CB Book Club -- In the latest installment in our Book Club series, we spoke to Alice Feiring about her new book, Natural Wine for the People (Ten Speed Press, 2019), a compact illustrated guide to natural wine. While this category is becoming enormously popular, especially in the U.S., there is still a lot of confusion about what exactly natural wine is, where to find it and how to enjoy it. This easy-to-understand primer sets the record straight.

CB Sips -- Imagine the most extraordinary location for a vineyard that you can. Got an image in mind? Well, we think Cantine dell’Averno, a four-hectare vineyard in Pozzuoli, has it beat: Not only are its vines growing inside the caldera of a volcano that is theoretically still active, but they also surround the ruins of a Roman temple.

CB Sips -- It’s a crisp and cold winter morning in Alentejo. We are in Mora, a one-and-a-half-hour drive from Lisbon, to visit Susana Esteban’s winery, a very simple adega where her award-winning wines are made.

CB Sips -- Ènek poured a rosy-colored splash of wine into our glasses, avidly explaining how this particular Aladasturi grape vine was meticulously cultivated in its native west Georgia.

CB Sips -- It is impossible not to look at the history of Quinta de Covela, a winery in Portugal’s Douro Verde region that has faced misfortune, gotten some lucky breaks and survived tricks of fate, as a masterpiece of literature, one that could easily be adapted to the cinema.

CB Sips -- Naked, free, wild, raw, true, clean… natural wine has many names, except its most obvious one, just plain ol’ wine. There’s no makeup or camouflage, nor is there any sort of artificial interference – chemical fertilizers or industrial yeasts, to name a few – in the vineyards or during the vinification process.

CB Sips -- Amyndeo, a mountainous region in northwestern Greece, is a prime spot for producing wine – in fact, it’s one of the most important wine regions in the country. Located between two peaks, Vermio and Voras, this area is known for cold winters with enough rainfall and snow for the vines to withstand the relatively dry summers (usually sans-irrigation).

CB Sips -- The wine harvest is about timing. The time it takes for a grape to ripen to optimal sweetness, the moment they are cut from the vine, the days or weeks that each mix of crushed grapes and juice sits in fermentation tanks or oak barrels. Timing is everything and to get it right, you not only have to be obsessed with accuracy, but also have a passion for perfection. Alejandra Cordero, the winemaker at Tres Raices, a winery in Dolores Hildago, located in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, has both.

CB Sips -- We used to spend a lot of time in western Georgia’s Samegrelo region when breakaway Abkhazia was our beat. Zugdidi, the regional capital, was our overnight stop coming and going across the river to the disputed land in the north. Our local friends would welcome us with Megrelian hospitality, decorating their tables with hearty and spicy local fare that made us purr. The wine, however, with its sweet barnyard vinegary tang, was a different story.

CB Sips -- Zeynep Arca Şallıel had a successful career in advertising in Istanbul, but in 1995 she decided to take on a daunting new challenge: taking part in the revival of small-scale viniculture in the ancient winemaking region of Thrace.