 |
| Stein “Ewald” Elbling Mosel/Italy 2021 ($34/btl) Štoka Vitovska Grganja Kras/Slovenia 2020 ($24/blt) Sequerciani Foglia Tonda Toscana/Italy 2020 ($47/btl) Tomei Abbuoto Lazio/Italy 2022 ($40/btl) Boissières “Lias” Marcillac/France 2020 ($42/btl) |
| One autumn afternoon when I was a teenager, my foster mother, Goldie Schwartz, pressed an odd (to my naïve eyes) looking apple into my hand and asked, “have you ever tried a Haralson (https://theappletreeguy.com/product/haralson-apple-trees/) ?” Prior to that afternoon supermarket-purchased, uniformly colored, and predictable red and yellow Delicious apples had been my only exposure, and so I scrutinized the strangely striated, unevenly colored skin of the farmers market Haralson with skepticism. But when I bit into the apple the scales fell from my eyes and I exclaimed, “now that’s an apple!”
The Haralson apple, introduced by the University of Minnesota in the twenties, deserves to be better known but as far as I can ascertain it remains a lesser-known, regional specialty, and that is a shame as it is an exciting piece of fruit. In a world awash with the commodity satisfactions of the Delicious apple you might dismissively think you know apples until someone like Goldie turns you on and you too exclaim, “now that’s an apple!” You may not be a Haralson person, but how can you know until you have tried one? The act of offering someone a wine that you know, just know in your heart, that they will enjoy is ideally what happens at the shop throughout the day. It could be the simplest bottle of cold, modestly priced Muscadet that leaves a customer exclaiming over a plate of fried calamari, “now that’s a wine!” This act is not based on a machine-learning algorithm (though cognitive scientists would surely object to this assertion) and, at least for a small, brick-and-mortar merchant, not amenable to market research, but in conjecturing or conjuring from a few verbal and non-verbal cues it might be possible to deduct what someone might end up digging. In a way, it is what all good drug dealers do, “hey, this is the good shit!” It is a way of connecting with folks, in part because drinking wine is not altogether a solipsistic act. This week’s tasting focuses on lesser-known grape varieties that might, if you give them a chance, speak to you like that Haralson apple did to me many years ago. Some of the varieties we are tasting are recently recovered, e.g., Tuscany’s fascinating and historic foglia tonda grape; others are exceptionally marginal and cultivated on just a handful of hectares, e.g., Lazio’s abbuoto. Others are not so marginal, but nevertheless find a regional specificity through which terroir speaks through in unique ways, e.g., the mansois we are tasting this week. Now mansois is a grape with many names and is grown throughout the southwest of France, but it is only in the Marcillac region—where it has been cultivated for centuries and in practice is the only red grape variety employed—that it finds its voice. Part of the reason for this may be the iron-rich red clay soils that dominate the region. My belief is that these soils impart a sort of rustic, sanguinous quality to the wines that you do not find from grapes cultivated on different soils: I do not know if this is a well-founded belief, but I am going to stick with it. |