Imagine three countries entering a wine competition. Italy arrives carrying the most bottles. France walks in wearing a designer suit, looking very expensive. Spain turns up with a harvest estimate that suddenly puts it ahead of France. The Spain vs France wine production race is the headline of the week,…
Picture an Italian restaurant telling you that red wine is no longer the most popular guest at the table. You’d look around for the hidden camera. This is the country of Barolo, Brunello and Amarone, so the white wine vs red wine in Italy debate isn’t supposed to have a…
Thirty thousand bottles, two trucks and seven masked men. That’s the Antinori wine theft in one sentence, and I have questions. Who wakes up and decides to steal enough wine to stock a small town? How do you move 30,000 bottles without anyone noticing? And, my favourite, how on earth…
There are certain things you expect to do on a wine trip to Italy, and joining a grape harvest in Italy usually isn’t one of them. Walk through a vineyard. Visit a cellar. Taste four wines and nod thoughtfully when someone says “you can really taste the minerality,” even though…
Picture Gérard Depardieu in gumboots, crouched in a row of Pinot Noir vines in Nuits-Saint-Georges, buying his first vineyard. It’s 1979. Cyrano de Bergerac, the role that would make him a household name outside France, is still a decade away. He’s not a star cashing in on a winery. He’s…
The first time you book a wine tasting in Italy, there are questions nobody seems to answer. Do you just walk in? How many wines are you actually going to get? Are you supposed to finish every glass, and do you have to buy a bottle afterward? What if you…
I have a small grievance with a bottle of wine I used to buy for about eight euros. It is now €11.99. Nothing dramatic appears to have happened to it in the meantime. Same label, same producer, same grapes. It hasn’t discovered Burgundy or hired a publicist. Meanwhile, everything I…
I watched a vineyard crew do something last August that looked a lot like vandalism. Entire rows of grape bunches, still small, still green, still weeks away from anything you’d want in a glass, got stripped off the vine by hand and left to rot between the rows. My first…
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