Why the place you discovered a wine matters

Ask someone about the best wine they drank last year and they will almost never begin with the wine. They will begin with the terrace, the anniversary, the friend who insisted, or the sommelier who took a chance on their behalf.

Context is part of the taste

This is not sentimentality. What we eat with a wine, who we are with, and how a wine is introduced all shape how it lands. A glass poured by someone who cares about it is genuinely a different experience from the same wine drunk absent mindedly at home.

So when we try to reduce a wine to a score, we quietly throw away most of what made it good.

The people behind the discovery

Somebody chose that bottle for their list. Somebody grew it, made it, imported it, or thought it was worth recommending on a busy Friday night. When the wine is remembered and they are not, the story loses its authors.

We think the restaurant, the wine bar, the merchant, the vineyard and the person who poured it deserve to stay part of the record.

Why it makes the next bottle better

Remembering where you found a wine is also practical. It tells you which lists you trust, which regions keep appearing in your favourites, and which styles you reach for when you are happiest.

Over time that becomes a far better guide than any single score. It is your own taste, recorded honestly, with the context intact.

What Francesca is trying to keep together

Francesca exists so that the wine, what you thought of it, and where you found it stay in the same place. Not a rating out of a hundred, but a record of the bottles that meant something and the moments that made them.

That is the simplest version of the idea. Wine is rarely just the bottle, so it should not be remembered as one.