Sciacarello (Mammolo) - Ajaccio, Corsica, France

One of my favorite kinds of Fringe Wines are those made from grapes that are somewhat common in certain blended wines, but which are rarely found playing the star role.  As I mentioned in my post on Susumaniello, blending grapes usually get their reputation by having one or two very nice qualities, but by also being somewhat deficient in several other areas.  A grape may have a nice aroma and good color, but may be low in acid or excessively high in tannins so if you can find another grape with good acid and a soft body but which lacks perfume and is lightly colored, the two of them together can create a well-balanced wine.  Though I generally focus on varietal wines for this blog, that's mostly a decision made on the nature of the content that I write about and not a personal preference.  I enjoy varietal wines, but some of my favorite wines in the world are blends, and I try to represent that section of the wine world, when I can, in my erratic Weird Blend Wednesday feature.  Since the focus of this site has really shifted more to individual grape varieties, though, it stands to reason that the majority of my posts deal with varietal wines.

All of which kind of takes me away from what I really wanted to talk about today, which was varietal wines made from traditional blending grapes.  Sometimes blending grapes really are useful only for the handful of attributes that they can contribute to a blend, but sometimes they just need a little change of scenery in order to show their true colors.  Carmenere, for instance, was a very minor component in Bordeaux blends for many years, but when the grape was exported to Chile and growers figured out how to work with it there, it became a star grape in its new home.  Malbec has a similar story, though it was a star player in a little area called Cahors before hitting it big in Argentina.  Even Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, the two king red grapes of the New World, were originally blending components of the great wines of Bordeaux, though they certainly played a more prominent role in those wines than Carmenere or Malbec ever did.

Which brings us to today's grape, which is one that a lot of people may have had at some point or another, but very few have had in a starring role.  It is known in Tuscany as Mammolo and it was once a crucial part of the Chianti blend.  It has been known in Tuscany since the early 17th Century under a variety of names, all of which relate in some form or another to the many different morphological characteristics of the many clones that are out there.  There's Mammolo Piccolo, Mammolo Grosso, Mammolo Asciuto and Mammolo Tonda, among many others.  The Mammolo part of the name is thought to come from the Italian name for violets, Viola mammola, because of the perfumed quality that the grapes can impart to a finished wine.  It was once widely planted throughout Tuscany, but its numbers have been on the decline and as of the 2000 agricultural census, there were less than 150 hectares (360 acres) under vine in all of Italy.

Off the western coast of Italy is the island of Corsica which technically belongs to France, but which is closer geographically and culturally to Italy.  We paid a brief visit to Corsica a few months back to take a look at a blended wine made mostly from a grape they call Nieullccio, but which happens to be none other than Sangiovese.  That particular wine also had a dollop of something called Sciacarello in it, which recent DNA testing (citation 1) has shown to be none other than the Mammolo of Tuscany (there is another Corsican grape called Malvasia Montanaccio which is also identical to Sciacarello and Mammolo, but that name is far less common than the others).  Like Sangiovese, it is thought that Sciacarello was brought to Corsica from the Italian mainland, and the fact that it has parent-offspring relationships with several other Tuscan grapes (none of which are widely known today) seems to back this theory up.  The name Sciacarello means "crunchy," but I'm not really sure how that adjective fits in with the grape itself.  Sciacarello is currently grown on just under 800 hectares of land (just under 2,000 acres) throughout the island of Corsica, though much of it, including both wines I'll be taking a look at today, is around the area of Ajaccio on the western part of the island.

I was able to find two Corsican wines from the same producer, but in two very different styles.  The first was the 2011 rosé from the Domaine Comte Abbatucci, which is 100% Sciacarellu (the local spelling of the grape's name), and which I picked up for around $30 from my friends at the Wine Bottega.  In the glass the wine was a very pale salmon-pink color.  The nose was fairly intense and very leesy with aromas of cheese and strawberry and little else.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  The pronounced leesy, cheesy character followed through on the palate and was joined by some tart strawberry and cherry fruits with a bit of a stony mineral finish.  The fruits were strangled at room temperature, but as the wine approached cellar temp, they began to open up a little bit and the strong aroma and flavor of cheese began to fade into the background.  It's a well structured, but somewhat austere wine that I had a hard time falling in love with.  At $30 a bottle, it's probably not something I'll be reaching for on a regular basis.

The other wine that I was able to try was the 2010 Domaine Comte Abbatucci red wine, which is 70% Sciacarellu and 30% Nieulluccio, and which I picked up for around $37 from Marty's in Newton.  In the glass the wine was a fairly light purple ruby color.  The nose was moderately intense with aromas of wild, brambly red fruit like red cherry and raspberry along with some dried leaves, underbrush and leather.  I thought I may have picked up a hint of violet, but it could have been my imagination running away with me.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of red cherry, raspberry, sour plum, dusty leather, cigar tobacco and damp tea leaves.  The wine reminded me more of Pinot Noir than Chianti and while I found it enjoyable enough, I thought that the nearly $40 price tag was a bit too steep for what you get here.  If this wine's price were slashed in half, then I think you might be a bit closer, but it's always very difficult to assign an exact price to a wine's experience.  If money is no object, then this is a very lovely bottle from a grape that is becoming increasingly harder to find in a starring role.

CITATION

Di Vecchi Staraz, M, et al.  2007.  Genetic structuring and parentage analysis for evolutionary studies in grapevine: kingroup and origin of cv. Sangiovese revealed.  Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science, 132(4), pp. 514-24.

Weird Blend Wednesday - Nielluccio, Sciacarello, Syrah and Grenache - Corse Calvi, Corsica, France

Nielluccio Grapes

Hello and welcome to the third installment of the Weird Blend Wednesday series!  Things have been a little tame around here lately as many of the grapes and wines that I've written about have been pretty straightforward, lacking any real mystery or controversy.  I hope to shake things up a little bit today and talk about one uncontroversial grape, Sciacarello, and one that's a little more interesting, Nielluccio.

For many years, there was controversy and disagreement surrounding the Nielluccio grape, with the main point of contention centered around questions concerning its origins.  One camp held that the grape was indigenous to the island of Corsica, while the other held that the grape was imported there from the Italian mainland during the time that it was under the control of the Genoese.  Oz Clarke is purportedly a proponent of the former position (in his Grapes and Wines which was published several years back, so his position may have changed) while Jancis Robinson is a proponent of the latter, having recently switched over from the indigenous camp.  In the beginning, both camps were arguing under the assumption that Nielluccio was a distinct grape variety that could not be found anywhere else.  Later on, it was determined that Nielluccio was ampelographically identical to the Sangiovese grape, and many began to speculate that the grapes were either very closely related or, possibly, even identical (or clonally variant at least).  To read the Wikipedia entry on Nielluccio, one would think that the debate is still raging and the answer is still to be determined.  It is not.

A research group from Bologna, Italy, published a study in 2005 which compared the DNA of 39 registered Sangiovese clones as well as 34 "biotypes" of Sangiovese to the acknowledged "reference standard" of Sangiovese to see if there were any differences.  The 39 clones all came back as identical both to one another and to the reference standard, while of the 34 biotypes, all but six were identical as well.  Nielluccio was not one of the six, meaning that it is genetically identical to Sangiovese.  Of the preceding argumentative positions regarding Niellucio, this finding really only completely discredits the one that holds that Nielluccio is indigenous to Corsica, since we know Sangiovese is not ultimately a Corsican grape.  The theory that the Genoans brought it over at some point during their rule of the island is still a possibility, though, and is currently the most widely accepted explanation of Nielluccio's presence on Corsica, where, as of the year 2000, it was planted on about 1600 hectares of land, representing about 14% of the total plantings within Corsica.

Sciacarello Grapes

Sciacarello is a bit more straightforward.  It is thought to be the same grape as the Mammolo that is grown in Tuscany and used as a minor player in both the Chianti and the Vino Nobile di Montepulciano blends.  The Italian name Mammolo comes from the grape's purported aromatic similarity to violets, called mammole in Italian.  It is generally regarded as the more interesting red Corsican specialty grape, but is only planted on a few hundred hectares of land throughout Corsica.  There are a handful of varietal examples, but I haven't been able to find any to date.

I was unsure whether I would write about this wine or not since it is mostly comprised of relatively common grapes, but the fact that the wine was from Corsica was what finally swayed me.  Corsican wine isn't incredibly rare, but it isn't exactly common either.  Corsica itself is the fourth largest island in the Mediterranean, which, while it belongs politically to the French, is much closer to Italy both geographically and culturally.  It is less than 7 miles north of Sardinia and 56 miles west of Tuscany, but is about 105 miles away from the Provençal coast of France.  It was controlled by the Republic of Genoa for over 500 years, from the mid-13th Century until well into the 18th Century.  The Genoans enacted strict rules on viticulture and viniculture and would not allow the Corsicans to ship their wine to any port outside of Genoa.  The Corsicans struggled for their independence, and in 1755 proclaimed themselves sovereign as The Corsican Republic with the publication of the Corsican Constitution.  The Genoans didn't really want to deal with this kind of trouble so in 1764 they secretly sold the island to France.  The French slowly began to build up their presence on the island until 1768 when the Genoans openly announced that they were ceding the island to the French in perpetuity with no possibility of retraction.  The Corsicans revolted at the news but were ultimately defeated and the island was officially annexed onto France in 1770.  Napoleon was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, in August of 1769, and one wonders how much differently history may have played out if Napoleon's home had not been transferred to France when it was.

The wine history of Corsica goes back thousands of years.  It is thought that there may have been some indigenous vines on Corsica, but when the Phoenicians settled the island, they certainly brought many of their own vines from their other territories.  Corsica came under Islamic rule around the 7th and 8th Centuries AD, and since the Islamic religion forbids the consumption of alcohol, the winemaking industry on the island suffered badly.  It rebounded significantly under Genoan rule, becoming famous throughout the European world, but was still limited by the Genoans strict control over the entire industry.  The Genoans definitely had the largest impact on the wine culture of the island, as can be seen in the wealth of Italian grapes that are still cultivated all over Corsica today.  The government sought to expand the Corsican economy in the 19th Century by focusing on winemaking, but the plan was derailed severely with the onset of Phylloxera.  When vines were finally replanted, many of them were planted to productive but bland French grapes like Carignan and Cinsaut and Corsica became a significant contributor to the European wine lake.  The EU vine-pull subsidies of the 1980's were very successful in Corsica, eliminating about 7000 hectares of low-quality vines and putting the focus more on higher quality grapes like Nielluccio, Sciacarello, Vermentino and some of the international varieties.

The wine that I picked up was from the Calvi sub-region of the island, located in the extreme northwest corner near the town of Calvi (just north of Ajaccio, where Napoleon's family made wine).  The soils here are predominantly schist with some granite.  The island is generally warm and sunny with regular rainfall, but very little rain during August and September, which usually creates ideal conditions for harvest.  The AOC rules stipulate that to qualify for the Corse Calvi designation, the finished wine must be made up of at least 50% Nielluccio, Sciacarello and/or Grenache together, while Barbarossa, Carignan, Cinsaut, Mourvedre, Syrah and Vermentino combined cannot account for more than 50% of the total blend with the further restriction that Vermentino and Carignan cannot make up more than 20% of the blend.

I picked up a bottle of the 2007 Domaine Maestracci "E Prove" Corse Calvi wine from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet for about $17.  The wine manager there told me the wine was about 1/3 Nielluccio, 1/3 Grenache, 1/6 Syrah and 1/6 Sciacarello.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep purple-ruby color.  The nose was moderately aromatic with dusky black cherry and black plum fruits with some wet leather and cocoa powder.  It was a very nice and appealing mixture of fruit and earth.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acid and some fairly serious tannins.  There were flavors of bright red and black cherry fruit with some blackberry, smoke, leather and tobacco.  Right after opening the fruits are predominantly red, but as the wine opens up they shift over to a darker, more brooding kind of character.  The whole way through, though, the wine is marked by an excellent balance between its vibrant fruit and duskier earthy flavors all held together with a solid vein of acidity and tannic skeleton.  The wine is enjoyable enough to drink on its own but it really does need food to truly show its stuff.  Any red meat would be fine, while the acid means that it could stand up to fattier meats or sauces as well as tomato-based sauces.  The wine is versatile enough where you really don't have to over-think the pairing and at only $17, you can buy a few bottles to have on hand anytime.