Selling Your Italian Wine to the US Market - My 15 Minute Talk

I’m going to take off my citizen blogger hat and don my work cap for this post. Read this as if it were a (TED) talk I would be giving to a group of Italian winemakers, hopeful exporters and importers, and young people looking to get into the Italian wine business in the United States.

Good morning,

As I look around the room, I see all manner of folks who are either devoting their life to Italian wine or who aspire to do so as a career. As one who had spent the last forty years doing just that, let me share some thoughts with you regarding the future and how you place your piece of the puzzle into it.

Nine Reasons to Give Thanks for Italian Wine

Italy and Italian wine, during my professional life, has been an arduus ad solem. It has so possessed me that I fear that I am like the Japanese soldier holding up in the Philippines who continued to fight 29 years after the end of WWII. At other times, more recently, I have felt the task to be more arare litus, in that the waves would come and wash away much of the hard work. It could be very simple to just walk into that ocean and keep walking, to disappear in time and space. But that will inevitably happen anyway, to all of us. Better to retreat to my highland post and keep fighting, even if the war has been won (or lost). And to the homeland, for which I have been fighting: look upon all these years, where thousands of men and women have been laboring and pursuing Italian wine’s ascension as some of the great wines of the world. How not so long ago it seemed we were all fighting for our place on the stage as a legitimate wine. That battle has been won. Let us give thanks.

Basilicata - Divining the Future of Italian Wine in a Place that Time Forgot

If you could find a window into a world, where time hasn't moved so rapidly, where things are like they were a year, five or even 50 years ago, would you climb up and through it? And if so what would you expect to find?

Basilicata is one of those places on the wine trail in Italy that has kept some of the old ways, not discarding them for the latest iPhone or Windows upgrade. There’s something about the ancient in this place that has rooted, moored and isn’t going away anytime soon. And that’s a very good thing for Italian wine lovers.

Assessing the Controversial/ Disastrous/Fabulous Italian Wine Harvest of 2017

Here we are – November 5, 2017 – for the most part the Italian wine harvest is over. And while we’re months and years away from practically determining just how successful (or disastrous) the 2017 harvest was, that hasn’t kept journalists, bloggers, winemakers, even P.R. wonks, from shouting claims from their respective vantage points. Like nervous hens, tut-tutting over every oeuvre, we have heard that it is a “disaster,” a “perfect storm,” a “vintage the likes of which we haven’t seen since the end of World War II” and “Hey, it wasn’t all that bad!” So how bad (or good) was it? What happened? How about a 3-point harvest report pop quiz - let’s see what the experts say?