For years, alcohol-free wine had exactly one hard problem, and it wasn’t the alcohol. It was the wine. You could remove the alcohol easily enough. Design a nice label, print 0.0% somewhere reassuringly large, and tell everyone this was the future of drinking. Then somebody tasted it. Too sweet, too…
If Italian sparkling wine is having a decent year while everything else struggles, there’s an obvious explanation. Prosecco. It’s always Prosecco, the bottle that conquered brunch, colonized the aperitivo hour. The one that convinced half the world that adding orange liquid to bubbles counts as a personality. Except Prosecco is…
Imagine having a genuinely good harvest and being told: excellent, now don’t sell all of it. That’s more or less what’s happening in Valpolicella this year. The 2026 harvest started early, nearly two weeks ahead of the historical average. Corvina is already in. Corvinone and Rondinella are close behind. Despite…
Nine Platinum medals. Every single one for white wine. From one of Italy’s smallest wine regions. At some point, that stops being a lucky year. It starts being a pattern. The medals came from the 2026 Decanter World Wine Awards, where Alto Adige outperformed every other Italian region or sub-region…
For most of 2025, an Italian winery that wanted to remove the alcohol from its own wine had to ship it to Germany. Someone else took the alcohol out. Then it came back. Not because the technology didn’t exist here. Because it was illegal to do it on Italian soil….
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…
On July 30th, in the villages of Gussago and Montorfano, pickers walked into the vineyards of Franciacorta and started the earliest harvest this region has ever recorded. Not earliest in a decade. Earliest, full stop, since anyone started keeping track. Weeks of temperatures sitting around 37 to 38 degrees Celsius…
In the early 1900s, the average Italian drank about 128 liters of wine a year. Today, that number sits around 26. Read that as a decline, and you’d be right. Read it as the whole story, and you’d be missing the genuinely interesting part. The Decline Is Real. It’s Also…
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