2016 passito "Tarasco", Piedmont, Italy
The region of Piedmont (Italian: Piemonte) with its capital Turin is located in the extreme northwest of Italy. With over 25,000 km² of land area, it is the second largest after Sicily. The beginnings of viticulture go back to the Celtic people of the Taurines (who gave the capital its name) and to the Ligurians. The Romans already knew of Piedmontese wines (from Gattinara, among others), but Pliny the Elder (23-79), a polymath and wine writer, does not mention any of them in his list of the best ancient wines. It was not until the Middle Ages that the wines from here, produced primarily by the monasteries, became known,...
Italy is one of the oldest wine-growing countries, the beginnings go back at least to before 1,000 BC. It was at this time that the Etruscans appeared in central Italy, settling areas in the four regions of today's Abruzzo, Lazio, Tuscany and Umbria. The origins of Italian wine culture lie above all in the Greek colonisation, which brought Greek wine culture to the peninsula, beginning in the 10th century BC on the island of Sicily as well as Campania and Calabria. The Greeks brought many of their grape varieties with them and named the ideal land for...
