A letter from Graham Mumm: what hosting a Crew taught me about my own wine

I am not supposed to write essays like this. The founder is not supposed to be a character on the platform. I am supposed to let the winemakers speak. I have been told this by people I pay for advice and by my mother, who has never paid me for anything but is always right.

I am writing it anyway because the thing I want to tell you is small and specific and I think it will be more useful coming from me than from a winemaker, because a winemaker is biased and I am, at least in this one moment, trying not to be.

The habit

I have been a serious wine drinker for about twenty years. Serious meaning I read about it, I visit places to drink it, I spend more money on it than a sensible person would. I have been, for most of that time, a bottle collector. I buy in verticals. I cellar in long stretches. I open a bottle when I feel it is ready, which usually means I open it with people I want to impress.

The habit I did not see was this: I almost never drink a bottle from the beginning of its life to the end. I drink a bottle when it arrives — to check. Then I close the cellar door for seven years. Then I drink it at a dinner I remember for the room and not for the wine. I have never, in twenty years of drinking, followed a single bottle's journey from grape to glass to empty.

What changed

I started SplitVineyards because I wanted other people to have a relationship to wine that I thought was not available anywhere else. That is true. It is also only half of the truth. The other half is that I wanted that relationship too. I had not found a way to buy it. I had to build it.

The first Crew I joined as a member — not as the founder, but as a regular Vintner-tier member who pays the same as everyone else — was the Champignon 2024. I followed Marie Laurent through the year she describes in her own essay. I tasted the verijuice in August. I tasted the post-ferment in December. I tasted the first barrel sample in March and the second in June. I did not taste the finished wine until it arrived this past October.

When I opened the finished bottle, I did something I have never done with a wine. I recognised it. Not the way you recognise a grape or a region. The way you recognise a voice. The acid in the 2024 Champignon was the acid I had tasted in August, when the juice was cold and green and not yet wine. The brioche note I got in December was there in the finish. The shape that had come in with the whole-cluster trials in May was the spine of the wine now. It was not a new bottle. It was the bottle I had been tasting, in fragments, for fourteen months.

What I know now

The wines in my cellar have not changed. I still have the verticals, the long cellar stretches, the bottles I open for people I want to impress. I drink them differently now. I think about the fourteen months I did not live with them. I know I am opening a finished thing, not a thing I know.

I am not going to tell you this is better. It is a different relationship. What I will tell you is that for most serious drinkers, the two relationships are not in competition. They are complementary. You still keep the cellar. You still open the old bottles at long dinners. You just also, now, have one or two wines a year that you know from the inside. The difference in how you drink the rest of the wine in your life — I have found, anyway — is surprising.

That is all I wanted to say. Back to the winemakers.