DELIVERY FROM £4.95
FREE DELIVERY FOR ORDERS OVER £100
The Italian Abroad Wine Blog is a wine blog and diary where I share my thoughts, primarily about Italian wine and food, but also on wine, food, and travel in general. I founded Italyabroad.com in 2003 and have been living abroad for over 20 years. Coming from an Italian winemaking family, I was introduced to wine at a very early age. While my roots are in Italian wine, I appreciate and enjoy good wine from all over the world, alongside great food and the joys of travel. My posts often weave these passions together.
To help you better understand Italian wines, we've created a series of Italian wine regions maps that show DOC and DOCG wines, their origins and the grapes they are made of, including your favorite Italian wines. I’ve also written a post on the Italian wine appellation system explaining and demystifying the Italian wine classification system and what it really means for wine lovers and enthusiasts.
Additionally, I host a YouTube channel , where you can watch me taste some of our wines and answer your questions about Italian wines and grapes. From the meaning of DOC to what makes an orange wine, we cover it all.
I hope you enjoy reading this wine blog! Feel free to reach out with any questions.
Salute
Andrea
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.
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.
It has been a couple of weeks since my last post and I have been wanting to write, but despite being in self isolation and having plenty of time, I can’t find anything to write about. Actually I do, there is plenty to write and talk about, it is just not about wine or food.
Duty has always been an easy way for any Government to raise finances, often hidden and justified, as a deterrent to the binge drinking culture or to alleviate the financial impact on social services, police and the NHS. The duty doesn’t just affect wine, it touches all alcoholic drinks, based on their alcohol content, and until last year, they were all considered as one
Does vintage matter? Yes, vintage does affect, for all reasons above and in different ways, the quality and the value of wine and in great vintages, the best and most famous wine makers will have prohibitive prices for the majority, but there will be plenty of less known wineries with more approachable prices
When buying for our pets we read the labels, the ingredients, we spend time and money, we want to know what we are giving them, when buying our own food the main driver seems to be the price, the offer, the deal, we never check the ingredients or ask ourselves whether these are the things we want to put inside our body. Always remember, you get what you pay for
We all love stories whether we admit it or not, we all are a bit romantic, we all like the “lived happily ever after” ending and marketeers have long know it, but they have never used this approach when marketing wine, until now, until an outsider had to remind all of us the power of stories
I recently read an interview to Pierpaolo Petrassi MW, Waitrose’s head of buying in BWS (beers, wines and spirits) where he warns "that the trend for lower prices across retail was squeezing margins and ultimately threatening sustainability of wine producer". Waitrose is probably coming out now because they don’t have the same power as the other big supermarkets and are being pushed into a corner, being forced to sell the same wines Tesco and Asda sells matching their prices, squashing their margins even more
What next for me, for us, non British, is a big question mark, will I be sent back to Italy or allowed to remain in the UK? The same uncertainty is affecting the wine industry. The immediate consequence of the vote has been the drop of the value of the pound versus the Euro and the Dollar and this will gradually starting to affect our daily live, including our wines.
Craft beer drinkers, the ones that use social media, can be easily moved to wine, if they can enjoy a good beer, then they can use their acquired taste to enjoy a nice glass of wine, the step is closer than everyone thinks
Before we say ciao, why not join our newsletter & stay up to date on everything happening on planet Italyabroad.com
0 
