As uniquely wonderful as wine is to drink and share, it is equally vexing and challenging to evolve new ways of selling it in our changed world marketplace.
It’s neither supply nor demand, nor the snarl of legal and shipping restrictions, nor the innate light margin structure that keeps the model offline and unevolved.
It’s the nature of wine itself.
At its core, wine needs to be sold, not bought. It’s this wacky reality that is its wonder, its anomalous dna and, I think, the key to how it will change dramatically over the next few years. Embracing its uniqueness is the solution.
Some products get bought. Shower curtains. Chocolates. Refrigerators. Gift baskets, packaged cheese, roses, office supplies and Q Tips.
Catalogs (and big box stores) are perfect for this. A picture tells the story. No conversation is needed, no scale of value required. You can shop by price, shop by convenience, shop by brand or functionality.
You just buy these things.
It’s not just commodities. It includes books and movies, high-end linens, furniture, even in some cases automobiles and art. The universe of knowable information is easily shared at a glance, in a list, in a referral or wrapped in a brand.
Amazon, Etsy, eBay and big brand online catalogs inherit this space.
Wine just doesn’t work there. These platforms list not sell. They are not wired to make a market.
Unassisted wine sales on the supermarket shelf or the online catalog are an exercise in frustration. Labels never tell the story. Mobile buying aids are invariably quirky more than useful. To the newbie and wine geek alike, browsing with intelligent intent is usually a non-starter.
As an aside, what Parker and numerical scales accomplished, as much as I find them false and disdainful, with a kind of (evil) brilliance was to commoditize wine so that it could be bought without assistance, without knowledge, without story.
It made wine ‘buyable’, something that could be purchased against an abstract scale applied to a product that eluded objectivity. It established market value (higher is better) that could be bought against. No longer did you have an indecipherable list of wines, you had Garanimals for wine, a numerical value scale with bad on one side, great on the other. A cartoon marketplace.
Once you create objective value, you establish criteria for discount as legitimate currency. Amazing, albeit a hypothetical and bogus economy.
The Achilles Heel of Lot 18 and the host of GroupOn wannabees that are selling wine like haircuts or harbor cruises are connected, I believe, to this dependence on numerical scales, corresponding discounts and this manufactured value scale. It’s a bubble that has burst.
This won’t work for wine. It’s antithetical to its nature.
Wine needs to be handheld and sold bottle by bottle. Its uniqueness and the taste of the consumer needs to be celebrated not mollified.
This happens every time we order a glass or bottle at a bar or restaurant.
It happens every time we shop at retail, feeling the weight of a bottle in hand, talking to someone passionate about the story behind the why and the how of that wine. The story of why this 20 or so dollar bottle is the right choice to pair with whatever the food or occasion might be.
This happens at tastings of course. Wine dinners. Wine bars.
This happens around offline visits to wineries and the follow on: online clubs and direct to consumer sales. And wine clubs, mostly the domain of big brands like Wall Street Journal or New York Times, bridge on this idea of a trust handshake, giving them the right to pre-sell you what they recommend over time.
I see a very different world coming. Evolving right in front of us.
A word where the community and social commerce possibilities of the web, the unique gestalt of wine and a broader (and flattened) national, possibly international market all comes together.
A great example is Kickstarter, which doesn’t sell wine, but sells dreams, one at a time, one to one on the web. If you can find a way to sell the dreams and the visions of the entrepreneur online, with absolutely no payback to the investor except good will, you can find a way to sell wine.
I believe that both the model for selling wine and the runway on the social web is right in front of us. We already know how to sell wine. Shops do this every day with perfection.
We already know that the catalog or priced-based model won’t work except for the tiniest piece of the market. We already know that new customer acquisition works best with an off/online paradigm. And we know that the social web is part of market’s backbone, dynamic and rapt with commercial behaviors that are ready as building blocks.
I’m personally vested in figuring out the extended on/offline web model through my wine community, theLocalSip in New York.
We are a young marketplace with 35 of New York’s best wine shops, with a collective vision of the future that ties the expertise of shops, the connection to their neighborhoods, their belief in tastings as extended events to sell wine, and a community online across the city and across the country. In less than 5 months we have hosted hundreds of tastings, built our own loyalty currency, poured over a thousand different wines to thousands of New Yorkers in 20 neighborhoods across the city.
We’ve figured out part of this model already. There is more being built and rolled out as I write now to extend the paradigm, bring in the broader national market, the bloggers, the enthusiasts, and surfacing something new that connects it all together.
This post is not about theLocalSip wine community though.
It’s about the web’s possibilities, the unique characteristic of wine to be sold, not bought, and a change in how we do business in today’s marketplace with new consumer behaviors.
It’s a belief that you don’t change wine and its characteristic appreciation as Parker did to fit an outdated commercial model. You do just the opposite.
You take the evolved pieces of the web, the marketplace and peoples need to connect wine to how it’s purchased to forge a new way that builds on what works, not rejects it.
I’m truly inspired by this future. Enthused about connecting the framework of communities and the dynamics of web connected individuals with hubs of shops around the country. Maybe the world.
Scores of start-ups are being formed, chasing this opportunity in every conceivable way. A very few will work. The consumer and wine and the new artisanal wine movement especially will win.
I’m interested in ideas that speak to ways that this can happen. Smart thinking that doesn’t take the easy route nor the belief that just because it hasn’t been done, it can’t work.
Do share your ideas.
We have wine and the web in common. It’s ours to define and build. Wine and the amazing connection between people and culture through taste it engenders, makes it worthwhile. At the very least, its a great conversation to have.
At the Thanksgiving table that is!
I’m the wine guy in the family, and every Thanksgiving I take a bus from the Port Authority (really a horror) to Jersey to see the extended family (always a kick). Schlepping two bags (6-7 bottles with ice packs) on the #2 train, then on the Martz line is the yearly drill.
Some years I do better than others. I never play it safe. This year I batted almost 500 and hit one home run and three triples.
Big holiday wine learning this year: Don’t wait to introduce the wine at the table!
Start informally (I did at the kitchen counter), uncorking everything, pouring and telling stories for each bottle with the group pre dinner. Everyone found their favorite and proceeded to the table glass in hand. Great format.
The hands down popular favorite of the evening:
7 Fuentes Suertes Del Marques 2010!
Mostly Listan Negro with a smidgen of Tintilla, this luscious bottle is from the Island of Tenerife, the largest of the seven Canary Islands off the coast of Spain.
The organic grapes for this bottle are grown in tiny craters to protect them from the wind and aid evaporation from the sea air. This wine piques the imagination and just dances in the glass. Pungent, silky, replete with minerality. A slightly sweet aroma and an almost unnaturally long finish.
Surrounded by nieces and nephews, doctors-to-be, teachers and business people, this caused heads to nod, glasses to get refilled and conversation to flow.
Taste. Vitality. Friendly and pure. This is a wine with everything we love about it for every type of wine lover. And with a turkey dinner…perfection!
From Chambers Street Wines for $22.99.
Three way tie for runner up: Descombes, Tissot and Broc!
Georges Descombes Regnie 2010
I’m an unabashed Gamay fanatic. Descombes is the first Beaujolais I ever drank and one of the original “Morgan Gang of Five” that turned the world, and myself, on to the wonderfully easy and always interesting organic Beaujolais.
All flavor. This bottle was ripe, but, to me, brighter than the 2009. Great acidity to carry the flavor and make it oh-so-friendly with food.
Quaffable with some real life in the mouth. This is unfined, unfiltered, miniscule amounts of sulfur at bottling—Gamay as natural as it can be.
I love this bottle. $21.99 at Chambers Street Wines.
Tissot Arbois Trousseau Singulier 2010
I’m a long-term fan (really a fanatic) of Stephane Tissot and the Jura. I have repeatedly ignored all warnings that serving Trousseau (or Poulsard) to the non geek is a non starter.
I continually do so and am continually proven right. This wine dances between some austere structure and satisfying cherry taste. An almost perfect wine in my book and the epitome of balance. Uncannily floral. Couldn’t choose something better for sipping with roasted anything in my opinion.
$32.99 from Chambers Street Wines and others online.
Brock Valdiguie Solano County Green Valley 2011
Berkeley Winemaker Chris Brockway discovered a plot of 70-year old bush trained Valdiguie, a grape with origins in the Languedoc-Roussillon, in Solano County, California and continues to make this amazing bottle.
Fruit forward, juicy but vivid on the palate. Really lively in the glass. A happy red filled with verve.
Simply a great bottle with Turkey or, (I think), even roasted fish.
New-to- me bottle and winemaker. At $21.95 from Frankly Wines, this is an easy one for holiday gifts.
Belluard NV Ayse Vin de Savoie Méthode Traditionnelle
The big disconnect of the evening between the family’s taste and my palate.
I discovered that the family was neither white grape nor sparkling inclined.
While this bottle was a dull thud with the family, it was a celebration and a marvel for me! I finished this open bottle mostly on my own happily throughout the evening.
Rumor has it that Belluard is the only one in Savoie (or anywhere) who cultivates the Savoie native Gringet grape. The first fermentation of this tradiionally made bubbly is done with native yeast; the second with Champagne yeast. Non dosage. Over an evening of sipping this it was wacky…sometimes all tart apple, almost layered. Other times with a spicy tang. Beautiful refined bubbles.
Maybe not a family favorite but at $19.99 a bottle for natural white sparkling, I’m stocking up! From Chambers Street Wines.
Sandy Skerk 2009 Vitovska
I didn’t open this bottle (sigh!). The reaction to the Ayse and the crowds rush to the reds found this, one of my favorite wines from a hero of mine that I visited in Carso Fruili, taking the bus home with me.
It’s open now, being sipped as I write this.
I truly love this bottle of wine. I can’t sip it and taste its weighty balance, its layered acidity, and its insanely long and rich mineral finish without thinking of the Carso and my morning at Skerk Vineyard. An amazing place, back to the Alps, front to the Adriatic, all limestone and iron ore and wonder.
Available only at 67 Wine in New York for $34.99.
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NOTE: Half of my Thanksgiving wines were discovered at wine tastings put on by New York wine shops that are part of theLocalSip wine marketplace that I founded. All the wines are available online through these shops.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!
Sometimes we rail for change over a long period of time, wake up one morning, and find that we have already turned the corner.
With the often rancorous debate over natural wine, I believe this has finally happened.
I just returned from the European Wine Bloggers Conference in Izmir, Turkey, where a Natural Wine Panel, with an A list of presenters in front of a large global audience of wine influencers was billed as a main event.
As articulate as the panel was, as polarized as the views certainly were, it seemed somewhat irrelevant to today’s marketplace. Quaintly retro and academic like a lecture on social issues years after a shift in norms.
It just didn’t seem to matter any longer.
We live in a different world today.
Dramatically and wonderfully so from five or six years ago, when natural wine as a ‘movement’ under the leadership of Alice Feiring and others, collided with the wine world’s establishment. The marketplace has evolved and moved on. The pocketful of remaining natural wine naysayers sound shrill and out-of-touch.
There’s a new global culture at play today. An almost perfect wave of change with an informed market and a feeling of collective responsibility for our personal health and the health of the planet.
Add to that the ubiquity of the social web that has normalized a globalization of local markets, and a consumer propensity towards the artisanal, towards the unique and towards interesting over perfect, especially in our food products.
This is true of a population of consumers wherever I travel in the states and Europe. En route back from my trip to Turkey this week, I can state that this exists firmly on both sides of the Bosphorus!
I am not talking just about wine. Wine didn’t invent the category of natural as a phrase or filter for consumable goods. It does, however, fit nicely under it.
In today’s world, people don’t just buy products, they buy beliefs.
True for jeans. True for food. True for wine.
The broad market, empowered and informed, has leaned toward natural as a norm, healthy as sexy in our food and agricultural products, sustainability as something to be striven for, social responsibility in manufacturing.
This is neither cult nor religion, just a general state of how an ever-growing portion of the population perceives what is ideal and right. The market would rather buy local, buy fresh, and would rather take referrals from friends rather than dogma from pundits.
It’s a signature of our times.
Natural as a term thrives in the marketplace because it is neither a definition nor a certification.
Organic is regulated certification with legal meaning on a wine bottle. This is true for Biodynamic as well. These certifications serve their purpose and tell the buyer how the grapes were grown.
But for wine, these certifications tell only a small part of the story, concentrating only on what happens in the vineyard. With the exception of sulphur, not at all on what is added or what happens in the cave.
Natural is a category, not a certification and a superset of both Organic and Biodynamic. It provides a lens into how a wine is made beyond how the grapes are grown. It guides you to discover the intent of the winemaker and starts you on a path to understand how a wine is made beyond simply the fruit.
Natural means loosely that people made the wine with organic materials and a non-interventionist approach. It means in many cases that the intent was to make the wine with natural yeasts and indigenous grapes in a traditional fashion.
These are neither rules nor laws, they are intents. The winemaker or your merchant can tell you what was done. The natural category just guides you to the point of discovery and disclosure.
The wine world is bereft of labels. Bereft of ways for the consumer to find some way to approach wine without mandatory education and with comfort.
Natural does this job well.
Interesting is the new perfect.
We live in the era of the small brand. The individual. The artisan.
Remarkably, what the Internet and technology have done to a flattened global world is to put the local, the unique, the hand made and the limited production on a pedestal.
We want to buy products that smack of the place they were made and the person who made them.
When I crack open a bottle of Vitovska from Carso on my roof deck in Manhattan and talk about how in Sandy Skerk’s cellar you can see the vines working their way through pure limestone and iron, friends get it immediately. They can taste the story in all its unfamiliarity and natural interest. This bottle is the product of that unique place from this unique winemaker with these wonderful (and unique!) grapes.
Nothing tastes more perfect than a story and a belief that is unique and geo-stamped as a place in your thoughts.
Natural wine as a belief doesn’t have a lock on interesting, but interesting is one of the characteristics you certainly do look for in a natural wine.
The market is not the least bit confused.
Natural as a category is everywhere in New York City. As the moniker under the name of a wine shop or bar. On menus. Used by sommeliers at the best restaurants.
Pundits are (sigh!) still decrying the confusion of the term natural and even some of my favorite natural winemakers, like Frank Cornelissen or Salvo Foti do indeed balk at being classified.
But the consumer cares.
Most consumers understand little how wine is made, and are happy to have a category that gives them comfort and consuming direction. They don’t wear t-shirts with natural written on them, but they do search for wines and food and product that are just that.
Natural wine as a category, a refrain even, used by boutique distributors, custom importers, shops and many winemakers, is a connector to a customer base that cares, that wants great taste and that want to shop within its beliefs.
To end…
The world has turned a big corner to a new path.
And in the wine world, this is the most exciting, open and undefined time to make, sell and enjoy wine made by individuals in unique spots on the globe with a belief in making wine as naturally as possible.
I’ve been striving to understand, and blogging on natural wine for years. It excites me intellectually and challenges my palate.
All the discussions in Turkey driving me to write this post on the way home have really whetted my thirst for something wonderful. I’ve been day dreaming about walking into Sandy Skerk’s cellar with him in Carso and tasting Malvasia from his barrel.
Time to shut the laptop and head to the wine cooler.
I’m thinking of that bottle of Ograde from Skerk that I’ve been saving, or maybe that Foti field blend that I first tasted at the Vigna del Bosco vineyard with Etna smoking in the background, to sip as I push this post live.
Sherryfest Saturday in New York last week was a retail revelation, an expression of the true power of community as a connector for thousands of people who enjoy wine as part of their everyday lives.
New York City is as complex and fragmented a retail reality as it is immensely influential and powerful economically. One of the country’s largest cities doesn’t sell wine in most grocery stores and big box venues are absent.
Yet across scores of micro communities, neighborhood wine shops sell astounding quantities of wine, mostly one or two bottles at a time, mostly to local customers who roll in from the street or bump into the shops on the web.
theLocalSip, the wine community I started this past summer, was privileged to be the connecting web platform for retail shops across Manhattan and Brooklyn for Sherryfest. On a citywide basis, the community of some 25 independent wine shops in almost 20 neighborhoods coordinated with the festival and hosted their tastings and their wines being poured (and sold) on theLocalSip web site.
Amazing actually.
Crowds were prevalent at every shop I visited. Hundreds (maybe more) of people tasted Sherry for free, dogs and kids in tow on Saturday shopping, chatting and sipping with their local experts.
Having fun and buying lots of wine. Community and commerce becoming one.
Many deserve credit for Sherryfest, especially the wine shops, Rosemary Gray and Peter Liem (organizers of the festival), and local wine writers. But there was evidence, big time, that theLocalSip community pulled together and let the city and the online world know when, where and what was going on.
What theLocalSip did for the festival was connect retail passion and expertise with a massive and fragmented on-foot New York population of wine drinkers. All connected in a hybrid real world and web platform.
We have been doing this for almost three months now with 325 tastings and close to a thousand different wines being poured for thousands of New Yorkers. Sherryfest was certainly a big aha for everyone at the power of the community that has been created.
We think of theLocalSip as a platformed expression of a community around New York, its neighborhoods, wine shops and the local businesspeople who run them. All wrapped up in a love of wine and food and hospitality.
What theLocalSip community does is connect the pieces. We connect the online and offline worlds of referrals and commerce, and bring local into a citywide and national focus.
theLocalSip community is built on a few basic beliefs:
We don’t believe that a wine community can exist solely online through sales sites and discount clubs. It takes the trust that shops earn one bottle at a time with their customers. That friends and bloggers earn one referral or post at a time with their networks.
We believe that that somewhere in the chain of recommending a wine, someone you trust has tasted it. It’s a handshake of taste that connects wine lovers down the street and across the web with merchant experts.
We also know that with a community web platform like theLocalSip, great neighborhood shops will find a national community online for their choices of wine–the shop’s palate if you will.
And mostly, we know that wine is not just the arcane stuff of the pundit. it’s about taste, the story in the bottle and creating memories around the occasion of drinking it.
theLocalSip is growing!
And we are seeking the best New York (all five boroughs!) wine shops from every neighborhood.
If you have the good fortune of living in New York and can wander into the now 30+ theLocalSip shops and taste, please give us a trial run. The service is free and takes just a second to join.
If you are elsewhere in the country, possibly an online connection to a shop that themes its tastings in a way that appeals could become a source of information and an online purchase source for you.
Regardless of whether you are here in New York or anywhere in the country, my bet is that if you enjoy wine and want the experience of buying to be as frictionless as the pleasure of drinking, this community may be for you.
theLocalSip wine community lives right here!
To the 60 winemakers on Mt. Etna, Sicily, one of the most active volcanoes on the planet, terroir is hardly an abstraction.
Etna has been erupting for some 500,000 years, at least once a year for the past decade. Continuously active. Always ‘blowing volcanic chunks’ in the slang of the volcanist.
As a long-term fan of the area’s wine, Etna as a real place that sits under the perpetually smoking volcano was something bookish and abstract in my mind till I climbed these hillside vineyards and let the volcanic sand run through my fingers.
I’ve loved and written about Etna over the years through the bottles of four local winemaking greats.
Benanti the patriarch. Biondi the beloved artisan. Foti, the soul of Etna, living and breathing the belief that the vineyard is indeed the wine. And Cornelissen, the foreign iconoclast, whose wines I love but there’s invariably a gap between unquenchable interest and pure sipping enjoyment.
From the first sunrise with the fuming volcano straight in view, it became clear what while I loved the taste of Etna from afar, I had missed the true magic of this place till that very moment.
The magic that comes with a smidgen more hands-on understanding and a healthy dose of seeing the land up close and personal.
That’s the magic I want to share.
It rises from a melding of the volcano as the heartbeat of Etna’s terroir, the astounding ubiquity of ancient, often ungrafted, indigenous grape vines, and a wholehearted embrace of traditional (and natural) winemaking from many in the region.
Define terroir as you like, but what’s clear to me, across grape variety and microclimates a plenty in this area, is that Etna itself as the volcanic replenisher of the soil is the atomic component of their terroir.
And to every one of us who picks a bottle of Etna Rosso or Etna Bianco from a restaurant menu or shop shelf, this is the plot of the story you are tasting.
The volcano is definitely the thing…
As a guest of the Etna Wine Blogger’s tour recently, we four-wheeled it to the top of the volcano, jeeped and labored up steep vineyard slopes, visited some 20 producers and tasted on the hillsides where the grapes were grown.
Unique beauty and surreal volcanic landscapes aside, I just couldn’t wrap my palate around the differences in tastes from one Etna Rosso or Nerello Mascalese to another. With the whites the differences from one Etna Bianco or Carricante were even more striking.
Boggling how different the tannins in the reds were from place to place, and the palate itself in the whites as we circumnavigated the volcano on three sides.
Elevations and microclimates aside, it gelled for me when I picked up this piece of volcanic flotsum on a steep vineyard walk in the historic Brancatelli, Monte Ilice Vineyard.
This chunk of ash, about a month old, (sitting on my desk now) is a tangible example of what drops from the sky and characterizes the soil I was walking on and what the grapes are grown in.
Nothing impacts more of what we taste in wine than the soil itself. This piece of air born lava is my clue to understanding the diversity of taste in the area and my deep visceral appeal for this region.
Etna is always spewing forth and a natural progenitor of the soil itself. Terroir comes from the sky here. Each bit of volcanic activity and each chunk of ash like that in my hand is different, from a different strata of the earth with different elements and mineral densities. The winds are the distribution system spreading the new additions to terroir willy nilly across the region.
And of course the less frequent, more dramatic eruptions which change the landscape and the land itself with lava flows.
What a place!
Like a child’s story. What really amazing terroir with uniquely fingerprinted and tasty results!
The vines are the thing….
Character and age never looked so good nor spread so wide in one place.
The photo is a 225-year-old Alicante vine in the I Vigneri, Vigna Centenaria Vineyard of Salvo Foti. Most of the vines in this vineyard exceed 100 years in age.
Many wine lovers relish the depth and concentration of flavors that we get from wines made from really ancient vines. A taste that comes with the character and complexity of age.
We pay a premium for this character on the market. Because of their scarcity and their quality. Old Vines in English, Vieilles Vignes in French and Alte Reben in German are wine label designations of something special everywhere in the wine world.
From a scarcity perspective, not in Etna it appears.
In most of the older vineyards, scattered everywhere, 60+ year-old vines and older seemed commonplace. I don’t know the why of this. Maybe it’s the volcanic sandy soil that contributes to the high number of pre-phylloxera vines.
Vitality certainly runs deep in this volcanic soil and age seems ever so gingerly…ageless.
Looking back to find a really bright future…
Etna coalesces around the intersection of this broad canvas of wondrous wine and a trio of factors bringing it together.
The volcano itself as the engine for terroir. This x factor in the longevity and character of the indigenous vines….and leadership, in the form of Salvo Foti.
Salvo, more than any other individual in Etna, is laying the groundwork for the future. And I think the future greatness for Etna as a wine region.
Foti is the organizer and leader of the I Vigneri project, named after a Vintner’s Guild founded in 1435 to align the small vineyards in Sicily around the cultivation of the Albarello bush vine. Close to 600 years later, the intent of the project is the same.
It is an agricultural collective dedicated to indigenous grapes, natural cultivation and an obsessive attachment to the terroir of Etna.
I had the pleasure of experiencing his dream first hand on this trip. With him, tasting at Vigna Centenaria (photo at the top of this post) and through this gate into a living diorama of Etna’s terroir and roadmap for what I hope is their direction for the future.
This is the doorway to Vigna del Bosco. The highest vineyard in Etna at 1300 meters and a glimpse into an Etna that is rising in vineyards of I Vigneri and the many winemakers inspired by Foti approach to terroir and viticulture.
This vineyard sits small and quiet surrounded by groves of Sicilian Oaks, Chestnut and Juniper trees. Stepping down and in is like stepping to a future idea of vineyard health, natural viticulture, respect for vine itself and a stewardship of place with craft and skill.
Tall Albarello vines in an impossible melting plot of indigenous grapes: Nerello Mascalese, Nerello Cappuccio, Alicante (their name for Grenache), Carricante, Visparola, Minnella, Grecanico.
This is Etna ungrafted! A verdant ecosystem of balance, climatic extremes and rigorous vineyard health.
It was magical here.
When a vine dies, they propagate another by layering. By choosing whichever vine is closest and bending a shoot underground to take root. In two years, it has added fruit to this natural field blend and takes it place along with the other more ancient vines, most between 60 to over a hundred years old.
I need to come clean and confess.
This most urban of New Yorkers was bowled over by this place. I just laid down on the vineyard ground here, zoned out on a hot Sicilian day under the shade of the grapes and watched the volcano through the vines.
Then, in a nearby grove of trees, with my friends and the winemakers, I tasted for the first time the wine I am sipping as I write. A 2010 field blend from Vigna Del Bosco, Vinudilice. As natural as can be (no sulfur added) and made entirely from the vineyard I just visited.
That’s the magic of Etna!
This place, that volcano, this taste of a natural field blend rolling in my mouth. Terroir all…all in a glass!
What a truly amazing trip this was!
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I want to thank generously Elisabetta Tosi, Giampiero Nadali and the Consorzio Tutela Vini Etna D.O.C. It was life changing.
I recommend that those interested check out the excellent posts from my fellow wine bloggers on the Etna Wine Bloggers Site.
Note: Photo at the top of the post is the tasting platform at Vigna Centenaria, Foti’s vineyard. The platform is made from lava rocks pulled from the vineyard itself. An astounding place to taste.
