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| Villa di Corlo “Rolfshark” Lambrusco di Sorbara rosato 2025 Salvetta Nosiola Vigneti Delle Dolomiti 2020 Bergmannhof Vernatsch Alto Adige 2024 Fedrizzi Cipriano “Teroldigo” Teroldego Rotaliano 2022 Lano “Lanöt” Langhe 2021 |
| Please join us this week for a quite varied tasting of northern Italian wines, presented by their importer, Adam Ohler, of Transparent Wine Company. We work quite a lot with Transparent, so we thought it’d be good for you to put a face to a name. Once you move beyond the impersonal work of wine in the age of mechanical reproduction, the wine business turns out to be an intensely personal one: each vintage is unique, wine growers, both Gen X and old farts like me, are irrepressible, compulsive tinkerers, and shipments deplete and are (sometimes) replenished. A son or daughter takes the reins from their retiring or dead parent, and the wines are worse for it, or, sometimes, better. You always want the importers you work with to have your back, and with Adam, I always feel that he does. His sort is the human equivalent of fresh mint—when he enters the room, you feel enlivened, and the burdens of life weigh less heavily upon your soul, if only for the few minutes he graces you with his presence. Of course, this doesn’t mean he’s a lusterless, namby-pamby pushover; he’s as bitchy and selective as I am about wine—but that’s a good thing, as you really don’t want to collaborate with folks who insistently try to peddle dull dreck.
The Transparent portfolio includes wines from France, Italy, Spain, and beyond, so to retain a focus, we had to decide what to concentrate on this week. Somewhat arbitrarily, we chose northern Italy as our focus. We’re starting with a wine that’s been on our shelves ever since Adam introduced us to it, and I’m embarrassed to say, I’ve likely consumed a case or two of it over the years: a dry, light, fresh Lambrusco rosato (zero sugar) that makes me happy whenever I open a bottle. I make sourdough pizza nearly every Sunday night at our house, and this is a wine that nearly leaps into my hands when I’m contemplating what to drink that evening. Next, a dry white wine from the Dolomite mountains, made from the sadly marginal grape nosiola, much of which is made into (delicious, impossible to sell here) sweet wine, but here is a rare, dry manifestation of it. Then, two wines from the Janus-face of the Dolomites: the first, made from the local vernatsch variety, light, lyrical, infused, low-tannin, modest alcohol; the second, darker, earthy, brooding, more demonic, is made from teroldego. To finish, a Piemontese wine made in part from the hyper-local and hyper-rustic freisa variety. |