"The biggest improvements in all of winedom in the last 15 or 20 years have 
been in Italy,"....thanks to great weather and modern production methods. If 
your idea of a fine Italian wine is a cheap Pinot Grigio or a bitter Chianti 
in a straw-wrapped bottle, you're in for a big surprise because because more 
and more of the best wines that hit the stores over the next few years will 
be Italian. "It has the greatest potential of any wine-producing region in 
the world," ...Already,..."some of the  values in Italian wine are 
extraordinary." 

Italy's... Gaja's wines... are emerging...as among the world's best in just 
about any style and price category you choose. Gaja wines are so expensive 
and in such high demand that you can probably find them only at top-tier 
restaurants ..., where a bottle of the Gaja Barbaresco we tasted would go for 
about $300. 

But check out the Italian section of any decent wine store and you'll now 
find many good-to-excellent selections for $8 and up. 
===========================================  
Moveable Feast
By Thane Peterson 
Business Week 

April 30, 2002 

VINO MOVES TO PRIMO POSITION 

Oenophiles will find Italian wines among their best bets in the next few 
years, thanks to great weather and modern production methods 

A sophisticated wine taster isn't supposed to swallow. That's why there were 
little silver spittoons on the table when I tilted a few glasses with Angelo 
Gaja the other day. Gaja is a charming, silver-haired 62-year old who some 
people consider the most important innovator in the Italian wine business. 

Indeed, the excellent new book Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy 
dubs Gaja "the top name in Italian wine, period." So when Gaja asked me to 
taste five of his wines --including his signature and justly famous 
Barbaresco -- while we chatted, I swallowed far more from each glass than a 
disciplined connoisseur would have. When I got up to leave, I caught my 
reflection and noticed my face was an embarrassing shade of pink. 

BARGAINS ABOUND.  Tasting Gaja's wines is a great treat because he's a key 
figure in the emergence of Italian wines as among the world's best in just 
about any style and price category you choose. Gaja wines are so expensive 
and in such high demand that you can probably find them only at top-tier 
restaurants like Daniel in New York and Charlie Trotter's in Chicago, where a 
bottle of the Gaja Barbaresco we tasted would go for about $300. But check 
out the Italian section of any decent wine store and you'll now find many 
good-to-excellent selections for $8 and up. 

"The biggest improvements in all of winedom in the last 15 or 20 years have 
been in Italy," says Kevin Zraly, author of The Windows on the World Complete 
Wine Course, the best-selling of all the wine guides. 

If your idea of a fine Italian wine is a cheap Pinot Grigio or a bitter 
Chianti in a straw-wrapped bottle, you're in for a big surprise because 
because more and more of the best wines that hit the stores over the next few 
years will be Italian. "It has the greatest potential of any wine-producing 
region in the world," contends Ronn Wiegand, a well-known California wine 
consultant who publishes the newsletter Restaurant Wine. Already, he says, 
"some of the values in Italian wine are extraordinary." 

NO MORE JUGS.  Italy's wine industry is the biggest in the world -- several 
times the size of America's. And Italy's warm climate and varied terrain make 
it perhaps the world's best natural growing area for just about any type of 
wine. Plus, the country has been blessed with fantastic wine-growing weather 
every year since 1996, so almost every vintage in the stores now is good. 

On top of all that, Italian producers have been radically improving their 
wares as they move away from jug wines. Over the last 15 years or so, nearly 
all the better-known Italian wine producers have adopted modern techniques 
such as fermenting their wines in expensive steel vats and aging them in 
small, French-style oak barrels. And many one-time jug-wine producers have 
replanted their vines and improved their growing techniques to grow fewer, 
higher-quality grapes. 

Italian wine production has actually fallen 17% since 1988 as more and more 
producers have shifted away from jug wines. Meanwhile, the number of Italian 
premium wines has soared, as have the country's wine exports. 

BARGAIN ACRES.  One reason many premium Italian wines cost less than $12 per 
bottle is that much of the replanted land is in sunny southern areas like 
Sicily, Puglia, and Calabria, where costs are low. Wiegand notes that wine 
property in Sicily goes for as little as $5,000 per acre, compared with as 
much as $100,000 per acre in California's Napa Valley. As big Northern 
Italian wine makers like Piero Antinori have expanded into Southern Italy and 
local southern producers have improved their techniques, the quality of wine 
from these regions has soared even as prices have remained far lower than 
from better-known northern regions like Tuscany and Piedmont. 

I don't necessarily think it's a good trend, but many Italian producers also 
have shifted to merlot and cabernet blends that appeal to U.S. consumers. 
Even in my little state-owned liquor store in rural Pennsylvania, I found a 
number of such blended wines in the $8 to $20 range. And two of the four red 
wines Gaja served were merlot blends from Ca'Marcanda, his new estate in the 
Maremma district of Tuscany. 

His Ca'Marcanda Magaris is 50% merlot, 25% cabernet sauvignon, and 25% 
cabernet franc, while his Ca'Marcanda Promis is 55% merlot, 35% syrah, and 
10% sangiovese, the most popular Italian grape. These new offerings are also 
cheaper than most Gaja wines, at $60 and $38 per bottle respectively. Within 
four or five years, Gaja plans to more than double Ca'Marcanda's production 
to 40,000 cases annually. 

CONVOLUTED CLASSIFICATIONS.  Personally, I think it's far better to take a 
chance on wines made from traditional Italian grapes such as sangiovese (the 
basic grape in Chianti Classico) and nebbiolo (Barolo and Barbaresco). They 
tend to be bolder and more interesting than the bland Merlots Americans 
always seem to go for. Both John Byrne (my BusinessWeek colleague who tasted 
the Gaja wines with me) and I found Gaja's new Ca'Marcanda blends very plain 
after tasting his more traditional Barbarseco and Brunello di Montalcino. 
Over the weekend, I found in my local store a very nice full-bodied 2000 
Santa Christina Sangiovese made by Antinori that cost just $11, several 
dollars less than the price for comparable French and California reds. 

The trouble is, Italian wine classifications are at least as convoluted and 
hard to understand as French ones. All told, Italy has 21 separate wine 
regions growing some 800 kinds of grapes. Some wines are named for their main 
grape variety (Sangiovese, for instance), some for a place (Chianti and 
Barolo), and some for their producer (Gaja, Antinori). 

To add to the confusion, some of the very best wines are blends that don't 
fit any of the Italian government's classifications, so they're simply 
labeled Vino da Tavola (table wine). It used to be that you could narrow 
things down by focusing on wines from the three major growing regions in the 
north: Piedmont (Gaja's home base), Tuscany (best-known for Chianti), and 
Veneto (known for Soave, Valpolicella, and Bardolino). But these days, the 
best bargains are often from others regions. 

SIMPLE LOWDOWN.  If you really want to get into Italian wines, I suggest 
consulting Vino Italiano (Clarkson Potter, $35), which just came out. It's 
co-authored by Joseph Bastianich, who owns several Italian restaurants, as 
well as the Italian Wine Merchants retail store in New York City. It gives a 
detailed, easy-to-read lowdown on Italian wine. Otherwise, try asking for 
advice in a good wine store. There's a list of some of the best ones in the 
back of Vino Italiano -- including Sam's in Chicago, Cirace's in Boston, and 
Wally's in Los Angeles. 

In the meantime, here are a few of Wiegand's favorite Italian reds at various 
price levels (approximately): 

• 2000 or 2001 A Mano Zinfandel from the southern area of Puglia, $10 to $12
• 2000/2001 Santa Anastasia from Sicily, $12
• 2000 Fuedo Monaci Salice Salentino, "a wonderful wine for the money," $10
• 2000 Poliziano Rosso di Montepuliciano, from the area next to Chianti, $20
• 1999 Peppoli Chianti Classico (one of Antinori's labels) from Tuscany, $22
• 1998 or 1999 Poliziano Vino Nobile di Montepuliciano, $28 
 

Peterson is a contributing editor at BusinessWeek Online. 
Follow his weekly Moveable Feast column, only on BusinessWeek Online 
Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
Copyright 2000-2002, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.