Appellations and regions of Italian wine

DOCG, DOC, IGT: what the Italian pyramid actually tells you

The initials on a label record how many rules a wine followed, not how good it is. Knowing what they guarantee — and what they do…

Reading an Italian label: the words that carry legal weight

Classico, Superiore, Riserva, Millesimato: an Italian label mixes terms defined in law with terms that are pure decoration. Telli…

Prosecco: DOC, DOCG, Rive and Cartizze — the hierarchy explained

One commercial name covers both an enormous lowland appellation and some of the steepest viticulture in Italy. The difference is …

The original Chianti, between Florence and Siena — and the appellation that spent forty years learning to stop diluting itself.

610 Wines · 210 Producer

The steep hills between Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, where Prosecco stops being a commodity and starts being a place.

581 Wines · 136 Producer

One grape, eleven communes, and soils that change the wine more than the winemaker does.

64 Wines · 23 Producer

Sangiovese given five years and a hilltop in southern Tuscany, and asked to behave like a completely different grape.

122 Wines · 58 Producer

Grapes dried for three or four months until they have lost a third of their weight — the most extreme thing routinely done to a red wine in Italy.

90 Wines · 56 Producer

The everyday wine of the Verona hills, and the appellation whose middle tier was invented to bridge the gap to Amarone.

139 Wines · 60 Producer

Italy's benchmark for bottle-fermented sparkling wine, and the only one with a style nobody else is allowed to make.

80 Wines · 31 Producer

Pale, brisk red from the eastern shore of Lake Garda — a wine that finally stopped apologising for being light.

77 Wines · 30 Producer

The flatland appellation that made Prosecco a global phenomenon — and had to rename the grape to do it.

134 Wines · 52 Producer

One DOCG, two very different wines — and the proof that a sweet, low-alcohol wine can be a serious one.

46 Wines · 29 Producer

Piedmont's everyday red, treated as the lesser grape for two centuries, then shown to be capable of something else entirely.

83 Wines · 32 Producer

The same Sangiovese, the same hill, one year instead of five — the most honest way to get to know a Montalcino producer.

57 Wines · 48 Producer

The large appellation wrapped around Chianti Classico — routinely confused with it, and hiding a sub-zone that deserves its own reputation.

48 Wines · 27 Producer

The same Nebbiolo as Barolo, fifteen kilometres further east, with a river changing everything.

31 Wines · 15 Producer

Garganega on volcanic basalt — and the Italian white most damaged by its own commercial success.

26 Wines · 16 Producer

Piedmont's traditional-method sparkling: first in Italy to be made, last to be recognised.

23 Wines · 15 Producer

Not a grape but a family, and not a sweet wine but — at home — almost always a dry one.

22 Wines · 5 Producer

A clay-grown white on the southern shore of Lake Garda, straddling two regions, that ages far better than its reputation suggests.

20 Wines · 13 Producer

The dried-grape wine that existed before Amarone — and survives today as two separate appellations, one red and one white.

30 Wines · 29 Producer

The misleadingly named grape: it is not sweet, and in the Langhe it is what you drink while the Nebbiolo waits.

31 Wines · 24 Producer

A blended white south of Lake Garda, next-door neighbour to Soave and Bardolino, and far less known than either.

19 Wines · 12 Producer

The Piedmontese white that looks towards the sea, made from a grape that has never quite convinced anywhere else.

8 Wines · 6 Producer

Tuscany's third great Sangiovese appellation, and the one that pays most dearly for a misunderstanding about its name.

8 Wines · 4 Producer

Isolated volcanic hills on the plain south of Padua, where Merlot is not a modern import but a two-hundred-year habit.

23 Wines · 5 Producer

The first Italian appellation created for traditional-method sparkling wine alone — and a viticulture measured in metres of altitude.

15 Wines · 7 Producer

The first Italian wine ever granted DOC status — and it is a white, in the region everyone describes as red-wine country.

11 Wines · 7 Producer

Border hills where Italian white wine changed its mind about itself — and where one grape had to change its name by law.

9 Wines · 2 Producer

The sandy bank facing the Langhe: same Nebbiolo, different soil, a wine you can drink sooner. Plus a white rescued from extinction.

8 Wines · 5 Producer

One of Italy's most widely drunk reds is named after a town it has nothing to do with.

79 Wines · 34 Producer

Abruzzo's first DOCG: the same grape, one strip of hills between the Gran Sasso and the sea, and much tighter rules.

26 Wines · 11 Producer

The rosé Abruzzo has never treated as a consolation prize — and which has had its own appellation since 2010.

28 Wines · 22 Producer

An appellation whose name covers two different grapes, and the difference between them is the whole difference.

34 Wines · 25 Producer