A Look Back at 2025: Your Most-Loved Posts, My Personal Favorites, and a Few That Deserved More Hype
Am I a thought leader yet?!
It’s been about a year and a half since I started writing over here on Substack. I moved over here because of *reasons* and have enjoyed my time here immensely. Beyond being a place to share my long-form thoughts on the things that keep me up at night, it has also been a really beautiful community-building space.
There are a handful of you who reply to the emails I send you, which is really lovely, as well as folks who comment on the posts and even share my posts on their own substacks (wow!)
It really feels like a community here. A digital third-place, if you will, that harkens back to ye olde days of social media when it was actually social. I enjoy my time here because it feels less like shouting into the void, which was one of the reasons I was so inconsistent when I hosted my blog on my website and used Flodesk for my email marketing.
So today I thought it would be fun for us to recap some of our favorite articles from 2025, especially for those who may have joined us mid-year or even as recently as last week (hi! welcome! Thanks for being here!).
We will break this into posts that you responded to well, or that sparked big discussions, posts that I particularly loved writing and like to revisit, and posts that I think deserve a little more attention (growers, not showers if you will).
Three posts YOU liked best:
This one cracked me up because I genuinely did not expect it to take off the way it did. Apparently, we were all collectively losing our minds about how hard it can be to find new ways to tell the same stories.
I think that this post struck a nerve. So many of you wrote in saying it articulated something you’ve been feeling for a while: that smaller, more niche wine events are really where the value lies in relationship building. I even note that Stacy Buchanan, the founder of the Blood of Gods Merrymaking (the very niche festival that sparked this particular article), is speaking on a panel at the 2026 Unified Wine & Grape Symposium called “Wine AND? Niche Festivals & Experiences in Wine – Why They Work and How They Appeal to New Consumers.” I can’t prove my post inspired that panel, but I’m absolutely choosing to believe it did.
I am extremely vindicated in the response to this post. With the exception of, like, two people, most everyone seems to agree that we really need to stop being so precious about wine if we want more people to drink it.
Three posts I really liked writing
This article was pretty personally significant to me. I was grappling with some big feelings about leaving behind my childhood home, and writing about the quieter, less-celebrated moments where wine shows up in our lives helped me make sense of all of it.
I had so much fun with this one because the question itself is such a loaded, endlessly looping conversation in the wine world. I love to have something to rant about, and I think you like it when I rant(?)
This one started from a vulnerable place, too. I’m still navigating how to talk about pregnancy (and eventually motherhood) without it becoming my entire personality. Writing this felt like a way to honor what’s happening in my personal life while also being honest about how much it’s impacting my professional world.
Three posts I think deserved a bit more attention
I really wish this recieved a bit more love. I think it said something that a lot of people need to be reminded of. I tried to make the case that creators can be incredibly effective partners when wineries treat them as valuable collaborators, not “vapid idiots” (actual words I’ve seen used to describe influencers). I am speaking on an influencer town hall at the Direct to Consumer Wine Symposium in January, all about how digital creators are redefining the value of a wine.
Stories are one of my favorite mediums on Instagram and remain one of the most underutilized tools in wine marketing. This piece kicked off a series that laid out exactly how wineries can use Stories more strategically. If you missed it the first time around, I encourage you to check it out.
This article was my attempt to peel back all the noise and remember why we’re doing any of this in the first place. I think we often get so bogged down in the weeds of selling and marketing wine that we forget why wine is important to us.