You Say Barolo

I have a new (and really annoying) party game.  It’s about Italian wine. I call it “Grape or Place?”

It works like this: I say a wine-related word. Then you tell me if it’s the name of a grape or the name of a place. After becoming indoctrinated into the world of Piemonte wines not too long ago, my brain felt like it was going to explode with information. I tried explaining all my new-found facts to my mom.

“There’s Barolo…”

“which is a grape?”

“which is a wine. And Barbaresco…”

“which is a grape?”

“which is also a wine. And then there’s Nebbiolo.”

“which is a place?”

“which is a grape. It’s the grape used in Barolo and Barbaresco. Which are also places.”

“Places where Nebbiolo grows.”

“Places where the Nebbiolo for these specific wines grows. The Nebbiolo for these wines grows on only the best, south-facing vineyards in the Barolo or Barbaresco zones….”

“Then what’s Barbera?”

Good question. Barbera, a red grape from Piemonte, has nothing to do with Barbaresco or Barolo, though producers of Barolo and Barbaresco often make a separate wine with Barbera grapes. And so goes the world of Italian wines. Sometimes, labels make it easier.  Barbera d’Alba or Barbera d’Asti are wines made with Barbera grapes from specific places (Alba and Asti, respectively). Sometimes it doesn’t work that way. Take the famous example of Vino Nobile de Montepulciano. Montepulciano is a historic hill town in Tuscany. Montepulciano is also a common red grape. But it’s not the grape used in Vino Nobile, a pricy Tuscan wine. (That would be Prugnolo Gentile, a strain of Sangiovese–the famous grape of Chianti.)

One of my favorite new discoveries is Lacrima di Morro d’Alba. The grape is an aromatic red called Lacrima, the town is Morro d’Alba, in the central Le Marche region. Morro d’Alba has nothing to do with Piemonte’s Alba, where Barbera grows. The Lacrima grape has nothing to do with Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio, a red wine from Campania. Tricky.

But that’s also what makes it fun. Lacrima di Morro d’Alba can only be made in Morro d’Alba. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find Lacrima vines beyond Morro d’Alba. The grape and the place are intrinsically linked. Only recently have bottles made it to the United States. In early 2004, Lorenzo Marotti brought his family’s Lacrima wine to the San Francisco Fancy Food Show. Soon, A16, which had only just opened, was pouring it by the glass.

The wine, all dried roses and violets, tastes spicy and invigorating. Its character clearly reflects the place in which it is made. In a world where wines are marketed with labels like “girlfriends with cupcakes wine” or “mommy juice” (and where people get into law suits over these names!) wine labels that make us pause and think about where the bottles originated make us more thoughtful consumers. Even if it means confronting confusion (Grape or place? Neither?) on a regular basis.

Tagged as: inspiration, Italian, wine