Let’s not digress before we even start. “Nightshift Superstar” is the title of a song by Muse, from their latest album, released in June 2026. Laurent and I listened to it at least a hundred times on a random Tuesday afternoon in the cubicle we use as an office in Brooklyn. I say cubicle, but to be fair it’s not that small. It would even be comfortable had we not stacked a dangerously high wall of wine boxes there for our mva wine curation. Oh well, at least we’re in good company.

One thing that unites us as a team, apart from our love for wines (plural) and good food, is a passion for music, although we operate by very different rules. I am very much a creature of habit, and I like listening to the same repertoire over and over again: favourites ranging from the most dramatically overwrought pieces of Wagner to the irreverence of the Gallagher brothers, during and after Oasis. Laurent, by contrast, decided long ago that living life to the fullest meant never going back, and that includes never listening to the same song twice. As a result, we have endless debates over what to put on at the office. I won’t dwell on the impact these discussions have on my productivity; suffice it to say they are recurring, and I intend to keep enjoying them regardless of how long they take.

Of course, the soundtrack of our working hours seeps into other aspects of the job, sometimes in the most surprising ways. For example: we are now at more than eight wine collections sourced at mva. In our own lingo, a collection means six different wines that we think are worth discovering together: think of it as a playlist rather than a random shuffle. That means that when I arrived a few weeks ago, I had over 48 wines to get acquainted with: not only in terms of taste, but also how they were curated, the winemakers behind them, and the terroirs they came from. Talk about a learning curve for a pretty much clueless drinker. I needed to find a way to make sense of these wines, and to be able to explain to our members what to expect when trying them, or why we fell in love with them.

Turns out, music is a very efficient way to resurrect tasting memories. When I ask Laurent about a wine, my question is rarely “what does it taste like?” or “what would you pair it with?” My usual go-to line is: “if this wine were a song, what would it be?” The answers are as eclectic as his taste. This delicate Burgundy white feels like a nocturne by Chopin. This dry orange wine from Portugal is closer to a minimalist rock song: we hesitated between Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure, and it’s still pretty much undecided. This pleasant, comforting Beaujolais relaxes us the same way “End of Beginning” by Djo does. And this smooth, silky red from Minervois? Definitely an orchestral Hooverphonics live. The 2012 version at Koningin Elisabethzaal, to be exact.

Yup, we’re huge nerds.

I mentioned in my inaugural newsletter in June that certain aromas have an uncanny triggering effect on my brain: dried fruit, petroleum, nutty flavours in general. It’s pretty much the same with certain harmonies or voice qualities. They’re my nightshift superstars: aromatic or musical notes that get me every time. It doesn’t mean they all taste or sound the same. It means that within a few seconds, or a few sips, they become immediately important to me.

Some people keep asking me what it’s like to blind taste every wine that makes it into our selection. My answer is exactly that. I’m not looking for something good, or decent, or fairly priced for the quality, even though that last criterion has its place. I’m looking for things that make me gasp, or cry, or go suddenly silent. I’m looking for wines that hit me like a meteor.

I’m looking for my nightshift superstars.

Cheers,

Arielle

Anyway, Gewurztraminer is a grape. It grows on vines. It’s harvested, and fermented like any other grape to make wine. And still, to people who are not acquainted with it, it feels like a wine that is “outside of wine.”

I might agree with that, in the sense that sweet and semi-sweet wines are some of the most underrated bottles in the world: Gewurztraminer from Alsace, Tokaji from Hungary, Vino Santo from Italy… All these wines rely on a higher dose of sugar to develop their aromas. But we live in an era that has identified sugar as the great enemy (although, to be honest, we have never consumed more of it in human history). I can remember countless conversations with wine professionals lamenting their clients’ lack of enthusiasm for sweet wines, even though a few cult vineyards still contribute to their aura (looking at you, Château d’Yquem).

As a learning-on-the-job chemist (I studied literature at school, but that story is for another day) who has been developing beverage recipes for quite a few years now, I have made my peace with the fact that sugar is a formidable flavor enhancer, just as salt is in the cooking world.

It helps with shelf stability and texture. It balances out the acidity of most ready-to-drink bottles or cans, whether they contain craft or mass-produced beverages. That might sound terribly unglamorous. That’s because there is a manufacturing reality behind it: to survive on a shelf, most beverages need to have a pH of around 3.5, roughly the same as a very mild cider vinegar, which few people would find drinkable on its own. Or it would be a very niche interest (which is totally fine: to each their own).

Let’s circle back to that bottle of 2020 Gewurztraminer I was trying out for mva. Laurent and I, French and strong-headed as we are, decided to persist and sign off on it. So we summoned a full-on apéritif around that bottle, under the very perplexed eyes of our Italian, Argentinian, and American guests that evening. What was a familiar, introspective experience for us was a complete discovery for them.

When I drink wines like this one, it reminds me of two things.

The first is a tender memory of a winter night in a countryside manor with my husband. We had spent a very tiring day emptying my mother-in-law’s house after her death. We were exhausted, covered in dust, and sad. We sat by the huge fireplace in the manor’s boudoir-like restaurant, and the owner Michèle — who had clearly noticed that our spirits needed lifting — offered us a glass of sweet wine. I can’t remember exactly what it was. I know it was a Coteaux-du-Layon. At the time, I’m pretty sure I didn’t even know that appellation was known for sweet wines.

What was in my glass felt like liquid gold. Almost magically, sip after sip, with the fire crackling in front of us, we were able to leave the sadness of the day behind us and marvel at the small family treasures we had uncovered in the dark corners of the house. A child’s hat with dog ears. An egg cup with my husband’s name engraved on it. A signet ring we recognised from black and white photographs from the last century.

That’s exactly what sweet wines taste like to me now: honeysuckle, smoked nectarine, and a mysterious, unbreakable link to people I have loved and will love forever.

The second memory dates back to my first creative residency at Michelin-starred chef Mauro Colagreco’s restaurant, perched on the hills at the border between France and Italy. I spent a full week haunting the kitchen, mixing unlikely ingredients to create non-alcoholic recipes that could survive both a taste test and high-temperature pasteurization. Right next to me, the restaurant’s beverage team was simmering a huge pan of dried fruit, straw, and spices. The vapours rising from the pan were intense. So much so that I stopped tasting my own experiments, because the only thing I could smell was dates, golden straw, and bitter almond. A new smell, and yet a strangely familiar one, like that of a Coteaux-du-Layon I had once found comfort in on a cold November night.

I could have cried, right there.

Every wine culture has its peculiarities. Personal taste builds slowly, from the flavours of our childhood to the moments of togetherness we are lucky to share with people we cherish. To someone who didn’t grow up with these memories, a wine might taste “outside of wine.” But to others, it is very much inside their lives.

Let’s create more discoveries like these together.

Cheers,
Arielle

Yes, you read that right. There is a reason why this newsletter is called “Clueless & Sipping”: that’s exactly what I am. The legitimacy of my tastebuds comes from another world entirely — that of tea. My palate was trained to appreciate the complexity and distinctiveness of what is now called “speciality tea”: teas treated like a grand cru, meant to be savoured as a fine beverage.

There are, surprisingly, numerous common points between tea and wine. Both are the result of the conjunction of a terroir, a tea or winemaker, and unique weather conditions. Both are identified through a vintage, and in both cases, that vintage can even be broken down by season. In Darjeeling, for example, teas are classified as Spring, Summer, or Autumn harvests — just as a Muscat from Alsace might be flagged as a Late Harvest wine.

After a few years in the tea industry, I started creating non-alcoholic beverages for Michelin-starred chefs — infusing and macerating fruit, herbs, spices, and all kinds of aromatic ingredients to craft blends that could be enjoyed alone or paired with food. I was never trying to imitate wine, and I never used dealcoholised wine as a base. But I explored wine as well, first because I liked it, and also because if you want to offer a non-alcoholic experience on par with millennia of winemaking, you’d better know the territory you’re in.

As a French person, I was already in love with wine, but in a very casual way. I can open a bottle, taste it, and say with confidence whether I like it or not. I know that certain aromas trigger an immediate reaction in my brain: gasoline, plums, roasted buckwheat.

And already from that last sentence, you can perhaps sense one of the problems I face now that I work in the wine world. More specifically, my job is to source exceptional small-batch wines through a rigorous blind-tasting process, for the members of a wine club called mva. I don’t do this alone: I have a partner in crime, Laurent, founder of mva, and we always invite a few winemaker friends to taste with us. And mind you, these people are not only friends. They are some of the most respected, critically acclaimed winemakers in the world, often producing wines from the most prestigious regions. They happen to be extremely modest and lovely. But the stuff they create sells for hundreds of dollars a bottle.

I’ve been doing this for three months now. It is still very early, and I am slowly learning more about wine. How it’s made, where it comes from, what winemakers are looking for when they make any given technical decision. But I definitely don’t blend in, and for a very simple reason: I don’t have the same vocabulary as my team and our winemaker friends. Not. At. All.

I remember the first blind tasting we did in Tuscany, to select the bottles featured in our 8th collection (a collection, in our own jargon, is a curated selection of 6 different wines). We tasted Spanish wines, as well as bottles from Alsace and the Loire Valley. It was a lot of work: we opened 38 bottles over two days. But it was wonderful, and I distinctly remember two cases of love at first sip: a Rioja with a lot of pepper, and a Gewurztraminer whose nose was like honeysuckle.

And that’s where my troubles began. As someone trained to taste tea and raw ingredients, my palate recognises things differently. Honeysuckle was not obvious to my fellow tasters, and roasted buckwheat raised even more eyebrows. At one point, I accidentally triggered a hysterical fit of giggles around the table by saying I didn’t like wine n°8 because it tasted like green beans.

My flavour memory includes things as unusual as nettles, pot-au-feu, Boston ivy (tasted by mistake as a child — I grabbed a leaf growing on the walls of my grandmother’s house; it turns out it has a pretty distinct bitter, dry taste), raw carrot, and timur pepper. My comments on the wines we taste tend to go along the lines of “this is like roasted pineapple, but without the sugar,” while the winemakers seated next to me say things like “it cleans my palate” or “it is well balanced.”

And so far, it has been my favourite part of the job. It’s not only that the people around the table have different tastes. Mauro, a winemaker friend from Piedmont who joined us in Tuscany, loves delicate whites, which is surprising, given that his vineyard sits within one of the most prestigious appellations in the world, Barolo, home to some of the strongest, most tannic reds on the planet. Mauro makes lovely reds, but his heart belongs to clean, fresh whites, and as it turns out, he makes those too. By contrast, I love heavy petroleum noses and dried-fruit notes. He experiences wine through texture first. I try to identify things that could be ingredients, if the wine weren’t made exclusively from grapes. We rarely agree. But when we do, it’s like a bridge cast between two worlds, and the bottle doesn’t last very long.

All of this is to say that this newsletter will feature a lot of what I like to call awkward tasting notes: I simply follow wherever my brain leads, in the hope that every strange note of nettle I detect will be an opportunity to spark debate and draw out conversations. Preferably with a glass in hand.

Cheers,
Arielle