A transcript. He would like it noted that he has a Level 3 WSET and did not spend four years studying tannin structure for this. The Evening Begins 19:04 Table seven has arrived. Four people. They’ve asked for the wine list immediately. No phones out, no checking the menu first,…
Most guides to this day trip start with the same assumption: you have a rental car waiting. You don’t. You’re in Venice. Nobody drives in Venice. Renting a car just to sit in it for a day, on roads full of hairpin turns, sounds like a strange way to spend…
Years ago, at a blind tasting with a few other wine obsessives, I confidently guessed the same grape for two glasses that turned out to be nothing alike. Different country, different colour, different everything on paper. I blamed it on a long day and moved on. I think about that…
A friend of mine once brought a bottle of Vino Nobile di Montepulciano to dinner and spent the entire meal insisting it was “basically the fancy version” of the Montepulciano d’Abruzzo we usually drink. I let her enjoy the theory for about an hour before I ruined it. She wasn’t…
Marsala wine gets marketed as pure Sicilian tradition. Old-world, sun-baked, passed down through generations of Sicilian winemaking families. Here’s the part that never makes it onto the label: the man who built the entire industry wasn’t Sicilian. He wasn’t even a winemaker. He was an English merchant who came to…
Here’s a sentence that sounds made up but isn’t: officially, the grape that makes Prosecco isn’t called Prosecco. Hasn’t been since 2009. Its legal name is Glera, and almost nobody outside the wine trade has ever heard of it. Italy didn’t rename the grape because a scientist discovered something new…
Brunello di Montalcino has exactly one rule that actually matters. The bottle has to be 100% Sangiovese. No blending, no shortcuts, no quiet exceptions for a rough vintage. It’s arguably the simplest, strictest law in Italian wine, and for decades it’s been the whole reason people trusted the name. In…
I used to think Pinot Grigio had one personality: cold, pale, easy to drink, and very committed to minding its own business. You ordered it when you didn’t want to spend ten minutes studying the wine list. Nobody at the table objected, nobody needed an explanation, it arrived cold, did…
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