In Praise of Wine Co-ops

The above is a title I once thought I would only ever use ironically. Back when I began as a wine journalist, when the Italian wine world was just beginning to awaken from its long slumber, an invitation to taste the produce of a regional cooperative was usually something I would firmly decline. Back then, most co-ops were turning out the least common denominator wine of their region – lots of it, designed to sell cheaply, to supply a supposed mass taste for nondescript plonk.

Well, the Italian wine world has transformed itself completely since then, and now co-ops are striving for quality production, and in most cases achieving it. Now, some of the most interesting tastings a wine maven can attend are those of cooperatives.

To understand how this came about, you need to know a little of the history of the co-op movement in Italy. For centuries, wine in Italy was a largely local affair, with growers – from the smallest sharecropper to the largest baronial estate – making wine mostly for personal and local consumption. A few of the larger growers bottled and commercialized their wine, but the market had nothing of its present-day dimensions. With a very few exceptions, Italian wine was very localized.

When Italy’s feudal sharecropping system, the mezzadria, finally ended (in the middle of the twentieth century!), small farmers fled the land for jobs in the cities, fields stood idle, and vineyards were neglected. A few producers with the resources bought up the land, consolidated the vineyards, and started commercializing their wines. The remaining smallholders, almost none of whom could afford to bottle their own wine, had little choice but to sell it to the big operations, usually – as you can imagine the market pressures – at a price more pleasing to the buyers than the sellers.

Enter the cooperatives. A few had been around for decades, mostly in the relatively few well-known northern appellations, where small growers had been able to merge their efforts and produce enough wine to be of interest to markets or distributors beyond their home region. Some of these are still active and very fine, especially in Alto Adige.

In Piedmont, one of the earliest and most successful cooperatives was Produttori del Barbaresco, which brought together small growers from all over the Barbaresco zone. It benefited from two key factors: a bevy of growers who worked many small but prized vineyards in prestigious parts of an important zone, and – maybe even more significant – enlightened leadership that from the beginning emphasized quality over quantity. Even now, in these days of superstar winemakers and much-hyped single-vineyard wines, the wines of the Produttori, whether basic Barbaresco, or Riserva, or any of the zone’s esteemed crus, stand in the front ranks of Barbaresco – which is to say, in the top echelon of Italian wine production.
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Produttori del Barbaresco can be regarded as the pacesetter, but other co-ops in regions famous and regions scarcely known caught on quickly. Co-ops offer many advantages for their members, far from all of whom are specialized in growing vines or making wine. Many are old farming families who love living on their land and working it. They still practice mixed agriculture. They may have only a few hectares, but some of it will be in grapes, some in wheat or vegetables, some in olive trees. Co-ops help them make a reasonable living, and they may belong to several, one for their grapes, one for their olives, one perhaps for their cheeses. Nobody gets rich, but they can all make a living and continue to enjoy the kind of life their families have followed for who knows how long.

Nowadays you can find cooperatives all through Italy, in zones both famous and not-so. Over half of Italy’s wine production comes from co-ops: I think that there are over 500 of them. Some may be quite specialized, but usually they produce the whole range of their area’s wines, and usually these days at quite a respectable level of quality.

A good example can be found almost anywhere. Tuscany, for instance, which is in all respects a quirky region of hyper-individualists, now hosts several fine co-ops in some of its most important zones. One whose wines I’ve been drinking lately is one of the smallest: Castelli del Grevepesa, in the Chianti Classico region, comprises only 18 growers. Not surprisingly, with most of them located in Panzano, Lamole, and Greve, they work mostly with Sangiovese.

Following the typical cooperative pattern, their newly harvested grapes are transferred immediately to the co-op winery where they are fermented, aged, and bottled by the co-op team – a general manager, an agronomist, and an oenologist. From those grapes they make Chianti Classico, Chianti Classico Riserva, and Gran Selezione wines. As a further economic boost for the co-op members, Castelli di Grevepesa also produces grappa and extra-virgin olive oil.
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Lately, I’ve been enjoying a lot of this co-op’s Clemente VII Chianti Classico Riserva 2018, a nicely balanced wine with lots of Sangiovese character and the kind of lively acidity that makes it a fine companion with all sorts of everyday lunches or dinners. And it has the added virtue of being quite inexpensive: It’s usually available for around $20, sometimes even less. To get a good reliable wine at that price, one I can enjoy with everything from hamburgers or steaks to, say, chicken pizzaiola: that makes me a very happy camper. You can see why I’m singing the praises of co-ops.

 

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Castello di Querceto

Tuscany is filled with superstar wines and winemakers, but it’s also filled – particularly the Chianti Classico zone – with superstars that haven’t yet been acclaimed. I’d nominate Castello di Querceto as one.

The site is quite a historic one. For many centuries in the Middle Ages, it really was a castle, a major fortification guarding key roadways, much fought over in the nearly endless small wars of the period. It was finally razed almost to the ground by the Aragonese at the beginning of the 16th century. Only vestiges of the castle remain, now incorporated into the residence of the owners. More than vestiges remain of the oak (quercia) forest that gave the site its name.
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The owners are the François family, of which Alessandro François is the patriarch. As the name indicates, the family is of French origin, now Tuscan and established at Castello di Querceto since the 19th century. The family has been actively engaged in wine production from its earliest days at the Castello, and it now produces a full range of Tuscan wines, from the most traditional Chianti Classico to a handful of Supertuscans (though, if I am remembering accurately, Alessandro hates that phrase, so maybe I should just refer to them as IGT wines).

I am a long-time fan of his Chianti Classico and Chianti Classico Riserva, which tend to fall into the well-structured, somewhat burly style of Chianti. These are archetypal bistecca Fiorentina wines, with the kind of muscularity and depth of flavor a big piece of beef like bistecca demands. They taste like the kind of wines that Querceto’s high-altitude, hilly, shaggily wooded site leads you to expect.
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The whole line of Querceto’s wines exudes toscanità. There are two Gran Selezione Chiantis, Il Picchio and La Corte, drawn from two distinctive vineyards. In addition, Querceto makes a very traditional Vin Santo, as well as a young and an aged grappa – neither of which I have been lucky enough to taste in recent years but the younger of which I remember very fondly for its heady aroma and warmth.

More of a surprise are some of Querceto’s IGT wines. Those I enjoy most are Cignale, a 90/10 blend of Cabernet sauvignon and Merlot, and the 100% Cabernet Sole di Alessandro. Both are big wines and want – and deserve – aging. Cignale is markedly robust, Sole – surprisingly for a 100% Tuscan Cabernet – the more polished of the two.

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It’s also the more adaptable. Recently we poured a 21-year-old bottle of Sole to accompany a fairly complex dinner, and it shone with every dish. Those ran from a starter of warm cauliflower salad, followed by a subtle braise of veal and oyster mushrooms in a rich, creamy sauce. It concluded simply with toasted hazelnuts, and the Cabernet played up perfectly to them all.

I had expected the wine to stand up well to each, but this performance went beyond that. Clearly, Tuscan acidity had a lot to do with the Cabernet’s ability to interact successfully with so many different flavors. Like the François family, Cabernet has adapted well to life at Castello di Querceto.

 

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Old Stones and Young Wines: A Week in Rome

A week in Rome, of course, is not enough to justify any sort of generalization about its current wine scene, and a person of any intelligence wouldn’t even attempt that. Nevertheless, here I am.
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Generalization #1 : The Roman thirst for young wines is unquenchable.

This has been true for years, probably decades, maybe centuries. It seems to be grandfathered into Roman genes, along with an ability to remain casual about the venerable antiquities they live among. However antique the ambiance, it is next to impossible to find a mature bottle of wine in an authentically Roman restaurant.

There may be a few (probably Michelin-starred) exceptions to this, but I think I’m on safe ground here: young wines – not just whites but also reds – are the rule in Rome. Many of these are very fine wines, though they may be a decade yet from what I would think of as true drinkability. 2021 is fine for Frascati, less so for Jermann’s Vinnae, while 2016 is barely acceptable for a fine red like Faro’s Rosso del Soprano, the oldest red we were able to get our hands on during our most recent visit to Rome.

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Generalization #2: The quality of wine in Roman restaurants is higher now than ever before in my lifetime.

And that’s a good many years of visiting Rome. Diane and I were everywhere impressed by the level of wine being offered at even the simplest local restaurants. And I am not talking great expense here: wine prices in Roman restaurants are astonishingly reasonable, especially to one fresh from the 300%, 400%, and 500% mark-ups of New York eateries. I don’t think we paid over €65 for any bottle all week long – and we were not seeking to economize.
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Generalization #3: The level of wine knowledge among restaurant staff has never been higher or more widespread.

I’m not talking here just about wine specialists, like L’Angolo Divino or Cul de Sac, but about classic Roman restaurants like Due Ladroni or Matricianella, where well-informed waiters can provide really helpful information about their wines. I can only imagine how useful and reassuring this must be to first-time travelers to Rome, or to Italian wine novices. I know that in my first trips to Rome I would have appreciated having that range of expertise available.
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Generalization #4: The variety of Italian wine available in Rome has never been greater. We’ve come a far cry from the days when asking for something beyond generic rosso elicited only Chianti – no details, no further specification – as an answer. Our choices were everywhere generous.
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So what did we drink? All the wines whose labels appear above, for starters.

Also, several different producers’ Cesanese, all very fine and very appropriate as a match for many Roman dishes. Cesanese is the traditional red grape of Lazio, and it is enjoying a renaissance these days. You could try any being offered: They are all delicious, and even though Cesanese can take aging, it isn’t hurt by being drunk young.

From farther afield, we enjoyed several of Jermann’s lovely Friuli whites, particularly a robust Vinnae (Ribolla gialla) and especially Capo Martino, an imaginative blend of everything from Chardonnay to Picolit.
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From the other end of Italy, from near Etna, we enjoyed a lovely red of very local Sicilian varieties, Palari’s Rosso del Soprano – supposedly its second wine, but in some vintages even better than its Faro. Our wine was a barely seven-year-old, a 2016. This may have been the best red of the trip.
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I say “may,” because a lovely Campanian red, Luigi Tecce’s Satyricon, gives it a run for the money. This is a 100% Aglianico from the Campi Taurasini area in the high hills around Avellino, and despite being very young – 2019 – it was a substantial wine with deep, intense flavors.  I can only imagine what it will be like in ten years.

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The best white? I should say that luscious Capo Martino, but I’m sorely tempted by several almost nameless Frascatis we had with various lunches. Frascati, like Cesanese, is a traditional wine of Rome, and like Cesanese, it is enjoying a real resurgence of quality. Light, aromatic, gently floral and mineral, it refreshes and revives and provides the kind of simple palatal pleasure that for many people lives in memory as the real taste of Rome.

BTW, If you’d like to see some of the things we ate on that week in Rome, take a look at this post on Diane’s blog.

 

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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.

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Castello di Volpaia: The Essence of Chianti Elegance

I have long been an admirer of the wines of Castello di Volpaia, because Volpaia specializes in what I love most in a wine: elegance. Elegance is easy to say but hard to attain: It’s that taut balance between, on the one hand, fidelity to the nature and intensity of the variety – in this case, Sangiovese – and on the other, lightness on the palate, with a graceful interplay of acid, tannin, and alcohol that makes the wine dance on your tongue.

A few evenings ago, a damp, chilly one (It was March in New York: What do you expect?), Diane and I had made a homely lamb stew – meat, potatoes, carrots, green beans, a pair of small onions, homemade broth for the ingredients to swelter in, not an herb in sight – and to drink with it I opened a bottle of Volpaia’s basic offering, a Chianti Classico 2018.

I expected it to be good, but it way exceeded my expectations. That simple young Chianti was marvelous with the stew and even better with the little taste of cheese with which we finished the meal. It tasted richly of Sangiovese and even more of Volpaia’s high altitude and sandy soils. It was packed with cherry-like Sangiovese fruit, at the same time delightfully light in the mouth, feeling and tasting highly refined and gracious. I was reminded how many times Daniele Cernilli uses the words “refined” or “refinement” in his reviews of Volpaia. If I had to describe this wine briefly, I’d call it classic high-altitude Sangiovese.

Being brief about Castello di Volpaia is difficult, however, because there is so much to say about it. First of all, it’s not a castello, but a formerly walled, hilltop medieval village. Once upon a time it served as a Florentine defensive outpost against Florence’s perennial enemy, Siena. After the 16th century, when peace invaded Tuscany, the walls started tumbling down and the vineyards growing up.

After the abolition of the mezzadria, the sharecropping system that had dominated Italian rural life and kept Italy green and poor for centuries, Volpaia almost became a ghost town, as its population fled the hard country life for better opportunities elsewhere. This is not ancient history: It happened in the 1950s and 1960s. That was a time when houses and vineyards and sometimes – as was the case of Volpaia – whole villages could be bought for very, very little. Not all the sites that then changed hands were so lucky in their new owners as Volpaia.
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Giovanna Stianti received it as a bridal gift when she married Carlo Mascheroni, an architect. The two have made Volpaia, both the town and its vineyards, their life work. They have lavished on both the buildings and the fields the kind of meticulous, loving attention that has earned Volpaia widespread recognition as the best and most beautifully preserved medieval village in Tuscany. The wines are just as highly esteemed: Their Chianti Classico Riserva Coltassella has frequently won Tre Bicchieri since its introduction in the 1980s. Its high rank has remained unchanged even as its legal status, following the evolution of Tuscan wine regulations, has grown from Vino da Tavola to Gran Selezione.

Aside from the careful attention that Stianti has given to the clonal selections, field work, and cellar procedures, there are two other reasons for the distinction of Volpaia’s wines. The vineyards are among the highest in Tuscany: Indeed, the very highest fields lie above 600 meters. And the soil of those fields differs markedly from the Classico zone’s predominant terroirs: It is made up of a lot less clay and a lot more sand and degenerating sandstone. With care in the field and the cellar, that translates into a far less rustic or heavy wine, a wine with a fine structure for immediate drinking, as well as for long life – a happy combination for any wine.

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The felicitous combination of so many special qualities has made Castello di Volpaia a benchmark for me, vinously and esthetically. If travel to Italy ever becomes possible again in my lifetime (!), Volpaia stands very high on the list of places I want to revisit.

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Four Fine Fonterutoli New Releases

Who says I’m too old to believe in Santa Claus? Taub Family Selections just provided four samples of Fonterutoli’s newly released best wines for me to try, and that’s one of the nicest Christmas packages I’ve received in a long time. Vicoregio 36, Castello Fonterutoli, Badiòla – all 2017 vintage, all Chianti Classico Gran Selezione – and 2018 Siepi IGT are the bottles in question, and opening them was a big holiday treat.

Fonterutoli is the Mazzei family. That tiny hamlet in the heart of the Chianti Classico country has been the family seat since the middle of the 15th century, and the Mazzei have been deeply involved in Tuscan wine since at least 1435.

That adds up to many generations of wine know-how and experience, which the present generations have used to keep their wines at the forefront of Tuscan production. The Mazzei have steadily pushed for the improvement of Chianti Classico: They were deeply involved in the Chianti Consortium’s Chianti 2000 project for instance, one of whose results shows in the 36 clones of Sangiovese that make up Vicoregio. And Siepi was one of the earliest – for my palate one of the most successful – of what used to be known as supertuscans, the wines that are credited with pushing Tuscan (and subsequently all Italian) winemaking into the modern age.

(A necessary aside: I’m very happy that “supertuscan” as a phrase is fading from use. I’ve always thought that the real supertuscans are the wines made with indigenous varieties, chief of them Sangiovese: Brunello, Carmignano, Chianti Classico, Chianti Rufina, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. Wines made from “international” varieties can be very fine, but they are rarely truly Tuscan in character. I would rate Siepi as one of the few exceptions to that, insofar as Merlot – its “international” component – has shown itself to be one of those varieties that have adapted best to the soils and climates of the Chianti Classico zone.)

I have been a steady admirer of Fonterutoli wines for several decades now, and there was nothing in these four bottles to change my opinion. With the proviso that all are very young and showing a small touch of bottle shock, they all impressed with their separate but equal expressions of their grapes and terroirs, and all promised interesting evolutions as they age.
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Vicoregio 36, Chianti Classico Gran Selezione 2017

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This wine originates in the Mazzei’s southernmost vineyards, in the commune of Castelnuovo Berardenga, and it reflects the huskiness of the wines of that area. It shows a rich, grapey nose, earthy, and a touch smoky (that may be the barrels), with a hint of dried figs. These elements all follow through on the palate. A smooth, round, mid-weight wine, with excellent Sangiovese character and a big, dry-fruit finish. Very fine for immediate drinking or keeping for five or more years.
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Castello Fonterutoli, Chianti Classico Gran Selezione 2017

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This is the family’s flagship wine, sourced entirely from the home vineyards surrounding the village of Fonterutoli. It displays the same aroma and flavor characteristics as the Vicoregio but feels lighter in body and higher in tone, simply more elegant overall – very typical of the best Chiantis from the heart of the zone. I tasted a wonderful zing of wild cherry in the mouth and the finish. An excellent wine, for immediate drinking or keeping for five to ten years.
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Badiòla, Chianti Classico Gran Selezione 2017

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The vines that make this wine grow in Radda at 570 meters, the highest altitude of any of the Fonterutoli wines. They are 100% Sangiovese, and they fill the wine with wild cherry notes from aroma through palate to finish. The other aroma and flavor components are like those of the two preceding wines, only more so, with an extremely long finish. This is about as elegant as a Chianti gets. Very, very fine: good drinking now but structured, I would guess, for a much longer haul.
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Siepi, IGT Toscana 2018

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Composed of 50% Sangiovese and 50% Merlot, this is a darker wine in all respects than the Chianti Classicos. It’s rounder and softer – smells and tastes of mulberry. On the palate, that mulberry merges nicely with the Sangiovese cherry. The wine is big and soft in the mouth (the Merlot showing its stuff), very composed and balanced. For all the Merlot, it shows some genuine Tuscan character in its fine acid balance. Truly, a one-of-a-kind wine, unique and fine.
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To sum up:  Siepi is a kind of wine I admire, but the three Chiantis are the kind of wines I love. Can’t help it: I’m old-fashioned – so let me wish you an old-fashioned Merry Christmas and a very Happy post-Covid New Year!

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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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An Ode to Ordinary

Well, I’m back from my vacation. Covid 19 hasn’t gone away, and there definitely won’t be anything like a normal autumn wine season, with its crowded portfolio shows and densely packed seated tastings of new releases. There have to be new releases, I guess, but how a working-from-home wine journalist is supposed to find them and taste them is beyond my imagination. Like so much else, the wine world that emerges from this corona-virus cocoon is going to be far different – perhaps unrecognizably different — from what it was before.

Facing up to that fact started me on a nostalgic yearning for the good old ordinary wine world I used to know. But thinking a bit more about that lost world made me realize that (a) it wasn’t uniformly good; (b) it wasn’t that old; and (c) ordinary was the wrong word to apply to it: There was actually very little ordinary about it.

What I’m talking about is the fact that since at least the 1960s, the wine world has undergone several seismic shifts: The world immediately pre-Covid was already a very different place – had in fact been several different places – from the one I had come to know way back when I first seriously engaged wine. Even more important, the concept of ordinary, as it applied to wine, had completely shifted its meaning from what vin ordinaire – a phrase one rarely hears nowadays – had meant for several generations. We are now well into Ordinary Wine 2.0 – or maybe 3.0 or 4.0.

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Let me explain – and I hope this doesn’t sound like ancient history, but you really do have to know where we’ve been to appreciate where we are now – or, I should say, where we were a few months ago. I’ll start with a case in point.

The other evening, for our dinner wine, I had opened a bottle of Castello di Meleto Chianti Classico Gran Selezione 2010. I don’t even know how I happened to have a ten-year-old Castello di Meleto: It’s not a wine I seek out, and usually not one I would lay down.
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Castello di Meleto is a real castle, located in the heart of the heart of the Chianti Classico zone, not far from Gaiole and a little further from Radda. That makes it a serious piece of Sangiovese terroir. In the late 1960s, it and its surrounding fields were acquired by a large Italian firm seeking to diversify into an agricultural component, as many firms did then, at the start of the Italian wine boom. For years it was a negligible producer of large quantities of wine. In the late 1990s, Castello di Meleto began – as almost every Tuscan estate had by then – moving toward smaller-quantity, higher-quality production, and by the end of the first decade of the present century it was producing quite respectable Chianti Classico.
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However the bottle wound up in my cellar, there it was, and we drank it with an ordinary meal on an ordinary day. It was very enjoyable: quite correct Chianti Classico, aging nicely, with charming Sangiovese fruit and character, delightfully adaptable with the main course and then with a little selection of cheese – all quite typical. This was by no means a great wine, but a thoroughly pleasing one, reflecting a level of field work and cellar care that now is almost universal – that is to say, ordinary.

The winemakers at Castello di Meleto are not going to be thrilled to be praised for being ordinary, but that’s precisely my point. The caliber of most of the wines entering the international market today – the ordinary level of wines that we can all buy and drink – is what back in the day used to be considered unusually good, ranging up to great. And that is because of the widespread shift from making wine in quantity, as simply a beverage to moisten food, to making wine of quality, as a fine drink to enhance meals of all kinds.

That, the most profound of the wine world’s earthquakes, began very slowly, perhaps as early as the 1955 vintage in Germany and France, and gathered strength all through the 1960s, until in the early 1970s it simply exploded. Bordeaux and Burgundy winemakers and negociants, riding an economic wave and dominating the international wine market, got greedy and demanded then-preposterous prices for their miserable 1973 vintage. The expanding American market resisted. California winemakers, who had been waiting for their moment, saw their chance and grabbed it, as did Italian and Spanish winemakers, and the wine world, which until that point had exclusively spoken French, began to learn other languages.
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That was the second step toward the polyglot market we now have. Wine & Spirits Magazine has just announced its Top 100 Wineries of 2020. The countries represented, in addition to France and the United States, include Argentina, Australia, Austria, Chile, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Uruguay. Such a list was unthinkable in, say, 1975. Now the questions it is likely to raise are more of the order of “What about South Africa?  What about Britain? Canada?  Croatia?”

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And it’s not just geographical change this Wine & Spirits list indicates: These are top wineries, wineries judged to be on a par with, just to pick two, Bollinger and Bouchard. Back in 1975, those worthies would have been shocked to be named in the same sentence with, for example, Mastroberardino or Stag’s leap.

The third of the wine world’s great transformations, and the one that made so much else possible, was the vast leap forward in wine technology. Both in the field and in the cellar, new knowledge and new methods improved the health and quality of the grapes that came into the presses, as well as what happened to them between that step and bottling. In the course of a few decades, winemaking around the world made a great leap from the Late Stone Age to the Twentieth (as it then was) Century.

And then, of course, came global warming, which among its very alarming effects had the lovely one of almost every year gifting with gloriously ripe grapes regions that used to see good harvests once every five or ten years. In between those good harvests, they used to endure many mediocre ones – which was then ordinary – with some real stinkers generously interspersed.

People who have come to wine only since the 1990s can’t realize what a golden age of wine they’re living in. Piedmont and Burgundy particularly have been enjoying fine harvest after fine harvest, one excellent vintage on top of another. Consumers have forgotten that there can be rotten harvests, because there’s always a good one somewhere in the greatly expanded wine world. Memories of truly undrinkable green, weedy wines – sometimes from the most reputable houses – have simply vanished.

(Of course, if global warming continues, we may start seeing bad wines for the opposite reason. Burnt, scorched, desiccated grapes could loom in our future.)

Anyhow, that’s all history, and my point is just this: What we now think of as ordinary in wine, like my thoroughly enjoyable Castello di Meleto, is the extraordinary result of a concatenation of causes working together over the last fifty years to lift the quantity, quality, and availability of good wine to the very high plateau we are now enjoying. There is real reason to fear the world may not be able to sustain this uniform, reliable “ordinary” level very much longer. So revel in our amazing ordinary while it is still ordinary and available. Remember the wisdom of Zero Mostel in The Producers: “Flaunt it while you got it!”

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Where Are the Wines of Yesteryear? Safely Locked in Memory

In the enforced inactivity that Covid 19 has imposed – the virtual tastings that now seem to be all over the internet are not the same as tasting real wine – Diane and I have been cooking determinedly and raiding the cellar frequently. No new young wines, no trade tastings, no lunches or dinners with winemakers – just our own kitchen skills and our own wines on hand.

It lacks a bit in variety from the wine point of view: I don’t get to try new vintages nor any wines or producers that are new to me. But it’s not what I could really call the same-old same-old. Whether by luck or cunning, I’ve got some nice wines stashed away, which we’ve been enjoying to soften our isolation from friends and colleagues. Not all of them are antiques (would that I had more of those!), but even the youngish ones can evoke memories: Wines, we are finding, are very good for that.

Just a dinner or so back, Diane and I opened our last bottle of Mastroberardino’s 2003 Taurasi, which led us into fond reminiscences of Antonio Mastroberardino, for many decades the head of the family firm and one our favorite wine people. We first met Antonio in the late ‘70s and had been friends ever since, until his death in 2014. I’ve come to think that Neapolitan men of a certain age begin to converge on a common face: My first thought, when I met Antonio, was that he looked like all my uncles.

My favorite memory of Antonio, among the many, is of the time he and his wife Teresa picked up Diane and me in Vietri to drive together to Naples. Antonio was of a pronouncedly scholarly, almost professorial turn of mind, and, instead of focusing his attention on the hair-raising autostrada traffic, he turned to broader issues – much to the consternation of our two wives in the back seat.

At one point he was trying to explain to me in English a complex idea about Italy’s political scene, the state of wine producing, and the attitudes and circumstances of Campania’s small growers. He finally gave up English and – mostly looking at me and only occasionally glancing at the road – laid out his thoughts in flowing Italian. After his peroration, he asked if I had understood it all. “Si, si,” I said, “ho capito in senso metaforico.” Yes, I understood it in a metaphoric sense.

That fixed Antonio’s attention on me even more. I thought Diane was ready to clamber into the front of the car and grab the steering wheel. “In senso metaforico,” he said thoughtfully, as if relishing the phrase. He looked ever so briefly at the traffic around us – and repeated “senso metaforico” a few more times, almost chewing the words. Then he turned again to me and said, in his most serious, professorial voice, “I congratulate you on your culture.” Finally, to the incredible relief of the two ladies in the back, he turned his thoughts to driving, as if that had successfully closed the matter.

I knew that the whole concept of culture was centrally important to Antonio, so I realized this was a tremendous compliment. But I have always thought that the episode said more about him and the character of his mind than it does about mine. There were very few like him in the wine world and it feels very good to remember him not just as a winemaker but as the thoughtful, humane person he was.

A very different set of memories was triggered on an evening when Diane and I were drinking a 2010 La Selvanella, a pitch-perfect Chianti Classico Riserva from Melini. Selvanella is sort of Melini’s home estate, a largish vineyard in the Classico zone, and Melini has been producing very traditional Chianti Classico there for many decades. Sipping this one alongside a modest home version of bistecca fiorentina, I found myself recounting to Diane an extraordinary visit there many years ago.

The Frederick Wildman firm, Melini’s importer, had organized a visit for a large group of wine journalists to several of the estates Wildman represented in northern and central Italy. This culminated in Tuscany, and climaxed at Selvanella. You could not imagine a more picture-perfect rustic Tuscan setting: brilliant sunshine on rows of neatly pruned vines, surrounded by the deep green of forest, and a spacious, shaded patio to shelter us from that very hot sunshine – and also to house a huge, wood-fired spit.

On that spit revolved skewer after skewer of cooking animals, ranging in size from thrushes through several other birds (the quail were particularly delicious, I recall) up to pheasants, then rabbits; and finally, on another even larger spit, cinghiale – a whole wild boar. There was not a single farm-bred creature in that whole intensely gamey and succulent lot: Every one of them had been shot by Nunzio Capurso, then the head of Melini, the winemaker at Selvanella, a generous host, and a passionate hunter. We tasted through several vintages of Selvanella at that feast, and now, enjoying this bottle of 2010, at home in not-quite-rustic Greenwich Village, with a fine but comparatively tiny steak, I vividly recalled the flavors and pleasures of that now far-distant, thoroughly Rabelaisian day. I can’t believe now how much I could – and did – eat then.

At another recent home dinner, Diane and I shared a bottle of Barbi’s 2013 Brusco dei Barbi, a lovely 100% Sangiovese from one of the oldest, most highly reputed producers in Montalcino (I wrote about Barbi Brunello recently here). This bottle, at not quite seven years old, was still a touch tannic but nevertheless tasted deeply of dense, dark, fully ripe Sangiovese grosso. It promised years of development yet.

That tannin, which we both remarked on almost simultaneously, triggered our memory of the evening – again many years ago – when Francesca Colombini Cinelli, proprietor of the Barbi estate, treated us to a vertical tasting of about a dozen Bruscos, the oldest twenty years old. At the aroma of the fourteen-year-old Brusco, Diane and I both exclaimed, “white truffle!” A broadly smiling Signora Cinelli explained that the Barbi family too had been pleasantly surprised by that. They had originally formulated Brusco to be a young, early-drinking wine, as opposed to the many years of aging needed by their Brunello, and they had not really expected the Brusco to have great aging potential. But good fruit, good soils, and great care in the cellar will not be denied, any more than will good memories – and Diane and I only regret that we don’t have more and older Brusco dei Barbi salted away.

“Sheltering in place” – or maybe it’s just age and garrulity – has triggered the flow of memories of decades of encounters with much-loved wines and even more fondly remembered people. These are probably a lot more fun for me to write about than for others to read, so I’ll try to moderate the flow – but I can’t guarantee that I won’t succumb again to the allure of wine and memory.

 

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Another Tuscan Triumph: Rocca della Macie

I seem to be on a Chianti Classico binge: My last post was about Cecchi’s lovely Chiantis, this one is about Rocca della Macie’s. All of which is just fine with me, because Sangiovese, the grape that is the heart and soul of Chianti Classico, is one of the world’s finest wine varieties, capable of innumerable different manifestations and styles. Simply stated: I don’t get tired of it.

Just a few weeks ago, Sergio Zingarelli, the owner of Rocca della Macie and a former president of the Chianti Classico Consorzio, presented to a very appreciative group of wine journalists a vertical tasting of six library samples of his Riserva di Fizzano, the estate’s flagship wine. They were 1995, 1999, 2005, 2011, 2013, and 2015.

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Riserva di Fizzano has been Rocca della Macie’s most important cru ever since the Zingarelli family acquired the vineyard in the mid-1980s. From the start, its wine blended 85% Sangiovese, 10% Cabernet sauvignon, and 5% Merlot to make a beautifully balanced wine, austere in youth but maturing to a smooth, round, structured wine redolent on nose and palate of dark berries and earth, as poised and elegant as any Tuscan wine. The 1995 seems completely mature now, but the ’99 – a very great vintage – is still evolving, and I can’t guess how many years it still has in front of it. The 2005 also promises greatness, though it is right now reticent.
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A great change came with the 2011 vintage. Zingarelli and his enologist Lorenzo Landi (a Tuscan of the Tuscans, I have heard him called) dropped the Cabernet sauvignon from the blend and made it 95% Sangiovese and 5% Merlot. The 2013 vintage followed suit, while the 2015 blended 93% Sangiovese with 7% Colorino, an indigenous Tuscan variety: this seems to be the direction of the future for this important wine.

Let me stress how significant I think this is. First, omitting the Cabernet is an addition, not a subtraction. The beauty of the multifaceted Sangiovese fruit shows through immeasurably more clearly without the mask of Cabernet. The young wine is no longer so austere, but now feels softer and fresher on the palate, with a greater richness and intensity of fruit. It simply has more and purer Sangiovese character. The clonal research of the massive Chianti Classico 2000 project that the Consorzio undertook almost three decades back is clearly bearing fruit (all possible puns intended), and Riserva di Fizzano – now designated as Chianti Classico Gran Selezione – is showing quite evidently just how marvelous its results can be.

During the lunch that followed this vertical, Zingarelli showed some newer vintages that highlighted the continuing evolution of his Chianti Classico. First up was the basic Rocca della Macie Chianti Classico 2017, 95% Sangiovese and 5% Merlot, a fine wine displaying excellent fruit even though very young. I’d wait a year or so to drink this one, when I think it will be lovely.
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Next came the 2016 Rocca della Macie Riserva, 90% Sangiovese, 5% Colorino, and 5% Cabernet Sauvignon. I thought this wine both lovely and a bargain (suggested retail price of $26.99: wow!) Terrific rich fruit, great balance, long, dry, cherry finish, drinkable now and structured for some years of life: As the current cliché has it, what’s not to like?

The third wine was Rocca della Macie’s second Gran Selezione, Sergio Zingarelli 2013, 100% Sangiovese. For my palate, this wine was a champion, elegant and structured, with decades of enjoyable life before it, and already showing complex, multifaceted Sangiovese character. Were I 20 years younger, I’d buy cases of it and stash it away where I couldn’t get my hands on it for at least a few years.
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The 2014 vintage of the same wine – a difficult vintage because of summer heat and humidity – tasted bigger and very ripe. This a very good wine, and very forceful and authoritative, but for me it lacks the elegance of the 2013. Lovers of big Chianti will no doubt prefer this bottling. That is a matter of taste: Both are fine Chianti Classico, as is almost everything from this progressive, increasingly important estate.

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