Saturday, June 14, 2008

Beverages in Italy- Wine

When one thinks of Italy, the first beverage that comes to mind will likely be wine, or vino in Italian. And since I am not a connoisseur of wine by any stretch of the imagination, I won’t be providing a critique of different wines, but instead I will try of give a brief overview of the Italian wine scene. The two main wines you will order in Italy and vino rosso (red wine) and vino bianco (white wine). One of the first things you will notice when shopping for wines is that they are a great bargain in Italy. You can find a pretty decent bottle in a grocery store for 3 Euro. At a restaurant, things can be a little different. You will often have to upwards of 10 Euro for a bottle of wine. There are also a few other variations of wines which you can buy such as prosecco, grappa, and dessert wine. Prosecco is a chilled sparkling wine, grappa is a grape based pomace brandy, and dessert wine is a sweet wine as one might imagine. Out of these 3 varieties I have only tried the dessert, which I would recommend highly to anyone. In general, you almost can’t go wrong with wine in Italy. As a rule of thumb though, try to stay away from wine packaged in jugs and plastic bottles. Special thanks to wikipedia.org for some wine descriptions.

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