Turbiana (Trebbiano di Lugana) - Veneto, Italy

It isn't often the case that I end up more confused after researching a grape than I was when I started, but that's almost what has happened in researching today's grape, Turbiana. The confusion that I had to sort through in order to figure out just what Turbiana actually is has steeled my resolve to provide citations in any blog post where I refer to published results.  In the past, I've tried to provide links whenever the articles are freely available online, and when they aren't, I've tried to either provide a citation or give enough information so that an interested reader can pursue the article themselves, but from now on, any research that I consult, I will be sure to cite.

It all started today when Nick over at the Spirited Gourmet sent me an email letting me know he had just gotten a wine made from the Turbiana grape in his shop.  By chance, I had recently had a different wine made from the Turbiana grape and was working my way through my notes to post about it.  Nick's email spurred me on, so I started to do some digging.  The Oxford Companion to Wine had no listing for Turbiana, but, in the entry on Lugana, did mention that Trebbiano di Lugana, the former name for Turbiana, was the same as Trebbiano di Soave, which is similar to Verdicchio.  When you search for Turbiana in Wikipedia, it automatically redirects you to the entry on Verdicchio.  The VIVC takes you directly to the entry on Verdicchio when you search for Turbiana as well.  Once you get past those three frontline sources, though, all hell starts to break loose.

As mentioned above, Turbiana was traditionally known as Trebbiano di Lugana and was thought to be just another member of the vast and varied Trebbiano family.  Several websites that I found point to "DNA research" that proves that what was known as Trebbiano di Lugana is actually genetically distinct from the Trebbiano family and is now known as Turbiana.  Other sites imply that Turbiana and Trebbiano di Lugana still coexist and are actually two distinct grapes.  Yet another site maintains that Trebbiano di Lugana is merely the local name for Trebbiano di Soave and that "recent research" has found that this grape, now called Turbiana, is not related to Trebbiano Veronese, whatever that is, and, further, is not related to Verdicchio.  The winery's website still refers to the grape as Trebbiano di Lugana with no mention of Turbiana at all.

What nearly all of the sites (except for the winery's) are trying to get at is that Turbiana is an independent grape variety that sciences has recently freed from the Trebbiano family.  Nearly every site linked above refers vaguely to "research" but none of them give a direct citation. I've noticed that The Oxford Companion to Wine does this constantly, which drives me a little bit crazy.  When I see a reference to "DNA research" and I know the person making the reference isn't a scientist or geneticist themselves, I always like to try to find the paper myself to be sure that the paper is actually saying the things that the writer is attributing to it.  It took a few hours of really creative googling, but I believe that the paper that is being referred to is actually this one from 2001.  In that paper, the researchers perform microsatellite analysis on 7 different Trebbiano subvarieties and 17 other grape varieties that look similar to Trebbiano.  What they found was that there was a lot of genetic diversity among the samples that they tested, but the samples that were the most similar were Trebbiano di Soave and Verdicchio (which, it turns out, are the same grape [additional source]) and Trebbiano di Soave and Trebbiano di Lugana.  The researchers are clear that Trebbiano di Soave and Verdicchio are synonyms, but it is a little less clear what the relationship is between Trebbiano di Soave and Trebbiano di Lugana.  The two grapes were 97% similar in the sections of their genetic code that the scientists tested for, but the only conclusions that the researchers draw is that the grapes are "genetically similar."

The more interesting thing that the study found is that the various members of the Trebbiano family are genetically dissimilar enough from one another for the researchers to conclude that they probably do not share a common ancestor.  Which not only means that they are all different grapes, but, further, that they probably aren't even related to one another!  The experiment examined Trebbiano Toscano, Trebbiano d'Abruzzo, Trebbiano Spoletino, Trebbiano di Spagna and Trebiano Romagnolo in addition to Trebbiano di Soave and Trebiano di Lugana and found that only the latter two were similar enough to be considered related.  So even though all of the grapes above are considered under the same banner of "Trebbiano," and, though they certainly have many of the same kinds of physical characteristics, genetically speaking, they're as different as they can be.

At this point, it's reasonable to ask why they all have the same name if they aren't related to one another.  Most theories about the origin of the name Trebbiano posit some geographical origin like the name of an ancient town in Tuscany or the Trebbia river in  Liguria.  That kind of origin story makes sense only if all of the grapes known as Trebbiano are the same grape or if they all can be traced back to a common ancestor located in that geographical area.  Since we know that isn't the case, the researchers conclude that the name probably comes from the word "draibio" which means "vigorous shoot" in Frankonian.  I don't know about the details (it has something to do with Charlemagne, I think) since the paper that they cite for that theory is in German, but the crux of the matter is that name Trebbiano comes from a description of how the vine grows rather than a location, which would explain the genetic diversity of the multitude of grapes with that name.

The story doesn't quite end there, though.  Another research group in Verona did another type of genetic experiment on Trebbiano di Lugana, Trebbiano di Soave and Verdicchio (among others), and found that those three grapes were essentially the same.  So, essentially, Turbiana is Trebbiano di Lugana which is the same as Trebbiano di Soave, both of which are different from Trebbiano Toscano or any other kind of Trebbiano, but which are the same as Verdicchio.  The slight differences in the DNA of Trebbiano di Lugana and Trebbiano di Soave found in the previous study are here attributed to slight differences in the soil and microclimate where the grapes are found, which, it turns out, can cause slight changes in a vine's genetic expression.

I was able to find a bottle of the 2009 Ottella "Lugana," which is grown near Lake Garda in the Veneto region of Italy.  In the glass the wine had a medium silvery lemon color.  The nose was nicely aromatic with lemony citrus, white peach and a kind of clean, stony river water sort of smell.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity.  There were flavors of white peach and lemon peel with that same stony kind of minerality on the finish.  It was a little flat and could have used a bit more acidity.  The nose was more enjoyable than the palate was, but it was still and pretty good wine for around $15.  It wasn't all that complex or deep, but it was crisp and refreshing and sometimes that's just the sort of thing you need.  I prefer Verdicchio from the Marche, but this is an interesting wine with a really crazy story you can tell to your friends while drinking it.  Or you can just enjoy it.

Weird Blend Wednesday - Petit Rouge, Cornalin, Mayolet & Vien de Nus, Valle d'Aosta, Italy

Mayolet Grapes

Hello, everyone and welcome back to Weird Blend Wednesday.  Today's wine is a fun little field blend from the Valle d'Aosta that is made up of several different grapes that are specialties of the region.  I think.  See, this wine is sold as a vino da tavola, or, this close to the French/Italian border, a vin de table, which means that the only thing that the bottle can say is whether the wine is white or red, who made it and the name that the producer has decided to give to the bottling, if any (in this case, the wine is called Cuvé de la Côte).  No vintage, geographical indication (other than the country of origin) or grape make-up is permitted on the bottle at all, which isn't usually a problem in this day and age since many producers just put that kind of stuff online and let the consumers find it themselves.  For this wine, though, the only information available is from the distributor (the great Louis/Dressner) who only offers that the wine "is a field blend from a parcel of particularly old vines."  There's really no telling exactly what is in this bottle, and it's possible that the winemaker may not even know, if the parcel is old enough.  The guys at the Wine Bottega, where I picked this bottle up, said that it was most likely a blend of the four grapes mentioned above, and so that's what I'm going with.

Vien de Nus Grapes

We've already taken a good, long look at two of the four alleged grapes in this blend.  Petit Rouge is the savage little grape that forms the base of the wines from the Enfer d'Arvier and Torrette sub-regions within the Valle d'Aosta.  Cornalin is the confusing little grape that is a different thing depending on where you find yourself.  If you're in Italy, you're probably talking about Cornalin d'Aoste, which is usually called Humagne Rouge in Switzerland.  If you're in Switzerland, Cornalin refers to a different grape, known as Cornalin du Valais, which is actually one of the parents for Cornalin d'Aoste.  It's a long, tangled story that you can peruse at your leisure via the link above.

The other two grapes are Mayolet and Vien de Nus.  Mayolet is certainly the more common of the two grapes and can occasionally be found in varietal form, while Vien de Nus is pretty much a blending grape.  Mayolet is referenced in writings dating back to the 18th Century and is thought to be indigenous to the Valle d'Aosta.  Recent DNA testing has shown that Mayolet is one of the parents of Cornalin du Valais (Petit Rouge is the other), which means that both Petit Rouge and Mayolet are the grandparents of Cornalin d'Aoste (Vouillamoz, J., Maigre, D., Meredith, C.P. (2003) Microsatellite analysis of ancient alpine grape cultivars: pedigree reconstruction of Vitis vinifera L. "Cornalin du Valais." Theoretical and Applied Genetics, (107) 448-454).  This wine, then, is kind of like a little family reunion in a bottle where Vien de Nus plays the role of a longtime neighbor who is like an honorary uncle, even though he isn't really related by blood to anyone there.  Vien de Nus also has a long history in the Valle d'Aoste and is thought to be native to the region, but if there is any genetic link between it and the other three grapes in this wine, I haven't been able to find it.

The wine that I was able to try was made by Franco Noussan who lives in the village of St. Christophe in the hills above the town of Aoste.  His bio on Louis/Dressner's site says that he works at the local university, which it turns out is the Institut Agricole Régional, the local agricultural school where the Cornalin and Prëmetta I wrote about earlier came from.  His winery is essentially an extension of his garage which he dug into the hillsides around his house.  He has several parcels scattered around St. Christophe including one with vines over 70 years old, which is where I presume the grapes for this wine came from.  Altogether he farms about 5.5 hectares of land which he works without herbicides.  He hand harvests all of his grapes and uses only indigenous yeasts in his fermentation.  He has been making wine for his family and friends for many years but has only been offering them commercially since 2005.

I picked up my NV bottle of the Noussan Cuvé de la Côte from my friends at the Wine Bottega for about $25.  In the glass, the wine was a medium purple ruby color.  The nose was very aromatic with black cherry, black plum and wild raspberry fruits with a touch of smoke.  There was something wild and savage to the nose that was very interesting and deeply compelling.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acid and medium tannins.  There were flavors of black cherry, dried cherry, wild raspberry and blackberry fruit with smoke, char and a little bit of funk.  It was wild and complex but really nicely balanced as well.  There was a good mixture of red and black fruits with nice charred, smoky undertones to it that was all held up with a lively vein of acidity.  I really felt like the wine over-delivered in terms of complexity and depth for the price, especially since wines from the Valle d'Aoste tend to be fairly expensive because of their limited production.  It would go well with all kinds of food but I think something with duck or sausage would be great as the bright acidity here would just cut through the fat and match well with meat that's a little funky.

Non-Fizzy Glera (Prosecco) - Valdobbiadene, Veneto, Italy

Prosecco used to be so simple.  If a bottle was labeled as Prosecco, you knew where it came from and what grape was used to make it because both went by the same name.  There was only one DOC zone, Prosecco di Conegliano Valdobbiadene, whose rules stipulated that the wine made there had to be comprised of at least 85% Prosecco grapes.  Since Prosecco was both a place and a grape, it was so easy to understand.

Leave it to bureaucrats and marketers, though, to come in and complicate a simple thing.  In addition to the one DOC zone, there were also a handful of IGT regions located nearby that were able to use the word Prosecco on their labels because it was the official name of the grape used to make the wine.  Fearing that consumers were too dumb to be able to figure out the difference between an IGT Prosecco wine and a DOC one, the authorities stepped in in 2009 with a new plan.  The Prosecco di Conegliano Valdobbiadene DOC region was elevated to a DOCG and the former IGT regions were all elevated to DOC status.  The Prosecco grape, though, would no longer officially be known as Prosecco, but would now be officially known as Glera (Glera has always been one of its synonyms, but Prosecco was by far the most common name for the grape).  Further, only the Prosecco di Conegliano Valdobbiadene DOCG region can now use the name Prosecco since, by changing the grape's name, the authorities had turned Prosecco into a geographical designation rather than a viticultural one.  The newly formed DOC regions have to use the name Glera if they want to refer to the grape that they use to make their wines.

So now we live in world where you go to Prosecco to drink Glera, which is a little confusing because the town central to the new DOCG is called Valdobbiadene, not Prosecco.  There is a village called Prosecco, which is likely the source for the original name of the grape, but that village is in Friulia, near Trieste on the Slovenian border (where, oddly enough, they call the grape Glera).  Some maintain that the grape is originally from there, while others believe it's from the Colli Euganei, about 30 miles south of Valdobbiadene, where the grape is known as Serpino, which is easily the coolest of the grape's synonyms.  The grape's history in the area around Valdobbidene can be traced back to the early 19th Century, though some believe that the vinum pucinum mentioned by Pliny in Roman times may be a reference to the Glera grape, though as we've noted many times, tracing any modern grape back to Pliny is a difficult task.

All that is well and good, you may be saying to yourself, but is this Fringe Wine guy really trying to pass Prosecco off as an unusual grape just because it's now called something different?  Well, no.  I'm well aware that Prosecco is everywhere (even, apparently, in one of those Facebook games called CityVille), but that's fizzy Prosecco.  The Prosecco di Conegliano Valdobbiadene DOC produced over 250 million bottles of wine in 2000, the overwhelming majority of which was either fully sparkling or frizzante.  No, what I've found is a still wine made from the Glera grape, which is a rare bird indeed.  The DOCG regulations do allow for the production of still wines, though very few producers bother as the fizzy stuff is what people really want.  Prosecco sales have been on the rise, especially lately, as people are beginning to turn away from more expensive options like Champagne in these rough economic times.  The method that makes Prosecco so much less expensive (the Charmat method) also tends to make the wines more fruit-forward with fewer of the bready, yeasty secondary flavors and aromas that mark traditional method sparkling wines.  Prosecco is an easy drinking, crowd-pleasing kind of wine and the bubbles are a major part of that image for consumers.

While marketing is a big reason for the tiny production of still Glera-based wines, the perception of the grape as somewhat bland and uninteresting is certainly another.  Bubbles, especially cheap bubbles, are a good way to put a little sauce on a dry steak, so to speak.  Finally, Prosecco has, historically, almost always been a sparkling wine.  The early history of the grape's cultivation reads an awful lot like that of the Mauzac grape.  Prosecco ripens very late and so it doesn't go into the cellar for vinification until late fall or early winter.  The wine usually wasn't finished with its fermentation before the temperatures dropped so low that the yeasts kind of fell asleep and stopped doing their work.  The winemakers would bottle when the vats stopped bubbling and, since filtration wasn't a common practice, the sleeping yeast cells would be bottled along with the slightly sweet wine.  When the temperatures warmed up, the yeasts woke up and carried on their work inside the bottle, expelling CO2 as they carried on, which didn't have anywhere to go inside the sealed bottle, and so was absorbed into the liquid, creating little bubbles.  People liked this style and, through the years, Prosecco wines have become synonymous with bubbles.

The wine that I had, though, was the 2008 (prior to DOCG elevation and, thus, "just" a DOC wine) Adriano Adami "Giardino" Prosecco, which I picked up from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $18.  This wine was 90% Glera and 10% Chardonnay and the grapes come from the Giardino vineyard, which the Adami family has owned since 1920.  Most of the grapes grown on this site end up in a kind of prestige cuvée, but they specially select some for this still wine.  The grapes are lightly pressed before being fermented in temperature controlled stainless steel where the wine stays on the lees for three months.  In the glass the wine was a very light, almost clear silvery lemon color.  The nose was fairly aromatic with green apples and lemon peel and just a hint of leesy funk.  On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with fairly high acid.  There were racy flavors of green apple and lemony citrus.  This wine was definitely on the wrong side of its lifespan (the Adami website recommends drinking within a year of the vintage), but it was still holding together very nicely.  It's simple and fruity with a really nice vein of acidity to hold it together.  At $18, it's a bit steep, though, and there are much better values out there, though if you can find a fairly young version, I'd imagine that it's pretty tasty given how well it has held up over time.

Nerello Mascalese - Sicily, Italy

If Nerello Mascalese was a person, it would have a serious little-brother complex.    It's never been considered the greatest grape in Sicily and has been greatly overshadowed for many many years by the Nero d'Avola grape.  Nero d'Avola was itself little known outside of Sicily until not that long ago, but now it is hands down the most well-known and well-regarded Sicilian grape, especially among the red  varieties.

It's difficult to talk about Nerello's recent presence in our lives and on our shelves without talking a little about the Nero d'Avola effect.  For a long, long time, Sicily was not regarded as a place for fine wine production by most of the world.  They grow a ton of grapes all over Sicily, but the overwhelming majority of the juice from those grapes ends up in bulk wine production or at the distillery.  Of course there were people on the island who were interested in making fine wines and who, for the most part, were succeeding in that task, but they were small voices in a loud crowd, so to speak, and the reputation of Siclian wines overall was still not that great in spite of their successes.  They could have tried to do what a number of different regions have done and decide to try their hand with the International grape varieties, which do grow well and flourish in the Sicilian climate, but if they had gone that route and tried to compete with the great wine regions of the world, I suspect they probably wouldn't have succeeded.  Cabernet from a region known for cheap wines is still just cheap Cabernet and that identification with mass-produced, cheap wines is a difficult barrier to pass.

What they really needed was something that would separate and differentiate them from the other wine regions of the world.  They found that something in the Nero d'Avola grape.  The story is similar to the phenomenon of Australian Shiraz or Argentine Malbec.  The Aussies didn't have an original product, but they had a different name for it that made it stand out from the other bottles on the shelf.  Argentina wasn't the only place making wines from the Malbec grape, but they were the only ones doing it in quantities that would make the wines easily accessible to nearly every consumer.  The trick was finding a little niche in the market that wasn't adequately filled by some other region and making the case that what you were filling that niche with was not only exciting and interesting, but was really only available from you, which is of course not true with Syrah or Malbec, but the marketing machines convinced a lot of people that it was.  The great thing about Nero d'Avola for the Sicilians was that they didn't even really have to spin it.  Nero d'Avola is only grown in Sicily and is only available from Sicilian winemakers.  They had a real, original wine to offer.

These wines were new and interesting, but they were also well made and tasty.  Consumers flocked to these wines because they were something different, but they stuck around because the wines were actually pretty good.  Even though the overwhelming majority of wine made in Sicily is still bulk (only 5% ultimately ends up in bottle and only 2% of that is DOC classified), those winemakers who were interested in reaching a different demographic had finally found their in-road with the Nero d'Avola grapes.  Consumers were now willing to buy and drink not only wines made from Nero d'Avola, but also wines from Sicily in general.  The tide rose and raised a lot of ships, which, finally, brings us to our featured grape, Nerello Mascalese.  Nerello and many of the other interesting Sicilian grapes are traveling the path blazed by the success of the Nero d'Avola grape.

There are actually two different Nerellos.  Mascalese is the more common of the two and is named for the plain of Mascali at the base of Mt. Etna, the Sicilian volcano that has really been the epicenter for quality wine production within Sicily.  The other Nerello is called Cappuccio, though I'm not sure why.  The two are almost always blended together since they tend to have complimentary characteristics.  One is lighter in color but higher in tannins while the other has deep color but low tannins.  I'm not sure which contributes which, and there is no real consensus about which of the two grapes is considered superior.  The important thing to remember is that they usually travel together and when they do, you're much more likely to see a higher proportion of Mascalese in the blend than Cappuccio.

The grape has been grown around Mt. Etna for at least 200 years.  It does well on the volcanic soils and can be especially nice when grown on higher altitude sites on the volcano.  Despite the fairly long established history and the lack of similar grapes in any other region, Nerello is probably not native to Sicily.  A study done in 2008 (source) found that Nerello Mascalese is almost certainly the offspring of the Sangiovese grape and some other unidentified parent, meaning that it probably came over from the Italian mainland at some point.  This puts Nerello in some interesting company, as the same study also found that Frappato and Gaglioppo, among others, had the same kind of relationship to Sangiovese, meaning that all of those grapes are at least half brothers with one another.

I was able to find a handful of different bottles of Nerello representing several different styles and philosophies. The first wine that I tried was a NV Casa Fondata Valdo that I picked up at Bauer Wine and Spirits for about $13.  This is actually made in the Prosecco region of Italy from Prosecco grapes (also known as Glera) and Nerello grapes or juice that they bring up from Sicily.  There's minimal skin contact with the Nerello grapes, so there's very little color, and the wine made in the Charmat method, as is most Prosecco, so it's much fruitier than your typical Champagne method sparkler.  In the glass the wine was a pale salmon pink color that was nice and fizzy.  The nose was fairly aromatic with bright, fruity strawberry and green apple aromas.  On the palate, the wine was on the lighter side of medium with medium acidity and nice bubbles. There were flavors of strawberry and raspberry candy with snappy green apple backing it up.  This is all fruit and is as simple as it can be, but it's nice and tasty and is something that's definitely a little bit different.  I'm sure Prosecco has some great food matches, but I always just like to drink it on its own and have a little fun with it.  For $13, it's really hard to go wrong.

The next wine that I picked up was the 2008 Nicosia Nerello Mascalese that I grabbed from my friends at Bin Ends for about $10.  It's more representative of the kind of everyday table wine you may find at your local wine shop.  In the glass, the wine was a fairly light ruby color.  The nose was nicely aromatic with red cherry and smoke aromas along with some stewed red berries.  On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acid and low tannins.  There were flavors of sour cherry and redcurrant fruit along with some dried herbs and chocolate on the finish.  As the wine opens up, the fruit flavors move away from the red end of the spectrum towards the black with more black cherry, black plum, smoke, chocolate and baking spice showing up.  It's a good, solid, Italian food wine that would be great with anything with a tomato sauce or with some braised red meats.  At $10 a bottle, it's a good, solid value wine that isn't going to blow you away, but is going to be well-made, well-structured and well-suited to a variety of different kinds of food.

The final wine that I'll be talking about is probably the most interesting and the most divisive.  A few weeks ago, my friends over at the Wine Bottega put on a tasting of the wines from Frank Cornelissan, the Madman of Etna.  The Cornelissan estate is really serious about the concept minimal intervention in the vineyard and in the winery and they take it about as far as it can go.  The wines made by Frank Cornelissan come as close as wine can come to that line that separates wine as a beverage from vinegar as a condiment.  They go into their philosophy in some detail on the website linked above and I encourage you to read what they have to say.

The estate makes three different red wines ranging in price from about $27 to about $150.  Each wine at each price point is made from grapes harvested at a certain altitude on the slopes of Mt. Etna with the most expensive wines made from grapes grown at the highest elevations.  The guys at the Bottega were nice enough to let us sample all of the different cuvees and even opened a few bottles from previous vintages that they had been squirelling away. I ended up buying a bottle of the Contadino 8, which is the bottom of the line cuvee, for about $27.  There is no vintage on the wine and the number is an indication of how many times he's made that particular cuvee before.  This is the 8th incarnation of the Contadino blend, which is mostly Nerello Mascalese, but it would be something of a fool's errand to try and figure out exactly which grapes are in this bottle.  The wine is unsulfured and unfiltered so I had to store it in the fridge upright until I was ready to drink it, at which point I took it out and let it come to room temperature over 24 hours.  I then very carefully decanted the wine twice to leave as much sediment behind as possible (when I did get some sediment, it was fairly bitter, so avoid it if you can).  In the glass, the wine is a light ruby red color that is more serious than a rosé but less dark than you'd expect from a red wine.  The nose was nicely aromatic with bright red cherry and candied cherry fruits and damp, forest floor kind of aroma.  In the glass, the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of red cherry, wild raspberry, wild strawberry, black tea and damp leaves.  The wine develops with incredible speed as it sits in the decanter in the glass and the bright red flavors get darker and duskier.  It reminded me a lot of some of the Trousseau from the Jura that I had or even of really funky Burgundy.  It's a wild, savage wine that is really unlike anything I've ever had before.  It's hard to recommend it unequivocally to people, as it is certainly not going to be everyone's kind of thing, but if you're looking for a weird, wild, different kind of wine adventure, give something in the Cornelissan line a shot.

Schioppettino - Colli Orientali del Friuli, Italy

In many ways, the story of the Schioppettino grape is the story of a lot of the grapes that I've written about on this site.  It's a grape that enjoyed a degree of popularity at some point in the distant past, and then, for one reason or another, was on the brink of extinction.  It has enjoyed some limited success and a few new plantings in more recent years, but, on the whole, it's still little known outside of a handful of regions.  While the outline of the story may seem familiar to longtime readers, it's always the details that make an individual story worth telling.  After all, if we rejected out of hand all stories with similar structures and outlines, then writers would have had to give up their craft thousands of years ago and the modern entertainment industry would have had to fold up shop before it even got off the ground (though whether this would have been such a bad thing is something you can ponder at your leisure).

So what are the details of Schioppettino?  For starters, it's a very old grape.  There are written records that reference the grape as far back as 1282 AD when the wine was used in a Slovenian wedding ceremony.  It's thought that the grape may be native to Slovenia, or at any rate to some area around the Italian-Slovenian border.  One of its synonyms is Ribolla Nera, indicating that it may be a dark-skinned mutation of or at least a relative of the Friulian/Slovenian grape Ribolla Gialla, though I can't find any indication of just what the specific relationship between the two grapes may be.  I would hazard a guess that since Schioppettino is the more common name, the relationship between it and Ribolla Gialla may be merely linguistic, but I would love to read about it if anyone has done the genetic research.  There are a few different explanations for the use of the Schioppettino name.  Some say that it comes from the Italian word scioppare, which means "to burst," while others say it comes from schioppettare which means "to crackle."  In either case, the bursts or crackles are a reference to a version of the wine that is made locally and sold very young with some residual CO2 in it, leaving small, snappy bubbles behind that crackle on the tongue.

As mentioned above, Schioppettino was, at one time, in danger of disappearing completely.  Like so many grapes throughout the world, Schioppettino was almost done in by the scourge of phylloxera that swept through Europe's vineyards in the mid 19th Century.  Many grape growers who found their vineyards decimated saw the plague as an opportunity to start fresh, and when it came time to replant, they often opted for less finicky and higher yielding vines, but in the case of Schioppettino, fashion was the force that nearly drove it into extinction.  Many of the growers in Friuli had their sights set on international markets rather than just local ones and so they replanted many of their vineyards to the classic French varieties of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Sauvignon Blanc, among others.  Plantings of the grape were so scarce after phylloxera that it was not included as an authorized variety in any of the DOC or EU regions until 1978, when the EU stepped in and issued a decree authorizing (or possibly just encouraging) the use of the grape in the Udine province of Friuli, which most sources credit as the act that saved the grape from oblivion.  Plantings have risen over the past few decades to the point that the grape is no longer thought to be at risk for extinction, but certainly not to the point where it is widely available or well-known.

I was able to find a bottle of the 2008 Azienda Agricola Grillo (not to be confused with the Grillo grape) Schioppettino from the Colli Orientali del Friuli region of Italy at Central Bottle for about $23.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep purple-ruby color.  The nose was nicely aromatic with rich black cherry and blackberry fruit backed by chocolate.  It wasn't all that complex, but it was pure delight to smell.  In the glass the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity and soft, silky tannins.  There were flavors of rich black cherry, blackberry and blueberry fruit with nice earthy chocolate and vanilla undertones.  The fruit here was pure, focused and right up front in the flavor profile but backed by excellent structure and a soft, smooth kind of earthiness.  The flavor profile wasn't particularly varied or complex but the flavors were deep and powerful without coming across as jammy or sweet.  For $23, I thought this wine was an excellent value and I wouldn't hesitate to buy not only this bottle again, but I also wouldn't hesitate to buy any wine made from this grape.  I am very curious about the frizzante wines made from this grape and see that there are some bubbly Schioppettinos imported into the US so I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for any of those.

Blatterle - Alto Adige, Italy

I live for wines like the one I'll be writing about today.  It's a wine made from a very unusual grape that is grown in a very small region of Italy and, essentially, vinified by pretty much only a single producer.  We've taken a look at a few wines like this in the past.  The Roscetto from Lazio and the Casetta from the Veneto are both similar in terms of their obscurity.  While I love to find wines like these, it can be a real pain to try to write about them.  When you pass a certain point of obscurity, doing the research for a blog post becomes a real struggle.  For most of my posts, the real challenge is in sifting through all the information I have to try and find the most interesting parts that I can write about.  With some grapes, though, the challenge becomes trying to find any information at all about them.  The grapes mentioned above, as well as today's grape, Blatterle, are not mentioned in any books that I have (aside from a passing mention of Casetta in Bastianich and Lynch's Vino Italiano) and are not heavily referenced online either.  My life gets a lot more difficult once I go diving past a certain level of obscurity and find myself in the murky waters of the virtually unknown.

I mention in the Casetta and Roscetto posts linked above that all of the information available about those particular grapes comes from the people who are selling you the bottle, which always makes me a little uneasy.  With Blatterle, the person who is growing the grapes and making the wine doesn't really have much of an online presence, so we are denied even that much access.  In this case, the source of most of the information is the importer of the wine, Louis/Dressner, whose founder Joe Dressner sadly passed away just a few months back.  I feel a little better about using the importer (this one in particular) rather than the winery itself as the primary source partly because the importer has a good reputation within the wine community,  but mostly because the content of their site, or at least the part dealing this grape, is very factually oriented, and if it's a sales pitch, it's one of the driest ones I've ever come across.  That sounds like a dig, but it's actually a really good thing in my opinion.  I'm a "just the facts" kind of person and am much more interested in winery sites that sound more like an encyclopedia than like a commercial.

Here is essentially what we know about Blatterle.  It is an old variety that is thought to be native to the Isarco River Valley in the Alto Adige.  The name Blatterle means "little leaf" in German (remember that the Alto Adige region is a weird kind of mixture of German and Italian cultures), which, I guess, means that this vine may have smaller than average leaves.  They say that the grapes themselves are kind of oval-shaped and golden colored, but I don't see it in the pictures that I was able to find.  It seems that historically the grape was used either for grape juice production or in the production of a lightish, everyday kind of wine.

The grape is grown pretty much exclusively by the Mayr-Nusserhof estate, which is located near (or possibly in) the city of Bolzano on the Isarco River.  The family who owns the estate are named Mayr while there are conflicting reports about where the Nusserhof comes from.  The importer says that it's a reference to some hazelnut trees (Nuss is the German word for nut) that used to surround the house but which were cut down as the city of Bolzano has impinged further and further on the Mayr family's spread, which is currently about 2.5 hectares of organically farmed land.  A shop in North Carolina presents the alternate theory that one of the current owner's relatives, a man named Josef Meyr Nusser, had the street named after him because of his actions in World War II, where his opposition to the Nazi regime led him to become a conscientious objector when the Nazis were recruiting soldiers from his occupied town.  As you might imagine, the Nazis weren't especially kind to opposition of any sort and Josef died in a concentration camp as a Catholic martyr.  The second story is not only much better, but is actually more plausible, so that's the one I'm going to choose to believe.

I was able to pick up a bottle of the 2007 Nusserhof "Blaterle" from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $23.  You may notice that the name of the wine is "Blaterle" rather than Blatterle.  Since the Blatterle grape is not approved for use in any DOC wine, the winery bottles this as a Vino da Tavola, which has the restriction that you cannot print a place name, grape name or vintage on the label of the wine.  Just by dropping one of the T's in the middle of the word, the winery is able to dodge these restrictions (the vintage is hidden at the bottom of the label where it says L07, the last two numbers being the last two digits of the vintage year).  In the glass the wine was a pale greenish lemon color.  The nose was fairly reserved with some pear fruit and something slightly nutty.  As the wine approached room temperature, there was something vaguely floral that started to show up, but never in any serious amount.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium to low acidity.  The wine had a very minerally flavor profile with some lean pear fruit and lemon peel, but not a whole lot.  This wine was probably on the wrong end of its life span and was suffering slightly for it.  It's interesting to compare my tasting notes with Jakob's Bowl who did his tasting a little over a year after I did and with a bottle that was one vintage year newer.  My bottle lacked the explosive floral notes that his had and mine had definitely picked up more pithy citrus in the bottle.  I'm interested in trying a younger version and will keep my eyes peeled and fingers crossed.

Pigato - Riviera Ligure di Ponente, Ligura, Italy

Today marks Fringe Wine's first foray into the tiny region of Liguria in Italy.  In fact, if I'm not mistaken, with today's post, Fringe Wine will have covered a wine from each of the individual regions within Italy.  Liguria is the last to be covered not because they lack interesting wines, but because they make so little of them and export even fewer.  Liguria is next-to-last in vineyard area and total volume of production within Italy, ahead only of the Valle d'Aosta.  When you look at a map of Italy, it's pretty easy to see why.  Liguria is a tiny region in northwestern Italy, right below Piemonte, that forms a narrow band that just wraps above the Ligurian Sea.  The landscapes here are dramatic, as there are steep hillsides and mountains that begin sometimes right at the shoreline and stretch back into Piemonte.  So what you have is an area that isn't that big to begin with that has very difficult ground to work, which results in a relatively small amount of wine being made.  Further, Liguria is a tourist haven, given their long shoreline and dramatic vistas, so much of the wine that is made locally is also consumed locally either by tourists or by the Ligurian natives.

I've been reading a lot about Italian wine over the past year or so, and have been eagerly seeking out some wines made from the unique grapes that are found in Liguria.  I've managed to pick up a few that we'll get around to in the near future, but for today, I want to talk about a grape called Pigato.  Pigato was probably the first Ligurian grape that I was able to try, though the first bottle that I bought was well past its prime.  It took me a few months, but I was able to find a replacement and I've been eagerly anticipating writing about this grape for a little while now.  I started flipping through some of my books to start my research off and noticed that there seems to be some controversy about just where Pigato may have come from, which started to get me even more excited since I just love those kinds of controversies.  And then I went to the Oxford Companion to Wine, who says that "DNA profiling showed that pigato and vermentino, both long-established in Liguria, and Favorita, cultivated in Piemonte, are all identical."

My heart sank.  There were all these great stories about how maybe Caesar's legions planted the grape in Liguria or that maybe the grape came over from Greece or maybe how it might have something to do with Arneis, but it didn't look like any of them were true.  The Oxford Companion doesn't cite their sources within the text, so I had to do some digging to find the article that they were referencing, and sure enough, in a study published in 1995, the proof was found.  The study itself was done to see whether microsatellite sequence-tagging was an effective method of differentiating between cultivars, and it turns out that it is (in fact,  nearly all DNA testing to determine relations between grapes use some form of microsatellite tagging these days).  The scientists took several different grape varieties grown in both Italy and Australia and ran them through the test to see whether the different varieties could be distinguished from one another and, further, whether the clonal variants from the geographically disparate regions would show up as the same grape.  Both tests were successful, but buried within the paper is the fact that in the course of the testing, Pigato, Vermentino and Favorita all tested as genetically identical, meaning essentially that they are clonal variants of the same grape.

It has long been suspected that Pigato has some relationship to Vermentino, with a few people believing that they may actually be the same grape, but the Italian officials currently recognize them as separate grapes (and, further, recognize Favorita as a separate grape as well).  I don't know if this has always been the case, as Nicolas Belfrage, in his Barolo to Valpolicella, mentions that there is reference to a grape called vermentino pigato, or spotted Vermentino, in a book called Bollettino Ampelografico published in 1883.  It kind of sounds like what may have happened is that there was a mutation of Vermentino at some point that had splotchy pigmentation on its skin which was then separated and cultivated on its own, but was still recognized as a variant of Vermentino (much like how Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris are variants on Pinot Noir).  At some point, though, people may have just gotten tired of saying Vermentino Pigato and started calling the splotchy grape Pigato for short.  Over time, the connection to Vermentino wasn't totally forgotten, but it fell far enough by the wayside that Vermentino and Pigato started to be seen as totally different grapes.  Even with the DNA testing done and published, many sources are still not aware of the connection even today.  Bastianich and Lynch, for example, believe the Greek origin story for Pigato in their Vino Italiano, which was most recently updated in 2005.

This is all leading to a thorny question, and it's one that I've written about a few other times here as well without any kind of resolution that feels satisfactory to me.  Where do we draw the line in deciding which grapes are distinct and which are merely synonyms?  DNA testing, at least as it currently stands, isn't the answer since if DNA is all we are concerned with, Pinot Noir, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris shouldn't be considered separate grapes.  I wonder, in this case, if the odd, splotchy pigmentation on the skins of the Pigato grape is sufficient to make the case for its differentiation from Vermentino?  If so, then what about the different sub-varieties of Catarratto that have greater or lesser amounts of a foggy kind of bloom on their skins?  How can we accept the one and not the other?

The short answer is that I don't know.  For the purposes of this site, Pigato, Favorita and Vermentino are all considered separately in virtually every text that I have, so I will follow their lead.  We'll just have to know that they are indistinguishable from one another within the context of modern DNA analysis and marvel that modern science has allowed us to see so deeply into what makes up these individual plants, but for some of them, our own crude eyes may still be the best tool to tell them apart.

The first Pigato based wine that I was able to try was the 2005 Bruna "Le Ruseghine" from the Riviera Ligure di Ponente DOC, located just west of Genova and just south of Piemonte.  The wine set me back about $34, which, unfortunately, isn't all that unusual for wines from Liguria.  The unforgiving geography means that most of the vineyard work must be done by hand rather than by machine, which means that labor costs are higher.  Further, the touristy nature of the region means that they can get away with charging higher prices for the local tourist trade, and so most people do.  In the glass the wine was a light gold color, showing a bit of its age.  The nose was fairly open with aromas of pineapple and grapefruit peel.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of lemon, melon and citrus peel with a distinct and prominent stony kind of minerality to it.  Overall, the wine was old and there just wasn't really any two ways about it.  A lot of the fruit had faded to a bitter kind of pithiness and the wine was just clearly over the hill and suffering for it.

Luckily I was also able to find a 2009 Claudio Vio Pigato from the Riviera Ligure di Ponente from my friends at the Wine Bottega for a more reasonable $25.  The back of the bottle says that the grapes are "heroically cultivated" in the tough Ligurian terrain, though at least this producer is able to keep the overall costs below $30 a bottle.  In the glass the wine was a golden lemon color.  The nose was fairly reserved with a touch of lemon and grapefruit peel. I don't often say that a wine has a minerally nose, but this one did have a kind of steeliness to it.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  The fruits were again fairly muted in this wine with some flavors of lemon and lemon peel with pineapple and white pear.  There was a stony, almost flinty kind of minerality to it that had a harsh, bitter edge.  When opening the first bottle, I was certain that age had played a large role in the muted aromatics and flavor profile of the wine, but after this bottle, perhaps that's just characteristic of the grape.  Neither bottle really had much to recommend it, in my opinion, especially given the fairly high sticker prices on them.  They kind of tasted like Riesling that someone had sucked all of the fun out of.  If you're a fan of lean, steely white wines with acid to spare, then maybe Pigato is your thing.

Casetta (Foja Tonda) - Terra dei Forti, Veneto, Italy

Today's grape, like the Roscetto grape I wrote about several months back, is one of those ultra-rarities that has been brought back from the brink of extinction through the efforts of a single producer who essentially has the current market on wines made from the grape cornered.  Unfortunately, that means that they also have the market cornered on information available about the grape, so for the most part, what information there is either comes from the winery directly or from other bloggers whose information seems to come directly from the winery.  So I'll issue the same caveat I did with my Roscetto post which is that since all of our information is coming from essentially the same place, our ability to cross-check any information is seriously limited and we're pretty much forced to take the winery's word for all of the information we have.

Albino Armani is the name of the winery and they've been doing business in northeastern Italy for over 400 years.  They have vineyard holdings in Trentino, Friuli and the Veneto and they make a wide variety of wines within those regions.  The story goes that in the 1980's, Albino Armani was starting to worry about the loss of many of the grapes native to some of these regions, so he set out to try and preserve what was left of them.  It looks like he made quite a few discoveries, but like the Pugnitello we took a look at a few weeks back, one in particular was more exciting than the others.  That grape was called Casetta, which is known as Foja Tonda in the local dialect, which means something like "round leaf."  The "Foja Tonda" is a bit of marketing gimmickry, as Albino Armani has the phrase trademarked and so is the only producer permitted to use it.  Not that there's a lot of competition.  It's estimated that there are only about 14 acres of Casetta in Italy (and therefore in the world since the grape is not thought to be grown anywhere else) and Armani owns and cultivates 12 of them.  The winery believes that the grape's history in the region can be traced back, vaguely,  to "antiquity," and that it ultimately fell out of favor with growers who were interested in more productively yielding vines.

For better or for worse there are "powers that be" in the world of Italian wine which have something of a say about what grapes can be cultivated and vinified in certain geographical regions.  Casetta was not approved for use anywhere, and so Albino Armani had to go through all of the processes of getting it approved.  At Albino's urging, the grape was officially reinstated for cultivation in 2002 (which basically means that it's on the governmental list of approved cultivars), and was approved for use in the Terra dei Forti DOC, where it must comprise at least 85% of the blend, as of the 2007 vintage (it is not permitted for use in any other DOC).  The Terra dei Forti DOC covers the Adige Valley between Trentino and the Veneto, is home to about 20 wineries, and has over 1300 hectares of vines divided up between over 1000 different growers.  I'm not totally sure, but I believe that 2005 was the first commercially available vintage of this wine, as there doesn't seem to be any online reviews for any prior vintages.

I was able to find a bottle of the 2006 Foja Tonda (100% Casetta), which is labeled as Vallagarina IGT since it was made the year before the DOC regulations came into effect, for about $20 from my friends at Curtis Liquors.  In the glass, the wine had a medium purple ruby color.  The nose was moderately aromatic with bright and juicy aromas of red cherry, black raspberry and waxy red fruit.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with high acid and low tannins.  There were flavors of sour cherry, black raspberry and wild raspberry fruit with some wild and dried blueberry flavors and a hint of chocolate.  The overall character was of tart, wild, brambly berryish fruits.  It's not deeply complex or intense, but it is bright and very fruity with just a hint of chocolate and leather to round out the bottom end.  If you're not a fan of high-acid red wines, this probably won't do much for you.  This would be a very nice wine for someone looking to jazz up spaghetti and meatballs or for someone looking for something a little different on pizza night.

Catarratto - Sicily, Italy

Pop quiz time again:  what is the second most planted grape in all of Italy?  As you might expect, Sangiovese is number one but I would have guessed that Trebbiano was right behind it and I definitely would have guessed that Trebbiano was the most widely planted white grape in Italy.  It is true that if you count all of the various sub-types of Trebbiano under a single heading, then Trebbiano becomes the most widely planted grape in Italy, but as of 2000, the Istituto Statistica Mercati Agro-Alimentari in Italy regards them separately, so I'll follow suit.  Trebbiano Toscana comes in third right behind today's grape, Catarratto (specifically Catarratto Bianco Comune, but we'll get to that in a minute).

The really amazing thing about Catarratto's high placement on that list is that all of the plantings of the grape are on Sicily, and nearly all of them are concentrated in the western part of the island.  In fact, Catarratto accounts for over 60% of the vineyard area on the island of Sicily, which is no mean feat as Sicily has more acreage devoted to the vine than any other region of Italy with over 330,000 acres planted (how the grape got to Sicily is a bit of a mystery as recent DNA testing [source] has shown that it is an offspring of the Garganega grape, which is primarily cultivated on the northern end of the Italian mainland in the Veneto region).  Catarratto Bianco Comune covered about 109,000 acres in 2000, which was actually down from nearly 150,000 acres in 1990.  None of those figures account for plantings of Catarratto Bianco Lucido which stood at about 20,000 acres in 2000.  So what's the big deal?  Why is so much land devoted to this grape?  The reason is pretty simple.  Catarratto is low-maintenance in the vineyard and yields like crazy, which is the perfect storm for growers whose main concern is selling their juice off for bulk wine production.  Catarratto is also important in the production of Marsala, but, as mentioned in the Grillo post a few days back, Marsala production has also become an industrialized, bulk production kind of affair and Catarratto's high yields, fairly neutral character and tendency to oxidize easily are all perfect for those kinds of operations.

I noted above that the planting figures were different for Catarratto Bianco Comune and Catarratto Bianco Lucido.  The Italian authorities recognize these as two distinct grape varieties, but recent DNA testing (source) has confirmed that they are actually clonal variants of the same grape (there are actually more than just these two, all genetically identical, but these are the most important in terms of acreage and volume).  They are distinguished from one another by the relative presence or absence of a whitish bloom on the skins of the grapes as they mature.  Comune has the most whitish color present while Lucido has less, creating a clearer, glossier looking grape skin.  Another sub-variety known as Extra-Lucido was discovered and isolated in 1971 from some Lucido vines and, as you might expect, it has virtually no bloom on the skins.  Comune is the more prolific producer, which is why its plantings tower over plantings for the other sub-varieties (all are rather voluminous yielders, though).  The Oxford Companion to Wine asserts that Lucido is the finer of the two in terms of quality production, but Bastianich and Lynch in their Vino Italiano hold that the differences between the two sub-varieties is subtle at most.  The tiebreaker goes to Nicolas Belfrage who, in his Brunello to Zibibbo maintains that Lucido is indeed the finer of the sub-varieties.

I don't know which one was in the bottle of Catarratto that I was able to find, but the odds suggest that it's probably Catarratto Bianco Comune.  I picked up a bottle of the 2008 Feudo Montoni Catarratto locally for about $20.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep lemon-gold color.  The nose was nicely aromatic with green apple and apple pie filling aromas with some pineapple tropical fruit notes.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity.  There were flavors of baked apples and apple cider with a touch of lemony citrus.  The finish was bitter with a powdery, chalky kind of edge to it.  The cidery notes kept getting stronger as the wine stayed open, making it harder and harder to drink.  Overall, I didn't care for this at all.  Even taking into account that it is probably just a little past its prime, the flavors here were too one dimensional and the chalky texture was so unpleasant that it became a struggle to get through this bottle.  I'm always wary of writing a grape off due to one bad bottle, so I'll keep my eyes open for something a little fresher and will post a review if I come across anything.

Uva di Troia (Nero di Troia) - Castel del Monte, Puglia, Italy

You might be inclined, upon seeing the name of today's grape, to assume that it has something to do with the ancient city of Troy.  "Troia" is right there in the name, you might say, so there must be some connection between the two.  While you wouldn't be alone in thinking that, you also wouldn't be correct.  It seems to happen a lot in the wine world (and beyond) that someone takes a quick look at a word and uses their intuition to come up with an explanation for it rather than doing any research.  In actuality, the name of the grape most likely comes from a town named Troia in Puglia which is west of the town of Foggia in the northern part of the region, which isn't nearly as exciting as a reference to the ancient city of Troy, but sometimes facts can be pretty boring.

It is thought that Uva di Troia came to Puglia via Greece several thousand years ago.  The name of the game in Puglia has traditionally been high volume bulk wine production so over the years growers would select certain vines that had larger grapes with more clusters to replant in their vineyards in order to increase the amount of juice that each vine could produce.  This kind of clonal selection in the field has result in a handful of distinctive clonal variants that differ primarily in the size of the grape and the compactness of the bunches.  As you might expect, those clones with very large berries tends to produce inferior wine.  The obvious reason is that the juice is less concentrated on these vines and the wine is dilute and lacking in flavor.  The less obvious reason is that Uva di Troia has a tendency for its bunches to ripen unevenly and the larger berries of certain clones cause the bunches to be more compact, making it difficult for some of the grapes closer to the center of the bunch to ripen completely since they are shielded from the sun.  These underripe grapes are tossed into the fermentation vat along with everything else where they contribute harsh tannins and acid to the finished wine.  Clonal variants with looser clusters and smaller berries are generally preferred for quality production, as the juice is more concentrated and the berries ripen more evenly and completely, making for a less harsh wine.

The grape is somewhat noteworthy for just how average it is across the board when you look at its viticultural characteristics.  It's fairly resistant to a wide variety of diseases, it yields fairly abundantly (depending on which clone is planted) and it isn't prone to dropping clusters or berries during the growing season.  It tolerates the heat of Puglia fairly well and while it's a fairly late ripener, that's not a big problem in the warm, dry Puglian climate.  Increasingly, however, plantings of Uva di Troia are on the decline.  It seems that Uva di Troia isn't quite as user friendly as the other Puglian stand-bys, Negroamaro and Primitivo, either in the vineyard, the winery or the marketplace.  Further, the DOC regulations for the most important region for Uva di Troia, Castel del Monte, are set up in such a way that use of the grape in the DOC wine isn't necessary.  The regulations stipulate that the wine must contain Uva di Troia and/or Aglianico and/or Montepulciano with up to 35% of non-aromatic red grapes added.  What that means is that a red wine from Castel del Monte can be 100% Uva di Troia, 100% Aglianico, 100% Montepulciano or any blend of the three grapes with over 1/3 of the blend allowed to come from virtually any other red grape.  There are a handful of other DOC regions that have Uva di Troia as the primary grape, but Castel del Monte is by far the most important economically and since there is no incentive for growers or winemakers to use the grape, many are moving away from it to the more recognizable Aglianico and Montepulciano grapes.

Fortunately, there are still some wines made from the Uva di Troia grape.  The Rivera winery is one of them and I was able to pick up a bottle of their 2003 "Il Falcone" bottling for about $33.  The wine is 70% Uva di Troia (called Nero di Troia by them, and supposedly made up of three different clones) and 30% Montepulciano.  The wine is from the Castel del Monte DOC, which is named for an octagonal castle in the area that was built by Frederick II in the 12th Century.  Frederick was apparently a big fan of hunting with Falcons, which is how "Il Falcone" got its name. In the glass the wine was a very deep purple-ruby color that was  opaque nearly all the way out to the rim.  The nose on the wine was very reserved with purple fruit that had a blackcurrant character to it with a hint of smoke.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity and medium tannins.  There were flavors of ripe black cherry and blackberry fruits with smoke, leather, tobacco, cocoa and cassis.  This is a dark and brooding wine with ripe fruit flavors that are held in check by the rich, earthy flavors.  This is very well balanced, very deep and very interesting.  It's hard to call a $30 bottle of wine a value, but if I had paid $50 for this wine, I still would have felt like I got my money's worth out of it.  It's a really fascinating, deep, complex wine that would be an ideal companion for game or grilled meats.  It's probably as good as Uva di Troia gets so if you happen to run across it, definitely give it a shot.

Grillo - Sicily, Italy

When researching grapes for this blog, I occasionally stumble over interesting stuff completely by accident.  In the case of today's grape, Grillo, I was simply looking online for a picture of some grapes that I could use to decorate the post with.  It's usually sufficient to enter the name of the grape into a Google image search to get what I'm looking for, but occasionally there are some surprises.  When I entered Grillo into the search today, I got back pages and pages of pictures of all kinds of crickets because, apparently, grillo is the Italian word for cricket.  So, for those of you like me who do not speak any Italian, there's your word for the day.  As for why the grape is known as Grillo, I have no idea.  Nobody who writes about the grape seems all that interested in the fact that the grape's name also means cricket, so my guess is that it's probably just a coincidence.  Nothing about the grapes or the vines look like a cricket to me and, as far as I know, crickets don't eat grapes, so I'm out of ideas as to the source of the name.

It turns out that exactly where the grape comes from is a bit of a mystery as well.  The most popular explanation online is that the grape came to Sicily via Puglia.  Nicolas Belfrage, in his Brunello to Zibibbo is doubtful about this since there doesn't appear to be anything like Grillo at all in Puglia.  Further, those who champion this explanation believe that the grape came to Sicily only after phylloxera struck the Italian vineyards, which would mean that it has only been grown on Sicily for about 150 years at the most.  I'm skeptical about this since another factoid given out about Grillo is that it was the basis for the famous Roman wine called Mamertino, which was a favorite of Julius Caesar.  One assumes that the ancient Mamertino wine was made around the area of Mamertino, which is itself on the island of Sicily, so if it is true that Grillo is the base of the Mamertino wine of old, then we have to posit that Grillo has been on the island of Sicily for several thousand years.  It is, of course, unbelievably difficult to match modern grapes to historical wines, so that's not exactly a smoking gun, but Belfrage's observation about the lack of similar grapes in Puglia seems pretty damning to me.  His theory is that the grape came to Sicily with the Phoenicians thousands of years ago, but given that Grillo's parents are listed on the VIVC as Muscat of Alexandria and Catarratto, which is thought to be native to Sicily, it seems more likely to me that Grillo was born on Sicily at some point in the distant past.

Grillo is particularly well suited to the Sicilian climate as it is very tolerant of high temperatures and dry conditions, which Sicily has in abundance.  Further, the grape is capable of reaching fairly high sugar levels when ripe, which was a major boon when it was the primary grape used in the production of Marsala.  Marsala, as some of you may know, is a fortified wine produced on the island of Sicily that is made in a way that is similar to Sherry.  The Sicilian name for what the Spanish call the solera system is in perpetuum.  In the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, Marsala was a big deal on the international wine scene, but demand for it has fallen even more precipitously than for the fortified wines of other areas such as Madeira, Port and Sherry.  For the most part, the Marsala of today is industrially produced and is good for little more than use as a cooking wine.  There are some artisan producers still making quality Marsala, but it is very difficult to find.

Grillo was once fairly widely planted, but as you might expect, once demand for the principal wine produced from it began to fall, acreage devoted to the vine began to decline as well.  It's also not exactly a prolific yielder, so as the process for Marsala production began to shift over to a bulk, industrial process, Grillo was uprooted in favor of the Catarratto grape, which yields more productively and reliably.  The low point for Grillo came in the early 1990's when acreage devoted to the grape fell below 5,000 acres.  Plantings have rebounded lately as the popularity of dry white table wines has increased over the past twenty years or so, and growers and consumers have found that Grillo can make interesting, characterful table wines.

I was able to find two wines made from the Grillo grape.  The first was the 2008 Corvo "Terrae Dei" which I was able to find for about $12.  In the glass, the wine had a medium lemon-gold color. The nose was shy with a little bit of lemon and pear, but not much. It picks up a little funky leesy, cheesy kind of aroma as it approaches room temperature, but it never really gets that strong.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity.  The sensation was of light, delicate fruits like lemon, lime, green apple and creamy pear.  The leesy kind of flavor persisted a bit onto the palate as well, providing an interesting, slightly cheesy and funky kind of flavor that picks up as the wine approaches room temperature, but never gets out of control.  I was a little concerned when I bought this bottle that it might be in the midst of its decline, and I think I was probably right.  It's drinking OK right now, but the fruit flavors are definitely in full retreat here.

Luckily I was able to find a bottle of the 2009 Ca' di Ponti Grillo from my friends at the Gypsy Kitchen for about $10.  In the glass, the wine was a fairly pale silvery lemon color.  The nose was very aromatic with melon, green apple, pineapple and grapefruit aromas.  It was like a fruit cocktail leaping out of the glass.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity.  There were flavors of creamy pear and melon with some banana and lemony citrus.  The fruits were much more muted on the palate than on the nose, which surprised me a little bit.  I have in my notes that the overall flavor profile was "broad," which, to me, means that the acid is fairly muted and the wine has almost a kind of creamy mouthfeel.  A broad wine has more acidity than a "flabby" wine, but it's still on the lower side of balanced.  I'm a sucker for a high-acid white wine, so this didn't really do it for me, though it is a very nicely made wine and at only $10 a bottle represents a very good value.  Those looking for a substitute for Chardonnay will find a lot to like here, but I just need more zip in my whites than this wine can provide.

Bonus factoid for those of you who read all the way to the end: Grillo is unusual in that it only has one known synonym.  The grape is also known as Riddu in some places, though the Palomino Fino grape has Grillo as one of its accepted synonyms.  Most grapes pick up dozens of synonyms as they move through different regions (see Chasselas and its 200+ different names), but Grillo only has the one.