I wrote a long piece entitled Pondering Basilicata and its Aglianico recently. Here are a few pictures that Elisabetta Musto-Carmelitano took and forwarded to me via Fortunato Sebastiano. I'm grateful for these, especially since I seemed to have messed up using Fortunato's camera. (Naturally, I left my camera at the hotel and naturally I ended up not using it at all. No comments, please.)
Springtime in the Musto-Carmelitano vineyard with the oldest vines, some over 90 years old. They produce very small quantities of fruit of great concentration. Note many gaps where oldest vines have died.
Ancient Aglianico vine. The winery makes only Aglianico. This is a good thing, and a focus that younger enologi like Fortunato are encouraging. The compulsion to make a wide range of wines seems to be a relic of the hit-or-miss approach to winemaking. After selling so many of their grapes to co-ops or big industrial wineries, aziende that switched over to doing their own bottlings had little or no awareness of what worked best in their terroir.
They also felt that, in order to seem important in the eyes of local consumers and retail buyers, they had to offer an assortment. Which accounts for the otherwise inexplicable presence of metodo classico sparklers made of Aglianico or Sangiovese in different parts of Italy.
A different Musto-Carmelitano on a different day. Like most small producers, they acquire a small bit of land here, one there, and so forth.
La famiglia Musto-Carmelitano:
Elisabetta and her brother
at right. Her father and uncle at left. I really liked her old
uncle. At the end of our discussion, he looked at me and said, "You
faahny." If he only knew.




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