When describing what makes his family’s wines (and those from Italy’s Romagna in general) unique, Ronchi di Castelluccio‘s Aldo Mario Rametta keeps coming back to one thing: the soil. “The soil is like a memory of the sea,” he says (rather poetically) during an online tasting of some of his family’s recent releases (which also…
Category: Italian Wine
Dizzying Heights… of Italian Cabernet (Highlights from VinoVIP Cortina 2024, Part 1)
This recap is nearly a decade in the making. I was lucky enough to have been invited to attend the 2024 incarnation of VinoVIP Cortina, held in the incredible locale of Cortina, Italy (which will host the 2026 Winter Olympic games, and was host to much of the filming of Cliffhanger). That invitation can be…
From Here to Eternity: Tenuta Licinia Recent Releases
The soft-spoken James Marshall Lockyer, winemaker of Tuscany’s Tenuta Licinia, would likely balk at the Iron Maiden reference of today’s title, but as you’ll see in a few minutes, the concept of eternal distance feels apt when tasting through his wines, because they have finishes longer than my run-on sentences. Established in 2007, Tenuta Licinia…
Postcard From Sannio, Part 2: Aglianico del Taburno
This is part two of a three-part series covering my media jaunt last year to Sannio, in Italy’s southern region of Campania. For part one, we focused on the region’s signature white (Falanghina). Today, we’re going to highlight Sannio’s signature red, Aglianico del Taburno. And we will also mention Chuck Norris (more on that in…