The Italian enoblogosphere is an uproar this week over racist comments made during RAI Uno’s Sunday night broadcast of the Premio Internazionale del Vino (International Wine Awards), hosted by Bibenda (Italy’s leading glossy wine and spirits magazine). During the broadcast, presenter Massimiliano Ossini asked the audience what wine would pair best with U.S. President Barack Obama and then responded, Brunello (which, translated literally, means brownish) or Nero d’Avola (literally, black [grape] from [the town of] Avola). The offhand remarks have been widely criticized in numerous posts published this week by some of Italy’s top food and wine bloggers, including Francesco Arrigoni who blogs for the national daily Corriere della Sera and Antonio Tomacelli who writes for dissapore. Pundits and television critics have also chastised the program’s executive producer Franco Ricci for the presenters’s poor pronunciation of wine terminology and winery names and amateurish production values: leading Italian wine writer and blogger and VinoWine editor Franco Ziliani commented on the episode here, as did blogger and sommelier Andrea Gori, who asked “is this the way to solve the problem of the Wine Country that doesn’t know wine?”

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