Vino Italiano Buying Guide : The Ultimate Quick Reference to the Great Wines of Italy

Rating:
Summary: Stuff This in a Stocking--Subito!
Review:
By Bill Marsano. Call this the perfect stocking-stuffer for wine buffs. The authors previously wrote the award-winning Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy, which I also recommend. It's confusing for many that the vast world of Italian wines frays into chaos at times--usually just when you think you've mastered it. Bastianich and Lynch manage to impose some order. The core of the book is the alpahabetical listing of wineries, to which a common-sense approach is applied. Italians are in love with long names. There is a town in Tuscany called San Macario in Piano di Ponte San Pietro; wineries, naturally, are often melodiously decorated with prefixes like Azienda Agricola and Azienda Viticoltura. The authors mercifully list such wineries under the principal part of the name. Thus Azienda Agricola Miani is under the M's. (I hope in future editions they will do the same with the innumerable wineries prefixed with Fattoria, Masseria or Castello.)

After you've found the winery you're looking for you also find crisp, accurate information on its wines, with a rough price-guide included.

There's lots of other useful stuff here: how to read a label, the meaning of DOC and DOCG, vintage charts and so on, but it's the big list of wineries (which doesn't skimp on Sicily, Sardinia and southern Italy, as some others do) that makes this book an excellent companion every time you head to your local wineshop.--Bill Marsano is an James Beard award winning wine-and-spirits writer.