Roscetto - "Falesco Ferentano," Lazio, Italy

Roscetto is one of those rare Italian grapes that is grown in a single place and made by a single producer and is not produced anywhere else in the world.  If you've found this page, you've probably gone through quite a few pages that have written about the grape and every single one of them mentions a single producer and winemaker: Riccardo Cotarella of Falesco Winery.  Wikipedia comes up empty, Jancis Robinson's Oxford Companion of Wine makes no mention, and even the VIVC (Vitis International Variety Catalog) has no results for Roscetto.  The only information that is available is coming from the winery, either in articles written about the winery or winemaker or from the winery's website itself.  Normally, I like to use a variety of sources so I can check them against one another, but in this case, not only is all the wine on earth made from this grape coming from a single estate, but seemingly all the information on earth about the same grape is coming from there as well.

So what do we know?  Falesco winery has a bottling called Ferentano that is the only 100% varietally bottled Roscetto on earth (some of their Roscetto crop goes into their Est! Est!! Est!!! bottling).  According to Falesco, the grape is an ancient variety indigenous to the Lazio region (and more specifically, Montefiascone, a town in northeastern Lazio about 100 km from Rome).  It is a white grape that turns a little pinkish as it ripens.  It has thick skins and after the grapes are crushed, the skins and juice are held together at a very low temperature for awhile (a process called cryomaceration) in order to extract the phenolic compounds from the skins.  The wine was first bottled by the Falesco winery in the 1998 vintage.  And that's about all I can find.  There's plenty of information out there about the winery itself, which is perhaps best known for their Merlot bottling called Montiano, though they have a pretty wide variety of offerings. Wine.com informs me that "in 2006, our customers purchased more bottles of wine from Falesco than from any other winery in the world."  I don't know how many cases of the Ferentano are produced, but I have found this wine in two different wine shops in the Boston area so I don't think production is down in the cult numbers.

The bottle I was able to pick up was from the 2006 vintage (oddly, both local stores where I've found this wine were from the 2006 vintage).  It cost me $12 at Bin Ends, but I picked it up from a sale rack marked 50% off.  I believe this usually retails for around $20. 
The wine had a rich, gold color in the glass.  When I first pulled the cork, the wine had a heady, appley perfume that faded pretty quickly into something fairly neutral with some buttery toast notes.  It was rich and full-bodied on the palate with good acidity and a creamy texture.  There were ripe apple, buttery toast, lime peel and toasted nut flavors with some vanilla.  It was pretty clear that this had seen some oak, and the winery web site confirms that the wine spends four months in oak barriques.  I was very pleasantly surprised at how lively this was at five years old.  This probably has the stuffing for a few more years in bottle.  It's very similar to white Burgundy or some of the more restrained California Chardonnays.  I don't know what kind of oak is used here, but it's almost certainly not American, and if you made me choose, I'd guess its mostly new French oak.  This is not really the style of white wine I go for, but this was really an exceptional bottle.  If you can track this bottle down, definitely give it a shot as it's a very unique grape (even if it is made in an international style).

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.

Mauzac - Blanquette de Limoux, France

Welcome, friends and neighbors, to Fringe Wine's 50th post!  In honor of reaching this milestone, I've decided to write about an interesting little wine I had recently from southwestern France.

Southwestern France has not, historically, been a hotbed for fine wine growing.  The Languedoc (on the Mediterranean coast near the Spanish border) was, and for the most part still is, the most significant contributor to the "wine lake" that exists in France, accounting for approximately one-third of all of the grapes produced in France.  Like La Mancha in Spain, though, the tide seems to be turning here as more producers are starting to focus on quality wine production and money from outside investors is starting to come in.  Some regions are definitely farther ahead of the curve than others, and one of those regions is Limoux.

Limoux has a very old wine-making tradition.  There are records that show that the Romans traded wines from Limoux during their occupation of the region thousands of years ago.  Local lore has it that the world's first sparkling wine was made in Limoux in 1531, predating Dom Pérignon by more than a century (we do all know that the Dom Pérignon invention of Champagne is a myth anyway, right?).  Much of the wine produced in Limoux today is still sparkling wine, as 3 of the 4 approved AOC categories are dedicated to sparkling wines.  There is the obligatory Crémant category that seems to pop up everywhere in France and which is made from mostly Chardonnay grapes with some Chenin Blanc vinified using the traditional Champagne method.  There is also the similarly made Blanquette de Limoux which requires that 90% of the blend be from the Mauzac grape with the other 10% being from Chardonnay or Chenin Blanc.  And then there's the Blanquette Méthode Ancestrale made from 100% Mauzac.

The méthode ancestrale is different and before we can really talk about how it's different, you need to know a little something about the Mauzac grape.  Mauzac is mostly grown in southwestern France (mostly in Gaillac and Limoux), though it is one of the allowed white grapes in Bordeaux.  The skin colors for the grapes range from green to black, and while there is a grape called Mauzac Noir, it is not related in any way to Mauzac proper.  The most important thing about it, though, is that it is a very late ripener.  What this means is that by the time that Mauzac has reached full ripeness in the vineyard, the temperature has already started to drop in the region.  It's important to remember that there is a temperature range within which fermentation is possible: too hot and the yeast cells die off; too cold, and they go to sleep and stop doing their work.  In the good old days, there wasn't any such thing as temperature control for fermentation vessels so winemakers had to hope for the weather to stay warm long enough so that the fermentation didn't stick.  Most grapes are harvested in late summer/early autumn which usually gives enough time before winter sets in for the fermentation to finish its job.  Mauzac, though, ripens much later, so by the time it gets to a point where the fermentation is happening, it's well into the autumn.  What would traditionally happen is that Mauzac would get stuck in its fermentation when it was about halfway through.  The weather would get so cold that the yeast would stop working.  The wine was then bottled with the sleeping yeast cells still inside.  When spring rolled around, the yeast would wake up and ferment a little more, creating bubbles in the bottle.  The wine doesn't ferment all the way dry (it gets up to around 7-8% alcohol), so there's still a bit of sweetness to it.  The wine also is not disgorged, so when the yeast cells have given their all and die, they stay in the bottle, which can give méthode ancestrale wines a cloudy appearance.

I was able to find a bottle of Blanquette Méthode Ancestrale from Toad Hollow Vineyards from my friends at Bin Ends for about $12.  Those of you who buy a lot of California wine may recognize the Toad Hollow brand and wonder just what is going on here.  Toad Hollow, located in northern California, has an agreement with Sieur d'Arques in Limoux and they sell wines made by this estate under the Toad Hollow label.  I only even picked up this wine because my wife was pointing out the hideous label on this particular bottle.  I had totally missed it, somehow, when combing the racks at Bin Ends, and when I saw what it was, I snatched it up right away.  It is not the most aesthetically pleasing thing I've ever seen in my life, but I'm not one to judge a wine by its label.  This bottling is also a little unusual in that it also has one of those rubber stoppers on a hinge that fits over the top of the bottle.  It is sealed under a traditional mushroom cork, but it does have the rubber stopper for saving some wine for later, I guess.

In the glass, the wine was a pale silvery lemon color and a little fizz.  I'm not sure how they did it, but this wine is clear and did not seem to have any debris or sediment floating around in it.  The nose had a generous and appetizing aroma with some nice green apple flavors along with a bit of stone fruit and flowers.  The wine was light bodied and semi-sweet with nice acidity.  It's definitely closer to a frizzante style than a full-blown sparkler.  There was candied green apple and sour apple flavors with something a little flowery about it.  The flavor characteristic I keep reading about this kind of wine is that they are kind of cidery, and I can see kind of see that. There's definitely a lot of apple flavors in this.  The closest comparison I can think to make is to Moscato d'Asti, though this lacks the intense aroma and flowery profile of Moscato.  It would be a great wine to serve with brunch or with a apple-centered dessert.  I personally had this bottle with some turkey chili and found that it went very well with that as well.  It's a simple wine, but that's not always such a bad thing. It's an interesting and unique star in the constellation of worldwide wine that's worth checking out if you can find a bottle.

Colombard - Bas-Armagnac, France

In the United States, there was a time where it would have been laughable to consider Colombard a fringe grape.  Until 1991, it was the most planted white grape in California (where it was known as French Colombard), accounting for over 70,000 acres of plantings at its peak.  It formed the base for many jug wines and was allegedly prized for its aromatic profile and its ability to retain acidity in very hot climates (like the Central Valley), but I suspect growers loved it mostly for its massive yields (over 12 tons per acre or over 200 hl/ha).  The Chardonnay revolution in California has displaced most Colombard plantings and what is left is nearly all used in jug wine production. The US also has some plantings in Texas and Alabama, of all places, and it is grown successfully in South Africa and Australia as well due to its ability to tolerate very hot conditions.

Colombard's home, though, is France.  Everyone's best guess seems to be that Colombard is the result of a crossing of Gouais Blanc and Chenin Blanc.  It is thought that it originated in the Charente region of France where it was vinified primarily in order to provide a base for Cognac. That role is being played mostly by Ugni Blanc (Trebbiano) these days, and plantings of Colombard in France have fallen as a result.  It is still permitted in Bordeaux and is planted in some of the less prestigious regions there where it is used primarily as a blending grape.  It is most widely grown in the Gascony region of Southwestern France where there are some varietal Colombard bottlings available.

Today's wine is from Bas-Armagnac in southwestern France (spanning the Landes and Gers départements in Gascony, for those with an intimate knowledge of French political geography), which is one of the three areas where grapes can be cultivated for Armagnac production.  I was able to pick up a bottle of the 2009 Claire de Montesquiou "Espérance" bottling for around $9 from my friends over at Bin Ends.  The wine was a pale lemon color in the glass.  Even with a heavy chill on it, the nose was generous with grapefruit, green apple, lime and some vegetal asparagus aromas and overall was pretty similar to a Sauvignon Blanc.  As the wine warmed up, it opened into more stone fruit and flower aromas, like a nice Viognier.  The palate showed the same kind of thing: more green apple and citrus when very cold with more round peach flavors as it warmed up a bit.  I personally preferred it with just a slight chill on it, but if you want it to taste a little leaner and sharper, throw it in the fridge overnight and keep it ice cold when serving.  There was a nice lingering minerality on the finish which was very refreshing. I imagine this with seafood or other light meat dishes, though it's charming and interesting enough where I wouldn't mind just drinking it on its own.  It's a great warm weather wine that I would love to crack open after mowing the lawn.  I was very surprised at the quality and relative complexity of this wine given its low price.  It seems to be very widely distributed so if you happen to run across it, do yourself a favor and give it a shot.

Freisa d'Asti - Piemonte, Italy

Friends and neighbors, today I have a very unusual treat.  Have you ever had a high acid, fiercely tannic wine like Barolo and thought to yourself, "if only this had some bubbles it would be just perfect."  If you have, then I may have just found your dream wine.  Say hello to our friend Freisa!

Freisa is grown in Piemonte, home of Fringe Wine all stars Grignolino and Brachetto (among many others).  It is believed to be native to the region, originating somewhere in the hills between Asti and Turin in the 18th Century.  It is related somehow to Nebbiolo, the true star of northwestern Italy, either as one of its parents or one of its offspring.  Freisa has two major clones: Freisa Piccolo and Freisa Grossa.  Of the two, Freisa Piccolo is the most widely planted.  Freisa di Chieri is a subclone of Freisa Piccolo which has its own DOC in the area around Turin.  In general, Freisa is a heavy grower, producing heavy vegetation and lots of grapes if not pruned carefully.  As a vine, it is somewhat resistant to downy mildew, but can suffer from powdery mildew.  The grape is grown almost exclusively in Piemonte with only a few acres in Argentina making up the rest of the world plantings. 

It's when we start to talk about styles of wine produced from Freisa that the real fun starts.  The wine is produced in a dry, still version, as well as a ripasso style where the Freisa must is fermented on top of Nebbiolo skins, which must make for a seriously tough wine to sip through.  The most common presentation of Freisa is in a lightly sparkling form which can be either a little sweet (like Sangue di Giuda) or bone dry (like Lambrusco).  "Oh," you might think to yourself, "a little spritz in a red wine can be delightfully refreshing...I've enjoyed many a dry Lambrusco on a summer day and enjoyed them immensely."  You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but you should realize going in that Freisa and Lambrusco are two very different grapes and they take to the process with wildly different results.  Oz Clarke's take is that it's a "love it or hate it" kind of thing, and that seems to be pretty accurate with some of the world's foremost wine experts.  Hugh Johnson considers the wine "immensely appetizing" while Robert Parker considers it "totally repugnant."  I find myself somewhere between the two poles, mostly just scratching my head trying to figure out what on earth I just drank.

The bottle I was able to pick up was from Cascina Gilli.  It was their Luna di Maggio Freisa d'Asti bottling from the 2007 vintage and it set me back $18.  The style of this wine is called "Vivace," which I guess means that its slightly less fizzy than a frizzante style.  If they insist there's a difference, I'll believe them, but that's a shade of grey that I can't see.  The Luna di Maggio is apparently made from the best quality Freisa grapes at the estate.  They get the fizz in there by adding a small amount of sweet wine after the grapes have totally undergone their initial fermentation.  The sweet wine starts a secondary fermentation in the bottle that does ferment the sugar to dryness, but which leaves carbon dioxide and a bit of fizzyness in its wake. 

In the glass, the wine had an inky, dense purple-black color that was opaque nearly out to the rim.  The nose was a little shy with some bitter green vegetable and coffee aromas and not much fruit.  The wine is slightly fizzy in the mouth and bone dry with high acid and shockingly high tannins.  If you've never had anything like this before, there is no way for you to prepare yourself for the shock of having your mouth stripped out from the tannins in a sparkling wine.  You can psych yourself up for it all you want, but you will not be prepared.  It will surprise you and you will need a few minutes to collect yourself.  Once you've pulled yourself together, there is dark black cherry fruit with some raspberry and espresso notes with a very bitter finish, but good luck getting to and staying with those fruit flavors.  I'll be honest: this wine just isn't for me.  I'm not saying it's a bad wine, I'm just saying that it doesn't push the right buttons for me as a wine.  It has the same kind of structure as a Barolo, but it doesn't have the nice fruit that Barolo has to round out the piercing acidity and rough tannins.  The bubbles don't really help as they just seem to accentuate the angularity and awkwardness of the wine in your mouth.  Overall, my general sense was of a thin, harsh wine that was just being mean for the sake of meanness.  Barolo can beat you up sometimes, but it also gives you something sweet that makes the punishment worthwhile and makes you come back for more; Freisa just seems to want to beat you up and then kick you while you're down.

The common recommendation seems to be that you should serve fizzy Freisa with a slight chill, but it didn't make much difference to me.  There may be foods out there that this wine is just made for, but for the life of me I can't think of one.  I would love to try a still version or a fizzy version with a some residual sugar in it to see whether its the grape or the style that I can't get over. As always, I never close the book on a wine without trying different producers and different years, but it may take awhile for me to screw up the courage to give this another shot.