Here’s what bothered me. Alcohol isn’t floating politely at the top of a bottle of wine, waiting to be poured away. You can’t strain it out. You can’t fish it out. There is unfortunately no tiny winery employee standing over the tank with tweezers, removing ethanol molecules one by one….
Someone always says the same thing about non-alcoholic wine. You honestly can’t tell the difference. I want to tell the difference immediately whenever I hear that. You took a finished wine. You pulled out one of the compounds responsible for its body, its aroma, its whole weight in the mouth….
In the early 1900s, the average Italian drank about 128 liters of wine a year. Today, that number sits around 26. Read that as a decline, and you’d be right. Read it as the whole story, and you’d be missing the genuinely interesting part. The Decline Is Real. It’s Also…
There’s an Italian sparkling wine that, by law, has to sit on its own spent yeast for a minimum of 30 months. Only then is anyone allowed to sell it. That’s two and a half years spent quietly getting better, in cellars in Piedmont, before a single bottle reaches a…
Go into any trattoria in the Langhe and order Barolo. What lands in front of you looks less like a wine glass and more like a fishbowl that skipped leg day. Nobody blinks. Ten minutes later you order a Gavi and get something the size of a shot glass wearing…
I need to tell you something I only properly understood recently, even though I’ve lived twenty minutes from the source for years now. Amarone was never supposed to exist. It’s a mistake. A genuinely accidental wine. Sometime in the 1930s, a producer left a barrel of Recioto, a sweet, dried-grape…
Here’s a story that sounds made up but genuinely isn’t. Sometime in the 13th century, Florence and Siena were locked in one of their endless territorial disputes, this time over the Chianti hills sitting between them. Rather than fight it out indefinitely, the two cities agreed to settle it with…
You are standing in a wine shop, staring at a wall of Italian bottles. Beautiful names. Beautiful labels. And then suddenly, confusion. One bottle says DOCG. Another says DOC. Another says IGT. You pick one up and think: “Am I supposed to know what these letters mean?” If Italian wine…
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