Look at the back of your next bottle and you might spot a small black-and-white square tucked between the alcohol percentage and the producer’s address. We already handed restaurant menus over to QR codes, so it’s tempting to roll your eyes at one more. But the wine bottle QR code…
Here’s something that should bother you a little. Italy has hundreds of wine grape varieties, and most of us rotate between about five. Meanwhile, the lesser-known Italian grapes sit on shelves wondering what they did wrong. Pinot Grigio gets the supermarket aisle, Prosecco gets the party, and a poor Timorasso…
Picture a group of professional cyclists racing through the hills of northern Italy. Legs burning, spectators cheering, vineyards quietly minding their own business. Then, at the finish line, there’s a bottle of Asti sparkling wine. Not a sports drink. Not an energy gel. Actual Italian wine. Before anyone imagines a…
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…
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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