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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
No or low alcohol drinks is a trend and as such, as a business we can't ignore it and we are not, however, no alcohol wine or spirits is something Italians don’t do, except Peroni which we all know it is not Italian, and the ones I tried, not Italian, were not good
At Italyabroad.com we've always campaigned and supported a healthy attitude towards alcohol, we never advertised or promoted cheap wine or alcohol in general, we always said less is better, same for food, we have a clear manifesto, even when goes against our financial interests
Grappa is the most Italian of all spirits, made from a waste product, the pomace, the left over from the wine making process, and originally the poor people ‘s drink. Rich people would make and drink the wine and give the left over to the poor people for them to make their own drink, grappa, drink that until recently, did not have a great reputation amongst spirits lovers
Christmas is the time of the year where we tend to spend more on a bottle of wine, we are all looking for that special bottle, and once we find the special bottle or bottles, it comes the question on how to store and serve them on the big day, storing and serving a wine correctly becomes very important, if done incorrectly can spoil the whole experience
If 20 years ago the wines were mainly divided into well and poorly made and the one well made were all following the same approach creating very similar wines, nowadays, even wines like Lugana have plenty of shades in between.
“Appassimento” is a style of wine obtained by drying the grapes for any period after the harvesting to increase their sugar content, sugar content that once fermented becomes alcohol, hence “appassimento” wines tend to have higher alcohol content. I have seen more and more producers making “appassimento” wines, and it is already a trend, however, I am not a big fan of this style wines for two main reasons
My journey into the Barbera d’Asti and Nizza DOCG and the whole Asti region was only a short trip, a limited insight into a big wine making region, a journey I was happy to be part of. Producers in the region are facing the same climate issues as the rest of the world, with extreme weather becoming a real threat and sugar content, and alcohol, going up and up. Due to the Barbera high acidity, alcohol is not yet a problem but unless something is done urgently, Barbera d’Asti as we know it, could soon be gone
I have been tasting and drinking Italian wines for over 20 years and I thought I had seen everything, yes there are plenty of producers I never heard of, new wineries being launched almost on a daily basis, but when I saw a poster with a bottle of wine saying “Buttafuoco”, spit fire in Italian, it really took me a few seconds to understand what the poster was about
I travel a lot up and down Italy and I had not seen anything like this small shop for a long time, I cannot even recall the last time I did, but I miss buying food that way. It was more than just buying food, it was suddenly being introduced to the people making it, being educated, becoming aware of the food I was eating, appreciating it. Nowaday, is all about price and retailers like the lady are hard to find, quality is a just a logo on the box, produce are tasteless and anonymous, they could come from Italy or Brasil and we would not know, everything seems to be and taste the same. Prosciutto is not a prosciutto and Bitto is not just a Bitto, there are plenty of shades and differences in between and by shopping the way we do, we miss them.
Yesterday, when having a shower, I read on the label of the shower gel that it had been tested on the people making it. Whilst, I am sure, it is not the only shower gel being used, more than tested, by the people making it, it is the first one actually saying it.
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