Tag Archives: Italian wine

‘Do The Macchiona’

08 Wednesday May 2019

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Macchiona is the kind of wine that stops you in your blind tasting tracks and asks ‘WTF is that’?

For a moment let’s forget the analytics, debates about quality, merits and demerits, and boring old points scoring, and just accept that this is what wine can, and should, be all about.

Subtle, heady, complex, hard to pin down, a combination of smells and tastes that make you think you are somewhere, when you are not, transporting you to a time and a place where you momentarily want to remain forever.

Half the group thought we were in Bordeaux, others correctly thought Italy, but all agreed we had somehow died and gone to heaven!

La Stoppa is an ancient estate in Piacenza, Emilia Romagna, originally planted over a century ago and owned by the Pantaleoni family since 1973. Vine stock is old and indigenous with naturally low yields from poor soils.

Rare as hen’s teeth, Macchiona is a blend of Bonarda and Barbera, matured for 12 months in Slavonian oak barrels, gorgeous, meaty and a bit raunchy with aromas of wild berries, herbs, bunches of fennel and a savoury-sour cherry finish – Bordeaux indeed!

Do the Macchiona!

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Freisa Good

02 Thursday May 2019

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As a long term advocate of non-compliance, I love a wine that divides opinion!

Sure it’s got more than a heady whiff of the farmyard, but that never stopped anyone buying Musar.

Decanting is ‘de rig’,  for a good hour before drinking, and the longer you can leave it resting, at room temp, with a bit of oxygenation, the better. This not only reduces the feral, bosky, gamey aromas, but it’s important to remember that this wine has been sitting in bottle since 2003.


Freisa in all its chunky, funky glory is a rare beast.  Robust, earthy, tannic and unafraid to speak its mind. If you’re new to Freisa, it’s first mention in Piemonte occurs around 1799 – so catch up! Burton Anderson describes it as having a kind of sweet – acidic flavour, like lightly salted raspberries. But whatever you do, don’t confuse it with Pinot Noir – that’s just too predictable dahling!  This is Freisa di Chieri, seriously small berried (unlike Freisa Grossa) with bigger phenolics and a similar structure to Nebbiolo.

Altogether now ….Freisa Good, Freisa Good..

Granato Foradori

30 Tuesday Apr 2019

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As you exit the narrow Salerno Gorge, a wide valley covered in vineyards and fruit trees opens near San Michele all Adige, this is the Campo Rotaliano home of the Teroldego grape.

The land has seen tribes and rulers come and go, Romans, Celts, Longobards, Francs, Tyroleans, Austrians, Bavarians and Italians, one of whom Nicolo da Povo was the first to mention Teroldego by name in 1383.

I know it’s just another grape you’ve never heard of, but you should take note as it has the potential to compete with the great wine grapes of Bordeaux. 

Cultivation of the grape is quite small, with around 400 hectares under vine of which about 75% is DOC. 

Elizabetta Foradori began exploring the grapes diversity back in 1985 and has thus far uncovered around 15 different biotypes which she uses for replanting. These form the qualitative backbone of her wines. Ensuring a vineyards diversity is the best guarantee of obtaining great results as you can propagate by massal selection – using field cuttings from your best vines – as opposed to clonal selection where you buy in clones from elsewhere.

The wines she makes are some of my favourite Italian reds, and if I ever feel a little down in the dumps, they serve as a restorative elixir causing my sense of humour to return, and a sweet little smile of satisfaction spreads across my ugly mug. 

Granato, Vigneti delle Dolomiti Rosso IGT, to give it its full title, is a noble beast. Deep, almost shy at first, it opens to give smells of wild berries, roasted hazelnuts, baked bread, tar and a herby eucalyptus quality that makes you feel you have just brushed up against the vine rows. The grapes are vinified separately and blended to achieve balance and concentration after long ageing in old wood. It is a dignified wine, pure and intense, changing in the glass each time you nose, and from sip to sip. Soft yet penetrating, the sweet fruit balanced with a supporting acidity that weaves its way through the wine like the wind in the mountains.

Romantic or what? You won’t get that kind of wordsmithery in the Sunday Papers.

Subtly Sublime

03 Tuesday Sep 2013

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Sometimes a few wines cross your path that demand attention. This can manifest itself in many different ways. They can be dreadful (these will be absent from this blog so as to avoid hurt feelings ref “The Conchords“). They may be prohibitively expensive. They may be massively monstrous, or alternatively, they may be subtly sublime. I enjoy alliteration and use it often in homage to my childhood English master who said ” Lewis! This essay is a mass of mixed metaphors”. To which I facetiously replied “Is that not alliteration sir”. The wry smile on his face as he said “Get out boy” stays with me today. I am digressing , these two wines come under the heading subtly sublime.

I seem to be tasting (drinking) a lot of Italian wines at present – obviously not right now as its the morning! I find them to be the perfect wines for autumn – subtle, medium bodied with enough tannic grip and vibrant acidity to compliment the kind of food suited to summer’s end.

The red is a Nebbiolo from G.D. Vajra in the Langhe. It’s a kind of “Baby Barolo” coming from younger vines, but packed with the classic violet and red berry aromas associated with the grape variety. Aldo Vajra is a traditionalist, and a champion of old-styley winemaking (His Barolos spend three and a half years in barrel prior to bottling). Vajra’s wines are less powerful than those from Serralunga, but what they lack in oomph they more than make up for in elegance. This is almost Burgundian in style with an intense and pure fruit character redolent of it’s origin. Tannins are ripe – but necessarily grippy, and the balance is sublime. If your funds cannot stretch to Barolo then this is the badger!

The sticky is from the Maremma, and, if tasted blind, could easily be mistaken for a Barsac. It’s intentionally made by Elizabetta Gepetti as an homage to the wines of Sauternes (my blind note said Barsac). A blend of Traminer, Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon grown in Scanscano, this is lush, ripe, jam packed with peaches and enlivened throughout with a racy, almost citrusy acidity together with a smidgeon of minerality for added complexity. Again, if your wallet is too skinny for Sauternes you can always get two half bottles of this – give it a blast .

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