Steak - Mark Schatzker [75]
The theme, obviously, and not surprisingly, was locality, and it was perhaps stated best by the wine, which was made out of a special grape called pugnitello, which means “little fist” (it has the same Latin root as pugnacious), so named because the grapes grow in clenched little clusters. Like the Cinta Senese and the Chianina, the pugnitello was pushed to the edge of extinction, again because of poor yield—other grapevines simply produced more juice. It was thought to have vanished, until in 1981 a researcher discovered some vines. The master vintner at Borgo San Felice took an interest in pugnitello precisely because of its low yield. High yield may be the friend of the grape farmer’s balance sheet, but it is the enemy of good wine. Fine wine makers do not want a lot of juice. They want very good juice, and they will cut as much as half the grapes off a vine mid-season so that the remaining fruit becomes more concentrated. In 1987, twenty-five acres of pugnitello were planted, and after years of experimentation, a new—and yet very old—wine was born. (Wine Spectator gave it the following pastoral description: “Lovely nose that reminds me of Zinfandel, with plum and flowers. Full-bodied, with jammy character, yet fresh, silky and long.”)
If you spend enough time eating in Italy, it begins to feel less like a country than like a collection of Italian-speaking tribes who happen to live on the same peninsula and eat similar food, though they themselves believe their foods are distinctly different. They cling to local food not to reduce carbon emissions or in the name of maximum freshness, but out of pride: Italians are the world’s proudest regionalists. Culinarily speaking, they cling to their dialects.
The bistecca alla fiorentina, originating all the way over in Perugia, was verging on alien. Everything else was grown on land that I could see. In the same way that Tuscany pleasures the eyes with its cypress trees and olive groves and farmhouses and hills crowned by walled cities that rise from fertile valleys, it pleases the tongue with dishes like pappa al pomodoro and Chianina steak. The region has a distinctive look, but it also has a distinctive taste.
There is a term that describes this phenomenon. It is a foreign word—from France—and one that is often bandied about by pretentious people who stifle the atmosphere at dinner parties. It is, nevertheless, a good word: terroir. Describing what terroir means is not easy. An advertisement for a wine I once found in a magazine does a good job: “The location, soil and climate of a given vineyard site directly affect the flavor and characteristics of the wine produced from that vineyard.” But Tilde has an even better definition. I once asked her to tell me what a pure savor is, and she said: “Any food where you can taste the nature that produced it.” A Podolica steak raised on Monte Tresino is a pure savor, but a feedlot steak from Texas, fed Nebraskan corn, coated with Montreal steak rub, and swimming in a puddle of canned broth produced in some unknown factory, is not. (It is, rather, a prime example of cuisine of mixture.) It was this very idea that Angus Mackay had in mind when he said that beef can be every bit as distinctive as single-malt Scotch. Terroir, simply, is the idea that you can taste geography. And in Tuscany, the geography tastes very good.
Every night, Borgo San Felice removes its steaks from the fridge four hours before dinner and places them near the fire, so that they may slowly rise to room temperature. After we swallowed the last bites of nudi,