Monthly Archives: December 2009

Best Tuscan wines? Life beyond Tignanello…

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In the wake of BrooklynGuy’s post on 1990 Tignanello and my subsequent response, a couple of readers wrote me asking me to create a list of currently available, interesting wines from Tuscany. In turn, I asked you to submit some top recommendations. Here’s what you had to say…

Tuscany

Top wine blogger (and dude whose musical and literary tastes always turn me on) David McDuff’s pics were “nothing cutting edge; all are just old friends.”

Isole e Olena Chianti Classico: Always a pure and elegant expression of Chianti (and Sangiovese.

Fattoria di Palazzo Vecchio Vino Nobile di Montepulciano: Honest vintage expression of the sun-baked Tuscan hills. (They also produce an excellent Riserva.)

Corzano e Paterno Chianti Colli Fiorentini: Proof that great farming can elevate mediocre terroir.

Tuscany

Sommelier to the stars David Rosoff didn’t “have a bunch of time to rack my brain on this today but…”

Castell’in Villa: Has to be there.

Caprili: I’m loving Caprili a lot these days.

Salvioni: Is it trite to say Salvioni?

Tuscany

Wine writer and veteran Italian wine traveler and educator Tom Hyland got right to the point.

Il Poggione Brunello di Montalcino: Classic, elegant, great ageworthiness.

Rocca di Montegrossi Vin Santo: Incredibly concentrated, remarkable.

Ornellaia: Superb fruit, superb winemaking.

And he added, “3 exciting new wines from Tuscany.”

Enrico Santini Montepergoli: Bolgheri red, one of that zone’s best.

Castelvecchio Numero Otto:100% Ciliegiolo, very sexy!

Guado al Melo Jassarte: Blend of 30 varieties combining Italian and Eastern viticulture.

Tuscany

Elaine Trigiani took time out from tasting and teaching olive oil in Tuscany to pen this dispatch.

Fattoria Ispoli Chianti Classico: Well-mannered combo of clarity and mighty persistence.

Podere Le Boncie Le Trame: Quiet yet profound as Giovanna herself.

Santa Maria Rosso di Castiglione d’Orcia: Fermenty.

Tuscany

Guitar player extraordinaire and owner of the coolest wine shop in Central Texas, John Roenigk took time out from the Christmas rush to weigh in.

Selvapiana Chianti Rufina: All the textural suppleness and tenderness I might ever have expected of Sangiovese all the while being completely flavorful and satisfying.

Antinori Chianti Classico Riserva: Fine and complex, always been a personal fave.

Fèlsina Chianti Classico Riserva Rancia: Superb Tuscan estate, really dedicated to Sangiovese. Superb wine.

Tuscan dirt

Brit wine educator and Tuscanophile, author of a newly minted wine blog, David Way loves “the Sangiovese of Chianti and Montalcino as much as anyone, but rather more off the beaten track are…”

Sassotondo Maremma Toscana San Lorenzo: Sassotondo’s top Ciliegiolo, aromas of cherries and pepper, distinctive cru from the Maremma’s deep south.

Rocca di Frassinello Rosso Maremma Toscana: Elegant product of French-Italian collaboration, 60% Sangiovese, beefed up with 20% each Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, finely judged new oak above super ripe fruit. Rothschild collaboration.

Massa Vecchia Vermentino di Maremma Toscana: Hyper-natural “white” wine made as a red, i.e. 20 days maceration on the skins, orange tinge, dense herby fruit smells, orange peel, extraordinary.

Tuscany

The Italian Wine Guy by antonomasia Alfonso likes winemakers who are “small and live in as well as on their land and are fully grounded.”

Querciavalle Chianti Classico Riserva: They age beautifully, are fabulous values and have given me as much pleasure as Brunello or Super Tuscan wines have.

Capezzana Carmignano: The blend of Sangiovese and Cabernet (part of the appellation) make for a mouthwatering and delicious lip-smacking red.

Angelo Sassetti Brunello di Montalcino: Yes, his brother Livio is next door and has gotten better press and p.r. But my heart and soul is with Angelo, whose wine is still simple and direct and not obfuscated by modernity of success.

Tuscany

I was really excited to see Massa Vecchia in David Way’s contribution. I love those wines and they stink to holy heaven. I don’t think they’re available yet in this country.

I have to second David Rosoff’s pick, Castell’in Villa. As Franco likes to say, it’s one of those wines in which I always find “emotion” and “poetry.”

I’m also dying to try Tom Hyland’s “very sexy” 100% Ciliegiolo by Castelvecchio.

There are a lot of others I would add, like Sanguineto in Montepulciano, also one of Elaine’s favorites. And I was was thrilled to see her include a wine from the Orcia River Valley. I have tasted some great wines from the Orcia river valley (outside of Montalcino), and, in my view, Orcia will be the next appellation to emerge as a producer of great wine from Tuscany (nothing I’ve tasted from Montecucco has really knocked my socks off).

Thanks, everyone, for weighing in. There are so many interesting wines from Tuscany to reach for these days. This polyglot hypertextual list is rife and ripe with trusted classics, a few surprises, and the heart and soul of Tuscany when you scrape off the patina of marketese. Nothing wrong with Tignanello, of course (BrooklynGuy’s post has inspired Alfonso to “stand upright” a bottle of 1990 Tignanello to taste with me and Tracie B when we get together next weekend). So many great bottles and so little time…

Best airport food? Guess where…

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Tracie B and I love to travel. No matter where we’re going, as long as we’re together, the trip to the airport is always a fun one for the two of us.

But the one thing that really sucks about traveling is the awful food options in airports. Even with all of today’s fancy concessions, the food is nearly always a smorgasbord of Sysco-kissed processed foods. Well, friends, I am here to tell ya that there is at least one airport in our country where there’s a local and very tasty food option. It may not look pretty but, man, I was so hungry yesterday by the time my lady and I got to the airport!

Salt Lick BBQ at the Austin airport:

bbq

The real thing (when I took Mama Judy there the other day while she was visiting us in Texas):

bbq

Hungry?

Amphora-aged Primitivo, pozoles and old Rioja, and a Texas wine I liked

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Above: This week, Tracie B and I attended our first holiday party of the year at the home of Texas “natural treasure,” author, radio personality, blogger and all-around delightful host, Mary Gordon Spence.

Man, has it been a crazy week — between work, Tignanello triage, the new Amarone DOCG, and the holidays upon us!

Above: Everyone who knows me knows that I rarely eat sweets. But homemade flan? Mary Gordon found my weakness!

Tracie B and I are headed to La Jolla for the weekend, a good thing since snow is expected today in Central Texas!

I’m working on my “interesting wines coming out of Tuscany these days” post and I received a lot of great recommendations from a bunch of Italian wine professionals and bloggers. Thank you, all. I’ll post them next week.

Above: George O brought this bottle of what I’m guessing is a dried-grape red wine from the Texas Hill Country made by Tony Coturri at the La Cruz de Comal winery. It was a great pairing for the flan.

If you haven’t seen it already, please check out this wonderful post authored by Franco (and translated by yours truly) on the amphora wines made by Vittorio Pichierri in Sava (Manduria, Apulia). Amphora wine is all the rage these days. Gravner started making wine in amphora in the late 1990s? Pichierri has been aging his wines in interred amphora since the 1970s and beyond (he uses an ancient format called capasone).

Above: We were joined by the inimitable Bill Head, whose tall Texas tales alone are worth the price of admission (seated next to Tracie B), his lovely SO Patricia, and George O. Jackson (right), photographer and author of a photo collection I am dying to see, Essence of Mexico 1990-2002, images of folklore he captured traveling through rural Mexico.

Dinner at Mary Gordon’s was just the excuse I’d been waiting for to open some older López de Heredia that a client gave me. The 1990 Tondonia white was stunning, as was the 1991 Bosconia. We opened both bottles as we sat in Mary Gordon’s living room and munched on jícama and chips and salsa: I couldn’t help but think about how great these oxidative wines are with food. The 2000 Bosconia Reserva was great with Mary Gordon’s excellent pozoles.

The conversation turned from tales of larger-than-life Charlie Wilson from Bill’s years in Washington to Mary Gordon’s memories of working for President Lyndon B. Johnson, to George O’s adventures in rural Mexico. I spent the whole evening on the edge of my seat. Maybe it’s because I live here now but it always impresses me how Texas often finds itself at the center of the American collective consciousness and American iconography.

Thanks again, Mary Gordon, for such a wonderful evening! And happy holidays to all ya’ll!

Reaction to news of the new Amarone DOCG

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jeremy parzen

Above: One of these things is not like the other things. One of these things just doesn’t belong here. Photo by Tracie B.

In the wake of the post by Franco and me yesterday at VinoWire reporting the Italian government’s approval of the new Amarone della Valpolicella and Recioto della Valpolicella DOCGs, the enoblogosphere is reeling with tweets, retweets, pings, and posts.

First and foremost, Italian Wine Guy reacted quickly with an update of his Best Italian DOCG List post.

I also saw a lot of responses to a group message I did from the VinoWire Facebook group: it seems there are a lot of people out there, studying for their Master Sommelier exams, who find this info extremely useful.

There were also a number of retweets from top sommeliers like Jonathan Honefenger of Tony’s in Houston and Master Sommelier Jesse Becker of Wine to Match.

Those of you who follow the Italian enoblogosphere may have noted an absence of reaction. It’s my sense that the move to create the DOCGs for Amarone and Recioto was more a gesture of vanity by producers than a marketing coup and really just the result of political back scratching by the inimitable agriculture minister Luca Zaia.

As wine writer Tom Hyland noted in his comment to our VinoWire post: “Let’s face it, Amarone is so famous that it doesn’t even need it. But given how many wines are now DOCG, it probably would have been embarrassing if it had never received this classification.”

You would think that Zaia and those who market Italian wines in the U.S. would wake up and smell the coffee: a definitive, officially sanctioned list of Italian appellations and detailed descriptions of regulations and production standards would be a no-brainer at this point. Americans love precision and they love technical details (California producers often write exact percentages of blends on the labels of their wines, for example). As it stands, Alfonso aka Italian Wine Guy’s list is the most comprehensive if not exhaustive list.

I understand why Italians don’t really care about the DOC and DOCG classification system at this point — especially in light of the recently implemented Common Market Organisation reforms. But in terms of marketing Italian wines to consumers in the U.S., an official list of DOCs and DOCGs would be an excellent tool for wine educators and wine professionals in this country (and would certainly help sales).

Dear minister Zaia, if you’re looking for a translator, I’m your man! (I even speak Trevigiano dialect!)

In other news…

There has also been a lot of reaction to my Tignanello post on Monday. I wanted to thank everyone for the comments: in the next day or so, I’ll do a post on what I think are the most interesting wines coming out of Tuscany these days. Please send me your comments, favorite appellations, thoughts, suggestions, by emailing me here.

In the comment section to the post, Cristiano pointed out rightly that “the father of the Tignanello is Giacomo Tachis, and not Renzo Cotarella.” (Renzo has overseen winemaking at Antinori for more than a quarter of a decade and was recently called the “father of Tignanello” by L’espresso writer Laura Rangoni.)

In other other news…

The photo above? Just for fun…

The ultimate (authentic) wine pairing for pizza

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Above: It’s easy to understand why they can make fresh, clean wines in the Commune of Lettere (Naples), where vines are tended atop the peaks of the Lattari mountain chain.

It’s another busy day over here at Do Bianchi Editorial and I really shouldn’t be posting. But when a lovely lady sends me an etymological quaestio, the chivalrous in me trumps my otherwise unflagging work ethic (hah!).

Over at My Life Italian, Tracie B has produced a truly wonderful and thoroughly delightful post on a wine we shared just over a week ago in New York: a sparkling red blend of indigenous grape varieties from the township of Lettere (province of Naples). You’ll have to click through to read about this wine and why it — together with Gragnano — is one of Neapolitans’s favorite pairings for pizza.

But as far as toponomastic matters are concerned, I poked around the web and found an answer to her query as to the origins of the name Lettere.

The most likely etymon I found was that Lettere is a corruption of Lattari (pronounced laht-TAH-ree, if I’m not mistaken), the name of the mountain chain where the township is located. The beautiful (and fruitful) mountains take their name, most believe, from the Latin mons lactarius, literally the suckling mountain (from the Latin lac meaning milk) because the mountain chain was known in antiquity as an excellent site for sheep to pasture.

Tracie B and I will be heading to central and northern Italy in early 2010 but we are hoping to head south next fall. We’ll be sure to take a print out of this listing of pizzerie in Lettere (click on “Dove Alloggiare e Mangiare”)!

And in the meantime, I’ll reiterate Tracie B’s advice: head to Kesté Pizza e Vino in New York and order some Lettere (or Gragnano) with your pizza!