Okay, so I need to tell you something. It’s going to make you side-eye every wine shop you’ve ever walked into. You know how you pick up a bottle, check the label, maybe Google it standing in the aisle like a completely normal person? Then you take it home. There’s…
I bought a bottle of alcohol-free Moscato a while back. Fifteen euros. It got me asking questions I didn’t expect to spend this much time answering. Is this wine, or an expensive impersonation of it? How do you even get alcohol out of something once it’s already mixed in? Why…
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…
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…
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…
I’ll admit something. For years I thought the stem was there to make the whole thing look fancy. Hold it delicately, take a small sip, nod like you know something. Meanwhile the person next to you is drinking wine out of a coffee mug and having, objectively, a better time….
The wine your uncle brings to Thanksgiving because it’s cheap and nobody will complain is fermented and aged in a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Actual underground cathedrals, carved into rock, holding bottles at a constant twelve degrees. I’m not exaggerating for effect. It’s called that officially. Cathedrals. And for a…
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…
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