Welcome to the New Old World!

Dear Wine Lover,

Our names are Gabriel and Alice, and we are here to discover with you some real Italian Excellence.

We wish to thank you for joining our mailing list and we welcome you to the wonderful world of Italian Wine Connection.

Yes... we know, this welcome Newsletter might look a bit too long but we assure you it will be worth reading! Promised!

You may wonder what sets us apart from the crowd of importers/retailers that try to make their money by getting cheap wines from overseas and sell them some overpriced some below cost on the Australian market. The answer lies between these lines above: we steer clear from this kind of mentality and we only get the Excellence for you.

We'll try to make our point with this example: Fosters Beer is the most famous Australian beer in the world but nobody drinks it in Australia.

Well, the same goes for Italian wines: pretty much all the Italian wines you’ll find on the shelves of supermarkets and retailers in general here in Australia are not drank in Italy, and this should ring a bell.

Italy is home to some of the largest wine companies in the world (yes, the ones you find on the shelves in your local bottle shop) and the smartest thing they’ve done is to buy wine produced by other people, they mix it all together, they treat it chemically to suit international trends and tastes and then they bottle it under different labels (yes you’ve read that right, same wine different labels and different price) so they can market it as they please.
We have personally conducted a research and we found out that roughly about 70% of the Italian wines you find on the shelves of Aussie bottle shops come from the 3 largest groups in Italy which are not wineries, they are real industries, factories, with a hell of a lot of different names and brands (next time you shop in store have a look at the back label, you’ll find the writing “Imbottigliato da ####” which means “Bottled by ####” ... the reference numbers are always the same for most of the brands).

By the way this is the game that the two big supermarket chains in Australia, importers of these wines too, have been playing for the past years with Aussie wines as well...selling you “supposed to be” boutique wines with fancy names inducing you to think they are family owned wineries where instead they are private labels of these two supermarket giants. Just to give you an idea, it is estimated that one of them owns 345 brand names and labels in your local bottle shop. Just shocking. I won’t name the names of these companies for privacy reasons, but if you are curious enough you’ll find them out.

So why do we do what we do and why do people choose us?

Well, it is quite obvious that we play in a very different field, the field of genuine wines made by real people with real grapes. Being born in Italy we have always had a deep connection with such amazing variety of native grapes, estimated to be approximately 355, and the culture of wine has always being deeply ingrained in our lives as a legacy left by our ancestors since the Roman Empire and even further back in time.

Italy is one of the most amazing places on earth, such small peninsula is home to so many different types of soils and climate conditions that vary almost every 50 kilometres. The same grape grown at a 200 metres of altitude will give a totally different wine from the one grown in the flats. That’s why there are so many D.O.C. and D.O.C.G. areas (equivalent to Protected Designation of Origin, read more on Italian Appellations here).

When we permanently moved to Australia we noticed how many low-end Italian wines were being sold here and some of our friends even told us: “Italian wines gave me the worst headache ever”. Not without shock, we realised that Italians are known around the world for brands of Excellence like Ferrari, Lamborghini, Ducati, Armani, Versace, Gucci, Prada, (I could keep going on and on, more on this topic in another issue), but they are also known for low-end wine??? Wait, what???? That is so wrong!!!

We believe that we should export from Italy only and exclusively the Excellence, something worth of being proud, known and appreciated around the world, definitely not the crap! We should praise the families that live wine on daily basis, not the money-hungry big producers. We should support those companies that make the effort to let the terroir, the nature, the climate conditions combine forces to create those grapes as mother nature intended, that will then allow the winemakers to craft much more than wine. Once you open one of our bottles you’ll hear the rain tapping on the leaves, the warmth of the sunbeams, the mediterranean winds gently blowing through the vines, the minerals in the soils...this is what wine should be...nothing less than "Bottled poetry"...

We have recently come back from a trip to Italy, where we have been liaising with some of the most renowned award winning wineries. Last year we started out with a range of 14 wines, but with the next shipment on the way we’ll have 50 more! How exciting is that? Stay tuned, we are going to get you the wines that won trophies and medals at London International Wine Challenge and many other wine contests! One was awarded best Italian Sparkling, another won best Italian Merlot, another one again won the award for best Italian Rosé and many more!!! Only the best for our wine enthusiasts!

Thank you for reading till the very end, we are thrilled to have you on board!

Please do not hesite to get in touch if you have any questions.

Cheers,

Gabriel & Alice