In recent years, UNESCO declared the Italian wine zones of Piemonte’s Langhe, Roero, and Monferrato and Veneto’s Prosecco Superiore–producing Conegliano-Valdobbiadene fundamental to humanity’s heritage. On the triumphs of Italy’s wines are written many stories, of landscapes, grape varieties, grandfathers, traditions, and the enological improvements they all once needed—mostly without much context. Vaquero Piñeiro, Tedeschi, and Maffi’s A History of Italian Wine: Culture, Economics, and Environment in the Nineteenth through Twenty-First Centuries fills in extensive data and intimate details covering two world wars, twenty years of the Fascist regime, new land-minded winegrowers, and ongoing interventions of the Italian state created in the second half of the nineteenth century and without which Italian wine would have very different meanings and tastes.

Periodizing their work between the 1861 founding of the Italian nation and the 2019 pandemic, the authors take off from 1873’s international Vienna Exhibition, where Italian wine showed slightly better than...

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