The arc of the Italian wine industry bends towards quality in the 21st century, something that has become increasingly clear to Sue and me as we have visited many of Italy’s important wine regions in recent years.
Quality has not always been Italian wine’s guiding star, however. Piero Antinori’s 2014 book The Hills of Chianti traces the 20th-century transformation of Italian wine from quantity to quality that continues today. The role of forward-thinking family wineries and their intense focus on quality from the vineyard to the cellar and beyond comes through on every page.
We recently sampled wines from two of our favorite regions — Romagna and Piemonte — that illustrate Antinori’s hypothesis about the link between quality and family-owned wineries.
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Rediscovering Romagna
I was reminded of Antinori’s book recently when we were invited to taste wines from Romagna, a region that extends from the Adriatic coast inward toward Bologna. We enjoyed these wines, mainly Sangiovese di Romagna and Albana di Romagna, when we lived in Bologna years ago (I was a visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins center there).
The wines were perfect with the city’s rich cuisine. We look for them here in America, but they are hard to find. I once asked one of the Colli Bolognesi winemakers about the problem and he just pointed over the hill. Tuscany, he said. Tuscany (and Antinori, I guess) get
This Article was originally published on The Wine Economist
