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The Italian abroad wine blog is my wine blog and diary. I founded Italyabroad.com in 2003 and have been living abroad for almost 20 years and this blog is a collection of my thoughts mainly about Italian wine and food, but also wine and food in general. I come from an Italian wine making family and got acquainted with wine at a very early age, but I don't just love Italian wine, I love any good wine and enjoy plenty of it, as well as good food and travelling, and often my posts include a bit of everything.
To help you understand Italian wines, we have designed a series of Italian wine regions maps featuring DOC and DOCG wines showing the origins and the grapes making your favourite Italian wines. I also wrote a post on the Italian wine appellation system explaining and demystifying the Italian wine classification system and what it really means for Italian wine lovers and wine drinkers in general.
Lastly, we have a Youtube channel where you can watch me tasting some of our wines and answer your questions about Italian wines and grapes, from the real meaning of DOC to what is an orange wine.
Hope you enjoy reading this wine blog and please get in touch if you have any question.
Andrea
Wine critics were once the most feared people in the wine industry, they could break or make a wine or winery, they were so powerful that they were revered from wineries all over the world. Robert Parker was the most powerful person in the wine industry, only the name would create a tsunami. Fast forward 20 years and wine critics’ opinions have very little impact: wineries are more interested in Instagrammers and social media celebrities than wine critics, even traditional regions and appellations such a Bordeaux and Champagne are rethinking their marketing strategy and focusing, aka spending, less and less on wine critics
Not the Euro, Italy and England are still playing and best of luck to both teams, not a friendly football match either; our wines and food have won plenty of awards and competitions and got great scores, still there is no mention on their pages. Another great year for our wines and food, yes, even our food wins awards but you don’t see them mentioned on their descriptions. If you follow my blog and have read my previous post on awards and competitions you would, by now, know that we taste and rate every single product we import and only import the ones we love. You will also know that we never import anything because of someone else’s score and do not list our products’ awards on their pages
But olive oil and in our case, extra virgin olive oil, is not “one”. Extra virgin olive oil is like wine, it is the final result of a process, and like for wine, each olive variety, cultivar in Italian, produces a different extra virgin olive oil and each one better suited for a specific use. Lighter, more delicate olive oils are better suited for delicate flavoured dishes, richer, more intense olive oils are better suited for richer, stronger flavoured food and true to my love and passion for extra virgin olive oil, I have been tasting olive oil from all over Italy with the aim of adding more to our range
I believe there is a strong correlation between the nation’s economy, and I would add the quality of the politicians running the country, and the decline of Italian food, in Italy and abroad. Not only, the dramatic economic situation the country has been living for the last forty years has reduced the income available for Italians to spend in food and wine, but it also has profoundly affected their mental and physical health
Being from Abruzzo I may be biased, but I believe wines from my region deserve a second chance. I remember when I first arrived in the UK, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo and Trebbiano d’Abruzzo were on every restaurant’s wine list, mainly as a house wine and mostly from one of the many wine cooperatives we have in Abruzzo - with a very few exceptions. At the time, there were very few good producers and the majority of growers were selling their grapes to the cooperatives, easier than bottling the wine
Cheese and wine is a paring made in heaven; there isn’t a better way of ending a dinner or just sipping some great wine with cheese. However not all cheeses and wines are made to go together, there are rules that can help in pairing them. Like any food and wine pairing, the secret is in finding the balance between the two.
And in a post COVID world, this attention will become even more important. COVID has left a scar on us and whether it came from a bat or not, we are all more concerned about what we eat and were our food comes from. COVID made us realising that we don’t know what is coming our way and the only thing we can do is to be careful in what we eat and as healthy as we can, and what we eat and drink is the main factor behind our being healthy
2020 has been a very difficult, challenging year for many of us, at all levels: professionally and personally, we had to reorganize our lives and businesses, rethink our priorities. We, together with our Italian small producers, have been affected, and we want to take this last post of the year to thank all of you that have helped us to get through and to the end of the year, we want to say 2020 times thank you. Thank you for your support and we wish you a great 2021.
Having been raised and played amongst vines and olive trees, I never fully appreciated how fortunate I was. At home, on our table, not only the food was homemade, but there was always plenty of olive oil and wine, and whilst for the wine I had to wait before I was allowed to drink it, olive oil has been part of my diet from day one. I would make trips to my grandparents only to eat fire roasted bread with olive oil: three, four, five slices. No sweet, no chocolate, I was happy with bread and oil, still am. Even now, I eat plenty of it, I make my own bread and I always have a glass of wine with it. Not only I love it, but it bring back wonderful memories of my childhood. Good wine and food brings back good memories too.
Soave is not the first Italian wine that has divided its appellation into crus, the same was done a few years ago by the Barolo consortium with mixed results, but Barolo is a wine with a different history and price compared to Soave. Will the new system work and help the wine to remedy to some of the mistakes done in the past? Will wine drinkers bother to learn about the different crus and pay a premium? It will take a few vintages before we can answer these questions.
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