Italy’s wine renaissance

I have just returned from a short break in Rome, with its rich infusion of the ancient, Renaissance and Baroque - and some wonderful restaurants, the likes of which we never see here. One of them had a wine list of more than 50 pages, with at least 30 Italian wines to a page, listed by the producer's name. There were more than 100 wines from Perugia alone (I know a reasonable amount about Italian wine and I had only heard of two!) The wine we drank was magical.

Italy has an appellation system which totally lacks the clarity of France's. Many of the most famous producers choose to ignore it completely and classify their wines as 'table wines', because they consider them too good to be associated with an appellation, or because they disagree with the local bureaucracy about which grape varieties they should use. The labels are normally beautifully designed and somewhat minimalist (ie, with as little information as to what the bottle contains as possible).

Central Italy is one of the biggest and most diverse wine-growing areas in the world. It extends from Tuscany (the home of Chianti and Chianti Classico) in the north, through Montalcino, Montepulciano, Perugia and the Marche, down to the Castelli Romani where Frascati is made and the Pope spends the summer.

A large proportion of the wines produced are consumed locally or exported to Italian communities around the world - Italians living abroad drink the wines from their native districts with an impassioned loyalty. We outsiders (even in the UK, the most cosmopolitan wine market in the world) only see a fraction of these wines, and they tend to be from the bigger brands (Fontana Candida for example) which - although perfectly respectable - lack the heart and the magic of those many small producers.

Next time you are lucky enough to be in Rome, have lunch at Al Moro (tel 0039 06-6783495) near the Spanish Steps. It's a gem of a restaurant – an old haunt of Fellini's that serves traditional Roman cuisine. The wine list comes in two volumes! ·