I enjoyed Fanny’s wine class this week, especially the discussion of what we used to call wine faults but which now go by the name complexing elements. Classic, can’t-miss examples of volatile acidity aren’t as easy to come by as brettanomyces contaminations, so I plan to keep an especially sharp nose out for wines that show this so that we can have convincing demonstration of it.
Mulling it over earlier in the week I remembered the most egregious example of V.A. that I’ve experienced in an otherwise sound wine bottle during my tenure at the Bottle. It was the basic barbera blend from Cascina Roera a vintage or two ago. I got it both in the bottle and in the 5 liter box and it was dramatic – enough airplane glue to keep a ten year-old boy busy at the kitchen table assembling model Messerschmitts for multiple weekends. Of course, it may be that no ten year-old boys have need for plastic adhesives any more. Today model Messerschmitts are more likely to come from 3D printers than the Revel kits of my youth.
* * * *
Here’s a geeky topic courtesy of Jeremy Parzen’s Dobianchi blog. The story is one we’ve heard before, at one of our monthly staff meetings and concerns the precarious condition of the simple but frequently delicious wine known as Valpolicella Classico. Liz told us about how the folks at Ca’ la Bionda were down on both Amarone and the ripasso style of Valpolicella. Both represent enrichments of simple Valpolicella, the former by means of the passito method of grape drying, the latter by using the gross lees leftover from Amarone production to provoke the second fermentation that raises alcohol and general richness in ripassi.
Ca’la Bionda told Liz that they demand for both was way up over the last 15 years or so. They link the new interest in these formerly under-performing wines with the Parker/Spectator reign of error that has distorted the proportions of all kinds of wine from their consensual, classical proportions. Remember hearing this?
Parzen summarizes the controversy in a post entitled “Will Valpolicella Classico cease to exist.” He notes that sinjce there is a direct relationship between the Amarone you make and the ripasso you can produce, the law prescribes a formula. Specifically, the rules stipulate that In volume, the quantity of “Valpolicella ripasso” designation of controlled origin wines can not exceed twice the volume of wine obtained from the lees from the categories “Recioto della Valpolicella” and/or “Amarone della Valpolicella” employed in the operations of refermentation/ripasso.
Put simply, a winemaker may make no more than two bottles of ripasso for every bottle of Amarone he produces. It makes sense, of course, that the rules should reinforce the necessary production methods, but with the demand for ripasso rising all the time growers are diverting grapes they may once have used to make a lovely, svelte Valpolicella Classico to Amarone production, with predictable results: namely, less normale Valpolicella.
Parzen’s concluding remarks are almost almost touching: As a bona fide Venetophile and Italian wine lover, it’s my sincere hope that the board and the appellation in general will work together to protect Valpolicella Classico. It’s a proletariat wine that aligns in tradition and in ethos with Veneto enogastronomy. When vinified in a traditional manner, it’s fresh, food-friendly, and delicious. In terms of price-quality ratio, it can represent one of Italy’s greatest wine values and it’s a sine qua non of Veneto culture.
* * * *
Regular guest Jim Chiavelli – the good-natured goateed chap with a fondness for fedoras and Cuban cigars – sent along a Slate article on how easy it is to fake wine by various means. Curiously, the author sees the Coravin device as a potential means for uncovering fakes, since wine from a suspect bottle can be drawn off for analysis without removing a cork. The problem is that unless the wine is old enough to be usefully subjected to carbon dating (as was the case with the fake Jefferson bottles a few years ago) analysis doesn’t really tell you much. Read the whole (brief) story here.
* * * *
Lastly, I do hope you will hop over to the CB blog and read my interview with Oz Wine Company’s founder Andrew Bishop. He floats at least one very provocative idea there. It is that natural wine and industrial wine have something very important in common: to wit, they both suppress a ‘sense of place’ in wine. It struck an immediate chord with me. I’ll work this topic over a bit more in a future wine note. Meanwhile, let’s talk about it!
That’s it for now.
-Stephen
A reminder that all weekly wine notes are archived at tableintime.com/weekly