Following a summer spent tasting her way through Italy's key fine wine regions, Sarah Heller MW presents the Italy Report 2023 - including tasting notes and scores for over 500 of the latest wine releases
When Club Oenologique invited me to produce The Italy Report 2023, highlighting wines with the greatest relevance (or at least potential) for collectors from Italy’s fine wine regions, I was thrilled for the opportunity to – I hoped – do justice to the wines that have been my focus since I started out in wine.
The next few months, though, came with a creeping sense of trepidation, as I had to acknowledge the deep ambivalence that has always surrounded wine assessment in Italy, particularly using numeric scores. This hit home as we were collecting samples for the very first report, on Brunello di Montalcino, when I stumbled across a Letter to Journalists from Matthew Fioretti of Cerbaiona, a rising regional superstar, titled ‘Cerbaiona: A No Points Zone’.