Beware of Eruptions!

The recent volcanic eruption in Iceland has caught the news accompanied by some spectacular pictures.  But Europe has several other active volcanos, notably Sicily’s Mount Etna, that erupts so often, it rarely makes the headlines.  So why, with the constant risk of destruction, would anyone want to plant vineyards on Etna’s slopes?  One, very understandable, reason is, if you grew up there and see it as ‘your’ land, but the area is increasingly attracting interest from non-locals who know of the potential of the thin layer of volcanic ash containing numerous nutrients that the eruptions leave behind.  Add to this Sicily’s Mediterranean climate and the chance of planting vineyards high on the volcano’s slopes.  What could be better?  Just forget the chance of eruptions!

I opened a bottle of a local red, Torre Mora’s Cauru Etna Rosso, recently (Majestic Wines, £15.99 when bought as part of their ‘mix 6’ deal).  Typical of Italian wines, there wasn’t much on the nose but, by contrast the palate was intense and vibrant.  Lovely clean fruit flavours – cherries and damsons in particular – before a long, herby finish.  The main grape variety here is the native Nerello Mascalese and, although the wine has had 3 months maturing in large oak barrels, there is no obvious oak influence, just a beautifully fruit-forward red wine. 

Made from vines situated on the slopes of the volcano between 650 and 700 metres above sea level (just over 2000 feet), the climate here is cooler and with a large difference between day- and night-time temperatures.  This preserves the freshness and acidity in the wine and makes it very food-friendly.  We paired it with some marinated lamb and the subtly bitter damson flavour in the wine cut any richness or fattiness of the meat perfectly.

Sicily produces some delicious wines in a range of styles and, indeed, bottles labelled ‘Etna Rosso’ can vary considerably but for a fresh, fruity red, this is excellent value for the money you pay.

Avoid the Trap

Wine buying is full of traps for the unwary.  Take Pouilly Fumé and Pouilly Fuissé for example.  Easy to confuse but two very different wines, one a Loire Sauvignon, the other a Chardonnay from Burgundy.  Or, how about Chinon and Chenin: a French wine region and a white grape variety respectively.  Talking about grape varieties, the same one can have different names depending on where it is growing – Syrah/Shiraz is just one of many examples of that.  And even wines with the same name can taste very differently to one another; the familiar Côtes du Rhône can come from a vast area of vineyards and producers can blend from more than 20 grape varieties depending on their preference – so, if you find one you like, stay with it, others may not be to your taste!

But perhaps the prize for the biggest trap of all goes to Montepulciano.  The same name is both a red grape variety, grown mainly in Eastern Italy (you may know the easy drinking fruity red Montepulciano d’Abruzzo) and a village in Tuscany which, just to add to the confusion, uses an entirely different grape for its famous wine.  The austere and ageworthy red Vino Nobile di Montepulciano is made from the Sangiovese variety, beloved of devotees to Chianti. 

The village of Montepulciano also makes a 2^nd, more approachable (and significantly cheaper!) red wine, also using Sangiovese and we opened a bottle recently.  Duca di Saragnano’s Rosso di Montepulciano (DBM Wines, £11.99) is deeply coloured with berry fruits and spice on the nose.  The palate is quite intense and rich with flavours more reminiscent of dried fruits and sweet spices leading to a long, dry finish.  The well-integrated tannins of the 2021 vintage indicate drinking now or in the next year or so, rather than a wine for keeping.  Interestingly, the label suggested pairing with roasted white meats – we decided on braised lamb shanks instead, which my wife and I think worked really well.

So, next time you see ‘Montepulciano’, look very carefully at the other words on the label – it’s one of the easiest traps to fall into and if you buy the wrong one, you’ll open a very different wine to the one you were expecting.

Italy Comes to Bath

I have been to many wine tastings over the years.  But, for me, food and wine are meant to go together, so the tastings I enjoy the most – and get the most from – are almost always when the wines are shown as part of a dinner, accompanying well-chosen dishes.  A short trip across to Bath recently delivered this to perfection when our favourite restaurant in the city, La Terra, hosted an evening of wines from Umani Ronchi served alongside some of their own delightful dishes.

Umani Ronchi have extensive vineyards in the eastern Italian regions of Abruzzo and Marche and specialise in wines made from native local grape varieties, principally Verdicchio and Montepulciano.  After a welcoming glass of fizz, we settled down to a delicate smoked salmon mousse with generous glasses of Casal Di Serra Verdicchio alongside.  This is, perhaps, Umani Ronchi’s best-known wine – fresh and herby with some richness from brief lees ageing but completely unoaked.

In true Italian fashion, a pasta course, a raviolo filled with meltingly tender duck leg, followed.  I might have teamed this with a red, but instead we had another Verdicchio, this one from old vines and matured in old concrete vats, rather than stainless steel.  Softer and more savoury than the first and an interesting match.

Our one red of the night, Cúmaro Rosso Conero, a 100% Montelpulciano aged for 12 months in old oak barrels, was the ideal partner for the main course guinea fowl – the breast roasted and the leg meat slow cooked in a small pie.  An innovative, delicious dish and one that showed off the wine really well.

All too soon, we arrived at our final pairing.  Dessert was an orange posset with white chocolate.  I don’t recall tasting many sweet wines from this area but Umani Ronchi produced a botrytised Sauvignon, Maximo, from the Marche region.  Grown on north facing vineyards with high humidity, this had all the intense marmalade flavours that come from nobly rotted grapes and, of course, the link with the orange of the pudding was marked.

A wonderful evening where food, wine and the convivial atmosphere we always find at La Terra all came together perfectly.

Back to the Past!

Fashions in wine come and go.  When I began drinking wine (many years ago!), German wines like Liebfraumilch were everywhere; not so now.  Then it was Chardonnay with more and more oak – a trend happily reversed.  After that we had a move towards higher alcohol levels driven, in part, by global warming.  Now, growers are looking for cooler sites and picking their grapes earlier, aiming for fresher, better-balanced wines.  So, what’s the latest fashion?  It’s back to the past!

Wines have been fermented and aged in amphorae – clay vessels (see picture left taken in Burgundy) – for thousands of years.  The Romans used them and many wines from Georgia, thought to be the ancient birthplace of wine, are still being made in them (although they call them ‘qvevri’).  But, until fairly recently, most producers chose between using oak barrels to gain added complexity in their wine or stainless steel tanks to emphasise the pure fruit characteristics.  Yet could clay amphorae be a way of getting both?  The Tuscan producer, Piccini, a family run concern now into its 4^th generation, seem to think so.  But amphorae are not allowed under the Chianti DOC rules, so Piccini market this wine as an IGT Toscana instead.

Histrio Anfora (Majestic, a real bargain at £10.99) is a medium-bodied red featuring a blend of 2 native Tuscan grape varieties, Sangiovese and Malvasia Nera. It spends 12 weeks maturing in amphorae, which allow in a little oxygen to soften the wine in the same way that oak barrels do, but without imparting any oak flavour.  As a result, lovely bright cherry and red-berry flavours and delicate floral aromas show through alongside some savoury, spicy hints. We drank the 2020 vintage and there’s still quite a bit of tannin there; I guess that this will integrate and the wine will be even better in a year or two’s time.  Pair it with lamb or duck legs or, perhaps, a good hard cheese.

And look out for other fashionable wines that go back to the past!

The Greek Grape

We recently enjoyed a bottle of Triplica’s Greco di Tufo.  The name of the grape variety, ‘Greco’, translates to ‘Greek’.  So where do you think our wine came from (apart from Majestic Wines, of course, a great buy for £9.99)?  If you gave the obvious answer – Greece – then think again.  It’s from the southern Italian region of Campania, in the volcanic hills above Naples where, according to the ‘Oxford Companion to Wine’ (aka the wine lover’s bible), almost all of the roughly 1000 hectares (2500 acres) of Greco planted in the world can be found.

So, if it’s an Italian variety, why call the grape ‘Greek’?  For the answer, you need to go back more than 2500 years, when the ancient Greeks were a major trading power and made the short hop across the Ionian Sea to land in southern Italy.  Naturally, they wanted familiar tipples and so brought their native grapes with them – among them, a variety that, over the years, has become the grape we now know as Greco.  Strangely, there seems to be no evidence of the same variety in modern Greece.

The wine itself may come as a surprise to those who expect the Mediterranean climate to produce full-bodied, ripe, high alcohol wines.  This is not like that at all.  The volcanic soils and the altitude at which the grapes are grown in the foothills of the Avellino Hills have resulted in a wine with a delicate pale straw colour with hints of green, fresh herbs, red apples and ripe pears on the nose and palate and a refreshing crisp acidity. Unoaked and beautifully balanced, perhaps my only criticism is that it finishes slightly short (but you can’t have everything for under £10).

Not a wine for keeping but enjoy now, either on its own or with light pasta dishes, a risotto or, if the weather stays as it has been for the first few days of September, a salad or even a picnic.

Tasting Northern Italy

Recently, I was asked to run a tasting on the wines of Northern Italy.  Not usually a popular subject, but I was more than happy to agree.  Even allowing for the fact that one of the country’s signature grape varieties, Sangiovese, and the wines of major regions such as Tuscany, Campania and Puglia and the islands of Sicily and Sardinia would all be out of bounds, there was, still, so much to choose from.

Alto Adige, in the foothills of the Dolomites, provided a good start with Stella Alpina’s crisp, appley Pinot Grigio (£10.99 – bought from Majestic, as were all the other wines in this tasting).  Pinot Grigio is quite a temperamental variety but, when yields are kept low, as here, it can produce lovely refreshing wines.  To follow, Roberto Sarotto’s Gavi (£12.99) and Inama’s Soave Classico (£14.99) were both fuller and richer – the latter showing how good Soave can be when well handled (many of the best examples have the word ‘Classico’ on the label).

Moving on, we quickly discovered that Italian reds, with their distinct acidity and firmer tannins, usually need food to show at their best.  Two from the Piedmont region divided opinions:  De Forville’s Barbera d’Alba’s intense red fruits (£12.99) attracting one of the tasters while the same producer’s leaner, more structured Nebbiolo (£9.99) was the choice of others.  Both wines would benefit from decanting if drinking soon or would happily keep another 2 or 3 years at least.

The same comment applies to our final wine: Veneti’s Valpolicella Ripasso (£15.99).  Ripasso is a winemaking technique whereby young Valpolicella is passed over the spent lees of an Amarone wine – one that has been made using sun-dried grapes to intensify the sugars and create a richer, more powerful and alcoholic style.  This ‘re-passing’ transforms the young wine and gives shades of an Amarone, but at a fraction of the price.  The full-bodied, but slightly sweeter style of this bottle even appealed to one of the group who, until then, had not found the reds to his taste.

That, of course, is the strength of a wine tasting: the opportunity to taste wines that you might not do otherwise and, hopefully, find new favourites.

A Birthday Celebration

It was my birthday recently and my wife and I chose to celebrate at a small Italian restaurant in Bath – taking the bus, of course, no drinking and driving for us.

The restaurant – La Terra (www.laterra.co.uk) looks nothing special from the outside but, inside, we were welcomed with knowledgeable and attentive service and Italian food at its best.  Quality ingredients, imaginatively cooked and beautifully served – just look at our main courses, plaice fillets served on tiny pasta shells with green beans and a red pepper sauce.  And they tasted as delicious as they looked. 

But, for me, a good wine list is as important in a restaurant as good food.  And, at La Terra, I found one of the best selections of Italian wines I have seen anywhere outside Italy!  I had little difficulty choosing Pieropan’s La Rocca Soave, a long-standing favourite of ours, to go with our fishy mains, but I noticed that, for those for whom Italian wine was more of a mystery, the staff were always around to offer helpful suggestions.

When it came to dessert time, my thoughts turned to a sweet wine.  Our server mentioned that they had a ‘passito from Sicily’ and, when I asked a little more about it before deciding, a taste was promptly offered to help me make up my mind – a smart move as we each had a glass.

Passito is a special kind of sweet wine and a speciality in Italy.  Grapes are harvested late in the season when they are very ripe and then dried on racks, sometimes in the open air, sometimes inside in airy rooms.  The drying process further concentrates the sugar in the berries (already high because of the late picking) so that, when the yeast is added for the fermentation, it struggles to work in the intensely sweet environment and only converts some of the sugar to alcohol, leaving a delightful, quite viscous, wine.  This one, by Paolini, had lovely hints of apricots and honey and enough balancing acidity to make the wine refreshing.  It was also an excellent pairing with our scrumptious desserts: a lavender-infused panna cotta and a pineapple posset with chocolate chips.

What more could we ask from a celebration meal?

All on the Label

Depending on your artistic point of view, you might describe the label on the bottle in the picture as minimalist and classy or simple and easy to ignore.  Either way, it contains everything you need to know about the wine inside – provided you know how to interpret it. 

Let’s start at the top.  Verdicchio (pronounced Ver-dicky-O with the emphasis on the middle syllable) is one of Italy’s best native white grape varieties.  Most widely planted in the Marche region in the east of the country, it’s also found further north around Lake Garda where it’s used for one of my favourite whites, Lugana, and also added to some of the wines of Soave. Below that are the words ‘dei Castelli di Jesi’.  Both ‘dei’ and ‘di’ mean ‘of’ or ‘from’ and you’ll often see them on Italian labels.  In this case, it tells you that the wine is from an area known as ‘the Castle of Jesus’ which is, as the words in red confirm, a DOC – the Italian equivalent of the French Appellation Contrôlée.  ‘Classico’ tells you that the wine is made from grapes grown in the original and best part of the DOC and ‘superiore’, in this case, means that lower yields were used, giving more intensity to the wine.  Finally, you have the name of the producer, Tenute Pieralisi, who is an Azienda Agricola – someone who grows their own grapes and makes the wine on their own property.  There’s a useful back label, too, but we won’t go into that now!

So, lots of information on a label that, at first, looks quite simple.  But what about the wine itself?  As with many Italian wines, there’s not much to greet you on the nose but, once you taste it, there are lovely clean, fresh citrus flavours – grapefruit and lime – yet the wine isn’t quite bone dry; some late harvested grapes have been included in the ferment giving an extra richness and complexity before a long, dry finish. 

I bought Tenute Pieralisi’s Verdicchio from the Wine Society and, at £10.50, it’s an absolute bargain.

A Tricky Match

I’ve mentioned before in Bristol Wine Blog that Italy – and the south of that country in particular – is an excellent source of good value and very drinkable wines.  The warm Mediterranean climate that the area enjoys might suggest that the focus would be on reds and there are certainly some attractive examples to be found there.  But the hilly areas inland from Naples are a little cooler and for me, produce the best wines of the area: fresh, characterful whites from high quality native varieties such as Greco, Fiano and Falanghina.  I’ve noticed Fiano among some supermarkets’ premium own-label wines and it’s worth a try if you see one but, as none of these grapes is especially well known or fashionable, prices anywhere should be quite reasonable.

Italian wines are generally very food-friendly and are often my first choice to pair with possibly tricky food flavours.  And a Skate wing gently poached and served with a sauce involving orange and lime juices, fresh ginger and lemon grass has enough tricky flavours to defeat many wines; the citrus juices provide both a sweetness and a sharpness and the ginger and lemon grass bring in aromatic oriental flavours.  Added to which, skate is quite a robust fish and so the wine needs to be similarly full-flavoured.

Enter Calvese’s ‘La Gusca’ Falanghina (DBM Wines, £12.99) from vineyards in the Sannio region north-east of Naples.  A lovely, rich, mouth-coating white, completely unoaked with fresh flavours of lemon- and lime-peel that perfectly complemented the dish and with just enough weight from the 13.5% alcohol to neither overpower the food nor be overpowered by it.  All in all, an ideal pairing for a dish that might have proved difficult to match, although the wine was so delicious on its own as an aperitif, my wife and I were at risk of drinking it all before we even started our meal!

Italy for Value

Many who enjoy their wine simply ignore Italy; ‘it’s too complicated’, ‘too many unpronounceable names’, ‘too many unfamiliar grape varieties’ are just a few of the comments I’m familiar with – and those are from consumers who have actually thought about Italian wines.  Sadly, many don’t even get that far.  And those that do, usually look to the famous names like Chianti and Barolo, where prices reflect familiarity (and dare I say it, not always quality).

But look further afield and Italy is an excellent source of good value and very drinkable wines.  The South (especially Puglia and the hills above Naples) and the islands of Sicily and Sardinia are particularly worth considering – see some of my earlier blogs for recommendations – but, perhaps even less well-known are the regions overlooking the Adriatic coast.

Marche is home to delicious dry, herby whites made from the local Verdicchio grape as well as attractive fruity reds labelled Rosso Conero and Rosso Piceno.  You should find reasonable bottles of any of these in good supermarkets for less than £10.  Marche’s neighbour to the south is Abruzzo, which, to my mind, produces one of the most reliable easy-quaffing reds that I know – Montepulciano d’Abruzzo.  Montepulciano is the grape variety and it looks like a mouthful to pronounce but is actually very easy:  Monty – pull – chee – arno with the stress on the ‘arno’.

The Wine Society list offers an example from Contesa Vigna Corvino, a deeply coloured red with intense aromas and flavours of damsons and blackberries, soft tannins and fair length.  It’s fresh and fruity enough to drink on its own or pair it with grilled lamb chops or Spaghetti Bolognese.  The wine is not especially complex, but very drinkable and a bargain at £8.50.  Look in your local supermarket and you may find a bottle of another producer’s ‘Monty’ for even less money.

And, if you hear someone say that Italian wine is just too complicated, lead them to the nearest wine shop (after getting them to read this blog, of course!)