Imagine having a genuinely good harvest and being told: excellent, now don’t sell all of it. That’s more or less what’s happening in Valpolicella this year. The 2026 harvest started early, nearly two weeks ahead of the historical average. Corvina is already in. Corvinone and Rondinella are close behind. Despite…
Picture ordering a bottle of wine at a restaurant. The waiter opens it, pours you a taste, you nod your approval. Normal so far. Then the follow-up question arrives. “Would you like that at 14%, or shall we take it down a little?” I’m sorry, what? We’ve spent years learning…
For most of 2025, an Italian winery that wanted to remove the alcohol from its own wine had to ship it to Germany. Someone else took the alcohol out. Then it came back. Not because the technology didn’t exist here. Because it was illegal to do it on Italian soil….
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…
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….
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…
There’s a specific kind of wine disappointment that goes like this: you open a bottle, take a sip, and land somewhere in the middle: not bad, not memorable, just wine. So you cork it, forget about it, and the next evening you pour what’s left almost as an afterthought. And…
You’ve done this. Stood in front of two nearly identical bottles — same region, same grape, same price — except one says Riserva. And you picked the Riserva, because obviously that’s the upgrade. Wine’s version of paying extra for legroom. I did this for years before I actually looked into…
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