Our fifth The Essential Guide to Italian wine

The 5th edition of our The Essential Guide to Italian wine is ready!

Allow me to take a break from editing the fifth edition of our Essential Guide to Italian Wine that will be published in a few days. There will be an Italia edition, as always, as well as an English version and, starting this year, also one in German. It will be presented in Milan on Sunday, October 14, and then in Rome on the 21st. Presentations will also be held in Germany, in Munich, and then London and the United States, probably in Los Angeles.

For yours truly, this will be his 30th wine guide. It follows the 24 with Gambero Rosso, one with Bibenda and now five with DoctorWine. It all began in the spring of 1987 and, with the sole exceptions of 2012 and 2013, since then all my summers have been dedicated to working with my editorial team to produce a wine guide. It is a job that goes far beyond simply giving an opinion and involves coordinating the work of many colleagues. This because it is obvious that such a guide cannot be done by one person alone even if, as many of you know, it is my face on the cover. It is a team effort starting with Stefania Vinciguerra, who is our managing editor, and Iolanda Maggio, the editing chief who also translated into English much of the guide. Then there is Stefania Serra, our graphic artist who typesets and makes corrections to the text, with us driving her crazy. The guide’s co-authors are Riccardo Viscardi and Dario Cappelloni, who not only wrote many of the reviews but during the year travelled Italy to taste wines and meet many producers, visit estates and take part in trade fairs and other wine events. My wife Marina Thompson handles the guide’s English version and organizes the presentations, together with Elisabetta Solinas, who was deeply involved even with a new baby in her tummy, who was born on August 13 (and we all wish them our very best!). Then there were a host of other collaborators and contributors whose names you will find in the guide’s colophon and who I thank all together. These are all competent and “good” people who do not profit financially for having taken part in this project and who give their views on the wines and wineries as wine lovers and not censors or champions of one strange ideology or another in regard to winegrowing or making methods. For them and for all of us what is important is that a wine reflects where it was made and the type of wine it is, that it is the product of rigorous respect for the environment and that it is “good”, which means pleasing, comprehensible, satisfying, moving and well-made from a technical point of view. It is less important to us if the producer is charismatic, charming or a “personality”.

The wine is the only thing we take into consideration, we do not judge people, something that is much more difficult and, having been a teacher for many years, something I have learned to avoid. Nevertheless, it is also true that there are some producers who over the years have also become our friends. But strange as it may seem, this is another reason to be particularly careful and even severe in judging their wines, in order to avoid the risk if being too benevolent.

That said, I must admit that I am the first to be surprised that we are now at our fifth edition. At a time when the printed media is in crisis, when wine guides no longer have the influence or importance they once had, we are bucking the trend and every year our sales increase. And not just in bookstores. Today, some wine shops sell more copies of our guide than the Feltrinelli bookstore chain, for example. We are now selling over 10,000 copies a year and this year we hope to hit 15,000. Not bad considering the times.

Our content is respectful and I hope reliable, which is our intention. We seek to offer news and provide small introductions to each winery which are small portraits that will entice the reader to visit them. This also in view of the fact that many offer hospitality, authentic luxury hotels amid the vineyards, as well as places where you can buy wine and other quality products directly from the producer. These are beautiful places where people are authentically happy to welcome visitors. People who live their profession with enthusiasm and passion.

We try to explain the wines and the efforts made to do things right without exaggerating or using incomprehensible terms but by informing and involving the curious and those passionate about wine. This is, in a nutshell, what we are all about.