Dispatch from the wine cellar: Is there a place for Italian wine in 2025?

After Thanksgiving I started a project: reducing, eliminating, paring down and finely tuning my wine collection. After 40+ years of amassing wines, I realized there were wines that were: 1) too old, 2) already dead, 3) not interesting, 4) too many and 5) I’ll never live long enough to drink all of them.

Now, we’re not talking about thousands of bottles. I’m not that kind of collector. But it has gotten up into the hundreds. And my wine closet, where I kept most of them over that past 30 years, just didn’t seem to be a good usage of space and energy. I bought a small unit, holding about 160 of the top wines I wanted to keep. And I had an older unit, which could hold the larger format bottles, the port and some additional wines that didn’t make it to the larger cooler, but I just couldn’t part with them yet. That left me with 150 or so bottles that just needed to go.

I was encouraged by a friend who recently downsized and had to leave a home which held probably 2,000-3,000 bottles in his wine cave. He opted to take about 500 or so bottles to the new abode. More than I had starting out on my journey of wine reducing.

Which comes to the wine selections I’ve retained. 70% are Italian, 90% of them being red. 23% are older than 20 years. 80% of them are ten years or older. That could be a problem.

15% of the wines are from California and another 15% are sweet or dessert wines, like Vin Santo and Port. 80% of the Ports are over 20 years old the oldest being a 1970 (Grahams Vintage). I’ve put in a Request-to-Above for cold winter nights over the next 10 years. Living in Texas I’ll probably get more tornadoes and hail than snow and ice, but we can always hope.

I wish I had more French wines, but I tend to drink them up. German wines too. I absolutely love riesling.

Italian wise I’m sitting well with wines from Tuscany and Piedmont. I better start eating more steak and pasta. Great, just what my doctor would love to hear.

Disappointments? I’ve got a selection of Texas and Etna wines going back over 40 years. So far, I’ve been nonplussed by both areas.

The reality is, I’m just not drinking wine like I used to when I was working in the trade. I still like wine and enjoy wine. I tend to prefer white wine lately. Maybe because we have such long warm weather seasons in Texas (May-November it seems).

I wish I had more wine from? Maybe the higher ranges of Piedmont: Gattinara, etc. I find I don’t have much, if any, from Veneto. Only two Amarone wines and one Ripasso, all from the same Vineyard, Viviani.

Barolo reigns as the most collected, followed by Brunello. Barbaresco is the next most collected. It used to be more but I sold off a bunch a few years ago when I realized I would never have enough time to enjoy them all.

Which leads me to the title of this post: Is there a place for Italian wine in 2025?

Obviously, there will be at my table, that’s my Project 2025: to drink more Italian wine in the new year. It’ll probably be  my Project 2026, 2027 and 2028 until someone comes up with a Project 2029 to clean up the mess that started in 2025. By then I’ll have whittled it down to a reasonable mess of wine. The world? Well, that’s a mess of a bigger kind, and something I can no longer feel responsible for fixing or worrying about as much. 70 million of my countrymen and women pulled the lever they felt compelled to pull. So, I will pull corks for the next few years.

Still, I am comforted by what the science fiction author Phillip K. Dick once said,  “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” 

We shall see, shan’t we ?

 

 

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