The Essential Guide to Italian Wine 2021

Descrizione

As our readers know, DoctorWine’s wine guide is different from the others starting with its title. It is “essential” because it is a selection of the best wineries and their wines and thus represents the absolute highest quality of Italian wines. A total of 1,202 wineries were reviewed, among the several thousand we examined, and 3,118 wines were succinctly evaluated and described in regard to their technical and organoleptic characteristics, out of the over 20,000 we tasted. Among these wines, 730 were singled out with a thumbs up “like” icon for their favorable quality/price ratio, those retailing at less than 15 euros (with a rating above 90/100) or less than 10 euros (with ratings 85/100 and above). For these wines you can drink every day there is also a mini-classification that crowns the best buy and lists the 10 best.

Like any respectable guide, DoctorWine’s guide also has quality pyramid ranking, which is represented by our “faccino” seal of approval symbol, a hedcut of Daniele Cernilli, which certifies the quality of wines that have achieved a rating of at least 95/100. This year there is a wine that received a 100/100 rating and was thus given three seals, as did the six wines with a 99/100 rating. Double seals were given to the 39 wines with a rating of 98/100, while those with ratings of 97, 96 and 95/100 were given a single seal.

It should be pointed out that this year we had a much less drastic criterion in awarding our prizes and honorable mentions. More “faccino” seals were given than in previous editions and this be it because of the extraordinary version of a wine, due to a particularly positive harvest, be it because we felt it would be inopportune to be too picky at a time when the world of wine also finds itself in difficulty. Nevertheless, these wines represent the absolute excellence of Italian winemaking this season and, for the majority of these wines, we will be hearing about them for years to come.

As always, to underscore the excellence of each category, there were 12 Special Prizes and our selection of 35 single-varietal wines, among which are some of the pillars of Italian wines and, why not, even some surprises.

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