Your free digital edition of the guide can be found at Slow Wine Guide 2020.

Join more than 80 producers from Italy, Slovenia, California and Oregon in San Francisco on Tuesday, February 18th at Pier 27, The Embarcadero for the Slow Wine 2020 USA Tour. Register to attend here.

The Slow Wine Guide evaluates over 400 different wineries and treats each with the utmost respect and attention. The Slow Wine team prides itself on the human contact it has with all producers, which is essential to the guide’s evaluations.

While other guides limit their relationship to a blind tasting and brief write up, Slow Wine takes the time to get personal with each winery in order to create a well-informed, detailed review of the wines themselves and the people behind the production.

Slow Wine selects wineries that respect and reflect their local terroir and practice sustainable methods that benefit the environment. And for the first time ever, those wineries that receive the snail or the official Slow Wine seal are 100% free of chemical herbicides, a quality that the Slow Wine Guide continues to passionately support.

Brief History

The first edition of the Slow Wine Guide to the Wines of Italy, published in 2010 by Slow Food Editiore (Bra, Italy), marked a watershed moment in the contemporary history of Italian wine writing. With its publication, the editors-in-chief Giancarlo Gariglio and Fabio Giavedoni not only abandoned the score-based formula that had dominated the field for more than 20 years but they also adopted a wholly new and innovative set of criteria.

For the first time, the pioneering Italian wine critics looked not just to the quality of the wines: They also took into consideration the wineries’ sustainable farming practices and the winemakers’ “Slow philosophy,” as Gariglio has put it, “which continues to be increasingly important to consumers in wine and food globally.”

Where a previous generation of Italian wine writers based their evaluations solely on subjective (and often modern-leaning) tasting notes, Gariglio and Giavedoni had their contributors base their selections on the wines’ relationship to the places where they are made and the people who produce them.

It was the first time that the Slow Food ethos had been applied so broadly to the world of Italian wine and it was the beginning in a new era of how Italian wines would be perceived throughout the world — and not just in Italy. In Gariglio’s words, they “wanted to tell the wineries’ stories.”

With the 2019 guide, the editors have continued their expansion into the US that started in 2017 with California to include Oregon.