I started living in Rome full-time in1980 at a time when wine brands and icon bottles weren’t that important in the everyday lives of Italians. Now don’t get me wrong: wine itself was very important and an integral part of the Italian daily diet and Mediterranean lifestyle, but it was something people rarely discussed the merits or nuances of; drinking glasses of wine with food was a part of the daily routine, just like drinking a cappuccino or having a slice of pizza as a snack while walking outside (pizza, the ultimate street food). Wine was an integral part of Italian lives but truth is nobody knew anything about it save what their grandparents and maybe their parents had told them: more or less that Orvieto was a good white wine, Chianti a solid red and Amarone a big rich wine. Remember, those were days in which Dolcetto was still valued more highly than Barolo. Nothing more, really. Just imagine that the owner of one of Rome’s five biggest wine shops didn’t know what Chateau Léoville-Poyferré was (even though he was selling it) and he asked me to tell him about it when I brought the bottle over to the cashier to pay: the exact same thing happened in another of Rome’s big five this time with a bottle of DRC Échézeaux about which the owner asked why I was spending so much for a bottle of wine. One of the leading Italian wine journalists didn’t know that Auslese was a sweeter wine category than Spatlese (he thought it was the other way around: I remember having to explain the various levels to him in the car on the way back home as he had gotten it wrong in public); and Brunate and Vigna Rionda (Vignarionda today) might as well have been names of automatons in Blade Runner for all they meant to 99% of those drinking wine in Italy.
