Vanity Fair Italia, Corriere della Sera (one of the country’s leading national dailies), and some of Italy’s highest-profile food and wine blogs like Dissapore are all talking about it: the first issue of the Gambero Rosso magazine under its new leadership and the masthead’s June 2023 cover story on natural wine.

Natural wine in the Gambero Rosso, you ask?

Longtime reporter for La Repubblica (another one of Italy’s leading dailies), Marco Mensurati, shocked the media community earlier this year when he left his new position as the editor of the paper’s Rome desk and became the editor-in-chief of the Gambero Rosso monthly magazine, now in its 32nd year.

For its first issue with Mensurati at the helm, he asked editor and writer Lorenzo Ruggeri, who’s been with the outfit for more than a decade, to write a cover story (June 2023) on natural wine and to interview the popular singer-songwriter Vincio Caposella about his new album where he makes some highly controversial declarations on the world of natural wine in Italy today.

“I have seen the best minds of my generation,” says Caposella (quoting the American Beat poet), “lose themselves in natural wine while the extreme right has taken over the electorate and [our] country.”

On his new album, “Il Bene Rifugio” (“Safe Haven”; the title is a riff on the finance term “safe haven investment”), Caposella sings, you natural wines… are on the wrong side…” (from the track, “Il Lato del torto,” “The Wrong Side”).

In his long interview with Ruggeri, the artist makes his case that natural wine is a “cliché” of the “radical chic.” It’s the same hypocrisy, he says, as that embraced by the “populist right.”

Wow.

Caposella, whose style is heavily influenced by Tom Waits, is a well known lover of natural wine. He cites Gravner as one of his favorite producers, to give you an idea.

“Vinicio Capossela exploits the pretext of natural wine in an effort to criticize a Left that has lost touch with the people — just like him,” wrote one commentator.

The interview is accompanied by a truly fantastic piece by Ruggeri (a good friend, for the record) where he writes about “The Lesson of Natural Wine” (not yet available online for non-subscribers). Not only does he profile some of the leading producers in the natural wine movement. But he also speaks to top Italian enologists like Luca D’Attoma, who talks about the highly positive influence the radical natural wine movement has had on conventional winemaking.

Historically, the Gambero Rosso has been known for its generalized disdain for the natural wine scene. Ruggeri even quotes a scathing editorial on the expression “natural wine” written for the masthead in 2013 (“If there’s anything that’s really natural,” wrote the editor, “it can’t be wine.”)

If this month’s issue is a taste of what’s to come under Mensurati’s leadership, then I’ll take a double please!

Super congrats to my friend Lorenzo on his wonderful cover story.