It was a little restaurant in Puglia.

Paper tablecloths. A handwritten menu. Nothing anyone would ever put on a list. I was sitting outside, and at the table next to mine was a group of local folks who, I slowly realized, had no intention of going anywhere.

The service wasn’t slow. They weren’t waiting on food. The wine was local, the plates came out one at a time, and they just… stayed. Talking. Pouring. Letting the next thing arrive whenever it arrived.

Here’s the thing.

I photograph wine and whiskey brands for a living.

I spend my working days in cellars, in distilleries, in restaurants and behind the bar, so watching how people drink and eat is quite literally my job. And I can tell you that table was doing something most of us have never been taught to do.

It wasn’t just the time they took. It was HOW they took it.

The wine came from a few miles down the road and was chosen before anyone thought about food. There was an order to the night, even though from the outside it looked like there wasn’t one. The locals waiting for a table didn’t hover by the host stand.

They stood outside with a glass of wine, chatting, like the wait was part of the evening too.

And honestly?

Somewhere between that table in Puglia and this one, I built a whole new way of eating out.

It changes how I read a wine list, what I decide before I ever look at the food, the one thing I hunt for on every menu, and how I let a night unfold instead of racing it to the end. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to bottling what that table had.

Let me walk you through it.

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When someone at a wine shop says “natural wine,” do you know what they actually mean?

Because here’s the thing. Half the people saying it can’t define it either. And that’s not a dig at anyone - it’s just accurate. There’s no legal definition. No governing body, no official certification, no stamp of approval. Just a loose, vibes-based consensus that’s been picked up by sommeliers, Instagram aesthetics, and the guy at every dinner party who needs you to know he only drinks skin-contact orange wine now.

So before we can even have this conversation, we need to actually talk about what it is.

The Basics of Natural Wine

At its core, natural wine means minimal intervention. Organic or biodynamic grapes. Wild or ambient yeast – the stuff that already lives in the air and on the grape skins, not a commercially cultivated strain added in to guarantee a consistent ferment. Little to no additives. Little to no added sulfites.

That last one matters more than most people realize. Conventional wine is legally allowed up to 72 additives. Seventy-two. Most people genuinely have no idea. They think wine is grapes and time. It’s often a lot more than that.

Sulfites are what most winemakers use to stabilize and preserve wine – to make sure the bottle you open in Minnesota tastes exactly like the one someone opened in London last Tuesday. Natural winemakers largely skip that step, or use it very sparingly. Which is why natural wine can be wildly unpredictable from bottle to bottle, vintage to vintage, sometimes even glass to glass.

That unpredictability is a feature for some people and a bug for others. Think farmers market tomato versus grocery store tomato. One is engineered for consistency, shelf stability, and broad appeal. The other might be the best thing you’ve tasted all summer – or it might be mealy and weird. It’s the same kind of thing.

The range in natural wine is enormous. It can be crisp and clean and mineral-driven. It can be funky in ways that are genuinely hard to describe without using the word “barnyard.” It can taste almost cidery, almost sour, and slightly fizzy when you were NOT expecting that. The texture is often different too – less polished, less round, more alive in a way. It might be cloudy. It might look like a smoothie. That’s not always a bad sign.

When people say “funky,” by the way, they usually mean something in the neighborhood of earth, cheese rind, wet hay, the smell you get after a big rain storm. It’s not funky like bad – it’s funky like interesting, if you’re into that. Which not everyone is, and that’s totally normal.

Natural wine was never designed for the masses. That’s intentional. It’s also half the appeal and half the problem.

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Most of them just haven’t noticed yet.

When dinner can show up at your door in thirty minutes and you can grab it in a pair of sweatpants, going out stops being the default. It becomes a choice. Every time someone books a table, gets dressed, and walks through your door, they’re choosing YOU over the couch.

Which means the in-person experience has to be worth it. Every. Single. Time.

Not to add any pressure, but hey - that’s just the way it goes.

We’re living in a convenience culture.

DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Deliveroo, or whatever delivery app they’ll come up with next. You can get whatever you want at the snap of your fingers, straight to your door. And while that sounds nice on the outside, I think that convenience is quietly taking away the nuance, the care, and the connection that make a meal feel special.

If you’re opening a restaurant, cocktail bar, or any hospitality space right now, every single detail needs to be impeccable.

Not just at the soft opening.

Not just on a Friday night.

ALWAYS.

The lighting. The menus. The way your team greets someone at the door, and the way they say goodbye. Because the places that will see their bookings increase for the next few years won’t be the most convenient ones.

They’ll be the ones that make people feel something.

And the ones getting it right are already proving it.

At Boia De in Miami, if you order a bottle of wine and it’s not what you thought it would be, you’re not stuck with it. You finish your glass, they take the bottle away, and they bring you a different one. Then they serve that first bottle by the glass to other guests for the rest of the night.

No awkwardness. No guilt. Just a team that genuinely cares whether you enjoy your night.

At Macchialina, you’re surrounded by warm lighting - even if you’re sitting at the bar - and you’re able to speak to the bartender about their wine and spirits program, how they select each bottle that comes through their doors.

I always notice when the full team has the same level of education that the program director or the executive chef does - and it always leaves me curious about what they’ll do next and when I can book a time to come back and find out.

But here’s the thing: not every elevated spot gets it right.

One of my favorite cocktail bars lost me for good in a single moment, and it had nothing to do with the food or the drinks.

So let’s talk about what actually separates the places you’ll remember forever from the ones you’ll forget by Tuesday. What I notice the second I walk into a room as someone who photographs these spaces for a living. Why QR code menus NEED to go. And if you own or operate a spot, exactly what I’d get right before you open your doors.

Because getting it right isn’t about one grand gesture. It’s about a hundred tiny ones.

And getting it wrong?

Sometimes that only takes one time.

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At Whiskey Washback in New York City, people were walking up to their booth just because of the photos. They didn’t know the distillery. They didn’t know the whiskey. They saw the imagery and wanted to know what this place was all about.

That’s the WHOLE point of a brand campaign. And honestly?

It’s the best compliment I could have asked for.

One of the most iconic images from the shoot was of Ashten, one of our models, sitting in the middle of a rye field in a golden dress that matched her hair. Every color and tone in the frame blended right into the grain around her. Literally, a master colorist in NYC couldn't have done it better.

That shot is still one of the visuals that lives rent-free in my mind.

But here’s what most people don’t know: this campaign almost looked COMPLETELY different.

Our original idea was a sauna-themed shoot in middle of Minnesota winter. Instead, we ended up on the sixth-generation family farm roughly ten miles from the Canadian border that’s home to Far North - with twelve models, two eight-hour shoot days, and a setup so simple you might not even believe me when I tell you what it was.

That single shoot became the anchor for a full website refresh, a martini bar campaign, a live events strategy, AND social media content that’s still going strong nine months later.

It also involved a gust of wind, a soaked tablecloth, a dead lighting set-up, and an iPhone flashlight saving the day (thank goodness!).

But more on that later.

So how did a one-woman setup pull all of that off? Let me take you back to the farm, from the exact gear in my bag to the scene that almost didn’t happen.

Behind the Scenes

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