Confused?

So are most people when trying to buy Italian wine. The number of grape varietals grown throughout Italy is staggering (estimated at over 2,000), and the regions are just as prolific. Unlike Germany and France, every area of Italy grows grapes that are used to make wine. The best-known are, of course, the Tuscan areas of Chianti and Montalcino and the Piemonte area of Brunello. There are hundreds more, however, that make both well-known and little-known wines. That’s where it can get super confusing.

When navigating the tangle of vines that make up the Italian wine landscape, the most important thing to help you is the label. This may sound simplistic, but if you remember the basics about how the Italians label their wines, it will make it easier for you to track down something you like…or at least know the right questions to ask the salesperson or sommelier.

Like France and Germany, Italy has wine laws that require producers to include specific grapes in wines that feature only an area’s name on its label. For instance, if a wine is called Barolo, that means that it is from the area of Barolo (a subregion of Piemonte). It also means that, due to Italian wine law, this red wine is made exclusively from the nebbiolo grape.

The reason for this naming practice is the same as it is in France: quality. The idea is that if a specific Italian wine is so spectacular as to be known the world round, it should be associated with the specific area that it is made in and not with the grape it is made from. Nebbiolo can be grown anywhere, but Barolo can only be made in Barolo.

What about all the wine made in places that don’t have names like Barolo, Chianti and Montalcino? That’s where wine naming in Italy becomes unique. In these other areas, the name of the wine will actually tell you everything you need to know. Take, for instance, the white wine trebbiano d’Abruzzo. What the name of a regional Italian wine like this tells you is what the wine is made of (the trebbiano grape) and where it is from (the Abruzzo region).

Now that everything‘s clear, there will never be any reason for you to be confused when purchasing Italian wine ever again. Right?

Sadly, this is not the case. As with the riddle I posed in the opening, there will always be strange and confusing conundrums in the Italian wine world. This is the result of an ever-evolving language forged from different regions that, until the 20th century, had little to do with each other aside from proximity. Montepulciano the grape grows throughout central Italy, but most famously in the area of Abruzzo. There, it is made into the popular montepulciano d’Abruzzo. While there are many delicious montepulciano d’Abruzzos made with style and finesse, most are considered, by and large, quaffing wines for the masses.

Montepulciano, the area, on the other hand, is a medieval village in the region of Tuscany. There, a wine called Vino Nobile di Montepulciano has been made for hundreds of years. This wine isn’t made from a grape called Vino Nobile (it is made from a clone of sangiovese called prugnolo), but the name comes from the noble reputation of those who drank it. Once considered on par with its Tuscan brothers Montalcino and Chianti, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano’s status as one of the three great wines from Tuscany has fallen a bit in recent years.

The main thing to remember when you are tasting Italian wine is geography. Take notes on what wines you like from specific Italian regions. This will help you the next time you are in a wine store or at a restaurant and are confronted with nothing but a name staring back at you.

Follow Josh on Twitter: @joshperilo.

Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Les Trois Graces Fontaine” (“The Three Graces”), 1999.

by Marsha McCreadie

When the Oracle asked Niki de Saint Phalle which it would be, “perfection of the life or perfection of the art,” she said, “Screw Yeats. I’ll take both.”

For the most part, this is what artist-sculptor Saint Phalle did and what she got. An installation of nine of her sculptures, mainly representing her fanciful gigantisms phase and the final colorful chapter of her work, is on public display on Park Avenue in the 50s this summer and much of the upcoming fall. The occasion—really the celebration—is the 10th anniversary of Saint Phalle’s death.

For New Yorkers, whether sticky in the city or in and out of town, the outdoors season is right, the colors bright, the spirits high. The generously sized figures, thighs and bosoms to rival Botero’s, include some of her most well-known works (no, not “Hon,” or “She,” the huge prone pregnant body into whose cavernous vagina the public can walk—that one is permanently on display in Sweden and would take up half a subway stop) that include “Les Baigneurs” (“The Bathers”) from 1983, made of polyester resin, and the highly comic “Les Trois Graces Fontaine” from 1999, poly ceramic, stained, mirrored glass figures in pop art bathing suits, camping it up. Probably not what Greek classicists had in mind, but joyful as all get-out.

These represent her signature Nana (French slang for “broad” or “chick”) series, originally inspired by the pregnant Clarice Rivers, wife of Larry. Also on display is “Nana on a Dolphin,” as described, making nearby office buildings look very dull indeed.

To Saint Phalle’s credit, she was exploring female archetypes and imagery a few years before it became de rigeur. From a wealthy Franco-American family, she once was a model for French Vogue but became interested in art, even getting kicked out of the exclusive Brearley School for painting fig leaves red, she said, and subsequently becoming an artistic autodidact. Seemingly always part of the movement du jour, it didn’t hurt that she had a talent for getting with the right people, the emerging influences—in the very early 1960s, for instance, hanging with pals like Christo and Jean Tinguely (eventually one of her husbands) when they were practicing the Dada-influenced movement of conceptual art.

She first achieved notoriety for her “shooting paintings,” hidden paint containers shot by pistol to finish the work. You get the idea: random, violence, what is art? How we miss the ’60s!

But she truly hit her stride with the fanciful large sculptures that became her trademark, often used in public gardens such as her Tarot Garden in Tuscany, an enterprise 20 years in the making financed in part by her self-named perfume. Especially appealing to kids, the playful aspects of her surrealistic amusement park-like spaces were seemingly at odds with a temperament that once led to a nervous breakdown.

For New Yorkers right now, the installations are in tune with our temper and taste: Women, sports figures, people of color. If you’re on Park Avenue at 59th Street North, check out Louis Armstrong (polyurethane foam, resin and steel) and Miles Davis at 58th Street North (similar materials), both from Saint Phalle’s Black Heroes series, as well as an homage to Michael Jordan and “Baseball Player” (nod to Tony Wynn).

Nine sculptures by Saint Phalle are on view on Park Avenue from 52nd to 60th Street, July 12-Nov. 15.

For more information, contact the Nohra Haime Gallery, the gallery responsible for the full Saint Phalle retrospective last fall, at 730 5th Ave., 212-888-3550, gallery@nohrahaime.gallery.com.