Italian Wines 2019

This guidebook is updated yearly. It is not for beginners, it does not contain glossy photographs, but is the most comprehensive yearly review of Italian wines, with a brief description of each winery, and their most successful wines, as they become available in the marketplace. Because it is pricy, it is mainly aimed at Italian wine aficionados, and members of the trade. Many of the wines are not available for purchase in the US, and the ones that are can be sought out in large metropolitan areas, with fine specialty wine stores.

Too big too hard to navigate. Binned it

This clumsy volume (1.5” x 1.5” x 9”) with tight binding making the book difficult to hold open in any way may be of use as a trade “brag book” but otherwise it fails even Italian wine devotees. Probably 95% of the wines are not available in the US (even in San Francisco) but this is hardly surprising as many producers covered here have as few as 15 hectares under cultivation. On the other hand, you will not find any of the large producers who buy in grapes but whose production is distributed in the US.The only reason to buy this book is if you are in the trade. Even then, searching for information is painful as the indexes are rudimentary and not based on any relational database software.