Spurred on by an impressive display of Italian wines made from autochthonous southern grapes at the June’s event ‘Radici del Sud’, as covered in my blog, I took to the road last week to explore the vineyards of Puglia, stretched out across the ‘heel’ among the olive groves, in an attempt to find out where […]

Fanciful thinking maybe, but there’s something compelling about this northern Piemonte hillside that reminds me of the Rhône’s most perfumed expression of Syrah: the combination of predominantly acidic, igneous soils, altitude, steep slopes, handkerchief-sized zones and pocket-book estates (!), the use of other grapes (Vespolina mainly) to give complexity…terroir interpreted this time through the Nebbiolo […]

Who says there isn’t a return to tradition in Italian fine wine production? Thirty years after buying the historical Barolo estate of E.Pira, Chiara has just taken delivery of the first of three 20 hl botte grande! And as she’s keen to point out that this is not a marketing ruse concocted by a modern […]

Barbaresco has often struggled with its own identity. Half the size of the neighbouring Barolo zone just ten minutes down the road, references about it being Barolo’s ‘sister’, the ‘queen’ to Barolo’s ‘king’, has only served to heighten its complex of inferiority. As a result many of its producers over the past twenty years have […]