Filippo Bartolotta celebrates the centenary of the Consorzio Vino Chianti Classico and delves into how recent vintages from the appellation have held up.
Despite my adventurous pedigree, your author is somewhat of a late bloomer when it comes to skiing, picking up some poles and donning my boots in the exotic Milton Keynes snowdome at the ripe old age of 38. And while a ski trip has become somewhat of an annual pilgrimage, it has been very much a set of variations on a common theme. A concrete micropolis high in the French Alps, inhabited by a multicultural meleé of seasonnaires, University ski club trips and ski-school snakes. Up early, ski hard, drink harder, repeat until the legs or the liver gives out. This year I vowed to discover something more nuanced, more cultural, more compelling. With my hunters hat on, my cappello da cacciatore perhaps, I headed to the Italian Dolomites. Travelling in my usual style, trading a wipe-clean pay-to-breathe Ryanair flight for a jaunt on a Skyalps turboprop was a dream. A nimble little plane (more private jet, less cattle car) whisked me to the small and delightfully efficient Bolzano airpor
The cobbled streets of Radda were quiet when I arrived in early December, around the start of the Omicron wave, but at the end of Via Roma I found a warm welcome at La Bottega di Giovannino. Monica Bernardoni, the chef and wine buyer, told me that her father started the business as a small