One Wine Critic, 411 Appellations

About Jeremy Young

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 with Distinction.

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

What I love about Italy

I've spent at least six months of my life in Italy. It's my favorite country in the world, and if I had to drink wine from one place for the rest of my life I wouldn't need time to think about the answer.

My wife Taylor and I spent a month all over Italy on our honeymoon. A month sounds like a long trip until you try to see Italy in one, and we came home with a longer list of places than we left with.

The wine is what pulled me in and it's what keeps me going back. No other country grows this many native grapes or makes this many genuinely different wines out of them. Drive two hours and everything in the glass changes: the variety, the soil, the shape of the bottle, what the people who live there expect the wine to taste like. Nobody has run out of things to find in Italy, and I don't think anybody is going to.

Then there's everything around the wine. Italian food makes more sense the closer you get to where it grew, and so does the wine that grew up next to it. I love the language and I'm still working on mine. I love that you can ask a stranger a simple question about what to drink and get twenty minutes on which producer in his town you should be buying instead.

This project is my excuse to know all of it. Every appellation on the list is somebody's town and somebody's family, and a hillside they decided was worth the paperwork.

Why this project

Italy has more protected appellations than any other wine country: 79 DOCG and 332 DOC as I count them. Most wine writing covers the same forty. The other 371 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. Every review is published here and on International Wine Report. 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, as many as a producer wants to send. If a producer or a consorzio wants a second or a third wine tasted from the same DOC, or a different wine from the one I asked about, 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.