Author -Ian D'Agata

Ian D’Agata has been writing and educating about wines for over thirty years. Internationally recognized as an distinguished expert, critic and writer on many wine regions, his two most recent, award winning books Native Wine Grapes of Italy and Italy's Native Wine Grape Terroirs (both published by University of California Press) are widely viewed as the "state of the art" textbooks on the subject. The former book won the Louis Roederer International Wine Awards Book of the Year in 2015 and was ranked as the top wine books of the year for the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times and the New York Times, while the latter was named among the best wine books of the year by Food & Wine Magazine and the NY Times. As a former staff writer at Stephen Tanzer's International Wine Cellar, Contributing Editor at Decanter, Senior editor at Vinous, and contributing writer at numerous other magazines and websites, he has also written extensively on the wines of France, Canada and other wine producing nations. Along with his former student and best pupil, Michele Longo, Ian is also currently the co-author of the Italy section in Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Book of Wine, the world’s best-selling wine guide. In recognition of his work devoted to the communication of wine knowledge and research, in 2015 Ian was named to Italy’s prestigious Accademia della Vite e del Vino, Italy’s association of university professors, researchers and academicians in the field of wine. Over the years, he has been honoured with numerous other awards and titles, including the Foglia d'Oro from the city of Dolegna in the Collio viticultural area, the Comitato Grandi Cru’s “Italy’s best wine journalist”, the 2016 Les Plumes d’Or awards nomination by French wine producers, winemakers and chefs (associated with Le Grandes Tables du Monde) as one of the world’s eight leading international wine writers and the 2017 Cuvée Award of Excellence (Ontario, Canada). As a trained medical doctor at the hospitals of the Universities of Cincinnati, Harvard, Montréal and UCSF, Ian has won grants in cellular and molecular biology, which explains his interest and current research focus on the discovery and correct identification of forgotten, native, grape varieties all over the world and to have wines made from all of them once again.