Thursday, October 07, 2004


ok, ok, the wine already

after a blizzard of email from the wine crowd, i'll report on a couple of the wines i found and liked in italy as i travelled about. even tho', of course, wine is rather outside my charter.

please note that getting wine information for many of italy's flirty stuffs can be difficult. some of the best meals are in little local places that serve charming -- and this just isn't the so-called "vacation glow" speaking -- local table wines made by members of the extended family or by neighbors.

thus when you ask what the wine is and where it comes from you are likely to hear that the owner's wife's second cousin's family has been making wine for umpteen years, that it's grown "around here," and maybe you can get the name of the grape.

this was my experience at da tonnino, where i had rabbit crepes with a truly pleasant red, displaying all the best characteristics of the aglianico grape: fruity, a little chocolatey, a tiny hint of leather like a new coach bag.

when i asked about the wine, the waiter said only, "it's aglianico, grown here in campania."

i asked to see the label on the bottle, and recieved a blank look -- the bottles had no labels, he said, since they were made by the usual long chain of relations. it was made by family who produced table wine especially for restaurants.

i'm not sure i believed this -- no labels? -- but for the time being, let's take that at face value. . .this wine, like many from the region, was probably a mix of aglianico and piedrosso, maybe 70-30.

the piedrosso grape was probably responsible for the wine's lovely, velvety color, since it's grown in a soil heavy in volcanic ash. but i'm not sure; wine is largely outside my purview. anyway a gazillion nice but not d.o.c. wines in campania are made along this general formula.

in siena we ate at what i think is a well-known and excellent restaurant, taverna di san giuseppe. there the "honest," local wine had a label: pagni, rosso del borgo, castelnuovo berardenga, siena.

of all the non-dessert wines i had in italy, this was my favorite: you know, a supple chianti. need i say more? the waiter also attributed this non-d.o.c. wine to "old neighbors."

long-time readers know i have a seriously unfashionable attraction to dessert wines, especially those that are great with chocolate. forgive me, i can't help myself.

in venice i enjoyed a marvelous glass of sicilian malvasia -- at the no-secret la zucca, which despite what people say is a snap to find; but then, i was never lost in venice, not once, since landmarks are everywhere, tho' i did take a couple of brief wrong turns -- as well as several glasses of local, lightly sparkling, lightly blushed fragolino, from vicenza.

the latter i personally believe, might be good with dark chocolate, due to its strawberry flavor. it's a wine that connoisseurs appear to disdain intensely, if not actually loathe.

i had two glasses of this around venice that weren't "foxy," but were just pleasant and gently sweet, no musk, earth, or concord grape juice. maybe i just got lucky because what i had seemed little different than a nice prosecco with a deep berry lilt; or maybe i've just again revealed i know nothing about wine. . .

but the malvasia, was well, malvasia: perfumed, apricot-almondy, and nearly as thick as port.

at the time, i sitting near the canal, when an american gentleman with a certain age, who reminded me of gore vidal, that literary type who took his inheritance and fled for europe long, long ago, deeply ambivalent about returning, leaned over to ask me what i was drinking.

"malvasia," i answered. "what is that?" he asked his partner. "malmsey," the other gentleman, who seemed to be british, sniffed.

after some discussion, they recommended to me a swiss wine -- they live now in switzerland -- dol heldenblut, or "blood of the heroes." they said it was a kind of pinot noir.

i know nothing about this wine; i've never had any, and there's zero info about it on google. so i won't comment further.

lemme close by mentioning 2 passitos i also enjoyed: from campania, the corte normanna, porta dell'olmo, d.o.c., falanghina passito 2002, with its notable diamond-shaped label; and from sicily, from the little island of pantelleria, duca di castelmonte, d.o.c., 2003.

the campania passito was an intense essence of vanilla, honey, and applesauce. all the best things about apples, everything you think of when you summon sweet apples to mind; i was wild about this glass, frankly.

the pantelleria passito was a little different, vanilla, honey, and the small intense cantaloupes i know as cavaillon. it was like having a bowl of melon, but the best melon ever. . .

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