Fresh off the boat, we’ve got four brand spanking new wines from Borgo Magredo ready for shipping to a home near you… or your home if you’re keen enough for a taste.

Two whites, a Pinot Grigio and a Friulano, and two reds, a Merlot and a Pinot Nero, will join our already well established Frizzante and Spumante Prosecco from the same producer.

The history of Borgo Magredo began in Grave del Friuli in 1973. Over the 20 years that followed, more than 200 hectares of vineyard have been planted, including cultivations that are experimental in this territory such as Moscato Rosa and Pinot Nero, which later became a great classic.

The wines of Borgo Malgredo currently present themselves in a new guise that’s original and extremely charming, bridging the gap between classic traditions and the modern trend-setting. But more importantly, it is the company’s drive to achieve the perfect combination of century-old enological culture and the contemporary drinking style that have made these wines an easy choice for us.

This style joins ancient flavours with contemporary taste. Friuli is known for varietal expression, and that’s just what you’ll get here. It’s a question of quality without compromise.

These hip new wines are available now at a very cool €11.99 per bottle.

You’d think they know best, wouldn’t you? Friuli-Venezia Giulia, in Italy’s north east corner, is very highly regarded by the Italian wine drinker for its pure, aromatic varietals. If you’re of the “when in Rome” mindset, you will know that relying on the knowledge and expertise of the indigenous people is quite a smart game to play.

So what is it that draws Italians to these wines in particular? Why, in terms of the national, homeland demand, is Friuli preferred over Tuscany, Sicily and Piemonte? Well, much of it lies in the style of wines being produced here. They are different to that of the western Piemonte and that of the southern regions. Italian consumers attach a high value to this because what is done here, and the style that is achieved, can’t be done as well elsewhere in Italy. But that’s not everything.

Importantly, what the terroir of Friuli brings is an incredible expression of variety like only a handful of regions around the world can do. This varietal expression is what wine connoisseurs pay the extra for. If you’ve ever tried our whites from Poggiobello you’ll have experienced a great example of the strengths and subtletess of a grape variety in its purest form, whether it was the Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc or Friulano. If you were conducting a varietal masterclass, it would be the white wines of Friuli that you would use.

Seventeen different grape varieties can be grown in Friuli’s two main DOCs, Collio (Goriziano) and Colli Orientali (del Friuli). The aforementioned white varieties are widely grown across these areas, along with Pinot Bianco (Pinot Blanc), but the best reds come from the south western corner of Colli Orientali, in the foothills of the Dolomites. Merlot does well here, as well as local grapes such as Ribolla, Refosco and Schioppettino.

For the month of June, save €3 per bottle on each of the wines from Poggiobello.

Sometimes it is nice not to have too much of a good thing too often. Maybe you don’t see someone for some time, or don’t experience something, maybe for a few weeks, a few months or perhaps a number of years. Then you go back to be reminded of how good it is, all over again.

I was reminded on Sunday night of how much I love a good Sangiovese. In this trade, you have the fortunate opportunity of tasting a lot of wine. But that is ‘tasting’. Many would agree with me on this, you don’t really get to know and appreciate a wine unless you bring it home and spend time over it. Enjoy it in a relaxed atmosphere with friends and family. Oh, and in this case, have a bloody good meal to partner it.

In actual fact, I was looking for a wine to accompany the food. Not the other way around. My girlfriend was taking the reigns in the kitchen on this occasion. We like to take turns cooking for eachother. I told her the options I had at hand and she picked a Chianti, which had kindly been given to us by a supplier of ours.

Sangiovese and Chianti are one of the true great matches in the world of wine in terms of grape variety and terroir. Like Pinot Noir, it has a knack for taking on the characteristics of where it is grown. Although not an easy grape to work with, Tuscany provides the necessary heat, long growing season and fair autumns required for this late ripening variety.

I read over at Decanter that the French will now be experimenting with Sangiovese after Vivai Cooperativi Rauscedo, the world’s largest cooperative nursery, sold about 170,000 vines to five Herault producers. That will be worth keeping an eye out for in the future.

We had the Bibbiano Montornello Chianti Classico with our meal, which had the trademark earthy, red cherry Sangiovese aromas and flavours, medium bodied with supple tannins and a striking backbone of acidity. Being such a great food wine, it turned out to be a fabulous match for our Beef Bourguignon, as well as a pleasent reminder of what I had been missing.

Poor Marsala. It’s had a rough time of it. A reputation that has been dragged through the gutters by none other than its own producers. For many people it has been reduced to a rather generic ingredient to add to the cooking pot. Even worse, there are still those syrupy, sickly sweet bottles on the market.

Like most things in this business, you can’t tarnish everything with the same brush. There have always been exceptions, just too few of them. But is Marsala now taking a page from the book of the reinvented Sherry?

The rules surrounding the production of Marsala have been tightened up in recent years to help reestablish a long lost demand. Just like the Sherry story, demand in the past wasn’t followed up with quality production and the industry suffered.

Marsala is made around the town of Marsala, in Sicily’s ‘wild west’. It was actually an Englishman, John Woodhouse, a merchant and Port, Sherry and Madeira enthusiast, who was responsible for first production. Today Marsala can only be fortified by adding grape spirit, as Woodhouse originally did back in 1773.

The process of ‘mutage’ involves ceasing fermentation, in this case by adding alcohol, thus explaining the higher alcohol content in the final product. Typically, the high yielding Catarratto is the main component, however, the Grillo and Inzolia are also used in the better quality versions.

With premium Marsala slowly edging back into the market, I would encourage folk to give it another chance, especially if you’re already on the Sherry and Madeira train. Only last week we added our first Marsala to our list – Vito Curatolo Arini Marsala Superiore Riserva. I can assure you this stuff ain’t for the cooking pot.

It sounds like a girls name, but in fact Cortese is another addition to your vast vocabulary of obscure Italian grape varieties. This is never going to be your next Sauvignon Blanc or Chardonnay. It’s not a crowd pleaser in the way these noble grape varieties usually are. Cortese makes a curious wine for curious people, both of which we live for.

Mainly found in Piemonte, in the north west of Italy, Cortese makes delicate, light whites with soft and subtle fruity citrusy flavours. The better versions usually have some minerality and that nutty, savoury edge, but the wonderful acidity is the signature characteristic of most. The best expression of the grape comes from the Gavi zone, around the town of Gavi, in the south east of the province of Alessandria.

The 1960′s and 70′s saw great success for Gavi commercially, but as with many regions that enjoy such heightened popularity in a short space of time, prices rise and in some cases, quality dips, before consumers find the next ‘Cloudy Bay’ and move on. Since then, however, there has never been a better time to give Cortese another shot. You just need to know where to look.

A silver medal at the International Wine Challenge is another small step to putting Gavi back on the map. “Attractive light elegant. Complex herbaceous. Rich.” That’s what the judges had to say about Bricco dei Guazzi’s 2009 Gavi di Gavi. Music to the ears of Gavi producers, and curious wine drinkers alike.

The Bricco dei Guazzi range is on offer as part of the Italian sale (20% off) until the end of February.

There’s nothing better to blow away the post Christmas winter blues than a good skiing holiday. And I mean nothing!

I spent last week in Livigno in Northern Italy, a picturesque town in the Alps, almost 2,000 metres above sea level bordering Switzerland. The skiing itself was top class and being Italy, the food and wine was also top class.

Being more familiar myself with the north easterly Friuli and the neighbouring Piedmont region, my interest and passion for Lombardy was reignited each evening during après-ski. Lombardy is known for its sparkling wines from the Franciacorta and Oltrepò Pavese areas, as well as its white wines made from Trebbiano, but it was the reds produced from Nebbiolo grapes of the Valtellina region that really caught our attention.

Valtellina is an east-west valley north of Lake Como between the Retiche Alps and the Orobic Alpine foothills. Sforzato Della Valtellina was my choice of wine to bring back from Livigno. A connoisseur’s delight, it is one of the great wines of Italy. It is almost exclusively made from Nebbiolo, the grape variety behind Barolo, which was introduced to the area in the 14th century with the development in trade growing in earnest between the 16th and 18th century when Valtellina was under the rule of the Swiss.

Sforzato or Sfrusat is a dry wine obtained from drying the best Nebbiolo grapes harvested in the most well exposed vineyard in the regions of Valtellina and Valtellina Superiore. The grapes are left to ripen for longer than most, and the result is a long aging wine of great intensity, with lively red fruit and incredible earthy, rustic leather and tobacco overtones.

I’ve opted for the Casa Vinicola Sforzato, a 2002 vintage recommended to me by a local wine merchant. I also brought back a Barbera d’Alba (couldn’t help myself). I look forward to both with great anticipation.

It started in the early 1980s. Young twenty-something Australian winemakers watching ‘The Flying Doctors’ on a Tuesday afternoon waiting for something exciting to happen. While September is desperately quiet for southern hemisphere winemakers, it’s a different story altogether in Europe and North America. Thus came about the flying winemakers, making Dr Callaghan look even more cool.

As Jancis Robinson pointed out in one of her recent Wine Course publications, Italy, our featured country for these cold winter months, was one of those country’s largely affected by this influx of young talent. Before this dose of reinvention, Italian whites were considered quite bland and unexciting. Now we have world class examples of international grape varieties. Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and the long established Pinot Grigio are being made with real distinction.

Shortly after this trend began, winemakers from the United States and then Europe started to migrate south in their quiet time. This interchange of ideas and techniques has done nothing but help raise the standard industry-wide, but I don’t think either side should gain all the plaudits. Instead of being at each others throats about who makes the best wine, the best producers have struck the right balance between the traditional “let the terroir do the talking” and the more modern take involving making it happen in the winery.

Italy produces more wine than any other country in the world, but don’t let the bland, volume whites that used to plague our supermarket shelves (and which sadly still do) put you off. The real treasures of Italy’s white wine making exploits are found in their indigenous grape varieties. Farnese Trebbiano, Poggiobello Fruilano and Casale Vecchio Pecorino are three our customers reach for tentatively at first… and then come back for six or twelve.

Picture sourced from Amazon.co.uk, from where, you’ll be delighted to know, you can find the full series.

I’ve touched on it before, Italy really is a treasure chest for unexplored grape varieties and wine styles. Unless you’ve been studying viticulture in Italy for half of your life, you’ll only be looking at the very tip of the iceberg. In the grand scheme of things, no matter how much we drink on our travels, we’ll never see the whole picture. That’s the best thing about wine. You never stop learning and enjoying new experiences.

One of the many indigenous Italian varieties is Pecorino, an early-ripening white grape found throughout Abruzzo, Umbria and Lazio. Pecorino is not to be confused with the ancient Tuscan cheese of the same name. I discovered this classic cheese in Rome last year. It’s more of an ‘everyday’ cheese, not at the same level as Parmesan, but a good bit easier on the wallet. I made quick work of a block of it and a bottle of Dolcetto on my last night there. And what a night it was.

The Pecorino grape, something of an endangered species in the big brand wine world, makes subtle, characterful wines. Farnese’s Marco Scarinci told Curious Wines how the future of the Italian wine industry rests on promoting and priding itself on indigenous varieties which give a real expression of their territory. It’s like trying to give Italy that ‘treasure chest’, boutiquey edge, making it a source of incredible riches, and very importantly, choice for all those curious wine drinkers who love to try different things.

Pecorino, adorned by Scarinci, is not a sweet fruit bomb with adrenalin inducing acidity. It is what it is. A product of the land, the winemaker and the variety itself. Farnese’s Pecorino is a great example. It’s a wine made with the same gusto that transformed their Trebbiano white into the International Wine Challenge Wine of the Year.

Delicate, but concentrated, with just a little oak for added complexity there’s a tantalising minerality on the nose leading to a concentrated, crisp palate with real depth and class and a lovely long finish. Expect balsamic notes and aromas of apples and pears on the nose; excellent body, intensity and persistence, with an ideal balance of mellowness and freshness.

That’s good Pecorino all over. It’s not trying to be anything else. Except when it’s cheese.

That is “Barbera” is a sweetheart, not “Barbara”. Although I don’t doubt that if your name is Barbara you are also a sweetheart.

Every week I seem to stumble across a new native Italian grape variety. It’s just one of the many things that keeps me curious about Italy. And it would seem that with every bottle I open, I’m tasting my way through hundreds of years of old worldly heritage.

Barbera is a grape variety that has caught my attention lately. I’ve known about it for a while, but for many wine drinkers it is still unfamiliar. It could have been much more popular today had it not been for some bad publicity in the mid-1980′s. A number of Barbera producers decided to add methanol to their wines, killing more than 30 people and blinding many more in the process. The fall in demand for Barbera allowed for Montepulciano to take the hot seat.

This story has echoes of Austria’s disastrous anti-freeze scandal around the same time. Whereas serious longer term damage was inflicted on the Austrian wine industry, the Italians escaped from this one with their reputation as a whole left reasonably intact. Lessons learned have led to a gradual revival of this Italian sweetheart, and hopefully before long it will be rolling off the tongue of wine guzzling enthusiasts as effortlessly as “Montepulciano”.

Thought to have originated in Monferrato, part of the Piemonte region in Northern Italy, Barbera is capable of very high yields, so pruning is important for producing the best fruit for the best wines. To soften the naturally high tannins, winemakers may age in oak, giving the wines an extra richness, with flavours of plummy black fruit and spice. Lighter styles boasting red fruits are also common. For me, Barbera, with its signature high acidity, is one to be enjoyed with food.

There are few wine producing regions that have a more loyal and passionate following than Barolo. Dubbed the ‘king of wines’ or the ‘wine of kings’, the Nebbiolo’s of this Piemonte sub-region in north west Italy are powerful, and certainly for many, unforgettable. Among the most recent additions to our Italian range, it was a certain Barolo that gave our chief taster one of the greatest wine drinking experiences of his life.

During the 70′s and 80′s there was a shift in what people wanted in a wine. Fruitier, less tannic and generally more accessible, easier drinking wines. Those big acidic Italian blockbusters were not, and still are not, everyone’s first choice, so some Barolo producers started to deviate from the traditional production methods, which involved fermenting the wine on its skins for around three weeks, extracting lots of tannins, before 20-30 days of maceration (for further extraction) and a couple of years ageing in large wooden casks. It would have taken the best part of a decade to soften these robust reds.

With better canopy management, the winemakers began using riper, better quality yields of Nebbiolo, and with modern winemaking technology, they managed to extract colour and flavour without all of the tannin. The traditional approach of 20-30 days maceration was reduced to 7-10 days. Since this change, there has been a steady middle ground achieved, although some will still lean either side of the middle.

The Franco Molino winery has two quite different offerings from the Nebbiolo grape. The 2006 Nebbiolo from the Molino winery itself, and the 2003 Bergadano Bardolo from Molino’s sister winery. The less expensive ’06 has undergone 8 days fermentation in stainless steel tanks. The ’03 Barolo is leaning toward the more traditional method, with 15 days fermentation. A malolactic fermentation then turns the tart malic acid into the softer lactic acid, making for a more approachable wine all-round, whilst maintaining an authentic taste of old. The third offering from Molino comes in the form of Dolcetto from the Alba commune. All good examples of traditional, regionally distinctive wines that have taken on a slightly more modern face since the ‘Barolo wars’ of the 70′s and 80′s.

There is 20% off Italy for the month of July and August, including the wines of Franco Molino.