Inzolia/Ansonica - Sicily and Isola del Giglio, Tuscany, Italy

A few days ago, we took a look at a grape known as Garganega in the Veneto in northeastern Italy and as Grecanico Dorato in Sicily way down in southern Italy, but virtually nowhere in between.  While I found that particular geographical situation odd, it is certainly not unique.  Today's grape, for example, is found primarily in Sicily, but is also fairly well represented in Tuscany and has been known in each of those areas for over 300 years, but aside from a few stray vines in Sardinia, Campania and Lazio, it isn't really grown anywhere else.  In Sicily, that grape is known as Inzolia while in Tuscany, it is known as Ansonica and today I'd like to take a closer look at it and its journey.

As mentioned above, Inzolia/Ansonica are first mentioned definitively in the literature around the 16th or 17th centuries.  I say definitively because the ancient Roman writer Pliny the Elder mentions a grape called Irziola in his Naturalis Historia, which some have taken to be the first mention of Inzolia in print, but aside from their similar sounds, there is no evidence that indicates that Pliny was talking about the grape we know as Inzolia today.  In Sicily, Inzolia has historically been found mainly on the western end of the island where it is has been valued as an ingredient, along with Grillo, in high-end Marsala production.  As the production of high-end Marsala has fallen, Inzolia has given way to Catarratto, which is more widely used for low-end Marsala production.  Inzolia is still relatively widely planted, though, as current Sicilian acreage stands at around 19,000 acres.  As table wine production has taken off in Sicily over the past few decades, more and more of the existing Inzolia plantings have been used for that purpose as well.

In Tuscany, the grape is known as Ansonica and is planted mainly along the coast and on some of the nearby islands of the Tuscan archipelago.  The most famous of these seven islands is Elba, where Napoleon was banished in 1814, and while Ansonica is grown there, the island we're most concerned with is called Giglio.  Giglio is a small (about 1.36 square miles), mountainous island made primarily of granite and located about 10 miles from the Tuscan shore.  It has been inhabited since the Stone Age and has been ruled over by the Etruscans, Greeks, Romans and Florentines among others.  At various times throughout history, the island has been completely abandoned as invading forces deported the native population, but it has always been resettled eventually.  Grapes have been grown on this island since at least the 6th Century BC, and today, Ansonica is the mostly widely planted grape there.

Despite their geographical distance, ampelographers have long suspected that Inzolia and Ansonica were the same grape and the Italian authorities have recognized them as the same for many years.  In 1999, the first DNA evidence started coming in which validated this particular hypothesis.  An Italian team used AFLP markers, which are a little bit different from the microsatellite markers primarily used today, to show that the Ansonica from Giglio was most closely related to Ansonica from the Tuscan mainlaind, Inzolia from Sicily, Roditis from Greece, Airén from Spain and Clairette from France.  While these results are interesting, we do have to take them with a grain of salt.  AFLP analysis is looking at DNA sites throughout a sample's genome, which means that it can be more precise than microsatellite analysis, but that precision isn't necessarily a good thing.  If you're looking for a murderer, then you want to be as precise as possible, but when you're dealing with families of plants that are subject to genetic mutation over time, that precision can indicate differences in two plants that you would otherwise consider to be identical.*  Clonal variants can show up in AFLP analysis as different varieties, as can geographically disparate populations that shared a common ancestor hundreds of years ago, but which have been evolving separately from one another ever since.  This is the case with Inzolia and Ansonica, and this AFLP analysis was able to show that there were differences not only between Tuscan Ansonica and Sicilian Inzolia, but also between Ansonica from Giglio and Ansonica from Tuscany.  The two Ansonicas were closer to one another than to Inzolia from Sicily and the Tuscan Ansonica was closer to the Sicilian Inzolia than the Giglio Ansonica was, which would indicate that the grape likely came from Sicily to Tuscany and then to Giglio.

I mentioned above that this study also found similarities between Inzolia/Ansonica and Roditis, Airén and Clairette, and this probably needs a bit of explanation as well.  Many genetic studies compare large groups of grapes from specific geographic regions in order to see how similar they are to one another genetically.  The theory is that grapes from a certain region have likely been together a very long time and are probably distantly related to one another in ways that are too complicated to tease out with pedigree analysis.  When testing a large pool of grapes, the scientists look to see which grapes have the most DNA in common with one another and then hypothesize that these grapes are then more closely related to one another than to the other grapes in the study.  The main problem in interpreting the results is that you are limited by the number and the variety of grapes in a study.  The results are really only telling you that these grapes are more like each other than the other grapes in the study, which can be problematic if you've chosen your samples poorly.  Imagine a study like this done with human beings where you're Italian and your family has lived in a small village for hundreds of years.  The researchers select you and a handful of people from your town and compare them with another group from the mountains of Tibet.  The study should show that you are more closely related to the people from your village than the villagers of Tibet.  Now imagine that the study took you, one person from the village in Tibet, and a pack of chimpanzees.  Suddenly you and the Tibetan villager look a lot more closely related.

The point is that these relatedness studies can be useful, but they can also be misleading.  The group above sampled a very high number of Greek grapes along with a handful of grapes from a whole bunch of different regions all over the world.  They tested very few Sicilian or Tuscan varieties, which one would expect to be more closely related, and so the results may be a little skewed.  They interpreted their results as showing that Inzolia likely came from Greece, due to its relatedness to Roditis, into Sicily before moving to Tuscany and then to Giglio.  In Wine Grapes, Vouillamoz points to a 2010 study (citation 1) where another Italian team analyzed 82 different Sicilian grapes to see how closely they were related as refutation of the study above.  They found that Inzolia was mostly closely related to a few other varieties with Inzolia in the name (but which are separate varieties) such as Inzolia Imperiale and Inzolia Nera (which is not a red-berried mutation of Inzolia at all, but rather a separate variety).  Further, this group also had similarities with Coda di Volpe, Grecanico, Frappato, Carricante and Nerello Mascalese among others.  Vouillamoz claims that the relatedness of Inzolia to these other Sicilian grapes indicates that it is likely from Sicily and not from Greece.  Since this particular study did not include any Greek grape varieties, it seems difficult to compare the results from the different studies and come to that kind of conclusion.  Both studies do seem to indicate that Inzolia came from Sicily to Tuscany, but whether it is native to Sicily or whether its ancestors or Greek seems to still be an open question.

I was able to try two different wines, one from Sicily and one from Giglio, made from the Inzolia/Ansonica grape.  The first was the 2009 Ansonaco from Familia Carfagna, which I picked up for around $50 from my friends at the Wine Bottega (though I have recently seen it available at Curtis Liquors as well).  In the glass the wine was a medium bronze gold color.  The nose was intense with aromas of ripe red apples, toasted nuts, apple cider, poached pear, brown sugar, dried apple and abundant autumn spice.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly acidity.  There were flavors of dried apricot, red apple, apple cider, toasted almonds, autumn spice and dried leaves.  I would have sworn that this wine saw some skin contact, but this website seems to indicate no maceration.  I thought this was a really gorgeous wine that was an absolute pleasure to drink.  It should be drunk at cellar or room temperature, as the cold really blunts the aromas and flavors.  It is a bit pricey but I thought it was worth every penny.  You probably could pair this with some food, but I really just enjoyed it on its own.

The second wine that I tried was the 2010 Case Ibidni Inzolia from Sicily, which I picked up from my friends at the Wine Bottega for around $12.  In the glass the wine was a medium lemon yellow color.  The nose was moderately intense with aromas of ripe white pear, green melon, ripe apple and something vaguely tropical.  On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with medium acidity.  There were flavors of ripe, round white pear and red apple along with a touch of mild pineapple and banana.  Inzolia does have a tendency to get flabby if not picked early enough, and I think that these grapes maybe hung on the vine a little too long.  It had some of those flat fruit-cocktail kinds of flavors going on and really wasn't my thing.

Reader and frequent commenter WineKnurd was able to try a more recent vintage (2011) of this wine which he picked up from his friends at Wine Authorities in Durham, North Carolina.  His tasting note reads:

"100% Insolia from Sicily, 12.5% abv with a slight spritz in the glass on first pour. Classic Italian white wine nose full of wet stone and minerals backed with notes of fresh cut granny smith apple and some hints of cantaloupe rind. The palate was lighter and less intense than I was expecting based on the nose and the wine in general had lower acidity than what I was expecting for an Italian white. Up front there are flavors of sour apple and melon rind but somewhere along the mid-palate it thins out and finishes weak. My guess is that this needs to be consumed as fresh as possible in Sicily, not a year behind in the USA. At $12.99 it doesn't break the bank but this is money better spent elsewhere."

CITATION

1) Carimi, F, Mercati, F, Abbate, L, & Sunseri, F.  2010.  Microsatellite analyses for evaluation of genetic diversity among Sicilian grapevine cultivars.  Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution.  57(5): pp 703-719.

*It really seems to be taken for granted that Inzolia and Ansonica are genetically identical, but I actually was not able to find any studies that specifically prove the synonymy.  I checked the microsatellite profile data in the VIVC with the data given for Inzolia in Citation 1 and found that the adjusted values matched at all six sites, so that's good enough for me.

Colorino - Tuscany, Italy

Colorino is one of those grapes that the average wine drinker has almost certainly encountered, but is probably not aware of it.  Colorino was historically very important in the production of Chianti, and if you've sampled a few different Chiantis in your lifetime, you've almost certainly had one with a little dollop of Colorino thrown in.  Colorino has been a traditional part of the Chianti blend for many years, though it rarely makes up more than 5-10% of the final product.  As you might expect from its name, the primary thing Colorino brings to the table is deep color, which it is able to impart even at such small concentrations.  Its contribution to the Chianti blend has been compared to that of Petit Verdot in Bordeaux, and, like Petit Verdot, some producers have decided to see whether Colorino is interesting enough to make varietal wines from.  I was able to pick one up recently, but before I get into that, let's take a little closer look at the Colorino grape itself.

As mentioned above, Colorino has long been valued for its contribution to the Chianti blend, especially for those producers who utilized the governo method.  In the governo method, some of the grapes harvested in September and October were set aside and not pressed with the others.  These grapes were allowed to dry out for several months before being pressed in mid to late November.  As you might expect, some grapes are able to withstand this drying process better than others, and Colorino is particularly well suited to it.  This concentrated, sweet juice was then added to the vats of juice that had just finished its primary alcoholic fermentation, which caused the fermentation to start up again.  While this had the immediate effect of increasing the final alcohol content, the main reason for this practice was that this second fermentation often kicked off malolactic fermentation as well, which, in the days before bacterial inoculation, was not always so easy to start in a wine made from a high-acid variety like Sangiovese.  The governo process made the wines drinkable much earlier than they otherwise would be, and was more heavily used when Chianti was seen as an easy-drinking, every day/every meal kind of wine.  With the more recent focus on quality and creating age-worthy red wines, the governo process has fallen out of favor.  Colorino continues to be used in the Chianti blend, though, for its ability to lend color to the final wine, and for a time, its popularity began to rise as many producers fought against the increasing presence of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in Tuscan vineyards and wines, though the gradual acceptance of the international varieties in Tuscany has caused its popularity to wane once more.

You may not be surprised to learn that a grape name like Colorino has come to be used for several different grape varieties over the years*.  A study done in 1996 analyzed four different grapes known as Colorino and found that not only were they each different grape varieties, but at least one of them didn't seem to even be related to the other three at all.  The outlier of the group was called Colorino Americano, while the other three were known as Colorino del Valdarno, Colorino di Pisa and Colorino di Lucca.  In 2008, another study (citation 1) analyzed Colorino di Pisa and Colorino di Lucca along with a handful of other Tuscan vines  and showed that the two Colorinos were in fact distinct and possibly have a parent/offspring relationship with one another.  To add to the confusion, the VIVC considers Colorino di Valdarno, Colorino di Lucca and Colorino Pisano to be the same variety and doesn't have an entry for Colorino di Americano at all.  They further list three other Colorinos that are different from the three mentioned above, calling them Colorino Dolce, Forte and Nostrale respectively.  I have not been able to find any other information on these three varieties of Colorino, so I'm not sure how they fit in with the others or even how widely cultivated they may be.  Wine Grapes tells us that the most common variety of Colorino is Colorino del Valdarno, but since it doesn't appear that the Italian authorities differentiate between these vines, any or all of the four (or seven) Colorinos could be present in your bottle.  The latest Italian agricultural census (2000) indicated that there were 436 hectares planted to Colorino, and one assumes that this figure includes the various Colorino varieties altogether.

I was able to find a bottle of the 2005 La Spinetta "Il Colorino" at Panzano in Southborough for around $34.  In the glass the wine was a deep, opaque purple ruby color.  The nose was moderately intense with stewed black cherry, black plum, smoke and charcoal aromas.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acidity and medium tannins.  There were flavors of black cherry, blackberry, sour cherry and wild blueberry fruits along with some licorice, smoke, char, and earth.  The wine was mostly dark and dense, but it had a nice bit of tart freshness from the sour cherry and blueberry flavors that kept it lively and interesting.  It is often the case that one understands quickly why blending grapes are rarely seen in a starring role when one finds a varietal wine comprised of these grapes, but I had the complete opposite reaction when tasting this wine.  Rather, I found myself wondering why more people wouldn't try to make wines like this, as it was complex, interesting and very tasty to boot.  The price tag looks a little steep at first blush, but I wouldn't have any qualms about paying that amount again for this wine.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and would definitely pick it up again if I ever run across it.

*Some sources have indicated that the Ancellotta of Emilia-Romagna and Colorino are the same grape, but it doesn't look like that's so.  While I wasn't able to find any specific studies that compared the two grapes, a recent study conducted by a French team (citation 2) analyzed over 4000 different grape accessions in a particular collection.  Though there is no table with all of the data shown, a later parentage study (citation 3) by many of the same team members gave a list of the 2300+ grapes used, which was culled from the results of the earlier study.  Ancellotta and Colorino are listed separately, which seems to indicate that they are genetically distinct from one another.  Just which Colorino variety was used, though, is unclear.

Citations

1) Vignani, R, Masi, E, Scali, M, Milanesi, C, Scalabreli, G, Wang, W, Sensi, E, Paolucci, E, Percoco, G & Cresti, M.  2008.  A critical evaluation of SSRs analysis applied to Tuscan grape (Vitis vinifera L.) germplasm.  Advances in Horticultural Science. 22(1), pp 33-37.

2) Lacau, et al.  2011.  High throughput analysis of grape genetic diversity as a tool for germplasm collection management.  Theoretical and Applied Genetics.  122(6), pp 1233-1245.

3) Lacombe, T., Boursiquot, J.M., Laucou, V., Di Vecchi-Staraz, M., Peros, J.P., & This, P. 2012. Large scale parentage analysis in an extended set of grapevine cultivars (Vitis vinifera L.). Theoretical and Applied Genetics. In press.

Ciliegiolo - Golfo di Tigullio, Liguria & Maremma, Tuscany, Italy

There are a lot of things at stake when paternity tests are given to humans, but it is virtually never the case that a genetic test is required to see which of a pair of individuals is the parent and which is the offspring.  The directional arrow of parent-offspring relationships are pretty easy to determine for animals because the age of one or both of the parties involved is usually pretty easy to determine.  The same is not  necessarily true for plants, though, and it is especially not true for grape varieties.  You might object that the situations aren't exactly the same, but I would contend that they're closer than you might think.

Let's take a moment to consider what an individual grape variety actually is.  Take Chardonnay, for example.  We happen to know that Chardonnay is the offspring of two other grapes called Pinot Noir and Gouais Blanc.  What that means is that pollen from a Pinot Noir plant was used to fertilize the flowers of a Gouais Blanc plant and when one of the resulting seeds was planted, a Chardonnay plant was the result.  But here's what we also know: when the same two parents got together on other occasions, the plants that grew were not Chardonnay, but were rather Aligoté, Auxerrois, Gamay Noir, Romorantin, and Melon, among many others.  All of these grapes are full siblings of one another, and if you think about the consequences of that fully you should see that what that really means is that each variety of grape is essentially like an individual person.  We can't get more Chardonnay plants by having its parents mate over and over again, so if we want to grow more Chardonnay vines, we have to clone the ones we have by planting cuttings.  By the same token, if we needed another one of you, we couldn't ask your parents to have another child but would rather have to clone you.

Now let's imagine a world where human cloning has been perfected and is not only allowed, but is the preferred method of creating new human beings.  Over time, there have been certain individuals who have particular qualities in certain combinations that makes them ideal human beings and these individuals are now our archetypes for the human race.  They are still capable of sexual reproduction, but this kind of reproduction is seen as a kind of genetic gamble that people are rarely willing to take so nearly all new human beings are clones of a series of archetypal individuals who were born as products of sexual reproduction several generations ago.  Let us further imagine that we are face to face with two of these clones who are ultimately descended from different individuals, one of whom was the father of the other, but we don't know which is the father and which is the son.  Neither of the individuals in front of us actively fathered the other, but one of the genetic lines is the ancestor of the other.  How could we tell which was the father and which was the offspring?

Obviously we can't just look at the two to see which is older since we're dealing with clonal lines and not direct lines of parentage and progeny.  You might be thinking that DNA analysis should be able to clear this up rather quickly, but it's a little trickier than that.  Offspring, both grape and human, get 1/2 of their DNA from their father and 1/2 from their mother.  If we were to analyze the DNA from each of the two individuals in front of us, we would be able to see that they share 1/2 of their DNA, but we wouldn't be able to tell which of them had passed that DNA to the other.  In order to determine which is the father and which is the son, we would need the genetic information from the mother as well.  Whichever of the two people in front of us also contained DNA from the mother would be the son and thus the descendant of the other.

All of which does, finally, bring us to today's grape, Ciliegiolo.  We know that Ciliegiolo has a parent-offspring relationship with Sangiovese, but the direction of that relationship is in some dispute.  Our story begins in 2007, when a paper was published which claimed to have uncovered the parentage of the Sangiovese grape.  José Vouillamoz (who some of you may remember from the Hondarrabi Zuri saga) and his team used a private database of microsatellite markers and 180 plant samples from various university germplasm collections in an attempt to discover Sangiovese's parent grapes.  To do this, they first checked to find grapes in their databases and samples that shared a lot of DNA with Sangiovese.  These grapes were hypothesized to be Sangiovese relatives, though the exact relationship at this point wasn't clear.  In order to establish parentage relationships, they essentially had to go by trial and error and try out a lot of different combinations of grapes as putative parents to see what worked.  In the course of their analyses, they found that Ciliegiolo and an obscure grape they plucked out of the countryside near Naples that they call Calabrese di Montenuovo were the parents of the Sangiovese grape.

Game over, right?  Well, not exactly.  Shortly thereafter, another research group led by Manuel Di Vecchi Staraz (citation below) analyzed the DNA of several thousand different grapes to try and determine how and where Sangiovese might fit in with any of their family trees.  This team was unable to find any parent-pair for Sangiovese among their samples and while they found a parent-offspring relationship between Ciliegiolo and Sangiovese, their research led them to conclude that Sangiovese was actually the parent to Ciliegiolo (along with a grape called Muscat rouge de Madére).  Further, their analysis enabled them to discover the parents of Muscat Rouge de Madére, which enabled them to do some analyses based on these sets of grandparents which, they feel, cemented their claim (I don't understand enough of the science to know how justified they are in this claim).  They also point to the fact that Sangiovese appears in the literature earlier than Ciliegiolo as proof that it is an older variety and thus parent to Ciliegiolo by necessity, but I don't find this argument convincing as names for grapes change frequently and the presence of a grape in the written record only accounts for its discovery not for its existence.

So we have a controversy here, and as far as I can tell, it is still unresolved.  A paper published the next year seems to side with Vouillamoz et. al., though you can really only tell that by looking at Figure 2 in their paper (the text is maddeningly vague).  The VIVC, though, seems to accept Di Vecchi Staraz's theory, and they list Ciliegiolo as an offspring of Sangiovese.  Wikipedia acknowledges the controversy and remains agnostic, if poorly cited, about it.  The Oxford Companion to Wine (online version) unequivocally states that Ciliegiolo is one of the parents of Sangiovese, which shouldn't be that surprising if you remember that José Vouillamoz, the lead author of the paper cited above which also makes this claim, is the OCW's resident grape pedigree expert.  In fact, José Vouillamoz is credited (obliquely, I should add...his initials are provided at the end of the entry and you have to click on the J.V. to get his name) as one of the authors of the entry (the other author is one of the cadre of MW's that the OCW has on staff who is an expert on Italian wines but not on genetics).  This means that the entry in the OCW wasn't written by a dispassionate outside observer, it was written by one of the scientists who is directly involved in the debate itself and it bothers me a bit that this not only was this fact not openly disclosed, but the other voices in the debate are completely disregarded in the entry itself.  If you only read the OCW's entry on Ciliegiolo, you wouldn't know that there was any controversy at all, and that doesn't sit right with me.  I haven't contacted anyone at the OCW regarding this because I'm not really in the mood to be told that I have to wait and buy their $125 book to read the full story again.

There are a few lessons to be learned here.  The first is that scientific discovery is a process which sometimes arrives at the truth quickly, but sometimes arrives there by a more complicated route.  The information that is currently available is conflicting, and it seems like a reference material such as The Oxford Companion to Wine should acknowledge that conflict to some extent.  The second lesson is that you should always try to be aware of who the author of what you're reading actually is.  The OCW, as an encyclopedic resource, is a collaborative effort, but there are certain articles that are written by specific contributors and those contributors are occasionally highlighted and credited, but not always.  It is important to know that what you're reading has been written by someone who is in a position to know what they're talking about (an expert), but it's also important to know whether the author has any other kind of stake in the issue at hand.  This particular entry is written by an expert, but he is a biased expert in this case and the responsible thing to do is to acknowledge both the bias itself and also the wider controversy so that interested readers can seek out the original materials if they are so inclined.

**UPDATE**

I've recently come across another paper published in 2010 that sides with Di Vecchi Starazin saying that Ciliegiolo is the offspring of Sangiovese and Moscato Violetto, which is a synonym for Muscat Rouge de Madere.  Their research seems convincing and I'm inclined to believe their results at this point. The citation is: Cipriani, G. et al.  The SSR-based molecular profile of 1005 grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) accessions uncovers new synonymy and parentages, and reveals a large admixture amongst varieties of different geographic origin.  2010.  Theoretical and Applied Genetics.  121: 1569-1585.

********

So, enough about all that then.  Let's take a look at a couple of wines made from the Ciliegiolo grape, whatever its relationship to Sangiovese turns out to be.

I was actually able to find two different wines made from the Ciliegiolo grape in two very different styles.  The first was the 2010 Bisson Ciliegiolo from the Golfo del Tigullio in Liguria in northwestern Italy.  This wine was made in a rosé style and I picked it up from my friends at the Wine Bottega for about $23.  In the glass this wine was a coral red color like the color of the juice in a bottle of maraschino cherries.  The nose was very intense with nearly every kind of cherry that you can imagine (maraschino, candied, dried, tart, red) along with a touch of strawberry.  The grape is supposedly named for the Italian word for cherry (ciliegia) due to its propensity to smell and taste like, well, cherries.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of sour cherry, wild strawberry, candied red cherry, cranberry and sour red fruits.  There may have been a hint of residual CO2, but I wasn't entirely sure.  The wine was fresh and juicy but completely dry.  This is a knockout summer wine that I would drink with just about anything.  The fruits were pure and ripe and the wine was an absolute delight to drink.

The second wine that I tried was the 2007 Sassotondo Ciliegiolo from the Maremma region of Tuscancy.  I had to special order this wine and my friend Joe at Curtis Liquors brought it in for me for about $18.  In the glass this was a deep, opaque purple ruby color with a narrow violet rim.  The nose was moderately intense with very meaty, savory flavor notes that reminded me of the smell of dry-aged beef steaks.  There were also dried black fruits (fig and prune) along with some flat cola, baking spice and chocolate.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity and fairly substantial tannins.  There were flavors of dried black fruits, black cherry and fig, along with a distinctive meaty, beefy kind of flavor and something like flat cola and imitation chocolate.  The wine tasted a little sweet, but it could have been the 15% alcohol giving that illusion.  The meatiness did eventually blow off but in its place that fake chocolate taste came on stronger and stronger.  I just flat out did not like this wine and was unable to finish the bottle.  The sweet taste and the fake chocolate were just too much for me and I only made it through one glass before I discarded the rest.


Citation:

DI VECCHI STARAZ, M.; BANDINELLI, R.; BOSELLI, M.; THIS, P.; BOURSIQUOT,
J. M.; LAUCOU, V.; LACOMBE, T.; VARÈS, D.; 2007: Genetic structuring
and parentage analysis for evolutionary studies in grapevine: kin
group and origin of the cultivar Sangiovese revealed. J. Am. Soc.
Hort. Sci. 132, 514-524.

Pugnitello - Tuscany, Italy

When I'm out shopping for unusual wines for this website, there are a few sections of most wine shops that I linger in, and a few sections that I blow right through.  I usually blow through the South American section, for example, because for the most part, I know exactly what I'm going to find there.   The South American sections of nearly every wine shop on earth are laid out the same way with the same kinds of wines in them and I know that the likelihood of me finding something unusual is pretty slim.  I tend to linger a little longer in the Italian sections of most shops and really pay attention to what they have because the chances of my finding something unusual in the Italian section are much higher than they are for pretty much any other section in the store.

Some of the larger shops have their Italian sections broken up into smaller, region-specific sections as well, and there are some parts of Italy that I really linger over and some parts that I blow right by.  I really dive in to the sections devoted to the wines of Piedmont (or anywhere in northern Italy, really) and Sicily in particular, but the region that I find that I skip over the most is Tuscany.  It's certainly not because I don't love wines from this region, it's just that for the most part, Tuscany's wines are very mainstream and the grapes that they use for nearly all of the wines are very well known.  I've been dying to try a wine made mostly from some of the supporting players in Chianti like Colorino or Canaiolo, but so far haven't had any luck in finding one.  The DOC reds are almost all made from Sangiovese of one form or another while the IGT wines are nearly all some blend of Sangiovese, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.  I am a big fan of these wines at my dinner table, but for the purposes of this website, Tuscany doesn't provide me with a lot of material.  To date, I've only written about one wine from Tuscany, a Teroldego/Syrah blend that was very nice, but which has proven to be an extreme outlier in the world of Tuscan wine.

Which is too bad, because it turns out that there are a lot of grapes that are native to Tuscany that may be of some interest to the wine world.  In the 1980's, a group of researchers got together with the aim of identifying and preserving what was left of the native grape population throughout Tuscany in an attempt to stave off the selective extinction of a large number of heirloom grape varieties.  They visited 500 estates throughout Tuscany and identified 229 different grapes that were growing throughout the region.  They took samples and planted 18 vines of each of them in an experimental vineyard property owned by the San Felice winery called "Vitiarium."  A large number of the vines produced grapes that were of no commercial or viticultural interest, but a few of them showed some potential.  In 1990 the researchers selected 13 of the most interesting vines and made small lots of wine from the grapes produced at Vitiarium.  Of those 13, a grape called Pugnitello quickly established itself as the star of the show, and the San Felice winery planted 1000 cuttings of the vine for more large-scale experimentation.  The first commercial bottlings were made in 2003 and have been made each year except for 2005.  In many cases, the governmental authorities are slow to recognize new discoveries like Pugnitello, but in 2002, the Italian Ministry of Agriculture put Pugnitello in the National Registry of Vine Varieties, and in 2003 the Tuscan  Regional Commission approved Pugnitello for use throughout the region.  As of today, only a few wineries other than San Felice are making a varietal Pugnitello, but it is happening.

The original Pugnitello vine had been found in a vineyard near the town of Cinigiano, which is just southwest of Montalcino in Tuscany.  The owner of the vineyard site had no information about the grape itself and there doesn't appear to be any record of the grape in any previous ampelographical work.  The name Pugnitello was given to the grape because the clusters resemble little balled up fists (pugno, in Italian).  The researchers conducted DNA testing on the grape and have thus far found no genetic links to any other existing grape varieties.  It's easy to imagine how the grape could have been overlooked in the past.  From a grower's perspective, it doesn't have much to recommend it.  The clusters are very small and the berries themselves are on the smallish side with thick skins.  The vine is also a naturally low-yielder, so pretty much any way you look at it, it doesn't look like a very profitable vine to grow.

Except for the fact that it makes really interesting wine.  On the consumer end of things, we often think that this should really be the only consideration given when one decides to plant and tend to the vine, but in reality, good wine is not always profitable for the grower, and it's all too easy to see how over time growers would abandon low-yielding, unreliable vines that make excellent wine for higher yielding varieties that make an inferior product, but make more of it and make it more reliably.  Those of us interested in characterful, interesting, different kinds of wines owe a great debt to growers and researchers who are committed to discovering and maintaining the great diversity of vines, whether their efforts pay off with a discovery like Pugnitello or not.  The world could very easily shift over to the major ten or so major grape varieties tomorrow without too much gnashing of teeth from the wine drinkers of the world, but part of what I really love about wine is its variety and the seemingly inexhaustible supply of grapes as source material.  I am grateful when I hear about discoveries like Pugnitello because I'm certain that the discovery won't lead to any kind of major financial windfall for its discoverers, but the fact that they were curious enough to go out and find something like Pugnitello and make wine from it just so that they could see what might happen really excites me.

I mentioned yesterday that my friend Joe Godas over at Curtis Liquors in Weymouth invited me to his back room to sample a Mavrotragano from Santorini, Greece, he had been given.  As he mentions in the comments to that post, his disappointment was as great as mine was at how the Mavrotragano turned out, but little did I know that he had a backup plan.  Joe hadn't told me about the Pugnitello before I showed up, but given the Mavrotragano's poor showing, he was gracious enough to open a bottle of the 2006 San Felice Pugnitello da San Felice that he had also been given as a sample bottle.  I'm not sure about the SRP, but online prices for this wine seem to be somewhere between $36 and $60. In the glass, the wine was a deep purple ruby color with a medium purple-crimson rim.  The nose was somewhat reserved with savory leathery funk over a bit of red cherry fruit.  As the wine opened up a bit, some darker, blacker fruits started to show up as well.  On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity and medium tannins.  There were ripe cherry fruit flavors with a bit of blackberry, leather, cocoa and espresso.  The wine walked the line between dark, ripe fruits and savory, earthy flavors extraordinarily well.  It was a bit closer to Brunello than Chianti in style, but really walked the line between the two nicely.  This is a very very good wine and it was universally preferred amongst the local distributor's and customer's in Joe's back room to the flashier, oakier Mavrotragano that had preceded it.  Yes, this wine sees some new oak, but it's much more integrated here and it gives the grape a chance to express itself in the glass.  If you run across this rarity, I'd definitely recommend it to you not only for the great story, but also for the great wine you'll find in your glass.

Aleatico di Toscana - Tuscany, Italy

Besides Brachetto d'Acqui and possibly Symphony, I don't know that I've really written very much about sweet or dessert wines.  Even though I happen to be a fan of sweet wines, I don't drink or buy them that often.  I think it's mostly because I've got this equation set up in my head where sweet wines = dessert wines, and the simple fact of the matter is that when I'm at home, I don't eat a lot of dessert.  Cost is another factor as good sweet wines are usually made in a way that requires an awful lot of grapes to produce a little bit of wine, such as wines made from raisined, frozen or botrytis-infected grapes, which tends to result in higher prices.  The spectrum of prices for sweet wines is much more compressed since they tend to start out higher on the low end than table wines, even if they flatten out faster at the high end.  High end Bordeaux, Burgundy and California table wines can run you $5,000 right out of the gate while the greatest Sauternes wine (and, arguably, the greatest sweet wine on earth), Chateau d'Yquem, will probably run between $300 and $400 for a half bottle.  Regardless of price, though, sweet wines definitely have their place at the table and I often find myself wondering why I don't drink more of them.

All of this is in introduction to today's grape, Aleatico.  Aleatico is a red Italian grape whose origins are very unclear.  There are written records dating back to the 14th Century which refer to the "Livatica" grape, which is commonly believed to be Aleatico (Livatica is also known as Liatico or Agliano so you put the two together and you get Aleatico).  It was thought for awhile that Aleatico was simply a red-skinned mutation of Muscat Blanc a Petits Grains, but recently DNA research seems to point to Muscat as a parent to Aleatico rather than a mutation (the other parent was unable to be identified).  The deep, intense color of Aleatico wines are also a big strike against the mutation theory, as the red-skinned clones of the Muscat family do not possess anything resembling the deep color of Aleatico.  Nobody disputes that the grape has some link to the Muscat family of grapes, though, and once you try the wine, it's pretty easy to see why. 

Another point of confusion with Aleatico is the matter of exactly where it's from.  There are a lot of grapes growing in Italy today that at one point in time came over from Greece, but it isn't clear whether Aleatico is one of those grapes or not.  There are some who maintain that it is a Greek import and others who claim that it's native to southern Italy (specifically Apulia).  Whatever the case turns out to be, Italy is the grape's current home. There are a few DOCs and one DOCG scattered across Italy that showcase Aleatico.  Most of it is grown in either Apulia, Lazio or Tuscany, though there are limited plantings in a few other Italian regions.  Interestingly, Aleatico is one of the few grapes grown on the Tuscan island of Elba and wines made from the grape were purportedly one of Napolean's few sources of solace during his exile there.  It is grown in limited quantities in other parts of the world like Chile, where it is known as Red Moscatel, and, surprisingly, in places like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Aleatico plantings seem to be on the decline throughout Italy, but I was fortunate enough to come across the 2006 bottling from Nanerone called "Piandibugnano" Aleatico di Toscana IGT at Bin Ends for $29 (500mL).  In the glass, the wine was an inky, dense, almost black color with a very narrow purple rim.  The wine had a grapey, flowery aroma very similar to other muscat-based wines.  On the palate, the wine was thick, but not syrupy, with nice acidity that was on the higher side of medium and, strangely, just a bit of fine, dusty tannin.  The wine was definitely sweet with ripe purple grape flavors along with some lychee and boysenberry jam fruit.  I had originally thought this might be lightly fortified, but have since learned (from my friends at The Wine Bottega) that this is in fact made in the passito method, where grapes are fully or partially dried before pressing.  I was a little surprised, as this clocks in at 15% alcohol, but it carries it very well.  The flavors here aren't particularly complex, but they're very intense and focused.  My sum-up note reads: "kind of like port spiked with Welch's or flat grape soda," which is not a knock on the wine in any way as I found it very enjoyable.  This is a home run with chocolate but has enough berry fruit flavors to complement a dark fruit cobbler or something in that vein.  This is a very reasonably priced dessert wine that you should definitely try if you run across it.

Teroldego - Trentino and Tuscany, Italy

I'm going to confess something: I'm kind of a geek.  I guess anyone who has read more than one of my posts probably could have figured that out, but I'm just going to come right out and say it here.  Part of why I love writing this website is that it gives me an outlet for the kind of geekery that I can't really let fly in my everyday life.  I love doing the research and learning about the minutiae of these unusual grapes.  I love exploring the nooks and crannies of the wine world to try and find hidden treasures and cool stories.  Today, for example, I was doing a little bit of background reading to get ready to post about Teroldego when I stumbled across an article in the journal Heredity called "Geneaology of Wine Grape Cultivars" (full citation: Vouillamoz, J., & Grando, M. (2006). Genealogy of wine grape cultivars: ‘Pinot’ is related to ‘Syrah’. Heredity, 97(2), 102-110).  I know, this dry, academic reading is what most people use to get through a particularly vicious attack of insomnia, but I love this stuff.  My day job is also at a big time research university, so I have full access to a lot of these journals.  Anyway, I started to read this article and it's talking about how for many years, scientists would look at the leaf shape of different grape varieties to try to determine the relation between different cultivars.  Needless to say, this was a very inexact science.  Recent progress in the field of genetics has allowed scientists to use genetic markers to identify parentage and sibling relationships between all these different grapes with much greater accuracy and with many interesting surprises (I'll spare you the excruciating details, but the method is similar to the method that forensic scientists use on DNA samples at crime scenes).  So I'm reading through this article and then looking through the references and picking up new articles and I look up and I've got 5 articles printed out in front of me and I figure it's probably time to stop and get to the matter at hand.

So, Teroldego, then.  It appears that there may be a sibling relationship between Teroldego and the Pinot family and there is likely a parent/offspring relationship between Teroldego and Lagrein and Marzemino (**UPDATE** Teroldego is definitely one parent of Lagrein, while the other is Schiava Gentile, according to: Cipriani, G. et al.  The SSR-based molecular profile of 1005 grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) accessions uncovers new synonymy and parentages, and reveals a large admixture amongst varieties of different geographic origin.  2010.  Theoretical and Applied Genetics.  121: 1569-1585.).  It also turns out that Teroldego is a full sibling (meaning it has the same two parent vines) to a grape called Dureza, which is one of the parent grapes of Syrah.  This is interesting in light of a comment from Jim Clendenen of Au Bon Climat winery in California which is quoted in Oz Clarke's Grapes and Wines.  Clarke has Clarendon saying that California should have planted Teroldego rather than Merlot and Barbera and, furthermore, it is his belief that if Teroldego were planted on the slopes of Crozes-Hermitage rather than Syrah then the wine there would be greatly improved. Bold talk indeed.  Au Bon Climat is primarily a Pinot Noir producer and their terroir isn't necessarily conducive to the Teroldego grape, but I believe that they do have a little Teroldego under vine (according to Eric Asimov of the NYT), though I don't know if they actually bottle and sell any of it (there is no mention on their website).  It is possible in California to blend up to 25% of other grape varietals into a single-varietal bottling in California without mentioning it on the label, so its possible that they could use those grapes for that purpose.  Some California producers are notorious for adding high color wines like Syrah to their Pinot bottlings for added color and depth so it wouldn't necessarily surprise me, but I'm certainly not going to accuse the winemaker of doing that based on a hunch and some anecdotal evidence.

Teroldego's home is Trentino in the Trentino-Alto Adige region of Italy.  We've spent a little time in the Alto Adige visiting with Schiava.  Trentino is the southerly portion of this region where the Germanic/Austrian influence isn't quite as pronounced.  There are references to Teroldego from Trentino mentioned as far back as the 15th Century. The grape is well suited to warm weather, which may seem a little odd for northern Italy, but they have some areas in the valleys and river basins where the grape can get all the sun and warmth that it needs.  It is a thin-skinned variety that produces a deeply colored wine, somehow.  There are competing theories about the origin of the name of the grape.  I've read that a court in Vienna once called the wine "The Gold of the Tyrol," and somehow that ended up as "Teroldego."  I've also read that it has more to do with the wire harnesses, or "tirelles" used to trellis the vine.  Matt Kramer, in his Making Sense of Italian Wine contends that that the name derives from the Gernman word teer which means "tar," a flavor which Teroldego can sometimes take on.  Take your pick, I guess.

The first wine that I was able to try was the 2005 Teroldego Rotalino (the official DOC name of the region in Trentino where most Teroldego is grown, named for the gravelley river bottom plain called Campo Rotalino near the Adige river) Riserva from Mezzacorona.  I was able to pick this up from my friends at Bin Ends for about $20.  In the glass, the wine was a dense purple ruby color nearly all the way to the rim.  The nose was full of smoky black cherry and black plum with some blackberry and blueberry.  On the palate, the wine was close to full bodied with fairly high acid and very little tannin.  The grape can be tannic in its youth, but at 6 years out, most of that seemed to be pretty well integrated.  There were flavors of black plum, smoky earth, tart cherries and stewed blackberries.  The wine was much fruitier and exciting on the nose than on the palate.  The finish is kind of abrupt as the fruit really falls off rather than fade away.  People have mixed feelings about the age-ability of Teroldego, and after this bottle, I can understand the misgivings. 

Talk to people familiar with the grape and they'll tell you that Teroldego grows in Trentino and nowhere else; in fact, Bastianich and Lynch (in their Vino Italiano) quote Elisabetta Foradori, one of the leading producers of Teroldego in Trentino as saying "you can't find it anywhere in the world."  Well, somebody forgot to tell Poggio al Casone.  This estate grows Teroldego and bottles it under their "La Cattura" label with a little bit of Syrah added to it (the bottle I had was 90% Teroldego and 10% Syrah, but their website currently lists the blend as 85/15).  I picked my bottle up from the Gypsy Kitchen for about $16.  The wine was a deep purple ruby color in the glass and had aromas of black cherry and black plum with a bit of stewed black fruit and a smoky, meaty kind of aroma that I'm guessing may be from the touch of Syrah.  On the palate the wine was close to full bodied with medium acidity and soft, well-integrated tannins.  There was lush black cherry and plum fruit flavors grounded with some savory earthy notes and a nice long, evolving finish.  This wine was the better of the two and really shows what Teroldego is capable of.  It's very similar in style to a northern Rhone wine for a fraction of the cost of what many of those bottlings would run you.