I write about wine because wine belongs to an increasingly rare category of phenomena: those that can only be understood through time.

 

Most human activities leave fragile traces behind. Fashions disappear, technologies are replaced, ideas change shape. Territories, by contrast, preserve a more enduring memory. Within landscapes survive decisions made centuries ago, forgotten power relationships, economic intuitions, religious beliefs, social hierarchies, and visions of the world that have helped shape the present.

 

This is why wine interests me.

 

Not as a product, nor simply as a gastronomic expression, but as a privileged vantage point from which to study the relationship between societies and the places they inhabit.

 

I have devoted much of my work to France, and in particular to Burgundy and Champagne, because few territories reveal so clearly how a community can transform an agricultural practice into a cultural construction, an economic reputation into symbolic heritage, and a local landscape into a universally recognised reference.

 

I studied International Relations, and perhaps for this reason I have always approached wine from a different perspective than the conventional one. I am less interested in bottles than in the processes that made them possible; less interested in events than in the structures that underpin them; less interested in immediate developments than in the slow transformations that shape societies over the long term. I seek to understand how a territory acquires meaning, how a reputation is built across generations, and how certain ideas survive long after the age that produced them has disappeared.

 

Over the years, I have travelled thousands of kilometres through vineyards, archives, villages, and cellars. I have met winegrowers, historians, merchants, public officials, collectors, and scholars. These experiences have taught me that wine is rarely the destination of an inquiry.

 

More often, it is the point of entry.

 

A point of entry into much larger questions: the relationship between geography and power, the construction of collective reputations, the enduring nature of territorial cultures, and the ways in which societies assign value to the places they inhabit.

 

My books emerged from this research.

 

I see them as attempts to read history through territories.

 

Because a territory is not simply a portion of space. It is the result of a continuous layering of decisions, conflicts, adaptations, and worldviews. Every landscape is the visible outcome of a history. Every territory is an archive in which time remains legible.

 

This conviction continues to guide my work.

 

We live in an age with unprecedented access to information and yet one that often seems to lose sight of historical depth. We move through places, cultures, and landscapes at a speed unknown to previous generations, but we frequently struggle to recognise the stories that have contributed to shaping them. And yet it is precisely within those stories that some of the most valuable keys to understanding the present can still be found.

 

This is why I continue to focus on territories.

 

Not because they offer a refuge from modernity, nor because they preserve an idealised past, but because they remain among the most effective ways of understanding how societies are built over time. To observe them is to reflect on the continuities and ruptures that have shaped the contemporary world. It is to understand how geography, culture, economics, and politics ultimately take on a concrete and visible form.

 

Through wine, I try to tell that story.

 

I try to explore the ways human beings build relationships with places, how communities transform space into belonging, and how history continues to live within landscapes long after those who shaped them have disappeared.

 

Because landscapes are not simply what we see.

 

They are history when it ceases to be a narrative and becomes space.