[Guido] Italian wine and not so Italian coffee

The drink that represents my country the most is certainly wine. Or coffee, either way. But even if our coffee is so well known in the world, we must admit that we just brew it. 

Guido's father is drinking a glass of one of the
1-3 bottles of wine that he produces per year

The real production of coffee is in South America and Africa. Not so for our wine. That's why in the ancient times Italy was called Enotria Tellus (the Land of Wine). And still nowadays Chianti, Martini, Marsala, Prosecco, Asti, Fontanafredda are just some of the most selling names of Italian wine in the world. 

The scale of the wine kinds in Italy ranges from the most tannic and less alcoholic in the north (wines made from the nebbiolo kind of of grape like Barolo, Nebbiolo, Barbera or Barbaresco) to the sweeter and more alcoholic in the south (like Marsala for example). 

The most famous, Chianti (Classico or Gallo Nero), is from the namesake zone of Tuscany: the Chianti hills, in the central-northern part of Italy. Made of both white and black grapes, it is a red wine very delicate and tasty, mildly alcoholic and delicious to serve with both meat or fish meals.

Even if American and Oriental wealthy people are buying more and more farms in our best winemaker places, in the Italian countryside it is still nowadays very common, for private people,  to produce a little amount of wine for their own use, to share it with friends or to make some gift for special occasions. That's why we have so many kinds of wine in our country: there are a lot of little producers and everyone uses some special personal method. 

Furthermore, Italy is a land full of different kinds of land and any particular land produces a particular grape from which it is possible to produce a particular wine. This is even the reason why very high level Italian wine is so expensive and difficult to find: we can produce only a very small quantity of each kind and a lot of them are even not for sale - they are just produced by people that enjoy them with friends. So Italian wine market is one of the few still remaining exemples of the fact that, even in the globalized consumerism world, not everything is for sale.

Gudio Giacomo Gattai from Italy