Exploring Italian Wine One Grape at a Time
The first week of the new year 2019 arrives in Italy with cold all the way down to the southern regions. The starting theme for this year at #ItalianFWT – Italian Wines for Cold Winter Nights – seems to fit the season very well. Let us imagine a cosy scenery at home on a winter … Read more
When I was thinking of an Italian theme for me to host this November in the #ItalianFWT group, I knew I wanted to focus on Calabria and the Gaglioppo grape. It is a very interesting region and an area that is often overlooked for other areas with higher visibility in Italy. Now, most of you … Read more
November 2018 at #ItalianFWT will be all about Gaglioppo and Calabria. We will talk about wine in Calabria with a focus on the elusive and sometimes not well-understood Gaglioppo grape. As I have many friends from Calabria, it was also one of the regions except for Tuscany that I travelled to already during my first … Read more
On January 7th, 2017, we were talking about artisanal and a sort of new generation of organic Cirò Doc wines at #WinesOfItaly #LiveStream. My guest was Cataldo Calabretta, who is a winemaker in Cirò Marina. I tasted Cataldo’s wines for the first time at Vinitaly last year. Then, last summer in I had the opportunity … Read more
The visit to the winery Cote di Franze close to Cirò Marina in Calabria was a long time coming, as I contacted them already last year when I was in Calabria. However, last year we did not manage to arrange a visit. Then at Vinitaly this year, together with Nadia, I passed by the Calabria pavilion … Read more
So this article is even more overdue than the last one about me and Nadia Padrin’s wine impressions at Vinitaly 2016 back in April. However, I have not had much time to write articles during the last couple of weeks due to work, so I will try and make up for it all now. In … Read more
This article is the second one about wineries in Calabria that I visited during my short holiday there in end-July this year. In the first article two weeks ago, I talked about the Ceraudo Winery. In this article, I will present a smaller organic wine producer who can be said to be an artisan of wine, … Read more
As you might remember from an earlier post, at the end of July I headed down south to Calabria for visiting friends and having a short vacation. I went to Strongoli Marina which is a small place on the Ionian Sea, just half an hour north of Crotone. Other more touristy places close to Strongoli … Read more
My aim has been, and still is, to walk in the footsteps of Giuseppe Garibaldi on Aspromonte, where one of his main battles took place in 1862; this after having written my PhD in history, partly on Italian unification and nationalism. So far, I have not arrived at Aspromonte. However, last week I went back … Read more