The Second Fermentation
On settling, clarifying, and becoming something worth savoring
In winemaking, there’s that time after the first rush of fermentation has spent itself, after the sugar has burned bright and fast and the wine is something other than grape juice but not yet quite itself, when a second, quieter transformation begins.
The French call it malolactic fermentation. The sharp edges soften. The wine settles into something rounder, more complex. It doesn’t announce itself. It just... becomes.
I’ve been thinking about that lately. Somewhere between researching albergues in Pamplona and mapping the wine regions of Burgundy, it occurred to me that I’ve entered my own second fermentation, so to speak.
Hailey is grown. The businesses are sold. And I’ve started doing things that the earlier, faster version of me kept filed under someday. Walking 500 miles across Spain. Spending slow weeks in the Rioja countryside with nothing on the agenda but the next village and whatever’s open for lunch. Standing in a cave-carved cellar in the Loire Valley, holding a glass of something ancient and alive, thinking this is what I came for.
That version of me at thirty-five wasn't lost, she was just early. Still running at full speed, managing everyone else's calendar, measuring her days in work obligations and grocery lists. There was beauty in that, too. All that heat, all that forward motion. She was in the first fermentation. Not wrong. Just not finished yet.
The Camino was supposed to be a goal. Something to train for, to achieve, to check. But the longer I sit with it, the more we study the maps and read the accounts of people who’ve walked it before us, the more I understand that it’s really an invitation to slow all the way down.
The Camino de Santiago, the Way of Saint James, is one of the oldest pilgrimage routes in the world, a network of ancient paths that wind across Europe and converge on the cathedral city of Santiago de Compostela in the northwest corner of Spain. The route we’re walking, the Camino Francés, stretches roughly 500 miles from the French Pyrenees across the plains of Castile and into the green, rain-softened hills of Galicia. People have been walking it for over a thousand years. Pilgrims, penitents, seekers, the grieving, the restless, the curious. All of them drawn by something they couldn’t quite name until their boots were already on.
You carry a credential, a pilgrim’s passport, and collect stamps in each village along the way. You sleep in simple albergues, share tables with strangers who become, somewhere around day four or five, something closer to family. The path is marked by yellow arrows and scallop shells, and on a good day you walk twenty-ish kilometers through countryside that has looked more or less the same for centuries.
That’s the practical version. The real version is harder to explain.
To walk at the pace of thought. To carry only what matters. To arrive somewhere, footsore and grateful, and ask for a glass of whatever’s local.
That’s the thing about wine travel, too. The best of it isn’t about tasting notes or ratings or the prestige of the appellation. It’s about sitting still in a place long enough to understand it. A carafe of Beaujolais at a table outside a bouchon in Lyon. A Barolo poured by the man whose grandfather planted the vines. A modest white in a sun-warmed plaza that you’ll never be able to find again and never quite forget.
You can’t rush any of it. The wine, or the walking, or the becoming.
Wine people know that malolactic fermentation doesn’t happen to every bottle. Some winemakers don’t even want it and they like the bright acidity of what was. But when it does happen, when the conditions are right and the wine is ready, what comes out the other side is something you couldn’t have engineered. Something rounder. More itself.
Our hope is to walk the Camino in 2027. The Camino Frances. Five hundred miles, one foot in front of the other, through the vineyards of Rioja and the Meseta and the green hills of Galicia. I don’t know exactly who arrives in Santiago. But I have a feeling she’ll be softer around the edges. More layered. Less in a hurry.
The second fermentation takes the time it takes. I’m finally okay with that.
And somewhere along the way, I fully intend to stop in a small village, sit down at a table in the afternoon light, and order something local and unhurried and speak to other pilgrims from around the globe and listen to their why’s and their stories.
Because I’ve learned — late, wonderfully late — that this is the occasion.