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| Angelo Negro Vino Rosso (brachetto) 2023 Reverdito Pelaverga Verduno 2023 Dogha “Il Grignolino” Grignolino d’Asti 2023 Lano “Lanöt” Langhe 2021 Castello di Castellengo “Rosso della Motta” Vino Rosso (nebbiolo) 2021 Boniperti “Bartön” Fara 2014 |
| One of the experiences of spending time in Italy is observing the fine-grained specificity of differing sensibilities. You only need to travel a few kilometers and stop for lunch to be met with a blank stare of incomprehension from your server when you ask for a dish of the pici with porcini that you gorged on the previous night in Sienna. The cultural traces of the Risorgimento are everywhere you look, and to make matters worse (or better), the granularity is sometimes from commune to commune, or even within a commune. This narcissism of small differences seems to stand against Fordist modernity with our Lego-like preferences and the commodification of everyday life.
Tonight’s tasting focuses on red wines from Piemonte, but not the usual suspects, dolcetto, barbera, and nebbiolo (ok, I’m lying—there are a couple of nebbiolo-based wines tonight, but they’re far from the tannin bombs you expect from a traditional Barolo). At the center of today’s Piemonte is nebbiolo, which these days gets all the glory, with dolcetto (which the Piemontese historically prized over nebbiolo) and barbera relegated to steerage—useful wines, but nothing a cultivated wine drinker need worry his or her pretty little head over. We’ve hosted tastings of Piemonte core and periphery in the past, and now with some new drops in the shop, it’s time for one again. This week I attended a seminar on commune-level Barolo hosted by the Wine Education Council, and it was startling to re-learn just how recently nebbiolo was considered a workhorse grape, over-cropped and capable of producing a lot of rustic wine of which the best you might say is that there’s a lot of it. And yet if you obsess over Barolo while ignoring wines at the periphery, you will not only foreclose your exposure to wines that you might dig, and you’ll miss out on something essential to understanding the wines of the region, miss out on the lore and sensibilities that got us where we are today. We’re starting with a pale, vivacious light brachetto (or dark rosé, depending on your predilection), a wine that today mostly exists as frivolous, fizzy, off-dry red wine, but here it is bone-dry, and with zero bubbles. We’re also tasting a delightful pelaverga, a wine with reputed aphrodisiacal properties, today cultivated only by a handful of vignaioli in the commune of Verduno, but also a wine made from one of the rustic, untamed genetic parents of nebbiolo, freisa. In addition, we have another rustic grape, grignolino, which can be quite tannic at times, but the one we’re pouring is supple and perfumed, and finally two nebbiolo-based wines, one alloyed with freisa, the other unalloyed. |