Who are the Future “Thought Leaders” for Italian Wine?

With harvest behind us and winemaking for the year finished, Italians in the wine trade are living out of their suitcases. Traveling to markets around the world, attending portfolio tastings and working with salespeople in the trenches. Last week there was Prowein. This week all eyes turn to Bordeaux for their annual UGC 2016 vintage tastings. But soon there will be Vinitaly. Emails are being sent to round up prospective new clients and export markets. Seminars are being scheduled. Dinners, which will go late into the night, are being planned, in and around Verona. And there are all the people planning travel to Italy to visit and taste, before and after Vinitaly. All this eating and drinking and tasting and talking, what will come of it?

The Secret Life of a Gateway Wine - Coming of Age in a Life of Wine

Living in a country that is geographically isolated from much of the world by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, many in America tend to live inside their heads. It’s funny that for those of us who love wine, the head is the receptacle for the precious liquid. If only it could occasionally be utilized as a way to flush our system and give us a more outward perspective. For some, I am sure it does. But the monkey brain inside of us, it chatters away.

I was talking to a group of young wine professionals last week, just relating the differences between now and then - then being the time when I was their age. Maybe younger. I was talking about wine and what my gateway wine was, a path which eventually led me to tables where an obscene array of aged and (often) great Barolo and Barbaresco were there for pure enjoyment. By chance, my gateway wine was a bottle of Thunderbird.

Italian Wine in the Second Decade of the Third Millennium Gets Off to a Shaky Start – 2011 and 2014 - Analysis, Expectations and Opportunities

With absolutely little or no pragmatic devices, and relying on instinct, I have hit a wall in the second decade of this new century, with regards to Italian wine. Two vintages, 2011 and 2014, are beginning to feel like other vintages, 1972, 1973, 1981, 1983, 1991, 1992 and more recently, 2002. I say this, not as a collector, for I have tasted wines from Piedmont and Tuscany from some of these vintages and have been happily surprised and rewarded. But as one who looks at these wines on an inventory spread sheet, week after week, and year after year, I have noticed alarming trends over the perception of vintages. From whence do these views emanate?

A Good Horse - And an Even Better Saddle

The other day I got a late-pay notice from a government agency. I fretted over it for a while, imagining all kinds of economic burden to my little world. And then a picture popped up on the screen, of some crazed leader laughing with his generals in front of a high powered missile, capable of potentially sending a nuclear payload into my back yard. And I forgot all about my little problem.

There are many ways to look at things, in this age of disruption. We can bemoan the loss of freedoms we once took for granted, we can activate socially and make our voices heard and we can celebrate for our side. And that is what is being done in various quarters around the country and indeed, in the world.