It Didn't Feel Like Summer Until I Drank This Wine

In Unfiltered, Bon Appetit's wine editor Marissa Ross shares her latest favorite bottles and—you guessed it—unfiltered thoughts on natural wine.

It was Memorial Day weekend. Supposedly. All signs of the holiday were absent. There wasn’t grill smoke or laughter in the air, no frantic texts to pick up more ice, or buckets of wine to even put ice in. I laid a towel in a patch of sunshine and looked around our empty patio in our eerily quiet neighborhood, missing past summers, wondering about summers to come. I was bummed. Then I opened my bottle of 2018 Marto “Weiss.”

The skin-contact blend of Muller-Thurgau and Riesling from young German winemaker Martin Wörner, aka “Marto,” is a hazy golden yellow, the same color as the fuzzy clustered flowers on my Jerusalem Sage plant that’s grown twice in size this spring. I’d be lying if I didn’t say the wine was slightly reductive, but it blew off quickly (without decanting) and was as fragrant as our Meyer Lemon tree with added aromas of honeysuckle and warm green melon left on a party platter. It tasted of smoked ripe cantaloupe freckled with sea salt and finished with energetic lemon squeezes; its soft, fleshy texture felt like tanned skin coming out of the shower after a long day in the sun.

The Marto “Weiss” had me wishing I had buckets of ice to throw the bottle in, and a crowded patio, people shouting over my 11-hour “ULTIMATE SUMMER VIBES 4EVERRR” playlist. But instead of still feeling sad about everything that was missing, I tried to appreciate what I did have: A beautiful wine, full of life, which made me see quiet signs of more life around me: the fuzzy yellow flowered plant I didn’t know the name of until now and baby green lemons barely hanging onto their blooms.

It also made me see the life that was still in me. With a fresh glass of “Weiss” in one hand and a Bluetooth speaker in the other, I blasted my playlist and danced alone in my yard. This summer isn’t going to be like others, but it’s still going to be summer. We just have to make it so.