We’re still around. That’s right.

Our strengths lie in the connection between expertise and service, between experience and offering pertinent information along with a good dose of transparency. That’s who we are.

In a world where some consider conceit to be competence, where communication is one-way and fake news is often taken as the truth and where influencers sometimes engage in subliminal advertising with total indifference, we’re still here, that’s right. And since I am almost the same age as Vasco Rossi, his song of that name, no so surprisingly, went straight to my heart.

Some years ago, I met the soccer player Francesco Totti and being a diehard Roma fan, I shook his hand and said: “Captain, you’re the best”. He smiled and replied, in his Roman dialect, “It’s not that I’m the best but that others are lacking”. This does not mean that we at DoctorWine are still around because the others are lacking, that would not be true nor correct to claim. What is true is that we take an approach that is a little different than the others. We work as a team and free thinking is encouraged, as opposed to just echoing my own personal views.

I say all this because we are beginning to work on our next Essential Guide to Italian wine, the 2020 edition, which again will come out in three versions: Italian, English and German. We continue to travel around to taste wines, trying not to ask producers for samples but preferring to attend previews and tastings offered by producer associations, acting as judges in wine competitions, visiting wineries, speaking to as many people as possible and exchanging opinions, all to be able to draw our own conclusions using our own palates, expertise and long experience. And the results are passed on to our readers without the presumption of being gospel and without the least intention if being some kind of “guru”, a role that I, frankly, detest.

This is what makes us different. Our strongpoint is the connection between expertise and service, between experience and offering pertinent information along with a good dose of information. This is who we are. We are not part of some wine religion. We respect everyone, we do no favors and do not exercise any pressure on producers, who we believe are free to express themselves through their wines and their own winemaking philosophies, which more often than not are aimed at expressing their land. What is important is that they do not confuse technical shortcomings with typicity. And this is where we come in, the role we play.

We give great importance to the what is behind a wine. The stories, backgrounds, personalities and places are more important than the ratings given and certainly more than descriptions involving strange aromas and off-the-wall organoleptic impressions that are found in other publications. That’s it in a nutshell. And perhaps this is why we’re still around. That’s right.