The Middle Ages were a time of silence and reconstruction.
The vineyards survived the fall of Rome and re-emerged in the hands of monks, who saw in wine not only a craft, but also an act of faith.
Europe was being reborn, and with it came a new way of thinking about territory. Wine ceased to be merely a product and became geography, law, and identity.
In this part of Stories of Wine, we journey through the heart of the Old World — the place where wine became organized, gained a voice, status, and boundaries.
It is here that history becomes system. And it is here that, as a winemaker, I feel the weight and the beauty of that legacy.
Block I — The Middle Ages and the Monks (chapters 21–28)
After the collapse of Rome, Europe fell silent. Roads were no longer travelled, trade weakened, and the vineyards the Romans had planted across the continent were slowly abandoned. But not all of them. In the monasteries, between prayer and work on the land, wine survived — and with it, the knowledge that would allow Europe to rebuild itself.
The monks were not merely producers. They were observers. They recorded, compared, adjusted. And it was in that patient work, repeated generation after generation, that the embryo of everything we now understand as terroir was born.
This block is a tribute to that long, silent time — when faith and method, improbably, became one and the same.
Block II — France: The Model and the Power (chapters 29–42)
No country has influenced the way we think about wine more profoundly than France.
Between kings, monks, merchants, and philosophers, wine became there a language of identity and class. It was in France that terroir became law, prestige gained rules, and pleasure was transformed into a system.
In this block, we explore the birth of French wine culture — a story where politics, religion, and geography intersect to create the model the entire world would seek to imitate.
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Block III — Italy: Diversity as Identity (chapters 43–52)
Italy does not have one model. It has many.
While France built a system, Italy built a world — plural, contradictory, impossible to reduce to a single idea. With more than 350 indigenous grape varieties, twenty distinct wine regions and a history that predates Rome, Italian wine is the fullest expression of diversity as a value.
Here, wine has never been separated from the table, the family or the land. It is as much a part of everyday life as it is of great occasions. And perhaps it is precisely this naturalness — this refusal to exist solely as an expression of prestige — that makes Italy so difficult to imitate and so easy to love.
In this block, I travel through the country from north to south: from the Alps to Sicily, from Nebbiolo to Nero d’Avola. Not as a wine tourist, but as a winemaker who sees in Italy a constant reflection of everything terroir can be when it does not fear complexity.
Block IV — Spain: The Vineyard as Territory (from chapter 53)
Spain is the country with more vineyard planted than any other in the world.
This fact surprises anyone who equates leadership with volume produced — because Spain does not lead in production, but in area. Its vines are older, more widely spaced, more resilient. These are vines that survived phylloxera ungrafted, abandonment, drought and time itself. And it is precisely from that resilience that their character comes.
Spanish wine was, for a long time, underestimated beyond its own borders. Rioja was known, but the rest remained anonymous. That invisibility was also a form of preservation — native grape varieties survived because there was no commercial pressure to replace them.
Today, Spain is one of the most dynamic references in world wine. Not because it copied France or Italy, but because it rediscovered what it had always had: altitude, ancestral soils, unique grape varieties and a wine culture rooted in everyday life.
In this block, I travel through Spain from north to south and east to west — from the elegance of Rioja to the minerality of Galicia, from the power of Priorat to the delicacy of Ribera del Duero. A country still discovering itself, where every discovery is a surprise.
Chapter 21
After the collapse of the empire, vineyards slowly began to cover the slopes of Europe once again. Not immediately, nor uniformly, but through a patient, almost silent process, guided by hands that saw in the land more than sustenance — they saw purpose. It was the Benedictine monks who, with discipline and constancy, restored order…
Chapter 22
In the abbeys of Burgundy, Alsace, and the Loire Valley, there were men who looked at the vineyard differently. Not only as sustenance, nor merely as a liturgical obligation, but as an object of continuous observation. These men were monks. And, without knowing it, they were also the first enologists in history. They observed, recorded,…
Chapter 23
For centuries, wine lived in retreat. Stored in monasteries, consumed locally, sheltered from the noise of an unstable world. But as medieval Europe began to reorganize, something changed. Roads were traveled once more. Cities came back to life. And trade, slowly, began to revive. With it, wine started to circulate again. At the great fairs…
Chapter 24
The kings of Europe understood early on something that is not always clearly stated: wine was not only pleasure — it was power. To control a vineyard was to control the land. And to control the land was to control people. In a world where wealth was rooted in territory, the vineyard held singular value….
Chapter 25
With the rebirth of cities and the refinement of European courts, wine entered a new dimension. It was no longer merely cultivated, protected, or traded — it began to be judged. Taste became a criterion. Chronicles, letters, and accounts started to describe wines not only by their origin, but by the experience they offered. People…
Chapter 26
As wine grew in economic importance, it became clear that producing, transporting, and selling was no longer enough. It had to be regulated. The expansion of trade brought with it an inevitable problem: inconsistency. Not all wines were equal. Not all producers followed the same practices. Not all merchants were trustworthy. In a growing market,…
Chapter 27
Cistercian monks were, perhaps, the most silent architects of European wine. They left no grand treatises and sought no recognition. But they left something far more enduring: a way of seeing the vineyard. With a vision that was both practical and spiritual, they shaped landscapes, organized territories, and deepened the knowledge first developed by the…
Chapter 28
France was beginning to emerge as the great beacon of European wine. Not by chance, nor solely because of the quality of its wines, but because it achieved something rare: it transformed centuries of agricultural practice, monastic observation, political power, and organized trade into a coherent system. While other regions of Europe produced wine, France…
Chapter 29
In France, wine was never merely agriculture. It became a language — shaped by soils, climates, villages, hillsides, and centuries of patient observation. A language in which every vineyard carries the history of a specific place and the memory of a long relationship between man and land. From Alsace to Burgundy, from the Loire to…
Chapter 30
There are places in the world where wine ceases to be a product and becomes a belief. Burgundy is one of those places. Here, the landscape is not merely beautiful — it is sacred. The slopes of the Côte de Nuits and the Côte de Beaune were walked and measured for centuries with the kind…
Chapter 31
If Burgundy is contemplation, Bordeaux is ambition. This is not a criticism — it is a distinction. Bordeaux understood early on that wine does not exist merely to be produced perfectly. It also exists to circulate, to be desired, to reach those who do not yet know it. And it was this awareness — commercial,…
Chapter 32
In 1855, wine ceased to be merely wine. It became status. The Paris Universal Exposition of 1855 introduced the world to something unprecedented: for the first time in history, the wines of Bordeaux were officially classified according to quality and prestige. Thus was born the first legal hierarchy of modern wine — a system that…
Chapter 33
In Champagne, the history of wine begins with a flaw. Bottles were exploding in the cellar. The Benedictine monks of Hautvillers spent their winters trying to understand why. The wine would ferment again after bottling — something the science of the time could not explain. Secondary fermentation was seen as a defect, a sign of…
Chapter 34
The Loire is France’s longest river. It crosses the country from east to west, flowing from the Massif Central to the Atlantic over more than a thousand kilometres. It is a vast river, lazy in some places, unpredictable in others. Along its banks grows one of the most heterogeneous, hardest to summarise and, for that…
Chapter 35
There is a paradox in Alsace that is visible at first glance. The houses have steep roofs like those in the villages of the Black Forest. The churches speak German with a French accent. The wines are called Riesling and Gewürztraminer—names that evoke the Rhine—yet they are bottled under the French flag. Alsace is neither…
Chapter 36
In France, the State has never regarded wine merely as a matter of taste. It has regarded it as a matter of power. From the Ancien Régime to the Fifth Republic, governments, kings and public institutions understood that wine was far too important to be left solely in the hands of producers. It generated wealth,…
Chapter 37
Some crises destroy. Others destroy in ways that force us to rebuild better. Phylloxera did both. Between 1863 and the closing decades of the nineteenth century, an insect no larger than the head of a pin accomplished what no war, no frost, and no drought had ever managed to do: it erased thousands of hectares…
Chapter 38
In 1935, France did something no wine-producing civilisation had ever dared to do before: it turned terroir into law. Until then, a wine’s origin had been a matter of reputation—something known, spoken of, and trusted. From that year onward, it became a legal fact. The name of a place ceased to be merely an indication…
Chapter 39
A law without anyone to interpret it is merely a text. The greatness of the AOCs lies not in the document of 1935, but in the institution that brought them to life. That institution is called the INAO. And its work, discreet and persistent, is to answer every day a question with no easy answer:…
Chapter 40
After laws and institutions, we arrive at what they seek to protect but can never fully contain: terroir. It is the most widely used and least understood word in the world of wine. It is spoken with ease, invoked on almost every label, and yet almost no one can define it without hesitation. Perhaps that…
Chapter 41
In France, wine moved beyond agriculture and became a language. It was no longer confined to the vineyard and the cellar: it took its place at the table, in conversation, in thought and in art. This was the great French transformation — perhaps greater than the AOCs, greater than the INAO. France taught the world…
Chapter 42
We have reached the end of a long journey. We began in the silent monasteries of the Middle Ages and arrive at an entire civilisation built around a bottle. Between those two points, France did something no other country had attempted with such ambition: it turned wine into method. It gave it laws, institutions, a…
Chapter 43
Italian greatness was not built by decree. It was born from the land, the family and time. With more than three thousand years of winemaking history and a diversity of grape varieties unmatched anywhere in the world, Italy is at once the oldest and the most contemporary of wine nations. After two decades spent examining…
Chapter 44
Piedmont is the exception the previous chapter did not anticipate. After describing Italy as the country that never needed a system, we arrive in the north and find the most regulated, most precisely delimited and most boundary-obsessed wine region in the country. Here, almost all production falls under a designation of origin, and Piedmont is…
Chapter 45
If Piedmont is the region that pushed rigour to its limits, Tuscany is the one that, at a certain point, decided to break its own rules — and discovered that rebellion, when done well, could itself become tradition. It is the most widely recognised Italian wine region outside Italy, and not by chance. Few places…
Chapter 46
Few grape varieties have a fate as strange as Sangiovese: it is the most widely planted variety in Italy, the backbone of dozens of appellations, and yet it remains almost unknown by name beyond the country’s borders. No one asks for “a glass of Sangiovese” with the same ease with which they order a Cabernet…
Chapter 47
Some regions are defined by what they conceal. Veneto is defined by what it produces — and for a long time, that was treated almost as an accusation. No Italian region bottles more wine. In 2024, Veneto accounted for around 10.7 million hectolitres, almost 22% of all Italian production, ahead of Puglia and far ahead…
Chapter 48
For most of the twentieth century, southern Italy had no face. It had volume. Every autumn, tanker trucks travelled north from Puglia, Sicily and Calabria towards Piedmont, Emilia, Burgundy and even Germany, loaded with dark wine, generous in alcohol and colour, produced for a single purpose: to give body to paler blends from the north….
Chapter 49
Etna is not a landscape. It is an organism that breathes. Seen from a distance, the cone looks still — crowned with snow for much of the year, a thin plume of white smoke rising slowly against the blue of the Mediterranean. Up close, it is clearly alive. It trembles, releases gas, opens new fissures…
Chapter 50
Every law is born from a wish to impose order on something that is, by nature, disorderly. Over six decades, Italy tried to do exactly that with its wine. The result was not the French system translated into Italian. It became something else entirely — more complex, more contradictory, and, in the end, more faithful…
Chapter 51
In Italy, wine and food never met each other. They grew up together, on the same hillside, under the same sun, served by the same hands. There is none of the deliberate gesture we practise elsewhere — the exercise of pairing, after the fact, a wine and a dish that happen to get along. In…
Chapter 52
Throughout this block, Italy refused, again and again, to give a single answer. Instead, it offered hundreds — one for every valley, every native grape, every culinary dialect that never felt the need to explain itself to a distant capital. There is no Bordeaux in Italy to serve as a model to copy, nor a…
Chapter 53
For decades, Spain made wine like someone guarding a secret without realising they were guarding one. It had more land planted with vines than any other country on the planet, grape varieties that existed nowhere else, a winemaking history that predates Rome by more than a thousand years — and still, the world knew it…