My fiancée and I spent Christmas in Milan, staying at the Radisson Collection Palazzo Touring Club. It’s a brilliant place — the historic 1894 headquarters of the Italian bicycle club, converted into a hotel that still feels like it’s holding its breath from the turn of the century.
We headed out of the lobby and toward the city center. Approaching the Duomo, you find yourself rooted to the spot, dwarfed by those jagged white-marble spires. To the side, the grand, polished bulk of La Rinascente—which has anchored this site since 1865—stands as a temple of modern commerce, its lights and window displays a sharp, vibrant contrast to the ancient stone of the cathedral.
Rinascente and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II were both designed as part of the same massive 19th-century urban renewal project that overhauled this side of the piazza. Rinascente frames the Galleria’s entrance, and once you step into that mouth of iron and glass, you aren't just entering a shopping arcade; you’re moving through the grand, monumental spine of the city. The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, built between 1865 and 1877, was the final piece of that overhaul. We wandered into Ristorante Biffi simply because the warm lights and the crowd pulled us in. Settled in, looking around the room, it hit us that we were sitting in a space that’s been anchored there since 1867—well before the final unification of Italy. You don't hunt down a place like that for its credentials; you just fall into it, and the history settles around you.
I leaned into the classics: cotoletta alla milanese. A massive, bone-in veal cutlet, breaded and fried to a deep golden brown, flanked by potatoes and sautéed mushrooms. For the wine, I dodged the standard local reds and went for a bottle of Masi Campofiorin 2020. It was the only move. I needed a wine with enough structural backbone to cut through the fried crust, but enough earthy weight to match the mushrooms without getting lost.
Campofiorin is a Veronese beast made from indigenous grapes. Corvina does the heavy lifting, bringing that signature tart cherry fruit and high, crackling acidity. Rondinella provides the herbal aromatics, and Molinara pulls it all together with a sharp, saline edge. These grapes grow in the hills outside Verona, rooted in limestone soils that sit between the continental chill of the Lessini Mountains and the thermal cushion of Lake Garda. It’s a terroir that keeps these grapes from burning up in the late-summer heat, preserving that crucial aromatic precision.
The Boscaini family, seven generations deep, wrote the playbook for this style. They started with the Ripasso method—re-fermenting wine on the pomace of Amarone to add depth and complexity. But decades later, they pushed further. They dropped the pomace entirely and started re-fermenting on whole, semi-dried grapes. It’s an appassimento component that drops in dried-fruit richness and density without turning the wine into a heavy-handed, high-alcohol Amarone clone.
The 2020 vintage got a warm summer with just enough diurnal swing to keep the acidity sharp. Masi played it smart: they delayed the harvest and pushed the proportion of semi-dried grapes in that second fermentation from the traditional 25% to 30%. The result is a wine with a deep, saturated weight. To keep that mass from getting clunky, they age it for 15 to 18 months in large Slavonian botti, with a touch of new French and Slavonian barrique to polish the edges. It smooths the naturally chalky tannins of the Corvina and adds a layer of earthy spice.
The pairing was a revelation. The wine's acidity sliced right through the fat of the veal, and the double-fermented depth dug into the umami of the mushrooms like a lock clicking into place. Sometimes the best meals aren't the ones you sweat over on OpenTable weeks in advance. They’re the ones you fall into on a Christmas afternoon, halfway between the Duomo and the Brera, just because the mood is right and the bottle is calling.
Pairs well with
