Maceratino - Colli Maceratesi, Marche, Italy

What the heck is Maceratino?  The more I researched this grape, the more I found myself asking that particular question.  There are a lot of suggestions out there for what Maceratino could be, but very few answers as to what it really is.  I did a little bit of digging and found some interesting stuff in the scientific literature that may help to shed a little light on the situation.

A lot of the confusion with Maceratino has to do with synonyms.  Maceratino has 21 synonyms listed in the VIVC, and, confusingly, eight of those synonyms include the word Greco while four include the word Verdicchio.  Many sources (including the OCW, Wikipedia and this Italian source) indicate that there may be some kind of relationship between Maceratino and Greco and/or Verdicchio, and some of them use the overlapping synonyms as an argument for that.  There are some ampelographic similarities between the vines that has led to the grapes sharing some synonyms, but it hasn't ever really been clear whether there's a serious genetic relationship between Maceratino, Greco and/or Verdicchio.  While I didn't find any studies that answered the question directly, I think I was able to find some answers by linking the findings from a few different studies together.

Before taking a look at Maceratino, I first wanted to take a look at the relationship between Greco and Verdicchio.  The OCW indicates that Maceratino could be related to either Greco or Verdicchio, but Wikipedia indicated that it was related to both, which naturally implies some sort of relationship between Greco and Verdicchio themselves.  The Wikipedia article on Verdicchio makes this a bit more explicit, as they say that with Verdicchio, there "appears to be a genetic relation to Trebbiano and the Grecogrape varieties."  We explored the relationship between Trebbiano and Verdicchio in the post on Turbiana, but this was the first that I had heard about an alleged relationship between Verdicchio and Greco.  The source for this claim is Bastianich and Lynch's Vino Italiano, which refers to Greco as a family of grapes with the Umbrian Grechetto as a subvariety and the Sicilian Grecanico as either a synonym for Greco proper or merely an offshoot of the family.  The authors further maintain that "greco may well have been the progenitor of most of the white varieties in Italy, including trebbiano, verdicchio, and the garganega of Soave in the Veneto," according to "some historians and scientists."

I took a look at a paper that I used for researching my Turbiana post, and pretty much all of the evidence that I needed was right there.  The authors of this paper didn't test Maceratino, but they did test Greco Bianco and Verdicchio and found that there was only 20% similarity between the two cultivars genetically, meaning that if they were related to one another, it would be very distantly.  Furthermore, Grechetto and Grecanico themselves had a similarity rating of 20% between them and both had a similarity rating of about 10% to Greco and Verdicchio, meaning that there isn't any really good reason to believe that these four grapes are closely related to one another at all.

So now that we know that Greco and Verdicchio aren't related to one another, we also know that if Maceratino is related to either of them, it can really only be related to one and not to both.  Maceratino isn't a very common grape and I wasn't sure if I could find a study with any genetic information on it, but, fortunately, I not only found one, but I found one that also tested Verdicchio as well (citation below).  This study was designed to test the discriminatory power of various microsatellite sites, which means basically that they were testing to see which areas of DNA differed the most across various grape varieties, so that those sites could be targeted in future studies.  The results indicated that Verdicchio and Maceratino matched exactly at three sites, matched for one allele at two other sites and didn't match at all on the sixth site.  This means that the two grapes are definitely distinct cultivars and are not a parent-offspring match, but there could be a more distant but still relatively close familial relationship between them.  The similarity of Maceratino to Verdicchio also means that it is very unlikely that Maceratino is related to Greco Bianco.

Geographically, this makes a lot of sense.  Verdicchio is thought to be native to the Marche region of Italy, where Maceratino is also found.  The name Maceratino doesn't have anything to with the word "maceration," but rather with the fact that the grape is thought to be from the town of Macerata in the Marche (though two of its other synonyms, Montecchiesse, meaning from Montecchio, and Matelicano, meaning from Matelica indicate that this bit of information isn't necessarily 100% controversy-free either).  Most Italian sources indicate that it has been grown in the Marche for hundreds of years, but plantings have been falling recently.   The reasons for its decline aren't 100% clear, as the vine yields generously and is relatively hardy in the vineyard while still producing quality wine.  This is usually the recipe for increased plantings, but some believe that Verdicchio's commercial success in international markets has led to many producers tearing up vines in order to plant more Verdicchio to meet consumer demand.  Most of the Maceratino that is still grown is found in the Colli Maceratesi DOC, where the white wines must be at least 85% Maceratino.

I was able to pick up a bottle of the 2009 Andrea Baccius La Murola Q Maceratino from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $10.  In the glass the wine was a pale silvery lemon color with greenish tints.  The nose was moderately intense with green apple, pear and lime citrus aromas.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity.  Right out of the bottle the wine was bright and zippy with pineapple, lime and green apple fruits.  As it opens up, the flavor palette gets a little broader with some white peach fruits and a bit of chalky minerality.  I much preferred it early in the evening when it was tart and refreshing, but I found that I liked it less and less as the night wore on.  It does represent a very nice value at only $10 and is versatile enough to complement a wide variety of foods.  I would definitely recommend giving it a shot if you run across it, as it seems to be getting harder and harder to find.

CITATION

Filippetti, I., Silvestroni, O., Thomas, M.R., and Intrieri, C.  2001.  Genetic characterisation of Italian wine grape cultivars by microsatellite analysis.  Acta Horta. 546.  pp. 395-399.

Greco di Tufo - Campania, Italy

There are a lot of grapes that go by some variation of the word "Greco" in Italy.  Searching for "Greco" in the VIVC database returns 61 results, most of which have Greco as a common synonym and not as the prime name (as in the case of our old friends Grechetto, Biancame, Pignoletto and our future friend Maceratino).  For the most part, when people refer to a grape as "Greco," they are referring to what is technically known as "Greco Bianco di Tufo," though there is also a Greco Nero and a Greco Bianco di Novara which I believe are related to Greco di Tufo, but I can't really find anything definitive to that effect.  Somewhat surprisingly, Greco Nero is actually much more widely planted than the Greco Bianco varieties, covering more than 3,000 hectares to Greco Bianco's 1,000, despite the fact that I don't believe that I've ever seen a wine made from (or even explicitly containing) Greco Nero grapes.

Most people believe that the name Greco is used for these grapes because they ultimately can trace their ancestry back to Greece.  The story goes that Greco (or its immediate ancestor) was brought to southern Italy via Greece about 2500 years ago.  Some people believe that Greco could have been the wine used as the base of the famous "Falernian" wine, which was perhaps the most famous wine of the ancient world, but as mentioned in my post on Falanghina, pretty much every grape grown in southern Italy is purported by someone to have been the primary grape used in that mythical wine.  It is notoriously difficult to match ancient descriptions of wines with modern grapes for a lot of really obvious reasons, and it's my suspicion that most of these comparisons are made either by wishful-thinking modern drinkers who are caught up in the grandeur of ancient Rome, or by marketers looking to cash in on those same starry-eyed drinkers (see also my post on Abbuoto for a discussion of the same issue regarding the ancient Roman wine of Cecubo).

But is the grape really called Greco because it is ultimately from Greece?  Yes, "Greco" means Greek in Italian, but it doesn't necessarily follow that it's named that because the grape itself is of Greek origin.  In a paper from 2009 in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture (full citation below), the authors indicate that in the Middle Ages, the word greco was used as an adjective to describe wines that were high in alcohol, sweet, and particularly long-lived.  This description could have been applied because the style of the wine was Greek, not because the grape itself was Greek.  It's easy to how, over time, the grape used primarily in the production of a wine called Greco might itself eventually come to be called Greco too.  Over still more time, people may have forgotten the original source for the name and invented the very plausible sounding Greek-origin story to account for it.  I don't know if that explanation is true or not, but it makes at least as much sense to me as the Greek origin story, and as far as I know, there is no vine in Greece today that resembles Greco di Tufo, or that has been proven to be genetically related to it.

Greco di Tufo has been shown to be genetically identical to at least one other prominent(ish) southern Italian grape, though.  The researchers in this study proved that Greco di Tufo was the very same grape as Asprinio, a grape that is cultivated mostly around the town of Aversa in Campania.  Rather than being grown in rows on man-made trellises, as most grapes are, Asprinio vines are trained up local popular trees and then across wires that are tied between each tree (you can see a picture and read a bit more about the process here).  The vines can be quite high, and harvest often requires the use of a ladder for the picker.  The wines are often made in a slightly spritzy style, though there are also still versions.  I've only ever come across one bottle of Asprinio di Aversa, but it was sealed with a synthetic cork and had completely oxidized in the bottle (it was five years old and so probably past its prime anyway, but the cork failure rapidly accelerated this process and made the wine completely undrinkable).  Asprinio and Greco Bianco are still listed as separate varieties by the Italian authorities (as in the case of Pigato, Favorita and Vermentino), but the DNA evidence pretty clearly indicates that they're the same thing.

I was able to find a Greco di Tufo wine, though, that was in much better shape.  There are a handful of Greco-based wines available in the Boston area, and I suspect that it's one of the more accessible grapes that we've covered here.  The wine I elected to try was the 2009 Terredora di Paolo Greco di Tufo which I picked up from my friends at Curtis Liquors for around $20.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep lemon gold color.  The nose was reserved with some white pear and apple, but very little else. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acid.  It was very lemony with some flavors of pineapple and green apple as well, but with a bitter, pithy finish to it.  The wine was tart, racy and lithe and was really a lot of fun to drink until the finish rolled around.  This wine is a bit pricey for what you get, and there are a handful of other examples that retail for a few dollars less than this one, so if you're looking for a light, zippy, lemony white for summertime and come across one of those, give it a shot.

CITATIONS

Muganu, M., Dangl, G., Aradhya, M., Frediani, M., Scossa, A., & Stover, E.  2009.  Ampelographic and DNA characterization of local grapevine accessions of the Tuscia area (Latium, Italy).  American Journal of Enology and Viticulture.  60(1): 110-115.