Eight years ago

For Stefano Bonilli and Danielle Cernilli, Gambero Rosso was a dream come true: a new way to communicate wine and food. We at DoctorWine consider it to be the inheritor of that philosophy.

Exactly eight years ago, I left the helm of Gambero Rosso and brought to an end an experience that began at the end of 1986. More than 24 years of work and almost all of them shared with Stefano Bonilli, who was the mastermind of and lead player in this adventure but was pushed out by new owners two years before I left.

For us, Gambero Rosso was a dream come true. We created a publication based on what we would like to read about food and wine and this because, at the start, we were more passionate than experts on the subject. Stefano was already a journalist, and a very good one, one of the key contributors at the Bologna office of Il Manifesto during the early 1970s to then become managing editor there in his home town and later in Milan and, finally, in Rome. He left the daily at the beginning of the 1980s to work first at Il Globo and then at state broadcaster RAI, where under Tito Cortese he contributed to the legendary consumer-orientated TV show Di Tasca Nostra (out of Our Pockets). The show was later shut down for political reasons after a test on different tomato purées penalized the leader producer of the time, which in response immediately pulled its advertising from the whole network. Finding himself suddenly unemployed, he pitched to Il Manifesto, which had always remained a home, publishing an insert dedicated to food consumption, Gambero Rosso.

The initiative was above all inspired by personal passion. Stefano was a “serial” client of the trattoria of Mirella and Peppino Cantarelli in Samboseto, near Parma; a friend of Carlo Petrini who, in the meantime, had left ARCI Gola; and knew Edoardo Raspelli very well, at the time Italy’s most feared wine and food critic. He approached wine and food with profound interest and not just journalistic curiosity. At the time, I was a promising Roman “sommelier” who had already published in various trade magazine and had collaborated for several years with Luigi Veronelli as well as for one edition of Espresso magazine’s Guide to Italian Restaurants, which was edited by the famous and in some ways notorious ex-prefect Federico Umberto D’Amato.

Gambero Rosso began with Stefano writing about food and me about wine along with the contribution of some prestigious and ambitious collaborators. Cristina Barbagli carried comparative tests on food products, Edoardo Raspelliwrote about restaurants and Carlin Petrini contributed with articles on the beginnings of ARCI Gola and later Slow Food. It was an authentic renaissance workshop full of incredible talents who would later prove themselves elsewhere. Others soon joined us and after only one year I proposed publishing a new wine guide and invented the 0-3 glasses rating system that they still use today.

It all came to an end in September 2008, when Stefano was unjustly fired. After that everything began to change and the original adventure became only a memory. It is not up to me to say whether this was for better or worse. What I can say is that exactly eight years ago, at the ripe age of 56, I resigned, changed horses and invented something else.

All of this was to say that DoctorWine would like to consider itself to be the inheritor of those times and that adventure. It is based on the similar principles and involves some who used to work with me back then. What have changed are the times, means of communication and even certain winemaking styles and winegrowing methods. What has not changed is the approach we have for all things concerning wine and, to a lesser degree, food.

What has not changed is the respect we all have for the work done by so many winemakers. Nor have our fundamental principles changed, which remain exactly the same as back then: to offer, above all, a service; to give friendly and unbiased advice; and to work with intellectual honesty and sense of responsibility. We may not follow the trends of the times but we do what we know how to do. And that works for us.