Vinitaly International Academy (VIA) forges ahead its Certification Course in San Francisco, USA, and welcomes 10 new Italian Wine Ambassadors and 1 Expert (the higher title). With an overall of 116 Italian Wine Ambassadors and 8 Italian Wine Experts to date, the San Francisco edition, held from October 16th to 20th, closes the third year of worldwide VIA courses organized in Europe, China, and USA, and was characterized by the high level of the candidates.

26 wine professionals from the USA and one from as far as Singapore gathered for an intense week of theory and tastings at the San Francisco Wine School. They all had one thing in common: the undeniable enthusiasm for Italian wine. All lessons were conducted by Dr. Ian D’Agata, author of Native Wine Grapes of Italy (winner of the 2015 Louis Roederer International Wine Book Awards as Book of the Year) who has been running the course since 2015. In addition to D’Agata’s groundbreaking treatise on Italian indigenous grapes, for the first time, candidates also took advantage of the new reference text Italian Wine Unplugged Grape by Grape.