Customer Reviews

Italian Wines 2005: A Guide to the World of Italian Wine for Experts

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Let's say you walk into a wine store somewhere and want to buy an Italian wine. A salesperson engages you and begins describing the Italian wines in the store. How do you know if he actually knows anything about Italian wine? Ask him/her if they have a copy of the latest Gambero Rosso Guide to Italian Wines and observe what happens. If he looks puzzled or just shrugs as though you were speaking an incomprehensible Italian dialect, you can ignore anything else he has to say on the subject.

Because to be in the trade, to be representing Italian wines, and to be ignorant of the Gambero Rosso is sacrilege, plain and simple. I'm not saying the Gambero is the absolute authority on the latest and best Italian wines produced each year (certainly not the latest, but more on that in a moment); however, it's a barometer you can always use to measure the commitment a store, a salesperson or wine steward has to Italy. It doesn't matter if they spit on it or revere it, they just need to have an opinion-hey, we're talking Italy, everybody's got an opinion, am I right or am I wrong?

I've reviewed the Gambero on Amazon for five consecutive years so I know from whence I speak. I've been using it as a yardstick ever since and it never fails. What is it? It's a paperback book that comes out annually and provides reviews of the best new wines in Italy. In the late fall they publish it in Italian. About six months later an English version finally gets over here. Other than coverage of the new wines, about the only other thing that changes each year is the color of the cover. Which means I'm starting to run out of new ways to talk about it, so this year I think I'll try something completely different.

Top 10 Reasons To Buy The 2005 Gambero Rosso.

10. You can cover it in foil and use it to press panini. The book is about the size and weight of a brick, which makes it a little unwieldy unless you actually need a brick. The '05 edition sports 912 pages compared to 864 last year and it has gained a tenth of a pound. Too many cannoli, or too many good wines?

9. It reviews wines that are so far off the beaten path you can't even find them. Nowhere else will you encounter this kind of breadth in parts of Italy that most wine salesmen have never heard of (see my review of The Renaissance Guide to Food and Wine for one expert who doesn't know the difference between Montalcino and Montepulciano., for example).

8. Domo arigato, Mr. Pigato. No, pigato isn't an unappealing flavor of gelato. It's a white grape from the vertiginous slopes of Liguria that makes a delightful wine for all kinds of Mediterranean seafood. Try finding coverage of all the worthy Pigatos released last year somewhere else and let me know when you give up.

7. Snail mail. The Gambero Rosso is published by a company called Slow Food Editore and their mascot is a snail. Say what you will about how useful this book is in helping to choose Italian wines, a snail could probably swim the Atlantic faster than it takes them to publish it each year. As a result, they always miss the latest vintages of some of the most popular high-end wines, like Barolo and Brunello di Montalcino. So if you're a fan of Robert Parker or the Wine Spectator, you'll get much more timely coverage there than the Gambero provides, even if I think the Gambero reviews are more reliable.

6. You say bicchiere, I say "What????" The official scoring system of the Gambero is to award 1-3 glasses to the best wines made each year, with 3 glasses being the ultimate honor. In Italian, the word bicchiere (sounds like bee-key-airy) means glasses (for drinking, not for seeing, although if you use this book a lot I predict you'll be enjoying so many good Italian wines you'll soon have trouble seeing straight.)

5. Is this a wine book or the DaVinci Code? The Gambero Rosso assumes you have an instinctive and encyclopedic knowledge of where all the wineries in Italy are located and you can use this arcane wisdom to find what you're looking for. So let's pick one at random and go find it in the book. How about Castello di Ama Chianti Classico? Maybe we should look in the Table of Contents for Chianti? Whoops, sorry, the TOC only covers the regions. Let's assume we know either Castello di Ama or Chianti is in Tuscany. After a few minutes of idly flipping through 100 pages in the Tuscany section, we discover that the producers aren't listed alphabetically, the towns are. What town is Castello di Ama in? Gee, I don't know. Let's go to the index, maybe that will help. Hmm, there's an index of wines, let's check that out. Oh, no! There are at least 300 chiantis listed in tiny dense-packed type, where's the one I want? Not to worry, there's also a producer index. I'll look under Castello. Hmm, there are 10 other Castello's -Hey Abbott!!! -but no Castello di Ama. In desperation I turn to the "A's" and eccola: it's listed as Ama, Castello di! At this point I'm ready to drink something French instead.

4. It's my party and I'll spit if I want to. Everything that makes it into the Gambero seems to be good. If you carry the book into a store, you'll make rewarding choices. I use the number of glasses as a scale to determine roughly what I want to pay. It doesn't always work, but it's not a bad calibration method.

3. He doesn't know his Asinone from his Elvio (Cogno). You won't need a salesman any more unless he's on the same page as you are.

2. Politics? Who me? The Gambero appears to be influenced by big marketing budgets and big prices when making its annual three glass selections. They also seem to have been smitten with the International Style, at least until last year when they suddenly declared it to be a national scandal and by inference, labeled Robert Parker the greatest threat to Italian wines since phylloxera. Can you say hypocrite, ragazzi?

And the number one reason to buy the Gambero Rosso:

1. Less is more. Find wines listed in the book that are rated with either one or no glasses. Pay less than $15 for them. Enjoy them with your favorite foods and be glad that most of the rest of the world hasn't caught on yet.

Ofcourse this book has some drawbacks, but I don't know a better resource for Italian wines. If you follow the track of wines rated with 3 glasses you won't be disappointed, if you like the type of wine ofcourse. And with some training you will learn to use the index which is to be honest a bit complicated and needs improvement.

The best Italian wines reviews you can ever find with vintage details, producer info and wine characteristics.