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.
A very old grape variety grown in Italy, more precisely in the north of Sicily on the slopes of Mount Etna and in Sardinia. Its origin would be Greek because it was reported in Greece in the 7th century B.C. It is the result of a natural intraspecific crossing between sangiovese or nielluccio and mantonico bianco. It should not be confused with nerello capuccio and pignatello nero. It should be noted that Nerello mascalese seems to be a grape variety adapted to altitude, as is the case in Sicily where it is planted at a rate of 6,000 and 9,000 vines per hectare. It is practically unknown in other wine-producing countries, which is certainly due to its late ripening.
sparkling wines from the region of Italy go well with generally quite well with dishes of beef, lamb or pork such as recipes of beef bourguignon in the oven of nanou, imene's tunisian ojja or endives with ham.
I was with some wine students in Chablis, visiting the affable Guillaume Michel of Domaine Louis Michel. The 2018 vintage in Chablis was prolific, though Guillaume’s team pruned the vines as hard as normal. Guillaume has a little more than a half-hectare of the smallest of the grands crus, Grenouilles (8.74ha in production in 2018, most of which is controlled by the cooperative La Chablisienne): delicious in 2018. And, after a year’s pruning and vine-tending, after hand-harvesting and scrupulous ...
The wines from Chianti Rùfina, a unique, high-quality sub-region of the greater Chianti area, are overshadowed by those of its larger brother, Chianti Classico. Now, Rùfina producers are striving to change that with Terraelectae, a category of wines that will sit at the pinnacle of the Chianti Rùfina quality pyramid. Each producer – there are only about 20 of them in all of Chianti Rùfina – will be able to designate a single-vineyard wine made entirely from Sangiovese as ‘Terraelectae’ and will ...
Rampant inflation, the global fuel crisis, recession fears and fiscal tightening from central banks have caused equities and bonds to tank over the past few months. Fine wine has significantly outperformed global equities and most commodities, but market momentum has been ‘much more subdued’ in the second quarter of 2022, said Liv-ex, a global marketplace for the trade. The Liv-ex 1000 – which tracks the performance of 1,000 leading fine wines – increased by 3.6% year-on-year in ster ...
