Italian Wine Report Scoring

•Don’t Miss (DM)

An exceptional Italian wine that must be tasted to be believed. Buy it, love it, cellar it, share it with friends.  A wine with few peers, period. The best of the best that can only be produced when the vintage offers exceptional fruit and the stars align!  A truly outstanding Italian wine representing the best in its class and meriting the attention of its peers and the world stage.  The next level of quality.

•Highly Recommended (HR)

An excellent Italian wine that delivers over and above a textbook example of its type and a sincere pleasure to drink.  An outstanding effort that exemplifies a very strong example of the varietal and zonal typicity and makes for quite enjoyable drinking.

•Recommended (R)

A solid wine with appealing character that is a textbook example of its type.  You can’t go wrong with this but there’s better out there.

•Pass (P)

An Italian wine that I can not recommend you buy or take the time to find.

Although all wine reviews are always subjective, over the past 20 years I’ve tasted my way around Italy’s wine regions enough times, poked around enough wine cellars, chatted-up enough winemakers, plodded through enough vineyards, and scraped my teeth after enough barrel samples of barolo and tocai, to offer you concisely accurate wine reviews. Reviews are generally limited to wines available in the U.S. market although more comprehensive zone tastings in Italy may include wines not currently available in the U.S.