I love Italian wine but rarely get to drink it. I think it’s because I’m married to woman with an American palate (the bigger and fruitier the better) and surrounded by friends who, when the wine list comes, go straight to Bordeaux. At home, I have to be persistent (or sneaky) to get a good Italian wine on the table.

When I’m successful, everybody’s prejudices are overcome, if only for the evening.

But I think two more significant barriers lie between Italian wine and many of its potential fans: first, there’s the problem of Bad Chianti. When I was coming of age, my only contact with Italian red wine was that cheap stuff in the bottle in the straw basket. Usually it was acidic and thin; sometimes it was even funky. But it was so ubiquitous and so linked in our minds with a satisfying, steaming pizza pie, Bad Chianti became the symbol of all wine hailing from Italy.

For more on the “fiasco” of twentieth century Chianti, click here:

(That bottle style, by the way, is known in Italian as a fiasco, from root word that gives us “flask” in English. I’m sure the relationship is accidental, if apropos, between the contemporary meaning of fiasco as “disaster” and the lapse in quality control experienced by the makers of Chianti during the last century.)

The second barrier between Italian wine and many of its potential admirers is the label. No other European country names its wines so arbitrarily. Sometimes the wine and the label bear the name of the region or town (as in Barolo or Valpolicella), sometimes the grape (pinot grigio, primativo), sometimes neither (as in the so-called Super Tuscans, which bear proprietary names like Sassicaia or Guado al Tasso).

Perversely, as more Italian growers are bottling their own wines instead of sending them to a cooperative, their labels are getting even more incomprehensible. Last night at a tasting organized around wines from Southern Italy at my local wine bar Vino Rosso, we tasted a red from an island just north of Capri that bore an arty brick-red label with a caveman drawing and “Pietratorcia” in gold type — and not much else. You had to get a magnifying glass to read “Scheria Rosso” at the bottom, and “vino da tavola di Ischia” on the back label. Which, come to think of it, doesn’t clarify anything: Not many of us have visited the island of Ischia. And although “table wine” signifies to Americans something inexpensive and simple, the Scheria (its name, as it turns out) was the priciest, most age-worthy wine of the tasting.

Pietratorcia, it turns out, is the winery.

Grape varieties listed on the label? Fuggetaboutit.

Never fear, though; you can pick up the tools you’ll need to decipher an Italian label, enjoy a good Chianti, and more in “Italian Wines: A Piccolo Intro.”