Italy

Italian wine is our first love, and it is very the reason we are here today. The culture, passion and zest for life found in every corner of the peninsula never stops enchanting us. The breadth and depth of wine styles found in Italy is rivalled by no other country in the world. Drop yourself into one of Italy’s 20 regions and you’ll be greeted with dozens of grape varieties and production styles. Navigating the labyrinth and uncovering your favourite Italian bottle is one of the true pleasures of the wine world, and it’s what we’re here to help with!

There are red wines with an established appreciation in this country, which continue to grow in popularity, like Barolo, Barbaresco, Brunello di Montalcino, Amarone and Chianti Classico. There are the encapsulating whites of Northern Italy’s Alto-Adige and Friuli Venezia-Giulia. There are the rising stars and the future classics that smart drinkers are getting their hands on now, like wines from Alto-Piemonte, Etna and Campania, and there are award-winning winemakers who want nothing more than to produce the best examples of wines from their local area – check out Pietracupa, Cataldi Madonna and Cantina Terlano.

The soil, climate, grape varieties and production methods vary greatly across the country but there are some things that tie many of our favourite wines and producers together. Firstly, a modesty and humility surrounding the best producers, an honest dedication to their land results in beautiful wines at fair prices (the same can no longer be said for the upper echelons of other European wines). Secondly, the acidic backbones that sing through Italian wines, and acidity is a wonderful thing. It opens the wines up to so many food pairings and it’s the reason people often broadly refer to Italian wines as “food wines”. And finally, it’s how the wines really reflect their place of origin, taking on and expressing the characteristics of their terroir – whether that’s mountain minerality, coastal salinity or sun-kissed Mediterranean fruit – Italian wines have an ability to really speak of their origins and for this, we love them so.

If you’re beginning your journey with Italian wines then welcome aboard, you can look forward to 20 years’ time when you’ve tasted a lot, you’ve found your favourites, but you continue to discover and learn. If you already know a bit of what we’re talking about then it’s great to have you and we hope to offer something that excites you. If ever you want to have a chat about that bottle that whisked you away momentarily to Italy, there’s no one that would like to hear about it more than us!