The wine journal of

Vera Lindqvist

Tastings · Cellars · Lists

“A good bottle is an argument for paying attention. It is rarely an argument for paying more.”

§ 1

On drinking better

Most people who ask me for a better wine are really asking for a more expensive one, and the two are related the way a longer book is related to a better book — loosely, and less often than the price tags suggest. What improves an evening is almost never another digit. It is a bottle chosen for the food, the weather, and the company, opened at the right temperature and poured by someone who has already decided not to perform.

That is the work. I taste widely so that you don’t have to, keep the notes on cards so the memory survives the evening, and bring the file to your table, your cellar, or your restaurant’s list. What I sell is judgement — the confidence to serve a bottle from a village nobody can pronounce, because it is precisely right, and to leave the famous one on the shelf.

This journal is the practice in book form. The chapters that follow set out the tastings I host and the cellar work I take on, each with its price printed plainly, because a sommelier who is vague about money is being vague on purpose.

Vera Lindqvist in a dark suit, raising a glass of red wine to candlelight in a stone cellar — Plate I — The sommelier, reading a glass against the candle.

§ 2

From the card file

Three cards pulled at random from a long drawer. Every wine I pour at a tasting enters the file first — producer, place, year, and what the glass actually said.

Källa & Frost ‘Norrsken’

Card number № 114

Varietal: Riesling
Region: Mosel
Year: 2023

Wet slate and white currant; the acidity walks in first and holds the door. Poured blind, it ends arguments about sweetness.

Viña Adelfa ‘Las Norias’

Card number № 167

Varietal: Garnacha
Region: Calatayud
Year: 2021

Crushed raspberry over warm stone, a bitter-orange finish. The bottle I open when someone says they only drink big reds.

Maison Verrel ‘Sous les Toits’

Card number № 203

Varietal: Chardonnay
Region: Jura
Year: 2022

Baked apple, walnut skin, a saline line through the middle. Serve it a shade warmer than you think and say nothing.

The producers above are inventions of this fiction — the drawer, however, is exactly how it works.

Dust-covered bottles with blank parchment labels resting in wooden racks in an arched stone cellar — Plate II — The cellar — where patience is stored by the case.

The tastings themselves — formats, rooms, and plainly printed prices — begin overleaf.

Turn to Chapter II — Tastings