Nowadays many people seem to be of the opinion that loving wine means drinking the most expensive wines in existence. While particularly at the more affordable end of the market, the price tag has some correlation with the quality of wine as it will determine how much the wine maker could afford to spend on creating the…
Top 8 reasons to visit a forgotten corner of Italy: Friuli-Venezia Giulia
Friuli-Venezia Giulia is an exotic part of Italy with a distinctive Slavic flair. The cuisine is unique in its extensive interweaving of sweet, savoury and spices such as gnocchi di susine (sweet plum dumplings) which are served as a first course, the same as pasta. The geography varies from crystal blue Alpine lakes and the…
Cellar Tour: Hofstatter and its Alpine cowboys
Hofstätter is located in a 15th century building founded as an inn by Joseph Hofstatter in the town of Tramin (Termeno) in Alto Adige. This is the Germanic part of Italy and Tramin looks more like Austria. The inhabitants speak German first then Italian and Ladinish. Hofstätter wine was originally produced from the inn’s mountain-side…
Cellar Tour: Two friends and a dream – Pojer e Sandri
Stories of enduring friendship are always a Hollywood hit, quite possibly because they are quite rare. This is particularly true when coupled with business. Pojer e Sandri’s story is more like that of a Silicon Valley hi-tech start-up out of a student’s parent’s garage rather than a veritable Italian winery. In 1975 Pojer e Sandri…
Cellar Visit: Coffele in Soave, Veneto
We made a visit to Soave in Veneto on a friend’s recommendation to visit the winery of Coffele. Coffele has two cellars, first the mid-nineteenth century Castelcerino vineyard in the Classico zone of Soave, 7 kilometres south of the village of Soave, and considered to be one of the finest in Soave. The other is…
Top 10 misconceptions about wine
1. Wine is expensive. Actually most wine is inexpensive. When I was in university in Italy, beer was more expensive than mineral water. Mineral water was more expensive than wine. So wine was cheap. You can guess what calculation most people on a student budget made. Wine is similar to clothing, in that most clothes…
