Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [77]
Italians had to respond to adversity. Everyone remembers those straw-covered Chianti bottles that made such quaint candleholders in the 1970s. You may even remember the wine, too, but probably not very fondly. Those were the dark days of Italian winemaking, when quantity-over-quality-minded producers used such poor farming and winemaking practices that the quality of Chianti (and some other classic Italian wines) hit rock bottom. (You might say in hindsight that the straw bottle, called a fiasco in Italian, was aptly named.)
Fiercely proud, Chianti vintners responded to the crisis creatively, in the Italian improvisational spirit. They planted foreign grapes (usually French, such as Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot), often blending them with the locals to upgrade the resulting wine, or using them to produce the varietal wines so popular with American consumers. They also “reinterpreted” the weakest winemaking and grape-growing laws, eliminating sloppy practices, developing improved ones, and sharing with other wine countries to cull their best practices. The most prominent result of all this was the emergence of so-called super-Tuscan wines, a luxury wine category combining the best of local traditions (such as the Sangiovese grape) and newly imported ones (including the Cabernet grape, and the use of new French oak barrels for aging rather than the large, Slavonian oak barrels traditional to Italy). The results sent many of Italy’s top wines back to world-class status and premium prices. The super-Tuscan wines remain some of Italy’s most famous, regularly trading in the same league with the French classics at wine auctions.
“Old Style” and “New Style” Winemaking
All of this experimentation and cross-pollination of ideas with other famous wine regions also launched a “new style” of winemaking in some of the most traditional regions. Winemakers working in the new style are careful to avoid oxidation of the grape juice at harvest so as to preserve the fresh fruit flavor and youthful, vivid color. They see to it that the grape skins are handled more gently during crushing and pressing in order to get softer, suppler tannins in the reds. Often, they use small, new French oak barrels to give a prominent, sweet oakiness to the wine (in the style of classic Bordeaux and top California Cabernets). Critics of the new style say it robs the traditional wines of their individuality and character, and the wine world of some welcome diversity. They also say these new-style techniques are used more to gain critics’ attention than to make great wine (you may remember our discussion of how an oaky scent and taste can sometimes make a wine stand out in a critic’s blind wine tasting). Proponents of the new style say it often produces better-quality wines that are “ready to drink” (meaning pleasant to the taster) sooner, and thus more commercially viable.
The Modern Italian Wine Law
Gradually, the government reacted to all of this change, creating the DOCG category to upgrade winemaking standards in Chianti and other traditional wine zones, and writing into law some of the better (but unauthorized at the time) winemaking practices that launched the super-Tuscan movement. In addition, in 1992, a new category was created–Indicazione Geografica Tipica (IGT) indicating a wine or style that is typical of its region. Its purpose was to try to bring the untraditional blends and varietal wines into the wine law system. Doing this is helpful (presumably) to the government in fulfilling the European Community mandate to upgrade the overall standard and prices of member countries’ wines by phasing out the production of table wines