Odds and Ends - Turina Wines Edition (Marzemino, Friulano, Schioppetino and sparkling Groppello/Marzemino)

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Odds and Ends, where I write about interesting wines that I've tried lately which I don't think merit a full post on their own.  All of the wines I'll be writing about today are made from grapes that I've already written extensively about in the past and those relevant links will be included in each write-up.  Additionally, all of the wines I'll be looking at today are imported by my good friend Paul Turina, whose new and improved company website can be perused here.  I profiled Paul and his company about a year ago (read here) and have since tried a handful of wines from various producers that he imports.  All of the wines I'll be writing about below were provided to me as samples by Paul, but all opinions expressed are entirely my own and I have received no compensation for any of the reviews below other than the wines themselves.

About a month after I first met Paul, I was introducing him to some people in the Boston area to try and get his wines distributed here (he is still looking for a Massachusetts distributor, so if anyone is interested, please email him).  One of the wines he poured at a meeting that I accompanied him to was this sparkling pink wine made by some distant relatives of his around Lake Garda in Italy.  I wasn't able to get a note written on the wine (unlike the sparkling Turbiana he also brought which I wrote about here), but I remember enjoying it quite a bit.  I asked him a few weeks ago if he still had any around and he said he had a few bottles from a recent shipment.  He handed the bottle off to me the next time he was in town and I promptly popped the cork on it.  It's a non-vintage, tank-fermented sparkling wine that is made from about 50% Groppello and 50% Marzemino and retail on the bottle (from Paul's website) is about $17.   In the glass the wine was a medium salmon pink color with fine steady bubbles.  The nose was fairly intense with aromas of fresh cut strawberry, red cherry, watermelon and pink bubblegum.  On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with fairly high acidity.  It was dry and tasted like cut watermelon and strawberries with a touch of red cherry.  It finished with a clean, almost quinine-like bitterness.  It's a fun wine, but it's well structured enough to be serious as well.  I drank it around Valentine's Day and it's the perfect wine for that occasion.

His distant Italian relatives not only make wines from Groppello and Turbiana, but also from the Marzemino grape, which I wrote about around a year and a half ago.  Paul recently let me try his family's 2009 Marzemino from the Brescia region of Lombardy on the western shore of Lake Garda.  In the glass the wine was a medium purple ruby color.  The nose was moderately intense with aromas of sour cherry, blackberry, cocoa powder and leather.  On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with high acid and fairly soft tannins.  There were flavors of tart cherry, blackberry, old dusty leather, black plum and cocoa powder.  It was a little lean, but it made up for it with a nice, bright, racy streak of acidity.  As I said in my previous post, Marzemino seems like a grape tailor-made for tomato sauces and pizza.  I had this wine with a big plate of spaghetti and it was a near perfect match.  While I'm not as fond of Marzemino in general as Don Giovanni was, I do like it in the right circumstances and this is a very well made example.

Paul imports wine from a number of different regions in Italy and from a number of different producers.  I've taken a look at some of his producers making wines from Vespaiola, Grechetto and Sagrantino in the past, but today I'd like to take a look at a couple of wines from a producer he works with in Friuli called Petrussa.  Petrussa is located in the Colli Orientali del Friuli region of northeastern Italy and they deal with many of the grapes that are common to that region.  One of them is Friulano, which we took a look at about a year ago.  This particular bottling is from the 2009 vintage.  In the glass the wine was a medium lemon gold color.  The nose was fairly reserved with aromas of white pear, lilac and eucalyptus.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly low acidity and a kind of oily mouthfeel.  There were flavors of eucalyptus, pear and lime with a kind of stewed vegetable quality that I find in many of the wines made from the Friulano grape.  This is a well-made wine, but it's a grape that I just can't fall in love with.

The next wine from Petrussa that I tried was made from the Schioppettino grape, which I did like quite a bit when I was able to try it before.  This particular wine was from the 2008 vintage and in the glass it was a medium purple ruby color.  The nose was moderately intense with aromas of black cherry, plum, fresh turned earth, damp leaves and leather.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with high acidity and soft tannins.  There were flavors of tart cherry, blackberry, old leather and wet leaves.  Right after the cork was pulled, the wine was searingly, almost abrasively sour but it does round out a bit as it settles into the glass.  It's bright and zippy the whole time, though, so fans of high-acid red wines probably need not apply here.  The bright, tart fruits are really well balanced by the damp earthy flavors and the wine reminds me a bit of an electrified Pinot Noir.  It needs food and it needs high acid food so anything with tomato sauce would go quite nicely here.

Marzemino - Garda, Lombardy, Italy

Let's go ahead and get this out of the way: yes, Marzemino was mentioned in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni.  Just before being sent to Hell, Don Giovanni says, "Versa il vino! Eccellente Marzemino!"  Which means something like, "Pour the wine!  Excellent Marzemino!"  Every single source that has anything to say about the grape relates that little vignette (including the blurb on the back of today's bottle), so in that grand tradition, there you go.  You have to wonder about a wine who's major claim to fame is a throwaway line in a 300 year old opera.  Marzemino is certainly not held in that kind of esteem these days, as the most enthusiasm that The Oxford Companion to Wine can muster is to call the grape "interesting," while Nicolas Belfrage (in his Barolo to Valpolicella), in a colossal feat of back-handed complimenting, says "there is no producer today, as far as I am aware, whose wine may be described as 'eccellente,' but then even a hamburger might be delicious if your next stop is Hell."  I happen to think that hamburgers are delicious in all sorts of circumstances, so I was very curious to check out Marzemino for myself.

Marzemino is a fairly old grape, known in northeastern Italy since at least the 16th Century.  It is thought to be native to this area, but solid evidence was lacking until recently (there's an alternate theory that it may originally be from around the Marzemin village in Austria, but I can't find any corroboration for that).  DNA testing has shown that Marzemino has a parent-offspring relationship with both Teroldego and Refosco dal Pedunculo Rosso, both of which are indigenous to northeastern Italy.  It is also a full sibling of Lagrein, meaning that both grapes share the same set of parents.  In my Refosco post, I was confused about the exact nature of the Marzemino-Refosco relationship, but a family tree on this page was most helpful in sorting that out.  What's going on is that Teroldego and an unidentified grape are the parents of both Marzemino and Lagrein, while Marzemino and another unidentified grape are the parents of Refosco.

Marzemino can be a high yielding vine, which may explain why it is still around despite its many problems in the vineyard.  It ripens late, which can be an issue in the some of the cooler areas of northeastern Italy (and which may explain the high occurrence of grassy and herbaceous notes that litter many descriptions of wines made from the grape).  It is also highly susceptible to a large number of fungal diseases which can make it a challenge to grow in wetter regions.  Yield control and proper planting are needed to produce quality wines from the grape since, as mentioned above, it can yield very large crops and suffers badly if planted at very high densities.  All of this adds up to a very high maintenance vine for quality production.

As Mozart's mention of the grape indicates, there was a time when Marzemino was rather in fashion.  It was a big deal in Austria for awhile, and still enjoys a certain popularity there to this day, but on the whole, Marzemino's star has fallen in more recent centuries and the grape has become more of a local phenomenon than an international player.  These days, most Marzemino is grown in the Trentino region of Italy, though there are also plantings in Lombardia, Friulia and the Veneto.  There may well be plantings in other countries, but you'd be hard pressed to find a varietal Marzemino outside of northern Italy.

I was able to pick up a bottle of the 2009 Costaripa "Mazane"  Marzemino for about $20 from my friends at Curtis Liquors.  The wine is from the Garda DOC (named for Lake Garda) which straddles both the Veneto and Lombardia, but this estate is located in Brescia, which I believe is on the Lombardy side of the border.  All the grapes for this wine come from a single vineyard on the hillsides bordering Lake Garda.  The yields are kept low and the wine sees very little oak with most of it fermented and matured in stainless steel.  In the glass, the wine had a medium ruby color.  The nose was medium intensity with red cherry, strawberry and stewed raspberry fruit aromas.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity and medium tannins.  There were flavors of sour cherry and wild strawberry fruit with a touch of leather and a little funk on the finish.  If someone asked you to describe a typical Italian food wine, you'd probably come up with something that very closely resembled this. The fruit flavors here are straightforward without being Kool-Aid simple and there's just enough tannic grip and acidic bite to complement a wide variety of foods, but especially tomato sauce based foods.  You can drink this on its own, but you'll get so much more out of it with something on your plate.  It's definitely not the kind of bottle that I'd reach for before being sent to my ultimate demise, but it's nice and is especially worth checking out for Chianti fans.