Every Spring I end up spending $500+ on a big batch of inexpensive Italian wines for my personal drinking.

And every Spring I ask myself: “Why am I not simply drinking Italian wines year round?”

There’s a reason for this cycle and it has to do with food. Coming into the summer months, my wife and I usually feel the need to cook more, control our caloric intake, and get ready for our summer bods. However, since we love to eat, we don’t like sacrificing flavor or our bon vivant lifestyle, so we start cooking healthier Italian recipes paired with crisp, clean, fresh, vibrant Italian whites.

This past weekend began a new cycle. I chopped up a mound of fresh broccoli, roasted it in the oven with olive oil, sautéed some garlic and chili flakes with more oil in a pan, added some lemon juice, and mixed it all with pasta and some Parmesan cheese. Super easy, super fast, super delicious.

Especially with the bottle of 2019 Roccafiore Fordaliso Bianco, 100% grechetto with crisp acidity and enticing aromas of stone fruit with white flowers.

If you’ve never heard of grechetto, that’s good; because that’s the fun thing about Italian wines. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of varietals you’ve never heard of, many of which are indigenous to the regions in which they’re grown (and have thrived over centuries because they pair well with the local cuisine).

If navigating the vast world of Italian wine seems overwhelming or daunting, let me introduce you to one of the best guides this side of the Atlantic: my old friend Oliver McCrum.

Rather than copy and paste his biography here, I’d recommend just clicking on his website linked above and getting lost in his catalog, but I’ll drop a few fun facts before you do so:

• The wines imported by Oliver are always delicious, well-priced, and interesting. They usually tell a story and exhibit a sense of place. Every bottle is like a $20 vacation.

• Oliver’s wines are food-friendly and practically force you to get into the kitchen. You can create an entire day around food and drinking (which is exactly what I did yesterday).

• Oliver has been working in the wine business since the late 70s. He knows his shit and has built incredible relationships over that time with some of Italy’s coolest producers. If you see his name on the back label, you can be assured the wine is good.

I didn’t stop with the grechetto, however. We plowed through a number of Oliver’s bottles yesterday, including the always admirable Piero Mancini Vermentino di Gallura; a white wine from Sardinia that combines fleshy fruit with crisp acidity and medium-bodied weight on the palate.

When you realize that both of these wines I’ve listed are just $14.99, you start to think to yourself: Oliver can ship these wines halfway across the world and they still retail for less than that bottle of shitty, over-oaked Chardonnay I got at the supermarket that’s made just a hundred miles away in California?

I come to that same realization every Spring. Hence, why a huge chunk of my paycheck goes to Oliver McCrum annually.

But I think 2021 will be the year I settle down and drink his entire portfolio year-round.

-David Driscoll