I do not have a great deal of knowledge of expertise when it comes to wine. What I do have is some experience of a few Italian wines tied to places I have visited, which proved very worthwhile.
Before we go on, I must strongly suggest that you drink wine from small, old fashioned, wine glasses. The huge modern lightbulb type glasses are top heavy, aesthetically unappealing and far too industrial for my tastes. They add nothing to the experience.
The first wine I can recall really encountering in Italy is from the first place we visited together there, Rome. Whilst not from Rome itself, Castelli Romani is essentially the countryside area outside the city and the closest wine producing appellation. They produce solid, decent red wines which flow into the eternal city and its bars and restaurants. That said, I imagine we got the wine from Spar rather than anywhere more poetic or exotic. The volcanic hills around Rome have probably been used for producing wine for the best part of three millennia but it appears that the wine produced there all tends to end up in the city and it’s very rare to see any for sale abroad.
The next wine we encountered is another red, and this time it’s the Negroamaro of Puglia. We rarely came across a bad one, and I have to say the ones on sale in Italy were generally lighter, happier and fruitier than any Negroamaro I’ve come across outside the region. The best of all was the ability to buy wine directly from the makers, usually sold from a huge stainless steel vat in a garage. They also sold giant five litre plastic jugs of the wine, which were very economical and generally excellent. It’s a very different sort of drink to what wine connoisseurs might drink - it’s young, fresh and designed for drinking soon.
From Puglia we moved around again, something of a trend in our lives. We’ve packed our whole life into boxes and moved a thousand miles something like a dozen times. This time life took us to the island of Sardinia - a true microcontinent. We were in the north west of the island and had a wonderful flat, some great friends and an employer who it’s hard to find something nice to say about. Sardinia itself has a rather unique food culture, from the wafer thin crisp breads that are called pane carasau through some unique types of pasta and a real love of odd ingredients. The wine I associate most with the island isn’t the wonderful red that we were served with grilled donkey steaks, but a light and sparkling white. The wine is known as Aragosta and has a picture of the langoustine on the label, being a dry and sparkling wine it was the “spumante brut” version that we liked most, but the regular Vermentino is easier to come by and almost as good. I can particularly remember gifting a bottle to our landlord’s son when he managed to get a new gas cylinder for us when our cooking gas went off mid-way through cooking on Christmas eve!
The last place we lived in Italy was up on the Venetian plane, where fog is sealed in between the Dolomites and the Gulf of Venice. It was a far cry from other places we’d been, and the weather was something of a shock to the system. In many ways you could tell it was the southern end of Mitteleuropa, with a notable Habsburg influence in some areas. Aside from the dry white wines which are often combined into Spritz Liscio, the area is also the home of Prosecco. It’s always dry, and tends to come in either a spumante version (many bubbles) or frizzante with slightly fewer.
Far from the now ubiquitous fizzy wine drunk all over England, it was a light and dry staple drink of the area. You could usually buy it by the glass, often very cheaply - one mountainside bar charged only eighty cents a glass. The single best version we had was made from the same grape, in the same method, but fell just to the south of the formal prosecco region so couldn’t be sold as such. Far from a pretentious drink, you’d see people stop off in a bar at 10am for a glass - either mid dog walk or just to break up the day, and it was drunk by as many men as women.
Are these the best wines? I don’t know. They’re special to me because they are drinks tied to experiences and places. A glass of nostalgia, the grapes of memory.
Much enjoyed reading this Samuel and you ending struck a chord with me. The luscious valpolicella ripasso my wife and I drank in a small trattoria on a birthday celebration in Verona, the velvety primitivo enjoyed while sitting at the bar of a deli in Rome's Testaccio market, the richness of the Amarone sitting high over Naples bay and for my 60th birthday the decadent treat of Sassicaia while sitting on the Capitoline Hill overlooking Rome. My Christmas morning tipple is a Franciacorta and Limoncello cocktail I discovered in the Hotel Grand Des Iles Borromees in Stresa that supposedly inspired Hemingway in his writing of a Farewell to Arms. As you write, they may not be the best wines but they conjure up the best memories.