Wine Story: A Boston couple’s wine-making adventure in the South of France. Plus, the battle over a Wellesley parking lot ...
What’s inside:
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This was a tough assignment: I attended a wine tasting at Frenchie Wine Bistro in the South End to get every drop of the story behind the wines.
- Reporter Tréa Lavery offers MassLive readers a deep dive into the dust up over a parking lot in Wellesley that MassBay Community College wants to sell.
- Shout-outs:
Wine All You Want
Amy and Pierre Villeneuve both had enormously successful careers as tech executives. Pierre, who is from Montreal, came to Boston with a PhD to teach at MIT before moving into private equity and tech entrepreneurship. Amy, who grew up in Peabody, is best known for transforming Kiva Systems and eventually selling it to Amazon in 2012 for nearly $800 million.
Neither of them had any expertise in winemaking. But a small thing like that didn’t stop this husband-and-wife duo from buying a vineyard in Provence and launching an ambitious winery.
Ok, OK, this might sound like a familiar story: Wealthy tech execs buy a restaurant, or shares in a tequila company, or a sports team. We’ve grown to expect this from the rich and famous.
But something about this doesn’t feel like an ordinary vanity project. For one thing, Amy and Pierre have used their ample startup skills to build an expert team and develop a rich ecosystem of partners in rapid time. (It certainly helps that Pierre speaks French.)
The speed appears to be paying off; in just a few years, Domaine Travelle has emerged from the shadows to win a Hachette star, which is typically reserved for more mature operations.
I was lucky enough to sit elbow to elbow with food and wine experts, such as celebrated Chef Charles Draghi, at Frenchie Wine Bistro in the South End as bottles of Domaine Travelle were poured alongside decadent bites of escargot and foie gras.
Draghi gave me a lesson in wine tasting for sure. And while I’m still no connoisseur, I can say that the Tilia 2025 AOP Cotes de Provence White really hit home with me. It felt like a perfect summer wine for New England with almost a hint of sea salt in it. (As always, I need to say that this is not a paid endorsement.)
I highly recommend asking for Domaine Travalle when you head out to buy your next bottle (or case!) of wine. Check out some photos at the bottom of my letter. Cheers!
Lots to Battle Over
The MassBay Community College wants to expand its physical footprint to house a cybersecurity program and a health and wellness center. To do this, it seeks to sell off a large parking lot to housing developers.
Who wouldn’t like this idea? Well, it turns out that a number of Wellesley residents don’t love it, as the parking lot abuts a state forest that has many people concerned about the ecological fallout from the potential housing development. But some think that this is just a cover for not wanting affordable housing in a wealthy town.
MassLive Reporter Tréa Lavery captures all sides of the story in a compelling read. I asked Tréa for a bit more context behind this complex issue.
Josh: Your story went live right before an important Town Meeting in Wellesley. What happened?
Tréa: Town Meeting members voted for “Option B,” to continue negotiating with the state and reserve litigation for later if needed. Option B got 118 votes or ~57%. Option A (go along with the state’s plan as-is) got 11 votes, Option C (straight to litigation) got 75.
Josh: Any other examples of other colleges running into similar problems in Mass.?
Tréa: Not that I’m aware of. This is a relatively new program specifically for state-owned land, and other projects they’ve proposed or have already started haven’t had the same level of pushback, at least according to the people from the state that I spoke to. Salem State University has already started building new housing on its south campus through this program, and even living here in Salem, I barely heard anything about it. My colleague Juliet Schulman-Hall has written about housing being built on land previously owned by colleges, but in that case, it was mostly schools that had closed, not sold off land they weren’t using.
Shout-Outs
Last but not least, shout-outs to the MassLive team for these great stories:
In our Forgotten Mass. series, photojournalist Sebastian Restrepo pulls back the curtain on a dilapidated old Broadway-style theater in Holyoke. Take a look inside and learn about how it will be restored to its former glory.
Political reporter John Micek dives into the numbers from the Anti-Defamation League’s latest report on antisemitic incidences in the region. Campus events were down, but the number of tracked incidents at non-Jewish K-12 schools increased significantly. Read more here.
Innovation columnist Scott Kirsner goes inside Cambridge-based Gander Robotics to show us a torpedo-like device that can be thrown overboard and search for a missing person in the sea. Read more here.
Have a great weekend, Josh
