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
I don't think he is. A part from the rumours about his never tasted but still highly rated wines according to his former colleague which could be a way from the former colleague to get a bit of attention and eventually make some money, what is Parker doing is making all wine makers to make wine the way he likes them and this is causing all wine converging to the same point, sorry points, the most sought 90+.
A few days ago I received a copy of the magazine Taste Italia and reading through I came across the wines reviewed by Brian St Pierre and once again, he picked all wined from the major supermarkets and even called Oddbins a specialist, I meant Italian specialist.
Last week Italyabroad.com we to the London International wine fair and we had a fantastic time. A part from having a successful event with all our visitors complimenting us for our portfolio wine, we tasted plenty of new wines, Italian and not. The Italian tasting was for business whilst the rest of the world one was pleasure and I have to admit that we tasted plenty of good and bad wine, but as I always say, it helps in refining the tasting skills.
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.
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