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One wine at a time, told properly.

Who makes it, where, and why that bottle is the way it is. Short readings, but complete ones: not promotional notes.

Molise

Why Tintilia stayed only in Molise

Almost every successful Italian grape has travelled. Sangiovese is grown across half the peninsula, Montepulciano reached the Marche and Puglia, Trebbiano is found practically everywhere. Tintilia did not: it stayed where it was, and the only reason is the climate.

The inland hills of Molise often rise above five hundred metres and see wide swings between day and night temperatures. Most red grapes cannot cope: they ripen badly, or not at all. Tintilia can, and in those conditions it develops firm tannin and a spiced note that is lost at lower altitudes.

For most of the twentieth century this was a commercial limitation. In the nineteen-seventies much of Molise's vineyard was replanted with more productive, easier-to-sell varieties, and Tintilia shrank to a few dozen hectares. The denomination was only recognised in 2011, by which time cultivation had been taken up again by a small group of estates.

Today that limitation has become its distinguishing trait: a grape found nowhere else, in a region almost nobody associates with wine.

Piedmont and Lombardy

Nebbiolo changes name three times in two hundred kilometres

In the Langhe it is called Nebbiolo and gives Barolo and Barbaresco. Further north, in Alto Piemonte, the same grape takes the name Spanna. Across the regional border, in Valtellina, it becomes Chiavennasca. It is always the same grape.

What changes is everything else. In the Langhe the soil is clay and limestone, the hills are gentle and the climate is continental: the wine that comes out is powerful and made to age. In Valtellina the vines sit on granite terraces carved out of the mountain, the soil is poorer and sandier, and the same Nebbiolo gives a leaner, tenser wine, with less weight and more perfume.

It is the clearest example of a principle that holds across Italy: the name of the grape explains less than people think, the place explains almost everything. That is why a catalogue ordered by variety stays incomplete, and why the Grapes atlas starts from territories.

Practical guide

How to read an Italian label

An Italian label carries four useful pieces of information, and several that are not. The first is the denomination: DOC and DOCG indicate a set of rules covering the area, permitted grapes, yields and minimum ageing. IGT indicates looser rules, not necessarily lower quality.

The second is the grape variety, which appears only when the rules allow it: a Barolo label does not say Nebbiolo, because the denomination implies it. The third is the vintage, which matters far more in cold regions than in warm ones. The fourth is the producer, which is the most important information of all and almost always the smallest on the label.

Not indicative, on the other hand, are the medals printed on the front, or unregulated wording such as «founder's reserve» or «special selection», which correspond to no obligation. «Riserva» on its own does: it indicates longer ageing, defined by the rules of that specific denomination.

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