Fuso Barbera (2010)
For professional wine writers, who have the time, resources and desire to do the whole blind tasting thing, price and value are not supposed to play into how they perceive a wine. For the rest of us, however, it’s usually impossible not to bring this to mind.
Which brings me to this Fuso Barbera. It was a Thursday night, after a particularly trying week, and though we typically reserve most of our heavy wine drinking for the weekend, we decided to splurge a bit and cracked open this red to go with some chicken & pesto pasta. I knew this wine only cost me $10, so it was a good mid-week wine choice, and I figured Barbera was versatile enough to go with a ligther dish.
This is everyday, mid-week wine at its very best. Bright, vibrant, lots of red fruit, terroir-driven, acidic enough to be versatile with food, and downright cheap. What more can one ask for?
I can’t, nor will I try to, separate this wine from it’s price. Nor do I believe I should, because this is a killer bargain. This is one of those “rush out to get another 1/2 case” kind of wines. If I were the type to have a “House” wine, this would be my new one.
I came across an article the other day entitled “Aglianico: Italy’s rising grape” or “next big grape” or something along those lines (sorry, don’t remember where). This concept makes some kind of sense, given that Aglianico is one of the key traditionally indigenous Italian grapes, yet doesn’t seem to carry the same respect that Nebbiolo or Sangiovese gets outside Italy. So, the potential for growth exists.
Chianti Classico is widely available from a large list of producers, so it can often be daunting to decide which to buy when dealing with the unknown. This can be even more difficult if you, like me, prefer to deal outside the well-known, widely available brands. Sometimes you just have to take a chance on a single bottle of a brand you’ve never heard of, and build knowledge from there.
Pennsylvania’s state system, which is the butt of many jokes and complaints (including quite a few from yours truly), has come through with another intriguingly rare Italian varietal. Discovering wines like these is what makes the exploration of Italian wines so interesting; this one has it all: rarity, historical significance, and most importantly, flavor.
Piedirosso (literally “red feet”, for their red stalks) is a red grape native to Campania that’s more often used for blending than as a single varietal wine. It is, however, the sole grape in Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio Rosso, a famous red grown on the banks of Mount Vesuvius (but that’s another story for another time). This Piedirosso is grown in the Phlegraean Fields (Campi Flegrei), an area west of Naples that also features volcanic soil, but lacks the heights of Vesuvius.
For a while now, Italy’s vintners have been embracing “international” varietals, and – to be perfectly honest – it’s not a trend I particularly care for. Though there is no doubt Super Tuscans have generated quite a bit of buzz, they are the main source of my consternation. It’s not that there is anything wrong with Super Tuscans – some of them are very good, but for me the ones that only contain Bordeaux varietals have me wondering “what’s the point?” Why not just drink a Bordeaux? Of course there are some that feature Sangiovese alongside the French grapes, which I find more appealing, but even then tend to prefer wines that focus on and feature natively (or longtime) Italian varietals more prominently.
One of the most difficult things about wine critique – and, before I even get into that, I should mention that I don’t consider myself a true wine critic, at least that inhabits the same space as people like Robert Parker and Steven Tanzer, or even bloggers who do actual professional tasting events, but at the same time, people who read my posts might be encouraged to buy a wine, or perhaps dissuaded from buying a wine, so in some ways, the same principles apply.
When I was last in Rome, I had the opportunity to visit Open Balladin, a bar & restaurant known mostly for the fact that it is one of the few restaurants in the city that doesn’t serve wine – only beer. It’s a neat place, with an impressive 140+ beers on draft and in the bottle. We had some snacks – nothing too special – but I got the impression that this place was more of a destination for drinks than for food.
From my experience, Avignonesi is the flagship Vino Nobile available in the US. This may, of course, vary from region to region, but this is the wine I have found most easily from New York to South Carolina, at least. In Tuscany, around Montepulciano, Fattoria Cerro was the most commonly available, and generally the cheapest Vino Nobile available at the “supermarkets”, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
This is one of my more interesting finds of late – it’s a blend of 3 grapes (33% Refosco, 33% Merlot, 34% Cabernet Franc), that’s also a blend of three consecutive vintages (“Treanni” = three years), resulting in a non-vintage release (even though the PA website lists this as a “2006″).