Congratulations to Paolo Mittiga, IWS for passing the Italian Wine Scholar exam with the highest honors!
About Paolo Mittiga:
''I am a wine enthusiast. I worked in the brokerage industry for over 27 years. Seven years ago, as a gift for my birthday, I received the enrollment to the Kevin Zraly course “The Windows on the World Wine Course”. At the time I did not know much about wine. However, after three months, I truly enjoyed the new class. I got very passionate about wine, I started reading many well known books on the topic, especially focused on French Wine.
I travelled to Bordeaux to learn more about it. On my way back to US I enrolled to the American Sommelier Classes in NY City including the Blind Tasting class that truly thought me a lot on the topic. I was so passionate that I also deepened my studies with more readings.
Two years ago, as I was searching for more in depth classes I came across to the Wine Scholar Guild and I felt that I needed to learn more about Italian wines. It also happened that at the time I moved back to Italy where I was born. Learning about Italian wines, as a result, became easier as I had access to the wines and to the different regions. I have travelled to Tuscany, Umbria and Campania so far. I wanted to see with my eyes what I was studying.
At the same time, I started The Wine Voyager, a company focused on Wine related events (TheWineVoyager.com). I felt I wanted to share my knowledge with other people, ignite the passion about wine in them as well. I have done many wine events in Italy (Naples) and NY/NJ with resounding success. I got excited seeing people truly enjoying the new topic and getting amazed learning it.
So Wine Education has become my passion.
I started with the very light course by Kevin Zraly, his book was the first one I read on the topic. I got very excited, as my passion was taking over, and I wanted to know more; so besides immersing myself in depth reading I also wanted to pursue a Certification program. I joined the American Sommelier courses in New York City for almost 2.5 years. I passed all their exams with honors. But I also realized that these certification programs, by covering such a wide range of regions and wines, only scratched the tip of the iceberg. I wanted to really master the knowledge of French and Italian wines (I also moved for large part of the year to Italy in 2015), so I joined the Italian Wine Scholar course; and soon the French Wine Scholar.
The course it has been just amazing, with the online classes and the in depth manual (book). I got introduced to a wonderful world that opened my eyes on the Italian wine production and its high quality. I was surprised and sad to see how little the world knows about our wines (beside some iconic ones) and how even within Italy the focus was truly about the regional wines. It is like Italy was really 20 states and the knowledge hardly extended beyond the regional borders.
With The WineVoyagers, I started the mission of expanding that knowledge, making sure that everywhere in any region we can comfortably talking and comparing wines of all the other ones.
I am in the process to establishing a US import of wines focused on the Campania region; I learned its wine through the Italian Wine Scholar, I tasted them all and I realized the incredible hidden treasures so unknown around the world.''
