TERROIR
THE FEATURE
The Flock in the Vines: Why Year-Round Sheep Are Replacing the Herbicide Tank
It is high summer in New Zealand's Waipara Valley, the vines heavy with fruit, and the sheep are still in the rows. For generations the flock was a winter tenant, turned out at bud-break before it could strip the young shoots. Raise the fruiting wire above a standing sheep's reach and the winter guest becomes a year-round resident.
At Greystone in Waipara and California's Paicines Ranch, that one change ended herbicides and cut tractor fuel by as much as 65 percent. The catch is methane: an April 2026 Bragato Research Institute study found year-round grazing more than doubled the block's carbon footprint. The honest win is not a greener bottle but land working twice, wine and wool from a single hectare.
THE DISPATCH
Latest from this week
Two Ukrainian Wine Professionals Take the 2026 Golden Vines Scholarships
Announced July 21: Eleonora Kolieichik, a sommelier now in Paris, and Anastasiia Fedchenko, a wine-data specialist in Tarragona, will each take a funded six-month internship at an Artémis Domaines estate, a roster that runs from Château Latour to Champagne Jacquesson. This year's program drew 26 applications, its highest since inception. The war may have slipped down the news agenda; the trade's quieter solidarity has not.
Australia's 2026 Crush Hits a 25-Year Low as Prices Keep Falling
Wine Australia's National Vintage Report, out July 16, puts the 2026 crush at 1.27 million tonnes, the smallest since 2000 and 25 percent below the ten-year average. The counterintuitive part: average grape prices still fell 6 percent, to about $370 a tonne (A$570). A tight crop that would normally lift prices could not, because the constraint now is demand, not supply, the same shakeout running through California and France.
THE PICK
DESCENDIENTES DE J. PALACIOS PÉTALOS VIÑAS VIEJAS 2023
In 1998 Álvaro Palacios, already known for reviving Priorat's old-vine Garnacha, took his nephew Ricardo Pérez Palacios to Bierzo and ignored the easy clay of the valley floor. They staked the steep schist hillsides above Corullón instead, in parcels with old names: San Martín, Moncerbal, La Faraona. Pétalos gathers old-vine Mencía from across the region under one rule, schist and elevation over volume, and it drinks of it: violet, wild herb, fresh plum, with the cut that hillside fruit gives.
It argues for the hard way of doing things, and rewards the same at the table: lamb, roast mushrooms, anything with char. At about $30 retail it drinks like far more, the kind of bottle critics single out among Spain's best values without the price the phrase usually carries.
Until next Thursday,
Adrian, TERROIR