Tasted and approved. Every single product we stock is tasted by us.

Yesterday, when having a shower, I read on the label of the shower gel that it had been tested on the people making it. Whilst, I am sure, it is not the only shower gel being used, more than tested, by the people making it, it is the first one actually saying it. You may disagree, but I do believe that in today's crowded market, full of special marketing effects and noise, sometimes, genuine and simple messages are the ones that stick with us, and this one certainly stuck with me.

On our website, there are plenty of references to our philosophy and ethical approach and we often mention that we only import products we eat ourselves. Every single product we import has been tasted and loved, and I really mean it, by us.

There are hundreds of retailers selling Italian wines and food, but we believe we are different. We have chosen from day one to only offer great, authentic Italian products offering outstanding value for money. We put our faces on every product we sell, every single product we stock has written on it “Tasted and loved by us”. We never offered a product we were not 100% certain of, and we are proud of it.

And our approach goes beyond the products, we only work with producers that share our values, small, passionate producers, family run, ethical, environmentally friendly, that only use natural and healthy ingredients and not products like Palm Oil, all our food products are and have always been Palm Oil free since 2003. We don’t just taste the product, we follow it from vineyard to bottle or farm to product, we are very lucky.

We have been around for almost 20 years and we know a thing or two about Italian wine and food, we know very little about everything else but are experts on Italian wine and food, and we have chosen from day one to only sell the products we love.

We could import and sell very cheap Italian, non authentic and low quality products, one of the advantages of being an expert is that we know all producers, good and bad, small and big, and we could really source cheap products and potentially sell a lot of them, but we won’t be comfortable in doing that, it is not who we are and what we stand for, we want to be proud.

We don’t believe or buy rated and awarded products, if we did, it will be a very boring job, it doesn’t matter whether a wine critic has given the wine a good rating or the product has won an award, nowadays any supermarket’s shelf seems to be full of highly scored or award winning products, there are so many critics and competitions that it is difficult not to get a good score or an award or a medal.

I have been involved in wine and food competitions in the past and wrote about them more than once, and I know that to get the award, the medal, it is almost like winning a lottery, there is little objectivity, this was our personal experience when entering a wine competition. A few years ago there was the tendency to age all wines, I never liked it and still don’t, ageing a wine is not for every grape and every wine maker and I think that balancing wood is one of the most difficult things to do, it is a form of art, but because one particular wine writer loved his wines “oaked” and every winery was aiming to get their wines highly scored by him, every wine was being overly oaked. The trend fortunately is gone and currently, wine makers have changed the way they see wood and try to use it as little as possible, they want to keep and show the wine’s personality instead of making all wines tasting the same, of wood.