The first time you book a wine tasting in Italy, there are questions nobody seems to answer. Do you just walk in? How many wines are you actually going to get? Are you supposed to finish every glass, and do you have to buy a bottle afterward? What if you…
I have a small grievance with a bottle of wine I used to buy for about eight euros. It is now €11.99. Nothing dramatic appears to have happened to it in the meantime. Same label, same producer, same grapes. It hasn’t discovered Burgundy or hired a publicist. Meanwhile, everything I…
Here’s a piece of pricing math nobody explains before you book: the fewer people in your group, the more each person pays. Book a private wine tour for two and you’ll pay roughly double, per head, what a group of eight pays for the exact same wineries, the same driver,…
Sit down at a café in Piazza San Marco with the orchestra playing, and a single glass of wine can run you €20 or more, plus a €6 per person charge just for the music. Walk two streets back from the square, and locals are paying €2 to €4 for…
Most guides to this day trip start with the same assumption: you have a rental car waiting. You don’t. You’re in Venice. Nobody drives in Venice. Renting a car just to sit in it for a day, on roads full of hairpin turns, sounds like a strange way to spend…
Years ago, at a blind tasting with a few other wine obsessives, I confidently guessed the same grape for two glasses that turned out to be nothing alike. Different country, different colour, different everything on paper. I blamed it on a long day and moved on. I think about that…
A friend of mine once brought a bottle of Vino Nobile di Montepulciano to dinner and spent the entire meal insisting it was “basically the fancy version” of the Montepulciano d’Abruzzo we usually drink. I let her enjoy the theory for about an hour before I ruined it. She wasn’t…
Marsala wine gets marketed as pure Sicilian tradition. Old-world, sun-baked, passed down through generations of Sicilian winemaking families. Here’s the part that never makes it onto the label: the man who built the entire industry wasn’t Sicilian. He wasn’t even a winemaker. He was an English merchant who came to…
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