Back home - reflections on the recent viaggio

Oh great, I have to go to New Jersey again.  I've hardly recovered from the intense trip to Italy and I've hardly set foot outside the apartment since I got home Saturday at 5 pm, and I'm on the road again.  Oh, and synagogue with Ken tomorrow.  And then there's Yom Kippur.  When oh when will it end? 

OK, enough ritual kvetching, an innate talent of Jews and Irishmen alike.  (I personally cover both those bases.)

As you may have been able to deduce from my exhausted ramblings via BlackBerry, it was a pretty grueling viaggio. 

We drove almost 3000 km -- almost 2000 miles -- many on excellent highways, too many on frightening hairpin-turny roads with broken paving.  We visited and tasted the wines of (it seems) 250 producers.  I exaggerate. 

We stayed in many uncomfortable B&Bs and country hotels.  (Below: All mod cons.)

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This was one of the really nice ones - what a pleasure!

In Reggio Emilia

Some of the wines were delicious and READY.  Some were promising but not really ready for the primetime of America (if it isn't already our day of the Untergang des Abendlandes...check your Spengler).  Some were, you know, eh.  Or instantly spittable.  Or so horrid on the nose that you poured out the bottle IMMEDIATELY because they smelled the way Love Canal must have back in the day.

All in all, a good trip. 

One thing that continues to impress me is the improvement I see in small producers of the Valpolicella and Soave zones.  The wines are lovely, they have character and they're perfect with a wide range of foods.  They're also friendly enough to drink as an aperitif.  Indeed, the wonderful young producers we've met there are fond of saying "you can drink our wine all through the meal," and they're right.  Not big, important wines, but clean, fine, and bursting with the harmonious flavors of well-made Soave and Valpolicella.

The other thing that continues to knock me out is the endless

expressiveness of Aglianico.  We have tasted and retasted a vast array of these wines in the past couple of trips, and the variety of flavors, textures, "readinesses" and treatments rivals anything you might find in other grapes and better-regarded wine zones of the country.  We're looking hard at a couple of producers whose vines may be too young at this time, or whose experience is a bit limited, but whose basic skill and raw materials are very exciting to contemplate in the near future. Campania and Basilicata are the homelands of this noble grape, and of course their terroirs are very distinct -- not only between each other but within each region as well.

The Boccella vineyard in November of last year.  Before harvest.  In Taurasi DOCG zone.

Further, I'm delighted to taste more and more Aglianicos which do not reek of excessive oak, and in some cases touch no wood at all.  Reduced yields give the best unoaked wines plenty of depth and "shoulders" with more tannic bite.  Not everyone likes this style of wine, but I do.  And if you don't, no problem.  There will be an Aglianico for you.

Comments

[Fredric Koeppel]

i hope you're going to bring in the full range of the aglianico experience for all of us deprived wine drinkers.

[terence]

Initially, just from 2 producers. Next year, I'm sure 2-3 additional. I'm pretty crazy about Aglianico, and it's a bargain at this point when compared with other"big" Italian reds.

By the time we get finished with it, I of course hope it isn't such a bargain!

[David J]

Er, la bella foto- '*before* harvest'?? Aglianico Eiswein??

[Dave]

Che meraviglioso viaggio. thanks for sharing all the travails and good times, and especially thanks for sharing all that wine,whenever it arrives.
i think the phrase "clean, fine, and bursting with the harmonious flavors" might be the key to building the market for new Italian wines.
Now, if you can just convince "some people" that wines such as those are worth reviewing.
grazie mille..

[Strappo]

Dave B., let's hope they will...I think the big, expressive Aglianici will be the easiest to get reviewed.

David R., the pic is a good example of why saying it's a "southern" wine leads to misconceptions about the climate, etc. This vineyard, like many of the zone, is about 2000 feet above sea level, ergo temps tend to be very high during sunny days and very chilly at night. Excellent for bringing out the aromatics and for bracing levels of acidity. The tannins of these inland, high-elevation Aglianici are a lot tougher and more demanding than the coastal ones, but here oak is usually a good thing in taming them. The danger, as always, is that the producer might be tempted to overapply the oak. Fortunately, in the case of Boccella, this is not so.

I use "fortunately" advisedly, because the enologo is the talented young Fortunato Sebastiano. The three of us call him Lucky (what's what his name means!) - and we too are among the "lucky ones" (fortunati) who work with him.

(Lucky, are you blushing now?)