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Lite Brite |
| My annual conversation regarding my allocation of Pranzegg’s “Vino Rosso Leggero” with its West coast importer, Jeff Morgenthal is always accompanied by a bit of magical thinking. It is a red wine given a brief maceration of under two days, which is shorter than some rosé wines with which I work: the resulting red wine is one of infusion rather than extraction. As the name implies, it is a light wine meant for near-term enjoyment; not the sort of bottle you squirrel away in your cellar or crawlspace to sleep for a tomorrow that may never arrive. In general, I think that any light-bodied red wine that’s low in alcohol (this one is only 11% ABV) and not too tannic is a good candidate for serving chilled. This wine meets all of these criteria and then some. This vino rosso leggero is pretty much all I want to drink during the dog days of a Los Angeles summer. Not that you give a shit about what I want to drink in August when the heat presses upon you like an anvil and you’re irritated, nay enraged not only by the ordinary and important things that make you so, but the smallest of things, too. I find that this wine is an anodyne to all that.
I try to obtain as many cases of it as I can manage in hopes that I can stock sufficient quantities to last until Thanksgiving, as it is not only the sort of fresh, soif-y wine so satisfying to drink when it is warm out but also a natural fit with a more vernal spectrum of flavors. It is a vain hope, as we always sell out of it by the end of September. I caution my customers who become enamored of with it to take some additional bottles, as it is of limited production (around 4,000 bottles – I get around 15 percent of the production), yet six months after the last bottles of it have left my shelves, I still have customers inquire about it several times a week. It is a wine from the northeast of Italy, the German-speaking region of the Südtirol, not far from the Austrian border. It is truly one of the most picturesque parts of Italy, with tiny storybook towns nestled in steep-sloped valleys between verdant hills and mountains. You feel like Julie Andrews, and that the Von Trapp children might appear at any moment. The winemaker, Martin Gojer, is the third generation of his family to farm grapes. The vineyards are on steep slopes, and you can see the town of Bolzano down below. Before Martin, the Gojer farm was the typical polycultural farm of the region. Grapes, fruit, and vegetables were grown for market, and his grandfather and father sold the grapes off to the local co-op as a cash crop. With the death of his father, Martin was abruptly thrust into managing the family farm, and under the influence of regional natural wine legend Josko Gravner, he eventually decided to transition the farm to organic farming and winemaking. Martin works with the traditional grapes of his region, which for red wines are Schiava and Lagrein (he also farms a bit of Merlot, but even Merlot has had a presence there for two hundred years). Although received wisdom would have it that Schiava is a prosaic grape variety, capable of producing prodigious quantities of over-cropped fruit (the name means “slave”) that make insipid wines. I beg to differ. Schiava is a grape that was just made for these times. You cannot make a big, chunky, fruit-bomb wine out of Schiava, as even in warm vintages with very grapes, it just does not go there. What you can make is iridescent, tart cherry pit, tense, mineral wines, full of mouthwatering acidity and tension—at least you can, if you are Martin Gojer. He changed the blend this year, eschewing Merlot for more Lagrein. Fermentation and aging in concrete and large old barrels. The result is as light and gluggy as ever, but the Lagrein this year gives a little bit of grip and a lovely amaro-like bitterness on the finish. |
