There are enough Italian wine varietals to make any wine lover, whether professional or amateur, confused for a lifetime. We recently came across a bottle of a pure Colorino, a grape that is typically used primarily as a coloring agent mostly in Tuscany. Writer Blake Gray called it “The world’s most pathetic wine grape,” so we were surprised by the Poggiopiano seen above – an amazingly well-structured wine with lots of sustained flavor, and clearly age-worthy.
Rather than trying to catalogue the over 800 individual varietals in Italy, which others have done rather well, we will only focus on a few red wine grapes that we have had, and adored, over the years. At a minimum, we hope you’ll try a few when they show up on a restaurant wine list – or you’ll source out a few for your own drinking pleasure. Either way, you’ll get a better idea of the wide scope of wonderful world of Italian red varietals.
Note: Check out some of the articles on Italian white varietals we have done:
