Three Cheers for the Right Wine – Be It Ever So Humble

No, I am not boosting my by-now antique book – just the concept behind it: The right wine – the wine that really fits the occasion and meshes with the food – can elevate any meal to a memorable experience. Grilled chopped sirloin and an eight-year-old Ridge Zinfandel aren’t just fuel, and they’re miles beyond a burger and a beer: They’re Dinner.

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You don’t even have to go as lofty as Ridge. For our traditional St. Patrick’s Day dinner of corned beef and cabbage, I opened a two-year-old, very inexpensive bottle of Gruner Veltliner, from a producer I knew nothing of. It was what I had on hand. That bottle of what might have been just plonk made a fascinating and utterly pleasing companion to the spicing of the corned beef and the sweetness of a Savoy cabbage. We couldn’t have had a more enjoyable meal with a much more prestigious meat or wine than that great match gave us.

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And that’s the point: The mesh of the food and the wine doesn’t depend on the rarity or reputation or prestige of either. It depends only on those simple miracles that can happen in your mouth every day.

Yes, you need to know something to make that miracle happen. You need to know your own likes and dislikes. You need to have at least a rudimentary idea of what the food you’re about to eat tastes like: You can’t match a wine with a dish you don’t know. And you need to know at least the general character of the kind of wine you’re considering, if not the specifics of any producer’s bottlings.

That’s why sommeliers are useful: They know their restaurant’s food, and they know its cellar, far better than you could. For your home cooking, you’re the sommelier.  You know your cooking, and you know your bottle: All you have to do is pay attention, think about the meal for a minute or two, letting your own experience of the food and/or your wine guide you. There is no mystery. The only equipment you need is taste buds.

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Some examples: With a plainly grilled or broiled red meat, any number of inexpensive young red wines will match quite nicely. If you want a soft wine, a negociant’s basic Burgundy or a Dolcetto will work well. If you want something with some acidity, Côtes du Rhône or Barbera, Beaujolais Villages or Lacryma Christi will provide it.

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This is not to say that the matter can’t be made complex: Dining at Taillevent on its ris de veau en croûte and trying to choose a wine from its intimidating wine list (Where was the comma in that price?) is complex indeed and, if your bank account can stand it, thrilling, but that isn’t simple food or everyday wine.

For a different sort of example of what I mean: A fresh filet of flounder, salted, peppered, lightly floured, and quickly sauteed in butter is going to be lovely with a young, unoaked Chardonnay – or Fiano, or Riesling, or dry Chenin Blanc, or even Muscadet. Any young, dry, unoaked, not-too-assertive white wine will make a nice match with that fish. In the right circumstances – say, on the sunny terrace of an ocean- or bay-side restaurant, with a light, fresh breeze gently cooling you – it can even become memorable in its simplicity.

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Raise the ante a little – make it crabmeat or lobster steeped in butter – and you want a bigger wine, with more character, one with a little minerality to play off against the sweetness of that shellfish. Then you’re going to need a Chablis, or a fine Lugana or Soave Classico, or even a good white from the Rhône – a wine that won’t be obliterated by the flavor of the lobster or crab. The key is only that the kids should play together peacefully, with no bully dominating the playground. Any moderately careful parent should be able to deal with that.

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As I said, it’s not complex, and it certainly need not be expensive. We are lucky enough to be living at a moment when, whatever else may be wrong with the world, we have more good wine in greater variety available to us than at any previous time. Probably the only real problem confronting us is the sheer number of choices available – but as one who can remember the days when the finest, and one of the few, white wine choices on many restaurant lists was “Soavebolla” (for all practical purposes, one word), I can assure you that’s a great problem to have.

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Should you want go a bit deeper into matching wine and food, or should you be perverse enough to enjoy complexity (I confess I do), here are two handy wine-and-food wheels I devised way back when for my book. I still like them, and I think you may find them handy.

 

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The Warmth of Winter Cooking and the Elegance of a “Simple” Wine

Here’s a happy coincidence of subjects: one of my favorite “drink it every day with everything” wines and one of my favorite producers of almost the whole range of fine Piedmont wines. As you might easily guess, this post was triggered by the bottle in which the coincidence occurred, at dinner on a recent evening.

It had been a very cold, sunless, windy, “wintery mix” of a day, calling for a lot of time in the kitchen playing with stove and oven, as much to keep ourselves warm (the heat is less than tropical in our apartment) as to avoid that “trapped indoors” cabin fever feeling. Our menu featured three long-time favorite dishes, earlier versions of which Diane has written about in her own blog, should you be interested in seeing them:

Individual Cheese Tarts

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Honeycomb Tripe with Parmesan Cheese

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Pear Cake

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With that lush, comforting oven-braise of tripe in mind (I know: some of you are making yecch! sounds, but just taste it some time), I opened a 2021 Poderi Colla Barbera d’Alba Costa Bruna. Brilliant choice, Tom! The combination was wonderful: food and wine meshed perfectly to create a truly restorative, wonderfully enjoyable dinner.

Most Barbera d’Alba is enjoyable with a wide variety of foods, but Colla’s Barbera Costa Bruna is an exceptional wine – period, no qualifications. The Colla family (I’ve written about them before) knows its business: It has been making wine in Piedmont since the 1700s, and since the mid-twentieth century, under the leadership of the late Beppe Colla, it has been in the forefront of quality production of the most important Piedmont wines – Barolo, Barbaresco, Dolcetto, and Barbera d’Alba.

On its prestigious Barbaresco site, Roncaglie, it has what it refers to as “a jewel within a jewel,” Costa Bruna, a two-hectare field long planted with Barbera. How long, no one knows for sure, but best guesses put the oldest vines on the site at 90 or more years. Vines like that, on the kind of soils that turn Nebbiolo into glorious Barbaresco, yield wines of intensity, concentration, and, above all, elegance.

You read that right: I’m talking about elegance in a Barbera with no admixture of any other grape and no long new-oak regimen. I hate tasting notes, but contrary to my usual practice, I’m going to give you mine from that night:

• Lovely deep garnet color. Great brambly, fruity Barbera aroma.
• Big, round, and soft in the mouth, but with lively, invigorating acid.
• Gorgeous complex fruit – very dark cherry, black currant and plum, hints of herbs and even some underbrush, with a very long finish.
• Big and mouth-filling, but nevertheless light and elegant on the palate.

This Costa Bruna was fine and fresh with the little tarts of three kinds of cheese that we started dinner with. It loved the tripe, broadening and opening to match its richness. The last of the bottle even drank companionably with the homey, sweet, pear cake, leaving the two of us contentedly patting our stomachs and congratulating each other on a fine meal.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow: we’ve got Colla Barbera to keep us warm.

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Cruising Into A White Wine Surprise

I’m just back from a not entirely great cruise down the St. Lawrence River from Montreal through Québec and around Nova Scotia to end in Boston. We’d hoped for long stretches of forested shores and autumn leaves and even some birds, but it was not to be: It turns out that beyond Québec City the St. Lawrence broadens out so far you might as well be at sea, with nothing but water to look at in every direction. Sigh.

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Thus scenically deprived, we spent more time than was truly wise eating and drinking, and that too not entirely happily. Our noble vessel – Windstar Cruise’s Star Pride – sported a quite lengthy wine list, but it was far too Californicated for our Europe-oriented palates: much too much New World wine, far too little French, Italian, or Spanish. Sigh again.

The crew did its best to stress the strengths of what the ship offered. Beverage Director Antony Cruz and Sommelier Johnbosco Pereira (pictured below) organized several tastings, starting with an introductory one contrasting New World and Old World styles, which was very appropriate for the majority of the passengers, and going on to tastings of premium wines, single malt whiskies, of which the ship stocked a goodly number, and Cognacs.

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Nevertheless, every day we had to deal with that dominantly New World list. This is not to say that we found nothing to drink: On the contrary, there were several bottles that we made the most of – particularly a lovely Prosecco for aperitifs and light lunches and a charming Barbera d’Asti from Batasiolo, as well as an Antinori Pèppoli Chianti Classico that served well with lunch.
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But the menus of our ship’s several dining venues were strongly white-wine oriented, with more chicken dishes than I had feared. Inescapably, this led to our heavily relying on the few white Burgundies and Spanish whites available, especially a good sturdy pair of Albariños and Verdejos, a very nice Labouré Roi Pouilly Fuissé, and one fine Chablis from Domaine William Fèvre.
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Some consequently unorthodox food and wine pairings led me to the conscious realization of something I had sort of known but never really formulated for myself: to wit, that white wines are unexpectedly versatile with all sorts of food, including dishes that you would normally match with red wines. Forget about red wine with fish, which really only ever worked well with salmon and pinot noir anyway: Try white wine with red meat.

Not just any white wine with any red meat, of course. You still have to pay attention to the complementarities of the weight and intensity of the two. For the more assertively flavored meats, you definitely want a white wine with some heft and authority of its own, and especially one with a respectable amount of acidity to deal with red-flesh sweetness and to cut through the fats of, for instance, a grilled lamb chop. It’s not ideal, but we did find a few Old World whites on the cruise that could do that very satisfactorily.

Spanish whites are generally sturdy enough to do the job. Among French wines, bigger white Burgundies will serve, but best of all – sturdier and richer in themselves – are Rhône whites. I think several Italian whites from Friuli and Campania would also handle red meats with little trouble, but we weren’t able to test that theory because the ship’s wine list was – for our palates at least – very deficient in Italian whites.

You will probably in most cases want to stick with the old red meat/red wine paradigm – but if you ever find yourself in a situation where the best wine on the list is clearly a white and you don’t want to eat fish or, heaven forfend, chicken, don’t be afraid to give a big, well balanced white a try with steak or chops. You might be surprised by how pleasing it can be.

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Brilliant Barbera: 1971 Marchesi di Barolo Barbera d’Alba

About a month back, one of the wine shops I deal with offered a selection of older Italian wines from a private collection. It was a lengthy list, with a lot of interesting items on it, some of them quite pricey. But there were also a good number that didn’t demand a second mortgage, and – even though I know older wines with unknown (at least to me) provenance can be a very iffy proposition – I was intrigued.

So I consulted the Secretary of the Treasury (aka Diane) and cherry-picked half a dozen bottles, for which the Secretary found a wine-closet bin that she promptly labelled “Tom’s Treasures.” This 52-year-old Barbera d’Alba from Marchesi di Barolo is not the oldest of them, but it’s the first I’ve tried. It was an auspicious beginning: I hope the others are as good, and in as good condition.
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Taking advantage of an unusually cool spell in August, Diane braised some beef short ribs and we served a cheese course – dishes we haven’t had while the temperatures were high. Needless to say, these are good flavors to match with a not over-powerful red wine. They would be perfect for a young and youthfully exuberant Barbera, and should be still be welcoming to this quinquagenarian.

Naturally, I handled this 1971 bottle gingerly, even giving it a half an hour in the refrigerator to bring it down to a more proper cellar temperature. Not knowing how fragile the wine might be, I didn’t pull its cork until we sat to table: I’ve seen enough old wines fade to nothingness within minutes of pouring to do everything I could for us to taste whatever this one might have to give us.

The bottle’s condition had been encouraging – almost no ullage, wine level high in the neck, no signs of seepage or leakage. Blessedly, the cork came out smoothly and whole, and the aroma that followed it, while not the very familiar fruit of young Barbera, was still vivid and forceful, seemingly  not very likely to fade fast.

In the glass, the wine showed the classic coloration of mature Piedmont reds, a light garnet surrounded by distinct orange ring. In a Bordeaux wine, that coloration would signal the start of a requiem, but in Piedmont red wines it simply indicates that the wine is maturing properly. A swirl of the glass and a sniff yielded a big, surprisingly tarry, aroma: very much alive, however unexpected.

I was a bit puzzled by the first few tastes of the wine. It was definitely a good, mature wine, but I would have been hard put to identify it as Barbera. The flavors of many kinds of red wine tend to converge when mature, so this wasn’t totally surprising, if a bit disappointing.

But as the meal went on, and the wine opened more – I’d clearly worried needlessly about it fading – recognizable Barbera sour cherry begin to show, especially with the cheese course, which also foregrounded the classic Barbera acidity. That same acidity probably also accounted for the wine’s surprising vitality.

This was for me a delightful experience, as much for its palatal and intellectual pleasures as for its confirmation of my longtime belief in the amazing potential of the Barbera variety. It’s a great grape, and in the right hands – which Marchesi di Barolo’s certainly are – it is capable of great things.

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Magnums: Big Risk, Big Reward

Ever since the advent of Covid-induced social restrictions, magnums have become a big problem for me. Most of the time, I simply cannot get enough people together to make serving the big bottles at all practical. So when, recently, we were actually able to gather six people (including ourselves, and all conscientious about precautions) for a multi-course dinner, I leaped at the chance to open a magnum to span two courses of the meal. I had a specific bottle in mind, one I was getting little nervous about, given my less-than-ideal storage conditions: a Vietti Barbera d’Alba Scarrone Vigna Vecchia, vintage 2004.
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Yes, you read that right: a 16-year-old Barbera. I know that, because of the variety’s naturally high acidity, Barberas are capable of long life, especially if left resting in their home cellars – but this particular magnum had been kicking around too many years in uncellarlike conditions and moved too many times from one set of such to another to encourage much optimism. I feared it was a wine on the edge if not outright over it.

Well, I was wrong to worry. It turns out that nature and wine are stronger than human abuse. This should not be read as my saying that you can mistreat your best wines and hope to get away with it – but it does mean that grape vines are survivors, and so, very often, are their progeny. This bottle of Barbera, far from being at the edge of the precipice, was just plain gorgeous, and it stole the show from the equally old bottles of very fine Castello di Querceto Chianti Classico Riserva and Banfi Poggio alle Mura Brunello di Montalcino that accompanied subsequent courses. My judgment was humbled, but my palate was delighted.

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The aroma of that Vietti Barbera amounted to a whole fruit salad – intense scents of blackberry, mulberry, and black cherry, all carried on a substrate of tobacco and forest notes. The palate was equally rich and intense, medium-bodied, with soft tannins and still a lot of live acidity (though much toned down from the vigorous norm of young Barberas). But the dominant notes were all those berries and cherries and their understrapping of tobacco (back in my pipe-smoking days I would have said Kentucky Burley), everything culminating in a huge finish of leather and black cherry. All these aromas and flavors, be it noted, were not brash and young, but matured and harmonious and nevertheless still fresh – an amazing balancing act that we lucky few diners caught at a moment of perfect equilibrium.

A good part of the explanation of the high quality of this wine lies in its maker and its vineyard. The Scarrone vineyard is a very large one, on a hillside circling around almost all of the center of the town of Castiglione Falleto. The best exposures on its slopes yield fine Barolos, the less favorable ones give great Barberas. Among the very best of these is Vietti’s bottling of old vines from its extensive Scarrone holdings, all of which lie practically at the winery’s doorstep.
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Detail from Alessandro Masnaghetti’s map of the vineyards of Castiglione Falletto. Circled number 12 marks Vietti’s cantina.

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The other factor that accounted for this wine’s quality was the very thing that presented problems for its service: the size of the bottle. The undeniable fact is that that the larger the quantity of wine that can be aged in a single container, the better it matures, the richer and more complex it gets, the sturdier it seems to be. That’s the lure and the danger of magnums: big risks, big rewards.

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Some Good Everyday Wines

Everybody needs everyday wines, especially at this time of year. But make no mistake: My emphasis is on good everyday wines, not just anything because it’s cheap. Obviously, inexpensiveness is an added attraction, but goodness comes first. I long ago decided that life is too short to ever drink mediocre wine, so even though I could never afford those legendary, crème de la crème bottles that headline so many ads, I’ve worked hard to ensure that the wines that accompany my daily bread are pleasurable, respectably made, and honorable examples of their breed.

What I’m going to talk about now are some wines that I can pretty reliably find in my vicinity. Let me offer a caveat about that: With the vagaries of importation and distribution, the variations of harvests, both qualitatively and quantitatively, compounded by the impact that Covid has had all around the world, none of us can ever be sure that the wine that is in shops this week will be available anywhere next month. That said, here are some wines that I have been enjoying for a few months now and hope to continue drinking for a good while yet.

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Whites

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A staple white wine that I can almost always get because it’s from close to home is Paumanok Vineyards’ Festival Chardonnay. If worse comes to worst, I can drive out to Long Island’s North Fork and carry some home from the vineyard. This wine is everything that basic, unoaked Chardonnay ought to be. Fresh and vigorous, with lovely, clean fruit and a sound structure, it will serve as an aperitif wine as pleasantly as it accompanies dinner. True to its Long Island heritage, it especially loves fish and shellfish.

Another equally versatile white wine is Pra’s beautiful Soave Classico Otto. Many people underestimate Soave. This wine shines with an intense minerality that will remind those drinkers of a really nice Chablis. The ones who already know Soave’s many virtues will appreciate the fruit and life and balance of this fine example of the breed. It may be my favorite Soave of them all, and I don’t exclude Pieropan from that consideration. Certainly, for everyday drinking, and in its price range, it’s matchless.

One more Italian white wine has recently become available in my area: the charmingly and appropriately named Il Gentiluomo, a 100% Cortese wine from Paolo Pizzorni, in the Monferrato zone of the Piedmont. I’m hoping this one stays in the market for a while, because it is a lovely, simple wine, medium-bodied and deliciously fruity, with excellent balance. It works with all sorts of light dishes from meat antipasti to roasted chicken. It particularly loves veal in all forms, from scallops to roasts.

We used to keep a lot of basic white Burgundies around for everyday use: They have a combination of fuller body and terroir character that makes them quite distinctive and intriguing. But Burgundy prices have begun another of their periodic ascents into the stratosphere. While there are still a good number of wines suitable for everyday use, their price now makes that inadvisable for most people. Your best hope, if you must have a Burgundy (and who, occasionally, does not?), will be to look for wines from Mâcon or Mâcon-Villages, but you will have to shop sharply.

You would be better advised to shift your attention northward to Alsace, where almost every producer offers a basic blended wine at an attractive price. Hugel’s Gentil is an excellent example of the breed, enjoyable in itself and extremely versatile with food.

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Reds

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Red wines offer more questions and more choices. After all, the wines range from light and understated to formidable, and the foods they’re asked to accompany are similarly varied in intensity and spicing. Especially in warm weather, I like to keep some Beaujolais on hand. The crus are my favorites – Fleurie, Juliénas, Chiroubles, Morgon, Chénas – but I also have a fondness for Jean-Paul Brun’s Terre Dorée basic Beaujolais, L’Ancien, which has plenty of character to pair with its charm and vivacity. His cru wines are also fine, but there are now many good producers of those available, so it is worth trying several to see whose style pleases you.

Still in the French range, Côtes du Rhône wines are always useful. The named villages are best, though they can get pricy – but careful shopping will almost always net you a Gigondas or Vacqueyras at a decent price. There are many makers, some quite small operations, so it’s impossible to predict what will be in any particular market, but IMO they’re all worth a try.

We drink a lot of Italian reds at casa Maresca, and it’s a frequently changing cast of characters, depending on what’s available. Distributors seem to have synchronized cycles: One season the shops will be filled with Tuscan wines, another it will be Piedmonts, with other regions’ reds getting whatever shelf space is left. That’s a shame, because there are fine, inexpensive red wines pouring out of every part of Italy, and a high percentage of them are well worth a taste.

I like to keep a lot of basic Chianti Classico around because of Sangiovese’s versatility with food, and there are many good ones available at quite decent prices, particularly the best wines of the best co-ops, which lack the prestige and therefore the market clout of the best estate wines. Lately I’ve been drinking with great pleasure a lot of Clemente VII and Panzano, both produced by Castelli del Grevepesa.

Equally adaptable with a whole range of foods is Barbera. This is a grape that, because of its naturally high acidity, can happily match with almost anything. For my palate, the greater body and more restrained acidity of Barbera d’Alba works best, but Barbera d’Asti, often accurately described as “racy,” has many partisans. There are many makers of both kinds, ranging from some of the most famous names in the zone (Ceretto, Gaja, Vietti) to some of the smaller growers (Oddero, Barale), and prices can consequently be all over the place, but patient shopping can usually reward with a really pretty wine at an attractive price.

When it comes to softer, less acidic everyday reds, you’ve got good choices from all over Italy. Here are my current favorites.
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• Dolcetto, from the same zones as Barbera and from many of the same makers – but look for Dogliani, a subzone so distinguished that it has won the right to use its own name rather than Dolcetto.
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• Valpolicella Classico, not Superiore, and definitely not Ripasso. The Classico has rediscovered the simple charm that once made Valpolicella one of Italy’s most popular wines. Brigaldara makes a nice one.
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• Lacryma Christi, from the slopes of Vesuvius, a soft-bodied, round, and mineral-inflected wine that matches wonderfully with pasta and pizza and sauced or braised meats. There are now a fair number of producers intermittently available in the US, but you will never go wrong with a bottle from Mastroberardino, the once – and maybe future – king of Campanian wines.
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Let us hope that the new year brings us whole tides of enjoyable, affordable wines like these. Covid and its consequences aside – this too shall pass – we are blessed to live in a golden age of winemaking, and there is no reason not to enjoy this abundance while it and we last.

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Cascina Castlet Wines and Two Announcements

I’ve rceently had the opportunity to taste some very enjoyable Barberas – Barbera d’Asti – from Cascina Castlet. This is a fine producer of wines from the Asti and Monferrato zones that has only recently returned to the American market. After a too-long absence, the wines are now being brought in by Romano Brands. For warm weather drinking, I found the brand’s basic Barbera just perfect – filled with fruit and that brilliant acidity that distinguishes Asti Barbera from its Alba cousin.

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I had intended to do a full column about them, but my friend Charles Scicolone beat me to the punch and wrote about them in such informative detail, and with so much familiarity and knowledge of the wines, that I decided that the simplest thing for me to do is just direct you to his post. Thanks, Charles.

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After this post, I’ll be taking a vacation from wine blogging, in the hopes that by the time I return – in a month or so – more of the covid-19 restrictions will begin to relax here in New York and we may actually have a wine season, complete with tastings and seminars and new release presentations, which would give me something new to write about – and not coincidentally ideas for reversing some of the depletion of my much-called upon “cellar.”

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To any readers who may be addicted to regular infusions of my prose, and of a perverse enough turn of mind to enjoy literary criticism: I am publishing in digital form the long book on allegory that destroyed so much of my mind, back when I was an academic. Welcome, if you dare chance it, to The Strangeness of Allegory.
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Talk to you in the fall!

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Enjoyable Everyday Wines II

I’m posting now about the inexpensive case of mixed, everyday red wines I put together as a complement to the dozen everyday white wines I talked about two posts back.

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We drink a lot of white wine at Casa Maresca, but we consume even more red. I’d guess that two out every three, maybe three out of four, dinners we make call for red wines – and since I care strongly about making the wine and food play happily together, it means I like to keep a good variety of red wines on hand. And that means, of course, reasonably priced wines, for all the obvious reasons.

Enough prologue: Here’s the list.

• Barale Barbera d’Alba 2017 Castlé
• Barale Dolcetto d’Alba 2017 Le Rose
• Bodegas Olarra Rioja Reserva 2010 Cerro Anon
• Cà Lustra di Zanovelli Marzemino 2017 Belvedere
• Centopassi Nero d’Avola 2016 Argille di Tagghia Via
• Château de Plaisance Anjou Rouge 2017 Entre Copains
• Cuvée des Galets (Côtes du Rhône) 2016
• Filipa Pato (Vinho Tinto Bairrada DOC) Baga 2017
• Oreste Buzio Freisa del Monferrato 2017
• Oreste Buzio, Grignolino del Monferrato 2017 Casalese
• Villa Sant’Anna Chianti Colli Senese 2015
• Viña Real Rioja Crianza 2015

In selecting this batch of wines, I was not trying to be experimental, to try new wines or kinds of wines I’m not familiar with. Food compatibility was the goal, and compatibility with the kinds of food we cook every day was the guiding principle of selection. Hence the preponderance of Italian wines on the list, and especially the large presence of Piedmontese wines, which I think are particularly food-friendly, and which – happily – are available in good variety in the New York area.

Barbera and Dolcetto I find are especially useful. Barbera’s medium body and high acidity make it compatible with an extraordinary range of foods, from – to choose a few random examples – asparagus frittata to tomato-based sauces to grilled sausages or even steaks, especially gamy cuts like skirt steak or hanger steak. Dolcetto is softer-bodied and far less acid, and it loves buttery sauces, mushrooms, more delicate meat – especially veal in any form.

Nero d’Avola is also medium-bodied, and on the palate feels and tastes Merlot-ish. Its strong suits are stews and brown-sauced casseroles – really any dish that isn’t aggressively sauced or spiced.

Even more useful – the utility infielder of red wines – is that perfectly named Anjou red, Entre Copains – “among pals,” which is how I envision large quantities of this wine must be drunk on its home turf. It’s 100% Cabernet franc, which is a Loire valley specialty, and this is one of most welcoming versions of it I’ve encountered. Its pleasing, soft, generic red fruit would match with anything from a good pizza on up the culinary scale to simple roasts and grilled meats. It’s practically the definition of an enjoyable everyday wine.

The Côtes du Rhône wasn’t quite that all-niches useful: By itself, it was a fairly light, high-acid Rhône, with cherryish fruit and a good finish, but it rounded nicely and gained some flesh with food, especially with cheese.

The Baga from Filipa Pato was also surprisingly soft on the palate and versatile with food. It stood up well, for instance, to mideastern spiced lamb meatballs and to Indian chutneys and pickles. Filipa is the daughter of Luis Pato, the acknowledged master of this grape in Portugal, and with this particular wine she has chosen a different path from that of her father’s formidable bottles.

The Grignolino and Freisa are more specialized wines that I couldn’t resist buying, since I don’t encounter them that often. Both are light-bodied, light-fruited reds ideal for warm weather quaffing, which is exactly what I’m saving them for. I should have done that too with the Colli Senese Chianti: These are always at-most-medium-bodied and fruity, with a touch of Sangiovese elegance, but this bottle was a tad too light for matching with cold weather dinners.

The Marzemino was another wine I selected simply because I don’t get many chances to taste it. This one turned out to be a big, not entirely balanced wine, black-plum fruited and a touch hot: It loved steak and mushrooms, but wasn’t too happy with anything else.

The two Riojas – Crianza and Reserva, at opposite ends of the aging spectrum – were both a bit disappointing. I love Rioja and find it very useful as a dinner wine, but of these two bottles the Reserva was too young of its kind and yet still too important for everyday utility, while the Crianza had been exposed to too much oak, which diminished its freshness and charm. I won’t give up on Rioja, however: I’ll just have to sample some others.

And there’s my necessary excuse to order some more wine. Diane, look away.

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In Memoriam: Beppe Colla

Beppe Colla died on January 15. Beppe was the patriarch of the Colla clan: Although mostly retired, he continued to advise his much younger brother Tino and his daughter Federica at their jointly owned estate, Poderi Colla. Before that, he had been the owner of the Prunotto winery and the winemaker who in the ‘70s and ‘80s guided Prunotto Barolo and Barbaresco to the heights of accomplishment and acclaim. He was 88 and, had he lived, would have enjoyed his 70th harvest this year.

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It is hard to overestimate Colla’s contribution to Alban winemaking, indeed to the whole Piedmontese wine world.

• He was one of the pioneers who opened the way for Barolo and Barbaresco to achieve the kind of fame they now enjoy.
• He made great wines before there was a single stainless steel tank or a notion of temperature-controlled fermentation anywhere in the Barolo and Barbaresco zones.
• He welcomed the new technology when it became available: At Prunotto, he used the first stainless steel fermenters ever seen in the Alba area.
• He made the first cru Barolos and Barbarescos, a then-heretical act for which he was at the time severely criticized by the local establishment.

Along with Renato Ratti and a few other like-minded individuals, he founded the Ordine dei Cavalieri de Tartufo e dei Vini d’Alba, a group that is widely credited with having spurred the modern revival of Piedmontese gastronomy, which immensely benefited the whole zone and every hungry tourist who has ever visited it.

At heart, for all his innovations and all the ways he altered the Piedmontese wine universe, Colla remained devoted to the traditional ideals of Barolo and Barbaresco: The wines had to taste first of the fruit and the soil, and of the technology never. At Prunotto, he crafted wines that became benchmarks of Barolo and Barbaresco. Even, I would add, of humbler varieties: I remember the incredible balance, intensity, juiciness, and encompassing elegance of the Barbera d’Alba that he drew from the Pian Romualdo site – Barbera that for my palate has not been equaled since, anywhere in the zone.

Throughout his career, he remained an uncomplicated person, devoted to his craft and his family, plain-spoken and shy of personal publicity. I had the pleasure of talking with Beppe Colla many times, over a good many years, and I always learned something from him: He was a trove of wine lore and viti/vinicultural information. But my characteristic memory of him will always be a simple one:  his shy smile of pleasure at the sight of someone enjoying his wines.

We have lost many fine winemakers in recent years – Bruno Giacosa, Beppe Rinaldi, Leonildo Pieropan, Antonio Mastroberardino, and now Beppe Colla. We are witnessing the end of the heroic era of Italian wine. A generation of giants is passing.

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Barbera: A Wine for All Purposes

Barbera is a wonderful wine, versatile and enjoyable and affordable. Perhaps the wine’s greatest virtue is how well it plays with all sorts of dishes, so when Diane and I find ourselves trying a new recipe – a pretty frequent occurrence here, given Diane’s weekly food posts – and uncertain what wine will pair with it, Barbera is often our go-to grape.

 

Lots of people, both consumers and growers, love Barbera: It’s one of the most widely planted varieties in the world and stands third among red grapes in vineyard space in Italy. From the grower’s point of view, Barbera has many virtues: It thrives in all sorts of conditions, bears heavily – sometimes too heavily – and almost invariably yields a wine that is at worst quaffable and usually much better than that. From the wine drinker’s point of view, Barbera’s rich, dark color, its bright fruitiness – usually described as some variety of cherry – and its zingy, lively acidity make it a delight at dinner. And it hardly hurts that most Barberas are inexpensive: It rates very high on the pleasure-for-dollar scale.

Outside of the Italian Piedmont, Barbera has become a workhorse variety, used frequently to blend with other varieties that need a splash of color and a jolt of acidity to brighten them. It was even customary to use it that way with the austere Nebbiolo grapes in prestigious Barolo and Barbera. But the workhorse can turn into a thoroughbred when it’s planted in the right places and treated with respect.

Giacomo Bologna was the first to make that clear in 1985, when he released the first vintage of his then-iconoclastic, now-iconic Bricco dell’Uccellone, a monovarietal Barbera aged in barriques. That wine, still made by his family on their Braida estate, showed for the first time how much breed and finesse Barbera possessed and began the trend toward treating Barbera as the noble grape it apparently is capable of being.

Naturally, many winemakers immediately went too far with this process – siamo in Italia!  They over-extracted and over-oaked their grapes and worked very hard to diminish, if not entirely remove, Barbera’s acidity, which for many wine lovers was and is the defining characteristic of the variety. So for some years in the 80s and 90s, it became far too easy to find bad Barberas, wines wherein the grape’s lovely cherry flavors were submerged in a sea of oak-derived vanilla or toast or even coffee, and the wine de-acidified to the point of flabbiness. There are still a few of those around, but sanity has returned to most Barbera producers, and the vast majority of Barberas are once again bright, fruit-enlivened wines of charm and grace.

For all that Barbera is planted so widely, I have been talking here primarily of the Piedmontese wine. That’s because around Alba and in the province of Asti and the Monferrato hills, Barbera attains its best flavors and highest levels of quality.

 

 

This a little odd, because Barbera is entirely unrelated to any other Piedmontese variety. In fact, no one really knows where it came from. The earliest reference to what seems to be the grape we know occurs in the very late 18th century in the Monferrato area, but even that reference is uncertain.

What is sure is that Barbera came into its own after the devastations of phylloxera, when the great majority of Piedmont’s vineyards had to be replanted, and it hasn’t looked back since. Alba, Asti, and Monferrato can now be considered its heartland, and all three produce outstanding wines. Asti’s are the brightest, lightest, most acidic, and at their best the most elegant. Alba’s Barberas are fuller-bodied and more intense, with a bit more tannin showing. Asti makers think Alba’s wines are a bit rustic and “nebbiolized,” and they may be right – though both those qualities can be virtues. The Monferrato versions tend to combine the best traits of both other areas, and they can, at their best, be stunning wines, but they are the hardest to find on this market.

Over the years, I have drunk excellent Barberas from many great producers. Here is a very short list of the best. Please bear in mind that most of them make several versions of Barbera – multi-vineyard, single vineyard, selected vineyards, old vine, barriqued and not barriqued, et cetera – and their varying price levels usually indicate how the makers regard them. You may or may not agree: I find with Barbera that simpler is often better.

• Braida: Asti, in several versions, including the famous Bricco dell’ Uccellone
• Burlotto: Alba
• Cascina delle Rose: Alba, two versions, textbook Barbera
• Cerreto: Alba
• Chiarlo: Asti; several levels, all good
• Cogno: Alba, plus a superb wine from an ungrafted, pre-phylloxera vineyard
• Iuli: from Monferrato, in several versions, and excellent
• Marchesi di Barolo: both Alba and Monferrato, both fine
• Renato Ratti: Alba
• Roccheviberti: Alba; small producer, but well worth seeking out
• Scavino: two versions of Alba, both very good
• Vietti: several versions of both Alba and Asti, all very good

Any bottle from this array of star producers ought to provide a Barbera novice with a fine introduction to the breed; a tasting of several of them should show the range of styles and nuances the grape and its zones are capable of. Go to it, and enjoy!

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