A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [37]
When I went home that night and tried to learn more, my reference library wasn’t much help. The Oxford Companion to Wine devoted an uncharacteristically uninformative inch of column space to the Sagrantino grape, noting that Sagrantino di Montefalco received its DOCG status only in the mid-1990s. (It was 1992, actually.) Oz Clarke’s New Wine Atlas covers Umbria in a single paragraph. Paolo Bea wasn’t even listed in Gamberro Rosso, the Italian wine bible, although three other makers of the mysterious Sagrantino di Montefalco had entries.
I started looking for Sagrantino on Italian wine lists here in New York and discovered a small, diverse range of wines, most of them fleshy, powerful, bitter, and spicy. Sometimes I was reminded of Syrah, or even Petite Sirah. Sagrantino is fatter, richer, and more tannic than Sangiovese, the dominant grape in neighboring Tuscany. The ideal Sagrantino, to me, tastes like blackberries and bitter chocolate dusted with cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove.
“The origin of the grape is very mysterious,” Paris told me recently. “One theory is that the Crusaders brought it back from the Middle East.” Presumably, if it were of Roman or Etruscan origin it would have been disseminated more widely. For whatever reason, the cultivation of Sagrantino is limited to a tiny area around the town of Montefalco. Until recently most of the grapes were dried to produce a sweet passito; a small fraction was used to make communion wine for the sacgramenti. The recorded history of the dry red begins in 1971, when Arnaldo Caprai founded his winery. Caprai is the pioneer who essentially created Sagrantino di Montefalco as we know it—if we know it. The relative obscurity of Montefalco is partly a function of small production; as far as I can tell, there are only ten or twelve serious producers, and most of them are making no more than a couple thousand cases. According to Paris, the other problem—this is Italy, after all— is that “squabbling prevents them from working together.”
Caprai is the only producer turning out enough wine to make much of an impact on the marketplace, and the only one who has really taken a scientific approach, experimenting with clones and rootstock. More to the point, the wines are superb and, unlike those of his neighbors, somewhat consistent in character; the funky wines of Paolo Bea, Caprai’s rival for the esteem of Sagrantino buffs, can taste very different not only from vintage to vintage but even from bottle to bottle. I imagine him stomping the grapes with his feet and bottling by hand—and I prefer to retain those images rather than calling his importer, Neal Rosenthal, to get the actual facts. In matters of the heart, and of the lower appetities, mystery can often be more stimulating than knowledge.
One thing I can swear to: Bea doesn’t use new oak barriques, which is one of the reasons his wines are so je ne sais quoi. Other producers are doing so, and while new oak can round out the rough edges of Sagrantino, it can also, in the wrong hands, make them taste dangerously similar to Tuscan Cabernet or Australian Shiraz. Such is the case with Còlpetrone, which regularly gets the top three-glass award from Gambero Rosso (which, scandalously, as of 2005 still has no listing for Bea) and tastes to me like a good Cabernet from, say Stellenbosch, South Africa. Scacciadiavoli switched to new barriques with the ′98 vintage without losing too much funky Sagrantino soul.
This is supposed to be the part of the essay where I tell you what a great value these obscure wines are.