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…
Here’s what bothered me. Alcohol isn’t floating politely at the top of a bottle of wine, waiting to be poured away. You can’t strain it out. You can’t fish it out. There is unfortunately no tiny winery employee standing over the tank with tweezers, removing ethanol molecules one by one….
There’s an Italian sparkling wine that, by law, has to sit on its own spent yeast for a minimum of 30 months. Only then is anyone allowed to sell it. That’s two and a half years spent quietly getting better, in cellars in Piedmont, before a single bottle reaches a…
There’s a two-thousand-year-old law that technically banned people from planting new vineyards in Italy. Nobody’s enforced it in nearly two millennia. Nobody’s even tried in centuries. And here’s the part I love: the emperor who wrote it gave up enforcing it within his own lifetime. I stumbled onto this chasing…
Sarah Jessica Parker’s Wine Has 70 Gold Medals and One Very Weird Bottle This summer, Sarah Jessica Parker released a wine infused with jalapeño flavor. The idea came from a TikTok trend. People were dropping fresh jalapeño slices into their glass of white wine for a spicy kick. Someone at…
Here’s a story that sounds made up but genuinely isn’t. Sometime in the 13th century, Florence and Siena were locked in one of their endless territorial disputes, this time over the Chianti hills sitting between them. Rather than fight it out indefinitely, the two cities agreed to settle it with…
You are standing in a wine shop, staring at a wall of Italian bottles. Beautiful names. Beautiful labels. And then suddenly, confusion. One bottle says DOCG. Another says DOC. Another says IGT. You pick one up and think: “Am I supposed to know what these letters mean?” If Italian wine…
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