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…
Bardolino and Valpolicella both earned DOC status in 1968. Same year. Same handful of grapes, mostly Corvina, with Rondinella and a bit of Molinara rounding things out. The vineyards sit close enough that you could plausibly see one from the other on a clear day, across the top of Lake…
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…
In 1985, Americans bought 11.5 million cases of a fizzy, sweet, pink-tinged Italian wine called Riunite. That’s still a record. Nobody’s broken it since. For over three decades, it held the title of best-selling imported wine in the United States. Not just from Italy. From anywhere. “Riunite on ice, that’s…
Supermarket wine aisles are designed to make you feel stupid. I’m fairly convinced of it. Fifty bottles you can’t pronounce. DOC, DOCG, and IGT stamped everywhere like the wine sat an exam. Gold medal stickers stacked three deep, as if the bottle just came home from the Olympics. Prices ranging…
I noticed it before I understood why. A bottle that had no business tasting as good as it did, sitting on the everyday shelf at my local shop here in Veneto, priced like it wasn’t expecting anyone to take it seriously. Turns out I wasn’t imagining things, and neither are…
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