June 1988. The green Volkswagen Beetle winds through the Chianti with deliberate slowness, on the legendary route 222. My parents in front, me in the back, stretched out over the seats.

It’s Sunday, and family tradition dictates that we go for a little drive. This almost always means the rolling hills of the Black Rooster, or in other words, of Chianti Classico, which are riven by the same straight road that bisects almost all of Tuscany. It passes through the gorgeous hill towns of Panzano, ...

A sense of expectation hangs in the air, a mysterious – or maybe mystical – feeling that something is about to happen. Your steps ring dry on the stones and become shorter as you struggle up the cobbled slopes of Triora. The atmosphere is pregnant with a sense of time without place, and it invariably surprises the traveler who innocently heads inland from the Ligurian coast. You couldn’t predict anything that you find here. In this day and age, we think of Liguria as nothing more than a strip of ...

No history of wine and vines can possibly omit the story of phylloxera.

Over the years, on my many travels among vineyards, time and again I’ve started a visit by looking at the very bottom of the young vines. And on these, beneath a protective waxy later, you can clearly see where the roots of an American vine have been grafted to a European one. The latter is known as Vitis vinifera for the quantities of wine that can be made from it. In showing its shoots, it allows winemakers to practice ...

The morning air is full of scents, and the pollen is dancing through it.

I rub my eyes and start sneezing. Good to see that my allergy has arrived right on time. We meet up with our friends in the town square, a happy mix of young and old(er). The usual stragglers eventually arrive, and then we’re off on our route, which starts with a climbing dirt track that has been around since the time of the Etruscans. Our destination isn’t far: it’s a large, sunny clearing at the foot of a ...

È primavera svegliatevi bambine…. sang the great Alberto Rabagliati in the mid-twentieth century. Spring: the season of reawakening. After the long, dark winter, where the dominant shades are the washed-out grays of the cloudy skies and the leafless trees, spring injects everything with color and puts something in the air that really lifts the spirits.

Now that we’re into our second year of restrictions, everything is mitigated to some degree; everything is complicated. But one ...