Imagine ordering your favourite Italian wine and being told someone wants to swap some of the grapes inside it. Not because the grapes ran out, and not because the wine is bad. A different grape would simply make life easier for the people growing it. That’s the argument now raging…
Look at the back of your next bottle and you might spot a small black-and-white square tucked between the alcohol percentage and the producer’s address. We already handed restaurant menus over to QR codes, so it’s tempting to roll your eyes at one more. But the wine bottle QR code…
Put a gorgeous vineyard on a label, sprinkle in a few green leaves, add a line about nature, and the bottle suddenly looks like Mother Nature personally signed off on it. You haven’t tasted the wine, you haven’t met the winemaker, and yet you already feel environmentally responsible. That’s clever…
Thirty thousand bottles, two trucks and seven masked men. That’s the Antinori wine theft in one sentence, and I have questions. Who wakes up and decides to steal enough wine to stock a small town? How do you move 30,000 bottles without anyone noticing? And, my favourite, how on earth…
I watched a vineyard crew do something last August that looked a lot like vandalism. Entire rows of grape bunches, still small, still green, still weeks away from anything you’d want in a glass, got stripped off the vine by hand and left to rot between the rows. My first…
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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