Know Your Lambrusco - Salamino, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Last week, I started a new series called Know Your Malvasia where I take a look at different Malvasia-named grapes and explain where they're grown and how they do or do not relate to other Malvasia grapes.  Today I'd like to expand that concept a little and start to talk about the various Lambrusco-named grapes.  There is a lot of bad information out there about Lambrusco grapes and over the next few weeks, I'd like to try to set as much of it right as I can, starting with the Salamino grape today.

The two most common bits of misinformation regarding the Lambrusco grapes are pretty much the same as for the Malvasias.  Some people will tell you about the Lambrusco "family" of grapes, while others will tell you that the various Lambruscos are made from "sub-types" or "sub-varieties" of a single Lambrusco cultivar.  The people that tell you this are wrong.  A study done in 2005 (citation 1 below) analyzed most of the Lambrusco-something cultivars grown throughout Emilia-Romagna and while they found first degree (parent/offspring) relationships between a few of the grapes in the study, pretty much none of the major of Lambrusco cultivars were found to be that closely related to one another.  Which isn't to say that they aren't related at all.  When the team analyzed genetic similarities for all of the grapes in the study, they did find that most of the Lambrusco grapes clustered together, indicating that they probably share a common ancestor at some point along the line, but how distant that relative might be is difficult to say. 

As we learned in my last Know Your Malvasia post, there really is no such thing as "sub-varieties" of grapes.  But one might wonder, if there isn't any direct familial relationship and if they aren't "sub-varieties," then why do they all have the same word in their name?  The word "Lambrusco" means "wild grape" in Italian, and it was long thought that the Lambrusco grapes were domesticated from wild vines around Emilia-Romagna.  A study done in 2009 (citation 2 below) analyzed many wild grape varieties in Piemonte and compared their DNA with several Lambrusco varieties as well as several other cultivated grape varieties of the region.  They found that the Lambrusco grapes had more DNA in common with the wild grapes than the other cultivated varieties, indicating that they were more closely related to the wild vines and may have been domesticated more recently.

It's worth noting that here in the United States, when we think "wild vines" we think of Vitis labrusca or some of the other "foxy," native American varieties.  In Europe, the situation is a little bit different.  Wild vines in Europe are still Vitis vinifera, but there is actually a sub-species of the vinifera species called sylvestris.  Please note, this is a sub-species, not a "sub-type" or "sub-variety."  Vitis vinifera subsp. sylvestris is differentiated from Vitis vinifera subsp. vinifera mainly by the fact that vinifera flowers are hermaphrodites, meaning that they have both male and female organs and so can pollinate themselves, while sylvestris flowers are dioecious, which means that some flowers are male and produce pollen while others are female and need to receive pollen from males in order to produce fruit (unpollenated flowers just fall off a vine and die, while pollinated flowers produce berries). One can easily understand why hermaphroditism was selected for by early farmers, since the ability to self-pollinate produces a more reliable and a larger crop.  Interestingly, there are a handful of Vitis vinifera subsp. vinifera vines that are not self-pollinating, but which are not necessarily dioecious.  Lambrusco Sorbara, for example, only has female flowers, so it must receive its pollen from other vines.  As a result, Sorbara is often inter-planted with Lambrusco Salamino so that the Salamino pollen can pollinate the Sorbara flowers. 

What all this means is that though many of the Lambrusco grapes may be distantly related to one another, they're not exactly a "family."   Furthermore, they are all separate grape varieties and are not "sub-types" of any single Lambrusco grape.  So how do you know which Lambrusco grape you're drinking?  Like Malvasia, it often depends on where you are.  Some of the Lambrusco grapes are easy to spot, since their names are typically printed right on the label.  Lambrusco di Sorbara is made from the Sorbara grape, while Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetto is made from the Grasparossa grape.  Lambrusco Salamino can be found in the Lambrusco Salamino di Santa Croce DOC wines, but can also be found in basic Reggiano DOC wines as well as the wines of Lambrusco Mantovano and the Colli di Scandiano e di Canossa.  You can always check the DOC regulations for the region of wine that you're drinking, but if there are many different varieties authorized for use or if your wine is labeled as IGT, then you may just have to live with the mystery.

Lambrusco Salamino is the most common of the Lambrusco varieties and is planted on over 10,000 acres of land (mostly in Emilia-Romagna, though a little bit is surprisingly found in Sardinia).  The name "Salamino" comes from the fact that the grape bunches are long and cylindrical and thus thought to resemble little sausages, or "little salamis."  There are at least five different clonal variants of Salamino that are recognized by ampleographers: tender, red-leaved, green-leaved, red-stalked, and green-stalked.  Salamino grapes are naturally very high in sugar and so they lend themselves to the production of sweet and off-dry wines, though bone-dry wines made from the grape are also widely available. The berries are deeply colored and can provide quite a bit of tannic grip to the finished wine, and Salamino-based Lambruscos are typically heavier-bodied and more aromatic than those from other Lambrusco grapes.

For those who might object that Lambrusco is far too common for me to write about here, I would counter by saying that the first of the three Salamino-based wines that I'll be reviewing is actually a Lambrusco Bianco, which is made from 100% Salamino grapes that were crushed and rapidly moved off the skins before picking up any coloring, as in a Blanc de Noirs Champagne.  The wine was the NV Lini 910, which I picked up from my friends at Curtis Liquors for around $16.  In the glass the wine was a fairly pale silvery lemon color with nice frothy bubbles.  The nose was fairly intense with aromas of toasty bread, apple, green apple candy, toasted nuts and a touch of raspberry.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with high acidity.  There were flavors of toasted nuts, toasted bread, ripe apple, pear, fresh cut lemon and lemon peel.  The fruits were a bit subdued, but there was a lot of secondary fermentation aromas and characteristics that were quite nice indeed (which is interesting, since this is a tank-fermented wine).  I found the wine both interesting and delicious and thought that it was a really great value for the money.

I also had the opportunity to taste Lini 910's regular Lambrusco bottling ($17), which their website says is 85% Salamino and 15% Ancelotta, which is a common Lambrusco blending grape that tends to soften the tannic edges of other grapes and round out the flavor profile a bit. In the glass this wine was a fairly deep purple ruby color with lots of fizz.  The nose was fairly intense with aromas of blackberry and black cherry fruit along with grape soda and leather.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  It was dry with flavors of black cherry, blackberry, cola, grape soda and a touch of smoky charcoal.  It was very fresh and very fruity, but also dry and very refreshing.  This wine is also tank-fermented, and I definitely think it helped to accentuate the fresh fruit flavors.  I had this wine with an Italian cold-cut calzone, and it was absolutely perfect, cutting through the oily meats while also standing up to and complementing the tomato sauce I was dipping into.

A few months ago, I wrote about a wine being imported by my friend Matt, who is a co-owner of the Wine Bottega in the North End of Boston, and his new company Selectio Naturel.  Matt brings in wines from all over Italy (and some from France too), and he has a handful of really killer Lambruscos in his portfolio.  One of them is the 2010 Fondo Bozzole "Giano," which is made from 100% Salamino grapes ($18 at the Bottega).  In the glass this wine was a deep, inky ruby-black color with bright purple fizz.  The nose was moderately intense with aromas of grape soda, black-berried fruits, dark chocolate, cocoa and char.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  It was dry, but absolutely loaded with blackberry and black cherry fruits and dry grape soda flavors as well.  There was a savory edge to the wine as well and I thoroughly enjoyed it with some ground-turkey lasagna.  It is versatile enough to pair nicely with a variety of foods, but is also delicious enough to just drink on its own. 

CITATIONS

1)  Boccacci, P, Marinoni, DT, Gambino, G, Botta, R, & Schneider, A.  2005.  Genetic characterization of endangered grape cultivars of Reggio Emilia province.  American Journal of Enology and Vititculture, 56(4), ppl. 411-416.

2)  Schneider, A, Marinoni, DT, Raimondi, S, Boccacci, P, Gambino, G.  2009.  Molecular characterization of wild grape populations from north-western Italy and their genetic relationship with cultivated varieties.  Acta Horticulturae, 827, pp. 211-216.

Ortrugo - Colli Piacentini, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

"It's hot, drink Ortrugo."  These were the words, tweeted by my friend Matt at the Wine Bottega (way back in the summer, naturally), that introduced me to the Ortrugo grape.  I had never heard of it before, but after some quick Googling, I could tell that this was something I'd be interested in.  I asked Matt whether they had any Ortrugo in stock and he said that they did, but the wine was only about 35% Ortrugo.  I like to try and write about varietal wines whenever possible and if that isn't possible, I try to aim for at least 75% of a blend, but sometimes I have to take what I can get.  I bought the wine and held out hope that I'd be able to find a varietal Ortrugo at some point in the future, but to date my efforts have been in vain.  I decided it's time to go ahead and write the post so today I'd like to tell you a little bit about Ortrugo and the wine that I was able to try.

Like an unbelievable number of grapes (see Abouriou, Malagousia, Timorasso, Pugnitello, Roscetto, Pecorino and Casetta, among many others), Ortrugo was on the brink of extinction until it was rediscovered and rescued in the 1970's.  It was first mentioned in print (under synonyms Artrugo and Altrugo) in 1881 and the first mention of it as Ortrugo appeared in 1927.  It is thought that the name comes from altra uva, which means "the other grape" in the local dialect, though it's not entirely clear what the other grape that it is being contrasted with might be.  It could have been Trebbiano Romagnolo, the Trebbiano variety native to Emilia-Romagna that covers a lot of ground throughout that region, or it could be Malvasia di Candia Aromatica which was the grape that was perhaps most responsible for Ortrugo's decline.  Throughout the early and middle parts of the 20th Century, many growers replaced their Ortrugo vines with Malvasia di Candia Aromatica, though I'm not really sure why since Ortrugo is a high yielding vine that is fairly easy to grow, though it is somewhat susceptible to the European grapevine moth.

The grape had all but disappeared when Luigi Mossi discovered a small patch of Ortrugo growing in a decrepit corner of one of his vineyards near the city of Piacenza in the Val Tidone.  Rather than just pull up the vines, Luigi decided to harvest them and make a small bit of wine from them.  He tasted the resulting wine with some of his friends and decided to plant an entire vineyard over to the grape.  People thought he was crazy to plant so much land to a grape that no one had really heard of, but pretty soon his wines made from Ortrugo were outselling his Malvasia based wines.  Other growers took notice and began to plant Ortrugo vines of their own.  Today there are about 500 hectares (1,300 acres) of Ortrugo planted in Italy and nearly all of them are in and around the Colli Piacentini DOC in the western part of Emilia-Romagna, which used to be a part of Piedmont and is just southeast of Oltrepò Pavese in Lombardy.  Varietal wines from Ortrugo are allowed here and some producers do make them, but it is also frequently blended with Malvasia and Trebbiano Romagnolo.  Ortrugo lends itself well to sparkling wine production and wines made from it can be found in fully sparkling, frizzante and still forms.

The wine that I was able to find was the 2010 La Tosa "Rio del Tordo," which is a still wine made from 35% Ortrugo, 35% Malvasia, 20% Trebbiano & 10% Sauvignon Blanc.  In the glass the wine was a medium lemon gold color.  The nose was moderately intense with aromas of grapefruit, peach and a touch of grassy herbaceousness.  On the palate the wine was light bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of lemon, grapefruit, green apple, apricot, and citrus peel.  It was tart, bright and refreshing and I was surprised at how much the wine reminded me of varietal Sauvignon Blanc given that that grape only made up 10% of the final blend.  It had a lot of Sauvignon Blanc character with a bit of peachy stone fruit and white flowers thrown in for good measure.  It's a very nice wine that is definitely great on a hot summer day, which is fortunately the situation that I was able to try it it in rather than the blizzard conditions we've been experiencing here in the northeast lately.  I hope to find a varietal Ortrugo some day, but in the meantime, this is the best that I've been able to do.

Odds and Ends - Sparkling Malbec, Botrytized Rkatsiteli, White Pinot Noir, Rufete Rosado and Pignoletto Redux

Today I'd like to introduce a new erratic feature where I provide a few tasting notes for some unusual wines that I've come across lately that I either don't want to write a whole post about or which feature grapes that I've already written a full post about and just don't want to fully revisit.  The former group mostly features wines made from common grapes but made in unusual styles and while I enjoy drinking these wines, I find that I don't have much to say about them, so when I go to write a new post, I tend to skip over those entries in my tasting notebook for those featuring novel grapes.  I'm starting to accumulate quite a few notes like that, though, so I decided to unload some of them here.  I also have a tendency to buy bottles made from unusual grapes I've already covered here so that I can compare them to the wines I've previously written about.  I used to just updat those prior posts with these new tasting notes, but since new posts get more readers than old ones, I thought that those notes may be missed by many readers, so I decided to include them in this little feature as well.

The first wine I'd like to write about is the NV Domaine Augis "La Rosée" sparkling Malbec from the Valency region of the Loire Valley in France.  Though Malbec is currently the superstar grape of Argentina, its original home is France and in many French areas, including this one, the grape is known as Côt.  This is a traditional method rosé sparkler that I picked up for around $17 from my friends at the Wine Bottega.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep violet pink color with vigorous bubbles.  The nose was somewhat reserved with aromas of fresh cut strawberries and crushed raspberries.  On the palate the wine was light bodied with fairly high acidity and smooth, creamy bubbles.  There were flavors of bitter cherry, fresh strawberry, red currant and crushed red berries.  I found the wine very clean and refreshing and enjoyed it with a pan seared swordfish steak.  I think it's a tremendous value for a traditional method sparkler at less than $20 a bottle and would recommend it unreservedly.

The next wine I'd like to talk about is the 2006 Satrapezo "Gviani," which is a dessert wine made from botrytized Rkatsiteli grapes (retail around $30 for 375 mL).  I've written about Rkatsiteli many times (here and here and here), but this is the first dessert wine made from the grape that I've been able to try.  The grapes for this wine were grown on the banks of the Alazanis river in Georgia where mists and morning dew from the river combined with warm afternoon sun provide the ideal conditions for the development of botrytis cinerea, which is perhaps better known as noble rot.  This fungus infects the berries by piercing the grape's skin, causing much of the water in the berry to evaporate, leaving a dense, sticky, sugary liquid behind.  This liquid is fermented as much as possible and, in this case, aged for a short time in oak barrels prior to bottling.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep lemon gold color.  The nose was fairly reserved with aromas of apricot, mint, orange marmalade, vanilla and pineapple.  On the palate the wine was full bodied with fairly high acidity.  It was very sweet with flavors of apricot, orange marmalade, honey, red grapefruit and peach cobbler with a clean, minty finish.  I found this wine pretty shut down at fridge temp, but much more generous and open at cellar temp.  I enjoyed this wine and thought it was a reasonable value, but it really lacked the complexity of fine Sauternes or BA/TBA wines from Germany.  Fans of botrytized wines should probably check this out, but connoisseurs may want to skip it.

Next up is the 2008 Trenz Spätburgunder Blanc de Noir from the Rheingau region of Germany, which I picked up from my friends at Curtis Liquors for around $18.  Spätburgunder is the German word for Pinot Noir and while German Pinot Noir certainly isn't that unusual, white wines made from the grape are.  I took a look at a Cabernet Franc wine (and a Nebbiolo wine) made using this method a few months back so readers looking for technical information on how the wine is made are referred to the Cab Franc post.  In the glass the wine was a medium lemon gold color.  The nose was fairly intense with funky, leesy aromas of candied strawberry, watermelon and candied apple.  It smelled more like a rosé than a white wine, which is what I also found in that Blanc de Franc.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  It was off-dry with honey, peach, candied strawberry, candied green apple and lemon curd flavors.  It was bright and zippy and walked that line between sweet and tart that the Germans are so fond of exploring.  I've had a few other Blanc de Noir style Pinot Noir table wines before, but this is definitely the best that I've ever had.

Next up is the 2008 Vina Salamanca Rufete rosado, which I also picked up from Curtis Liquors for around $13.  I wrote about the Rufete grape a few years back, but at the time, the only wine I could find containing the grape was 50% Rufete and 50% Tempranillo.  This wine is from the same producer, but is made from 100% Rufete grapes.  In the glass the wine was a light salmon pink color.  The nose was moderately intense with funky, leesy aromas of strawberry and not much else.  On the palate this wine was on the lighter side of medium with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of red cherry, fresh cut strawberry, raspberry and a touch of leesy funk.  This wine was definitely in decline a bit as it was a few years old by the time I got my hands on it, but it was still crisp, fruity and refreshing, which is all I really ask of my pink wines.  I know that there are red wines made from the Rufete grape out there, but I have been unable to track any of them down thus far.  When I finally do, you can bet that tasting note will be up on the site somewhere.

The final wine that I'd like to write about was the 2008 Branchini Pignoletto from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy (which I picked up at Panzano Proviste for around $18).  I wrote about the Pignoletto grape a few months back and took a look at two wines from Alberto Tedeschi which were very good but were hardly what you might consider traditional.  When I came across this example from Branchini, I decided to try it out to see what a regular table wine made from the grape might be like.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep lemon gold color.  The nose was somewhat reserved with ripe apple, lemon and mint aromas along with something vaguely floral.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity.  There were flavors of white peach, mint and Meyer lemon with a bit of nuttiness on the finish.  The citrusy lemon notes were dominant at fridge temp, but the peachy flavors woke up and became a bit more generous as the wine warmed up.  This wine was probably a little over the hill, but it still provided an interesting counter point to the more avant garde efforts from Tedeschi.  Overall, I thought it was OK, but probably not worth the price tag.  The Tedeschi wines were much more interesting and characterful and only a few dollars more than this example, thought they're also probably more of an acquired taste.

Albana di Romagna - Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Though the history of viniculture and viticulture goes back several thousand years, the histories of individual grapes tend to be measure on the scale of hundreds of years at the most.  There are several good reasons for this.  The most important reason is that the craze for varietal wines and the consumer and winemaker focus on individual grape varieties is a very recent phenomenon.  Wines were traditionally given names related to their geography, and the grapes that went into making those wines was of secondary importance at best.  The linking of individual grape varieties with particular places didn't become a legal issue until the last hundred or so years when the various appellation laws began to take effect throughout Europe.  While individual grape varieties may have been associated with famous wine growing regions in the distant past, there was nothing (or very little) forcing any of those growers to continue to grow those grapes in those regions other than tradition.

Another, more obvious reason for the lack of long historical records for individual grapes is that grape names have tended not to be very stable throughout history.  The lands of Europe have changed hands many times over the past few thousand years and each new wave of conquerors brought their own languages and their own attitudes towards wine making and wine drinking.  The mix of materials, languages and cultures made it difficult for a stable vocabulary to develop so even if a particular grape variety has been in continuous cultivation for a thousand years, it would be easy to lose track of it through the historical record as that record shifted from conqueror to conqueror and from language to language.  Throw in the lack of a consistent and thorough historical record for all wine making regions throughout history and the lack of a unified ampelography, and you end up running into a lot of trouble when you try to trace an individual grape very far back through the written histories.

Some grapes do have long historical roots, though, and Albana is one of them.  The first written record of a grape known as Albana comes to us from a work written in 1305 AD.  Pietro de Crescenzi, a Medieval agricultural writer, writes of Albana that it makes "a powerful wine with an excellent taste."  You can find some variation on this theme in just about any source you pick up that mentions the grape, though I've often wondered how anyone can be sure that the grape called Albana 700 years ago is the same as the grape currently known by that name.  This becomes an even more troubling question when you take a look at the two etymological reasons given for the grape's name.  The most common reason given is that the grape's name comes from the Latin word alba, meaning "white," and it was given its name because of its exemplary stature in comparison with other white grapes.  The second explanation for the grape's name is that it was originally cultivated around the Alban Hills of Lazio and was named for them*.  Both explanations seem to allow for the possibility of a lot of confusion with similarly named grapes, and I would be very surprised if it turned out that Crescenzi's Albana and ours were the same grape.  Since there's probably no way to say for sure, though, we should probably just note our skepticism and move along.

What we can say for sure about Albana is that it is an important piece of the Garganega family tree.  Garganega is the great white grape of Soave, and recent studies have shown that it has a parent/offspring relationship with a staggering number and variety of grapes throughout Italy.  One of those grapes is Albana, though Garganega also has a parent/offspring relationship with Catarratto, Trebbiano Toscana and Malvasia di Candia, among others.  What is really shocking about these findings is the geographical dispersion of these grapes, as they can be found from the Veneto in the northeast to Emilia Romagna in the center-west, all the way down to the island of Sicily in the south.  It isn't clear whether Garganega is the parent to all of the varieties listed or whether one of them is one of its parents, which means that Albana is either a grandparent to the others (if it happens to be a parent to Garganega), or is a half-sibling to them and possibly a grandchild of one.

As you might expect from a grape purported to be as old as Albana, there are many different clonal variants of the grape currently cultivated.  The most common one is known as Albana Gentile di Bertinoro, but Wine Grapes lists at least five other clonal varieties as well.  They also hint that some of these could actually be seedlings of Albana and thus not technically clones but rather separate varieties, but no evidence, DNA or otherwise, is provided to back this up.  Albana's curious claim to fame is that it was actually the first wine promoted to DOCG status in Italy in 1986 with the establishment of the Albana di Romagna DOCG (a decision which is universally considered to have been politically rather than qualitatively made).  There are currently nearly 7,000 acres of Albana under vine in Italy as of 2000, which is down from around 11,000 as of 1990.  Albana wines run the gamut stylistically from light table wines to sparkling wines to sweet passito style wines.

I was able to try two different Albana-based wines, one in the dry table wine style and another in the passito style.  The first was the table wine, which was the 2009 Umberto Cesari "Colle del Re" Albana di Romagna, which I picked up on a recent trip to Pennsylvania in one of their state stores for around $15.  In the glass the wine was a medium silvery lemon color with greenish tints.  The nose was moderately intense with green apple, lime and grapefruit citrus aromas, along with just a hint of leesy funk.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity.  There were flavors of white peach, green apple, lime and juicy ripe pear along with a hint of beeswax and lees.  The flavor profile was broad and generous, with a little bit of citrus to rope it in.  I would have appreciated a bit more acid to it, as without it I thought the wine was a little bit bland.  The blurb description of the grape in Wine Grapes calls it an "inherently neutral Italian variety" which I thought was a pretty accurate description, but then it goes on to say that it " can produce very good sweet wines," so I decided to pull the cork on my passito wine to see how it fared.

The second wine that I tried was the 2003 Umberto Cesari "Colle del Re" Albana di Romagna Passito, which I picked up from my friends at Marty's for around $40 for a 500 mL bottle.  In the glass the wine was a reddish tawny-amber color.  The nose was fairly reserved with some date, raisin, burnt sugar and toasted nut aromas.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acidity.  It was very sweet with flavors of dried cherry, raisin, date, scorched brown sugar, walnut and maple syrup.  I was surprised at how bright and zippy the wine was given the lackluster acidity in the table wine I tried, but the acid was bright and vibrant here and really made the wine dance on the palate.  It was sweet, nutty and very tasty, but the price tag did feel a little steep.  It was definitely a more interesting and complex wine than its table wine compatriot, and if these two bottles are representative, then I would agree with the assertion in Wine Grapes that the sweet wines made from this grape are really the place to go for the best Albana experience.

*There is apparently yet another possible explanation, given by this site, which says that the grape name comes from its resemblance to the straw colored hair of a Roman empress named Albana.  I've not seen this explanation elsewhere and though I like it more than the other explanations, I feel that it's probably the least likely.

Spergola - Emilia-Romagna, Italy

If you only looked up the Spergola grape in the Oxford Companion to Wine, you might think it was a little disingenuous to include it on a site focusing on unusual wines.  The OCW entry for Spergola reads in full: "occasional name for Sauvignon Blanc in the Emilia region of Italy."  The online version of the OCW is generally kept pretty up-to-date with the latest information on grape synonymies, homonymies and relations, especially since they've been working so hard on their upcoming book all about wine grapes, which is due out late next month, so you might be inclined to take their word for it regarding Spergola and move along.  If you've followed this blog at all over the past year or so, though, you know that that's not how I do things around here.  I don't care who says it, I don't ever believe that something is true unless I can at least find corroboration from other sources or, preferably (where applicable), scientific evidence that clearly demonstrates the truth or falsity of a given claim.

My search for the truth about Spergola led me in a few different directions.  Tar and Roses has an entry on Spergola with some interesting historical information, such as the fact that the first mention of Spergola can be traced back to the 15th Century.  Their take on Spergola's relationship to Sauvignon Blanc is the same as the OCW, though, which was not an encouraging start.  On the other hand, the VIVC has a stand-alone entry for Spergola, which is usually a solid indication that it is a separate cultivar (if it was just another name for Sauvignon Blanc, searching for Spergola would lead you to the SB entry and Spergola would merely be listed in the accepted synonyms section).  Finally, the importer's website (the indomitable Louis/Dressner), in their section on the winery who made the bottle I'll be taking a look at below, says "for many years [Spergola] was considered a type of Sauvignon, but has now been genetically proven to be a grape variety of its own."

While I don't ever just accept the phrase "genetically proven" or "DNA studies have shown," seeing that phrase at least lets me know that someone has done the work and all I need to do is track it down.  For those interested, the two best ways that I've found to try and find academic papers published about wine are Google Scholar and the Vitis-Vea database.  A simple search for "spergola" in the Vitis-Vea database yielded only three results, but the title of the second result ("Morphological and genetic characterisation of the white grape cvs Spergola, Sauvignon and Sémillon") immediately told me that I'd found what I was looking for.  The problem was that the Vitis-Vea database doesn't have PDF copies of all of the papers they have abstracts for and since the university I work for (in an administrative and not an academic capacity) isn't primarily an agricultural school, it can be difficult to actually get my hands on some of these papers.  To compound matters, this particular paper was published in an Italian journal and was likely also written in Italian, so even if I could get the article, I probably wouldn't be able to understand it.

Fortunately, nearly every journal offers the abstracts of their papers for free, and for this particular paper, the abstract was not only very comprehensive, but it was also written in English.  Those interested can read the full abstract here, but in brief, the researchers decided to test whether Spergola and Sauvignon Blanc were the same grape.  Spergola is also known as Spergolina Verde in some places, and some believed that it could be the same as Sémillon, so the scientists tested that as well.  Their ampelographical and their genetic tests were all unequivocal and demonstrated conclusively that Spergola, Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon were all separate, genetically distinct grape varieties.  They advise that "the name Spergola should be stricken from the list of the Sauvignon synonyms recognised in the National Catalogue of Grape Varieties and registered therein as a variety in its own right. It should, at the same time, be listed among the recommended varieties in the Reggio Emilia province areas, with the consequent changes in the CDO labelling for Colli di Scandiano e di Canossa white wine, in which at present it is indicated as a synonym for Sauvignon and Spergola."

This paper was published in 2001, and as far as I can tell, there hasn't been any further work to disprove the findings, so it seems like it's pretty safe to say that Spergola is definitely different from Sauvignon Blanc.  It seems to be grown almost exclusively in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, where its naturally high acidity means that it is usually made into a sparkling wine of some sort.  Some sources also indicate that Spergola is sometimes used in the production of Balsamic Vinegar, but the Consorzio Produttori Antiche Acetaie says that for traditional Balsamic Vinegar, "the grapes harvested must be those 'used for the wine traditionally cultivated in the province of Modena,' and in particular from Lambrusco and Trebbiano grapes." It's not inconceivable that some Spergola may find its way into some form of Balsamic Vinegar somewhere, but if you're interested in tasting what the Spergola grape is all about, Balsamic Vinegar is probably not your best bet (delicious as it may be).

I was able to try a bottle of the 2007 Ca de Noci "Querciole," which I picked up from my friends at the Wine Bottega for around $35.  This wine is 100% Spergola that undergoes a natural re-fermentation in the bottle to give it a little bit of fizz (the same winery also makes a traditional method sparkler from Spergola that I have not had the chance to try).  It's also unfiltered, so there are almost certainly going to be some little floaty things in your bottle and possibly your glass if you don't pour carefully.  In the glass this wine was a medium bronze color with steady bubbles.  The nose was fairly intense with yeasty bread dough, ripe apple and toasted nut aromas.  On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with fairly high acidity. It was lightly fizzy and really heavy on secondary fermentation and oxidative characteristics.  There was some ripe apple and apple skin fruits along with a bit of apple cider, but it was mostly nutty, dusty and yeasty.  It looked and drank more like beer than wine, which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your preferences, I suppose.  Button-down Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio lovers will probably want to give this wine a wide berth, but adventurous wine drinkers will certainly find a lot to intrigue and provoke here.

Centesimino/Savignôn Rosso - Ravenna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

I know that this probably isn't news to any of you, but there are a lot of different grapes grown in Italy.  It is estimated that there are over 2,000 grape varieties that are indigenous to Italy, though only (only!) about 400 of them are authorized for use by Italy's Ministry of Agriculture.  The top 20 most planted grapes in Italy  represent only about 5% of the total varieties approved for use (and only about 1% of the total varieties estimated to exist within the country), but they account for almost 60% of the total plantings, meaning that the hundreds of other grapes in Italy, which represent about 95% of the approved varieties (or 99% of the total estimated varieties), account for only 40% of the nation's total plantings.  It's not quite as dramatic (or as important) as the inequities that prompted the Occupy movements of 2011, but there's a comparison to be made there, if you so desire.  This is a wine blog, though, and not a political or economic blog, so let's leave that stuff behind and concentrate on the Centesimino grape, which is what we all came here for today.

Centesimino is a relative newcomer to the Italian wine scene, as references to the grape can only be traced back to the mid 20th Century, with some sources indicating that the grape was being cultivated as early as World War II and others saying that it really started around the 1950's.  The story goes that an Italian fellow by the name of Pietro Pianori discovered the vine growing in a garden in the center of the town of Faenza in the Ravenna province in the eastern part of Emilia-Romagna.  This garden had high walls surrounding it that supposedly prevented the phylloxera louse from getting inside, and this vine was able to survive the epidemic.  Pianori took a cutting from the plant and began to cultivate it on his estate.  When the grape grew well, a few other farmers took cuttings from Pianori's vines to plant themselves, and today all of the Cenetesimino vines in existence can be traced back to Pianori's "Terbato" estate.  Pianori was apparently something of a miser and one of his nicknames was Centesimino, which means something like "little cent," but which is idiomatically used to denote one who is excessively careful with their money.

The grape is also sometimes known as Savignôn Rosso or Sauvignon Rosso, though it has no relation whatsoever to either Cabernet Sauvignon or Sauvignon Blanc.  The origin of this name is a little unclear.  One story has it that a man named Paolo Visani commissioned a local art publisher to create specialized labels for Centesimino wines that he was trying to sell.  Visani, for whatever reason, put "SAUVIGNON – vino rosso di Faenza" on the label, though whether this was a stroke of his own imagination or merely a reflection of what the locals were calling the grape is difficult to say.  The latter explanation is probably more likely, as there's very little chance that Pianori was calling the vine Centesimino, so he may have called it Sauvignon Rosso because of the wild condition that he discovered the vine in.  Whatever the story was, there was no way that the grape would receive any official recognition with a name so similar to Cabernet Sauvignon, so the official name of the grape became Centesimino in honor of Pietro Pianori, the man who saved it from oblivion.

Centesimino was included in the Italian national catalog of vine varieties in 2004 after a round of testing to determine whether it was actually different from other grapes in cultivation in Italy (source, in Italian, for this entire paragraph is here).  It was said to resemble Alicante Bouschet and Grenache vines and had to be conclusively differentiated from them before being allowed to enter the registry.  The first round of tests (using an older DNA testing method known as isoenzyme analysis) showed that it was definitely distinct from Grenache and Alicante Bouschet, but the tests showed similarities between it and seven other grapes (interestingly, among those seven were Cesanese and Ciliegiolo).  The second round of tests was more conclusive and Centesimino was shown to be distinct from the other grapes in the national catalog.  Centesimino became official on May 7, 2004.  I do not believe that it is allowed in any DOC wines at the moment, but it is permitted in the Ravenna IGT.  There are a total of 8 producers who grow the vine today and all of them are located around the town of Faenza where the grape was discovered.

The wine that I was able to try was the 2009 Poderi Morini "Savignone," which I picked up from my friends at the Wine Bottega for about $20.  Morini's website explains why they elect to call the wine Savignone rather than Centesimino:

Dedicated to the great Gino Veronelli, a well-known Italian wine expert who believed that the name “Centesimino” belittled this great native variety and preferred to call it Savignone, the Italian translation for “Savignôn”, its name in the local dialect.

Poderi makes a few different Cenetesimino based wines.  Their "Traicolli" bottling is aged in wood for a year before being bottled, while this wine is stainless steel tank fermented only prior to bottling.  They also make a sparkling wine from Centesimino grapes that they call "morosé" which comes from some of the younger vines on the property (and which I would love to get my hands on).  Production is fairly small for all of these wines with about 5,000 bottles of the Traicolli and 6,000 bottles of the Savignone and morosé made each year.

In the glass this wine was a fairly deep purple ruby color.  The nose was fairly intense with black cherry, black plum and dusky raspberry fruit with something pleasantly funky about it.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity and light tannins.  There were flavors of black cherry and blackberry fruit along with some charcoal, licorice and a lot of black plum.  The stainless steel treatment for this wine really allowed the fruit to shine through, and the fruits in this wine are pure, intense and gorgeous.  I was so taken with this wine that I chose it as one of the two bottles I brought to the BYOB dinner at Taste Camp Virginia this past year.  I don't know if the other attendees were as enamored with it as I was, but I can definitely say that this is one of the better wines that I've tried in the course of doing this blog.  This grape is now on my "buy on sight" list, though I don't have high hopes for finding many more wines made from it.  If you run across it, definitely pick it up and give it a shot.

Pignoletto - Emilia-Romagna, Italy

My first exposure to the Pignoletto grape was in the dimly lit tasting cellar at the Wine Bottega in the North End of Boston.  The Bottega had invited Alberto Tedeschi, a winemaker from Emilia-Romagna, to come over and present his wines, all of which are made from the Pignoletto grape.  It's not often that I am able to meet the person who makes the unusual wines that I buy, so this was a real treat.  I found the wines and the man very interesting and picked up a couple of bottles that we'll get to in a bit.  First, though, I'd like to take a closer look at Alberto's grape of choice, Pignoletto.

The Pignoletto grape is considered the "king of the Colli Bolognese wine zone," but few have heard of it outside of this region.  The grape is grown on over 17,000 acres of land in Italy, but it can be very difficult to find wines made from it here in the US, and in fact I've not been able to find another wine made from Pignoletto other than these Tedeschi bottles.  For some reason, wines from the Emilia-Romagna region within Italy, other than Lambrusco, can be difficult to find in general.  Today's post marks only the second time I've written about a wine from Emilia-Romagna (the first was Mostosa/Pagadebit), and I only have two or three more in my cellar that I hope to write about in future posts.  There are a lot of really cool grapes grown in Emilia-Romagna, but for some reason, few of them make it to us over here.

Unfortunately, information about the grapes from Emilia-Romagna is about as scarce as the wines themselves. Wikipedia has no entry for the grape and the Oxford Companion to Wine's entry reads in full "lively, crisp white grape grown around Bologna in northern Italy on an area totalling almost 7,000 ha/17,300 acres according to the 2000 vineyard census." What information I've found is scattered on various sites online.  Some of those sources indicate that Pignoletto is the same as the Grechetto grape grown primarily in Umbria, but I don't believe that's the case.  The VIVC does list Pignoletto as an accepted synonym for Grechetto, but it also has a separate listing for Pignoletto itself, so I believe that the Pignoletto grown in Emilia-Romagna is distinct from Grechetto.  The name Pignoletto probably comes from the word pigna, which means "pine cone" in Italian, which is the same root as the red Pignolo grape grown in Friulia, though the two grapes are not related.  In both cases, the name comes from the fact that the bunches of grapes produced by the vines resemble pine cones.  Some believe that the Pino Lieto referenced by the Roman writer Pliny is the same as the modern Pignoletto, but as we've found before, linking Roman grape names to modern grapes is a virtually impossible task.  The grape is unusual in that it has very thick skins which are very high in tannins so most white wines made from the grape are pressed very lightly and moved away from the skins as soon as possible in order to avoid too much tannic extraction into the wine.

Alberto Tedeschi leases several small vineyard sites, a one hectare site called Spungola and another small site called Bellaria, that are devoted entirely to the Pignoletto grape.   He farms organically and does all of the vineyard work and cellar work himself.  He uses natural yeasts for his fermentations and doesn't fine or filter his wines.  The first wine of his that I tried was the 2007 "Spungola Bellaria," which is his still wine that is named for his two vineyard sites.  I picked this up from the Wine Bottega for about $20.  For this wine, Alberto presses the grapes very gently and leaves the juice outside overnight.  He then transfers the juice to stainless steel containers and allows the natural fermentation to occur over a 3-4 day span.  He then racks the fermented wine into neutral oak containers where the wine ages for at least 12 months on the lees.  In the glass, this wine was a deep bronze tinted gold color.  The nose was reserved with apple cider, pastry dough and toasted nut aromas.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with  fairly high acidity and a surprising little bit of a tannic grip.  There were flavors of toasted nuts and golden apples with a cidery kind of character to it.  It wasn't oaky, but did taste kind of woody, like sawdust or like cracked pecan shells or something like that.  It was definitely a bit oxidized, though that's almost certainly by design.  It was a very unique wine that is definitely not for those looking for squeaky clean, fresh white wines.  Fans of the oxidized white wines of the Jura will find a lot to like here.

The second wine that I tried was the 2008 Pignoletto Sur Lie, which is a frizzante wine made from Pignoletto grapes, which I picked up from the Wine Bottega for about $25.  For this wine, Alberto ages the wine on its lees for at least a year in stainless steel containers.  He bottles this wine with a bit of unfermented must which he had kept refrigerated, and the sugar in the unfermented must causes a secondary fermentation in the bottle giving the wine its fizzy character.  In the glass, this wine was a deep golden bronze color with light fizz and some cloudy sediment floating around.  The nose was fairly aromatic with ripe cidery apples, apple peel, nuts and sweet yeast rolls.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity and light fizz.  There were flavors of toasted nuts, ripe apples and apple cider with a bit of a yeasty character to it.  It too is a bit oxidized, though not to the same degree as the still wine.  The wine needs to be carefully served as the cloudy sediment is bitter and the less of it that ends up your glass, the better.  It is a very unique wine that is difficult to compare to anything else I've had.  Tedeschi only farms about 2.5 hectares of land in total so the quantities for these wines are limited, but they're distinctive and interesting enough that I'd definitely recommend more adventurous wine drinkers seek them out.  Even if you've had wines made from the Pignoletto grape before, you've probably not had one quite like either of these two.

**UPDATE** I recently was able to try a more traditional wine from the Pignoletto grape and my tasting note can be found in this post.

Mostosa (Pagadebit) - Pagadebit di Romagna, Italy

Last week we took a look at the Bombino Bianco grape and noted that one of its synonyms was Pagadebit, or "debt-payer."  In that post, I alluded to a grape grown in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy that is also known as Pagadebit and is thought to be the same as Bombino Bianco.  It turns out that most of what is known as Pagadebit in Emilia-Romagna may actually be Bombino, but some of it is actually a rarer, much less well-known grape called Mostosa, which is what we'll be taking a look at today.

Figuring out exactly what Mostosa is isn't an easy task.  Most sources, if they mention the grape at all, only mention that it is a rare white grape used primarily for blending in the Lazio and southern Emilia-Romagna regions of Italy.  Some sources also indicate that Mostosa may be the same as the Biancone grape, and it is here, in the area of accepted synonyms for the grape, that the trouble really starts.  All grapes that are grown anywhere in the world have several different names that they are known by, generally as a result of their movement through different regions (Chasselas, for example, has over 200 synonyms).  Before the days of the internet and the world-wide wine scene, grape growers from different regions weren't necessarily in very close contact with one another, so as new grapes arrived and settled in, they tended to pick up names from the local dialect or they picked up colorful descriptive names that the local farmers may have just liked more than whatever the grape had been called when it first arrived.  In Europe especially, the names of the grapes weren't that important because the wines were (and for the most part still are) labeled geographically and not varietally, so as long as a vine grew well and made decent wine, it wasn't really all that important what you called it or, to some extent, even what it was.  In many countries, Appellation Control laws have changed that by specifying the specific grape types that can be grown in a given region, but remember that these laws are less than 100 years old, while the history of grape growing and wine making goes back thousands of years.

It is also important to note that since there was no centralized place for information about what a vine actually was, mistakes were often made either by growers or people selling vines either due to mislabeling or misidentification both of the accidental and of the malicious sort.  When vines are very young, they all look pretty much the same.  Even when they grow up, it takes a skilled eye to differentiate between the thousands of different grape types, and mistakes often happened.  There is the famous story about how most of what was grown in Chile and called Merlot actually turned out to be Carmenere.  As information about grapes becomes more centralized, and as genetic testing becomes more sophisticated and accessible, it is becoming easier to correct these mistakes and to figure out exactly what is going on in many of these vineyards.

With today's grape, I suspect that the issue is more with the local naming of grapes than with a case of pure mistaken identity from mislabeled vines.  In my opinion, it is the colloquial "Pagadebit" name that is the source of all of the confusion.  According to the VIVC, there are four different Italian grapes that have Pagadebit (or some variation) as an accepted synonym (and one Croatian grape, Plavac Mali).  Those four grapes are Pagadebito, Bombino Bianco, Mostosa and Biancone.  Of those four, Biancone is an accepted synonym for Mostosa, but not the other way around, while Pagadebito has both Mostosa and Biancone as accepted synonyms.  Bombino fits in because it has Pagadebit as an accepted synonym, but is not itself an accepted synonym for any of the other three grapes.  All four of the grapes mentioned above have their own VIVC variety numbers, which I believe means that they are distinct cultivars (parent information is only available for Pagadebito and Mostosa, which have different parents and are thus clearly different grapes).  Further, Nicolas Belfrage, in his Brunello to Zibibbo, quotes Salvatore del Gaudio and Domenico Giusto's Principali Vitigni as saying: "the descriptions of Trebbiano Abruzzese, of Caccio (another name for Mostosa), and of Pagadebito (almost certainly Bombino Bianco in this context)...differentiate themselves from one another in several respects, so that in the last analysis it seems possible definitely to state that the three are different varieties."  There is no mention of Biancone in this analysis, so it's hard to say what their opinion of its relation to Mostosa is.  It is worth mentioning, though, that in their Wine Grape Varieties, George Kerridge and A.J. Antcliff note that Biancone is native to Corsica, indicating that it probably isn't related to any of the grapes mentioned above.  Further, they note that it is the highest yielding vine currently planted in Australia, clearly showing how it earned its "Pagadebiti" nickname in Corsica.

What I think may have happened is that the Pagadebit name was attached to one of the grapes and then was either picked up by other growers in other regions who decided that the name was an apt descriptor of grapes they were growing.  It is certainly possible that the growers in each different region came up with the name independently of one another, but it seems unlikely.  I imagine that a grower traveling into a different region may have heard the locals refer to one of their grapes with that name and thought to himself, "I have a vine just like that back home," and may have started referring to his own crop with that name.  Over time, the name got entrenched and when people scan the vinous landscape today, they want to believe that grapes that share synonyms are related in some way, possibly even identical.  I don't believe that these grapes are related any more than I believe that all people with the last name Smith are related, though I would be very interested to see someone do the DNA analysis to see what the story really is.

All of that colloquialism is well and good, but we live in an official world and when we are dealing with wine that crosses international borders, some arm of officialdom inevitably steps in.  My journey down this road began when I picked up a bottle of the 2010 Trere Pagadebit di Romagna frizzante from my friends at the Wine Bottega for about $12.  The wine is from the Pagadebit di Romagna DOC, which requires a minimum of 85% Bombino Bianco.  The back label on the bottle, however, indicated that this wine is made from 85% Mostosa and 15% Chardonnay grapes.  I emailed the winery to ask whether Mostosa and Bombino were the same grape or, if not, how they were able to bottle a DOC wine from Mostosa grapes, but received no response.  Their website also clearly indicates that Mostosa is the primary grape here, as does the Wine Bottega's site, and the research that I've done seems to indicate that Bombino and Mostosa are definitely two distinct grapes.  I'm not sure what's going on with all the official stuff, but it's really between Trere and the Italian government, I suppose.

In the glass, this wine was a pale greenish silvery lemon color with a little fizz to it.  The nose was nicely aromatic with candied green apple (or sour apple candy or something like that) and a touch of flowers.  On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with medium acidity and a light, fizzy texture.  It was somewhere between dry and off-dry with flavors of candied green apple, a touch of apricot/stone fruit and just a little bit of toastiness.  There was also a distinctive apple peel character that almost verged on cider.  Overall, the wine was light and fruit and very similar to Prosecco, though a little less bubbly and slightly more complex.  It's a fun little wine that's very enjoyable for the money and is probably best on its own or with light snacks.