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…
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…
If I asked you where wine was invented, what would you say? France? Italy? Spain?, Maybe Greece? Honestly, those would have been my guesses too. After all, they’re the countries we hear about whenever people talk about great wine. But here’s the part that completely caught me off guard. Wine…
Here’s an experiment for your next trip to the wine shop. Pick up two bottles that look roughly the same size and shape. Turn them both upside down. If one has a deeper dent in the bottom than the other, you are, in a very literal sense, holding less wine….
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