Whenever friends visit Venice, I lead them away from the crowds on the waterfront, past the Arsenale, to a convent in Castello. Behind its walls, friars still grow vines.

In Hong Kong, a room of experienced tasters could not agree on acidity, tannin or sweetness. So one week I brought four bottles of water, each holding a single component, and we tasted them one at a time. This is the method that came from that evening, and how to repeat it at home.

The first time I turned the pages of The Italian Dream, I had the reaction most foreigners have: I want to be in that book.
Through a long lunch in a garden and the houses of Italy's old families, it captures an art of living quietly preserved for generations.
It is a dream, of course, but one worth looking for, because it does exist.

Before it was a wine, Lugana was a marshy forest that travellers crossed with caution, a blank space between the lake and the plain.
Today it is home to a grape with its own name and white wines that, given time in bottle, can stand beside the finest anywhere.

Every year the Valpolicella consortium asks me to taste the new Amarone. On paper, these wines should be exhausting. Lately one word keeps appearing in my notes.

Much of wine communication answers questions nobody has asked yet: information offered before interest exists. People find their way into wine through a moment, and knowledge follows when curiosity asks for it. Wine has no shortage of information. What it needs more of is invitation.

On Etna, I once picked up a fragment of lava and put it on my tongue. It tasted of rock. What soil really gives a wine turned out to be more interesting.