Suburban Goes to Italy and France - Part One

Each year, I go to Verona at the end of March/beginning of April for the Italian wine fair known as VinItaly. It is something that really would be extremely difficult to describe. Over 150,000 wines are available for tasting in an area that is roughly the size of 10 football stadiums. Thousands of ornate booths are set up to display just about every wine made in Italy. It’s kinda like the Grand Canyon; sure I could describe it to you, but until you have seen it, you can’t really know how big it is….

My goal each year is to taste as much as I can and buy some terrific wines for the store that we can make available for the rest of the year. This year was more challenging than ever before, mostly because of the weak dollar. Wines I had purchased for many years that were great values have become so pricey that they are no longer interesting for the price. But undaunted by this, I was able to find 20 or so wines that are tremendous values even with the current exchange rates! - Lance Cerutti - www.suburbanwines.com/