Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [78]
All of which brings us back to our basic strategy: Get comfortable with the two famous regions, get a handle on the cheap-but-good stuff, dabble with the one-of-a-kinds, and then remember my secret weapon buying rule for when you are out of your league (see below).
Rosso, Bianco, and Rosato
We need to spend a moment on color. Serious Italian wine, and there is certainly plenty of it, is red. The Italians, with extremely rare exception, just do not care about white wine. Not that plenty of it isn’t made, but much is for export and for cheap, refreshing drinking during seaside holidays in Italy’s stunningly beautiful coastal towns. The rest is meant to employ gallons of mediocre-quality juice from vineyards whose output used to go into Italy’s famous reds (to their detriment) before the recent quality revolution. So you mainly need to know that most Italian whites are refreshing but basic, and the prices should be, too. Rosato (rosé in Italian), on the other hand, can be fun. Nearly every region makes it from whatever red grape reigns locally. They are inexpensive and tasty—definitely worth trying, slightly chilled, in summer, or any time with spicy food.
Tuscany
Getting to Know Tuscan Classic Reds
The cedar, the olive, and the vine—these icons define the Tuscan countryside just as the Duomo in Florence and the Piazza del Campo in Siena define her two major metropolises. Although Tuscany is a major center of experimentation in Italian winemaking, it remains a headquarters for Italian classic reds, all based on the Sangiovese grape. Their other common theme is that all are oak aged by law, although the minimum oak-aging time varies according to the DOCG, with Brunello the longest of all.
The dichotomy between old and new styles exists here, although it seems that many wineries have solved the debate by doing a bit of both. It is not uncommon for one winery to have multiple bottlings—a “new style” wine, either as a proprietary blend or an appellation wine, using perhaps Cabernet Sauvignon or small French oak barrels, or both; and an “old style” wine made of Sangiovese and other local grapes, aged in the traditional large Slavonian oak barrels. This lets them cater to fans of either style.
CHIANTI DOCG This wine has come a long way since the days of the kitschy straw-covered bottle—although these are still produced, and you should avoid them. Nowadays, the Chianti worth your attention ranges from solid everyday drinking wines with some character, to serious, complex, age-worthy wines of world-class status. Unfortunately, the DOCG rank applies equally to the entire range of the region’s wines, making it difficult to predict the quality of any given wine, and thus generally holding the Chianti DOCG’s image at an average level. Here’s a little more information on the zones that are consistently worthy of the DOCG ranking.
Chianti Classico is the hilly center and historic heart of the Chianti zone between Florence and Siena, generally yielding some of the best-quality Chiantis. Yield limits here are the strictest of all the Chianti subdistricts. Recent changes in the law now allow the use of 100 percent Sangiovese (previously, inclusion of lesser grapes, including some whites, was mandatory), as well as the inclusion of small proportions of untraditional grapes such as Cabernet Sauvignon. Those are powerful changes. On the taste side, with white grapes eliminated, and Cabernet sometimes blended in, you’ll find a deeper, richer, more powerful version of Chianti than you might remember from the straw-bottle days. Indeed, they are serious wines, and they have prices to match. Serious wines can cost serious money. I think many of the best ones are worth it, but our tasting will let