Do I – Do You – Drink Too Much?

Hello everybody: I’m back, having been roused from my long winter’s nap by a farrago of essentially prohibitionist propaganda.

The august New York Times, in a recent, wonderfully alarmist article, warned the nation of the deadly dangers of consuming even tiny amounts of alcohol. The ominous headlines say it all:

Even a Little Alcohol Can Harm Your Health

Recent research makes it clear that any amount of drinking can be detrimental.

Got that? Any amount. If it doesn’t outright cause your death, at very least it will mutate your DNA, with all the perils that implies for yourself and your progeny.

Hogwash, I say. I take such manifestoes with a whole shakerful of salt. By the lights of that medical research, I should years ago have died of kidney disease and/or cirrhosis, if not heart disease and an utterly destroyed digestive system.

And, logically, the same must be true of most of my colleagues in wine journalism, not just in the US but everywhere around the world. If a small amount of alcohol is dangerous, the prodigious amounts we all professionally process must be mortal many times over.

© HA! Humoristes Associés, 1980

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Yet here we are, vocal and still imbibing. I’m 84, and I thoroughly enjoy my wine with dinner every night, as I have for the past 60 years, and most nights a small brandy afterwards. How is it possible I survive such a lethal regimen? Is there even a remote chance that alcohol could, for the human system, be preservative rather than deadly?

© HA! Humoristes Associés, 1980

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I don’t know, and I really don’t care. I have nothing to do with alcohol anyway: I never touch the stuff. I drink wine, of which alcohol is but one – and far from the largest – component.

That’s more than a verbal quibble. That’s a whole difference in outlook, a whole different approach to the question. Ask different questions and you get different answers. Can drinking wine at dinner improve people’s digestion, mood, and outlook? We all know it can. Does being happier and more content improve one’s life and support one’s general health? That is the very essence of a rhetorical question.

To my mind, leaving such considerations out of the so-called investigation invalidates all of its conclusions. Our lives are not monothematic or one-dimensional, and any medical advice that acts as if a single component can be isolated from the whole rest of the corpus – pun intended – of our lives, or as if everyone’s metabolism acted and reacted the same way, is to my way of thinking just plain stupid. And I am, frankly, getting tired of having to point this out. Surely medical practitioners know the good effects of happiness?

Back in the days when philosophers (the only doctors of the day) talked about things that mattered to people, Thomas Aquinas considered the question of what was the right amount to drink and what was drinking too much. By all the available evidence, Aquinas enjoyed his meals, and it’s sure he didn’t wash them down with Pepsi, so we may take it that he knew whereof he spoke. After much consideration of pros and cons, he concluded that one could drink usque ad hilaritatem – up to the point of merriment, or joyfulness.
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© HA! Humoristes Associés, 1980

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I couldn’t agree more. They knew something about drinking, those old masters. Merriment and joyfulness will prolong more lives than abstinence, or any amount of medicine.

By the way, if you’re interested in a totally different-from-the-medical-spoilsports’ take on the cultural role of drinking, I recommend you take a look at Edward Slingerland’s Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. As he asserts,

The sheer popularity, persistence, and importance of intoxicants throughout human history begs explanation…. My central argument is that getting drunk, high, or otherwise cognitively altered must have, over evolutionary times, helped individuals to survive and flourish, and cultures to endure and expand.

The whole book is entertaining and illuminating – much like a good glass of wine.

 

Christmas 2022

For this holiday season, I’m wishing all my readers

a very merry Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Yule
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and also

a happy, healthy, peaceful, and prosperous New Year.
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Now, Ubriaco will be taking a small mid-winter break. You’ll find me here again soon, with a fresh supply of red wine, white wine, and purple prose, in 2023.

Beni di Batasiolo: A Barolo Family

I Beni di Batasiolo is the name of a family firm of Barolo producers, and a very accurate name it is. Beni are what we would call estates or properties, in this case specifically cru vineyards, and the Batasiolo family operates several of them, which it vinifies separately as quite distinctive single-vineyard bottlings. These include Vigneto Bofani in Bussia; the equally well known Brunate in La Morra; Cerequio, also in La Morra; Boscareto in Serralunga; and Briccolina, also in Serralunga.

That’s a nice family of wines indeed, so when Fiorenzo Dogliani, the proprietor and president of the firm, and Palm Bay, its American importer, held a comparative tasting of all these crus I was very happy to attend. That was one of the best decisions I’ve made lately: The event was both enjoyable and illuminating.

That was not only because of the crus involved but also because of the vintage to be shown: 2013. This was a great Nebbiolo vintage, and Batasiolo, which likes to hold back its wines until they are readier to drink than most Barolo new releases (before Covid, it sold primarily to restaurants), was just now releasing 2013s. Lucky me.

Not entirely by the way, Mr. Dogliani, who was presenting the wines, mentioned that his 2022 vintage is “fantastic,” though he couldn’t predict when it will be market-ready. Nebbiolo, he said, is greatly benefitting from Piedmont’s warming climate. That’s at least one spot where global warming is doing us some good.

Before we began the red wine tasting, we sipped a lovely Gavi di Gavi, Batasiolo’s 2021 Granée, a really fine Cortese – saline, mineral-inflected, and sapid, and a great palate-bracer to prepare us for the battery of red wines. Then to work.
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First up was Barolo Bussia Vigneto Bofani (unless I mention otherwise, all the reds I tasted were 2013 vintage).

This was an auspicious beginning, a lovely Barolo, with a deep, dark-cherry aroma, medium-weight in the mouth, with flavors of cherries and undergrowth, beautifully balanced. Abundant tannins, nicely softened by time and held in check by a lively acidity.
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The next wine was from Brunate, perhaps the most celebrated site in La Morra.

It was markedly different from the preceding Monforte d’Alba wine – higher-toned in both aroma and taste, and showing more basic black cherry flavors. It too was beautifully balanced – that would turn out to be almost a Batasiolo signature – even though it felt bigger in the mouth than the Bofani.
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The third bottle was Cerequio, another La Morra wine. Despite Cerequio’s great reputation, I’ve never been a big fan of its wines. They have always seemed to me a little lacking, almost a bit hollow at the core. Well, this bottle changed my mind about that: It was the best Cerequio I’ve ever had, excellent Barolo in every respect, from its cherry and cedar nose through to its very long, fresh finish.

Batasiolo’s own note says “the Barolos from this vineyard are a lighter style, perfumed and velvety, with exceptionally long ageability.” That seems quite right to me.
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The next example was Boscareto, from Serralunga d’Alba. Batasiolo says this vineyard “produces a bold style of Barolo that is elegant with great body.”  Dogliani described it as “our most traditional Barolo.”

I found it lovely on the palate, but I would describe it more as restrained and, as Dogliani rightly said, very elegant rather than bold, with a beautifully long finish, still quite fresh, and promising very long life. I agree that this is classic Barolo, and of a very high order.
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The last bottle was Briccolina, which Batasiolo describes as a “well-structured, full-bodied wine that can age for 15 to 20 years.”

It is the only one of Batasiolo’s Barolos that spends any time in barriques, which I hasten to say I could not taste in the wine – so much the better!  While this is not a vineyard I am at all familiar with, this seemed to me quite a classic Barolo, sprightly and balanced, with a lovely nose and palate.

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The final wine of the tasting was one that contravened Batasiolo’s estimate of a 15- to 20-year life span for Briccolina: It was a Briccolina 1996, and it was a great wine. Lively, elegant, and fine, with an ethereal nose, a beautiful Barolo palate, and an incredibly long finish, this was the first wine of the day that I, with my fondness for mature wine, regarded as really ready to drink, with years of life still before it. There couldn’t have been a better way to end the tasting, or to show what Batasiolo’s wines are capable of.

For those of you who might want to try this experience for yourself: Batasiolo will be shipping six-packs of this tasting (the five 2013s and the 2021 Gavi) to the US very soon.

 

At the Heart of Campanian White Wine: Donnachiara

I’ve never made any secret of my fondness for the wines of Campania. I think the whites in particular, fermented from indigenous varieties, stand among the best in Italy. And of them – Campania is rich in indigenous grapes – I think those of the Irpinia area of Avellino province – Fiano di Avellino and Greco di Tufo – deserve to rank among world-class wines.

Both these wines are vinified from ancient varieties cultivated high in the hills east of Naples on decayed volcanic soils rich in mineral traces. The combination of soil, variety, and the microclimate of those hills produces wines of a character and quality impossible to duplicate.

A few weeks ago, I and several other journalists enjoyed a tasting of these wines with Ilaria Petitto, the CEO of Donnachiara, a winery located in Montefalcione, right in the heart of this great white wine zone. I’ve known Donnachiara’s wine for years now, and from my very first taste what I’ve admired most about them is their pitch-perfect typicity.

To be sure, Donnachiara’s wines reflect the changes each different growing season brings. But underlying that – or overriding it is perhaps more accurate – the distinct character of Fiano di Avellino and of Greco di Tufo is always apparent in them: the floral and hazelnut scents of the Fiano, its lightness and elegance on the palate; the herbal and mineral aromas of the Greco, its greater weight and hint of oiliness in the mouth.

Only a few Fiano and Greco producers bottle both a classic wine and a cru version, so it was particularly instructive to have them presented side-by-side at this tasting. Its main focus was two pairs of white wines:

• Fiano di Avellino 2021 and Empatia Fiano di Avellino 2021
• Greco di Tufo 2021 and Aletheia Greco di Tufo Riserva 2020.

All four wines are DOCG; the second wine of each pair was a single-vineyard selection. All four were superb.

The basic Fiano was spot on: lovely floral nose, smooth body and mouth feel, charming and elegant. This was a Fiano I could happily drink all the time – had I not tasted the Empatia right alongside it. That basic Fiano was fine, but the Empatia was truly exceptional, raising all of Fiano’s virtues to another level. To top it all off, these wines appear on the American market for as little as $18 and $21!

Similarly, the basic Greco di Tufo was classic: a slightly oily mouth feel, scents and tastes of undergrowth and mushrooms and mineral, a very long finish – simply a completely enjoyable white wine. The Aletheia had the same character, only more so, with more intense aromas and more concentrated flavors. I felt it needs a little more time to pull itself together, even though it is evidently a great wine.

If you’re not familiar with these two wines, it’s worth knowing that they are among the Italian white varieties that most reward aging. Fans of each will argue about which ages better.

I don’t have a definitive opinion on that. I’ve had 30-year-old bottles of both, and they were wonderful – still live, with their initial fruit flavors evolved into deeper, more complex harmonies of woodsy, undergrowthy, mushroomy, and mineral elements, all harmoniously merged. But I just find it very hard to keep Fiano and Greco – especially Donnachiara’s – long enough to mature to that stage because they are so good right from the start.

More Bottles In and Of Bordeaux

In my last post, I wrote about the light, wine-themed lunches Diane and I enjoyed at Bordeaux’s Bar à Vin during our recent trip to France. This time, I’d like to talk about our dinners of classic Bordeaux dishes at the Brasserie Bordelaise.

These were emphatically not light – traditional Bordeaux cooking is rich – but they were delicious, and we left every evening happily stuffed and well protected against any evening chill. (None materialized: the weather in Bordeaux was unusually, almost unnaturally, warm.) Diane’s post about these meals will tell you all about the pleasures of lamprey à la bordelaise and wine-braised beef cheeks. I’ll confine myself to the wines.

We began with a contretemps. We had asked for a bottle of Lafon-Rochet, an estimable Saint-Estèphe, which our very fine – and as it turned out very knowledgeable – waiter Frank opened and of which he poured a small amount for us to smell and taste. Diane thought she detected a whiff of corking: her sense of this is very acute. Frank swirled and sniffed and made a face, and swirled and sniffed again before announcing that it was slight but the bottle was definitely corked. He opened another, and we all sniffed together – and to his extreme dismay, this bottle was worse, even more emphatically corked.
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Frank was aghast: This had never happened to him before. We actually spent a few minutes calming him, assuring him that we understood that such things happened, that we didn’t hold it against the house, and so forth, before we decided not to try a third Saint-Estèphe but instead to go with a bottle of a Pessac-Léognan, Domaine de la Solitude. That wine was absolutely lovely, a classic cedar-accented red Graves, and it partnered beautifully with the whole spectrum of rich flavors our lamprey presented.
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The house made totally superfluous amends for the initial wine problem by presenting us, at the end of meal, with small snifters of a 25- and a 20- year-old Armagnac – both marvelous, and a totally appreciated generous gesture.

Our second night at Brasserie Bordelaise, our last in Bordeaux, went off without hitch. Diane feasted on her beloved roast chicken and I on an ambrosial braised beef cheek. To accompany these dishes, we again tried our luck with Saint-Estèphe, this time an old favorite of ours, Château de Pez.
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This wine was, to everyone’s relief, totally sound and made a perfect partner to our meal, characteristically blending some of the elegance of Saint-Julien (the neighboring commune to its south) with the intriguing little touch of rusticity that is the hallmark of Saint-Estèphe. Chicken and beef couldn’t have asked for a better partner.

I would say that elegance with a little touch of rusticity describes not just the wines of Saint-Estèphe but also the meals we enjoyed in Bordeaux. We dined and drank as well there as we have in all but the most exalted Parisian restaurants, and for me at least the availability of fine cellars of excellent Bordeaux wines was a special treat.

Nostalgia played a great part in my enjoyment, no doubt: It’s been decades since I was last in Bordeaux, but I learned wine – centuries ago now – mostly on bottles of Bordeaux. Even though my palate has gone in many different directions since then, in our few days in Bordeaux, it re-encountered its old teachers with great pleasure. Maybe sometimes you can go home again.

Some Bottles In and Of Bordeaux

Diane and I are just back from a long week of vacating in Bordeaux, most of it a cruise on the Garonne and Gironde plus a few days in the city of Bordeaux at the end. The cruise was a bit disappointing – iffy weather, long bus excursions, and an uninspired chef on board. But Bordeaux itself was wonderful – a beautiful city, with abundant pedestrianized areas in the historic center and some very fine food, not to mention an abundance of excellent Bordeaux wines (what else?).

At strolling distance from our hotel we found the Maison du Vin, a wine school whose wine bar – the succinctly named Bar à Vin – provided us exactly the kind of amply lubricated light lunch we enjoy.
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And only a short distance further on was the Brasserie Bordelaise, an establishment with a lengthy local wine list and a devotion to traditional Bordelaise cuisine. We had arranged for two dinners there, and wound up taking two lunches at the wine bar, so we had two splendid days in Bordeaux, with casual walking and sightseeing and a little shopping, regularly punctuated by a generous intake of red wine. Not only is red wine Bordeaux’s best production, but the shipboard menu had leaned heavily towards whites, so we had to reset the balance. Which, I assure you, we did.

For this post, I’ll talk only about the lunch wines. These pleasing light meals featured several glasses of wines from most of the left-bank appellations, from Pessac-Léognan (formerly Graves) in the south up through St. Estèphe, and on to the Médoc. The entire list offered 30 wines, all Bordeaux, and all by the glass. On the first day we started simply, with a charcuterie plate and two glasses of Les Hautes de Smith Pessac-Léognan.
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We noticed several patrons giving themselves tasting lessons – two glasses of wine, side by side, carefully tasted and noted. I was on vacation and so refused to take a single note, but we did give ourselves a comparative tasting of two cru bourgeois wines. A glass of Château La Cardonne Médoc and one of Château Larose Perganson Haut Médoc accompanied a plate of foie gras quite pleasurably, and with no perceptible difference in quality: both tasted classically Bordeaux, with dominant Cabernet Sauvignon fruit and nicely rounded tannins.
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For our second lunch, we started with a white Pessac-Léognan, Château Olivier, to accompany our opening dish of trout rillettes. Then we moved on to cheeses and charcuterie, which we matched with a St. Estèphe, Chateau Tour des Termes, and a St. Emilion, Pavillon du Haut Rocher, a very satisfactory pairing after our brief white wine divagation.
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All the wines we tasted were excellent of their kind, and I can safely urge anyone visiting Bordeaux and curious about the range of its wines to spend a little time at the Bar à Vin. You’ll learn a lot, and you’ll enjoy it. Just as a for-instance: It had been a long while since I’d drunk a red Graves (that first Pessac-Léognan), and it was a real pleasure to rediscover the cedary accent that so delightfully distinguishes the wines of that region from the more northerly appellations (Margaux, St. Julien – you know, that bunch).

My next post will be about our dinner wines at the Brasserie Bordelaise.

A Top Tier Barolo Estate: Elvio Cogno

The Cogno winery is probably not as familiar to most Barolo fans as names like Mascarello or Conterno, but in my opinion, it’s in the same league, right up there with the best of Alba’s elite. The name it bears, Elvio Cogno, is the name of its founder, a top-notch winemaker who many decades ago left his position at Marcarini, where he had been responsible for some of its finest vintages, to establish his own winery on a prime hilltop in Novello. That’s probably the least known of Barolo’s communes, but the Cogno winery has put it on the map.
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Cogno’s winemaker, for some time now, has been Valter Fissore, Elvio’s son-in-law. With his wife Nadia, they have kept Elvio’s spirit alive, and if anything have raised the quality of the wines. This is a winery that stands in the top tier of Piedmont accomplishment.

I don’t say that lightly, but every time I pour a Cogno wine, I taste the truth of it. These are wines of grace and elegance wrapped around depth and power. Classic Barolo aromas and flavors, to be sure, but also layers of them, so each sip seems to open up a new vista. That’s good grapes, good terroir, and masterly winemaking.

Cogno has many claims to fame, but not the least is that it produces the only 100% Nebbiolo Rosé in the Piedmont. That’s not the color of the wine: it’s the name of the grape. The Nebbiolo clone situation is beyond complex and bordering on bewildering, with the possibilities of numerous sub-varieties compounded by a jumble of regional names for each of them.

For years, orthodoxy held that there were three main clones: Nebbiolo Lampia, Nebbiolo Michet, and Nebbiolo Rosé.

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That apple cart was thoroughly upset about ten years ago, when ampelographical research established that Nebbiolo Rosé was definitely not a clone of Nebbiolo but a whole separate variety, perhaps even a parent of Lampia (of which Michet now seems to be a genetic variant). This is a situation that most wine journalists have simply chosen to ignore – as have, apparently, all the official wine bodies, as no Barolo containing Rosé has yet to be declassified.

Cogno’s Vigna Elena still sports its Barolo DOCG, so I guess the tacit agreement is that Rosé still counts as Nebbiolo. Except for Vigna Elena, Rosé, though beautifully fragrant, has only ever been a small fraction of most producers’ Barolo. That’s because of its lighter color, long regarded as a serious flaw in a red wine. We are happily over that particular fetish and can now appreciate the special beauty of a wine like Vigna Elena.

I had the pleasure of verifying that for myself just a few nights ago, when Diane prepared a special dinner as a setting for an – as it turned out to be – equally special bottle of Cogno’s Barolo Vigna Elena 2004.
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I was just bowled over by this wine. Its aroma popped out the second I started pouring it, a rich, intense fragrance of black cherry and black raspberry. Those flavors and that intensity continued on the palate. There, it felt light-bodied, but at the same time mouth-filling and deep, with a long, long finish of dried fruits. The black cherry component became more and more prominent as the wine opened in the glass.

This Vigna Elena was perfectly at home with our first course, a country paté, and it loved the rare beef that followed. With the cheese course – a very young Tuscan Pecorino and a mature Taleggio – it got all fat and sassy. At no point did I get the impression that this wine had yet reached its peak:  There was just so much freshness to its fruit that I would guess that it is still at least ten years away from full maturity, maybe more. This was simply a great bottle of Barolo. Hats off to Valter and Nadia.

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The Elvio Cogno winery is no one-trick pony: It makes the whole line of Langhe wines – several different Barolos beyond Vigna Elena, a Barbaresco, an estimable Langhe Nebbiolo Montegrilli*, a Dolcetto, and an eye-opening Barbera from pre-phylloxera vines, a real rarity in this part of the wine world. Valter Fissore has even embarked on an effort to save one of Piedmont’s rare, endangered white grapes of quality, Nascetta, which Cogno bottles as Anas-Cëtta. It’s a bit of an oddity in this land of red wines, but quite intriguing, and well worth trying. As is, in my opinion, anything under the Cogno label.

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*  Shortly after I finished drafting this post, I discovered a bottle of Cogno’s 2005 Montegrilli Nebbiolo that I had inadvertently stored away – inadvertently because I usually think of the ideal drinking window for Langhe Nebbiolo as being 4 to 8 years from harvest. I don’t think of it as a wine for long keeping and maturation. Boy, was I wrong. I have seriously underestimated Nebbiolo, or Cogno, or both. I opened this bottle – without any great expectations – for a simple weekday dinner, and it was wonderful. At 17 years of age, it was still quite live and enjoyable, very elegant on the palate and just brimming with characteristic Nebbiolo flavors. If I had been tasting it blind, I would have thought it a good Barolo just beginning to mature. Another tip of the hat to Valter and Nadia!

Rocca delle Macìe: Chianti for Grown-ups

The Chianti Classico zone grows titles of nobility as profusely as it does vines, and the two are nowadays closely linked. Hundreds of years ago, marchesi, baroni, even principi may have earned their rank by successful careers as Florentine merchants or Lombard warlords, but nowadays they’re all winemakers, and most of them quite famous and accomplished as such. Which makes it all the more surprising and noteworthy to find that one of the now most prestigious and forward of Chianti Classico wineries is, by the standards of this historic zone, a rank newcomer, founded by an untitled “foreigner” – i.e., a non-Tuscan.

I am referring to Rocca delle Macìe, whose wines I suspect most of my readers have tasted and enjoyed. Founded in 1973 by Italo Zingarelli, a very successful Roman movie producer who had a lifelong dream of vines and wines, Rocca delle Macìe started with 93 run-down hectares, only two of which were in vines. From this less-than-inspiring beginning, the Zingarelli family has built up an estate that now covers over 200 hectares of vines and 54 more of olives spread over six locales, plus an elegant relais hotel.

Italo’s son Sergio, who has just finished a term as president of the Chianti Classico Consorzio, is now running the family business, and Rocca delle Macìe has become a fixture of the Chianti Classico landscape.

A little over 20 years ago, the family undertook a major renovation of the vineyards, seeking better microclimate/soil/Sangiovese clone matches for maximum quality in their wines. One result was the designation of the Le Terrazze vineyard in Castellina, which they consider their finest vineyard, as the source of their Chianti Classico Gran Selezione Sergio Zingarelli. Just recently, I was able to taste nine vintages of that wine, courtesy of Rocca delle Macìe’s American importer Palm Bay.

This was a very illuminating as well as enjoyable experience. The wines shown started with the 2010 vintage, followed by 2011, ‘12, ‘13, ‘14, ‘15, ‘16, ‘17, and ’18 – no cherry-picking of only fine vintages, but an honest display of nearly a decade of Gran Selezione wines. That line-up allowed us tasters to trace the evolution of Sangiovese from year to year, as well as to experience the continuity of the vineyard’s and the family’s style. The latter is quite classic. These wines, even in the lesser vintages, all showed beautiful Sangiovese character, with great restraint – no fruit bombs here – and balance. My thought at the time was that these are Chiantis for grown-ups, and I’ll stand by that.

Here are some brief notes on the wines, all Sergio Zingarelli Chianti Classico Gran Selezione DOCG, in the order we tasted them.

2010: Lovely wild cherry aroma; fine, elegant palate. Very nice Sangiovese acidity under-strapped by soft wood tannins. Long finish. A great vintage and a harmonious wine.

2011: A difficult hot, dry summer grudgingly yielded a good but not excellent wine, smooth and round in the mouth, but with a slightly cellar-y aroma. This vintage demanded much care and effort in the field and in the cellar.

2012:  Similar to the 2011, but slightly smoother and softer on the palate. Not great, but good.

2013: A step up from the preceding two vintages. Rounder and fresher both in the nose and on the palate. More pleasing and immediately enjoyable.

2014: Darker and more concentrated than the ’13, with its tannins nicely softened. Enjoyable now, with a good fruity finish. All the preceding vintages had been 90% Sangiovese blended with 10% Colorino; starting with 2014, this Gran Selezione became 100% Sangiovese.

2015: A good growing season makes a good vintage. This wine is very pretty, well-balanced and lively. You could almost call it perky.

2016: Not quite as fine as ’15, but still a lovely Chianti, with fine Sangiovese flavors and character. Opens beautifully in the glass.

2017: Very fresh smelling, with the palate equally fresh – dark cherry-ish flavors. A very young and pretty wine, from a growing season hot and dry, like ’11 and ’12. The vineyard team has clearly learned how to deal with that.

2018:  Smells more tannic, even though you’re not supposed to be able to smell tannin. Must be the new barrels. Big and soft, but still closed. It needs time, but it should be fine. Sergio called it “a classic vintage for Sangiovese.”

All these wines showed well, though 2010, 2015, 2016, and 2018 stood out. It was almost a shame to have started with the 2010, since it was the only one of these vintages that was, for this lover of mature wines, truly ready to drink. But that’s why cellars were invented.

Grignolino Rising

Grignolino is the name of an uncommon indigenous Italian grape variety and the wine it makes. Both, obscure for many years, are starting to cause a bit of a stir in wine circles.

It’s an ancient variety, with solid documentation of its presence and importance back to the Middle Ages: In all probability, it’s much older than that. Native to the Monferrato zone in the Piedmont, it is now almost rare, though it was once one of the most widely grown varieties and most prestigious wines of that whole area of Italy – a zone that now includes the far more famous Barolo, Barbaresco, and Barbera. Indeed, many of the fields that now grow Barbera were once the home of Grignolino, which has been steadily ousted by that heartier and more prolifically bearing variety.

Grignolino grape clusters

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It’s a wonder to me that any Grignolino is cultivated at all. Everything I read about makes it sound like a horror of a grape to grow. In her Wine Grapes, Jancis Robinson, who shows almost no regard for the variety, notes that it ripens unevenly and is “susceptible to powdery mildew and especially to botrytis bunch rot and sour rot.”

Ian d’Agata, who likes Grignolino’s wines, gives more details about its problems in his Native Wine Grapes of Italy, saying:

• it needs very sunny sites, which puts it in direct competition with more profitable varieties like Nebbiolo, and “it also needs well-ventilated sites, to ward off the risk of rot due to its compact bunch;”
• it “has a huge amount of intravarietal variability;”
• “many of the older grapevines are also virus-affected, and the cultivars suffer from millerandage;”
• it “succumbs easily to common grapevine diseases and yields generally very little juice.”

Given all that, you might wonder why anyone goes to the trouble of growing it.

Yet many winemakers I’ve spoken to have a real fondness for the variety. Bartolo Mascarello and Pio Boffa, I remember, had an affection for the wine, and both made splendid examples of it. Boffa felt strongly that it formed an important element in Pio Cesare’s identity as an authentic and traditional Piedmontese winery.

Because of growers like Mascarello and Pio Cesare, small but significant pockets of Grignolino still survive, principally in the Monferrato zone, and there is now a small but significant revival of interest in the grape. That’s because the wine it makes is, at its best, distinctive and distinguished. A good majority of the wine lovers who get a chance to taste it love it.

Ian d’Agata, for instance, rhapsodizes about it. He calls it “a lovely variety, one of the prettiest in Italy” and says it exudes “a lovely aroma of fresh flowers, small red berries . . . and spices” and “it is blessed with high, refreshing acidity and crisp tannins that leave the palate feeling fresh and clean.”

That touches some of the important bases for Grignolino’s virtues, but to my mind it also leaves out some important considerations. It makes Grignolino seem too simply pretty, too frail. For sure, Grignolino is the very opposite of a powerhouse wine: grace and nuance are what it is about. But it doesn’t lack guts.

A bottle of Oreste Buzio’s 2020 Grignolino del Monferrato Casalese that I opened last week showed a lovely light strawberry-ish color and aroma. In the mouth, it was strawberry-ish too: light and refreshing, but still with evident depth and complexity. It made a delightful dinner companion to a grilled scamorza first course and was equally at home with a dish of pasta all’amatriciana.
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It would be easy to describe Grignolino as a perfect summer wine, but that would underestimate it severely: Its big acidity and equally big tannin make it adaptable to all sorts of food, as I found when opening another Grignolino, a bottle of La Casaccia’s Poggeto, also Grignolino del Monferrato Casalese, also 2020.

Visually, aromatically, and palatally, this was a perfect example of the breed. Though not an optimum companion to a rare steak, it dealt reasonably with the meat, and then bloomed with the cheese course. It almost made love to a delicious, runny Robiola. And it even matched comfortably with the plum cake that followed. This is a fine, versatile wine, not only at home with dishes of all sorts, but also completely enjoyable all by itself.
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You may happen on a bottle of Grignolino that is very dark, perhaps even with high alcohol, but that is an aberration. The classic Grignolino is light in color, just around 13 degrees of alcohol, and easy and refreshing on the palate, yet structured and substantial with all that acidity and tannin. It’s an odd red wine, an outlier, a maverick – maybe even a paradox. That’s all part of its considerable charm.

Despite the growing interest in Grignolino, there is still not a lot of it even in Italy, so it won’t be easy to find in the US. If you come across one, do try it. It’s very different from most of the red wines you’re used to – and we know what a great pleasure it is to find a new wine to add to our repertory.

“Why Do We Have 37 Brandies?”

Back during the annual ritual known as spring cleaning – misnamed, I think: It should more properly be called spring messing – Diane asked me that question. I was momentarily dumbfounded, and all I managed to say was a lame “37?”

Many years ago, when she asked me a similar question – “Why do we have 44 bottles of grappa?” – I was able to confidently and truthfully say “Because I’m working on a big article on grappa for Decanter.”

That wasn’t the whole truth, as anyone who knows my fondness for grappa understands, but it was at least a plausible cover for my shameless indulgence. Back then, I could honestly claim to be the most important proponent of grappa in the US: I had published the first North American article about grappa back in the 80s, in Attenzione, and written about it in several other magazines as well – so I could, with a straight face, say I had a professional interest in that distillate.

But now that I am no longer an active wine journalist (except for this blog), how could I explain needing so many brandies?

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Had I not been taken by surprise, the answer was easy, really: They all have different uses, different niches that they fill. Just as I am passionate about matching a wine with food that will show it at its best (and vice versa), so am I interested in choosing the digestivo that will best complement the dinner I’ve just enjoyed.

That’s the real key for me: Call them brandies or digestivi or after-dinner drinks, whether it’s grappa or cognac or armagnac or marc, malt whiskies or curaçao or chartreuse, whatever their name, their function for me is to complete my meal, to round off the whole culinary experience. That may sound pompous, but it tends to be delicious – and figuring it all out is sheer fun.

So: Shameless self-indulgence once again, with a slight admixture of self-education. As Brillat-Savarin so well understood, a true gastronaut’s work is never done.

You can be forgiven for wondering what all those bottles are, and what niches I think they fill. A fair enough question, so here’s a broad rundown. For simplicity’s sake, let’s divide them, as those in the liquor trades often do, into “white goods” and “brown goods.”

White goods consist primarily of my beloved grappas, of which I like to keep a goodly selection on hand – grappas of Barbera and Dolcetto and Nebbiolo, Tuscan grappas, even southern Italian grappas, from Campania and Calabria and Sicily, all regions where this originally northern drink has gotten a firm hold.
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Each of these grappas differs from the others in basic ways, having the aromas and characters of the very different grapes from which they are made, and so meshing with very different meals. I take almost as much pleasure in making the right match as I do in actually drinking the grappa.

This category also includes tequilas, a class of drinks that I have been late in coming to appreciate, as well as eaux de vie of mirabelle, poire, and/or framboise, all offering a small explosion of fruit aromas and flavors. Served ice-cold, they can be by themselves a perfect summer dessert.
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Then we come to the brown goods, which will be more familiar to most people than the white. These may include barrel-aged grappas, but mostly they are cognac, armagnac, and an occasional marc. Burgundy and various appellations of the Rhône are my usual sources for marc.

I like to keep on hand a basic cognac and armagnac, as well as better bottle or two – a good vintage of armagnac, and for cognac a reliable producer’s more rarefied selection of vintages or areas of growth, such as Grand Champagne or Borderies. And not to forget Spanish brandies, which are very different in character from their French counterparts.
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Finally, I always need to have a few single malt scotches on hand, and Diane is occasionally fond of an herbal liqueur or plum brandy.
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Those bottles arm me for most contingencies and pretty much any sort of cooking my fair bride may wish to do; and that gives me a great sense of security and comfort, a very desirable condition for the aging wino. Also – I confess to a bit of showmanship – at the end of a dinner party, I like to set out 4 to 6 different bottles for our guests (and ourselves) to sniff and choose from. And that’s why we have 37 – or whatever the number may be now – bottles of brandy.

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P.S. from Diane, who has just counted them: It’s only 29 now. Poor baby!

P.P.S. from Tom: I must do something about that!