A sweet red from Emilia-Romagna nobody takes seriously. A crisp white with a reputation it can’t shake. A pale, pretty red from a lake, dismissed by critics who like their wine louder. A sparkling wine so light it once didn’t legally qualify as wine in America. A Sicilian red bulk-shipped…
Every write-up of Aglianico eventually says the same thing: it’s the Barolo of the South. I read close to fifteen wine guides while researching this piece, and every single one reached for that exact phrase within the first paragraph. At some point that stops being a description and starts being…
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…
I’ll admit something. For years I thought the stem was there to make the whole thing look fancy. Hold it delicately, take a small sip, nod like you know something. Meanwhile the person next to you is drinking wine out of a coffee mug and having, objectively, a better time….
The wine your uncle brings to Thanksgiving because it’s cheap and nobody will complain is fermented and aged in a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Actual underground cathedrals, carved into rock, holding bottles at a constant twelve degrees. I’m not exaggerating for effect. It’s called that officially. Cathedrals. And for a…
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…
If I asked you where wine was invented, what would you say? France? Italy? Spain?, Maybe Greece? Honestly, those would have been my guesses too. After all, they’re the countries we hear about whenever people talk about great wine. But here’s the part that completely caught me off guard. Wine…
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