I bought a non-alcoholic Moscato recently. Fifteen euros. For a wine that, with the alcohol left in, usually costs half that. Moscato has never been a wine that demands respect at the till. It’s cheap, sweet, easy, the wine equivalent of a song you enjoy without needing to defend it….
Someone always says the same thing about non-alcoholic wine. You honestly can’t tell the difference. I want to tell the difference immediately whenever I hear that. You took a finished wine. You pulled out one of the compounds responsible for its body, its aroma, its whole weight in the mouth….
Right now, across most of Italy, vendemmia is happening. That’s the word for the grape harvest, and if you live here, you feel it before you see it. Tractors moving slower through country roads because they’re loaded down. Restaurant menus quietly swapping in something new. A kind of low hum…
Every August 15th, Italy does something most countries can’t quite pull off. It stops. Not just offices and schools, which close for weeks anyway. Shops shutter. Small towns empty out. Even cities built for tourists go strangely quiet. Half the country has already left for the coast, the mountains, a…
On July 30th, in the villages of Gussago and Montorfano, pickers walked into the vineyards of Franciacorta and started the earliest harvest this region has ever recorded. Not earliest in a decade. Earliest, full stop, since anyone started keeping track. Weeks of temperatures sitting around 37 to 38 degrees Celsius…
In the early 1900s, the average Italian drank about 128 liters of wine a year. Today, that number sits around 26. Read that as a decline, and you’d be right. Read it as the whole story, and you’d be missing the genuinely interesting part. The Decline Is Real. It’s Also…
There’s a specific kind of wine disappointment that goes like this: you open a bottle, take a sip, and land somewhere in the middle: not bad, not memorable, just wine. So you cork it, forget about it, and the next evening you pour what’s left almost as an afterthought. And…
Every sommelier speaks a second language. It isn’t French, though it sounds like it should be. It’s closer to professional flattery, dressed up with grape juice as the excuse. Nobody ever hands you the dictionary. So here it is. What They Say About the Smell “Notes of barnyard” It smells…
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