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
The problem with Prosecco is not that they are flooding the market, is that they are flooding the market with very poor quality sparkling wine and if they continue, this strategy will eventually backfire
Watch our latest Wine Conversation episode and find out if it is Gavi or Gavi di Gavi, too many wine drinkers think they are different wines, but aren't they?
Choosing a Chianti is like winning a lottery, despite the same name on the label, the wine can be very different, watch the latest episode of Wine Conversation and discover why
Watch our latest episode of Wine Conversation and discover Franciacorta, a classic method sparkling wine, and learn the difference between the different methods
I recently read an interview to Pierpaolo Petrassi MW, Waitrose’s head of buying in BWS (beers, wines and spirits) where he warns "that the trend for lower prices across retail was squeezing margins and ultimately threatening sustainability of wine producer". Waitrose is probably coming out now because they don’t have the same power as the other big supermarkets and are being pushed into a corner, being forced to sell the same wines Tesco and Asda sells matching their prices, squashing their margins even more
Unless we start educating the ordinary Joes, there is no point in blaming supermarkets for supplying cheap and poor wine, once the education process has started, the same supermarkets will be forced to improve the quality of their wines, but until then, supermarkets are simply giving what their customers want and we like it or not, is a cheap and poor wine
Wine appellations are nowadays outdated, appellations are the reasons Lidl sells Chianti at £3.99 and our Chianti retails at £11.49 and for the average drinker, they are exactly the same wine sold at different prices. Appellations are also outdated because wine drinkers want to know what makes the wine, what the grape or grapes are
What next for me, for us, non British, is a big question mark, will I be sent back to Italy or allowed to remain in the UK? The same uncertainty is affecting the wine industry. The immediate consequence of the vote has been the drop of the value of the pound versus the Euro and the Dollar and this will gradually starting to affect our daily live, including our wines.
As soon as I entered the room, the first thing that struck me was that almost every winery had at least one bottle of wine on their table with a sticker on it saying that 90 points Parker or Wine Spectator or Wine Advocate with a very few exceptions
Food Unwrapped on Channel 4 was "unveiling" the secrets behind "making rubbish wine taste good" as Kate Quilton said, like she did not know that rubbish wine can actually be made taste good by simply adding chemical "ingredients"
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