A bottle of Sassicaia will run you several hundred euros today. Sometimes considerably more. In 1971, Italian law considered it exactly the same grade as jug wine on a Tuscan kitchen table. Not because it tasted bad. Because of paperwork. The wine simply didn’t follow enough rules to earn anything…
There’s an Italian sparkling wine that, by law, has to sit on its own spent yeast for a minimum of 30 months. Only then is anyone allowed to sell it. That’s two and a half years spent quietly getting better, in cellars in Piedmont, before a single bottle reaches a…
Italy makes the wine. Tourists make the reviews. And based on what shows up online, some visitors arrive at centuries-old, world-class wineries expecting a nightclub with a gift shop attached. These are eleven completely fictional reviews, inspired by the very real energy of people who booked a wine tasting and…
There’s a two-thousand-year-old law that technically banned people from planting new vineyards in Italy. Nobody’s enforced it in nearly two millennia. Nobody’s even tried in centuries. And here’s the part I love: the emperor who wrote it gave up enforcing it within his own lifetime. I stumbled onto this chasing…
Picture coming home from dinner with friends in ancient Rome. Before your husband asks how the evening went, he leans in and kisses you. Not hello. Not because he missed you. Because he’s checking whether you’ve been drinking. I read that sentence three times before I believed it wasn’t a…
Sarah Jessica Parker’s Wine Has 70 Gold Medals and One Very Weird Bottle This summer, Sarah Jessica Parker released a wine infused with jalapeño flavor. The idea came from a TikTok trend. People were dropping fresh jalapeño slices into their glass of white wine for a spicy kick. Someone at…
Somewhere in Lausanne, Switzerland, a team of fluid dynamicists spent years pointing high-speed cameras at glasses of wine. This was at one of the most serious engineering universities in Europe. Not because they wanted an excuse to drink on the job. Nobody had ever properly explained what happens when you…
You’ve done this. Stood in front of two nearly identical bottles — same region, same grape, same price — except one says Riserva. And you picked the Riserva, because obviously that’s the upgrade. Wine’s version of paying extra for legroom. I did this for years before I actually looked into…
We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. By using our site, you consent to cookies.
Manage your cookie preferences below:
Essential cookies enable basic functions and are necessary for the proper function of the website.
These cookies are needed for adding comments on this website.
Google reCAPTCHA helps protect websites from spam and abuse by verifying user interactions through challenges.
You can find more information about our Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy.