Wine explorer · Traveler · Enthusiast
Wine works on memory. A single glass can collapse time — my wife Lynsey across a table somewhere we didn't expect to love, the light at a particular hour, the exact minerality of soil you've both stood on. I've chased that feeling across continents, from California's morning fog through Portuguese schist, Tuscan stone, volcanic rock in Santorini, and the high silence of the Andes. What started as curiosity became obsession: I needed to understand where these tastes came from, what the land was actually saying, why one vineyard's wine feels entirely different from its neighbor's — even when they're growing the same grape.
That search has become our life in pieces. Behind the bar at a tasting room, in the dirt of a vineyard, in conversations with winemakers who have spent decades learning to listen to what their land will make. I've learned the structures and patterns through WSET training. But mostly I've learned that wine only makes sense if you've felt it — in context, with the soil underfoot and the producer across the table, in the actual moment of discovery.
Matt Dinovo is a WSET Level 1 certified wine enthusiast and floor operator at Uncorked Wine Tastings in Dublin, Ohio. He has firsthand tasting experience across California, Northern Michigan, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Canada, and Argentina, and is currently pursuing WSET Level 2 (exam July 2026). He has been a wine club member for over a decade.
Wine only makes sense if you've stood where it grows. I've tasted in California's fog at dawn, walked schist slopes in the Douro as the light changed, sat in a stone room in Tuscany while the producer described the soil his family had been working for four generations. The mineral taste of Santorini makes sense once you've felt the Aegean wind and seen the pumice underfoot. These moments — the actual place — are where wine stops being a thing you're learning about and becomes something you understand.
I'm WSET Level 1 certified (October 2025), currently pursuing Level 2 (exam July 2026). The training is a guardrail — it keeps the stories honest, stops me from mistaking mood for structure. But it's also just language: when you taste with anyone serious about wine, having a shared vocabulary for what you're actually tasting (acidity, tannin structure, regionality) means you're not constantly translating feeling into words. It's the difference between tasting and talking about tasting.
I work the floor at Uncorked Wine Tastings in Dublin, Ohio — pouring, guiding guests through their first encounter with wines most people have never heard of. Thousands of conversations across an evening: someone who tastes their first serious Riesling and feels something shift; a collector who knows exactly what they want and watches to see if we're taking them seriously; beginners who apologize for not knowing the "right" words. You learn quickly that wine education is mostly about permission — giving people the confidence to trust what they're actually tasting instead of what they've been told to taste.
I've been in wine club memberships for over a decade — past clubs at Tamber Bey and Viansa, currently in three including Blustone. The consumer side teaches you what actually matters: a tasting note that tells you something you didn't know about the wine, consistency in what arrives, an actual relationship with the producer or curator — not just a checkbox renewal. You notice what's forgotten and what's remembered. That's stayed with me.
From Napa's structured Cabernets to the cooler, more restrained wines coming out of Sonoma, Carneros, and the Central Coast — California's range is wider than its reputation suggests. I've tasted across the spectrum and spent time with producers who are pushing past the big, extracted style that defined the last generation.
Leelanau and Old Mission are doing something genuinely exciting. The twin peninsulas jut into Lake Michigan, and the water moderates the climate in ways that produce elegant Rieslings, Pinot Gris, and cool-climate reds that most people outside the Midwest have never encountered.
I'm a member at Blustone Vineyards in Lake Leelanau — voted the best winery on the peninsula five years running. This photo was taken at Rove Winery at the Gallagher Estate, which sits at the highest point on the Leelanau Peninsula; the views stretch for miles in every direction and do a lot to explain why people keep planting vines here. MAWBY in Suttons Bay is one of the most serious sparkling wine operations in the Midwest — méthode champenoise, with a reserve solera dating to 1993. Bel Lago in Cedar farms 37 acres and over a hundred grape varieties, including Blaufrankisch and Siegerrebe alongside the expected Pinot Gris and Riesling, which tells you something about how seriously they take what the land can do. Three Trees Vineyard, also in Suttons Bay, had wines selected for the James Beard Foundation's Dinner of the Decade — a detail that tends to end conversations about whether Michigan wine is worth paying attention to.
This is where my deeper appreciation for terroir-driven wine really started, before Europe or South America. The region rewards the curious and punishes anyone who shows up expecting California.
The Douro is where I fell hardest. We started at Sandeman's caves in Vila Nova de Gaia — one of the oldest port lodges on the river, founded by a Scotsman in 1790 and still recognizable worldwide by The Don, that stark silhouette in a Portuguese student's cape. The cellars run deep into granite, cool and dark, smelling of oak and something much older than the building itself. Row after row of aging pipes and toneis, centuries of port accumulating in the dark. The difference between a ten-year and a twenty-year Tawny becomes obvious in a room like that.
From there, a river cruise east into the valley — through the massive locks at Carrapatelo, where the boat is lifted or lowered thirty-five meters like something industrial and slow and improbable, and into the terraced vineyards carved over centuries into steep schist hillsides. The terraces are a UNESCO World Heritage site, and you understand why once you've seen them at the scale the river gives you: an enormous, human-made landscape, Touriga Nacional and Tinta Roriz rooted in soil that looks like it shouldn't sustain anything.
Outside Régua, in Galafura, we visited Adega das Giestas Negras — a schist winery with 1575 engraved above its door. Inside, a chestnut wood spindle press eight meters long and over three hundred years old, lagares carved from the same stone as the hillside. The Coimbra de Mattos family has worked this land since before anyone alive can remember, and restored it as a museum in 2006. What stayed with me was the absence of distance between the equipment and the landscape outside the window — they're made of the same thing.
VintageTheory, outside Sabrosa in the upper Douro, felt like the other end of the same story — a boutique producer with panoramic views of the valley and a terrace where you sit with ports aged ten, twenty, and thirty years alongside Douro table wines. The kind of place you don't rush. The kind of wine that makes you stop talking mid-sentence.
Vinho Verde deserves more credit than its reputation as a summer sipper — the single-varietal Alvarinhos from Monção and Melgaço are as serious as white wine gets.
I visited Fattoria Poggio Alloro, a working estate five kilometers from the medieval towers of San Gimignano. It's a fourth-generation family farm — the Fioroni family have farmed this land since 1955 — and the wines reflect that rootedness. The estate produces Vernaccia di San Gimignano DOCG, Chianti DOCG, Vin Santo, and a Sangiovese-forward red blend called "Convivio," made with a touch of Colorino for depth and color. Everything is certified organic. The 360-degree views of vineyards, olive groves, and the towers of San Gimignano on the horizon are the kind of thing that makes the abstract concrete: Sangiovese in its native context, with the landscape that shaped it.
Ontario's Niagara Peninsula is producing wines that would surprise anyone who formed their opinion of Canadian wine from a liquor store shelf.
Tawse Winery in Vineland is a family-owned, certified organic and biodynamic estate on the lower slopes of the Niagara Escarpment. Founded by Moray Tawse out of a passion for Burgundy, the winery uses a six-level gravity-flow design, geothermal energy systems, and hand-harvested fruit from low-yield vines. It has been named Canadian Winery of the Year four times. The Chardonnay and Pinot Noir here are legitimately Burgundian in aspiration and often in execution — cool-climate precision that holds its own against serious benchmarks.
Megalomaniac Wines, also on the Niagara Peninsula, takes a different approach — irreverent branding wrapped around genuinely well-made wines. The barrel room visit made clear this isn't just a marketing exercise; the winemaking is taken seriously even if the attitude isn't.
Santorini's Assyrtiko stopped me cold the first time I had it on the island. I visited three producers — each with a distinct approach to the same volcanic terroir.
Gaia Wines operates out of a beautifully restored stone building on Santorini's eastern coast — originally a tomato processing factory from the early 1900s. Their flagship Thalassitis Assyrtiko, and the singular Thalassitis Submerged — bottled and aged underwater at twenty meters depth — are among the more singular things I've tasted.
Hatzidakis Winery, carved into the hillside at 330 meters elevation outside Pyrgos, was the first producer to champion Mavrotragano — a rare indigenous red grape that had nearly disappeared. Their cave-like tasting room and organic vineyards make for one of the more intimate visits on the island.
Santo Wines, the island's large cooperative established in 1911, sits atop the caldera with panoramic views of the volcano and Aegean Sea. The cooperative represents the island's growers collectively and produces across the full range of PDO Santorini styles, including Vinsanto, the sweet sun-dried dessert wine made from late-harvested Assyrtiko.
High-acid, mineral-driven, almost saline in character — Santorini's wines only make sense once you've stood on the island and looked at what's actually growing in the rock. The vines train low in a basket shape called kouloura to survive the fierce Aegean winds. Greece makes a case for indigenous varieties that no amount of reading can prepare you for.
I attended a tasting hosted by Anuva Wines — a Buenos Aires-based importer that specialized in curating high-quality Argentine producers and introducing them to serious wine buyers and enthusiasts through guided tastings in the city. Anuva are no longer in business, but what they built — direct access between consumers and small, quality-focused producers — was a model worth remembering.
Mendoza's Malbec has an undeserved reputation for being easy. At altitude in the Uco Valley, the combination of intense UV exposure, cold nights, and volcanic soils builds structure and complexity that rivals anything in the southern hemisphere. Worth taking seriously.
The first thing you learn when you take wine seriously is that confidence comes from sensation, not status. Trust what you actually taste. The second is that geography — the land, the weather, the generations of people who have been working that soil — is not an abstraction; it's the reason the wine tastes like anything at all. And the third is that the best wine conversations don't happen with people who claim expertise. They happen with people who have stayed curious long enough to keep being surprised.
The same instincts apply whenever you're trying to understand what someone actually needs from an experience — not what they say they want, but what lands.
If you're someone who wants to deepen your relationship with wine — not to impress anyone, but because you're genuinely curious — if wine is a serious interest, or if you're building a wine program and want to talk about what actually works, I'm at matt@mattdinovo.wine.
Wine is better when you have people to talk about it with. This site is my part of that conversation — stories and choices that have shaped how I think. If something resonates, or if you want to continue the thread, here's where you can find me:
