Beyond the ‘snail’s pace’ analogy, which refers the mollusk’s characteristically slow pace, the Slow Food insignia of the snail also indicates top wineries across Italy. That’s because the Slow Food organization has also developed the Slow Wine Guide – equivalent to the Slow Food Guide, but for wine – celebrating its 10th anniversary this year!
As a branch of the Slow Food organization, the Slow Wine Guide follows the same basic core principles: encouraging awareness regarding the wines they drink, where they come from, how they taste and how their choices affect the rest of the world. This guide was the idea of the editors-in-chief for Slow Food Editore, Giancarlo Gariglio and Fabio Giavedoni, who decided to abandon the score-based mentality of wineries, looking beyond the technical and tasting the particular notes of flavor from each label, ultimately digging deeper into the souls of each any every wine. The birth of the Slow Wine Guide marked a revolutionary moment in the history of Italian wine cataloguing and reviews. “We want to go beyond what’s is in the glass,” says Gariglio, “We are looking for values in the wine.”
Giancarlo Gariglio
The ‘Slow Food’ philosophy takes the sustainable farming practices of each featured winery into consideration, linking their unique stories with the territory and its people. Following the Slow Food philosophy, the wines must be “good, clean and fair.” “This intuition proved to be right,” explains Gariglio, “Making the Slow Wine Guide one the most comprehensive and acclaimed Italian wine guides in the world naturally expanded its reach outside Italy, with the inclusion of Slovenian wineries in 2017, California’s wineries in 2018 and Oregon’s vineyards in 2019. We are very proud of the path we started 10 years ago, since we contributed to raising awareness of environmental and social consciousness, some of the most debated and urgent topics nowadays. Not only are consumers more careful and interested in discovering this ethical way of working, but the world of wine itself is changing – with more and more producers joining the Slow Movement.”
The guide – available in English and for purchase on Amazon – features reviews of over 500 different wineries, each one visited and inspected by Slow Food experts. It adopts a new approach to wine criticism and looks at a variety of factors to evaluate wineries in a more ‘holistic’ way. For example, they take wine quality, history and adherence to terroir, value, environmental sensitivity and ecologically sustainable methods of practice into consideration.
The Slow Wine Guide uses its characteristic snail to signal a cellar that has distinguished itself through its own interpretation of sensorial, territorial, environmental, and personal values in harmony with the Slow Food philosophy. Only wineries that are pesticide-free can receive the ‘mark’ of the Snail. The Bottle is a symbol, on the other hand, is allocated to cellars that show a consistently high quality throughout their range of wines. The Coin symbol? An indicator of great value.
The guide has also big plans for the future. The next step will be the inclusion of wineries from the East Coast – from states like New York, Virginia, Maryland – and much more in 2021!