In a world featured by an ongoing development and globalization (more information, means, and goods exchange speed), the idea of sommelier, which could be dened of French origin and stemming from the tradition, turns out to be a little narrow-minded, if with it one suggests that a professional owns a wine knowledge in a general sense.

Now, clearly we need to go beyond our own boundaries and to take into consideration the context in order to understand each other. We need to know styles and techniques which go beyond a typical territory and the du jour wine cellar (such knowledge could be instead enough for the classical idea of a professional committed almost exclusively to restaurant industry). Some activities, such as de-alcoholization or chips, cannot be got rid of as wrong, unless whether supported by appropriated arguments, or as falling into biodynamic (its success is a concrete example). It is not possible to acclaim the new Italian product which is not new, but adapting to international styles and less territorial of other areas, maybe a little bit more persuasive. Of course, a skilled professional in the field we refer to, cannot have but a worldwide culture related to all the places in which vine is cultivated, and of the wine, not meant as a simple and ritual benchmark of the terroir, but above all to the culture of production of that wine and of that territory. Wine is certainly nature, but addressed from the culture of a certain context mainly in the taste. Again. Who professionally deals with wine must know the phases of the vine, starting from the earth to end up into consumer palate, being the latter the ultimate judge. In the middle, however, there are a lot of passages (natural, technical, economic, environmental, commercial, legislative, sensorial, alimentary, related to other foods, etic) that cannot be dodged or ignored. For the modern wine lover, the relationship between wine, its quality and price is of pivotal signicance, even though quite protean. Signicance which is
becoming more and more strategic to understand and to understand each other. Average quality of a wine, belonging to a specific denomination, depends from disciplinary guidelines, from the behavior synergy of producers and from several variables: it could be possible to discover that who has a tradition of more than three centuries might be not better of one who has it of less than fifty years.

The aim is to open a path in this direction integrating among them different cultural patterns (in primis, French, English, American, Spanish, and of the New World), trying to pull up the great wine and cooking Italian tradition of our Renaissance who saw in the masters of cuisine and wine, maître, etc., incomparable champions of style and choreography, never separated by matters of method and
opportunity¹. Making wine must be a great traditional handmade work (technical and emotional) also nowadays, which is reflected in the all-accomplished professional of such a suave nourishment, who handles it through its several phases, and, above all, knows it in its changing and polyvalent intimacy. In short, the book we are working on aims at proving the necessity of a new approach for wine, of
professional, or even just cultural, gures who do not replace those today present in classical meaning, but who follow a cultural revolution in terms of approaches and contents, more than its overtaking. The way is long in Italy more than in other nations, but we believe there is vast room and a large number of experts, connoisseurs and wine lovers, in a nutshell a cultural background really fertile and reactive: women, new generations, new technologies, sensibility towards etic;
then, we believe that the disadvantage position of nowadays market withdrawn into itself may open up in not so long time, also thanks to the small contribution of such modest book that just aims at suggesting this idea.

A wine Master must know at several levels of deepening (with regard to different qualications) the whole cycle of production and consumption of wine. Such knowledge, then, must be handled towards two directions that go to from the earth to the table, but also the other way round, and in parallel way from the consuming phase to that of vine implant (formula reversal). This dual circularity must be owned and intrinsic to each wine Master, both qualied, graduated or else. It is a forma mentis and a modus agendi which comes before any concrete action with, in and about wine.

This integral, dual entry and return, circularity, then, can be, as said, only
global and catch comparatively all the vine-wine productions and all the markets of the world. Wine cannot admit any kind of provincialism, not even a luxury one. The master of wine works in some place and in some role, but has to go beyond such place and role, and understanding the world of wine in its universal interpenetration is more and more inescapable. Whatever it is his personal and specialist function along the complex wine weaving factory and consumption, what just said has to be (and such must be) his global vision, the philosophy of this plant and of this juice which makes so pleasant our lives. The book, in phase of general planning, aims at acquitting to a cultural and innovative function, to a more specically practical duty, and, in the meantime, to take a social charge of a product of such a great charm and loveliness, but that also brings some risk at natural and social level.

^{1 The idea of proposing a volume - currently undergoing -, which describes a new professional gure, that of Wine Master, starts from those remarks above.}