Italy's Back-to-the-Land Vintners

Individualistic and sometimes iconoclastic, these winemakers look to the past for clues on making distinctive wines

By Robert Camuto - Wine Spectator May 31, 2012

For a new wave of Italian winemakers, great wine is about mixing modern wine knowledge with old-fashioned know-how. In the past 10 years, some young Italians have returned to the land, leaving city life behind and often taking radical steps to shift winemaking back toward its local, small-scale roots.Though many are armed with university degrees having nothing to do with agriculture or enology, they are returning to their ancestral soils to work for themselves. And they are looking to the past, making boutique wines using artigianale (artisanal) methods and green farming, bolstered by a minimum of modern enology. Read full article in the Wine Spectator