Twenty years ago this month, I started this blog—On the Wine Trail in Italy. Nearly 1,800 posts later, I'm still here, still learning, still looking. Thanks for coming along for the ride. Here's to a sunny future, and to all of you who make this conversation worth having. Salute, and have a great holiday.
I was in my local Italian market last week, picking up olive oil and pasta. A woman nearby stood staring at the wine section, Brunellos lined up like soldiers. She looked lost. I asked if she needed help. She did—looking for something specific. I found it for her, pointed out a couple alternatives, and moved on.
Walking away, a thought flickered through my mind: "I bet she doesn't know she just got advice from someone who spent forty years working with Italian wine." I laughed at myself and kept walking toward the eggs. What a ridiculous thing to think.
But it raises a question I've been chewing on for years: what actually makes someone an Italian wine expert?
The wine world has become obsessed with this. Certifications, credentials, letters after your name. Everyone's racing to establish themselves as THE authority on Italian wine. Take a course, pass a test, get certified, update your LinkedIn. Oh, and start a Substack, or better yet, a podcast. Don't forget to get on the junket circuit. Congratulations, you're now an expert.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: knowing the pH levels of Barbera or memorizing every sub-zone in Piedmont doesn't mean you understand what makes Barbera speak to people's souls. I remember walking into my first Vinitaly in 1984. I arrived imagining (in my wildest dreams!) that I might be one of those experts on Italian wine. Within an hour, I realized I was nowhere close. The room was full of people who had spent lifetimes learning, tasting, living this stuff. They knew the difference between Lampia and Michet (biotypes of Nebbiolo, btw) the way a musician knows scales.
I still see it at tastings today—young and old alike, all vying for their place on the ladder of preeminence. And honestly? I've met plenty of people who thought they were the world's authority on Italian wine. I've never actually met the person who was (Well actually, there was one or two, but they would deny it, vehemently).
Because here's what I've learned after four decades: real expertise isn't about knowing every DOCG or being able to recite vintage charts. It's about understanding why a simple Langhe Nebbiolo from an unknown producer can move you more than a 100-point Barolo that everyone's chasing.
Don't get me wrong—knowledge matters. You should know how to pronounce the names. You should understand where wines come from, why a Tuscan wine is different than one from Piedmont. But that's just the foundation. The real stuff—the stuff that actually matters when you're opening a bottle with friends or choosing something for dinner—that comes from somewhere else.
It comes from balance. From perspective. From understanding Italian wine within a larger global context, not just in its own bubble. It comes from staying curious instead of claiming mastery. Because once you think you're an expert at anything, there's always someone or something new to knock you down a peg or two.
The biggest revelation came for me after I retired from the wine trade in 2018. I'd spent decades as an "Italian wine director," translating and communicating the Italian wine message. And then I stepped away from all that. Suddenly, I wasn't invested in being irrefragable anymore. I wasn't proving my expertise. I was just... enjoying wine again.
It was liberating. I could walk into a wine shop and not automatically catalog everything I saw. I could order something at a restaurant without mentally rating it or comparing it to every other version I'd tasted. I could just drink the damn wine.
"Open the bottle. Drink the wine. Cut the crap." I find myself saying this more and more. Yeah, I said it again.
Here's what I want regular wine drinkers to know: don't be intimidated by people who call themselves experts. Trust your own palate. Trust your own experience. If you like a wine, you like it. If you don't, you don't. No certificate or credential changes that.
The best Italian wine knowledge doesn't come from courses or competitions. It comes from curiosity. From trying new things. From asking questions. From paying attention to what you're drinking and why you like it.
Maybe the real experts are the ones who've stopped needing to be experts. The ones who've shed that yoke and discovered they can now actually enjoy Italian wine for what it is: something to share, something to savor, something woven into a meal and a moment, not dissected and scored and ranked.
I know plenty of dead Italian wine experts who would rather be here, alive, drinking the most pedestrian bottle of Chianti than have their expertise memorialized in some dusty credential. "Give me life," they whisper.
So give yourself permission to just be an enthusiast. That's where the real joy lives anyway.
