Picture spending decades making wine, watching enormous amounts of it leave your island, and knowing the people drinking it might never hear your name. Then an international wine magazine turns around and crowns you its Wine Region of the Year. That’s the story behind the Sicily Wine Region of the…
Imagine ordering your favourite Italian wine and being told someone wants to swap some of the grapes inside it. Not because the grapes ran out, and not because the wine is bad. A different grape would simply make life easier for the people growing it. That’s the argument now raging…
Put a gorgeous vineyard on a label, sprinkle in a few green leaves, add a line about nature, and the bottle suddenly looks like Mother Nature personally signed off on it. You haven’t tasted the wine, you haven’t met the winemaker, and yet you already feel environmentally responsible. That’s clever…
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…
Europe has a genuinely strange wine problem this year. Some cellars have too much wine. Some vineyards barely have enough grapes to fill a bottle. Italy is looking at storage tanks it doesn’t know what to do with. France is heading into its smallest harvest since 1957. And somewhere in…
Picture ordering a bottle of wine at a restaurant. The waiter opens it, pours you a taste, you nod your approval. Normal so far. Then the follow-up question arrives. “Would you like that at 14%, or shall we take it down a little?” I’m sorry, what? We’ve spent years learning…
I’ve seen bottles described as non-alcoholic Prosecco. Alcohol-free Prosecco. Zero-alcohol Prosecco. Prosecco alternatives. Prosecco-style sparkling wine. At some point I started wondering whether Prosecco itself had been informed about any of this. Because Italy has rules. Lots of rules. You cannot grow some Glera grapes wherever you fancy, put bubbles…
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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