I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.

I'm Levy Dalton.

I'm Erin Scala and here's our show today. Oh, In Dagataa, the scientific advisor for Vinidale, also the author of the Native

Wine Grapes of Italy and also a writer for Venice and Decanter. Hello sir how are you?

I'm very happy to be here. Thank you. Thank you very much.

So you have a really distinguished career in terms of writing and researching Italian wine, the on the ground in the vineyard level but also at the DNA level and looking at it from a scientific bent and then looking at it from a tasting angle which is a combination that's not true of a lot of people like that whole

sweep there. So how did you get started with Italian wine in general?

You know even though I'm a wine writer today I'm essentially a wine geek and a wine lover.

And just like everybody else, I like to get together with my friends and taste wines.

And when I was much, much younger and still in university living in Rome, one of the big things is to go out for weekends to the

Castelli right nearby. The Castelli famous for a white wine, the Castelli Romani or Frascadia

Vilettri, and what I started noticing was that I changed tavern or restaurant every weekend and the house wine was remarkably bad or remarkably good depending on where I went and like everybody else I just thought it was you know the producer who you know

Don't know what he was doing or was particularly good at his craft and then one day

Talkative of a restaurant owner saw that we were interested.

We were like 19 or 20 at the time and he thought it was cool that some youngsters were into wine.

And he said, you know, the reason why this wine's so good is because the producer uses grapes that nobody has anymore.

And that was a really novel concept back in the 80s.

And we didn't know what he meant.

And he said, well, listen, I'll take you to the vineyard and you'll see for yourselves he's

super nice guy I think all he wanted to do was get the hell out of the restaurant he left his wife and

his daughter to man the stoves and he took us to this vineyard which wasn't that far away

and you know we didn't need to be experts we didn't And he took us to this vineyard, which wasn't that far away.

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