Imagine three countries entering a wine competition. Italy arrives carrying the most bottles. France walks in wearing a designer suit, looking very expensive. Spain turns up with a harvest estimate that suddenly puts it ahead of France. The Spain vs France wine production race is the headline of the week,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
You’ve done this. Stood in front of two nearly identical bottles — same region, same grape, same price — except one says Riserva. And you picked the Riserva, because obviously that’s the upgrade. Wine’s version of paying extra for legroom. I did this for years before I actually looked into…
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…
We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. By using our site, you consent to cookies.
Manage your cookie preferences below:
Essential cookies enable basic functions and are necessary for the proper function of the website.
These cookies are needed for adding comments on this website.
Google's current Sign in with Google client library. It renders the Google sign-in button, or the One Tap prompt, so visitors can log in to your site with their Google account. It replaces the older Google Sign-In platform library.
Service URL: policies.google.com (opens in a new window)
Google reCAPTCHA helps protect websites from spam and abuse by verifying user interactions through challenges.
Google Tag Manager simplifies the management of marketing tags on your website without code changes.
Statistics cookies collect information anonymously. This information helps us understand how visitors use our website.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that tracks and analyzes website traffic for informed marketing decisions.
Service URL: policies.google.com (opens in a new window)
Jetpack's built-in visitor analytics. It records page views, referring sites, search terms, and outbound link clicks, and also carries the shared visitor-tracking library used by Jetpack Instant Search and WooCommerce Analytics.
Service URL: automattic.com (opens in a new window)
Google reCAPTCHA helps protect websites from spam and abuse by verifying user interactions through challenges.
You can find more information about our Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy.