The first supplier of raw materials for any form of communication has a precise identity: it is called "change". And this is even more true in the world of wine: if there were not a continuous fervor made up of innovation, technological progress, rediscovery of ancient viticultural and winemaking practices, recovery and deportation of ancient vines, the communication of wine would not even have a reason to exist. Instead, between old and new players in the world of production, for some decades there has been a frantic chase made up of accelerations, sprints, overtaking, sudden braking, search for alternative routes and, more often, shortcuts.

This has led to an abnormal multiplication of the offer, not only in terms of labels on the market, but also of wine types, so radically dissimilar from each other that it would not be improper to speak of different "product types".

The trouble is that the location of these new typological "personalities" is not defined, clear, mappable both in geographical, economic and regulatory terms. However, we catalog the wine, by price, by denomination, by geographical area, within that category we find all the macro-types that have emerged in the market.

And the same happens if we use the producer as a theater of investigation: whether it is a small, medium or large winemaker, a social winery or a merchant, a boutique winery or a multinational, in its catalog, we will invariably find, in most cases, a plurality of types side by side without logic, without there being a strategy behind it and,  much less, a company philosophy.

The good rule of an attentive observer is to stop every now and then, reason and perhaps draw conclusions, print an overall photograph, go from the particular to the general and understand in which direction we are going. To improve the work of the observer, to provide critical tools to those who produce, to give a hand to the consumer who has a thousand reasons to find himself at least disoriented.

Years of attention to what is stirring, both on the sparkling surface of the laden tables and in the darkness of the cellars, leads us to outline the presence, on the market, of seven macro-types, each with its own well-defined raison d'être, both technical and commodity: wine-alcohol, wine-sugar, wine-fruit, wine-wood, wine-land and wine-image.

It is the wine that has trod the scene as a protagonist for a few millennia, the one that made poets sing because it helped to languish souls and induce them to love transport, the one that inflamed soldiers and gave them the courage to throw themselves into battle. The quantity of alcohol present in a unit of measurement has been for centuries the parameter of quality, the indicator of the economic value of any batch of wine

With the evolution of winemaking techniques and consumer tastes, however, alcohol has begun to lose its central role to the advantage of other elements that have gradually made the fortune of some restricted areas (think of the effervescence of Champagne, the fruitiness of German wines, the sweetness of Port) without ever being able to impose themselves as new parameters of qualitative and value evaluation. In the last century, wine-alcohol has been increasingly relegated to the low-level consumption bracket and has seen two categories of producers among its main architects: industrialists (in which, for our convenience, we also include merchants and cooperative wineries) and self-producers (i.e. that myriad of farmers with a patch of vineyard who produce wine for themselves,  family members and a few customers-friends).

In statistical terms, wine-alcohol still represents the largest slice of the market but in the last thirty years the scenario has changed radically. Industrialists, traders and cooperative wineries, while dedicating themselves mainly to the low end of the market, have inevitably invested in technology, radically transforming their product, giving it characteristics that go far beyond the instinctive demands of their customers. Those who have a taste memory today find in wines sold in bricks, or in ladies, or on tap, organoleptic characteristics that in the seventies contributed to the excellence of some avant-garde producers.

This leap in quality has led to a curious phenomenon: wine-alcohol consumers have survived the almost total disappearance of the product they are looking for and find themselves "forced" to drink better because there is no worse on the market. Unless they turn to the variegated world of self-producers which has perhaps been reduced a bit in quantity but has not changed one iota in terms of quality.

There the goal is the same as a few centuries ago: to produce as many grapes as possible and obtain a wine rich in alcohol. And even the techniques used are always the same, primordial, crude, stingy, almost as if to borrow the rule that seems to come from popular religiosity: wine is a miracle and the miracle is beautiful and credible if it is revealed in a context of poverty (economic and mental). We know the slogan very well: "This wine is made with grapes!".

If wine-alcohol has been the dominus of the wine scene for millennia, in all times it has had to give up a small part of the proscenium, but the most visible, to wine-sugar.

Because since time immemorial and until the early twentieth century, if the alcohol content was the first reason for attraction, being sweet was the discriminating element between the wine of the vulgar and that of the powerful, that of taverns and that of royal tables, the first drunk sitting on a bench, the second limply lying on a triclinium.

The twentieth century can rightly be defined as the century of the redemption of dry wines and that of the decline of sweet wines, whose universe has clearly split in two: on the one hand, those of low quality, almost always sparkling or sparkling, made to capture ignorant palates, to cheer popular festivals and wedding banquets; on the other hand, the noble lineage of passito, botridized, late harvests, so refined and extreme that sweetness becomes a marginal element, almost an inevitable accident, at most a sort of base whose function is to support, and therefore enhance, the abnormal set of aromas and flavors that they manage to concentrate in a small glass.

The former are quantitatively more widespread and can generate strong earnings, even if difficult to consolidate: ignorance is always transitory and palates either evolve by arriving at better wines, or regress becoming easy prey for soft drinks, colas and beers.

The latter represent a small market niche, marginal in terms of global turnover but extremely significant in terms of the image of those who produce them. In short, these are exercises in style, pieces of skill in which you launch yourself in search of applause in the open scene, no matter if the box office will cry, complaining that there were more guests than paying spectators.

There is no person in the world, expert or novice, habitual or occasional drinker, who does not spread a beautiful smile when he brings his nose and lips close to a glass that releases freshness, aromas of flowers and fruity flavors. The wine-fruit is the archetype dreamed of and pursued since the dawn of oenology, the one that gave inebriation to Noah, the one sung by many poets and drunk by few mortals.

The fact that it has been a chimera for millennia is due to the fact that the techniques of vinification and conservation allowed the wine to directly express the characteristics of the grape with which it was obtained only for a very short period of the year, from racking to the arrival of the first warm weather.

And the subsequent rapid degradation has pushed winemakers to invent conservation techniques that inevitably mortified the fruitiness, the close and natural (as well as pleasant) link with the grape variety of origin.

The technological advances of the last fifty years have made available to us techniques that allow us to overcome that ancient handicap very well and offer the market fruit-wines that maintain their fragrance throughout the year and even beyond. There would be a lot to indulge in a competition of excellence, but very few prestigious producers compete with this type and if they do it is mainly for box reasons, to add to the list a wine that is easy to market, destined to provide gold rather than laurels.

Yet there would be no more suitable time than now, at least in Italy, to address the production of wine-fruit in terms of high quality: in fact, in what other area could the generalized focus on native vines offer its best results? What sense does it make to rediscover Nero d'Avola and then age it in barriques to make it look as much like a Bordeaux Cabernet as possible? Is it a sensible operation to try to safeguard our "immense varietal heritage" without then transferring its peculiar characteristics to the wine that is obtained from it?

The trouble is that, for the moment, that of native vines seems more like a fad (if not a desperate commercial hope) than a long-term strategic choice. Even if some enlightened producers are sowing well and it is to be hoped that they can trace a new path capable of starting fruit wines towards the Olympus of the wine elite.

It has dominated the scene for a few centuries and is the result of the convergence of random factors and technological intuitions that have led to a universally accepted codification of the quality parameters of modern wines.

The random factor consists in the advent of wooden containers that have gradually replaced amphorae, jars and stone and masonry basins in cellars. The intuition, in having understood that these new containers were not just containers but real oenological machines that intervened in the maturation of the wine, improved it while transforming it from the gustatory point of view, standardized its salient characteristics making wines of different origins and harvests more similar, gave it longevity by greatly lengthening the season of its marketability.

It is no coincidence that the primordial land of wine-wood is Bordeaux and that that is the place where the market has always been in the hands of the "negociants", i.e. people who are attentive to those characteristics of organoleptic and temporal stability that guarantee a (well) aged wine in wood. And it is not equally coincidental that wine-wood has become a world standard, the first test of anyone who wants to measure himself, in the old as in the new worlds, with international markets.

A gustatory standard that in the last thirty years has rapidly descended the steps of the quality pyramid, pushing the most savvy mass producers (read: Australians and Chileans) to rediscover ancient techniques of enrichment in tannins (today they are called "chips", Sante Lancerio, praising their use, called them "tacchie") using them to produce low-cost wood-wines with enormous market potential.

Italian producers noticed this trend very late and, when they became aware of it, they threw themselves into it with the enthusiasm (and naivety) of novices, immediately aiming to "beat" the market dominators, i.e. the great Bordeaux chateau. Some, like Sassicaia, have even gloriously won their battle but it is so evident that "ours" are so lacking in unity, equipment and organization that they can never even dream of winning the war.

In short, the Italian wine-wood, with the sole exception of the two strongholds of Brunello and Barolo, moreover in a perpetual state of renovation, appears as a large mosaic in which every single tile shines for beauty, color and intensity of light, but the overall image continues to appear blurred, one of those in which everyone can see what they want.

Rereading the evaluation sheets published in the old vintages of the numerous wine guides still dominant, you would realize how some descriptors were almost absent in the first ones and present with increasing frequency year after year. We are talking about the noun-adjective "mineral", graphite, flint, and all those elements that come from the bowels of the earth rather than from the plant world.

This change in our language is not a fixation of tasters in search of originality but the indicator of a change taking place, of a new trend that meanders among producers devoted to high quality and who do not pursue it trying to resemble the already consolidated sacred monsters.

We can call this new challenge wine-earth, that is, a wine that transcends the grape variety and uses it as a tool to absorb and make its own the moods of the soil in which it has its roots. And then he transcends the wood and bends it into a useful tool to cement those moods, smooth their edges, balance them and give them back to us in perfect harmony with each other.

Mind you, nothing new under the sun.

The wine-land has its own precise homeland of choice, consolidated for a few centuries and appreciated above all by those who know wine beyond fashions and marketing sleight of hand: Burgundy.

The extraordinary thing is that, almost spontaneously, in the most diverse parts of Italy, new producers decide more and more often to try their hand at the production of land-wines, facing an undertaking that is in many ways reckless, both from a winemaking and commercial point of view. Because these are wines that require great effort and sacrifices, terroirs of rare mineral complexity, extreme vineyards in terms of age, conformation and training method, agronomic and oenological practices rarely codified, intuition rather than ratiocination, courage seasoned with a pinch of madness.

And once they start the market they have to fight against the stereotypes of consolidated success, made up of power, wealth, aggressiveness, all elements that have an easy game in telling even the well-cultured consumer.

As arduous as the undertaking is, the results are comforting and it is certainly from this niche that the great Italian wines of the future will emerge. They just need time, encouragement and a more mature, disenchanted and deeply sensual consumer.

This sixth macro-typology should be taken into serious consideration but, going through each of the previous ones, it could not structurally be part of this list.

The wine-image represents a powerful category in terms of numbers and value, protagonist of every national and international market, a winner in all times, capable of seducing and fascinating even the most experienced and shrewd taster. The wine-image is a product that takes the form of bottles that are not ordered and uncorked for the type to which they belong, for the aromas and flavors they are able to unfold, for the pleasure you feel in drinking them. They are ordered and uncorked for what they represent, for the ability to satisfy the expectations of our mind even before those of our palate and our belly.

The energy spent by producers to create a winning image around their wines is constantly growing and the fight to emerge is getting harder and harder, with no holds barred.

These are efforts that often pay off, cloaking the wines that are the subject of a magical aura capable of enormously influencing the consumer's choices, but also the attitude of experts and those tasters who make objectivity their distinctive mark (and this is the first reason for the multiplication of blind tastings, the need to verify on anonymous samples the positive judgments given by tasting with open cards).

All this, of course, without wanting at all costs to negatively connote the category of wine-image. It is only a matter of being able to identify the thin line between charm and beauty. And tasting without the conditioning of the image can serve to reveal when charm is only a tool to hide a substantial lack of beauty. Even if today, to be honest, the problem of Italian wine seems to be completely reversed: many, too many wines are surprisingly beautiful but relegated to the margins of the market due to a chronic lack of charm.

And it will certainly not be the judgments, votes and rankings drawn up by experts that will transform mice into white horses, pumpkins into golden carriages and Cinderella into princesses.

GO TO: