Bringing Great Italian Wine to the UK

[Craig Camp]

Shoddy examples of mass-volume wines have done no end of damage to Italy's image in Britain. So much so that several Italian-born sommeliers, chefs and former City traders have been inspired to set up small businesses to import better examples. Their strength is their ability to track down the kind of obscure, regional gems that rarely, if ever, appear on supermarket shelves.

[slacker]

It is true, Italy's image has slipped, or probably never risen from the depths of price pointing.

Still, as a source of affordable, true wines, it is not that bad either - just be selective. The problem as I see it does not only affect Italy: it is one of the uniformity of wine styles from around the world.

As merchants we cannot have the goal of transforming a nation's view of wine, as the huge growth in wine drinking over the past few years has not been fuelled by regional typicity, but by bulk wine from everywhere in the world.

Andrew Catchpole helps wine merchants with his views in this case, rather than fmcg players. So that's good.