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…
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…
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