Lombardy tends to get reduced to a single wine in most people’s minds: Franciacorta, the region’s celebrated sparkling wine and a worthy subject in its own right, covered elsewhere on this site. But Franciacorta is only one corner of a region that stretches from alpine terraces near the Swiss border down to the flat plains…
Sicily has spent the last thirty years quietly becoming one of Italy’s more interesting wine islands, and most travelers still arrive expecting sunshine, granita and cannoli rather than serious wine. That gap is exactly what makes it rewarding to explore. Mount Etna alone produces some of the most distinctive volcanic wines in Europe, grown on…
Most travelers arrive in Campania for Naples, Pompeii or the Amalfi coastline, and the wines that could have poured for a Roman senator sit almost entirely overlooked an hour inland. That is a mistake worth correcting. Campania is home to three DOCG wines, a red that ages as gracefully as anything from Piedmont, and two…
Most people who drive the coastal roads of Liguria are looking at the water. It is hard not to. The Ligurian Sea sits below almost every vineyard in the region, close enough that the salt spray reaches the vines on windy days. But look inland for a moment, and you will notice something else: terraces….
There is a moment, driving north from Verona along the Adige valley, when the landscape changes quite suddenly. The broad flatlands of the Veneto give way to a narrowing gorge, the road is pressed between river and rock face, and the vineyards begin to climb the slopes in terraces that were cut out of the…
Southern Italy has no shortage of wine regions with serious credentials, but few feel as raw, sun-baked, and genuinely rewarding to explore as Puglia. Stretching down the heel of the Italian boot between the Adriatic and Ionian seas, this long, flat region produces more wine than almost anywhere else in the country, and for most…
Italy’s only landlocked region sits in quiet defiance of its own obscurity. Umbria shares a border with Tuscany to the north and west, occupies the geographic centre of the peninsula, and has been growing vines on its clay-limestone hills since at least the Etruscan era. Yet it rarely appears on the itineraries of wine travellers…
Most people arrive in the Veneto for Venice or Verona and leave without fully registering what they have driven through. Between those two cities alone, the landscape holds some of the most varied and genuinely important wine-producing territory in Italy. Limestone ridges rising north of Verona, volcanic basalt slopes east of the city, fog-shrouded plains…
There is a particular moment, usually somewhere between Greve in Chianti and Panzano, when you stop looking at the map and just look out the window. Rows of Sangiovese climbing limestone ridges, stone farmhouses flanked by cypress trees, and light that seems uniquely calibrated for this landscape. No amount of reading prepares you for how…
There is a moment, somewhere between the first pour and the second sip, when Franciacorta stops being a conversation point and becomes an experience. The glass catches the light; the perlage rises in a fine, disciplined column; and the nose delivers something that resists easy categorisation: ripe orchard fruit, a whisper of brioche, a mineral…