The first DOC and DOCG Atlas of Italy

News 19 October 2016 Italian Wine Chronicle

You will be thinking: “if we need a guide to the guide, that’s a bad start”. But maybe not! We just want to make the reading of the first DOC and DOCG Atlas of Italy super easy. We came up with the idea of providing a handbook, or as we used to say at school, a “cheat sheet”, to help you find your way around this complicated world of designations and their regulations.

The most useful information

It often happens that you want to check how long you should age a Chianti Classico for, what the Collio varietal wines are, or the geographical mentions of Barolo and other details (minimum alcohol level, yield per hectare…). Thanks to the internet, it’s easy to go straight to the ministerial decree (“the production regulations”). But it is almost impossible to read it: you dive in among articles and clauses in the hope of finding what you are looking for… we have done it for you, extracting the most useful information and sometimes rewriting it.

Grape varieties, wine types and more…

In our data sheets you’ll find:

the main grape varieties (with the minimum and maximum percentages allowed; however, we don’t specify the percentage of “other suitable grapes”)
the wine types allowed (Sparkling wine, White, Red, Riserva, Superiore, Dried-grape wine, etc…) and the minimum alcohol level
the subzones and geographical mentions
the minimum residual sugar in g/l for sweet wines
the minimum planting density in vines per hectare and the maximum grape yields allowed in tonnes per hectare
the ageing time and type (if applicable)

How to use the Atlas of DOCs and DOCGs

In total there are 419 Italian designation (344 DOCs and 75 DOCGs), divided per region and located on the maps. If that isn’t enough, for each region we are publishing up-to-date data on the hectares of vineyards, production, the number of wineries, exports, etc. Lastly, to enhance the project further, we asked certain wineries to present themselves as ambassadors of their DOCs, therefore next to each data sheet you will find a recommendation for a particularly representative wine. Enjoy the atlas. We certainly cannot define it as an “adventure novel”, but it is certainly a great help for enthusiasts.

To buy the Atlas (paper or digital) click here.

Although it is published in Italian, is easy to understand. Take a look at an example page.