Wine Spectator October 31, 2018

Visit WineSpectator.com/103118 to find links to all of the following resources. FREE RESOURCES FOR ALL OUR WINESPECTATOR.COM READERS LETTER FROM EUROPE Contributing editor Robert Camuto blogs from his trips through Italy, France and beyond, visiting cutting-edge wine regions, iconoclastic producers and companies that drive wine trends. DAILY WINE PICKS Terrific wine finds in three price ranges, six days a week. Check our site daily for the latest picks or follow them on our Twitter feed, via @WineSpectator. NEW YORK WINE EXPERIENCE Join us Oct. 18–20 for this year’s great lineup of tastings and seminars. Our full coverage of the event will bring the world’s best winemakers and chefs to you with photos, articles and videos. WHAT AM I TASTING? Test your tasting skills in our mystery wine game. Every two weeks, we post a tasting…

Italy holds a special place in the hearts of many wine lovers. First, there’s the larger context: the amazing history, the beautiful scenery, the delicious food. Then there’s the wine itself. It may not be as aristocratic as the bench-mark French appellations, nor as hedonistic as some New World regions, but in its elegant balance of fruit and earth, structure and pleasure, it’s like the Goldilocks of wine. This issue surveys three premier Italian regions: Piedmont in the north, Tuscany in the center and Sicily in the south. Tuscany and Sicily are the subjects of comprehensive tasting reports, by Bruce Sanderson and Alison Napjus, respectively. In Tuscany, Sanderson rates the 2015 vintage at 97 points—“classic” on Wine Spectator’s 100-point scale. After reviewing more than 750 wines from the region, he points you to the…

Rival Regions In his Letter from Europe blog on WineSpectator.com, Robert Camuto pro-filed some young leaders making Aglianico del Vulture in the obscure Basilicata region (“Young and Restless in Southern Italy,” Aug. 6). A reader asked for more information. How would you compare and contrast Etna (which is a cur-rent darling in the wine world) with Basilicata in terms of drawing attention to itself? Is there more capital flow into Etna, which would explain its jump in publicity? Thomas Molitor New Mexico Robert Camuto responds: Every wine scene is different. To have one requires a terroir, the right mix of people dedicated to expressing it, and also investment. The second part—the people—is critical, and Etna had a confluence of the right producers from different places in the early 2000s. It has snow-balled from there. Vulture…

Three years ago, Peter Sisseck of Dominio de Pingus became suspicious. A cork supplier his Ribera del Duero winery didn’t normally use contacted his office because a restaurant in Galicia had placed a request for Pingus-branded corks. “We sort of let it go,” Sisseck told Wine Spectator.But two years later, a Danish buyer complained about two seemingly fake bottles of Pingus he had purchased at auction in Belgium. When Sisseck looked into it, he found that someone from a restaurant in Galicia had sup-plied the wine. “It struck me that when we investigated the incident with the corks, it also came from a restaurant in Galicia,” said Sisseck. His concerns sparked an investigation by Spain’s Civil Guard. In July, officers announced that they had broken up a counterfeiting ring that had been…

Summer skies in California were once again tinged with smoke this year. Multiple wildfires raged across several areas, including Mendocino and Lake counties. Smoke hung in the air over Napa and Sonoma, an acrid reminder of the deadly wildfires that swept through the region less than a year ago. By midsummer, California was already experiencing its worst fire season in nearly a de-cade, with 3,770 fires recorded as of July 29, according to Cal Fire, the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. By that date in 2017 the state had seen 3,440 fires. “The fires have started earlier this year,” said Cal Fire deputy chief Scott McLean. He at-tributes the fire risk to California’s six-year drought. There is still plenty of dried vegetation lying on the ground that can act as…

Joël Robuchon, one of the chefs who revolutionized French cuisine, died Aug. 6 of cancer in Geneva. He was 73. His culinary empire comprised 24 restaurants from Paris to Shanghai, Las Vegas to Hong Kong. Robuchon’s career started modestly when, at age 15, he began work as a pastry chef at the Relais de Poitiers hotel in his hometown of Poitiers. He went on to earn raves as the head chef at Hôtel Concorde-Lafay-ette in Paris and opened his own restaurant, Jamin, in 1981. He later moved to larger quarters and renamed the restaurant Joël Robuchon. Robuchon’s signature cooking style focused on amplifying the flavors and textures of two or three ingredients at the center of a dish. He took the tenets of nouvelle cuisine, which simplified the rigid hierarchies of traditional…