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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Livio Felluga’s Terre Alte: A Very Great White Wine

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Livio Felluga is a highly respected name in Friulian wine, and rightly so. Since the middle of the last century, at least, the family firm has been at the forefront of quality wine production in Friuli and a leader in raising the quality of — and calling worldwide attention to – the varietal wines of Friuli, especially the white varieties...

Tocai – now called Friulano – was the native variety that first drew the wine world’s attention to Friuli. The Felluga family championed it, and I can still recall my pleasure at sipping its almond-inflected goodness, way back when I first encountered it, longer ago than any of us would care to recall.

Livio Felluga

I remember with equally deep pleasure my first press visit to the Felluga estate, tasting the whole range of its white varieties while listening to Livio, the principal winemaker, delivering a non-stop monologue of carabinieri jokes that had us all – even those who spoke no Italian – in stitches. I briefly wondered whether anyone so funny could possibly make great wine. He could, and he did. The Italian wine world was rich in such multi-faceted characters in those days.
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Terre Alte was Livio Felluga’s great invention. First produced in 1981, it was from the start – and still remains – a blend of three white varieties in pretty much equal proportions: Friulano, Pinot bianco, and Sauvignon. All are grown in some of the best and highest fields – thus the wine’s name – of the firm’s great Rosazzo property, where the soils are a complex of marl and decomposing sandstone.
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Felluga’s Rosazzo Vineyards

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While there is obviously some slight variation from vintage to vintage, Terre Alte has maintained a pretty consistent character right from its start: It’s a big wine, round and full in the mouth, with great aromatics – minerals and flowers, white fruits and forest scents – and a highly complex, mineral-inflected palate marked by notes of apricot and tropical fruits. With all that, Terre Alte also ages very well, growing subtler and deeper as it does. This is a world-class white wine, from one of the best sites and best producers in one of the world’s great white wine regions.

Just recently I opened a bottle of the 2007 Terre Alte to match with Diane’s beautiful dish of braised chicken and morel mushrooms in cream. I am not a great chicken aficionado, but I thought this combination of flavors and textures was wonderful – and the Terre Alte thought so too.

The wine was a lovely copper-gold color. I don’t know whether it was the power of that visual suggestion, or whether this vintage was an example of the ramato style that used to be more common in Friulian whites, but the very floral nose was marked by a distinct coppery edge that I found very attractive. In the mouth, the wine was big and round, balanced, with fine acid. Minerals and flowers and dry white fruits dominated the palate, with dried apricot notes becoming more and more prominent as the wine opened.

This was a very nuanced wine: nothing blatant, but lots of intriguing flavor hintlets and that persistent coppery edge. And it had one final surprise: with cheese, it suddenly felt very clean and fresh, as if it had shed years of aging.

If only wine writers could do the same. Sigh.

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Praise for Pinot Grigio, too!

I hate to sound cynical, but I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of people who happily consume Pinot grigio have no idea what that wine tastes like at its best, and that it should always taste that way. They’re mostly drinking, probably at inflated prices, inexpensive Pinot grigio that is being almost mass-produced for its apparently indiscriminate and insatiable market.

Old timers will remember that we’ve seen this before, with insane fads for light Italian white wines that looked as if they would never end – until they did: Soave, once upon a time, and Verdicchio, both of whose quality producers have had to labor mightily to restore their reputations once the bubble burst.

I’m hoping Pinot grigio can avoid a similar fate. The quiet, steady, rock-solid work that many producers are doing throughout the whole arc of Pinot grigio’s cultivation zone ought – ought – to be sufficient to sustain the wine’s reputation when the thirst for watery whites moves on to another variety.

A good example of what I mean by the best of Pinot grigio can be found in the bottles from Albino Armani. This is a firm that – despite its trendy, very fashionable and “now”-sounding name – is not a new start-up but a family firm that has been making wine since 1607. The name is their own, and the present head of the winery, Albino Armani, has been visiting the US and presenting his wines wherever Covid restrictions make that possible.  He and I did not meet this time, though we did many years ago when I visited the firm’s Veneto estate and headquarters.

This time, my Wine Media Guild colleague and US representative of several Italian wine organizations, Susannah Gold, provided me with some samples to taste. They form the basis of what follows, though my long-standing esteem for Armani wines flows from that long-ago visit, when I was bowled over by the wonderful typicity that Armani achieved with every variety it grew.

This time I was tasting three of Armani’s basic Pinot grigios: one from Valdadige, one from the Venezie, and one from the Grave del Friuli.

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That trio was particularly interesting to me because it represented in miniature the west-to-east sequence of the primary zones for Pinot grigio production in Italy. Armani maintains wineries in each, so I expected each of my bottles to accurately reflect the characters of Pinot grigio’s different growing areas.
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All three wines were of the 2020 vintage, and all three showed nearly identical pale straw color, as you would expect of Pinot grigio. I tasted west to east, so my first bottle was from Valdadige, which proved to be a fine place to begin.
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It initially had a lovely stony-and-stone fruit nose, followed by earth and spice. Diane picked up a little lemon among the stones.  In the mouth, the wine gave similar stone fruit, earth, and spice flavors.  Diane tasted pear as well. Over all, it was smooth feeling, with restrained acidity and a touch of elegance. (How often can you say that of a Pinot grigio?) I particularly liked its long, dried-peach finish.

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My second bottle was Pinot grigio delle Venezie.

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Its aroma was very similar to the Valdadige wine, but a bit stronger and a touch earthier, as were the flavors it gave in the mouth. I tasted dried apricots on the palate and some peach in the finish, but overall I found it subdued: not fully open, in fact, as if it needed more time to pull itself together. Diane called it austere. Based on the aroma and the finish, I think this wine will grow in time – six months, a year? – to become a really lovely example of almost hefty, medium-bodied, classic Pinot grigio. But not yet.

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My final sample was from the Grave del Friuli, which turned out, not to my surprise, to be my favorite: I think Friuli has a genius for all sorts of white wines and a bevy of producers – Jermann, both Fellugas, Princic, and Villa Russiz, just for example – capable of showing it.
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This Pinot grigio had a stronger, more assertive aroma than the first two. It featured the same kind of fruit but with more pronounced earth and mineral. On the palate, it seemed bigger, more complex, more characterful. Its finish was very mineral, with even a slight coppery edge.  This for me was the wine of the flight: I loved its weight and its complexity.

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Overall, these were three fine Pinot grigios. I would use the Valdadige wine for cocktails and aperitifs, the Friuli bottle as a dinner wine, and I would wait a year for the Venezie wine – and then drink it happily at any time.

 

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July Cellar Selection: 2007 Vintage Tunina

Silvio Jermann’s Vintage Tunina, the seventh selection of my 12 special wines for 2021, has been a spectacular wine from the get-go. Back in 1975, the then-21-year-old winemaker created it outside the existing Friulian wine categories, from his own imagination and what his grandfather had told him about older Friulian ways of making wine.

Post-World War II, Friulian winemaking had become resolutely monovarietal. Many grape varieties were grown – especially white varieties – but they were always harvested and vinified separately to make 100% varietal wines: indigenous varieties like Tocai (now called Friulano) and Verduzzo and Picolit, as well as international (read French) varieties such as Chardonnay and Sauvignon blanc. Friuli was a paradise of single-variety white wines.

Jermann’s grandfather told him about an earlier tradition: field mixes of several varieties and blended wines. Jermann was intrigued: He had visions of wines of greater complexity and far greater longevity than most of what he saw around him. With brashness and luck – and talent – he followed his own instincts, and in 1975 gave the Italian wine world what may well be, after over 40 years, its finest white wine: Vintage Tunina.
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This was and is a harmonious blend of Chardonnay and Sauvignon blanc (usually close to 80%), with the balance composed of Malvasia, Ribolla gialla, and Picolit. The exact percentage of each variety may vary from vintage to vintage, but those five have remained all along. And all along, Vintage Tunina has probably garnered more Tre Bicchieri, Cinque Grappoli, and paeans of praise than any other white wine in Italian history.
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Jermann Vineyards

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Back in November of 1998, at my first Salone Del Gusto in Torino, I attended a nine-vintage vertical tasting of Vintage Tunina: 1997, 1995, 1994, 1993, 1991, 1990, 1989, and 1987, ending with 1982. That last was a wonder vintage all across Europe, an opening salvo of global warming, bringing amazing ripeness to the grapes and major problems to farmers and vintners, who had never dealt with such heat before. I think of it as the first harvest of the new weather patterns, and hence a highly significant vintage to close a significant vertical tasting.

Because Vintage Tunina is both so important a wine and probably the least well known to wine drinkers of my chosen 12, I’d like to present a synopsis of my notes on that tasting, as a way of demonstrating what Vintage Tunina is all about.

1997.  Recently bottled and so fresh it seemed almost frizzante, but round and mouth-filling, with generous apple-and-orange fruit and a very long finish. An impressive, substantial wine.

1995.  Same as the ‘97, just a bit older and more emphatic. Medium gold color.

1994.  Color deepening to dark gold with green highlights – very attractive. Nose more earthy, with dried apricot scents appearing. Bigger and more mouth-filling on the palate, with apricot and mango fruit flavors. The finish seemed endless.

1993.  Slightly different one. Abundant spice – cinnamon and woodruff especially – over dried pear, in the aroma and on the palate. A lovely wine, still youthful and fresh. They get nicer and nicer!

1991.  Gorgeous: Dried pear on the nose, rich and spicy; dried pears and cinnamon on the palate. Big, yet light-feeling, mouth-filling but not cloying; still fresh and invigorating, with its muscular structure becoming evident.

1990 and 1989.  Vintages firmly announcing the arrival of climate change in northern Italian vineyards. Wonderful spicy aromas – dark dried pear tones prominent – and mature deep fruit flavors. Sapid, with exceptionally long, drying finishes.

1987.  Had developed further in the direction of ‘89 and ‘90, with the big structure coming more to the fore.

1982.  That first hot-weather vintage that caught so many winemakers off guard, and a wonder. So many green highlights in its dark gold that it almost looked electric. Still fresh and livelily acidic, with white fruits dancing on the palate. Only the smallest traces of really evolved flavors: could easily mature for another decade.

Which brings me, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, to my present wine, a 14-year-old Vintage Tunina of the 2007 harvest. It hardly makes sense any more to talk about vintage quality with Silvio Jermann’s wines: Whatever the growing conditions, he makes great wine, and the very hot 2007 growing season seems to be no exception. Why I have put this wine away and not tasted it until now should need no explanation: It’s just a wonder that I’ve been able to keep my hands off it this long.
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So: Diane prepared a simple, luxurious dinner to taste my wine against – a foie gras mousse (bought, not made) to start, an elegant braise of veal with morels and cream for the main course, and just a taste of cheese to finish. Each course brought out a different facet of the incredibly complex wine.

But first things first. Color: This ’07 Vintage Tunina was dark amber gold, with only a few scattered green highlights. This might lead you to think the wine was oxidized, but one whiff of its intriguing deep and complex aroma would dispel that thought. On the palate, it was delicious and profound. Not a big rush of fruit, but very fresh and youthfully vigorous: It tasted as if it had years to go yet. Many layers of many flavors – honey and dried peaches or apricots, with underlying mineral and even metallic elements, copper for instance.

The mousse emphasized the wine’s harmony and depth. The veal and mushrooms minimized its minerality but foregrounded its honey and fruit components. The cheese brought back its minerality. Overall, as it opened in the glass, the distinctive taste of its small amount of Picolit – the peculiar smoky tang of grapes lightly touched with pourriture noble – came to the fore and persisted right into its very long finish. What a complex wine! What a pleasure to drink!

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Wine in Venice: Not as Great as It Should Be

Granted, my expectations were probably too high. Granted, I was only in Venice for a week, and probably missed a lot of good shops and restaurants. And granted, there was an abundance of drinkable, enjoyable wine in most restaurants.

But – and this is a very big but – given what Venice has to draw upon from the land to supplement the treasures offered by its lagoon and the Adriatic, there should have been an abundance of great wine too. All the resources of the Veneto, Friuli, and Alto Adige lie at Venice’s doorstep, and those three regions contain dozens of fine white varieties and hundreds of great producers – most of which you will have to search pretty hard to find any trace of in Venice. It ought to be a capital of great white wines, and it’s not.

Not that Venice doesn’t drink white wine. Prosecco is ubiquitous, both as a wine in its own right and as a principal ingredient in La Serenissima’s beloved spritz, an aperitif of Prosecco, sparkling water, and a splash of Campari or Aperol. It’s almost compulsorily the first thing you’re offered when you enter a restaurant or sit down at a café. A spritz is cool and very refreshing and unquestionably charming, but in many of those cafés and restaurants, Prosecco may well be the best there is on the wine list.

Most lists are very short and not at all deep: maybe a Soave or a Lugana from the Veneto, maybe a Sauvignon or – rarely – a Friulano from Friuli, maybe a Chardonnay or Pinot blanc from Alto Adige. That’s about it. I don’t know why there isn’t more and better wine: Perhaps this is another sad result of Venice’s hyper-tourism, the consequence of a daily influx of hordes of once-only customers who neither know nor want any better. But it’s a sad situation for the serious wino, in a place where the seafood can be wonderful.

I’m not saying there is no good wine in Venice, just that you have to search hard to find it. Out in Burano, one of the smaller islands near Venice, the restaurant Venissa provided a lovely bottle of Pietracupa’s Fiano di Avellino, one of my favorite Campanian wines, which I was delighted to find so far off its own turf – and especially because it was one of the more reasonably priced wines on what was predominantly a very costly list.

And in Venice itself, at the fine Osteria da Fiori, which offered the best wine list I encountered in my week of seeking, Diane and I enjoyed a 2016 Vintage Tunina, Silvio Jermann’s masterly blend of Chardonnay, Sauvignon, Ribolla Gialla, Malvasia, and Picolit. Although very young, this wine was so fine that I was tempted to make this whole post an ode to it – but that would have conveyed a very false impression of Venice’s wine scene.

I can’t pass it over in silence, however. Vintage Tunina – a fantasy name, invented by the then-young Silvio Jermann back in 1975, when he produced his first bottles of it – is one of Italy’s greatest white wines. It was iconoclastic, back then: The norm in Friuli was monovarietal wines, which were held to be traditional. Jermann pointed out to anyone who would listen that that was a new tradition: His grandfather had told him that, before WWI, all Friulian wine was blended, usually a field mix. So he began experimenting, liked the results he obtained, and so persisted, for which we should all be grateful. Vintage Tunina and other of his “inventions” (e.g., Was Dreams…, Capo Martino) rapidly became stars, winning prizes and markets and drawing attention to Friuli’s great potential.

Back in 1996 (I think it was ’96), at the Salone del Gusto in Torino, Jermann conducted a vertical tasting of two decades of Vintage Tunina, back to the 1976 vintage – his second – thereby demonstrating another of Vintage Tunina’s excellences. It ages beautifully, growing deeper and more intense with increasing years. I remember the ’76 was transcendent, like velvet in texture, dry, mouth-filling, tasting richly of dried fruits and earth.

So, here in 2019 Diane and I were drinking with great pleasure the fortieth descendant of that 1976, and our only regret was that it wasn’t 20 years old. And maybe that we weren’t either.

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Enjoyable Everyday Wines I

If you’re a committed wine lover and need your fix every day, it’s a great advantage to live in New York City. The variety of fine wine available is unmatched anywhere in the world, and shopping is a snap. Let it sleet and storm outside: You can sit at your desk – perhaps sipping a glass of wine – and let your search engine (Wine-Searcher is a good one) investigate for you. That’s especially handy if you know more or less the kind of wine you’re seeking.

Even handier is the search service provided by several of the larger retail shops in New York, which allows you to rummage through their entire inventory by any of several different criteria.
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I’m especially fond of one that Astor Wine and Spirits offers: searching by price range. That’s useful for any number of reasons, but I especially like that it offers me things I might not have thought of, wines outside my usual Italian and French go-to categories. We all get into ruts: This helps push me out of them. Twenty minutes of online browsing and I can put together a case of 12 different whites and another of 12 different reds at prices I like – say between $10 and $20 for everyday wines – and they will probably be delivered within 24 hours. For an aging wino, it doesn’t get much easier.
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Let me be clear: When I say everyday wines, I mean every day. Diane and I have wine with dinner every night. All right, maybe once or twice a year we have beer, but 99 times out of 100 we opt for wine – and like most people in this galaxy, we can’t afford to drink great wine every time. Not that I haven’t done my best to raise the level of our daily bottle by, for decades now, buying wines young and unready but at reasonable prices and squirreling them away for as long as I could.

Besides, it’s not just wine we care about: It’s also and especially what Italians call the abbinamento – coordinating the wine with the food it accompanies. That’s crucial to making an everyday dinner something to relish. You have to pay attention to the way the wine and the food mesh. Much as I love mature Barolo and Barbaresco, I don’t want to drink them with a dish of frankfurters and beans. It’s disproportionate – and besides, good franks and beans are estimable in their own right and deserve a decent wine that works well with them. Don’t send a Brunello to do what a Bardolino can do better, don’t open a Beaune Premier Cru where a Beaujolais Villages is what’s needed.

(Incidentally, the above examples illustrate the first principle I laid out centuries ago in The Right Wine, my book about wine and food matching: Scale is crucial. I feel even more strongly about the second principle declared in that book: Acidity is what makes a wine food-friendly. But that’s a topic for a different post. End of digression.)

Now, just what sort of everyday wines am I talking about? Well, here’s the case of white wines, all under $20, that I recently purchased, most of which I tasted first as an aperitif (we all need to keep up our strength while cooking) and then with dinner.

 

Alsace Auxerrois Leon Manbach 2017 – Very pleasant, light, but substantial enough to handle a choucroute. Nice white-flower and mineral nose, round, but with enough acidity to work with food. Quite decent.

Alvarinho Couto de Mazedo 2016 (Vinho Verde) – Very nice Albariño, crisp, fresh, aromatic: Good aperitif, fine with fish.

Alvarinho Regueiro 2016 (Vinho Verde) – quite fine: rounder and fuller than the preceding wine, more dinner wine than aperitif. Excellent with a roasted orata (sea bream).

Jean-Paul Brun Beaujolais Blanc 2017 – excellent Beaujolais producer. Nice unwooded Chardonnay, with round fruit and great freshness. Very enjoyable.

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Classic Domaine de l’Ecu Muscadet 2016 – This is a Muscadet producer I normally like very much, but this bottle was a bit of a disappointment. Drunk by itself, it tasted too much of oak. Food wiped that out to some extent, but it never rose to the level of crispness and sharpness I had hoped for.

De Cranne Bordeaux Sec 2016 – Should have been really interesting (the blend is 40% Sauvignon gris, 25% Muscadelle, and 35% Semillon), but turned out to be somewhat coarse and disappointing.

Gavi di Gavi Podere Merlina 2017 – Not a big, round Gavi, but a lighter-bodied, mineral-inflected example, with a marked and enjoyable citrus bite. Fine as aperitif and with lighter fare.

Meyer-Fonné Alsace Gentil 2016 – A lovely Alsace wine, so floral that the initial taste seemed German, but it rounded beautifully with a pheasant pâté and roasted chicken thighs.

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Ribolla Gialla Ronchi di Cialla 2017 (Friuli Colli Orientali) – quite fine and characteristic. Stood up beautifully to a choucroute garnie, and I don’t know how much more you can ask of a white wine.

Rioja Blanca Real Rubio 2017 – A bit disappointing: old-fashioned, slightly oxidized white, not unpleasant but with no charm.

Timorasso Colli del Timorasso Ricci 2014 – A lovely light Timorasso, soft-bodied but with sufficient acid; floral aroma and delicate palate of dry pear and apricot. Very enjoyable.

Weszeli Grüner Veltliner Langenlois 2017 – Very good and characteristic Grüner, with nice balance, body, and minerality. Partnered quite nicely with Chinese dumplings and home-made egg foo young. Bright, light on palate.

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I grant you that this is not an earthshakingly exotic list of wines: Had I wished, I could have cast a much wider net. But these are the kind of wines I like, so this time around I stuck with them. Others, of course are free to be as experimental as they wish: There were 88 other wines on the list I was choosing from. Have fun!

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The Essential Guide to Italian Wine? Very Possibly

With its recently released 2019 edition, its fifth, Daniele Cernilli’s Essential Guide to Italian Wine has come of age. Published now in Italian, English, and German editions, well over 600 pages long (and well indexed), and reviewing 1,134 estates and 2,809 wines, the Essential Guide certainly covers the Italian wines that a North American consumer needs to know about – in fact, many more than are currently available in this hemisphere. But one can always hope.

Cernilli’s Guide is organized in the classic way, region by region, the producers listed alphabetically and awarded zero, one, two, or three stars based on their total production and track record; and selected individual wines scored on the now standard, to me infamous 100-point scale and their price range indicated – all useful information, handily presented.

For those who may not recognize his name, Daniele Cernilli is a central figure in the Italian wine world, a critic of major importance and great knowledge. He was one of the founders of Gambero Rosso and was deeply involved not only in its editing but also in the whole process of its evaluations, which by way of their one-, two-, and three-bicchieri awards became the most prestigious of all of Italy’s ranking systems.

When he and Gambero Rosso parted ways several years back, Cernilli reinvented himself as Doctor Wine and began creating his Essential Guide.

I shudder to think of the amount of work it took to bring it to its present condition, especially since Cernilli and his co-workers do not solicit samples or accept advertising from individual wineries. Instead they visit wineries, participate in regional and consorzio tastings, and even buy wines from the same sort of shops Italian consumers patronize. That last practice will send chills up the spines of wine magazine publishers on several continents.

Full disclosure: I’ve known Daniele Cernilli for at least two decades. Even fuller disclosure: We don’t always agree – in fact, we have sometimes been on opposite sides of a wine, a winery, or a wine style. But I don’t know anyone who knows the wines of Italy – all of Italy – in greater depth than he does, so I always take his evaluations seriously.

Here’s a representative example of both his knowledge and our occasional disagreements: The 2019 Guide’s White Wine of the Year award is shared by two wines:

• Fiano di Avellino Stilèma 2015, Mastroberardino, Campania
• Solo MM 15 2015, Vodopivec, Friuli Venezia Giulia.

Now, Fiano di Avellino is a justly esteemed grape variety, and Mastroberardino has long been one of its finest producers. Additionally, I happen to have tasted the Stilèma, and I agree totally with Cernilli’s judgment of its greatness. Here’s what he says of it in his entry:

Typical notes of flint, then fresh almond, wild herbs, elegant and extremely clear aromas. Agile and savory taste dominated by a magical freshness that gives elegance and drinkability to the wine. Smooth and long persistence. Great wine.

Stilèma is the first fruit of an experiment initiated by the late Antonio Mastroberardino to use materials derived from old and especially from pre-phylloxera vineyards (of which there are several in the Fiano zone) to back-engineer Fiano di Avellino to the sort of prime vines and field and cellar techniques that yielded the greatest wines of what we can call the “pre-industrial years” of Italian winemaking. As Antonio’s son Piero puts it:

We intend to evoke the style of vinification of the native vines of Irpinia (Greco, Fiano and Aglianico) as it took place between the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 70s of the twentieth century for Taurasi, and between the years 70 and 80 for the two noblest whites of Irpinia. It is, then, the style (or the Stilèma) of a family that interprets, over generations, the natural heritage of its territory, which makes it specific, as predestined to play a role in that land.

Noble purposes, and already producing noble results.

But what of Cernilli’s other choice for White Wine of the Year? Solo MM 15 2015 is a wine and Vodopivec a maker unknown to me. Cernilli describes winemaker Paolo Vodopivec as a meticulous and devoted craftsman, committed to the very localized traditions of the Friulian Carso and to experimentation with vinifying wines in amphorae. Of this wine, he says:

100% Vitovska grapes. Fermented in amphora for 6 months then aged in large casks. Unfiltered. Bright straw yellow color. Austere nose offering notes of sea breeze and aromatic herbs. The palate is expressive, briny and citrusy; powerful and fresh, vibrant, and with a unique personality. Wonderful wine.

That’s certainly detailed enough to prompt me to look for a bottle next time I’m in Italy, since I infer that it comes to this hemisphere only occasionally, in small quantities and at fairly high prices. A little research told me that Vitovska grapes are very localized within Friuli, had almost disappeared until rescued a decade or so ago by some devoted winemakers, and are now enjoying a small vogue in Italy. Worth a try? For sure. One of the year’s great white wines? Given my very uneven experiences with amphora-aged wines, I’d say that’s far less certain.

But the surprising (to me at least) award pairing gives evidence, if any is needed, of just how unconventional and eclectic Cernilli’s palate is, how plugged in to the Italian wine scene he is, and how informative and useful – indeed, what a simply interesting read – his Essential Guide is. You can count on one finger the number of annual wine guides I enjoy picking up and just browsing in: This is it.
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Since this will be my final post of 2018, there can be no better time to wish you all a very happy and a very vinous New Year – which I do, most heartily.  Cheers!

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Kobrand’s Tour d’Italia

A few weeks ago, I attended a seminar led by Kevin Zraly at the New York presentation of the importer Kobrand’s annual Tour d’Italia. This showing of Kobrand’s line of Italian brands was open to the wine trade and media. The seminar was available only to wine media members, and organized around a selection of Kobrand’s major Italian producers – Pighin (Friuli), Silvio Nardi (Tuscany), Michele Chiarlo (Piedmont), Nozzole (Tuscany), Sette Ponte (Tuscany), Masi (Veneto), and Medici Ermete (Emilia Romagna).

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Have you noticed that nothing is selected or organized any longer, but everything is curated? Well, the wine world isn’t exempt from that kind of verbal hyperventilation. What is called a seminar these days (and not just by Kobrand: It’s universal) is simply a panel of producers talking a bit about their estates and the representative wine they’re showing. And the wines at this event and the larger portfolio tasting of which it was part aren’t just fine wines or even great ones: These were “The Icons of Italian Wine.”  Icons is a vastly overworked word, but what puts this phrase over the top for me is the definite article: The icons – there can be no others. Give me a break, please.

OK, so I’m tilting at windmills again: I’ll dismount and get back to the wines. Which weren’t bad at all. Some not my style, but well made of their kind, true to their varieties and to the winemaker’s vision. Some very good, drinkable young and worthy of some aging. And at least one just remarkable: This was Masi’s Costasera Amarone Riserva 2009, which already tasted lush and lovely and which promises to be off-the-charts gorgeous in 20 years.
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The presentation of these wines was very honest and straightforward, lacking the kind of hyper-seriousness foreboded by “icons” and “seminar.” Kevin Zraly is an old pro at events like this: He kept things lively, interesting, and moving at a good pace; and he allowed plenty of time for questions – of which there were almost none. The few there were could have come from civilians, not wine professionals.

So my big disappointment at this event was not with the wines or their presentation, but with what we used to call the press corps and now have to denominate the media. They seemed totally content with the basic information being offered: no questions, no remarks on what they were tasting, no burrowing for technical data. That’s like writing an article entirely from the press handouts. It made me nostalgic for the guy who always used to ask about pH and reverse osmosis and then endlessly argue with the winemaker about the truth/accuracy of what he was saying. At least that guy cared, and he had some core of knowledge against which to weigh the winemaker’s claims. I got no sense of any of that in this session – which is seriously too bad, in many respects.

OK, I mounted my horse again. Apologies. In addition to the Amarone that I loved, I also particularly enjoyed

• Pighin’s 2017 Collio Pinot grigio, a totally unwooded wine that tasted richly of oyster shells and pears, the way Pinot grigio used to,
• Medici Ermete’s 2017 Concerto, a single-vineyard dry Lambrusco sparkler of seductive raspberry/strawberry charm,
• and Chiarlo’s 2013 Barolo Cerequio, a very elegant, balanced wine that the maker compared to the outstanding 2004 vintage.
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Also quite interesting was Sette Ponte’s 2016 Oreno, a Tuscan IGT Bordeaux blend (Merlot, Cabernet sauvignon, Petit verdot), a wine big in the mouth, rich and fat, with splendid Italian acidity, bigger than the Bordeaux wines it’s modeled on, with more fruit and more enlivening acid. I’m no fan of Bordeaux grapes in Italy, but this is a good wine.

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2017 Tre Bicchieri Winners

On the day of our heaviest snowstorm so far this year, the annual New York presentation and tasting of Tre Bicchieri award-winning wines took place just about half a mile from where I live.

So I slogged through the flying snow and the street-corner slush to take advantage of what I hoped would be a sparse crowd and a lot of idle winemakers, thus allowing me to actually taste some wines. For the first hour, I was right, and I did have the opportunity to taste some remarkable wines – but then the storm let up and the hordes came in, and my chances for thoughtful tasting ended. I’m happy for all those hard-working winemakers that the Tre Bicchieri tasting is such a popular event, but as a hard-working journalist I do most seriously wish there was some better way to experience and evaluate these wines.

But you’ve heard that lament from me before, and are probably quite tired of it now. Besides, the key thing about this particular tasting is how many top-flight Italian wines it gathers in one room, and I don’t want to let the circumstances of the tasting obscure that. My palate and the collective palate of the Tre Bicchieri judges don’t always agree 100%, but those guys sure get an awful lot right, so a collection of almost 200 top-ranked wines amounts to an event to pay serious attention to, no matter how many people you have to elbow aside to do it.

Not that even under the best circumstances I could manage to taste all 200 in one afternoon, but I did my best to get to a reasonable assortment of old-favorite, regular prize winners and some of the new kids on the block. I was impressed by everything I tasted, without exception. I don’t get the chance to say that often, so let me repeat it: Every single wine I tasted that snowy afternoon deserved its Tre Bicchieri designation. Here are the ones I tried: first reds, then whites.

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From Basilicata

Re Manfredi’s Aglianico del Vulture Manfredi 2013, a wonderful example of a grape I love

From Piedmont

Elvio Cogno’s Barolo Bricco Pernice 2011, another masterpiece from winemaker Valter Fissore

Bruno Giacosa’s Barbaresco Asili Riserva 2011, one of Barbaresco’s finest crus, beautifully rendered

Elio Grasso’s Barolo Ginestra Casa Maté 2012, benchmark Barolo, as always from this estate

Giacomo Fenocchio’s Barolo Bussia 90 Dì Riserva 2010, macerated 90 days on the skins, with consequent depth and intensity

Oddero’s Barolo Bussia Vigneto Mondoca Riserva 2010, a classic Barolo of a great vintage

Vietti’s Barolo Ravera 2012, a lovely, beautifully balanced wine with potentially great longevity (and I also liked Vietti’s very nice but not prize-winning Barbera d’Asti La Crena 2013)

From Sicily

Palari’s Faro Palari 2012, year after year the best red wine made in Sicily, in my opinion (and the 2012 Rosso del Soprano is right on its tail in quality: It got Due Bicchieri)

Planeta’s Cerasuolo di Vittoria Classico Dorilli 2014, a lovely light-bodied wine, refreshing and vigorous

From Tuscany

Boscarelli’s Vino Nobile di Montepulciano Il Nocio 2012, as always an elegant, complex wine

Castellare di Castellina’s I Sodi di San Niccolò 2012, graceful and lovely Sangiovese from winemaker Alessandro Cellai

Castello di Volpaia’s Chianti Classico Riserva 2013, medium-bodied, perfectly balanced, with the elegance that always marks Volpaia

Il Marroneto’s Brunello Madonna delle Grazie 2011, as always from this remarkable cru and maker, a very great wine

Mastroianni’s Brunello Vigneto Schiena d’Asino 2010, maybe the best Tuscan wine at this gathering of greats

Ricasoli’s Chianti Classico Gran Selezione Colledilà 2013, a luscious, juicy wine that drinks far too easily

Terenzi’s Morellino di Scansano Madrechiesa Riserva 2013, very young Sangiovese, with this maker’s trademark balance and elegance

From the Veneto

Allegrini’s Amarone 2012, already big and textured

Bertani’s Amarone 2008 and 2009, both still young and evolving, with great depth and the promise of decades of life

Masi’s Amarone Vaio Armaron Serègo Alighieri 2011, a stunning wine from a great site

Speri’s Amarone Vigneto Monte Sant’ Urbano 2012, another fine example of what seems to be a great year for Amarone

Tenuta Sant’Antonio’s Amarone Campo dei Gigli 2012, an infant Hercules

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I doubt anyone is surprised by the fact that Italy is producing so many fine red wines, but for me the best news of the day was how superior so many white wines showed themselves to be. Every single one I tasted had distinct varietal flavors joined to genuine goût de terroir. This for me was the most fun of the afternoon, and I kept switching from big reds to whites of every kind to keep my palate fresh. (It worked for a couple of hours, then I gave out.)

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From Alto Adige

Abbazia di Novacella’s Valle Isarco Sylvaner Praepositus 2015, a stunning, fresh, and vigorous wine from a grape of usually no great distinction, this year slightly better than the Abbazia’s normally superb Kerner Praepositus

Produttori San Michele Appiano’s Pinot Grigio St. Valentin 2014, high-altitude, rounder than usual PG – a real dinner wine

Produttori Valle Isarco’s Sylvaner Aristos 2015 – this seems to have been Sylvaner’s year; a lovely, lively wine

From Campania

Marisa Cuomo’s Costa d’Amalfi Furore Bianco 2015, a lovely, fragrant dinner wine coaxed from postage stamp-sized terraced vineyards along the steep Amalfi coast

Fontanavecchia’s Falanghina del Sannio Taburno 2015, lovely, characteristic Falanghina, invigorating and lively

Pietracupa’s Greco di Tufo 2015, medium-bodied and deeply flavored, with strong mineral accents, a fine wine, almost as good, in my opinion, as the same maker’s Fiano di Avellino, which didn’t get Tre Bicchieri

From Friuli Venezia Giulia

Livio Felluga’s Bianco Illivio 2014, a masterful blend of Pinot bianco, Chardonnay, and the native Picolit, sapid and intriguing

Primosic’s Collio Ribolla Gialla di Oslavia Riserva 2012, one of the briefly fashionable orange wines, but better than simple fashion: intense, distinctive, rich, and with the right food incomparable

Russiz Superiore’s Collio Friulano 2015, a lovely medium-bodied, deeply flavored (hints of almond) example of Friuli’s native grape

Torre Rosazza’s Pinot Grigio 2015, what PG used to be, fresh, vigorous, almost rambunctious

From Lazio

Casale del Giglio’s Antium Bellone 2015, distinctive, flavorful wine from an almost disappeared variety that merits preservation (Charles Scicolone has written about this estate here)

From the Marches

Cocci Grifoni’s Offida Pecorino Guido Cocci Grifoni 2013, a lovely wine from a variety that had been in danger of disappearing

Velenosi’s Offida Pecorino Rêve 2014, another fine example of the same grape variety, medium-bodied and mouth-filling; very enjoyable

From Sardinia

Vigne Surrau’s Vermentino di Gallura Superiore Sciala 2015, textbook Vermentino, fresh and bracing

From Sicily

Cusumano’s Etna Bianca Alta Mora 2014, capturing beautifully the volcanic nuances of Etna’s slopes

Tasca d’Almerita’s Sicilia Carricante Buonora Tascante 2015, a very characteristic version of Etna’s great white grape

From the Veneto

Pieropan’s Soave Classico La Rocca 2014, always the finest cru from this consistently great producer

Graziano Prà’s Soave Classico Staforte 2014, one of many excellent cru Soaves from this producer, all fresh, enjoyable and very age-worthy

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There were many more wines to taste, but I had about reached my limit for tasting accurately and for elbowing, so I trudged my way back home through the remnants of the snow storm. I wish I had had the capacity for more, because I’m sure there were more discoveries to be made and reported on. Ars longa, vita brevis. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Non sum qualis eram, etc. You get the idea: I’d do more for you if I could, but . . .

 

 

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Another Name to Remember: Montcalm

Autumn weather and the autumn wine season have arrived, and a busy time it’s being. Among the flurry of events I’ve been attending, I particularly enjoyed the tasting offered by Montcalm Wine Importers, a smallish New York-based firm that, despite the vaguely French-sounding name, is building a significant portfolio of first-rate Italian wines.

That, I found out, is not accidental, because Montcalm turns out to be the wine importing arm of Genagricola, which in turn is the agricultural arm – including, of course, viti- and viniculture – of one of the largest Italian insurance firms. Originally Montcalm seems to have been set up to distribute Genagricola’s own products here in the States, but it has grown well beyond that mission by acquiring some excellent small estates from all over Italy. One lovely fall afternoon in mid-September, I – along with several other wine journalists and a good many knowledgeable retailers and sommeliers – had the chance to taste through Montcalm’s line.

For sure, someone with an excellent palate is choosing its wines. Their range is pretty much geographically complete, from Sicily right up to Piemonte and the Veneto, with a fine roster of estates all along the trail. Some names will be very familiar to the US market – Poderi Colla, for instance, about which I posted just a while back. Some are not as well known here as they deserve to be: Cennatoio, for instance, is a first-rate Chianti Classico maker.

A good many of Genagricola’s own wines fall into the latter category. They come from properties all over Italy and each bears its own name, so you may well have already tasted some of these without realizing they were part of a larger enterprise. These include far too many wines for me to comment on in this post, but here are a few I found above-average interesting:

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Solonio Cesanese Lazio IGP Ponte Loreto
Cesanese is the Lazio region’s native red grape, and vintners there are finally starting to exploit its potential. Examples remain all too scarce here in the States.

Poggiobello Friuli Ribolla Gialla
Ribolla gialla is another variety that remains relatively rare here. It makes a substantial and distinctive dinner wine – definitely not a cocktail sipper.

Tenuta Sant’Anna Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso
I don’t want to give the impression that Genagricola specializes in only esoteric varieties, but the firm’s growers do make conscious efforts to preserve and propagate native varieties. Refosco is a Friulian native – one of the few native red varieties cultivated there – and another wine deserving of a much wider audience.
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Among the independent wineries that Montcalm imports, a few really stood out for me, so I’ll just briefly tally them here.

Sant’Agata
A Piedmont estate, producing good Barbera d’Asti and the much less common Ruché, a red variety of potential distinction. I tasted both the 2013 Ruché di Castagnole Monferrato “Na’ Vota” and the 2010 “Pronobis.” Both were very fine, rich, and intense, characteristically smelling and tasting of chestnuts – excellent examples of yet another grape variety that deserves more attention.

Poderi Colla
A classic Alba-area estate, making all the zone’s classic wines: Dolcetto, Nebbiolo d’Alba, Barbaresco, Barolo, and the superb blend of Dolcetto and Nebbiolo, “Bricco del Drago.”

Manzone
Another Piedmont estate, making pretty examples of Dolcetto d’Alba, Barbera d’Alba, and Nebbiolo Langhe. The stars of its show are three Barolo crus: Bricat, Castelletto, and Gramolere.

Lunae
This is a Ligurian winery that produces really lovely Vermentino, especially its Black Label. It also makes a very interesting and unusual red wine, Colli di Luni Rosso DOC “Niccoló V.” A blend of 70% Sangiovese, 15% Merlot, and 15% of the local Pollera Nera, the 2010 I tasted drank all too easily and was just beginning to show what promises to be interesting complexity.

Cavalierino
A certified organic winery headquartered in Montepulciano. Its Rosso di Montepulciano was delightful, soft, with a deeply Sangiovese character. The Vino Nobile di Montepulciano was an excellent example of the breed, elegant and pleasing.

Il Marroneto 
This is a brilliant Brunello estate, which seems never to make a wine less than fine. All I tasted were even better than that – the 2011 Rosso di Montalcino, the 2009, 2010, and 2011 Brunellos, and most of all the infant but already intense 2011 Brunello di Montalcino “Madonna delle Grazie.”

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I didn’t get to taste everything that afternoon, and a few wineries that I missed I very much regret. Le Caniette, for instance, a Marche winery, makes whites from the indigenous (and reviving) grapes Passerina and Pecorino that I would have liked to have tasted. So too the Pecorino from the fine Abruzzo estate Illuminati, the red Negroamaro from the Puglia winery Apollonio, and the Etna red and white from the Sicilian Vivera. But you can’t – or at least I can’t – do everything. As the man says, Ars longa, vita brevis.

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