Italian winemaker Luigi Mancini was having so much trouble selling wine in London that he gave up on his own language.
Faced with sceptical restaurateurs in the British capital, he switched the label for his white wine to the more familiar French name to win them over. "Pinot nero is not well known, while pinot noir is," he said.
Mr Mancini, who exports about half of what he produces from his vineyard near Pesaro on the Adriatic coast, blamed the confusion over his wine on the haphazard way in which his country promoted its wines overseas. "We could all sell more," he said.
Giorgio Serra, who recently became responsible for wine at the Buonitalia state marketing agency, said the problem lay with the disorderly way in which Italy's regions tried to get more people to drink their barolos, brunellos and barbarescos.
Mr Serra's resolve to clean up the marketing mess strengthened during a recent trip to Japan, where he found French wine dominating restaurant menus.
"You'd be hard-pressed to find a Japanese who knows about campania wine," he said.
Although France and Italy fill more glasses than any other country in the world, they face fierce competition from the likes of Australia, Chile and the United States, which often use cheap prices and slick marketing tactics.
Between 2001 and 2005, Australia nearly doubled its export market share to 10.5 per cent in terms of tonnes, according to figures from Ismea, a farm research body based in Rome.
By contrast, Italy's share of that market declined from 23.73 per cent to 18.88 per cent.
Italy stood to lose even more market share if it did not follow France's example. Mr Serra said: "Small producers will suffer most."
In France, winemakers work closely with promotional agencies to target specific markets or countries.
Sopexa, partially owned by the French state, is the agency that Mr Serra would most like Buonitalia, which also promotes olive oil and other foodstuffs, to copy.
Andrea Rea, a marketing expert at Milan's Bocconi University, said Italy's huge variety of wines should give it a competitive edge because its New World rivals focused on a much narrower selection like merlot and shiraz.
"Italy, in its disorder, is essentially competitive," he said, adding that it had a lot of room to grow. "There are about 770,000 makers of wine, 30,000 of whom put it in bottles."
Mr Serra has already started work in Japan.
After learning that the Japanese used a French handbook to train sommeliers, he had printed a rival Italian manual: "This was just to even things out a bit."
Mr Serra is also broadening his marketing blitz to include China, India, and the United States.
But many regions could be sceptical of his strategy after having spent the last 20 years turning their cheap table wines into premium labels, said Mr Rea.
After organising trips abroad for producers from all over the country, Lucio Tasca, chairman of the association of Sicilian wine makers, said he saw no reason for state involvement.
Given the challenges facing Mr Serra, Andrea Sartori, head of Italy's biggest confederation of winemakers, UIV, said he was realistic about how long it would take Buonitalia to become the next Sopexa. "It'll take another 20 years. I won't live to see the end of it."
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