Why pay for the sticker

I never bought a bottle of wine because of its points or awards, not even when I first started drinking wine, I was never attracted to the shiny medal, always liked to discover hidden treasures, it makes you proud, and I took with me this philosophy when I started Italyabroad.com. Italyabroad.com is all about importing wines, initially I then we as the team grew, liked and never because of their points or awards.

Points and awards come and go and there is no fun in selling wines that other people said were good - I would have kept working in the corporate world, I don’t think I mentioned before, but I have given up a corporate career to follow my dreams - and we will be like any other wine shop, all selling the same usual suspects. And it will be the same for wine drinkers, imagine walking into a shop and finding the same wines, it would be more exciting buying soft drinks…

Points and awards change every year, every vintage, and due to countless wine competitions and wine writers, almost every winery has at least one wine that has received a gold medal or a good score but what makes a wine competition better than another or a wine critic better than the rest? Which gold medal is more shining than the other golds or which 95 is more “95”?

During the lockdown, with more people shopping for wine online, my Facebook feed has been inundated with wine offers and still shows plenty, I guess Facebook knows, amongst the other, that I love wine, and the offers were either highly discounted cases, with wines worth even less of their selling price, or highly rated or award winning wines with crazy prices, wines I would never buy.

Having been part of this wonderful industry for over 20 years and drunk wine since I was a teenager, I tasted a lot of very expensive/rated/award winning wines, and pretty much every time I was left disappointed. Not because of the wines, the wines were normally good, just not exceptional and certainly not worth their prices.

Wine is very subjective and there are no two wine critics or competitions that would give a wine the same score. The wines are only tasted once, maybe twice if they pass the first selection, and under certain conditions, tasting a wine at the beginning of the session will give the wine better chance than tasting the same wine at the end of the session, after a long day, and I can guarantee you that a tasting session is all but fun.

At Italyabroad.com we don’t just taste the wine several times, but also taste different vintages, we want to ensure that the great wine is not a “one off”, but at the end of the process, even if it takes longer, we build relationships, we have been working with the same producers since we started.

We stock plenty of award winning wines, but for us the emphasis in not on the sticker, entering a competition costs money, but on the wine and you can be certain that all our wines, would be award winning wines if we only entered them…