Archive dive in five: Decanter May 2017

Rewind nine years to May 2017, when the world mourned the 22 killed in the Manchester Arena bombing.

Earlier that month Emmanuel Macron won France’s presidential election, Canadian rapper Drake took home 13 gongs from the Billboard Music Awards, Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman premiered at the cinema, and Arsenal beat Chelsea 2-1 in the FA Cup final.

And wine lovers were enjoying Volume 42 issue no8 of Decanter magazine, priced at £4.50.

A deep blue twilight sky, with ancient ruins by a coastline, is the image background for our ‘Best of Italy’ main coverline.

The bottle of Morella’s La Signore Primitivo from Puglia references the secondary headline of ‘10 stunning discoveries’, alongside Masseto – ‘The Petrus of Italy’.

Inside, these were five things that piqued our interest from the May 2017 issue.

Archive dive in five

1: Southern stars

Master of Wine Susan Hulme introduced us to the 10 producers in Italy’s south ‘who have impressed me most in the past 18 months’.

On a journey readers could follow on the illustrated map, she travelled from Campania to Puglia via Basilicata, then down to Sicily (Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot, missed out),

Hulme admitted ‘there's so much going on’ that it was difficult to pick just 10, so she focused on both new and established names that remain ‘relatively undiscovered’.

Southern Italy’s warm autumns, high-elevation sites, distinctive soils and the ‘abundance of riches’ in its late-ripening, heat-resistant grapes, results in ‘a heady and intoxicating mix’ in the hands of ‘daring, passionate winemakers’, she enthused, creating ‘an explosion of vivid, delicious wines that are full of personality’.

2: 'The new Old World'

Not all that long ago, it used to be acceptable to split the wine world into Old World and New World, said Simon Woolf in introduction to this feature (also see below).

‘Life isn't so simple in the 21st century,’ he added, explaining that the ‘resurgence’ of wine nations around the Mediterranean and Caucasus had created what he diplomatically suggested was best termed ‘the new Old World’.

Woolf, who has been joint Regional Chair for Balkans, Central & Eastern Europe and Caucasus at the Decanter World Wine Awards since 2023, introduced this ‘sprinkling’ of countries with ‘rich histories of wine production and consumption dating back millennia’, before he and other Decanter experts highlighted the best regions, grape varieties, producers and wine styles in Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Georgia, Lebanon and Israel.

3: A natural evolution

Simon Woolf was kept busy this month (see above) also chairing a ‘first-of-its-kind tasting’ blind panel tasting of 122 natural wines – ‘a small but significant niche; the agitator that keeps the wine world on its toes’.

He agreed the category could be hugely variable, but ‘in a world full of homogeneity and blandness, there is surely no better antidote’ – a host of wines ‘as diverse, irrepressible and idiosyncratic as the growers who produce them’.

He went on to ask how we should define natural wine – or whether the category even needed defining – ultimately deciding ‘they must be judged on their own terms’.

He (with advice from other industry experts) came up with a Decanter charter of quality used as the criteria of entry for this tasting.

4: Letters: plus ça change…

‘Letter of the month’ was from regular correspondent Paul Davis from Wimbledon in London, who implored wine lovers to ignore vintage charts and ratings and enjoy wine for the drink that it is ‘crafted by artisans, drunk with friends, explored for a lifetime’.

Brian Rauder from Guelph in Ontario, Canada, vented the disappointment of sharing one of his most-prized wines – Mastroberardino’s Radici Taurasi Riserva 1996, which he’d gone to great effort to source directly from the winery itself – with unappreciative dinner guests. ‘I have learned the hard wat to be more discriminating about what I serve to whom’.

Other letters extolled stemless wine glasses at picnics and encouraged Decanter experts to recommend more affordable wines. Sound familiar?

5: Guess who?

A fun franchise that kept Patrick Grabham, Decanter’s veteran art editor (who has been with the magazine since 2006) amused for many years was the ‘Say what you see’ rebus.

He picked a winery or wine producer featured in that issue and then came up with some word and picture clues to help readers solve the riddle.

Can you guess what this one is?

Is there an issue from the past 50 years you'd like us to look back on? Drop us a line at editor@decanter.com

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