MY LONG JOURNEY DISCOVERING THE WINES OF SOUTHERN ITALY--CONFESSIONS & REVELATIONS

I have a confession to make.

I knew precious little about Italian wine before I opened The Wine Country in the fall of 1995, and it was the wine region I most fretted about.

“It doesn’t matter,” one local wine salesman reassured me.  “The only thing you need to know about Italian wine in Long Beach is Chianti and Pinot Grigio.”

My hometown of Long Beach had never been a hotbed of wine sophistication before I built our store; there was only one wine store within the city limits that stocked anything but a perfunctory smattering of imported wines, such was the dominance of California wine by the mid-1990s.

The last time I had anything to do with Italian wine was early 1985, when I managed a small retail store in a shopping mall with a few selections.  For the next ten years I co-founded and co-owned a boutique wine brokerage/distributorship that offered French wine, Ports and Madeiras and the wines of a dozen California family wineries. 

But no Italian wines.

It was unfortunate for me, because the years between 1985 and 1995 represented nothing less than a revolution in Italian winemaking that elevated Amarone, Barolo, Brunello di Montalcino, and Super-Tuscans to collector status, thanks to Robert Parker’s and Wine Spectator’s sudden interest in these thrilling wines.  Italian wine tourism was about to explode as well.

Yes, I had heard of Barolo and Brunello, Taurasi and Chianti Classico, Moscato and Marsala, sampled some from time to time, but I couldn’t tell you which wine came from where.  Places like Tuscany, Piedmont, Campania, and Sicily were just names in a wine book.

It was clear I had a lot to learn and fast.

Thanks to a few suppliers, I was invited to some pre-opening trade tastings of Italian wines where I asked a lot of naïve questions (“Is Barolo usually this light in color?  I remember them being dark.”) and discovering interesting wines from exotic places like Sardinia and Calabria.

My greatest tutorial, however, came from an importer's wine rep from named Luciano Brusselo, a tall, handsome and rather dashing figure with a mellifluous Italian accent who brought me close to 40 wines.  He arranged the bottles on three eight-foot-long tables placed end-to-end, in geographical order from northern Italy to the south.

And so we began my Italian wine education.  With only a single lightbulb extended from an exposed rafter above us for illumination, Luciano poured samples of wines from Friuli, Veneto, Trentino, Alto Adige, Piedmont, Marche, Umbria, Tuscany, Molise, Campania, Puglia, Campania, Sardinia and Sicily, explaining along the way each red and white wine’s grape varieties, the topography of the region, local foods and a smattering of cultural tidbits as we traversed from left to right.

Before me was a glass and a large pad of paper, where I furiously scribbled notes on page after page, pausing to observe, swirl, sniff and taste each wine, admiring how each reflected its origin.  Luciano was delivering a master class on Italian wine, patiently answering all of my questions and sharing his experience and wisdom with nuggets like, “I never serve Amarone with dinner, but with Gorgonzola after dinner, it is sublime!”

I noticed how firm and linear the wines from the cool northern regions were, contrasted with the central provinces of Tuscany and Umbria, where the wines were more relaxed and saturated. By the time we got to the Southern Italian wines of Campania, Calabria and Puglia (the home of Primitivo), the wines had plusher textures, were extremely flavorful and very easy to like, and I imagined how good they would all taste with all sorts of foods cooked with garlic and olive oil.

After all these years I can’t recall how long Luciano and I sat that day, teacher and pupil, but I remember vividly the impact his lessons had on me as we left the table that evening.  Many of the wine estates we sampled that day are still on our shelves 29 years later, and I felt for the first time I had at least a working handle on Italian wines.  It would take further years of discovery, experimentation and study before I felt confident in my on-again, off-again role as Italian wine buyer, but in time, I determined that if our store was going to be best in its class for Italian wine with the kind of expertise and depth of knowledge I wanted, I’d have to delegate the role of buyer to another.  

I’ll give you an example of my journey to that decision. 

In the summer of 2004, I had the privilege of spending two weeks with the Marc DeGrazia organization, touring a week in Tuscany and a week in Piedmont, a trade visit that was very important to my growth as a wine guy.  During a visit to Tuscany, we visited Brunello producer Livio Sassetti where our host mentioned six microclimates within the small Montalcino area.

I was just learning what makes Brunello a great wine, when I was faced with this trivia.  If I want to master Brunello, I had to know the characteristics of all six sub-regions in good years and challenging ones.  That would take years and a lot of focus, I thought. 

The next week in Barolo, we visited five or six of the subregions within the designation, and though I gained a lot of insight on La Morra, Serralunga, Monforte, Castiglione Falletto and others, I knew it was a task best left for someone on my staff other than me who could drill down more completely to fully grasp the subject at hand.

What About the South?

After a return visit to Italy with Dale later that year touring Rome, Florence, Portofino, Lake Como, Alto Adige and Venice, I haven’t been back to Italy since. 

Which means I haven’t explored the varied wine regions south of Rome, nor visited the Amalfi Coast, Naples (the home of pizza) and Campania, Calabria (the toe of the Italian boot), Puglia, (the heel of the boot), Sardinia (where the white Vermentino shines) and Sicily, the home of Marsala wine, Nero d’Avola, Grillo, and the great tasting reds, whites and rosés of Etna.   And it’s hard to fully grasp a wine’s purpose unless you experience it in its homeland, walked its vineyards, met its makers and dined at their tables.  Yes, we can still learn a lot by popping corks at home and at least introducing ourselves to these new experiences, but there is no experience like being there.

Encountering the wines of Campania for the first time was a revelation.  I didn’t expect to love the indigenous white wine varieties Fiano, Falanghina, Greco di Tufo as much as I did, nor appreciate and enjoy the full range of wines made from the red Aglianico, including its greatest expression, the mighty wines of Taurasi.  They are grown inland from Naples, on the far side of Mount Vesuvius.

Just as compelling to me are the wines of Sicily, grown in ancient vineyards but now crafted with the same kind of technical expertise as any wine region in the world.  I’ve experienced great-tasting Syrah grown in Sicily, but I’m so much more in tune with more traditional local varieties like Nero d’Avola and Nerello Mascalese, wines that combine modernity with timelessness.

Technical upgrades in the vineyards and wineries have made the wines of Puglia juicy, instantly appealing and usually very affordable.  The more rustic wines of Basilicata and Calabria give you a sense of place when drinking them, especially when combined with the simple farm foods of their respective regions.  You’ll know exactly what I mean when you enjoy a bottle of Salice Salentino with your next pizza or red sauce pasta.

I've found the wines of southern Italy fill the needs of the kind of Italian food most of us grew up on, the East-Coast red sauce and cheesy meatball faire of the neighborhood pizzeria.  Not only that, whenever a customer asks us for a red wine to pair with an Asian dish, like peanut-sauce chicken sate (which just happened), many of the simpler red wines of Calabria, Puglia and other sun-saturated regional wines have a lower acidity and less of a "cut" than cooler climate wines, thus allowing them a bit more flexibility with foods with a bit of sweetness in them.

Each bottle of wine from Italy’s south is an adventure in itself, and an invitation to a simpler, more authentic life.  Drinking one stimulates the imagination, and for many of us, it has us dreaming of a future visit and making plans, as Hemingway would say. 

Which reminds me of the last thing I heard during the final dinner of my Italian wine tour in 2004.

“Next time you visit Italy you must visit Sicily,” Marc DeGrazia told me.  “Ahh, the wines, the food, the women…”