The more you taste wine and learn about grapes, viticulture, and vinification methods, you will likely drift toward more wines that highlight terroir. Author, Joe Campanale, with Joshua David Stein, take a deep dive into Italian wines from small artisan producers using indigenous grapes and artisanal methods. In the Acknowledgements at the end of the book, Joe Campanale notes, “My professional career has been entirely focused on Italian wine, first in a retail Italian wine, store, then with an Italian wine distributor, and finally at an Italian restaurant…” With this admission you can really see how and why he delves so deeply into individual wineries, bringing forward stories about the winemakers and how they make their wines using indigenous grapes.
The idea behind this book is to capture the efforts and quality of Italian wines from artisan winemakers. Joe is not a fan of the DOC and DOCG wine pyramid, discussing its issues as it relates to quality, e.g. an unfiltered cloudy wine could be denied DOC or DOCG status for example made by an artisan winery, and then offers his method to define quality Italian wine using his “Vino Vero Venn diagram”. Vino Vero is Italian for “real wine”. For him, a great wine should embody three overlapping values: native grapes, an exceptional terroir, and an artisan winemaker who uses low intervention methods to let the grape’s characteristics and terroir be present in the glass. There are some issues with this approach as wines such as Super Tuscans, which use some International varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in the blend would not qualify as Vino Vero.
The VVV diagram shows a small overlap between the three values for his Vino Vero, but I wondered how much overlap there would be for individual wineries. Should some wineries almost have the three overlapping circles match 100%? I think that it would help the book if the authors took 2-3 wines and went through each V and explained how and where he placed each of these wines in the VVV diagram. Would we get differently shaped Venn diagrams?
They also cover current trends in Italian winemaking, e.g. pet-nat and orange wines, and finally, in the largest section of the book, they take us across Italy’s twenty wine regions, covering some of their rich history, indigenous grapes, and showing some exceptional wines and producers in each region.
In each of the twenty wine regions that the authors cover, there are detailed stories about how a winery owner purchased and started their winery, how they found obscure grapes which they painstakingly brought back from near extinction and their ancestral methods such as using amphora and long skin contact for white grapes when they produced their wines. The authors spend the majority of the book providing stories about their Vino Vero wineries, which is wonderful to read, but maybe not for someone to read all at once, as the stories have a lot of similarities. I’d recommend that a reader pick a region where they enjoy wines the most, like Tuscany, then read that section covering in this example, 5 native grapes and 5 winemakers of note. Use this approach for other wine regions in your order of interest.
Some Helpful Thoughts
As a wine lover and a cartographer, I think it would be interesting to put a pin on a map for each of the wines they list, either right at the winery, village, or wine region, and then compile this for each of the red, white, sparkling, and orange wines. Do the authors have a bias for a certain region of Italy overall or for red wines for example?
Keeping with maps, for each Chapter covering a wine region, e.g. Liguria, I think it would help if there were a detailed map that showed the areas (towns, rivers, lakes, etc.) that the authors discuss. The authors are very familiar with the regions and talk about these geographic features, but for those of us interested in the wines, seeing a map that points them out would be of great benefit. Maybe we will see this in the Second Edition of the book?
Another thing that I thought would help a reader remember a wine or winery after reading a section would be to include one wine label from each winery so they can more easily find these wines when they go to their local bottle shop.
To Conclude
This book is not meant for beginners. The authors cover many obscure grape varieties, vinification methods, and trellising, etc., that they assume the reader is already familiar. If you have been drinking Italian wine for many years and you have traveled to Italy, or are planning a trip, this book would be a good guide to finding gems in Italy. Cin Cin!
Where Can I Buy This Book?
I did see this book online for purchase from Indigo Chapters as well as on Amazon.ca. There are likely other booksellers where you can purchase this book, but you would need to check their websites.
Thank you to Clarkson Potter Publishers for providing a digital copy of this book for me to review.
