A few days ago I posted on Instagram that this year was looking peaceful from the vineyard. Clear skies over Veneto, steady temperatures, the kind of spring that settles your nerves after a rough few years.
Then I got a message from Mansue.
Our biological producer — whose vines sit in the Treviso countryside — had been hit by hail. Not the light kind. Grandine. Ice. The sort that arrives without warning in May and tears through a canopy that took weeks to grow.
Just like that, the story of 2026 changed.
A bottle doesn't lie
I talked about this in a recent reel, and I'll say it again here because I think it's one of the most beautiful things about wine: every bottle tells the story of the year it was born in. Not metaphorically. Literally.
When you open a bottle, you're uncorking a record. How warm that spring was. How fast the grapes ripened under the summer sun. How much it rained — and when. A bottle of wine is the only thing I know of that works this way. A kilo of flour doesn't tell you what the wheat field looked like in April. Olive oil is forgiving of its year. But wine carries its year on its back, in every sip.
This is what makes vintage variation so fascinating — and why I find it strange that people sometimes treat consistent as a compliment when talking about wine. Consistent means the story has been edited out.
What hail in May actually means for the vine
Hail is particularly brutal in spring because the vine is at its most exposed. The buds are tender and small. Clusters haven't formed yet. A single storm can strip leaves, scar young shoots, and rupture whatever growth has come in from a careful, patient spring.
The vine can recover — they're remarkable plants, much more resilient than they look. But recovery takes energy, and energy spent healing is energy not spent ripening. The timing of hail matters enormously: an early May storm gives the vine more time to compensate than one in August, when there's no time left to start again.
Does this mean the 2026 harvest from Mansue will be poor? Not necessarily. It means it will be honest. It will reflect what happened. It will ask more of the winemaker — more choices, more attention, more willingness to let go of what didn't make it.
Some of the most precise, interesting wines I've ever tasted came from difficult years. Because when a vine has to fight, it focuses. The fruit it manages to produce is concentrated. The wine that comes from it carries a kind of tension — a nervousness — that easier years don't always have.
We'll be watching
We'll follow this harvest closely. As importers who travel to our producers and care where the bottle came from and what it cost the vineyard to fill it, moments like this are reminders of why we do things the way we do.
A wine isn't made in a factory. It's grown, under an open sky, subject to things no one can control. And that's exactly what makes it worth choosing carefully.
We'll update you as the season unfolds. In the meantime, the wines already in our shop from this producer come from years that were kinder — or equally dramatic, in different ways. Either way, they carry their story with them. That's the point.