A Miscellany of Mature Red and White Wines

Diane and I are in the process of bringing home the wines that we have stored off-premises for many years. Just having those goodies nearby has prompted me to – shall we say? — look into them, just to see how they’re doing. So far I have been very happy with the results, so here is a kind of interim report on some of the cellar gems whose corks I’ve pulled recently.
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Luis Pato Quinto do Moinho 2000
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This is a big, big, big wine! Coffee and currants in the aroma were followed by a rush of semi-soft tannins, black currants, berries, and coffee in the mouth. This single-vineyard Baga feels strikingly larger than its modest 12.5% alcohol would indicate. It’s not hot, but mouth-filling and complex, with a lingering coffee/berry finish – in all, a fine, distinctive wine. It went nicely with a risotto of mushrooms, onions, and Spanish chorizo. The cheese course (Pont l’Eveque and Taleggio) brought up all the wine’s sweet fruit.

Vinified from 100% Baga, an indigenous Portuguese grape, and by one of Portugal’s most renowned winemakers, Luis Pato, it seems to have decades yet in front of it. It strikes me as a great wine in all respects, and markedly different in flavor and accent from Spanish, French, or Italian reds: A strong reminder that I must pay more attention to the wines of Portugal.
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Col d’Orcia Brunello di Montalcino 2006
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As its name implies, Col d’Orcia sits above the Orcia river, in the extreme southwest corner of the Brunello zone. Its 108 hectares of Sangiovese grosso vines consistently yield one of the best Brunellos of the zone, and this one is no exception. It opened with a rich, vinous, cherry-and-earth nose. On the palate it felt big but soft and tasted of black cherry and tar/tobacco, very deep, with a long finish.

This was an excellent wine, very elegant and balanced, as I’ve come to expect from Col d’Orcia. Its fruit was very rich, almost sweet, combining youthful zest with mature depth. Clearly, a wine to enjoy now and for at least the next ten years: Col d’Orcia just seems to go from strength to strength.
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Sartori Amarone Corte Bra 2004
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Sartori is a third-generation, family-run winery. Its vineyards are in the heart of the Valpolicella zone, and it handles its vines and grapes in a very traditional manner, resulting in Amarones of great character. This one had an almost-Port-like aroma, big with dried fruits. On the palate, it showed soft and velvety, with fully mature and deep fruit flavors. Concentrated black plums predominated, but different layers showed as it opened in the glass or followed a bite of braised duck or vegetable.

True to Amarone style, this was a huge wine, but well-mannered. As it grew and grew in the glass, I found my wine-speak failing me, and all I could think of to say was “What an incredibly winey wine!”  When I lose language, you know the wine is amazing.
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Three great red wines. Now, I realize that August isn’t the ideal time to be writing about serious red wines. But as a concession to the season, I also opened some older bottles of white wine – including one you probably wouldn’t expect.
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Fontana Candida Frascati Luna Mater 2012
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This was lovely, fully live and fully mature: no primary fruit flavors, but plenty of mature ones — guava, spiced pear, mace, and more. It showed wonderful balance and smooth, mouth-filling flavor, plus a long, sapid, refreshingly acid finish of dried white fruits. As fine a mature white wine as one can imagine, it was delightful with olive bread and big cheeses.

Who knew Frascati was capable of this?  I at least should have: I’ve been preaching the gospel of the quality and longevity of Italian white wines for a long time, and I should have realized that the grapes that go into Frascati – Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia – undistinguished as those may seem to be, are just as capable of yielding top-flight, long-lived wines as any other Italian white grape, when they are selected and treated with respect and care. A bottle like this one is certainly proof of that.
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Paumanok Minimalist Chenin Blanc 2014
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I had wrongly listed this wine in my storage sheets as Paumanok’s basic Chenin Blanc 2019, and so, without looking very closely at the bottle, I chilled it and served it with a very simple meal – which it totally blew away. I hope this was just my ordinary befuddlement and not the first sign of senile dementia.

On behalf of the soundness of my senses, I can say that from the first sip I realized this was a special wine – as, at last, an attentive look at the label quickly confirmed. Paumanok Vineyard’s Minimalist wines are vinified from specially selected lots of grapes, often left a little longer on the vines to attain complete ripeness, and then handled minimally in the cellar so that in the bottle they show the grapes and the soil, not the winemaking.

This bottle was maturing beautifully but still quite fresh, with classic Chenin fruit, dry and chalky yet still floral and hinting variously of apple and especially pear: a wonderful wine from Long Island’s North Fork, which perfectly captures the essence of Chenin Blanc. I’d guess it has years of life still before it. In my opinion, with Chenin Blanc, Paumanok does as well as or better than any American winery on either coast. My erroneous listing betrayed me into an unexpected treat. Would that all my mistakes were so lucky.
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Benanti Etna Bianco Superiore Pietra Marina 2012
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Benanti is a leader in fine Etna wines. The family firm has been totally committed to quality production on Etna for decades now, from long before Etna became celebrated and fashionable. For many of those years, Benanti’s winemaker was the now universally acclaimed Salvo Foti, and he consistently drew the best from the fine properties that Benanti farmed.

Pietra Marina is one of the most important of those. 800 meters up the eastern slope of Etna, planted entirely to Carricante, the indigenous white grape of the volcanic zone, Pietra Marina’s grapes yield juice of delicious concentration, capable of long life and steady maturation. This exemplary bottle was just plain lovely, mineral and fresh and bracing. It started with a beautiful aroma of dried pears and little hints of apricot. That followed through on the palate with some apple joining the fruit chorus, all buttressed by a tingling minerality, and all held in a wonderful balance of fruit and acid. For all the richness of its flavors, it was a restrained wine, not at all aggressive or assertive, but completely welcoming. I kept thinking as I drank it that I would really like to taste it alongside a grilled fresh porcini cap – hard to find here in New York, but maybe worth the flight to Sicily for.

Just for the record: Pietra Marina is capable of much greater aging than this 11-year-old. I’ve been lucky enough, during several visits to Benanti, to taste 20- and 23-year-olds that were totally fresh and live and as lovely as this bottle. Great terroir, great variety, great care, and great talent: it all makes a very great wine.

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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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White Wine Weather

By now it’s news to no one that white wine weather has arrived. Heat and humidity reign here in the Northeast, and in other parts of the US the weather is much worse, running from extreme drought to extreme storms. The last are probably not alleviated by white wine, but otherwise, summer heat can always be countered with a chill, pale glass of a dry, lightly fruity, refreshing white. Today, I’m celebrating two that help me through the dog days: one from the north of Italy, Abbazia di Novacella’s Kerner, and one from the south, Salvo Foti’s Etna Bianco Aurora.
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Abbazia di Novacella Kerner
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The Abbazia di Novacella may be the northernmost winery in Italy, seated up at the top of the Adige Valley in what used to be the German Sud Tirol. It is also a working monastery and a tourist site of some repute, with gorgeous baroque buildings and libraries, and lovely mountain views. My geography is a little weak, so I’m not sure whether those mountains count as eastern Alps or western Dolomites, but they are impressively high, and the Abbey’s vineyards lie on their lower slopes.

The grape Kerner is hardly a household name, even among ampelographers. The variety was created in Germany in 1929 from a deliberate cross between Riesling and the variety known in Italy as Schiava grossa (Vernatsch in German). At one time Kerner was widely planted in Germany, but those acres have dwindled, and the German-speaking territories of what is now Italy seem to be its last stronghold. It has never had a large presence on the American market, but I can speak from sorry experience when I tell you that there currently seem to be several very mediocre bottlings of Kerner available, so watch out.

The Abbazia’s version is a very long way from mediocre: Light-bodied and charming, with a little zing of Riesling fruit and plenty of minerality from those mountain soils, it’s a reliably refreshing warm weather drink, versatile with any number of foods. For instance, it dotes – as do I – on prosciutto and figs, and works just as happily with shellfish and white-fleshed fish – the kind of foods we all eat more and more of as the solstice passes and the warm weather stays.

Incidentally – and because it would be criminal of me not to mention this – the Abbazia’s premium version of Kerner, Kerner Praepositus, is one of Italy’s great white wines. It has more heft than the “simple” bottling, but no less charm. Neither version is expensive, especially not for their quality: Careful shopping can find you Kerner for around $20, Kerner Praepositus sometimes under $40.
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Salvo Foti Etna Bianco Aurora
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Aurora presents a very different story. It grows on mountain slopes too, but those of an active volcano, Etna, in Sicily, just about as far south as you can get within Italy’s borders. It’s made by Salvo Foti, one of Etna’s leading exponents. For years, he was the head winemaker for Benanti, a pioneer of Etna viticulture and champion of its indigenous varieties. Aurora is his fantasy name for a blend of 90% Carricante and 10% Minella, both traditional varieties in that corner of Sicily but neither very widely grown – Minella hardly at all – anywhere else.

Aurora is a bigger wine than Kerner, and a touch more expensive – but it is every bit as fruit-and-mineral-propelled. Its flavor is complex and its fuller body indicates a primary role as a dinner wine. As such, it is superb, adapting to everything from fish and shellfish through chicken, pork, and veal.

I have also found that slowly sipping a glass of Aurora while cooling down after too much time in the sun is an intensely pleasurable experience, so I wouldn’t hesitate to rank it also in that exalted Italian category of vino da meditazione. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that it’s always worth your attention, and I’m happy to drink it anywhere, anytime.
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Let the heat waves come: I’m ready for them.

 

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