Here’s a sentence that sounds made up but isn’t: officially, the grape that makes Prosecco isn’t called Prosecco. Hasn’t been since 2009. Its legal name is Glera, and almost nobody outside the wine trade has ever heard of it. Italy didn’t rename the grape because a scientist discovered something new…
Brunello di Montalcino has exactly one rule that actually matters. The bottle has to be 100% Sangiovese. No blending, no shortcuts, no quiet exceptions for a rough vintage. It’s arguably the simplest, strictest law in Italian wine, and for decades it’s been the whole reason people trusted the name. In…
Italy loves rules. Denominations, sub-zones, grape percentages down to the decimal, government seals on the cork. You’d think a country this obsessed with paperwork would produce wine that’s tidy and predictable. It doesn’t. Some of the strangest, most rule-breaking things in Italian wine happen precisely because the country takes its…
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…
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