Top 100 red wines of Italy - Page 10

Discovering the wine region of Italy

Italy - home of Moscato, Chianti, Amarone and Prosecco">Prosecco - has a Rich and diverse wine heritage that dates back over two thousand years. Famous for its astonishing diversity of Grape varieties and wine styles, Italy is also important for the Volume of wine it produces: just over 4 billion liters (about 1. 06 billion U. S.

gallons) in 2012, from 800,000 hectares of vineyards. It is rivalled in this respect only by France and Spain. (© Wine-Searcher) Managing and marketing such a vast portfolio of wines is not an easy task, especially in today's highly competitive wine market. The Italian government's wine classification and labeling system uses a four-level quality hierarchy of over 500 DOCG, DOC and IGT titles.

See Italian wine labels. Italy is divided into 20 administrative regions (see left), all of which produce wine to some degree, and all of which contain various wine regions. The most important, in terms of quality and quantity, are Tuscany, Piedmont and Veneto. Each region has its flagship wine styles.