Wines of Italy

After living in Paris for 11 years, I felt pretty comfortable with French wines. I have a feel for the various regions and labels and for the most part understand what I am getting. Italian wines, by contrast, have been a terra incognita, with the obvious exception of Chianti Classico. Italian labeling was never as systematic as the French and in any event Italian winemaking lagged the developments elsewhere, often giving them a fusty air of mediocrity.

That's all changed now, though the bright new designer labels don't really give you the same kind of information as French labels. In his How to Love Wine, NY Times critic Eric Asimov suggests a self-tutorial as a way of getting to know wines. Buy a case of different wines, he says, and systematically try them, with food as rule, and make careful notes as you go along.

So as part of my new Italy fever, I've embarked on a self-tutorial on Italian wines. Addie Bassin's, it turns out, displays their large collection of Italian wines by region anyway, so it was fairly easy for John, who assisted me, to select 6 wines in the $15 to $20 range (which Asimov says is the sweet spot for good value) from different regions. I already had a little notebook for recording wines -- I briefly tried to record them all but realized that was pointless because I would rarely buy the same wine again -- and it has now been re-purposed for this self-tutorial. As a further study aid, I'm using Google Maps tools to customize a map and locating each wine as it is consumed. In my map searches, beautiful photos of vineyards kept coming up, so I created a pinboard for these.

Much like learning the language itself, it will be a slow process requiring some patience. But the reward presumably is that I will be much more conversant with the world of Italian wines. According to Asimov, you can drill down further in subsequent stages. For instance, if you find that you like the Piedmont wines best, restrict your tutorial to those wines, and then to a particular terroir in Piedmont and so on.