publishers than the NEA itself, and the recent cuts hit those councils just as hard as individual grantees. (Publishers Weekly, 30 May 2025)

or

Unlike a private patron or foundation, the NEA’s grants carry the federal government’s implicit endorsement. That means the government is steering culture. Cowen has argued that “the NEA attempts to create a mini-industrial policy for the arts. But governments have a terrible record for choosing future winners and losers, whether in business or the arts. (Cato libertarian think tank position paper on ending NEA funding)

Cato’s arguments don’t seem particularly well-informed to me, but since they published this in April the Trump administration has opted to invest $8.9 billion in Intel, the chips company. What about the terrible record used to argue against arts funding? With a mere $207 million a year going to the NEA?

Reading fiction is good for you

You can find a host of arguments about why and how reading fiction is good for you, from writers (no surprise there), teachers and even the Harvard Business Review, based on neurocognitive research over the years. Storytelling is as old as humanity and no, it’s not escapism or pure entertainment. It’s one of the main ways we learn. And if you’re thinking, aha, so I can just watch Netflix and movies and TV series, I’m sorry, but you have to read or listen to audiobook fiction to get the full benefits. Fiction vs. non-fiction? Psychology Today in March 2025 reported that

“findings in cognitive neuroscience reveal that when we read fiction, our brains engage in a process strikingly similar to real-life experience. Functional MRI studies show that the same neural circuits activated when we process real-world social interactions, emotions, and problem-solving are also engaged when we read about fictional events. For example, the brain’s mirror neuron system, which plays a key role in empathy, responds to characters’ experiences as if they were our own. This suggests that fiction is not merely make-believe—it is a kind of cognitive simulation that allows us to practice social and emotional skills in a low-risk environment…

…imagination is not merely an indulgence; it is a fundamental cognitive ability that allows us to hypothesize, innovate, and problem-solve. Psychological studies have shown that individuals who regularly engage with fiction exhibit higher levels of empathy and social intelligence compared to those who primarily consume nonfiction. In a world increasingly characterized by division and misunderstanding, these skills are more crucial than ever.

In summary, reading or listening to a novel might add to your empathy, theory of mind, critical thinking, storytelling as crucial to human cooperation, cultural safekeeping, fosters imagination, resilience, emotional intelligence—

A PubMed research roundup is more muted but agrees: there is “ robust evidence for a small-sized positive relationship between reading fiction and cognitive benefits.”

Little kids and teenagers should have stories read to them and be reading them, research shows, but you might be surprised to learn there is currently growing interest in seeing more research into how older adults can benefit from fiction. The International Literacy Association reports that cognitive and well-being benefits were shown in two recent studies:

In relation to connection, older adults reported feelings of connection to fictional characters, settings, story events and authors in addition to feeling more connected to family, friends and others through informal book-talk or participation in reading groups.

How to pick up a book

Let’s go! It’s time to improve yourself through fiction. First, prepare yourself by stepping back into the realm of novels, short stories, novellas, etc.

• Re-read a book that once gave you enormous pleasure. Suggestion: Charlotte’s Web, by EB White. You might enjoy first learning how a spider spins a web, from the UK’s Natural History Museum. Try the audiobook sample, with the author reading the book and prepare to be charmed.

• Go to book events. Coming up in Switzerland this weekend, the much-loved Fête du livre in St Pierre de Clage, Valais. Also, it’s a fun village to explore, surrounded by vineyards and multiple hiking trails. End the day with a very good glass of wine.

• Visit an independent bookstore and support them by buying a book. When you visit another city, find out what the best little book shop in town is; go there.

• Tell someone what you’re reading each week. Make sure if it’s non-fiction that there’s also a fiction book. Here’s what I’m reading this week—what about you? Selected Poems by James Schuyler, Coming up Short by Robert Reich, The Hidden World of the Fox by Adele Brand and Sula by Toni Morrison. Sula is a re-read for me, well worth it.

• Join a book club. Or start one. For people who don’t want to make that social commitment, there are plenty of online book clubs. Find one that suits you. I’ve been toying with joining writer Garth Greenwell’s small online club. Barring that, I might join a short course he is offering online, where a group studies one book in six sessions. Try an online search, ask at the local library and ask at a local bookstore. The Swiss Tourism Office has some information on book clubs in English.

• Rules are bendable; nobody says you have to read the same way you did when you were younger. For years I read only one book at a time. I’ve learned to juggle several books by creating different reading spaces and times. Reich’s memoir is currently my breakfast table reading, Sula in a corner chair is my bedtime story. I try to take a morning coffee break on the veranda with the fox book. Poems are a wakeup treat and they also help keep me from picking up my phone to scroll the news before I’m even out of bed. Maybe for you, taking a weird just-out novel, about two graduate students looking for their professor “who happens to be in hell”, to a bar (Katabasis, RF Kuang) is what you need, or go to the gym with a 10-hour audiobook, Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall.

• Let yourself mark up the book. I was taught to revere books and take good care of them, in part because most of them were borrowed from the library. If you own yours, I hereby give you permission to use yellow highlighter and to scribble notes in the margin. Very satisfying!

• Read a book aloud to someone else. Children are the first choice, as it’s a double whammy, you’re doing yourself a favour and getting someone else started on a good habit for a lifetime. Second choice? old folks. If you know someone whose eyes are not what they once were, suggest you read to them. It doesn’t have to be your 95-year-old parent. Invite someone for tea or coffee or an aperitif and say that for a change you’d like to read aloud for 15 minutes. A short story rather than a novel might be just the thing. Here’s one of my own, with a friend link to make it free to read on Medium. The story is good for anyone over 65. (“My sister stole her first car at age eighty-five. She imagined it would be the last time she would steal one, as she didn’t believe in driving after the age of eighty-eight. The event that triggered the theft was simply stupid from her point of view, although some of the rest of us were incensed for her sake…”)

And most importantly, create at least one reading space in your home. You probably have to share it, some of the time, but declare ownership for your reading moments. It might be the bathtub, or the barstool next to the stove where you cook, a comfy chair or, if you’re prone to snoozing when you read, maybe a straight-backed chair (suggestion: soft cushion for the seat).

Now, back to Charlotte and her web…

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Saturday, early in the morning, I harvested rhubarb from my Alpine garden, marvelling at the deep pink of the stalks, striated with green. Spring comes late at this altitude, and rhubarb is our first taste of it. The harvest was twice what I had planned thanks to the ground being trampled on Thursday by gardeners trimming big trees after our 17 April epic snowfall of one metre in 24 hours. Too much rhubarb means just one thing: pie time.

I feel terribly sorry for anyone who does not love pie and very sorry for anyone who does not bake pies and sorry for anyone who thinks a pie without a homemade crust is really a pie. Because I love and bake and believe in pies, Saturday morning turned into a joyous occasion. I put Bach on in the kitchen, told my adult daughter Tara, who is quite handicapped (which is not an impediment to loving pie) that we were about to bake rhubarb pie. She quickly installed herself on the kitchen floor in anticipation. Every few minutes she needs to be reminded that from the gleam in her mother’s eye to the first bite of warm pie, there is a long waiting period. She watches my every move, and when the pie goes into the oven she watches over it while it bakes.

Sometimes it’s the shortening that triggers memories, or it might be the flour, but this time it was the pastry cutter. You cannot bake a pie without memories flooding the kitchen and your heart. This pastry cutter is a strange tool, all curved wires and a very worn once-green wooden handle. I have two others, modern and black with flat shiny surfaces where they cut. One is squarish with small square holes, the other round with circular ones. One is a potato masher, but I never remember which. In any event I mash with a fork.

One of my sisters gave me that pastry cutter last year, when I visited her in Nebraska. She is downsizing, slowly, as is everyone in their seventies. She remembered my pies. So before I brought it home to Switzerland we made pie crusts and put them in her freezer, to be used for Thanksgiving, and we reminisced about how we had all used that pastry cutter as children, so it must be as old as me.

I have three pastry cutters and an excess of just about everything for the kitchen because my husband Nick, who died in 2020, loved pies as much as he loved stocking a kitchen with tools. He liked to cook but more than that he liked to think about all the things you could cook and he had a kind of male love for mechanical objects. He never baked a pie in his life. He could hardly wait for mine to come out of the oven.

Pies are not necessarily in the genes. My Grandma Lonergan was the family’s famous baker, mainly of pies and a steady stream of fresh bread. The smell of her house was imprinted on me early, and drove my own love of baking. Yet, my mother, who grew up in that house, was a determinedly efficient housewife of the 1930s to 1950s era of big refrigerators and all other appliances, and Betty Crocker. If my mother ever baked a pie, I don’t remember it.

Favourite pie? It depends on the season although pumpkin from garden ones is right up there, and apple if you have perfect just-picked apples and the right spices, or cherry when the tree boughs are kissing the ground with their load of fruit. Then there’s the chocolate cream pie that in 1974 caused my non-cooking boss (her boyfriend was married, so no home-cooked meals called-for), at my first real job, to tell everyone I was a fantastic cook. I panicked in case someone suggested I cook a meal, and I started practicing from The Joy of Cooking.

Later, I lived in Paris where I over-ate individual lemon tarts on the basis that unlike American pies, French tarts don’t have top crusts, so they are nearly diet food. Thirty years later when I thanked my new Swiss neighbour for some help she’d given by taking her a pie, she rolled her eyes at the American excess of a top crust, but she did say later it was good.

So many people, so many pies! I once offered a fresh pie as a prize on the Swiss news website I published. The man who won it was unable to collect it, but we had a mutual acquaintance and when I asked him to give the pie to his friend the winner, he looked at me warily.

“He’s married, you know. Happily married.” Oh dear, the old pie as bait idea, and my explanation did little to convince him that I, too, was happily married and the pie was a prize.

It’s taken a long time to learn to be careful about making pies for men. The first apple pie I made for the first boyfriend prompted him to decide we would get married and I’d leave school and we’d have a passel of Catholic kids right away. I balked: in a fright (I was busy reading Susan Sontag and Betty Friedan and The Joy of Sex) I drank too much beer on a sunny May afternoon on campus and ending up making out for hours (remember those days? We thought they’d never end) as part of an anti-Vietnam college protest. A., the boyfriend, had a creepy roommate who passed by, went home and told poor A., who came by to see for himself. Sure enough there I was rolling on the grass with another guy. Despite his Siciliano blood he walked home quietly and waited for me to break up with him. It took me a week and a great deal of red-faced mumbling, unaware that he’d seen my crime. I saw him again ten years later and hoped he was as relieved as I was that we’d split, for we certainly went in different directions. I remembered his mother’s extraordinary homemade pasta, tomato paste and sausages, I said. He remembered my pie.

In the Swiss kitchen now I change the music, talk to my daughter, try to show her a photo of herself at age 10 where she is waiting for a pie to cool on the veranda. She isn’t interested in screens or pictures of her past, or pies that you can’t put in your mouth right now. Her eyes light up as I cut butter into little cubes.

Pies are first and foremost family affairs, and my mother loved my pies. Her favourite was always lemon meringue. In an unusual effort to please her I would so very carefully use a spatula to get the meringue just right, sealing the edges at the crust. Then I had a binge of making banana cream pies, and one sister loved those. If we are still speaking today, despite our differences over the American leadership, it might be because of those banana cream pies in our background, moments of love shared.

Rhubarb pie: technically, the rhubarb filling comes first because the fruit needs 15 minutes of being married to sugar to let go of its sharp tongue, before it can enter the sociable side of the pie: the crust. We’ve all known couples who are like this. Sugar on its own is too much sweetness, and who needs that, but rhubarb alone is also over the top, with its acidic character. This sounds like an argument in favour of marriage, suggesting that each benefits from and is improved by the other. I believe marriage only rarely does this, creates one better whole from two contrary parts, so no, pie is not an argument for wedded bliss. The history of pies nevertheless may well be tied to women trying to charm or hoodwink men into marrying them.

Rhubarb filling (various sources)

Mix together: 4 cups (about 480 g) of rhubarb stalks (ends trimmed off—cut into 1/2-inch/2.5 cm pieces) with 1.25-1.5 cups of sugar, 4 tablespoons flour and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Let sit for 15 minutes.

Consider this: I have known few men who bake pies from scratch, although James Beard famously loved them. In fact, try as I might, not a single such specimen comes to mind. As for hoodwinking, both men and women do this, but more often by being manipulative and pie is not a discreet enough tool for this.

The absence or presence or profusion of pies, if I think about it in relation to love affairs in my own life, offers a few lessons. I mull them over as I knead the dough. Kneading is akin to meditating, with a sensory edge and the promise of more of that to come.

Pie dough for a two-crust pie

2 cups white flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 2/3 cup chilled shortening (Crisco can’t be beat for this) plus 2 tablespoons chilled butter, 4-6 tablespoons water

The Joy of Cooking (20th century version) is the bible here: Cut half of the shortening into the flour until it’s like cornmeal, then the other half until it’s like small peas. Sprinkle the water, lifting with a fork until you can form two balls of very slightly sticky dough. In my dry climate, I often have to use 6 tablespoons of water.

After the Italian-American bowed out, I spent too much time making out with and no time baking for B., the new beau. We never quite hooked up, since he’d gone in a short time from being geeky with thick glasses and a shaved head (thank his dad for that), to a very sexy long-haired dope-smoking guy with contact lenses who played Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Girls fell over him. The next thing I knew he was marrying the cutest little blond on the block who did his laundry, cooked his meals and generally ensured he felt he couldn’t live without her.

Fast forward nearly 40 years, marriages in disarray. At long last, I baked him a pie. He was happy to eat it, but he was indifferent. “Indifferent” is a word I don’t use lightly here, for the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. “I’m not really a foodie,” he explained. Neither am I. But I do love pie and he didn’t. Sure enough, soon after, we both realized that we’d been leaning on each other in the wake of relationships that had ended, and we were able to shake hands and say farewell while remaining friends. He kindly doesn’t send digital rolling eye emojis if I send a photo of pie.

The art of rolling pie dough

You have to bake about 100 pies before you develop that special feeling that tells you the dough is just right for rolling. I can only encourage you to go for it. Form a ball that is firm enough to stick together and not dry. Using only the palms of your hands, not your fingers, gently flatten the ball into a circle about half the size of the bottom of the pie pan, on a lightly floured surface. Use a good, heavy rolling pin on a lightly floured surface. If you don’t have a heavy one, try using a full litre water bottle, preferably one without grooves. With quick, light movements, roll the dough out from the middle until the circle, now thin, is larger than the rim of the pie pan. It helps at the start to keep adding a sprinkling of flour to the surface so you can spin the dough before each rolling, to make sure it’s not sticking. I use a large, thin cooking spatula/flipper to loosen the dough gently, often sprinkling flour onto the spatula. Gently set the rolling pin down on one edge of the dough and ease the dough over it until the dough is dangling on either side of the rolling pin. Speed is essential here: get that dough into the pie pan now!

At this point in Saturday’s pie process I began to reflect on old friends, how we used to communicate by hand-written letters and we don’t any longer. A couple of years ago I opened a box of old letters, including those from the love of my life when I was in my 20s and early 30s, before I met my husband. Every time I began to feel comfortable and at home in the relationship he dumped me. His new girlfriend (our next door neighbour who left her husband for him) told him she wouldn’t let him “abandon” her, as he had me. He seemed impressed by her assessment of his relationship with me and that word abandoned. When he told me this, we were camping on a mountainside, and he was two-timing her to be with me (life was complicated then). I was too angry to tell him that “abandoned” was my word and description, not hers—she’d picked it up when, under the guise of wanting to be my best friend five years earlier she’d pumped me for information and intimate details about my relationship with him. Call it the One Who Got Away or think of it as lucky me, but here’s the point: I don’t recall ever baking him a pie, in the 10 years I knew him.

It’s rare to bake pies for people who don’t know how to at least appreciate you; maybe some innate pie-baking instinct spares us that error. More than 40 years later he still refuses to speak to me after one of those nasty and embarrassing romantic/friendship blowups.

The lattice top crust

The best top for a rhubarb pie is lattice crust. It leaves room for the rhubarb to breathe while it bakes, the way people need to give each other room to breathe. Now this step gets tricky, at least the first time. I learned it quickly because the year I was seven or eight I received a small weaving loom kit for Christmas, complete with multi-coloured elastic cloth bands. The idea was to make potholders for the kitchen. I was soon spending my meagre allowance of nickels and dimes on more elastic bands, with blue and red particularly popular. That year my mother was never short of potholders and they made a bright display next to the oven.

You do a lattice top with the same potholder weave, alternating strips of over and under. Under and over. I remember early in my pie-baking career thinking that my love life felt like that. I met a man, W., in Paris and I was smitten, the only word for it. He seemed equally smitten. I took him to a small Montmartre restaurant and taught him to eat frog’s legs and we wandered home with arms around each other, misty rain obscuring city lights. When in Paris … when he was in Paris we talked about art and beauty and history and then he went back to America, before I understood that he had a wife in America—

I am now fluting the edge of my rhubarb pie, lattice crust neatly in place, and suddenly realise that I never baked a pie for him. We were too busy trying to be lovers under an inauspicious sky which, inevitably, was a sky that fell in. His wife learned of his deception and threw a fork at him that sent him to the hospital for stitches. Not, I believe, a fork for eating pie. Another marriage that didn’t last, but by then I was gone.

“Served him right,” said a close friend when I recounted the story, years later. She will eat any pie I bake, and it is she, Scottish, who pointed out to me that American pie crust has a pinch of salt that makes it special. He, meanwhile, is good to his second wife.

Baking the pie, cooling it

I nearly forget to dot the crust with butter. I have cannot eat dairy products thanks to a tick bite that sparked an alpha-gal allergy, but I cannot bake a fruit pie without using a tad of butter to make the flour and juice thicken. I resolve to eat just one slice.

Tara is getting impatient, and I slip the pie into the oven.

“Ten minutes at 200, then down to 180 for another 35 minutes,” I tell her. She knows this game. I no longer need to check my little chart for translating fahrenheit to metric, but it took me about 30 years to make the transition.

I resolve to think of pie in relation to women in my life while this one bakes, to avoid the trap of thinking that pies are circles of love we make mainly for men. They’re circular because they have no beginnings and no ends. I don’t remember the first pie I baked and I don’t believe I’ll remember the last one as such. I rather hope it will be key lime meringue. Or maybe pecan. Meanwhile, I bake for my daughter and after 15 minutes of cooling, despite its soupy look, we cut into the pie, that first slice and although she can’t speak, I do believe she’s telling me to make the slice a little larger. So I do.

Normally, pie should cool for an hour. Take the tip of a long knife and place it in the very centre of the pie. Cut deeply and slowly, from the centre to the edge. Lift the knife and repeat—making sure that the slice you’re cutting will be the perfect balance between crust and filling. This is a very personal decision: ignore voices that say “just a little piece for me.”

When my son, who lives in China, came home for the holidays I baked a pie, pecan with a dose of Iowa rye whiskey and molasses. It was eaten far too quickly, not because we kept cutting into it but because we all kept sneaking by to “just tidy the edges”. Pies are notoriously difficult to cut neatly, if they’re home-baked. At bedtime there was one small slice left and I decided that when I came down early to put on the kettle for the family I might make a small cup of tea for me and have pie before breakfast, the height of decadence. But when I pulled the pie pan out of the oven (where we always put “the rest”) in the morning I saw what qualifies as the world’s tiniest slice of pie. I was stumped. Then my son, preparing for an early morning meeting with people in China, crept into the kitchen looking sheepish.

“Oh, you’re up already.”

“Was this you?”

He nodded.

“Why did you leave this tiny, tiny scrap?”

“You always say to be polite and leave the last slice.”

True. He took his coffee and wandered off. My tea was ready. I stared at the pan and remembered my mother telling her four squabbling daughters to be polite and leave the last slice. The implication was that it was for my father and when he actually got the last slice he made a big deal of it—he understood his role. She was the maker and enforcer of rules, but he was to appear to star in that role (it makes me think of the US president now, and his gang of enforcers). She also used to bake and then hide cookies from us because we were not good at following the rules, until she had the brainstorm to hide the cookies in the washing machine. And then she forgot the chocolate chip cookies hiding in there when she washed a load of white clothes.

Should I bake another pie, I wondered, staring at the one pecan wrapped in a hint of crust.

Pies are circles within circles. No beginning and no end. The number of slices is finite of course, but the space between slices is infinite and the more pies you bake, the more love you share. My daughter and I will not finish the rhubarb pie, although despite my promises to myself I have two slices. The rest is taken to the group with whom she lives, for a Saturday afternoon treat. I explain that the American pie pan, ten inches with sloped sides, is precious and irreplaceable in Europe, and I’d like to take it home. Of course, says the man, who washes and dries it for me after carefully sliding the half of a pie onto a large plate for their “quatre-heures”, which all French-speaking schoolchildren know means an afternoon snack to give you the strength to get through the rest of the day.

I’m home, my daughter is with her friends, the pie pan is stowed in a cupboard in the basement, where I won’t be tempted to use it. Pies are nevertheless on my mind again and it’s only Monday, and I’m alone. I cannot bake another pie yet.

Who, I wonder, will need a pie sometime soon.

Shame about that old beau halfway around the world who still can’t speak to me or answer a Christmas letter after four decades—he could use a little sweetness in his life, I’d say. Some logistical issues, of course. But then I remember how my first clue that “we” would never make it was my suggestion in 1975 that we make a bowl of popcorn and he told me he never ate it because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to control himself, and he’d eat too much. Cannot a whiff of excess be part of joy, to be balanced out the next day, I wondered? He was very fit, still is. Does he ever let himself eat pie?

A crumb of honesty is called for here. A tap on my own knuckles: what I’m really doing is saying I won’t take part in my own erasure, the silent treatment by someone who once meant a great deal to me. The New York Times (paywall) recently had an article about how unhealthy for everyone the silent treatment is:

… Some people think the silent treatment is a milder way of dealing with conflict, said Dr. Gail Saltz, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

But it isn’t, she explained. “The silent treatment is a punishment,” she said, “whether you are acknowledging that to yourself or not.”…

…While using the silent treatment may give you a sense of power and control, Dr. Williams said, it’s also draining. It takes work to enforce “this behavior that’s unusual and contrary to norms,” he explained, “so it takes a lot of cognitive effort and a lot of emotional effort.”

It’s possible to move on in life but still remember the past and even keep it alive; where would we be as fiction writers if we didn’t understand that even where the past is someone’s undoing, its traces woven through the present are what can make people stronger.

Where are we as a society if we don’t acknowledge our past and allow it to survive in the present, adapting it with good grace to improve our world? Talking to each other to explore differences, without bullying noise—and also without bullying silence is the starting point. America, are you listening? There is no room for the silent treatment—in this case, political deafness—if you want the country to have a future.

I’m not entirely joking when I say town hall meetings with homemade pie might help.

I think of my mother and her frequent reminders to be humble. Humble pie. Lemon meringue for her, who could be sharp with this daughter who was too wild as a girl. She worried about eating too much bread but she would let herself go for a large slice of good pie. I took her out for a cup of tea and a little lemon tartelette in Paris in the 1980s, then baked her one of my own pies: hands down, mine won her over. We disagreed sharply over religion, but four years later, when I married, the wedding was in a Catholic church out of consideration for her. I got more out of that act of generosity on my part than it cost me to make it.

I think of her mother. Grandma’s apple pies came steaming hot out of a black iron stove with a pipe that ran up through the ceiling, pies that we knew were made just for us, and it reminds me that I carry her middle name, Genevieve, which when I was little seemed exotic. It still carries a special something—lessons in generosity?—for me. How had Irish immigrants given her a French name and who, in that family, taught her to bake pies? I remember my mother telling me stories about growing up in that small town in Iowa, surrounded by large farms owned by German immigrants who worked so hard from sun-up to sun-down that they ate six meals a day, and they had pie, always at least two varieties, for at least two of those meals. Maybe she told us those stories to motivate us to work hard: the reward might be endless pies when we visited Grandma, who was most decidedly not of German stock, but shared a belief in pies with those fellow citizens with whom she disagreed about so many other things.

My thoughts go to my father and his love of gooseberry pies and I run outside to check on the wild gooseberry bush I planted in his honour. Last year was its second year and I had enough gooseberries for one pie. Friends from America visited one summer and C. was so excited by my Iowa recipe gooseberry pie that he had three slices (now, there’s a young guy who’s buff and can afford three). This year, it looks like maybe there will be two pies.

It’s time to check on the blueberry bushes and yes, they are coming along nicely, although I beg them to be more prolific. Next year, they nod.

I add a blueberry pie to a chapter of my just-completed novel, which I am revising:

Edward was baffled by this new Mildred and uncertain if he liked what he saw. She made him nervous. She still prayed, but there was a steely determination to it, and most of her prayers seemed focused on turning the children into suffragists, which he thought was nonsense. One day she told him she didn’t believe in God. She was baking a pie, deftly stripping early blueberries from their stems with a small knife to avoid staining her fingers. The fluted crust sat ready for the filling, next to the chipped green ceramic fruit bowl.

“Then what in heaven’s name are you doing praying!”

Why were pies always at the scene of family crises, he wondered.

My cherry trees come to mind and I rush outside again. Yes! The massive snowfall three weeks ago was so steady and straight-down and soft although wet that the blossoms stayed intact. Now it’s raining gently. Look at those berries!

I put it on my calendar: 10 June, bake a cherry pie. This gives me just enough time to consider who needs a pie the most, besides the baker.

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These are photos from my garden before and after our extraordinary April 17 snowstorm in the Alps in Valais, Switzerland. Spring arrived, the cows were out in the pasture next door, flowers were up—and then we had a surprise record 100cm of snow in 24 hours, more than forecast. Power lines and large tree branches went down under the weight of it, bushes were broken in two. This is Switzerland, so people sensibly stayed home and allowed the snowplows to work: they were out in force all night and day. Remarkably, the snow disappeared within 48 hours as temperatures suddenly rose. (Northern Italy suffered more, with heavy rains leading to swollen rivers, flooding and mudslides.)

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Before the snow

During the snowfall

Broken by the snow

Rising again: resilience

I have scores of new subscribers here as a result—my thanks to all of you for staying with me. Since several people are new to Substack, which is how I publish this newsletter, here is some basic information about how it works and how I use it.

Why I moved to Substack

I moved here to simplify blog publishing, which is why many people moved here; I no longer have to maintain the technical side of my blog or use a separate service like Mail Chimp to send out the newsletter. Many if not most people use Substack more like Facebook, as a forum for discussions, but that isn’t my goal, nor do I want to create a community so much as I want to provide you with an information service and a place that brightens your day with new ideas and takes you down new paths. I welcome “likes”, comments and discussions because they help me know what you enjoy and find interesting.

I send out this newsletter by email a couple of times a month, not more because I think we’re all overwhelmed by emails. Anyone with the Substack app receives it there as well. I’ve just started using Substack Chat to share just photos with captions twice a week, to replace my popular (1000+ followers) Instagram photo feed.

You have three options if you want to read things on Substack (without necessarily posting things yourself): you can be a follower, a free subscriber or a paid subscriber. Please read the explanations and then follow the instructions to make sure you’re receiving all of—and only!—what you want.

Three levels for reading

• follower: I won’t see your email and you will see only my Notes (I rarely post these) and not my photo Chats or the newsletter. What you see from me arrives only in your Substack feed, with notes from anyone you follow. This works for certain types of Substacks, for example if you’re following a political commentator who publishes daily Notes. If you want to read my work, I don’t recommend this. Please subscribe.

• subscriber: anyone can subscribe for free to receive a writer’s “posts” by email. These are then also visible on the Substack app. If that writer uses Chat, as I do, subscribers also have access to the Chat “threads”, but they are sent by email only if you elect to be notified. I publish under the name of Ellen’s Wine World where I have four types of posts, Ellen’s World newsletter which I send by email, Ellen’s World long reads only some of which I send by email and Ellen’s World wine hiking only some of which I send by email. When I don’t send them by email I include a link in the next newsletter. The fourth post: the archives from my old blog, slowly being transferred here and never sent by email.

• paid subscriber: I very rarely offer an incentive in the form of material not available to others, so paid subscribers are being rewarded only with my appreciation at this point. And it is greatly appreciated—like many other writers on Substack, I put my (wine and journalism) expertise to work here and I spend time producing this material, without earning a cent from it other than paid subscriptions. In the good old days, which were always an illusion, everyone made noise about how online publicity is good for marketing one’s work. Nonsense. If you read this regularly and you feel you can afford it, please do contribute, as it helps defray my work costs, and there are some. That said, I, too, am solicited over and over, and we all have to choose what to support; I’m happy to have free subscribers.

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Instructions for getting what you want

The key here is managing “notifications” for each subscription—if you subscribe to five writers, you need to go to your settings for each one and select only the posts you want to receive.

To do this, first find your subscriptions. Go to your home page on substack.com by selecting the top left icon, an orange and white bookmark. On the home page, select the orange ball at the bottom left of the screen. This gives you a menu; select “settings”. In settings scroll down to “subscriptions” and this will give you a list of all your subscriptions. For Ellen’s Wine World, you should see the four posts (Ellen’s World newsletter, Ellen’s World long reads, Ellen’s World wine hiking, archives from my old blog) and the Chat thread. Select the ones you want to receive by email/on the app. You can change these at any time. Do the same for all of your subscriptions. For me, if you want to see only photos, select only the Chat threads. Just the newsletter? Select only that one. Here’s my corresponding home page with the top menu showing these.

A sample for another writer

Here’s what my Notifications look like for Aimee Liu, an author and writing teacher I subscribe to—she’s an excellent helper to writers. Note that all are for posts except the last one, which is for her Chat threads. Compare this to the menu on her home page.

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Notes and chats, my move away from social media

Substack isn’t always intuitive, I find, and it took me a while to learn that “Notes” are discussions open to anyone who goes to Substack, while a “Chat” is a closed group discussion or in my case, set of photos posted, available only to subscribers. You might not care one way or the other!

What have I done to move away from what I consider too-toxic social media? I rarely used Facebook in recent years, so I won’t miss it, won’t try to replace it. If I wanted to, I would use BlueSky for that, but I would have to encourage my friends to join me there. Notes on Substack work like FB for many people. Instagram? Flashes, a very new beta part of BlueSky (bsky.social.com), is not bad, but it’s still too limited, thus my choice of sharing photos with subscribers on Substack. I’ll occasionally also put these in Substack Notes, open to the world. WhatsApp: I’ve just moved to Signal and I’m very happy with it, more secure and less junky, and it’s easy to invite friends. In a few cases it won’t work—some friends say it is too small in their country, others that they are happy just with phone texting, and why not. Check them out.

If I were still a small business, as I once was, I’d simply set up a simply Substack blog, bring over old blog subscribers if there is a blog or web site, and invite social media followers to a happier place.

X? Forget it. I do wish politicians would invest more time in good governance and less in social blather on X and similar places. I guess I won’t be running for office any time soon.

Can I really have started posting photos on Instagram in 2012? Less than two years after it came online I became a fan. I’m a writer who initially trained as a photojournalist and while my world is now centred around words, I believe that images remain a crucial pathway to understanding the world. My goal with Instagram has always been to amuse and entertain but mostly to offer food for thought through photos and to see similar work by others.

Here’s one of my Instagram latest posts, a video of the newly hatched tadpoles in my garden pond 31 March. More than 3,500 views; I guess people would rather dream about frogs than read about the president who turns into a toad. I added Kermit the Frog singing “Tadpole”—remember that delightful and optimistic tune?—which I can’t do here. Check it out and smile. For a long time I thought people speaking French were calling them pétards, little firecrackers, which was cute and funny. But it turns out I was mishearing them and they are têtards, oops. Bodiless heads! For those of you who are not keen on frogs, these are small mountain ones who make low quiet sounds and eat all the insects I don’t want in my garden.

Sadly, as Meta makes a corporatized mess of what was once a good photo-sharing platform, there is no way to archive this work once you leave the Meta-world. Nor is there any good way for me to directly contact the 1000-plus followers I have to let them know where to find me now that I am getting off Instagram, What’s App and Facebook because these have lost whatever soul we brought to them. Our mere presence there or use of these platforms puts money in Trump’s coffers via the millions Meta is paying him: $25 million to settle the court case brought by the Wannabe President in 2021 (Reuters report, 25 January 2025)

Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts were suspended after his supporters launched an assault on the U.S. Capitol following a speech by him repeating false claims that his election defeat was the result of widespread fraud.

Out of the settlement amount, $22 million will go towards a fund for Trump's presidential library, and the rest to legal fees and other plaintiffs in the case.

The payout has made no difference to Zuckerberg’s chances of stopping the 2020 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuit against Meta; the court case opens tomorrow, 14 April. Personally, I hope the FTC wins, even though the case was initially brought by Trump as part of his getting-even campaign. Too many people say they can’t get off of these platforms because there is nothing comparable out there. Let’s give potential competitors a fighting chance.

So, what are the alternatives?

I spent a month testing BlueSky and Flashes as Facebook and Instagram alternatives. If you love Facebook or X/Twitter (I don’t and won’t miss FB; I could never stomach Twitter and Musk’s X is worse), you might like BlueSky, which is growing rapidly—but you’ll have to encourage your pals to join you there. Flashes, BlueSky’s answer to Instagram is in Beta and I hope they succeed. For now it’s good, simple, but a bit too limited. I’ll probably add photos there now and again to encourage them.

WhatsApp: Signal is a far better option, if you can get your addicted friends to move, which is a tough call in Europe. My family is happy to make the move. If I’m part of your WhatsApp world, you can find me here or on email. I’m seriously considering using only Europe-based Cloud services because of concerns about increasingly insecure data in the US.

I won’t be posting images on Instagram anymore: I’m pausing my account this week—you won’t see me and I won’t see you after Wednesday (for a last peek). What was once a place to share photos has become an advertising and marketing platform with a few nice photos from friends thrown in for stickiness (thank you for the latter, Dear Algorithm). I’m not deleting the account for now, trying to be optimistic that Meta will be forced to dump Instagram and a more honourable and sympathetic owner will show up. But I’m not holding my breath.

I’ll post 3-4 photos at a time on Substack Chats, which are visible only to subscribers (free and paying) to Ellen’s World. You can opt to be notified about these here, or at least I think you can! I’m new to this, so let me know if there’s a problem, please. In the interest of not bombarding your mailbox, I’ll be posting photos no more than twice a week. Please feel free to opt out of the notifications knowing that you can simply visit Ellen’s World Chat whenever you like, for a day brightener.

I was planning to share a handful of favourite memories from Instagram in Substack Notes, which are open to everyone and not just subscribers, but the work-around is too time-consuming. I thought to add them to this post, but you know what? Adding a screenshot from there causes an error message here. Not allowed. Poof! Bye-bye shared memories.

So here are random favourites from that year, when social media still held such promise, or when we were still naive. These are plucked off my computer:

Chateau de Châlon visit, extraordinary old wines; Gerald Besse winery glass of cool white sitting on local granite—an image that made it into my book Vineglorious! Switzerland’s Wondrous World of Wines (2014); a new 2012 stamp that might have been meant for today’s world; my parents on their wedding day in 1936, found in a box of old photos in 2012. They would never have believed a fortune-teller who described the world of 2025 to them.

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My first Chat photos, to give you an idea.

Thinking to cheer myself up by seeing what happened on March 13 in recent history besides the one thing I’m reading too much about in the news today (hint: a pandemic), I am taken aback to discover that it’s not been one of the best dates for getting up in the morning. As a result, I’m finally comfortable enough to add my memories of Friday the 13th, 2020 and its fallout, to the history books.

But first, in history: what a day.

• 1634, first meeting of the Academie Francaise in Paris, which makes it nearly 400 years that someone has been telling the French how to speak; no wonder they find it hard to tolerate foreign bunglers

• 1677, Massachussetts gets title to Maine for $6,000

• 1881, Czar Alexander II is murdered in Russia, after several botched attempts

• 1933, the discovery of Pluto is announced and in 1942 Uranus is discovered on the 13th, too (a new planet today, anyone?)

• 1935, Britain begins driving tests

• 1938, the Anschluss: Austria is annexed by Nazi Germany

• 1996, Dunblane, Scotland school shooting (16 children and 1 adult died) results in Britain banning handguns

• 2012, A fiery bus crash inside a tunnel in Sierre, Switzerland (down the road from me) kills 22 children returning home to Belgium from a ski week, and 6 adults. The cause was never clearly determined.

• 2013, Francis became the first non-European pope in 1,250 years (Argentina)

• 2027, Maine gets title to Canada for $66,666 (reader alert, this could be fake news).

You get the idea. What you’re about to read is not a saga of ghastly past moments or Covid and all the awfulness it brought us; it’s about choosing life in whatever form it’s handed to you and making something of it. It’s about fear and bravery. It’s also about wind and teeth and flying on empty and ashes on mountaintops and it ends with a request for you to please think about my daughter, who has no speech and who will be given a general anesthesia tomorrow — but I get ahead of myself (skip to the end if you’re in a hurry). I’m afraid Covid does sneak in here.

Wind

Should the Rhone valley in the Swiss Alps, where I live, suddenly let loose the roaring wind we call the foehn, tomorrow or at any time, shingles will rattle and shutters will try to bang. Nerves will fray. Here, on the balcony sit my wind ducks, ready to do their job — cheerful blue, yellow, red — they wait for the next great gust that will make us run to attach all vulnerable parts of this larchwood alpine chalet that is happier hugging clouds and wispy breezes on calmer days. The Spanish call them wind ducks. They look like apostrophes to me, but then I am a writer.

I bought five of the ducks in Leroy Merlin in Malaga, Spain, some years ago, cheap bright rubber things to be wedged at the bottoms of doors or in between doors and frames or in the middle of shutters’ clasps. They held inner and outer doors in place in La Cala, in a small apartment we owned that opened onto balconies facing east and west. When the wind wasn’t blowing and the cold air of December cleared the Alboran Sea, you could settle your eyes on Morocco, otherwise invisible. La Cala is a place where the air always moves, but then occasionally the calm sunny demeanour of southern Spain mysteriously gives way to airborne violence.

Wind doesn’t speak a language, although it makes sound, noises, even music, and these have significance. It’s a force, it moves, it heats us up or cools us down, it creates chaos, creates memories, it stirs up dust that ruins your lungs and makes you swear if you wear contact lenses.

I could say the same about my daughter Tara, autistic, non-verbal but rarely silent. She was named for the hill of peace in Ireland, an irony when she was hyperactively young, a name that fits somewhat better now.

Wind sweeps, like an oversized broom, across seascapes and landscapes. Wind ducks are designed mainly to hold doors in place, and work when any of these winds blow:

Think of Spain’s Costa ventosa, renamed Costa del sol when dictator Franco decided in a marketing moment that “sunny” would bring in more tourists. The wind didn’t die down. Visitors just weren’t forewarned and were encouraged to buy sun lotion while pharmacies nevertheless stocked up on soothing eyedrops. Consider Southern France, where the mistral blows cold and hard and stirs up disturbing moanings. The bise, an icy wind in western Switzerland, sends people to cafés to share a glass of wine. The foehn, in eastern Switzerland and in my home of Valais, is a sandpapery dry and wild wind that bears the German name for hairdryer. When it blows I wear glasses, even indoors. It’s treasured by winemakers, for it blows away damp and the fungal diseases that taunt grapes. The foehn dries the grapes, thus allowing Noble rot, better than it sounds, to develop. This demands a kind of fungal multitasking that well-tended grapes master in order to become world-class sweet wines that can age well for decades.

Wind can carry fear. The first wind that made me afraid was a regular visitor to my childhood in Iowa, tornadoes. I tell you, it’s true: they can flatten a house, and doors and windows and walls and roof tiles, and certainly wind ducks don’t have a fighting chance. I once sang in a school choir competition with my best friend on Friday and on Saturday the church we’d sung in was decapitated. The roof was scooped up and deposited in a field, shredded. So while I’m grateful that wind ducks help me escape slamming doors and keep me calm when the wind rises in Switzerland, I remain in fearful awe of tornadoes, where the only solution is to live in a house with a basement, run to it when the world blows silent and the air goes green and the wind is suspended — and close your eyes when the wind suddenly roars and turns everything upside down and inside out.

The tornado, singular, is one of the antagonists in the novel I am completing this month: Windsongs.

Teeth

When Tara was small she fell in love with stackable plastic ducks in blue, red and yellow. She must always have something in her mouth, even now, and when young that included these ducks. Thirty years ago we had nine of them; three were thrown over a waterfall, but miraculously, today we still have three. They are a shambles, chipped and discolored from too much love. She could not be without them when she was little, but three years ago something happened and she grew up, at age 30, and she no longer needs ducks. If she wants to tell someone she likes them, or express thanks, she finds the ducks and in a gesture fit for a world leader (Donald, are you listening?), she gently and respectfully and firmly holds out her ducks. A peace offering of sorts.

I think of her as my personal (and much loved) tornado. Wind ducks don’t work with her, either, when she is raging. I fear that tomorrow we will have a Tara tornado, and we have no basement, no place to escape to. Tara at age 33 still has all her baby teeth. She may or may not have cavities or broken teeth or root canal trouble. No one has been able to look in her mouth since she was five, when a sly dentist got a quick glimpse. Her mouth is her personal property and she protects it with force. For 30 years she more or less brushed her teeth and enjoyed stealing other people’s toothbrushes, then one day she stopped.

Tomorrow she will fast until 10:00, enough to upset her, then she will be taken in a wheelchair, wearing a mask, as she goes to the hospital — three words that will provoke much anxiety and possibly panic. She will be given a general anesthesia, eyes filled with fear, while I stand next to the dental surgeon and anesthetist, all of us in surgical masks, and calm her with soothing words about how everything will be all right, followed by a song, Frère Jacques. I’ll ask the doctors if they would like to sing along. At some point, when she stops fighting unwanted sleep they will take a good long look at her mouth, the place where she samples and tests what life offers her and decides if she will let it in or not.

Flying on empty

Five years ago, on Friday the 13th of March, I flew to Chicago to research my novel, Windsongs. I laughed at the date, and its promise of bad luck. I took along masks, nevertheless, for there were rumors of Covid getting worse again, rapidly. I was in the charming little town of Batavia, Illinois for one day when the bank closed, the restaurants closed, and then the library and the supermarkets.

I barely made it home to Switzerland as border after border shut down over the next 48 hours and plane after plane was canceled. It took two days and reservations on eight flights, to Oslo, Rome, Istanbul, Cairo, even Moscow, each one a more absurd flight plan, then each one canceled, falling like a house of cards. In the end I flew on a nearly empty Aer Lingus flight to Shannon in western Ireland, a place where I once lived and that I love, but there would be no leaving the plane. The only other passengers were two young men of dark skin and unclear origin who were turned away at the border — but there were no planes to fly them back. Did they live at the airport for months? I’ll never know. The airport had a deadly calm about it, no restaurants or shops open, no means of getting food or water for several hours, vending machines a thing of the future, the handful of people keeping as much distance as possible from others. Suddenly there was a flight to Zurich for four of us and a ghostly empty train through the Alps and I was home. My husband insisted we avoid being in the same room at the same time, for weeks. Once he relented, we remained at far ends of the dining room table.

Tara was given a mask and told she couldn’t come home nor could she have visitors. It was four months before she saw us, and by then she was desperate. She dislikes screens — phones, computers, ipads — and burst into tears when we appeared on them, our only means of contact. The technology confused her, and we gave up on the calls because she went straight to the front door of the group home she shares with 7 others and refused to leave it for hours, sitting on the floor, hoping we were on the other side and someone would find a key.

Ashes on mountains

Seven months later, my husband, her father, was able to go to Spain. He died in an accident, nothing to do with Covid, and was repatriated just in time, before the borders closed yet again. Tara’s brother flew home briefly, then back to China, where he lives, just as it closed its border, and where he became stranded for two years. The man across the street died of a brain tumor, and his aunt two doors down died of loneliness, grief and old age. Her niece and husband, another two doors down, also died, he from Covid, she of unknown causes. No one had a funeral, a memorial service, or even visitors to the family. I learned of most of these deaths only two or three years later. Our bank in Spain froze our account unexpectedly when my husband died. The Spanish authorities refused to accept a Swiss court’s decision, in place for years, that I Tara’s mother am her guardian, and inheritance plans, so carefully put in place, unraveled.

My novel in the making, Windsongs, became covered in digital dust. I couldn’t remember who any of the characters were, except the tornado.

We had no way to have a funeral service of any sort. There was nowhere to hold a service, no mourners. We had no means of taking ashes up to the mountain top. When we finally did, three years later, I’d just had surgery to repair my thumb and wore a cast on one arm, creeping over the icy mountaintop trying to use one walking stick for balance. Skiers zoomed around us as my son tried to discreetly tuck the urn inside his ski jacket, checking the wind to make sure the ashes would not blow onto the ski slopes. He’s a mountain specialist in the Swiss Army, so to everyone’s relief, the ashes went where they were meant to go.

Death was complicated, as was life. Our house remained standing, but it was not entirely intact.

Tara could not bear to wear a mask, still often required, for more than two minutes, until the day when she simply could not bear to wear a mask. She needs her mouth to be free. This is where and how she lets life in. She insisted on coffee at 6:00 in the morning in mid-winter, on the snowy veranda.

And then to everyone’s surprise Tara began to grow up, all at once, at age 30. She looked at cell phones, just enough for fleeting glances of photos of her father, her brother’s new baby, and me, between weekends at home. She, who like many autistic people, had never liked hugs began to hug and hold hands and kiss. She developed new skills, like undressing herself to get in the bath, a favorite activity, and bravely walking around in deep swimming pools on her own, laughing. She went from handing a mug to someone when she wanted a cup of coffee to pulling out the mug, the instant coffee, the milk, and lining them up on a counter, with a look of pride and expectation. She is still capable of doing this at 6:00 in the morning, on a winter’s day, and going out to the veranda in below freezing weather to wait for that cup of coffee. She’s finally taught herself to open the door to the veranda. Better yet, to close it when asked.

Covid destroyed so much, but in the wake of the damage, there has been some good. The messiness of Spanish bureaucracy is sorted out, and financial worries have become smaller wrinkles. Tara is smiling again, although something seems to be bothering her at times and we suspect it might be dental problems. Some of her baby teeth are tiny, ground down by the years. Her brother the entrepreneur travels the world and his family is healthy. Windsongs will be finished by the end of March. I’ve made it through the winter despite having Covid and ocular shingles at the same time and fretting over turning into a blob because I couldn’t stand the cold or sunshine for three shingles months. I write about wine and hiking, and could have neither.

My mood is again upbeat, although it’s taken some work to reach this point. I’m aware others often don’t see the work involved, the fears that never entirely dissipate, the loneliness of any widow or single parent of a very handicapped child. Recently a friend told me I “sparkle”; when I wonder how I’ll hold it all together I remember this and try to hold up that mirror. It helps to have someone see me as positive. When others ask, in admiration, how I do it, I wonder, too, and then I look at Tara, and I ask her the same question, knowing I’ll see, rather than hear, her wordless answer. I tell her she’s beautiful and she smiles.

Tomorrow at the hospital will, I hope, give us only a small tornado. After the surgeons look at her mouth, she may or may not be able to put things in her mouth, depending on what they find. She’ll wake up expecting at the least to put her hand in her mouth or better yet, a favorite old Raggedy Ann doll or best of all, food and a cup of coffee. She will not be happy, nor calm if she has to wait. But she’ll wait, she knows how to wait now, because she’s decided she’s keen to let life in, no matter what shape it takes.

Please wish her well, please wish her a mouthful of happiness.

First published on Medium

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A love story for everyone who would like a little love and warmth this week. Here’s the link to get you past the paywall on Medium.

Spiralling

Ellen’s World newsletter will come out again in the next couple of days. I am finally back at work after three long months of illness, an unpleasant case of shingles, not gone but now at least under control. Please get vaccinated if you’re over 60! And thank you for your patience and understanding.

Ellen’s World long read

The world of wines is scrambling to find solutions to the impact of climate change, from a greater emphasis on white wines in famously red Rioja to a £12 million annual investment in research in Bordeaux. “The future of wine”, the title of an experts panel presentation linked to a book and exhibit by the Valais Vine and Wine Museum, seems like a massive subject to tackle. But I came away from a recent presentation with a clearer idea of where we’re headed.

Highlights from the talks

The case of Bordeaux

Nicolas Vivas, oenology professor at the University of Bordeaux, makes a reassuring confirmation that Bordeaux intends to keep the identity it has forged over the past couple of centuries. But major constraints have to be addressed. The growing season has become shorter and shorter, with harvests about 20 days earlier than 30 years ago. The harvest time and temperatures at various points in the growing cycle have a major impact on quality. Alcohol levels have become markedly higher, which reduces the quality of very fine wines. As a result, says Vivas, “our goal over the next 30 years will be to slow down today’s climate constraints. In the coming years we need to manage freshness and acidity” in the face of the changes. For an overview of what Bordeaux is doing, Great Wine Capitals, “Climate change in Bordeaux”.

It’s about the grapes

José Vouillamoz, Swiss ampelographer and grape genetician, points out that “before the 1960s there was little diversity within grape varieties—new clones can help us adapt.” Among grapes that have long been with us, Pinot (first recorded mention: 1375) has 1,000 clones, Garnacha (first mention: 1513) 500 and Sangiovese (first mention: 1600) 113 clones. Rèze in Switzerland was first mentioned in 1313 and Cabernet Franc in France in 1534. We are now likely to look to past environmental successes to develop clones, both crossings and hybrids. The 2022 Merlot in Bordeaux, for example, was not the disaster that everyone expected, given wildfires and capricious weather. “In the future we’ll be looking more at the genetic memory of vines”, after observing how well some of our oldest grape varieties are able to adapt to crises. Some of these old grapes went through an earlier ice age and we’re able to learn from them about survival tactics. Vouillamoz points to Cornelin and Touriega as two examples of interesting older grapes where we have documented details from centuries earlier.

Also interesting options for decades coming up, with lower alcohol, good acidity and fruit, colour, among reds: Refosk in Slovenia, Refosco in Italy, with le Souza in Portugal comparable to these. Papazkarasi in Turkey and Xinomavro in Greece relatively comparable to Nebbiolo. For whites: Rèze in Switzerland and Lafnetscha in Switzerland and Italy, Cramposie in Romania and Assyrtiko in Greece.

There is hope: fewer than 10 grades today account for 80% of planted vineyards—and yet we have records for some 10,000 grape varieties, so today’s vineyards and winemaking models are taking advantage of a mere 1% of grape varieties. Vivas notes that in 30 years, Bordeaux’s grapes won’t look like today’s.

Winemakers must learn to manage risk

Climate change is not new but managing the short-term speeded up impact will be a challenge. Vivas says that vigneron education now must put the accent on learning how to manage risk. “And with grands vins, there is a greater risk.”

What do we want to drink, how often?

Drinking habits are clearly changing, and it’s not just an overall drop in wine consumption. Benoît Bach, oenology professor at Switzerland’s Changins HES-SO (University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland), notes that studies show 50% of Swiss women now do not drink alcohol at all, with research and studies published by AddictionSuisse showing a drop in all age groups, men and women, as health concerns about alcohol kick in.

Bach believes this will continue, which means there is a market for zero alcohol wines. Marc Vicari from canton Vaud’s de-alcoholization centre La Vigneronne reminds us that “Wine is not a ‘na

tural’ product—in the sense that it’s a product made using a technique designed to stop a natural process.” Grapes left to continue developing after ripening, following nature’s laws, simply rot. There’s a future for zero percent wines, but we’re in the early days of getting these right, of developing the de-alcoholization process to create products people can love. Fear of using technology to tamper with wine is unfounded, Vicari reminds us: champagne is the most technical wine in the world, versus natural.

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So where does that leave natural wines in our future? Bach believes that these wines are a niche and that they will remain with us. “There are clients, but it’s a market that’s not really growing.” Vouillamoz adds that we’re at a point where it would be helpful for consumers to learn to differentiate between a good and a bad natural wine, because “natural wine” is still linked to a kind of environmental missionary zeal that overlooks quality, for some people. Changes in labeling could well help, with QR codes being used increasing by wineries to share more information about how the wine is made, what’s in it.

The audience voted for what it would like to see in future wines. Fresh, local, organic were the most popular words from the options offered, all of which were on the table of wines sampled at the end of the museum’s presentation.

Note if your email cuts this: read the article in full on ellenwallace.substack.com

Forget canonised wines - this holiday, be seduced by a wine you like

Before the holidays, consider your wines. I don’t mean: start your shopping list. I mean: think about What you might drink and Why and in particular How. Ask if you can give one wine more time than usual. Consider forgetting that you want to impress others or yourself with that very special very expensive very old vintage bottle lurking in a dark corner. Give yourself the gift of knowing wine as art.

Tip: Opt for moderation instead of trendy abstinence or its extreme opposite, high-intensity drinking.

The What, at my house

At my house in the Swiss Alps on Christmas Eve we will open a bottle of 2018 Vin de Constance from winery Klein Constantia in South Africa. This is a sweet wine, not late harvest, that has been famous for centuries (Jane Austen and Napoleon liked it), but that’s not why we are drinking it. My husband and I tasted and were enchanted by earlier vintages while visiting his family in SA for Christmas 2019—his last, as it turned out. He died in an accident in December 2020, when all the world was worried about dying from Covid. We will raise a glass to Nick (maybe rereading our tribute to him) and to his happiness the day he first tasted Vin de Constance.

This will not be a sad toast. Nick and I visited wild Pearly Beach, then cozy Hermanus on the coast, before going to Klein Constantia (Cape Town) for a tour of the vineyards. My notebook was filled with questions and my mind laboured to memorize the answers as we grabbed the sides of the bouncing open jeep that December day. It was followed by a tasting session in the cozy cellar of this remarkable winery founded in 1685 (better for note-taking). From there we went to his nephew’s home in Stellenbosch and enjoyed the antics of children on Christmas Eve, then stood out in the garden after a braai (barbecue) on a cool summer night, for it’s the southern hemisphere. Nick sang along to Paul Simon, Diamonds on the Soles of Her Feet. No one objected that he was a bit off key.

A passing family of nine paused to carol for us, a capella Christmas songs with exquisite African harmonies. An ancient grandpa carried the deepest, richest notes, causing me to shiver at the sheer beauty of it, and I drew my shawl closer. At the end, as someone handed out warm cookies all around, he came up to me, as the oldest “A Ma”, took my hands in his and bowed. Nick’s smile, for family and his beloved Africa, was peace itself.

Vin de Constance will not be venerated or canonized for its cost or fame or history this 24 December, despite its reputation (Jamie Goode’s report on his 2018 visit helps you understand this part). While these wines can last decades, we’re having a wine that was bottled just three years ago. It will be fully appreciated because I plan to give it time and pay attention to the wine itself. I’ll look for the emotional message it sends.

The emotion I’m talking about runs deeper than my family story. Wine that is art shares a universal message. This wine is aged in new French oak and some acacia for three years, so I bought the 2018 after Nick’s death, in Switzerland, with a future family event in mind.

Klein Constantia—the tools, the skills, the art

From the first sip I’ll be looking for a thread from the growers and winemakers who, that year, took grapes into the cellar, 21 different batches of them harvested between January and April for varied acidity then sugar levels.

They began with a basic recipe, some thoughts on the “textbook” cold weather vintage and an idea—just as a painter has a sketch and palette and tubes of oil. And then creativity and self-questioning will have set in, as they blended while the juices fermented, then again as the wine matured. It’s a process I, as a fiction writer, recognize. We research, we have notes, outlines, we write and rewrite, then edit until it is just right. The result is the expression of a need to share a message through a medium. It’s the same artistic process whether the end result is a painting or novel, orchestral score or a wine.

I could rewrite Macbeth, changing a character here and a quote there. You and I could take those same Klein Constantia Muscat de Frontignon grapes, and make a wine following the technical specs, if we were skilled. We would not come up with the equivalents, just as that Mona Lisa poster in the Louvre gift shop will never pass for the real thing. We would be making copies that were pleasant but without feeling; all art can be copied and will give this result.

We will let the Vin de Constance 2018 wine do what art does, transmit the feelings of the artists who made it.

Does art have to be the work of one creative soul, rarely the case with wine? Of course not. Think of films that are more than money-grabbing movies. Think of operas, of Renaissance ceilings and commissioned triptyches such as Giotto’s 13th century Stefaneschi and, most likely, much of Shakespeare’s work.

If wine is art, what exactly is art

Can we truly call wine art, or is this an exaggeration, the kind of marketing inflation that is a trendy sales tool in the wine business?

Leo Tolstoy was a Russian writer famous for his fiction, but he also wrote essays, one of which has become a classic over the past 125 years. In What is Art? he writes, “whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings …

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God … but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity …

… We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theatres, concerts, and exhibitions, together with buildings, statues, poems, novels … all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human life is filled with works of art of every kind—from cradlesong, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings, but only that part which we for some reason select from it and to which we attach special importance.

“A means of union” (my emphasis above). When scientific studies measure the harm that alcohol can cause, including of course wine, I remind myself that, at its best, wine also does immeasurable good because it brings people together and not just because it is a lubricant. The trick is balance. I keep this in mind when the talk of abstinence grows too loud, just as I remember the cries of abomination and immorality that are raised when new and unfamiliar types of art appear.

In April I visited the Quai d’Orsay in Paris for a major exhibition on the history of Impressionism. Paintings that shocked and horrified the world when they appeared are now glorified, to the point where the show was too packed to be able to view most paintings and as many people had their backs to the art in order to take selfies than had their faces turned to the paintings to study them. Children on tricycles were herded through by parents photographing their children receiving an early cultural education. If this is what art does, maybe we should consider abstinence?

Finding the art in art

Start with a painting …

Some weeks ago the New York Times published a series on how to focus, as a challenge, Can you spend 10 minutes with one painting? It caught my eye because I’d been reading a collection of essays, Art Objects, by Jeanette Winterson, where she challenges us to spend one hour looking at a painting. Her 1992 book had made me wonder if I could do just that, in a public space, since I don’t have any Masterpieces hanging on my walls. Why would you bother, I hear you mutter. An hour? Winterson, before trying this, compared all art to a foreign city one has been dropped into “and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar”. I would argue the same can be said of wine, all wine. You can memorize the guidebooks and read the fine print on the labels, but do you know it?

After spending an hour with a painting she wrote:

What has changed is my way of seeing. I am learning how to look at pictures. What has changed is my capacity of feeling. Art opens the heart.

Art takes time. To spend an hour looking at a painting is difficult. The public gallery experience is one that encourages art at a trot… [there is] the thick curtain of irrelevancies … Is the painting famous? Yes! … Is the painting Authority? … Who painted it? What do we know about his/her sexual practices …Where is the tea-room/toilet/gift shop.

In August the New York Times published comments from many of the 7,000-plus readers who had tried the 10-minute focus experiment. Increasing discomfort. Increasing distraction. Increasing invention (“I can make up stories about the characters on the canvas much as art-historians like to identify the people in Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.”). Increasing irritation. This is the list NY Times readers provided after their 10-minute viewings. What was striking about the comments is that they were all about the viewer as much as what was viewed. In fairness, the newspaper had asked them how they felt.

By then, I’d read Winterson’s comments on what we would find if we viewed a painting for an hour. The 10-minute views remarks added weight to Winterson’s:

Admire me is the sub-text of so much of our looking; the demand put on art that it should reflect the reality of the viewer. The true painting, in its stubborn independence, cannot do this, except coincidentally …

We are an odd people: We make it as difficult as possible for our artists to work honestly while they are alive; either we refuse them money or we ruin them with money; either we flatter them with unhelpful praise or wound them with unhelpful blame, and when they are too old, or too dead, or too beyond dispute to hinder any more, we canonize them, so that what was wild is tamed, what was objecting, becomes Authority. Canonizing pictures is one way of killing them. When the sense of familiarity becomes too great, history, popularity, association, all crowd in between the viewer and the picture and block it out. Not only pictures suffer like this, all the arts suffer like this.

How to kill art, including wine

“All the arts.” Read this again and replace paintings with wine. A recent article on Swiss wine by a writer who helicoptered in, as journalists call this, mentions Gantenbein, Donatsch and Chappaz wines up front, to give the author Authority and the reader that aha! moment of recognition of wines labelled iconic. The article isn’t about these wines, it’s just situating the reader among Swiss wines that have been canonized to create a framework for anything new to the reader. In the process, something is flattened, lost—what’s new will be compared to bucket lists, the 500 wines I have to drink before I die.

Once someone who is considered to be an Authority declares a wine, especially of a particular vintage, to be a great wine (and thousands of bottles are sold around the world and vintages are examined closely and compared so that the wine now has a History and becomes rare) the price climbs and the proud buyers/now owners boast of their ability to cellar it. And yet, that very fine wine was once a new idea, a creative venture, a work of art.

“The calling of the artist, in any medium, is to make it new”, writes Winterson, noting the new work doesn’t repudiate the past but rather reclaims it. As with a Picasso or Cezanne or Hodler, a good wine always has precursors, vines that were tended in a certain way that was once new and that is now accepted, grapes that were handled in a revolutionary manner that is now copied widely. In fairness to the three Swiss producers just named, all continue to produce beautiful wines, carefully studying the terroir and the vintage each year. Marie-Thérèse Chappaz (Authority, in the form of Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, gave a Petite Arvine sweet wine of hers 100 points in 2023), in particular, has little patience with being called iconic and she pours her energy into routinely re-inventing and re-creating wines. This is indeed art.

It’s not necessarily easy to distinguish art versus a simply pleasing bottle of wine. Winemakers encourage us, rightly, to stop worrying about whether or not we know or understand a wine and to just let it please us. Their goal is to demystify the wine, to get us to relax and to have faith in our own taste. This is a good start, but we can take it further.

The same principles apply to paintings. I’ve gone to galleries and museums over the years and while I abhor bucket lists, especially for viewing art, I’ve often come away saying I loved it, I loved it not, I loved it—and so on through the entire show, quickly and without much thought. I would tell you I know little about art. But Winterson’s own experience convinced me to try spending an hour with one painting to see what I come away with, to understand why this particular piece of art has touched me.

Give it time

Art takes time, says Winterson. I allowed myself an October afternoon at the Gianadda Foundation in Martigny, Switzerland, for its show, Regards Croisés Cézanne Renoir, which closed 19 November. I thought I might need an hour just to find a painting I could look at for an hour, and I was right. The painting that caught my eye, that I returned to, was one of the last ones. I’d been considering an intriguing Cézanne, Le rocher rouge (the red rock), but my interest in it felt intellectual, a desire to dismantle the style and process.

Taking my cue from Winterson, I was looking for something that didn’t just please me—several of the paintings qualified there, for I like both of these artists—but something that made me pause, that made me feel … what? I didn’t know.

Just in case I didn’t last, I had a nice hike in the vineyards above Martigny as my reserve activity.

It turned out the hour was not difficult and it was memorable. Two details are worth noting because this works only if the conditions are right—something I’ll keep in mind for that Christmas Eve South African wine. The Gianadda is a favourite place of mine for viewing art because the crowds tend to be small and they are art-lovers who linger and discuss. I chose a day and time when there would be few people. It was easy to look without interruption. Most people, seeing me, stepped back so they wouldn’t block the painting. Secondly, next time I will take a lightweight folding stool. It hadn’t occurred to me that there are no chairs in front of paintings here. A kind employee, when I asked if I could borrow a chair from the auditorium, insisted on bringing it for me.

When I compare this experience with the Quai d’Orsay Impressionist show, I think of what it would be like to drink a rare 1950 Bordeaux at Harry’s Bar in Paris, while being jostled by men shouting orders for cocktails and women with too much perfume reaching across me for their retro ballons of Beaujolais Nouveau.

The painting I chose, Auguste Renoir’s Femme au chapeau de paille (Woman in a straw hat), was not the most famous or eye-catching. It was small, just 35x27cm. It took me a while to realize what had given me pause. I love hats and thought at first it was the broad-brimmed hat with its large and loose flowers, a classic for the period, 1915. But there were other hats, his wife in the garden in one (1905) and another from 1915-1919 that was larger and more luxurious. Then I decided maybe it was the colours, tones of pink and rose and russet and peach, all favourites of mine since the days when I was a red-headed child who was told I looked good in those colours.

But then I remembered Winterson’s negative comment about “the demand put on art that it should reflect the reality of the viewer”, so I stopped thinking or trying to understand why it appealed to me and I simply looked at it, without rules about how to do so except to stay focused. It dawned on me: this is the rare Renoir where we don’t see the face, remarkable for an artist known for his portraiture. It’s a closeup and yet the eyes are hidden. What, then, was I looking at? I walked up close and studied the paint strokes. I stepped back and the structure, the balance became more apparent. I sat down again and went adrift.

And finally I saw it. For several minutes more, I sat and felt tears rise and recede, as unformed phantom memories of my own came and went. There is one line, one stroke in particular, that is the essence of what moved me. The young woman’s mouth is barely open, the way we are when our breathing is shallow and we are distressed. But it is the jaw, the taut angle at which it is held, that speaks of grief. A death? A lover lost? An employer who chastised her? It doesn’t matter—the chagrin is seized, suspended, that fleeting moment of pure hurt, when deep sorrow catches us unaware. The beauty of his ability to capture that private yet universal drama made the clock disappear and I was startled as I handed back my chair to see that I had sat there for more than an hour, letting the painting lead me where it would. I can’t tell you what I thought about; I don’t know.

It was after I left the Gianadda that I read about the painting and I was not at all surprised to learn that 1915 was a very difficult year for the artist. His second son was critically injured in the war, his wife died, and he moved out to the garden to paint, fast and hard and with brush strokes that were forceful, at times almost violent. Grief is violent. The true artist, says Winterson, is after the problem, the false one after the solution. For Renoir, I’d wager the problem was how to express the purity of sheer unhinging loss.

… finish with a wine

Coming back to 2018 and Vin de Constance, I don’t know what the winemakers were seeking, only that it goes beyond terroir or weather that year or technology. These are winemaker’s tools, used with skills that have been honed. There is something else that they will not have identified until the wine was made. I can read this official description, and it is like the colours and hat of my Renoir, offering hints and only hints about something greater:

Bright and yellow gold in colour. The nose is layered with complex flavours of Seville marmalade, ginger spice and grapefruit. A rich and luxurious mouthfeel, the wine is full-bodied, fresh and vibrant. The palate is balanced showcasing a perfect harmony between salinity, acidity, spice and sweetness. Concentrated with suspended density, it concludes with a pithy astringency and a lingering finish.

The Why and the How of my wine

I chose this wine because I remembered that it was distinctively different from other South African wines or from late harvest sweet wines, at which Switzerland excels. That each vintage I tasted had something that made me fall in love a bit, blindly. Wine is a form of art that begs us to use all of our senses.

How we will drink it: this wine is art, I am sure of it, and I want to understand why. We will put a small child to bed and then the rest of us will take a glass to sip, quietly, each in a comfortable corner, no cell phones or work or music, just a few minutes alone with the wine and silence in the hope of coming to the table to share one small thing about it. It might be a memory, such as a sea breeze or a childhood reading of 1001 Nights imagining Sheherazade’s jewels or a desire, to see the glory of the sun abruptly streak across a mountain peak. Maybe a vaguely sensuous longing to touch velvet or listen to Beethoven’s Fifth.

We’ll see what feelings reach us.

In any case, there will be some left to share, over conversation and dessert.

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To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Vineglorious! Switzerland’s Wondrous World of Wines, I’m offering the book for CHF10 (standard price: CHF24) plus shipping, until 31 December 2024, or as long as supplies last. Tip: It makes a great holiday gift and if you would like me to sign it, just add a note to your order, with the name of the person.

For details and sample pages, see ellen-books.com but please note that to benefit from the special offer price with updated shipping costs, buy directly here:

• to Switzerland, 2 working days, CHF20, buy now or use QR code

  

• to Europe including Britain, 4-10 working days, CHF35, buy now or use QR code

  

• rest of world, 14 days, CHF43, buy now or use QR code

  

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The best little background book on Swiss wines

I published the book in 2014 to fill a void, providing an introduction to Swiss wines for two groups: English-speakers in Switzerland, surrounded by vineyards but who were new to wine and wanted to know more, and those who knew about wine elsewhere but little about the gem that is Switzerland as a wine-producing country. Since then, the internet and social media have grown, and far more information is available today, in English, but it’s fragmented. The book, which does not review specific wines or wineries, is still current (I’ll include a note with a couple of updates) and provides a good starting point to learn about Swiss wine. I’ve had plenty of love letters for the book from among the 3,000 people who’ve bought it. The size is designed specially to fit easily inside briefcases, suitcases, backpacks and the weight is just 500 grams, with travellers in mind.

In 2014, when I tried to interest publishers, I was told that a book in English on Swiss wines would never sell, a “niche within a niche”. I decided to cash in some of my pension savings to self-publish it. Happily, they were wrong! I’d like to thank those of you who have already bought the book as well as Swiss Wine Promotion and regional groups including Geneve Terroir, Vins Vaudois and Vins du Valais, who have used the book to help promote these wines internationally.

I will not be re-publishing Vineglorious! when my stock is sold out. I still judge wines, am a member of two Swiss AOC commissions, am an invited professional member of Mémoire des Vins Suisses (and the International Circle of Wine Writers). I continue to write about Swiss wine and to promote my book Wine Hiking Switzerland, published by Helvetiq in 2022. But my professional work is now centred around writing fiction, with the exception of this newsletter. Who knows, maybe you’ll find some Swiss vignerons in my novels and stories—I’ll let you know here, when that happens!

There are so many wine tasting events going on in the next few days, around Switzerland, that it seems only fair to add to the ones listed in the 27 October newsletter. If you’re aware of others and feel you can vouch for the quality, please add a comment here, with a link or details.

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Gout & Terroir, Bulle, Fribourg, 30 October-3 November, a lively Switzerland-wide food and drinks fair that features the best of many, many local products, with the emphasis on artisanal agricultural products.

Weinfestival Basle, Basel city, 26 October-3 November, large wine fair featuring international and Swiss wines, master classes (register in advance). This year, highlighted: “Nebbiolo, merlot, Pinot und Bruno”

La Syrah au fil du Rhône, St Maurice, Valais, 1-2 November, the place to get up to speed on the excellent quality of upper Rhone Valley Syrahs. The wines have all won gold medals in either a national or international competition, so quality is guaranteed and you can focus on finding your newest Syrah love: “23 vignerons ont été sélectionnés cette année, 1 vaudois, 1 genevois, 4 Français, 1 italien et 16 valaisans!”

Brisolée season is in full swing in canton Valais, with all the magic of tasting wines and smelling roasting chestnuts, which are the main course for a meal where you can also expect dried meats, cheeses and more. There are several locations for this in Valais, all of them near good hiking trails or walks among the vines. Château de Villa in Sierre and its excellent wine bar offer this until 8 November. Consider a hike from Muraz up through the vines, any route, and downhill to the chateau. For the more ambitious, follow the trail done in September by the Marché des cépages. Another of my favourite spots is Fully, where you can hike from Branson up to the Combe d’Enfer and end up at the chestnut forest before going to one of the many restaurants that offer a brisolée. Another great place: Plan Cerisier above Martigny, where you can hike in the vines and end up at the restaurant with a view of the length of the upper Rhone.

Soil to Soul Days, Zurich, 31 October-4 November, with natural wine as part of the focus on sustainable soils and healthy foods.

Arvinis, 8-11 November, Palexpo in Geneva, always a good collection of Swiss and international wines to taste, with 50 stands this year, workshops.

Vini in Villa, 29 November-1 December, Villa Ciani, Lugano, 30 Ticino wineries.

Bonus—two events that are not about wine: Chocolotissimo in Neuchatel has a theme of sport and chocolate this year (there is a Saturday wine and chocolate workshop), and a free class offered by TCS about children’s car seats (did you know that as of September 2024 only certified seats can be used? or that you should remove your child’s winter jacket in the car for the seatbelt to work correctly?), Cossonay Ville, Vaud, 13 November, advance registration.

Natural wines over the past year have gone from trendy among the few to mainstream, just as organic wines did, not so long ago—while biodynamic wines are still inching their way into wine drinker awareness on a larger scale. Wild or indigenous yeasts creep into descriptions, questions about eggs used for fining in a world of growing allergy numbers. For oldtime drinkers and newbies alike, there’s a whole new vocabulary to understand.

The selling points, albeit up for discussion, of these wines: better for the environment, better for us. But how, and what exactly are all these, and how do Swiss wine labels help us make sense of them?

Swiss Wine Promotion is a good place to start. It offers a free online course, in several languages including English, to learn about Swiss wines. You opt for one of three levels of expertise, then register and follow the educational modules in order. in April 2024 the course added a module about certification and more for these relatively “new” types of wines. Note that Switzerland is close to the European Union, but stricter for some certification and labelling. Calling these wines “new” is a bit of a misnomer because people made organic wines for millennia around the world, before the growth of commercial agriculture in the 19^th century and the arrival of synthetic chemicals in the mid-20th century.

It’s nice to have an idea of what’s gone into making your wine, especially if you care about quality. Based on the Swiss Wine Course (and with permission), here is a rundown of certification for Swiss wine. It might at first seem like there is an excessive number of these, and they can be confusing for English speakers, but there is sense to the system. Switzerland is small, but in agricultural terms it is complex because the landscape is so varied. Some wineries are part of mixed farming domains, small families must make a living from just a few hectares while others are cooperatives or owned by companies. The focus of all these groups is to encourage vignerons to create quality artisanal wines and to help wine-lovers find them, a blessing for those of us who live here, for this is not a land of recipe mass consumer wines.

Santé, to your very good health!

Working definitions for Switzerland

Organic wine: careful attention to natural processes, encouraging useful insects, using no synthetic pesticides or chemical fertilizers. In the cellar, only a few natural additives are allowed.

Biodynamic wine: a philosophical approach that follows nature’s rhythms:  “[it] strengthens the soil, plants, animals and people. As well as using organic production and promoting ecological diversity in the vineyard, biodynamic producers energize the life of the soil and strengthen the vines with biodynamic preparations. The cellar only offers very few possible corrective measures.” Source, Swiss Wine

Natural wine: wine from certified organic or biodynamic grapes that are pressed and fermented (indigenous yeast only) with absolutely no intrants – no additives, no filtering, no sulphur

Wild yeast, also called indigenous and sometimes natural yeast, found in the vineyard and on grapes, enters the winery on the grapes. Source, Wine Folly

For the international context, the OIV (International Vine and Wine Organization) has statistics, definitions and regulations for organic wines worldwide (pdf).

Swiss certified organic wines

A national organic certification system was set up in 1997 with the creation of the “Swiss Organic Ordinance”. Any wine that carries “bio” (organic) on its label must be certified through this system. Soil health is a key part of this, “The fertility and biological activity of the soil shall be maintained and, if possible, increased.”

Four bodies, private companies, are accredited to carry out certification. They check that wineries (and other agricultural producers) are compliant with the federal ordinance and they often offer their services to other countries: bio.inspecta AG, Bio Test Agro AG, Ecocert Swiss AG and ProCert AG. They are required to carry out at least one inspection a year and spot checks as well as obtain and test samples. The federal agriculture office oversees the certification companies. How well this is done in any country depends on oversight, and Switzerland’s reputation for this is relatively good, according to my own anecdotal conversations with people in the business.

This is not the same, please note, as the social audits that are the target of a New York Times article 30 July 2024; it points to the worrisome shortcomings of “social audits”, which American and European companies use to ensure they are respecting bans on labour and environmental abuses.

Some agricultural products, including wine, may be organic even though the label does not state this. Certification isn’t required if these are for consumption only in Switzerland, so don’t assume the producer is being dishonest in calling a wine “organic” when the label doesn’t show it. The certification process can be costly and small producers in particular may not feel it’s worth the effort and expense. On the other hand, certified organic wines definitely meet a strict set of standards, a consumer guarantee that “organic” isn’t being used simply as a marketing ploy.

You will sometimes see that a winery is listed as “in conversion” to organic. Federal regulations require farmers to follow organic production regulations for two years before they can apply for certification. Occasionally, if difficult circumstances require it, they can ask to take five years.

Organic farmers often prefer to use the term “reconversion”, to underscore that soil started out healthy and was weakened by conventional farming methods, while organic farming aims to restore its vitality. This point is particularly important to biodynamic producers (see Biodynamic, below).

International agreements on wines labelled organic

Swiss government certification is closely aligned with European standards for organic wines. Europe had a mix of standards and in some cases dubious implementation until a new European Union system went into effect in 2012. Switzerland was one of the first countries to be part of this European organic Wine carta initiative (EoWc)

Since then, an international system to harmonize standards and allow countries to recognize organic wines from other countries has been under continual development. The new regulations have improved the consistency and quality of these wines. It’s complex and subject to international agriculture and trade agreements and thus to frequent revisions. A Swiss wine certified as organic cannot simply be imported into the US with a Swiss label, for example.

Switzerland follows the European Union’s lists that recognize “third countries” bodies which oversee certification and labelling. For the US the list is long because each state has several bodies. Other countries may be partially recognized until the EU is confident that the level of their standards meets that of European countries.

Federal certification plus Swiss private organic labels

In addition to an official Swiss federal system, two highly respected private groups approve organic labels with their own very strict standards that go beyond federal law: Bio Suisse and Demeter. The first covers organic wines and the second biodynamic wines.

Bio Suisse was created in 1981, well in advance of a national legal requirement. Its label, which shows an organic bud (Bourgeon), is well known throughout Switzerland. More than 540 wineries use this label.

Swiss Wine Promotion notes that:

This label goes beyond international provisions and the Federal Ordinance on Organic Farming. The entire estate must be organically farmed. In order to promote biodiversity, 7% of the estate's land must be pasture, dry stone walls, hedges or trees. So that the vine is protected from diseases and pests, Bourgeon winegrowers pay particular attention to natural processes favouring the populations of useful insects. As they do not use synthetic pesticides or chemical fertilizers, soils retain all their character and fertility. In the cellars, winegrowers are entitled to three times less additives or treatments than their European organic counterparts. For winemaking, only a few natural additives are expressly allowed.

Demeter, an international federation with a Swiss branch, is celebrating its centennial in 2024. Biodynamic wines are the result of an intense relationship with the soil:

“Living wines need living soils. The soil is the “treasure chest” of every Demeter biodynamic vineyard, explaining why biodynamic winegrowers are particularly careful with it. They make sure that the humus layer of the soil grows continuously so that their vineyard can withstand both droughts and heavy rainfall, allowing a variety of micro-organisms to settle in it. All this contributes to the expression of terroir and aroma in wine.”

Diversity in the vineyard, biodynamic preparations and working with sun and moon rhythms are part of the toolkit of these winemakers.

A third label, Ladybug

IP-Suisse stands for integrated production, established by a small group in 1989. Today some 20,000 Swiss farmers, including wine grape growers, adhere to its standards and use the Ladybug logo. The programme has two objectives: to reduce the use of phytosanitary (chemical) products and promote biodiversity, mainly through more green cover, and more surface area where biodiversity is a priority. It came about as the result of a proposal from WWF.

Beyond certification: charters, regional labels

Vinatura (details in French), like IP, is focused on sustainable farming, but it has a precise task. The Swiss Federal Office of Agriculture mandated the Federation for the Development of Sustainable Viticulture (now called Vitiswiss) to create guidelines to obtain “proof of ecological performance”, known as PEP. The label indicates to consumers that these wines are made following economic, social and environmental principles of sustainable development. These are laid out in a charter with eight points to which growers must adhere.

Vin Nature is a newcomer, with its promotional body,  Association Suisse Vin Nature (ASVN) founded in 2021. Its 21-point charter is designed to help producers but also to promote the diversity of Swiss natural wines. These wines were being made earlier, but there was not always agreement about what constituted a “natural” wine, still an issue in the wine world at large.

There are yet more labels, some regional, others with a particular winemaking focus. Four of the best-known are:

• Vaud’s Terravin (a strong cantonal quality label)

• St Théodule in canton Valais for wines that meet environmentally-friendly standards throughout the production process

• Grain Noble ConfidenCiel in Valais to maintain the high quality and world-class reputation of the canton’s late harvest sweet wines

• the Mémoire des Vins Suisses to encourage and promote well-aged Swiss wines by maintaining and regularly tasting a bank of these.

Bonus: here are a couple of questions from the Swiss Wine Promotion training module on organic and biodynamic wines—can you work out the answers? Consider signing up for the free course!

What is aquatic eutrophication?

• a metamorphosis of aquatic flora

• a proliferation of useful bacteria

• excessive accumulation of nutrients

How is the magic of organic viticulture expressed?

• through faster growth

• through slower growth

• with denser clusters

• with less dense clusters

• with stronger skins

• less robust skins

• with more aromatic fruit

• with less aromatic fruit

Copyright 2024 Ellen Wallace, may not be reproduced without permission

The European Union has mandated it and wineries are starting to grapple with it: nutrition labeling for wine became the law in the EU in early 2024, although some delays in implementing it are allowed. The 2024 harvest is the first vintage that is affected.

Hold on, you say, we eat to nourish ourselves, but we don’t drink for nutrients, so why does anyone think we need this? And, you moan, I haven’t yet worked out what all the other stuff on a label means—organic, biodynamic, winner of X and Y and Z gold medals, natural, without added sulfites or fining. Even magnifying glasses won’t help us read what must surely be tiny, tiny text. Whatever happened to the idea of a bottle with just a pretty, zippy label that makes me want to open it and watch the light trip the fantastic in the liquid I’m pouring?

In the wine world, the concept of a label as a place to put nutrition information is relatively new and not always well received. Wine labels are traditionally marketing tools and, potentially, works of art. Remember those first government suggestions to alert pregnant women that wine could be harmful? Today most countries, including France, land of classic labels, require such warnings. There’s a strong pushback, though, to increasing the size of the warning to make it more visible. France rejected that option in 2017, ten years after it added the warning.

Meanwhile, governments are increasingly suggesting that we should drink very little, or better yet, no alcohol. This isn’t because politicians are teetotallers, unlikely in Europe at least, but because science is looking more carefully at how alcohol affects us. The industry trembles at the thought that bottles will next be required to carry cigarette-style labels that tell us drinking can cause death. This is no way to sell the product and, like cigarettes, the space where you can park all that information is small, so what’s a winemaker to do?

There will always be resistance from those—this sometimes includes me—who feel that governments shouldn’t make everyone suffer while they babysit a handful of people who don’t look out for themselves. But we need to step back and put changing attitudes in context, historically and futuristically.

What can and should and will wine labels look like, and why?

Food labels: more than an example

People with food allergies learn to be assiduous readers of labels, an option we didn’t have 50 years ago. Two days ago I ate a salmon tartar from a reliable source, only to break out in hives and suffer swollen eyes. To my great surprise (reading the label too late), I discovered that it has milk proteins and whey. My alpha-gal allergy from a tick bite in 2022—no dairy, no meat from mammals as a result—sometimes kicks up a fuss when I eat processed foods because of dairy proteins mentioned only in tiny print.

““Food allergy has become a growing public health problem around the world,” according to a senior allergy researcher at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Wine can carry allergens that trigger some reactions.

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Before 1973 the United States, the pioneering country for mass food nutrition labeling, had no allergy or nutrition labeling rules. For the next two decades nutrition labeling made inroads but it was mostly voluntary. Meanwhile, brand marketing sold us on the look, taste, smell and texture of foods, often sidestepping how something might not be great for your health. Simultaneously, the rapid rise in processed foods encouraged some producers to make outsized nutrition claims—remember “extremely low in saturated fats”? The National Library of Medicine in the USA notes: “The proliferation of ambiguous claims on labels and in advertising led to charges that the government was tolerating claims that were ‘at best confusing and at worst deceptive economically and potentially harmful’.

The flip side of this was that no health claims could be made on labels, a policy that dated back to 1938 when nutrition research was in its infancy, but 45 years later the science of nutrition as related to health had made great strides. In 1984 Kellogg’s, working with the National Cancer Institute in the US, began to suggest on its breakfast boxes that eating more fibre might reduce the risk of some cancers—thereby causing an uproar. In 1988 and 1989 two US government reports on nutrition and health set off a flurry of interest in nutrition that has never died down. Since then, the history of food labeling has been that of a teeter-totter balance to protect consumers from fraudulent claims while ensuring they receive helpful, accurate information. At the same time, research and government oversight made standardisation (serving sizes, nutrient daily requirements) a priority.

These alerts to danger and encouragement to adopt better health habits rely on research that is ongoing, sometimes contradictory and available to most people mainly through condensed media and social media reports that summarise or, worse, pull extracts from often complex reports. Technology has speeded up research and publication, and it’s hard for labels to keep pace.

Another complication is that research results tend to be language- and country-specific. The European Union was nearly two decades behind the US in adopted nutrition labeling, in 1990, with the system revised significantly in 2012. But in 2022 the US government was asking the EU to please harmonise its labels.

The wine nutrition conundrum

The EU in 2021 added wine—seen as a food—as a product requiring nutrition, allergy and energy information. The new rules, with three years to implement them, would “cover the existing gap between wine and all other food products which for many years have been required to provide such information.” The nutrition basics:

The new rules raised a host of questions, with answers provided at the end of 2023. The label can be shrunk somewhat in: “… cases where the energy value or the amount of nutrient(s) in a product is negligible. [The information] on those elements may be replaced by a statement such as ‘Contains negligible amounts of …’ indicated in close proximity to the nutrition declaration.”

Are wineries required to mention they use egg white for fining, or that they add sulfites and yeasts? The bottom line is that ingredients used as “processing aids” (yeasts, for example) do not have to be included but any such aids that leave traces in the final product must be listed.

For your average wine drinker, there are several potential concerns.

• One is the readability of labels, but here there is a solution that would have been unthinkable a short time ago—QR codes. The new information can be contained in a QR code, so keep a phone handy if you’re buying or drinking wine. How well this works over time remains to be seen, for QR codes need to be updated.

• Higher prices because wineries will need to provide accurate measurements, for calorie counts in addition to the alcohol content already required, as well as the other information that must now be listed. The new regulations have spawned a new mini-industry of QR code suppliers who take care of all this, for a fee.

• QR code user information tracking is not allowed, but it’s up to each government to oversee this.

Can this marriage be saved?

Wine and health, still in love but sparring

Are the new rules overkill? New food labeling requirements once seemed so, and are now widely accepted. Whether wine drinkers will consider the new label information useful remains to be seen. But it is here to stay and while other countries, including Switzerland, do not yet require nutrition labeling for wine, it’s probably down the road. Research and new regulations are not perceived the same way in different countries—consider France versus the US for the debate about wine is good for you, wine is bad, but over time this can change.

Consider the case of the ongoing alcohol and health debate. A New York Times article in January 2023 may have sparked the latest move in the US to stop drinking altogether—it was followed by an article in June 2024 entitled “Is That Drink Worth it to You?” which referred back to one “Is Red Wine Actually Good for You”, which looked at a major research report that concluded no, it isn’t. And by October 2024 the influential New York newspaper was asking “What is Considered ‘Moderate Drinking’” (apologies if you hit their paywall).

Experts used to think that low or moderate amounts of alcohol were good for you. That assumption was based on research showing that people who drank in moderation lived longer than those who abstained or drank excessively. The longevity benefit disappeared around two drinks a day for women and three drinks a day for men... But many researchers now think that those conclusions were based on data analyses that had “all kinds of methodological problems,”

according to one expert. Another is quoted as saying ““there was no amount of alcohol that benefited health,” in the research results.

Earlier this month the World Health Organization embarked on a campaign to convince Europeans to drink less. The organization’s European region has one of the highest per capita alcohol consumption figures in the world.

Alcohol is linked to over 200 diseases, among them at least seven types of cancer, including breast and colon cancers. Alcohol is currently directly responsible for 8.8% – 1 in 11 – of total deaths in the European Region. Yet despite these serious health risks and damaging outcomes, less than half of Europeans are aware of the link between alcohol and cancer.

The problem is that despite continuing research there is not a consensus about what amount of alcohol is acceptable—while no amount may be beneficial it is much harder to measure how much causes harm. There appears, nevertheless, to be growing agreement that we should drink less than what we previously believed was all right. As a result, several countries, including Switzerland, have recently changed their recommendations to lower quantities. While France now suggests a maximum of 10 drinks (of 10cl) a week for men and women, Switzerland suggests 2 a day for men and 1 a day for women should be the limit. The US says 7 drinks a week, Canada says just 2 drinks. Switzerland updated its dietary recommendations in September 2024 and included a note that alcohol should not be consumed every day. Some progress has been made in moderating drinking, a press release from Swiss health authorities noted:

03.09.2024 - In 2022, 83% of the Swiss population aged 15 and over drank alcohol. This proportion has remained stable since 1992. However, the share of people using alcohol on a daily basis has fallen from 20% to 9% over the past 30 years. Binge drinking at least once a month concerns mainly young men aged 15 to 24 (31% of this age group) and daily alcohol consumption mostly men aged 65 and over (31%). These are some of the results from the Federal Statistical Office's (FSO) new publication dedicated to alcohol consumption. 

The toughest health impact of wine for scientists to measure is the one that redeems it in many of our eyes. Conviviality, sharing. Perhaps the now outdated research about the health benefits of red wine were looking too much at the heart as a muscle when all along the benefits came from the heart as an instrument of joy and pleasure. This is perhaps why we might want to keep drinking, albeit more intelligently if we start paying attention to research results and what the labels say about them. We can hope the new labels improve. And that while the wine industry will continue to suffer from falling sales, in countries like Switzerland where the emphasis is on small productions of top-quality wines, there will always be room for winemakers, the stewards of the land.

Further reading, including sources for this article:

Nouvelles règles d’étiquetage des vins

EU-Compliant QR Code Labeling for Wines | Winefo

Food analyses - Biolytix

This is how nutritional value and ingredient information must look on the label | wein.plus Wine Magazine

Plan & Pricing | Winefo

wine - Biolytix analyses

EU-Compliant QR Code Labeling for Wines | Winefo

New Wine Labelling Regulations: Everything You Need to Know

Nutrition labeling: What manufacturers need to know? - Biolytix

History of Nutrition Labeling - Front-of-Package Nutrition Rating Systems and Symbols - NCBI Bookshelf

Food Safety Website Registration

How the alcohol industry fought against pregnancy warning labels in France. A press coverage analysis spanning 20 years - PMC

New EU Regulations for Wine Ingredients and Nutritional Labeling Come Into Effect December 8 | Food Safety

The shoes, the shoes …

Cartes postales

Ellen Wallace

3 min read / 500 words

Reportage

31 July 1979 — The most beautifully shod foot encountered in Paris today: a kelly green satin high heel of perfect height, on an exquisite leg attached to an elegant foot at the end of the top leg of a pair that were crossed under the table. Never has a shoe intimidated me as much, or made me feel so inadequate. We were in the 8th arrondissement, a quartier normally out of bounds for my budget, at a restaurant where Judy, the owner of the leg and foot and shoe, said she would take me because to her astonishment I had never tasted mousse au chocolat.

“Theirs is the best, thick and slightly bitter, not airy or sweet. If you’re going to live in France, you have to understand chocolate mousse.”

The cloth was white linen, the cutlery heavy and polished, most other diners were having affairs disguised as leisurely lunches and the window view allowed time to study strolling women with shiny brown boxes, unmarked, that were suspiciously large yet lightweight, the sure sign of an haute couture purchase along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

She ate none of it, simply watched me with pleasure… (continue for free this time, with this special Friend link on Medium).