The Essential Guide to Italian Wine 2022

Description

This is the 8th edition of the Essential Guide to Italian Wine, which debuted with the 2015 version. The guide’s guru is always Daniele Cernilli, the internationally renowned wine critic and journalist, who leads a team of vastly experienced and professional tasters.

The mainstay philosophy of the guide is that of being essential, in other words, to not lump together thousands of estates but select those that, in DoctorWine’s view, are the best and that in the coming months will offer prestigious wines to the market.

A total of 1,241 estates were selected (out of the many thousands we examined) and a total of 3,085 wines were synthetically reviewed, evaluated and described, focusing on their technical and organoleptic characteristics, out of over 20,000 tasted. Among the wines selected, 721 were singled out for their excellent quality/price ratio, having retail prices of less than 15 euros and in many cases less than 10. These wines were indicated by the thumbs-up “like” symbol and among them there is also a mini-ranking that indicates the best among these along with a list of the 10 best buys.

As with any guide worth its salt, the DoctorWine guide also has its quality pyramid, which is indicated by the by-now established “seal”, with a hedcut of Daniele Cernilli to signify that he “sticks his neck out” in certifying the quality of the wines that have obtained ratings of 95/100 or above. This year, we have two wines that top our ranking with a 100/100 rating and thus were awarded with three seals, while there were 13 wines with a 99/100 rating, which also received three “seals”. These wines are the guide’s “crème de la crème”. A total of 45 wines earned a double seal having obtained ratings of 98/100 while those with ratings of 97, 96 and 95/100 were given one seal.

In order to make reading easier, this year the wines awarded prizes were listed within the sector for each individual region and in the introduction only the wines with three and two seals were listed along with, naturally, the 15 Special Prizes and our list of 35 Single Varietal wines, which include some of the pillars of Italian quality wines.

Along with the evaluations of the wines, there is also a system to rank the quality of individual estates, which is expressed in zero to three stars, a classification based on how emblematic they are of their territory, their reliability in regard to quality and their international image.

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