Italian wine has long been a favourite in the American market and Italian wine merchants have found a buoyant and ready market. Italy has been making wine for 36 centuries, yet after all this time it remains probably the biggest puzzle in the world of wine. There is hardly an inch of land which could not ripen grapes of some sort, and Italian wines are made from the mountainous north, right down the long limb of the mainland, to Sicilly and, further still, to the tiny island of Pantelleria which almost touches the African shores off Tunisia .
From this gigantic vineyard Italian wine accounts for more than 20% of the world's entire output. Italian wines also represent a bigger volume than all the non-European production put together, and Italian wine exports account for some 40% of all wine exports from any and every country in the world.
Despite these daunting figures about Italian wines, it is surprisingly hard to provide a long list of great Italian wines from down the centuries. Undeniably Barolo and Barberesco are famous and expensive Italian wines. Chianti is famous or infamous depending on how you look at it. But what next then? Lambrusco tops the bill - but how many people think of it as a wine at all? Soave, Bardolino, and Valpolicella? - not exactly renowned for their memorable qualities. Frascati, Verdicchio, certainly Orvieto - now I am running out of names. What about Asti Spurmanti I hear you shout? - This excellent Italian sparkling wine has been continually and ignorantly derided by those who set themselves as wine experts. And if I were asked to name famous wine properties, famous single vineyards, which is easy for France or Germany , I could only come up with a few names.
The sad fact about Italian wine is that almost all of the Italian wines that have been sent around the world have been of the most basic imaginable. France and Germany import enormous quantities of Italian wine to blend into numerous anonymous concoctions of their own. The USA takes shiploads of Italian wines, but traditionally these have been almost entirely made up of Lambrusco, Soave, Frascati and nameless blends from the south. Similarly Britain takes a lot of Italian wine, but it is Chianti ,Barolo, Soave, Valpolicella and the rest of the crew that dominate sales, mainly because of their low prices.
However this is a misleading overview of the state of Italian wine. Italy has more exciting, original and relatively undiscovered flavours than any other wine nation, and it is these that the online Italian wine merchants have been offering. Whereas France has created a series of classic flavours against which equivalent wines from other countries can be measured. The classic flavours of Italian wines are largely without imitations or emulators, and until the emergence of online Italian wine merchants, largely unknown. Consequently, it is hard to say what a Chianti, Barolo, Soave or Lambrusco should even taste like, mainly because there are rarely two Italian winemakers who agree on precisely what a particular wine's flavour should be. After a long love affair with frankly boring Italian wines as standard, the modern American wine enthusiast can now enjoy the best of the new Italian red wines, Italian white wines and Italian sparkling wines just by buying Italian wine online. Online tour operators offer tours of the Italian wine regions, where you can fully enjoy the combination of Italian food and wine, along with Italian wine decorative bottles.
