Here at Woodland Hills Wine Company, we're only too happy to extol the virtues of Italy and its wines. And the thing that really excites us, the true beauty that is Italy is that it can claim the greatest diversity of wine types, styles, and grape varieties on the planet. Indeed, every one of the country's 20 regions is to some extent in the wine business. Moreover, Italy has always been at or near the top in terms of sheer volume produced, even if quality lagged that of, say, France more often than not. Italians are also great consumers of their own product, although (as in the rest of Western Europe) per capita consumption has been in gradual decline over the past several years.

Not until the 1960s was there any sort of systematic attempt to impose some order on the almost anarchic chaos that was the Italian wine scene; it came in the form of an official regulatory scheme modeled after the French INAO, namely the DOC (Denominazione di Origine Controllata) rules. DOC wines are subject to detailed legal   More

Here at Woodland Hills Wine Company, we're only too happy to extol the virtues of Italy and its wines. And the thing that really excites us, the true beauty that is Italy is that it can claim the greatest diversity of wine types, styles, and grape varieties on the planet. Indeed, every one of the country's 20 regions is to some extent in the wine business. Moreover, Italy has always been at or near the top in terms of sheer volume produced, even if quality lagged that of, say, France more often than not. Italians are also great consumers of their own product, although (as in the rest of Western Europe) per capita consumption has been in gradual decline over the past several years.

Not until the 1960s was there any sort of systematic attempt to impose some order on the almost anarchic chaos that was the Italian wine scene; it came in the form of an official regulatory scheme modeled after the French INAO, namely the DOC (Denominazione di Origine Controllata) rules. DOC wines are subject to detailed legal stipulations as to geographic boundaries, permitted grape varieties, crop yields, and aging requirements. Over time, however, it became clear that some very fine wines were being made that did not necessarily conform to DOC parameters; there was no choice then but to saddle such wines with the unfortunate vino da tavola ("table wine") designation, which in a way damned them with a kind of official faint praise. The bureaucratic response was to create a separate class in many regions just for these excellent, but nonconforming, wines—ergo, the IGT (Indicazione Geografica Tipica) category. This move has not been without its unintended consequences, however: for every boundary-busting, individualistic expression of a gifted winemaker's creativity under the IGT rubric, there now seem to be at least three examples of bland, facile, internationally-styled mediocrities (often made from Cabernet or Merlot) that are barely recognizable as Italian.

Fortunately, a movement seems to be afoot to correct the excesses committed in the name of the "modernization" of Italian wine. Barolo producers who may have flirted with roto-fermenters, or who rushed to fill their cellars with high-toast, new French barriques, are in many cases now seeking a better balance between tradition and technology. Tuscan winemakers who seemed 10 years ago bent on launching Bordeaux 2.0 are now willing to admit that, hey, they're in Tuscany and they grow Sangiovese...and that's OK! Finally, we now see less "glamorous" zones asserting their own unique regional identities by championing their highly individual, character-rich indigenous grape varieties.   Less