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| Carpinetti “Kius” Brut Vino Frizzante Lazio 2022 Calabretta Rosato Terre Siciliane 2024 Picariello “BruEmm” Falanghina Campania 2023 Picariello Fiano Irpinia 2024 Andrea Occhipinti “Alea Rosso” Lazio 2023 |
| One of the abiding, structuring categories in wine is the north-south divide. In the north of France, you find Champagne and Burgundy, historically vaunted locations, valorized for producing complex, serious wines that can take on profound, tertiary characteristics after snoozing in your cellar or wine fridge for years, a sort of alchemical process that transmutes lead into gold. The cooler temperatures of the north result in more acid-driven, more structured, more refined, more “serious” wines. Sure, the received wisdom goes, the south of France produces good stuff, too, but these are mostly “useful,” value wines (Hermitage and Châteauneuf de Pape are edge cases) that are meant only to drink young, rarely offering the complexity of the more serious stuff from the north. In the north of Italy, Piemonte is the location producing some of the most profound wines in all of Italy, with the sangiovese-based wines of Montalcino trailing not far behind. The south is where to find value wines, such as inexpensive, red-checked tablecloth nero d’avola from Sicily, or gaglioppo-based reds from Calabria—not much to see here, the received wisdom would have it, move on. In Spain, too, you see a similar divide, with Rioja in the north taking pride of place over the useful wines of Valencia in the south (sea-inflected Jerez is the exception). You may find the same dichotomy repeated in Austria, too, where Burgenland, south of Vienna, is the territory for useful wines, never capable of reaching the heights of grüner veltliner in the north. There’s a lot more to this north-south divide, a lot to unpack, not the least of which is the condescending attitude that northerners proffer to their fellow citizens in the south—the term, “terroni,” for example, means dirt in Italian, is the derogatory word that northern Italians once used to help them feel superior to the farmers in the south. This dichotomy is one that we soundly reject in the shop. We dig Champagne and Barolo, to be sure, but also the shockingly nervy whites of Roussillon and Campania, and the vibrant, structured reds of Mt. Etna, which, in some vintages, are as capable of alchemical, cellar transmutation as the wines of the north. You can spend your entire life forging your own chains (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3egTE9_Hwk) , safely coloring inside the lines of your coloring book, or you can create your own coloring book from a blank page. Tonight, we’re tasting five Italian wines from areas with an extraordinarily long tradition of making wine, but lack the imprimatur of the received wisdom. We’re pouring two wines from Lazio, which is mid-Italy, neither north nor south, but of course a territory of winemaking that dates to antiquity. Rome is located in Lazio, but until recently, you would be hard pressed to find Lazio wine in the city, other than the ubiquitous and not terribly exciting Frascati. Meanwhile, a small group of winemakers, including Dario Ciolli, Marco Carpinetti, and Andrea Occhipinti, are working strictly with the grape varieties that are indigenous to Lazio and demonstrating that the north-south dichotomy is not all that received wisdom would have it. We’re tasting a dry, sparkling wine from Carpinetti, made from the local Bellone variety (used in some Frascati, but you’d hardly know it), likely cultivated by farmers in antiquity. We’re also tasting a light, earthy red from Occhipinti, made from aleatico, a |