Nero d’Avola is Sicily’s most planted red grape. Roughly 15,400 hectares of it, more than anything else on the island, by a wide margin. And for most of the 20th century, if you drank it, there’s a good chance you had no idea. It wasn’t hiding in some obscure corner…
Bardolino and Valpolicella both earned DOC status in 1968. Same year. Same handful of grapes, mostly Corvina, with Rondinella and a bit of Molinara rounding things out. The vineyards sit close enough that you could plausibly see one from the other on a clear day, across the top of Lake…
At one point in the 1970s, Soave outsold Chianti in the United States. Not a niche category win. The actual best-selling Italian wine in the country, red or white, full stop. Ask most people about Soave today and you’ll get a shrug. Or a memory of a thin, forgettable white…
Go into any trattoria in the Langhe and order Barolo. What lands in front of you looks less like a wine glass and more like a fishbowl that skipped leg day. Nobody blinks. Ten minutes later you order a Gavi and get something the size of a shot glass wearing…
In 1985, Americans bought 11.5 million cases of a fizzy, sweet, pink-tinged Italian wine called Riunite. That’s still a record. Nobody’s broken it since. For over three decades, it held the title of best-selling imported wine in the United States. Not just from Italy. From anywhere. “Riunite on ice, that’s…
Supermarket wine aisles are designed to make you feel stupid. I’m fairly convinced of it. Fifty bottles you can’t pronounce. DOC, DOCG, and IGT stamped everywhere like the wine sat an exam. Gold medal stickers stacked three deep, as if the bottle just came home from the Olympics. Prices ranging…
I need to tell you something I only properly understood recently, even though I’ve lived twenty minutes from the source for years now. Amarone was never supposed to exist. It’s a mistake. A genuinely accidental wine. Sometime in the 1930s, a producer left a barrel of Recioto, a sweet, dried-grape…
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