Native Italians - Wine & Spirits Magazine

Books

Native Italians

by Stephanie Johnson • July 11, 2022

Friends and acquaintances traveling to Italy often ask me to recommend wine regions and producers to visit. I may just start recommending Joe Campanale’s new book. It is a true insider’s guide to all twenty of Italy’s wine regions, each section including a succinct introduction about what makes that region unique, an overview of its key grape varieties, and brief profiles of “Winemakers to Know”—and Campanale really does know them, having encountered the producers during dozens of visits to Italy.

He sets the context for his choices by introducing the Vino Vero Venn diagram (VVV), a construct he developed over a career in which he started as a junior sommelier at Babbo, became business partners in several NYC restaurants, and eventually opened his own place, Fausto, in Brooklyn. Campanale describes his diagram as an alternative system to Italy’s complex and often convoluted DOC/DOCG system of classification, and claims that it is a guide to “real wines,” or wines that embody “terroir.”

Under VVV’s straightforward criteria, Campanale focuses on wines that are made from native grapes in exceptional terroir by artisan winemakers. Vino is not a comprehensive tome listing every variety, wine type and producer, leaving you to separate the wheat from the chaff. Instead, Campanale cuts straight to the chase, profiling a handful or two of the most compelling producers from each region and adding a longer list of other exceptional producers for further exploration—a roadmap leading to interesting and delicious wines from some of Italy’s greatest artisan winemakers.

Vino: The Essential Guide to Real Italian Wine, by Joe Campanale with Joshua David Stein; Clarkson Potter (2022), 320 pages, $35

Stephanie Johnson

is the Italian wine editor at Wine & Spirits magazine.

This story appears in the print issue of Summer 2022.
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David joined Wine & Spirits in 2021 after immersing himself in the world of wine at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally from Boston, he graduated from Boston University with a degree in English and completed a master’s degree in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College in 2021. Prior to working at the magazine, he served as an editor and staff writer for the music blog Sound of Boston and worked in scientific publishing. Aside from wine, he loves basketball, arguing about Taylor Swift’s best album, and everything Greta Gerwig touches.

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Corey Warren moved to New York in 2015—fifteen years too late to join The Strokes—after earning a degree at Cornell in Comparative Literature. He started polishing glasses at Betony and threw himself into the restaurant world. Later, while a captain at Aquavit, he began working part time in the Wine & Spirits tasting department. Now, in addition to running tastings, he serves as critic for the wines of the Loire, Southern France, Argentina and South Africa. Corey likes almost anything bubbly, from Miller High Life, the Champagne of beers, to Champagne, the Champagne of Champagne, but he’ll drink anything once, and loves finding unique wines.

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After graduating with a degree in journalism from the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Patricio Tapia attended Bordeaux University in France, where he studied for a diploma in wine tasting and winemaking. Since then, he has visited wine regions around the world and authored several books, including his annual Descorchados, a Chilean wine guide; The Wines of Colchagua Valley; TodoVino and Wines for Great Occasions. Tapia is also the South American correspondent for The Oxford Companion to Wine, The World Atlas of Wine and Oz Clarke’s Pocket Wine Book. For the past three years, he’s been a host on the El Gourmet channel in South America. At Wine & Spirits, Tapia is the critic for the wines of Argentina, Chile and Spain, and regularly contributes articles on these regions.