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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
The big names in the Italian wine industry are slowly losing their appeal, new producers and regions keep coming out, with a new young generation of wine makers are driving the renaissance of Italian wine, producing fantastic wines and my top 10 best Italian wine list will definitely include them
My visit to the Vinitaly this year started with a mail I received immediately after landing with a link inviting me to read it. The link took me to an article, published by a very important weekly Italian magazine, called Velenitaly about two scandals currently happening in the Italian wine industry.
A few days ago, on my way back from a day in the countryside I stopped at Asda to buy some milk for my next morning breakfast, I went to see their wines. This shop was somewhere at the border between England and Scotland. I found the Italian section and started browsing amongst their wines, a part from plenty of Pinot grigio coming from all over regions and ranging from £3.99 to £8.99 without any explanation for the non wine connoisseur, my attention was grabbed by a Soave that was on sale for a staggering £2.98.
This week I was watching the weekly episode of Breaking into Tesco which I consider a PR exercise for Tesco in a time where everyone is trying to tell us not to shop in supermarkets and be very careful when shopping. Through the program Tesco is showing us its shining facilities and offering the winner of the series, the opportunity of seeing his or her recipe transformed in a Tesco product.
Last Wednesday as anticipated and expected, the Chancellor has announced the duty increase as an instrument to fight the binge drinking, however, we all know that this won't have any effect on the binge drinking but will only penalise conscientious drinkers and will help supermarkets in growing even more their market share and put small and independent and knowledgeable shops out of business.
Until recently chocolate was thought to be better with other alcoholic drinks, warm, soft and round like Rum or Cognac but this opinion has changes thanks to a wave of wine lovers and experts happy to experiment. Matching wine and chocolate, however, is not an easy task due to the complexity of the chocolate itself and its thousand of variety and ingredients used.
I always mention during my tastings that wine is very personal, we can assess the quality of the wine, but everything else is left to our personal taste and we all have a different taste. To better explain my point, I tell you what happened to one of our wine. We submitted a wine to two different International wine competitions, probably the most famous, that includes amongst their judges plenty of Master of Wines and experts. Result: in one competition won the highest award, in the other one not even a mention. Nothing can prove my point better than this.
We keep watching on TV programs about what is behind the food available from supermarkets, but very often, the attention is not on the taste but on other elements that could be the way the lamb or chicken are treated or where it comes from.
In the last few weeks and will continue for a few more, every night on TV there is a program about the food we eat. A few nights were about chickens, then ready meals and more will come. It seems that suddenly a food revolution has started. I grown up in a culture where we were taught that you get what you pay for from when we were kids and this applies to food like anything else and having a business background, I also know that all businesses needs to make profits to survive. Starting from these two assumptions, it is easy to get to the conclusion that whenever we think we saved some money, we have actually wasted the money we spent. This is truer for the food because everything we eat and drink can harm our health, and even when it does not, they are not a pleasure anymore.
I finally got back home, it took me a bit longer than expected but I made it and I started to celebrate the festive season the Italian way with family and friends.
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