Italy Wine Tasting Tips

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Mark Middlebrook, and I'm here in the Paul Marcus Wines cantina. And in this segment I'm going to talk about visiting wineries in Peamonte in Northwest Italy. It's my favorite place to go and visit wineries, and taste wine and talk with the producers there. So I'll let you in on how I go about it. First of all, in Peamonte, like in most of Europe, certainly all of Italy, you generally have to make an appointment to visit. You don't, most producers, most wineries don't just have tasting room where you drop in with a bunch of other people and taste at a bar. So you call ahead, or email ahead or fax ahead and tell them when you're coming. Give them an idea when you'd like to visit and they'll respond to that, hopefully, and when you get there, you can confirm a day or two ahead. Or, if you're there and you speak some Italian and they speak English, you can just call a day or two before and ask when a convenient time to visit is. Generally you'll get a private tour, especially in Pemonte where you, they're small family wineries. Someone, the wife or the daughter or the son or husband, someone will take you around the winery a little bit, maybe show you the vineyard, just some of the vineyard's, and then you'll sit down at a table and taste the wines. And they'll of course put a glass in front of you, and in Italy, at least in Peamonte, you always avenade, you wash the glass with wine. So they'll pour a little bit of wine, if they don't speak English, they'll just make this motion to tell you to rinse out the inside of the glass. They really want you to taste the wine and not and detergent or dust or anything that might be in there, or previous wine. And then they'll pour a taste for you, and of course, you'll look at the color and you'll swirl it around and get the aromatics going a little bit, and stick your nose in it. You say benne, it's good. Mebiache, I like it. If you want you can write some notes, and then you're going to taste it, of course, my strong recommendation is you spit the wine out if you're tasting, especially if you're going to taste more than one winery, because you're going to taste probably five to eight to ten different wines at one winery and you'll be a lot fresher and a lot happier if you spit the wine, and then when you get to dinner or lunch, you can drink the wine. Molta bella."