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The Italian abroad wine blog is my wine blog and diary. I founded Italyabroad.com in 2003 and have been living abroad for almost 20 years and this blog is a collection of my thoughts mainly about Italian wine and food, but also wine and food in general. I come from an Italian wine making family and got acquainted with wine at a very early age, but I don't just love Italian wine, I love any good wine and enjoy plenty of it, as well as good food and travelling, and often my posts include a bit of everything.
To help you understand Italian wines, we have designed a series of Italian wine regions maps featuring DOC and DOCG wines showing the origins and the grapes making your favourite Italian wines. I also wrote a post on the Italian wine appellation system explaining and demystifying the Italian wine classification system and what it really means for Italian wine lovers and wine drinkers in general.
Lastly, we have a Youtube channel where you can watch me tasting some of our wines and answer your questions about Italian wines and grapes, from the real meaning of DOC to what is an orange wine.
Hope you enjoy reading this wine blog and please get in touch if you have any question.
Andrea
A few days ago, on my way back from a day in the countryside I stopped at Asda to buy some milk for my next morning breakfast, I went to see their wines. This shop was somewhere at the border between England and Scotland. I found the Italian section and started browsing amongst their wines, a part from plenty of Pinot grigio coming from all over regions and ranging from £3.99 to £8.99 without any explanation for the non wine connoisseur, my attention was grabbed by a Soave that was on sale for a staggering £2.98.
This week I was watching the weekly episode of Breaking into Tesco which I consider a PR exercise for Tesco in a time where everyone is trying to tell us not to shop in supermarkets and be very careful when shopping. Through the program Tesco is showing us its shining facilities and offering the winner of the series, the opportunity of seeing his or her recipe transformed in a Tesco product.
Last Wednesday as anticipated and expected, the Chancellor has announced the duty increase as an instrument to fight the binge drinking, however, we all know that this won't have any effect on the binge drinking but will only penalise conscientious drinkers and will help supermarkets in growing even more their market share and put small and independent and knowledgeable shops out of business.
Until recently chocolate was thought to be better with other alcoholic drinks, warm, soft and round like Rum or Cognac but this opinion has changes thanks to a wave of wine lovers and experts happy to experiment. Matching wine and chocolate, however, is not an easy task due to the complexity of the chocolate itself and its thousand of variety and ingredients used.
I always mention during my tastings that wine is very personal, we can assess the quality of the wine, but everything else is left to our personal taste and we all have a different taste. To better explain my point, I tell you what happened to one of our wine. We submitted a wine to two different International wine competitions, probably the most famous, that includes amongst their judges plenty of Master of Wines and experts. Result: in one competition won the highest award, in the other one not even a mention. Nothing can prove my point better than this.
We keep watching on TV programs about what is behind the food available from supermarkets, but very often, the attention is not on the taste but on other elements that could be the way the lamb or chicken are treated or where it comes from.
In the last few weeks and will continue for a few more, every night on TV there is a program about the food we eat. A few nights were about chickens, then ready meals and more will come. It seems that suddenly a food revolution has started. I grown up in a culture where we were taught that you get what you pay for from when we were kids and this applies to food like anything else and having a business background, I also know that all businesses needs to make profits to survive. Starting from these two assumptions, it is easy to get to the conclusion that whenever we think we saved some money, we have actually wasted the money we spent. This is truer for the food because everything we eat and drink can harm our health, and even when it does not, they are not a pleasure anymore.
I finally got back home, it took me a bit longer than expected but I made it and I started to celebrate the festive season the Italian way with family and friends.
Yesterday I was reading the newspaper and I read about a MP calling the chairman of Tesco as the godfather of binge drinking and then I received a mail from the WSTA (wine and spirit trade association) to which I belong asking for information for a survey on how an increase of alcohol duty will affect the trade and I decided to write about it. Binge drinking is a problem.
For the coming Christmas we are all making room in our cellar for the right wines for our days and nights in with friends and families. My Christmas wines will be Prosecco to start with, plenty of full bodies, rich, complex aged red for the classic Italian meals and the traditional Spumante to accompany the Panettone and to welcome the New Year. Christmas festive season in Italy is made by days spent eating and drinking. Long meals, plenty of food eaten and wine drunk outside when visiting friends and families, a marathon harder than the real one if you are not fit. Somehow, Italians got something in their DNA about this capacity of enjoying food and wine in bigger quantities.
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