“Did you already know you were making one of the world’s greatest red wines?”
“Yes. That’s exactly the idea I started with.”
(From “Manteniamoci giovani, vita e vino di Emidio Pepe”) (more…)
There are places you can only truly understand when someone tells you how they were first imagined. Because a vineyard, long before it becomes wine, is always an act of…
Every crisis needs a culprit. The wine world seems to have found its own: young people.
“Generation Z doesn’t drink.”
“People in their twenties prefer cocktails.”
“They have no wine culture.”
It is a simple explanation—perhaps too simple—but it has one major advantage: it shifts the focus away from the industry itself. If young people are the problem, then wine doesn’t need to change; they simply need to learn how to appreciate it. (more…)
“We got it wrong.”
There are words that do not come from the mind, but from somewhere much deeper. Words that emerge before the filter, before form, before even the decision to speak them. (more…)
I still have in my mind the image of Michele Lorenzetti bending down, picking up a handful of soil, holding it in his palm and then studying it thoughtfully as he slowly lets it run through his fingers. There is nothing theatrical about the gesture, no ostentatious rituality, only a precise, almost instinctive movement belonging to someone who does not observe the land from the outside but knows its most intimate grammar. It was in that moment, far more than through his words, that I began to understand what practicing biodynamics in Gattaia truly means. (more…)
For years, the wine world lived with an almost religious conviction: wine had to be at the center of the conversation. Trade fairs talked about wine. Tastings talked about wine. Producers talked about wine. Communicators talked about wine. (more…)
When we think of a wine region, our minds often turn immediately to the wine that best embodies its spirit. It is the reflection of an identity shaped over time, the result of a silent dialogue between people and nature. What is far less common is for the name of a wine or a territory to instantly evoke the name of a producer. (more…)
There are men who found movements, and then there are men who change the very vocabulary through which a civilization looks at itself. Carlo Petrini was precisely that: not merely the father of Slow Food, but the man who forced the world to reconsider the deeper meaning of eating. (more…)
There is a phrase that, for those born between Florence and its surrounding hills, is not merely a song but something closer to a call of the heart: “La porti un bacione a Firenze” (“Bring a big kiss to Florence”). Odoardo Spadaro wrote it in 1937 thinking of the nostalgia felt by those far from home, yet even today those words seem to describe the almost visceral bond between Florence and its land. (more…)
There are stories that are not born in a laboratory, but around a table. They carry the soft sound of hand-rolled pasta, the rich aroma of ragù simmering slowly, and that suspended light of Italian Sundays, when everything slows down and seems to remain there, just a little longer. (more…)
There are tastings that linger because they manage to tell a place, a story, a vision of time. This was the case with the masterclass dedicated to Château d’Yquem, held in Florence on April 9th in the rooms of Pandolfini, the oldest auction house in Italy, where the allure of collecting met the culture of wine in a day destined to leave its mark. (more…)
My discovery of Umbria at Vinitaly 2026 began in a packed room, with a masterclass capable of conveying far more than a simple tasting. (more…)
