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…
I noticed it before I understood why. A bottle that had no business tasting as good as it did, sitting on the everyday shelf at my local shop here in Veneto, priced like it wasn’t expecting anyone to take it seriously. Turns out I wasn’t imagining things, and neither are…
There’s a castle at the southern tip of Lake Garda that you can only reach on foot, across a drawbridge, over water on every side. Cars stop outside the gate. You walk in like everyone has for the last seven hundred years. The Scaligero Castle in Sirmione has stood since…
Here is a sentence I did not expect to write about a hotel in the middle of a city. They make their own wine. Not “they have a good wine list.” Not “the sommelier is very knowledgeable.” The family who owns Massimago Wine Suites also owns a working winery forty…
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