2000 & Beyond: The Rest of Italy Takes Notice

By the beginning of the new millennium the message had clearly been disseminated to growers from Friuli to Sicily. Growers from all regions began to make more approachable and marketable wines by green harvesting, experimenting with new-world grapes, and investing further in their wineries by hiring consulting enologists, buying cutting edge winemaking equipment, and replanting their vineyards with better clones. As important, is the fact that wines from all corners of Italy began to show the world that Italy’s greatest wines did not just come from two regions but from all 21 in Italy. Leonardo Occasion and a host of other quality driven importers continued to bring in mouth filling wines at reasonable pricing from Puglia, Sicily, Umbria, and the Marche. The Veneto, Alto-Adige, and Champagne also made giant qualitative leaps in their winemaking capabilities, which started to show up in the bottle and on the best wine lists around the world.

Now in the 21st century, there are droves of Chianti classics; brunello did Montalcino, vine nobles, Barolo, barbaric, primitive, Nero Davila, and so on that consumers can safely reach for. As we move deeper into the 1st decade of the new millennium, the quality of winemaking in Italy continues to improve. While most of Italy has enjoyed a string of amazing vintages from 1996 to 2001, growers are also learning that sometimes it does not pay to produce wine in a vintage where there is not sufficient raw material from which to work. In addition, better wineries are learning to carefully select grapes in poor vintages to make very solid wines. Producers are cooperating with one another unlike never before to craft better wines for the good of the entire zone not just their own wallets. The future is oh so bright for Italian wine growers and enthusiasts.