Exploring Italian Wine One Grape at a Time
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
Today at the yearly Sommelier Challenge of Fisar Firenze our team, The Winetrotters, won and took home the ‘gold medal‘ so to say. So, sorry if the first part of this post will talk a lot about ‘our team’ and our victory in this wine competition which is mostly for fun and an excuse to … Read more
As you might have noticed, Tuscany is a land of history going back to the Etruscan era and beyond. Winemaking can be traced back as far in history too. Often I have been talking about Chianti and Chianti Classico in my articles, but this time I will focus on Rosso di Montepulciano and Nobile di … Read more
Don’t we all want to finally get away on a bit of holiday at this time of the year? That’s what me and my friend Susie did, we headed off on a mini-break to the beach last week. We went to the south of Italy, more precisely Santa Maria di Castellabate south of the Amalfi coast. … Read more
A couple of weeks ago, Vieri, a friend of mine asked me to come along to an informal inauguration of a wine bar of friends of his. Being passionate about wine, as you all probably know by now, I went along, of course, and brought some other friends, too. Uva Nera, the name of the … Read more
Aperitivo, tasting Syrah from Cortona Enjoying a bottle of Syrah 2011 by Stefano Amerighi together with friends the other night, made me think about sharing the special traits of DOC Cortona. As often at our weekly aperitivo evenings, we hang out at Le volpi e l’uva, a wine bar close to Palazzo Pitti in the … Read more
For those of you who still have not been to Trattoria Da Burde in via Pistoiese 154, at the outskirts of Florence, you should really try it out. So if you are soon travelling to Florence, you should definitely go to one of their Friday evening dinners, which are always organized around a wine tasting … Read more
Coming back to the words in Whitney Houston’s hit song So Emotional from the 1980’s, they are really perfect to describe the feelings during this last weekend at the Fisar Annual Congress in Bologna. The Competition Friday afternoon saw the final in the competition to nominate the Fisar Trofeo Rastal Best Sommelier of the Year. … Read more
When reality starts getting topsy-turvy, places like Malmö, in Sweden, are now having 6 weeks of 35 degrees heat waves while the Mediterranean countries have experienced the coldest summer since many years, but some positive things seem to come out of it all. Apart from the fact that Scandinavians get a chance to even more crawl … Read more
