Men Who Like to Travel - David Latt

The 2018  Vini d'Italia   tour was an invitation-only gathering to sample wines from some of Italy's best small-production wineries. After Philadelphia and Austin, the last stop was  Terra ,  Eataly 's rooftop dining room in the revitalized Century City Mall. Marilyn Krieger  works for the  Winebow Group  which organized the tour.  She said that the event was an opportunity to taste premium Italian wines distributed by  Leonardo LoCascio Selections  (LLS) and to talk with the winemakers. The wines we would taste that afternoon would evoke the location of their cultivation and the winemaker whose palate guided the creation of that year's bottling. Each wine was unique. Each winemaker had a story to tell. I understood completely what Krieger meant. I love visiting vineyards and enjoy meeting winemakers, like  Shawna Miller  at  Luna Vineyards  in the Napa Valley and  Mélanie Weber  in her vineyard overlooking Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The wines serv

Which Swiss wines do you love? Hands? Anybody? Nobody? Know why? Only 2% of Switzerland’s wine production is exported. All the rest, 98%, is consumed domestically. The best way -- actually, the only way -- to sample Swiss wines is to visit Switzerland. That’s what I did. The Valais’ Microclimate Having grown up with images of Switzerland as a land of snow-covered mountains, when I visited the Valais, a wine-growing, French-speaking canton east of Geneva, I expected cold weather. But the climate was better suited to shorts and T-shirts than to parkas.  Neatly trellised vineyards climb up steep hills taking advantage of a hot, dry microclimate. With 300 days of sun a year, the Valais feels like Napa and  Sonoma  except for the Matterhorn looming in the distance.  In Switzerland, family-owned vineyards and wineries (called   vignerons-encaveurs)  are the rule. Even if unprofitable, they stay in the family.  During a hosted trip w e met one wine maker whose family was reg