As the Wine half of Food & Wine Magazine for the past 15 years, Ray Isle occupies one of wine journalism’s most important and influential posts. Importance and influence in wine can often mean stodgy and humorless, but open to a random page in the executive wine editor’s new book, The World In A Wineglass, and you might be surprised: For someone who’s tasted thousands of wines and written millions of words about it, Isle’s prose somehow still crackles with energy.

A creative writing grad student who quickly got bored with academia, Isle started in wine as a cellar rat at a winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains, then tried his hand as a sales rep (“There’s no greater Sisyphean task than trying to sell port in August in New York”), before finally finding his way to journalism.

We spoke with Isle about his career journey, his new book, his favorite wines, his best guess for what the future holds and what he loves to drink for fun (when he’s not drinking for work).

On finding his way to wine

• I didn’t grow up in a wine-drinking family. I had no plans to write about wine. My father was an English professor. I was headed down a creative writing path. 
• I happened to get a fellowship in the Bay Area, which meant I started hanging out at wineries. The people at [retail shop] K&L Wines told me that you could work bottlings at nearby small wineries and get paid in wine. As a grad student, that was really appealing. So I ended up working as a harvest intern for a couple harvests at Clos LaChance, which was (at the time) up in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
• After two years, I realized I was done with academia — everyone hates each other!
• So I ended up in New York, left my teaching career and got a job as a sales rep hauling a bag of wine around.
• Josh Greene at Wine & Spirits read something I wrote and liked my writing, which pretty quickly turned into an offer. I spent five years there and moved to Food & Wine after that. 
• I’ve benefited by not growing up with wine — I maintain that sense of discovery. I fell in love with it out of the blue. My sole experience with wine in college was literally lying on my back on the floor at a party and having someone squeeze wine out of a bag into my mouth. That doesn’t exactly predict a career as a wine writer.
• Food & Wine is a mass consumer magazine — I try to keep myself in the mind of the budding wine person, because wine’s very easy to make pretentious. So I try to translate that complexity into something approachable, which is fun.

On writing The World In A Wineglass

• I decided to write this book because I felt there hadn’t been a book that took a global look at people who were making wines of place that expressed an independent personal vision, but doing so in ways that were environmentally conscientious.
• Over time, I’ve gotten less and less interested in the classic “93-point, blackberry, asphalt, drink this in 7-10 years” thing. That whole taxonomy of adjectives and point scores just misses the whole point. There's something wonderful beyond the baseline grape-juice-in-a-glass character to wine. 
• I wanted to get into people’s stories. Most of what I like writing has to do with the people who make it, who are a part of wine. We tend to look at wines, dirt, stones, terroir in terms of the geology and climate, but we sometimes overlook the human aspect, which to me is one of the most interesting things.
• The other reason I wrote this book is because of conversations I had with people in their early 30s who were drinking wine who said, “Why do I care if this got 92 points? I want to know how it was made.” It’s a sensibility that follows from an interest in food. Where was this grown? How did it get here? What do we know about it? I think wine often trails behind food in terms of trends — and this kind of interest in food has started to translate into a similar interest in wine.

On wine critic scores and objectivity

• In some ways, looking at wine and saying “high acidity, medium body, tangerine,” is fine. But with a really good wine it's a little like looking at a Picasso and saying “it’s good because it has green paint and it’s Cubist and uses an impasto technique.” None of that gets to the heart of why Guernica is a great painting. There’s something there beyond just the elements. 
• Wine isn’t necessarily art — it’s a craft that leads toward art. But I do think with really good individual wines, made by a person with a point of view, from a place that keeps the soil alive, there’s an identity or character that’s beyond simple adjective description. If you love wine, you’ve experienced this.

• One reason I find the assumption of objectivity about point scores to be bizarre is that there's nothing objective about experiencing a glass of wine. As with art, you can have a form of objectivity because you’ve got a general cultural reference; it exists within the context of what people think is good. 
• But when you just say, “This is 93 points,” come on! It’s 93 points today, for you. Sure. But I’m skeptical that’s truly objective. It can’t be objective! We’re humans. We can aspire toward objectivity, but we’re not necessarily good at it. The problem with scores is that they assume complete objectivity, which isn’t realistic. 
• Wine isn’t completely subjective either, though. My daughter made me a drawing of a horse when she was six. I love that drawing, but I’m cognizant it’s not the Mona Lisa. I don’t have a problem saying DRC [Domaine de la Romanée-Conti] La Tâche is better than Yellow Tail Shiraz. It just is. But there are other ways in which this gets complicated. For example, if you come from a Western music tradition and you hear Asian music on a different scale, it can sound completely wrong to you, yet still be great music.  
• That’s where things get interesting with natural wine and some of the “flaws” people pick up on — if you’re not in the standard tradition of wine, some of those flaws aren’t necessarily flaws to you! One of the most interesting things I found interviewing winemakers for my book was that a number of them who make “classical” wine but have also made natural wine began to rethink the idea of what is a flaw. It made them more aware about how they make their “classical” or “traditional” wines, but without necessarily changing their methods. This can get stupidly polarizing in the wine business, but it’s fascinating.

On knowledge and pleasure in wine

• I’m a little weary of the idea of cultivated taste because wine has such an apparatus of pretentiousness about it. But knowledge is pleasure when it comes to wine. I don’t necessarily mean hierarchical knowledge, though. I mean the more you know about a wine, the more complex your experience with it is. You add layers to it beyond taste. Or at least your apprehension of taste is modified by your knowledge. 
• Taste is weird because you’re getting chemical taste input, but it’s all filtered by your brain — so there’s a weird thing where memory and knowledge tie into it.
• There have been psychological studies that show your actual taste and pleasure centers light up differently when you know — or believe you know — certain things about wine. So if you’re passionate about organic viticulture, those wines will actually taste better to you because your brain will interpret them as tasting better.

On the sky not falling in the wine industry

• Wine’s been around for 8,000 years, it doesn’t seem like the death knell is at hand. There’s always this “the sky is falling, wine is doomed, the next generation isn’t going to drink this stuff” thing. But not a soul I knew in my 20s drank wine. The lack of interest in wine from Gen Z? I’m not sure there’s less interest from people that age than they’ve always shown.

• I do think there's a neo-prohibitionist thing going on — you know, “alcohol is bad for you” (which it obviously is in large quantities). And yet we've had alcohol in our lives for many, many, many millennia. Michael Pollan talks about the human desire for disorientation. (That’s fun if it goes away). You can go back thousands of years or back to the idea that kids will spin around for fun. I don’t see humans giving up on that. They might shift the methods for attaining it though. I do see a challenge to the wine market from cannabis. Or maybe we’ll all just start spinning all the time, I don’t know.  
• If there’s a turn away from wine generally, I think it’ll be on the more commercial side. Which is maybe OK. There are always affordable ways to get wasted that I don't see as a threat to the wine world. Wine isn’t usually the cheapest, most efficient way to get drunk. Which is fine, actually. If it was, that’d be depressing.
• There will always be people who are interested in wine just like there’ll always be people who are interested in stories or things that taste good.

On producing and consuming wine conscientiously in a changing climate

• There’s no question there’s a warming cycle going on. You see it in an almost universal advancement of harvest dates around the world. 

• Wine’s not a staple from an agricultural perspective — no one dies if they don’t get wine. A few of us wine writers think we might die, but wine operates in a different agricultural zone than staple foods. So it’s not subject to quite the same pressures, but it’s subject to the same environmental pressures.

• Most of the environmental changes that need to be made in wine are on the production side rather than the consumer side. But the single most important thing consumers could do is to stop being thrilled by really heavy glass bottles. If you look at the carbon footprint of wine, a huge part of this is shipping glass. Some bottles are 13 ounces and some are two and a half pounds. You’re shipping two and a half pounds of glass around the world to make your wine look fancy? That’s bonkers.

• But the shipping question gets tricky. Not every place makes great wine, just like not every place makes pineapples. But as a consumer, if you look at how the grapes were grown and pay attention to whether they were trying to be environmentally friendly, that makes a difference. Support the producers who do good work.

• The world of place-driven, individually farmed, conscientiously made wines is by nature much smaller than that of industrial wine. You’ll never have the audience you have for Budweiser. But these producers and this type of wine don’t need everyone on the planet to drink it.

On the virtues of not always taking wine so seriously

• Look, sometimes all you want is a beverage — I’m drinking a coffee that came out of a machine right now, it’s fine. Some chef said to me once that “sometimes rice is just rice.” Not everything has to be special all the time.

• It’s like at the end of a hike, if someone hands you a Budweiser, you’re like, “Thank God —  it’s cold, it’s wet, I'm happy.”

• And hey, some people who get into wine via Barefoot end up wanting Domaine Weinbach. I’m a case in point.

On drinking terrific wine without spending a fortune

• One of the points of the book is that there’s really good wine that’s made in an interesting, non-alarming way that also isn’t expensive. Many of the wines I discuss are under $100. Some are $20 or $30. Now, you may not be able to drink these for $5 per bottle (and you can’t even do it for $20 in Napa), but you can absolutely do it in Puglia or Languedoc or parts of Spain. It takes some hunting, but you can do it.

• A lot of really good wines at $25 or $30 are brilliantly made: in Italy, Castello di Monsanto Chianti is one of them. Pieropan’s Soave Classico is another — they farm brilliantly, it’s a steal. In California, the Tablas Creek wines are widely available and remarkably good. Eyrie Estate in Oregon — their Chardonnay is really lovely. It’s well-made and farmed super intelligently. Greywacke Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand is a great wine for $26. 

• I feel guilty that sherry isn’t in the book because the production process is too opaque for what I was writing about. But drink more sherry, what the hell! It's great and it’s not expensive. 

• One of the great revelations of writing the book for me was Alsace, which isn’t in vogue as much these days, but gosh, those wines are good. And many of them aren’t too expensive.

• Some of the stuff being made in southern Chile, particularly Itata and Maule, is really interesting and a total deal. 

On forecasting the future

• With the caveat that most people who make these projections are wrong, I’d say that in the next 10 years, crisp, chillable, lighter-bodied reds will continue growing in popularity. A lot of my colleagues in their 20s want wines like Beaujolais, certain Chilean reds or Grenaches like Angela Osborne’s. 

• We got into a big, heavy wine zone for a while, which we’re moving out of. I like wines that are uplifting and don’t weigh you down.

• I suspect sparkling wines from around the world will keep growing in popularity, too.

• There’s going to be more hybrid crossover stuff — combinations of fruits, drinks with cannabis and alcohol. The current boundaries of drinks categories are much more permeable now.

• We’ll see what happens with packaging. Twenty-five years ago you wouldn’t have thought screw-caps would have shown up on $40 wines, but they do today.

• Region-wise, it’s hard to figure out with climate change, but one of the great, weird success stories is English sparkling wine. You couldn’t have made those 50 years ago. The grapes wouldn’t have gotten ripe enough.

On drinking wine for pleasure when drinking wine is your job

• I taste a ton of wines, but the wines I go back to? I love good, dry Riesling. It’s obviously one of the great wines of the world, but it’s also one of the most refreshing and pleasant to drink on its own or with food.

• I love great older Burgundy, if someone else is buying it. That’s been priced way out of the journalist salary zone.

• I find I end up coming back to producers I have an affinity for. David and Jasmine Hirsch — I like and admire them and their wines. Same with Littorai. 

• In Chianti, my go-tos include Castello di Monsanto and Rocca di Montegrossi. Again, I just admire what they’re doing, and the wines are great for what they cost.

• There are wines that couldn’t be more different aesthetically, that I love almost equally. I love [Loire Valley natural wine producer] La Grange Tiphaine’s wines, but I also love [Napa Valley producer] Spottswoode, who makes brilliant Cabernets. But both winemakers share certain things in their approach that makes me want to return to them.

• For my job, I actually try to drink anything I haven’t come across before, particularly in restaurants. I want to try things I haven’t had.

• If I could just have one wine, the one I’d want would be a 1984 Diamond Creek Volcanic Hill. That was my lightbulb wine. It changed my appreciation of wine. I haven’t had it in years, so I might as well finish things off with the wine I started with. It’d probably go well with barbecue. I’m from Texas, so I love great barbecue.