Marsala wine gets marketed as pure Sicilian tradition. Old-world, sun-baked, passed down through generations of Sicilian winemaking families. Here’s the part that never makes it onto the label: the man who built the entire industry wasn’t Sicilian. He wasn’t even a winemaker. He was an English merchant who came to…
Here’s a sentence that sounds made up but isn’t: officially, the grape that makes Prosecco isn’t called Prosecco. Hasn’t been since 2009. Its legal name is Glera, and almost nobody outside the wine trade has ever heard of it. Italy didn’t rename the grape because a scientist discovered something new…
Brunello di Montalcino has exactly one rule that actually matters. The bottle has to be 100% Sangiovese. No blending, no shortcuts, no quiet exceptions for a rough vintage. It’s arguably the simplest, strictest law in Italian wine, and for decades it’s been the whole reason people trusted the name. In…
I used to think Pinot Grigio had one personality: cold, pale, easy to drink, and very committed to minding its own business. You ordered it when you didn’t want to spend ten minutes studying the wine list. Nobody at the table objected, nobody needed an explanation, it arrived cold, did…
Italy loves rules. Denominations, sub-zones, grape percentages down to the decimal, government seals on the cork. You’d think a country this obsessed with paperwork would produce wine that’s tidy and predictable. It doesn’t. Some of the strangest, most rule-breaking things in Italian wine happen precisely because the country takes its…
Some wines make me thirsty. Not all of them, which took me a while to notice. I’ll finish a glass of one red and feel completely normal. Then on a different night, with a different wine, I’m reaching for water before I’ve even cleared half the glass. Real thirst, the…
Okay, so I need to tell you something. It’s going to make you side-eye every wine shop you’ve ever walked into. You know how you pick up a bottle, check the label, maybe Google it standing in the aisle like a completely normal person? Then you take it home. There’s…
I bought a bottle of alcohol-free Moscato a while back. Fifteen euros. It got me asking questions I didn’t expect to spend this much time answering. Is this wine, or an expensive impersonation of it? How do you even get alcohol out of something once it’s already mixed in? Why…
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