Claire Hill Wines - Grist Syrah 2021

The moment I fell in love with wine, I was 19 years old and living in Paris. My roommate was the son of a family friend, his father a fellow Socialist student organizer alongside my great-aunt in the 1960s in Paris. The wine was a white Burgundy raided from my boyfriend’s father’s cellar. My art history professor had given me the advice that the best way to learn French would be to find a French boyfriend, and so I started dating a boy I met in a bar my first week, whose family happened to own a large Champagne house and some vineyards in Burgundy. Growing up in California, red table wine was a common fixture at dinner. It was utilitarian, mass-produced stuff and hardly inspired one to think about where exactly it had come from. It wasn’t until I took that first sip of white Burgundy that I got it: that wine could speak to a place. That it could inspire aesthetic reverence and wonderment. I’ve always been one to wonder why things are the way that they are. Obsessed with mythology as a