By Eimear Corcoran
I came to Bologna one year ago from Ireland with a suitcase, or three, not a word of Italian and no one I knew in the city. I had never been here before, but surprisingly, I wasn’t nervous. The second I landed in Bologna, I felt at home. And the people I met made that feeling come even more naturally. I fell for the city almost immediately. Not for any one reason, but for all of it at once. The terracotta buildings, the kilometres of porticoes, which mean you never have to worry about going out in the rain and staying dry. The way strangers on a bus will passionately debate where to find the best tortellini or caffè. Bologna is warm in a way that has nothing to do with the weather. There’s something about the city, its people, its energy, its food, its chaos and its charm, that pulls you in before you’ve even had time to think about what’s in your glass. A year later, I feel incredibly lucky that I arrived here not knowing anything about the city, no idea what would be next for me and absolutely no idea just how much this city would come to mean to me.
What I didn’t expect was how much wine would become part of my love for Bologna. The wine itself is good, of course, but what makes drinking it here special is the people you share it with. In Bologna, a glass of wine is rarely just a drink, it’s an excuse to sit down, talk, argue, laugh and enjoy eachothers company.
That’s how I discovered the city’s wine culture, across a counter, shoulder to shoulder with students and grandmothers, in tiny rooms with communal tables and sometimes no menu at all. I was surrounded by people who are now some of my closest friends, and I think that’s what Bologna does best, it gives you good wine, good food and, most importantly, people to share them with.
Where it started: the enotecas that taught me to drink slowly
My first real wine experience or education happened at Medulla Vini, tucked under the portico on Via Oberdan. It’s barely bigger than a large kitchen, one big table, a couple of tiny ones, and Luca behind the counter with his dog keeping watch. There’s no wine list. You tell Luca what you’re in the mood for, or you don’t, and he pours you something organic, biodynamic, or natural that you’ve probably never heard of and will think about for weeks afterward. It was here that Emilia-Romagna’s own labels, MaraMia, cloudy pét-nats, obscure Sangiovese, first got under my skin. Nobody was performing wine knowledge at me. They were just sharing something they loved, and it worked.
From there it was a short walk to Enoteca Storica Faccioli, a Bologna institution that’s been pouring wine in the same spot near the two towers since the 1920s. Elisa and Stefano, who took it over in 2012, kept everything that made it special, a narrow room, the mortadella that arrives without you needing to ask twice, the sense that you’ve wandered into someone’s living room, and built one of the city’s best natural wine lists on top of it. Sitting there with a glass of something local and a plate of cured meats, I understood something about Bologna that no guidebook had told me, wine here isn’t a subject to master, it’s an excuse to stay longer.
And then there’s Enoteca Bibe, under the ancient portico of Alemanni near Porta Maggiore. The name comes from an old Latin toast bibe vinum, “drink wine”, and it still feels like an invitation two thousand years later. The owners make their own wine on the hills of Pianoro and fill the rest of the list with small artisan producers they clearly believe in. It’s the kind of place where you go in for one glass and leave two hours later having made plans for dinner.
The table: where Bologna’s wine actually gets used
Bologna’s nickname, “la grassa” (the fat one), isn’t an insult, it’s a badge of honour, and no trattoria wears it better than Trattoria della Santa, serving Bolognese classics from the same spot since 1916. The tagliatelle al ragù, tortellini in brodo and balanzoni here are the dishes I measure every other version against, and the house wine is exactly what it should be: unpretentious, generous, and built to disappear alongside the food rather than compete with it.
For something a little more candlelit, Osteria Solferino does traditional Bolognese cooking with warmth to match, tortelloni in butter and lasagna verde, and a wine list that leans, rightly, into the region’s own reds and whites. It’s the kind of place a local sends you to rather than the kind you stumble into off a guidebook.
No evening in Bologna is complete without a visit to Cremeria Santo Stefano, tucked into the bottom of Santo Stefano, one of my personal favourite parts of the city. You may think it has nothing to do with wine but after a bottle of lambrusco, nothing tastes better than creamy gelato.
The wines behind the glass
Emilia Romagnan wine may not have the same reputation as its neighbouring regions of Tuscany and Veneto, but just south and east of Bologna, in the hills of Romagna, Sangiovese and Lambrusco tell their own quieter story, and a few episodes of the Italian Wine Podcast do a great job of introducing it.
In Ep. 196, Attilio Scienza, the Vinitaly International Academy’s Chief Scientist, explains why Sangiovese from Romagna tastes so different from its Tuscan cousins in Chianti or Brunello. The soil, climate, and winemaking traditions all pull it in a gentler direction. Where a Brunello is built for power, Scienza describes Sangiovese di Romagna as easier and simpler, a wine shaped to match the region’s rich, salumi-heavy, pork-forward cooking rather than something that needs to stand up to wild boar or a Fiorentina steak. In other words, pour it alongside a plate of cured meats or a simple pork ragù, not a hulking steak, and you’re drinking it exactly the way Romagna intended.
Pignoletto, the native white of the Colli Bolognesi hills right on Bologna’s doorstep, plays a similar role at the other end of the table. Locals treat it the way you’d treat a good Prosecco, chilled, lightly sparkling, and poured as an aperitivo alongside gnocco fritto or a plate of mortadella and Parmigiano, its bright acidity cutting straight through the fat.
And then there’s Lambrusco. In Ep. 214, Monty Waldin sits down with Tommaso Chiarli of Cleto Chiarli, the oldest winery in Emilia-Romagna. Tommaso walks through the region’s different Lambrusco styles, Salamino, di Sorbara, and Grasparossa, and builds a full four-course regional meal around them, pairing each rich, fatty course with a chilled, lightly sparkling red rather than reaching for something heavier, exactly the same instinct Scienza described for Sangiovese.
In Ep. 99, Alessandro Medici of Medici Ermete traces Lambrusco’s strange journey: from 1970s glamour, when James Bond apparently preferred it to Champagne, through decades of a cheap-wine reputation, to the well-deserved renaissance it’s having now. And in Ep. 2152, Cynthia Chaplin talks to Alicia Lini of the Lini winery in Reggio Emilia, whose family has been making Lambrusco the traditional way, hand-riddled, unbothered by fashion, since 1910.
Listen to any of these episodes of the Italian Wine Podcast and a pattern emerges, nobody here is reaching for a big, serious wine to match a big, serious dish. The wines of this region were built for exactly the food they grow up next to. It might be the most honest expression of what this region’s food and wine culture is actually about, nothing fussy, nothing performed, just good things shared with good people.
That, more than any tasting note, is what Bologna taught me about wine. Wine was never really the point on its own. The city, the glass, and the friends around the table complete each other, and I’ve never wanted to separate them since.
Cin cin, and see you at the next table.
