I used to think Pinot Grigio had one personality: cold, pale, easy to drink, and very committed to minding its own business. You ordered it when you didn’t want to spend ten minutes studying the wine list. Nobody at the table objected, nobody needed an explanation, it arrived cold, did…
For years, alcohol-free wine had exactly one hard problem, and it wasn’t the alcohol. It was the wine. You could remove the alcohol easily enough. Design a nice label, print 0.0% somewhere reassuringly large, and tell everyone this was the future of drinking. Then somebody tasted it. Too sweet, too…
Every wine has a season it’s built for, whether anyone admits it or not. Rosé wants sunshine. Prosecco wants a terrace. And somewhere around the point where you start wearing a scarf indoors, out of necessity and not fashion, a certain kind of red wine finally gets let off the…
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….
Somewhere in Lausanne, Switzerland, a team of fluid dynamicists spent years pointing high-speed cameras at glasses of wine. This was at one of the most serious engineering universities in Europe. Not because they wanted an excuse to drink on the job. Nobody had ever properly explained what happens when you…
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…
There’s a specific look people arrive in Italy with. Not the “I’m on holiday” look. The “I must not mess this up” look. It shows up at restaurants first. Before the food. Before the wine. Before anyone has even opened a menu. They sit down and suddenly become extremely careful…
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