One taster, 410 appellations.

Me

I'm Jeremy Young, Senior Editor at International Wine Report. I taste and score wine for a living, mostly from the Pacific Northwest and California, and I hold the WSET Level 3 Award in Wines with Distinction.

Outside of wine I build software and run a couple of small businesses. That's why this site exists as a site and not a spreadsheet.

Why this project

Italy has more protected appellations than any other wine country: 78 DOCG and 332 DOC as I count them. Most wine writing covers the same forty. The other 370 get a line in a reference book, if that.

I wanted a reason to taste all of them. Tasted properly, written up with a score, on a page that will still be there in ten years. When someone searches for a DOC nobody has written about, I'd like them to find a real review.

The rule is at least one wine from every appellation. It doesn't have to be the best wine of the appellation, it has to be a fair example of it. Where I can, I pick something with US distribution so you can go and buy it.

More than one is welcome. If a producer or a consorzio wants a second or a third wine tasted from the same DOC, send them and I'll write them all up. The count on the home page tracks appellations, so extra wines add reviews to a page rather than moving the number.

Samples and scores

Samples are welcome. Many of these wines don't exist in the US market, so for a lot of appellations a sample is the only way a bottle reaches me. Every review says how I got the bottle, and a sample is always marked as a sample.

Scores are mine, on the 100-point scale I use at International Wine Report. There's no way to pay for a review or a score, and sending a bottle doesn't buy a kind one.

Send two bottles

Every wine submitted needs two bottles. This is a requirement, not a preference.

The first one gets opened and scored. The second is there because bottles fail. Cork taint, heat damage in transit, a bad closure: any of those and the wine I taste isn't the wine you made. With a backup on the shelf I open the second bottle and your appellation still gets its review. With only one, I have to write to you and wait, and some of these wines take months to reach me the first time.

The second bottle also lets me re-taste before I publish when a wine is close to a score boundary, and it gives me a clean bottle to photograph.

Contact

The fastest way to reach me about a bottle is the form. For anything else, email jeremy@theitalywineproject.com.