I got tired of drinking the same six grapes.

I started Wine Underdogs because I was bored. Not with wine — never with wine — but with the same handful of grapes turning up on every list and every shelf. Cabernet, Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio. Great grapes, all of them. But they were crowding out hundreds of others that deserved a seat at the table.

The grape that changed everything for me was Alicante Bouschet— a teinturier whose flesh runs as red as its skin. Cut one open and it bleeds. It was bred in France as a cheap coloring grape, written off as a workhorse, and then quietly turned into something extraordinary in Portugal’s Alentejo. An underdog with a chip on its shoulder. I was hooked.

So I started chasing that feeling everywhere I could find it: the inky native reds of Portugal, the 8,000-year story still being written in Georgia, the oldest winery on earth tucked into a cave in Armenia, and the alpine grapes of northeast Italy that rarely leave their valleys. Those four are the pillars of everything I write about here.

My approach is simple: taste honestly, score honestly, and never talk down to you. Every note here comes from a bottle I actually opened. No snobbery, no jargon for its own sake — just good wine, explained plainly, so you can find the next great bottle nobody’s talking about.

That instinct didn’t come from nowhere. I read Rhetoric & Composition at the University of Central Florida, spent years teaching ESOL and composition, and a good stretch translating in Crimea — a life spent, one way or another, in language, persuasion, and the distance between cultures. Wine, it turns out, is just another thing worth translating well.