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Molana Dry Red 2021 

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Tasted 31st March 2024

There’s a great story behind this.  I’m not entirely independent here, as the wine belongs, in part, to one of my MBA students – but this still cries out to be told.

A side-tag on the front label gives the hint: ‘Iranian winemaking in exile’.  The wine is produced by an Armenian company called Keush, owned by my student (Aimée Kueshguerian) and her family.  They have been developing their wine production in Armenia for some years now, producing a range of wines (their Areni is well worth seeking out), but Aimée’s father had another vision.  Armenia borders onto Iran, and – despite its Muslim heritage – Iran has a long history of wine production and wine drinking (think Omar Khayyam, but also of the Sufi poet Rumi, who also eulogized wine – at least metaphorically – as an aid to enlightenment and the understanding of God).  Nevertheless, since the Islamic revolution of 1979 the public use of alcohol has been impossible in the country – although it is probable that in a number of out-of-the-way communities, particularly amongst the Kurds of the north west, wine has been made for private use. Aimée’s father, Vahe, an Armenian born in Syria, raised in Lebanon, educated in Italy and then working in the United States has a broad vision for wine and what it can do.  He and his family have been contributing to the renaissance of the Armenian wine industry (lost for a time in the Soviet pursuit of cheap brandy), but he looks beyond his immediate heritage to the wider region in which he lives – and became focused on the now-prohibited tradition of wine in Iran.  It’s impossible, of course, to make it there – but why not make it over the border in Armenia but using Iranian grapes?  This wine is the product of that quest.  The journey to get the grapes was far more dangerous than most winemakers would ever contemplate undertaking; a flight to Teheran, negotiations with grape suppliers, then overland up to the western borders of the country to source the grapes, plus hiring a truck to take them more than 300 kilometres up to the Armenian border – finally crossing under inspection of customs officials.  All the while the danger that a tip-off to the authorities could land him in gaol.  The journey has been recorded in a film, ‘Somm: Cup of Salvation’ – it’s well worth seeing if you get the opportunity, and more of this in a future post.

So, what of the wine?  Medium deep ruby colour.  Quite a savoury nose with stewed black fruit and a rather meaty character.  Aimée tells me no oak has been used in its ageing – but I would have said it had spent a little while in older oak if I hadn’t been told this.  Yet it is also quite aromatic with hints of violets and blackberries.  Full bodied and quite warm (perfect for the wet Easter Sunday when we drank it with roast lamb!)  Very dense black fruit, a touch spicy, quite firm but not excessive tannin with a drying finish.  Not super complex but a very satisfying wine.

The name of the wine is given to honour Rumi; he had the honorific title of ‘Molana’ as a respected religious scholar and leader.  Here is one extract of what he wrote of wine:

I drank that wine of which the soul is its vessel.

Its ecstasy has stolen my intellect away.

A light came and kindled a flame in the depth of my soul,

A light so radiant that the sun orbits around it like a butterfly.

Finally, whilst I firmly believe that the quality of a wine has little to do with its label, this is the most beautiful and evocative label I have seen for a long time; intricately patterned, gorgeous colours, and perfectly representative of the style of this part of the world.  Not a bottle to turf into the recycling bin when the wine is finished.

Paltrinieri Lambrusco di Sorbara DOCG ‘Leclisse’ 2022

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I suspect that most people who read this blog probably haven’t let a drop of Lambrusco pass their lips for years – even decades.  Sickly, rather thin with big bubbles it’s more in the category of alcoholic, fruity cola than anything to do with wine.  I have, in the last decade, tasted some well made and well balanced Lambruscos, but it is hard to get most people to take the wines seriously.  Passing through Modena – the city at the centre of the region – on my way to Ravenna for the start of an Italian holiday I decided to use the opportunity to visit one of the more renowned producers of Lambrusco to find out more about the region and see what the preconditions for quality are.  My wife very generously agreed to this detour – and I even think she quite enjoyed the visit!

This is a medium sized, independent domaine.  It is run by the current generation of the Paltrinieri family, the dynamic Alberto, but he is third generation.  His grandfather, who was a pharmacist, began it as a sideline in the 1920s.  Historically all the wines were made by the ancestral method (having a current resurgence as PetNat).  Like almost all current Lambrusco much of the Paltrinieri production is now tank (charmat) method.  What was most immediately surprising was that with two exceptions (a white and a red) the domaines wines are all pink – of one shade or another. 

The family focus on producing wines mainly with the local sorbara grape, which they consider, because of its good acidity and fragrance, the best local cultivar.  Sorbara is a sterile grape – which means other grapes need to be planted near it to fertilise it a flowering – in this case salamino.  However, my ‘interesting wine’ is made with 100% Sorbara grapes.

All of the wines are good and it’s hard to pick one – but the one I’ve selected, the Leclisse – for its perfect balance, gently aromatic nose with some beautiful red fruit on the attach and excellent length.  The fizz is soft – although it’s charmat method it is given quite a long, cool second fermentation which keeps the bubbles small.  It’s dry, with – at 11% – an unintrusive alcohol.  This for me is almost the archetype of a delicious wine.  Profound, not really, complex – not very, but pure and focused and so easy to drink with gorgeous flavours.  And very neatly priced.

I want to note that the other wines from the domaine can be excellent; for me the Leclisse just shaded them, but the Radice (‘root’) which was my wife’s favourite was also very smart; it’s the ancestral version (therefore rooted in the old ways of making sparkling wine) and is not disgorged, so still with yeast lees.  There is also the excellent Grosso – a DOC wine made by the traditional method.  Nevertheless, for the first time in my life I’ve got to admit that I think a tank method wine is better than its traditional method equivalent.  That – plus the commitment of the family to maintain their heritage, and to prove that even in the most despised regions good wine can be made – makes it an interesting wine for me.

What gets planted where and why II: Franschhoek

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Most keen wine drinkers know that chenin blanc is the most widely planted grape in South Africa.  Those who follow the history will also know why – because as a non-aromatic variety with overt acidity it’s ideal for making brandy, and white fortified wine, long a staple of the South African industry.  What is less well-known is that a couple of centuries ago, before British imperial demands for those styles of wine came to dominate, semillon was the most significant grape in the Cape. 

Both, of course, came early to the region, brought either by the Dutch East India Company traders from the west coast of France, or by the Huguenot protestants who settled here when chased from their country by that most Catholic (and tyrannical) King, Louis XIV.  So, for over one hundred years semillon dominated.  Now the residual plantings of the grape are mainly used in blends.

Except in Franschhoek: the name means the ‘French Corner’.  It’s the bowl in a series of mountain ranges where 300 of those religious dissidents were first settled by the Dutch authorities in 1688.  They brought with them a good knowledge of how to make wine, which helped to kick start the Cape wine industry.  They created their refuge from persecution and began to make the wine which had comforted them back home.

And there I was too, at a tasting provided by the local wine producers, enjoying a bit of Southern Hemisphere warmth in mid-November, and not a chenin blanc in sight – but a whole range of semillons.  For some reason – the residual French memory perhaps – the grape is still there, making a distinctive range of wines, showing the texture of the grape to its best.  What’s more, they tend to come from older vines, giving lower yields, and therefore much more concentration.  A couple of the wines I tried were from the same vineyard with vines planted in 1905; others were from 1936, or 1942.  The young ones from the early 1990s or the beginning of this millennium.  This had a noticeable impact on their quality.  Most of the grapes used to be sold in anonymous blends or with no varietal name but in the last few years the local producers have decided collectively to push the wines (last time I was here, nearly 20 years ago, nothing was made of the grape).  It’s effectively their identity.  You could also argue that in marketing terms it’s a point of distinction, helping them to sell the wines – but as one producer said to me, ‘no one knows semillon; it’s a bastard to sell’.  Local attachment to the grape preceded any clear business plan.

Why this variety in this place?  No-one did a detailed soil analysis or hydrological study, nor a temperature assessment, to see if it was the ideal grape for the region.  It just happened to come with the original settlers, it reminded them of home, they planted it and the wine which they made was ok, and 235 years in its still there, because it seems to work, and it is now part of the heritage.

Finally, just before finishing this this otherwise sympathetic story, it’s worth remembering that the land given to the French had been occupied by the indigenous Khoisan people for a long time and was taken by the Europeans without anyone asking them if they agreed to it or wanted to have grapes planted there.

The South African ‘Old Vines Project’

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I’ve written before about the South African Old Vine Project.   That was based on a presentation in Germany.  This time I had the chance to explore it in place – and the whole idea is a fascinating cultural phenomenon.

Old Vines have become a topic of interest to the wine world in the last few years.  Jancis Robinson and her team especially have been discussing them and promoting their value in a number of geographies (https://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/old-vine-registry-launched).  South Africa, perhaps more than any other country, has been in the forefront of this campaign.  Partly, it is because the country has a great heritage and it benefits from having a way to promote that heritage.  Partly it is because there is an organisation now known as SAWIS – SA Wine Industry Information and Systems – whose antecedents have, since 1900, been keeping very precise records of vineyard plantings, when grapes were planted and what cultivars were used.  If you search their statistical database you will discover that there is 0.81 of a hectare of harslevelu planted in the Swartland that is more than 20 years old, although that area pales next to the 33.16 ha. of bukettraube planted in the same age category.  (No, I haven’t heard of it before either but clearly it has much greater potential than harslevelu.)  SAWIS doesn’t run the Old Vine Project but its rigorously maintained database allows the certification of old vines – which in this case means those with more than 35 years age.

When I was there before Christmas we had three linked presentations on the Project, each from a different perspective.  The eminent South African viticulturist Rosa Kruger talked about the origins of the project.  In 2013 there were a mere 8 pioneer members developing the project; a decade on the number had grown to 140 – and with links now to similar groups in Spain, Italy, Argentina, California amongst others.  The Project keeps a registry of Old Vines, it teaches people how to prune them correctly (their age gives them special needs), and it tries to preserve the knowledge and memories of older farmers of traditional work methods and of the land.  Rosa also posed an interesting question: why have the vines which have survived remained alive?  What is specific to them or their environment or management which has allowed this to happen?

The second presenter was Jonathan Steyn, a business professor at the University of Cape Town and a friend, who wanted to talk about the value of old vines to producers. He asked what the value of the Old Vine category is in South Africa.  He noted that the label did increase the recognition of, and price paid for, chenin blanc.  This is significant given that this is a wine grape which is substantially undervalued for the quality it can deliver (and not just in South Africa) and that the label acts very much in a similar way to the designation ‘luxury’ in persuading South African drinkers to buy the wine.

The final speaker was the doyen of South African wine writers, Michael Fridjon.  He noted that, unlike Europe, there had been no traditional recognition that you get more concentrated flavours from older wines.  Cooperatives, who brought the majority of the fruit, used it to produce brandy for which wine age was irrelevant.  It needed the collapse of the cooperative system in the 1990s and a few far-sighted wine producers to rethink the approach to these vines – a form of resurrection for the industry, particularly in regions which had traditionally been viewed as producing lower quality fruit.  A heritage was (re)discovered – but it took the end of the old Afrikaner protectionist system to allow it to be found.  Many farmers had kept old vineyards for sentimental rather than economic reasons, because ‘grandpa planted it in the 1929s’.  This suggests a system that is a fault but individuals whose sense of identity has overridden that and leaves their individual heritage – the sudden emergence of ‘good’ wine.

What we see is a great idea rooted in history and creating a quality guarantee around its production, offering economic advantage, and in a sustaining story for the South African wine industry which talks of individuals leaving their mark despite the institutions.  Combined this makes an underlining mythology for the whole category. Don’t take that comment as being critical of what’s happening; there is no doubt as well, that ‘Old Vines’ can make for interesting and very enjoyable wines: see the latest ‘interesting wine’ I have posted.

And two afterthoughts.  SAWIS has seven vineyards older than 1900 in  its records, age unknown but all recorded as 1900.  These form the ur-myth for the whole idea, the vineyards lost in time which form the paradigm for what follows.  One of  these vineyards is ‘T Voetpad – source of a wine which I’ve already raved about before.  Meanwhile, the foundation of SAWIS itself has its origins in difficult – even dangerous – times.  In 1900 the British Cape Colony was in the middle of a bitter war with the independent Boer Republics to the north.  The year saw the British capture the key Boer cities, use a scorched earth policy and create a series of appalling concentration camps – provoking a Boer guerrilla campaign in response.  Over the following two years the brilliant Boer leader, Jan Christian Smuts, led a guerrilla campaign through the Cape Colony including some of wine regions.  It’s astonishing that anyone had time to worry about producing a vineyard registry but also maybe a sign that even in the darkest times the wine industry can manage to plan for the future.

What gets planted where and why I: Calitzdorp

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Why do particular varieties get planted in specific places?  The assumption most wine drinkers will have is that growers in the well-known regions of France, Italy or Spain spent centuries experimenting with different grapes until they worked out which made the best wines.  The truth is probably more prosaic; there were limited local varieties available, often arriving from somewhere else, and some from that local pot were given pre-eminence – usually based on their ability to give high yields within the specific ecosystem.

But when you get to other parts of the world the ‘why is it here’ question is open to much more random answers – as a recent tasting of wines from Calitzdorp in South Africa revealed.

In case your initial response is ‘where Calitzdorp?’ then no, I hadn’t heard of it before now either.  Calitzdorp is a small town in the Klein Karoo; a hot, dry area inland in the Western Cape of South Africa, traditionally know for grapes which went to making fortified wines and brandy.  I was recently tasting the wines from the region – a first for me, as it is hardly known outside the country, and came across its interesting story. 

Calitzdorp now has its own regional designation in South Africa – and this is partly due to its focus on Portuguese grapes.  My introduction to it was an alvarinho – the Portuguese white grape mainly responsible for vinho verde – and a very good wine it was.  I got talking with the producer showing it (it was not his own wine).  Naturally I wanted to know how a fairly localised Portuguese grape had ended up in the South African outback and the producer presenting the wine – Boets Nel – gave me the history.  Essentially, red Portuguese grapes were planted by mistake.  His father had wanted shiraz, went over to the Swartland near the Atlantic coast in the 1970s, and came back in error (a genuine mistake – or was he tricked?) with tinta barroca, which originates in the Douro Valley.  Rather than cursing their luck they decided to capitalise on this, and brought in other varieties – tinta roriz and touriga naçional – later the white alvarinho, which was made into this wine which I tasted by Boet’s cousin.  Boet then showed me his red wine, made from these grapes – and very good it was too.

No plan, a chance mistake – though grapes which work perfectly in that environment.  There are now seven producers in the area which use these varieties, with a rule that to label the wines as Calitzdorp at least 70% must come from these (originally) Portuguese grapes.  Based on the two wines I saw it works.

A new year, a new start

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Welcome back to my Wine, Culture and Society blog.  It’s been on hold for a while due to pressure of work and other personal commitments, but the symbolism of a New Year (even if it is ‘just another day’) makes this seem like a good time to restart; that – plus the build-up of a lot of interesting visits and thus stories and ideas over the last few months.

I have lots of exciting posts to pen, wines to talk about, and travelling to do; make sure you come along for the ride.  What can you expect over the coming weeks?  Some interesting developments on the story of old vines in South Africa, more on the current state of Tokaji, a bit of Vienna transplanted to the Adelaide Hills and the development of some of the previous ideas about wine as a symbol of dissent.  Wine and its role in forming identity generally is going to be one of my themes over the year or so. 

Volcanic Slopes Vineyards Pure 2018

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We hear a lot about the role of complexity in good wine.  For me, along with balance, power and interest it is one of the four key factors in determining how good a wine is.  Yet I think complexity has a twin which is not identical.  Complexity has substance and intellect – it challenges you, may even threaten you, it teases you as you try to puzzle it out, and laughs at you when you get it wrong but it can draw you in with its argument and win you round, so you see what it was like all the time.  Its sibling is different – quieter yet immediately striking.  Quite simply the twin is just stunning – that’s all that matters.  No challenge, no threat, no bluster, merely quiet, welcoming beauty.  Its name is purity.  There are wines which seduce not by their complexity, but just because they are so pure that you need nothing else.  I sometimes see them as the vinous equivalent of water – not tasteless but crystalline, innocent, wholesome yet very, very sexy (and if you think that overrates water then just imagine a full-on thirst).  The twins aren’t mutually exclusive.  You can find some wines which have both purity (the immediately striking sibling) but then complexity, which pushes its way to the front subsequently and demands attention – though usually, as a friendly sibling it tries to complement rather than compete.  Riesling is a classic variety where purity shines (in the greatest cases with complexity alongside it) but there are others and recently I’ve realised that assyrtiko is often one of these too.  One thing which tends to mask the purity of a wine (whilst giving complexity) is oak – particularly new oak.  One reason, therefore, why riesling typically often expresses purity.  Having said that older oak may be less of an impediment – I’m thinking here of chablis which has had a few months in older (and perhaps larger) barrels to fill it out slightly but which can remain mouth-wateringly pure.

Pure – VSV

This wine is produced under the label Volcanic Slopes Vineyards – but it is a ‘boutique’ wine production from the much better known Estate Argyros on Santorini and the label doesn’t focus on the VSV company – rather on the name of the wine.  Argyros consistently make some of the best assyrtikos from the island (which means best from the world).  There are a range of styles, all well done, but this caught my attention when I tasted it at Prowein recently.  The wine is made comes from the Episkopi (bishop’s) hillside near there main winery, but with separate production in an old canava – (traditional Santorini small wine production building).  This is the only wine currently made under the VSV label.  We often hear producers liking to boast about their old vines (one recent winemaker told me that his old vine wine was from 25 year old vines!)  This is from 150 year old vines (not an unusual feature of Santorini vineyard) and it has been fermented in cement (an old-fashioned though returning material for fermentation tanks), which I think has contributed a bit to the purity of the fruit.

It has some floral notes yet nothing dominates; the flavours are finely integrated.  It’s a lighter, more delicate style than some of their other wines but the purity shines through.  Lovely acid balance, great length and the wine will age well.  Santorini wines are becoming more and more expensive, but this is worth whatever they want to charge (and will still be a lot less than grand cru burgundy).

Maybe I saw purity in this wine because of a not-so-subtle prompt from the name, which overtook my tasting objectivity.  However, I think not; in this case it called ‘pure’ because that is exactly what it is.

The Arrival of a Sussex Sparkling Appellation: A Sad Day for English Wine

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I don’t normally comment on current news in my blog – but the announcement of a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) for wines from Sussex in southern England [https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2022/06/sussex-sparkling-wine-granted-pdo-status/] merits a comment, as a retrograde step for English and Welsh sparkling wine production.  The mistake is a nuanced one – but it’s very significant, and shows a failure of cultural understanding, which is where I become interested.

PDOs in Europe are broadly about the ecosystem of the vine – what might be called terroir.  They may be vast (Champagne, or AC Cotes du Rhone) or small (Pauillac or Le Montrachet) but they are about what gives a wine their style.  The same is true of Chianti, Rioja, and the Pfalz.  A large PDO like Champagne cuts across four departements (French counties) and two very distinct regions.  Le Montrachet is a vineyard split between two villages and Rioja includes three administrative regions of Spain.  Yet they share common climatic (and often geological) features, use the same grape varieties and have a common culture of production – of what they are trying to make and how they are in fact making it.

The Sussex PDO is not like that.  Its boundaries are East and West Sussex – not rooted in environment per se but stretching back to tribal identity in Anglo-Saxon England and then medieval local organisation.  Yet the assumption is that because this is where local authorities are based, this is where wine will have a common character.

This is not just an Old World worry (even if it may be a first world problem!).  The Carneros AVA at the north of San Francisco Bay traverses two counties – Napa and Sonoma – because both parts of those counties share a specific climatic effect.  Margaret River was established across two often competing shires because from Karridale to Dunsborough there are broadly similar environmental characteristics.  Gimblett Gravels in New Zealand is small part of Hawkes Bay (about 800 hectares) with its own legal protection because of a specific alluvial soil.  Sussex PDO has none of this: does Tinwood (to the west and fairly coastal) really have more in common with Oastbrook, (90 kilometres to the east, right in the middle of the Weald and inland) than with Hambledon in Hampshire (like Tinwood, on the edge of the South Downs National Park)?  And surely Oastbrook shares much more with the Kent vineyards around the Weald such as Harbourne.  A Sussex PDO merely tries to fit the subtleties of regional wine styles into a politician’s or administrator’s worldview which is a recipe neither for accuracy nor success.  (Think about how Italian politicians and bureaucrats meddling in DOC and DOCG provisions has created a history of oenological failure).

There is, however, a bigger reason why this matters, and that is ‘the’ consumer.  Consumers are just getting used to sparkling wine from Great Britain.  They don’t have the means yet – nor even more the desire – to explore regional differences.  Only 25 years on from the first success for Nyetimber the key task for the English and Welsh wine industry is to establish, in the minds of consumers, their sparkling wine as the great wine which it can be.  That goal is well underway but it is nowhere near finished – especially given the pricing of the wines.  This aim is fundamental, and anything which confuses the issue just detracts from that key marketing goal.

Finding out what differentiates wine from different places takes time.  Margaret River was first planted in 1967 and only now are wine producers beginning to see the sub-regional differences in wine styles.  In Burgundy it took hundreds of years to see to those variations clearly (and it is still being worked on).  English and Welsh wine producers are beginning to understand some of these differences slowly but to impose a PDO at this stage (particularly one based on administrative boundaries) is just a distraction from the bigger question

Wine and Culture – the Book

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This is a rather different post from normal – it’s about something very personal, rather than an exploration of a specific aspect of wine and culture around the world.  You could say that it is a merely promotional comment, but it’s also designed to give a rather broader insight into my work.  So…

After almost three years hard work, with six brilliant co-editors, today sees the release of the Routledge Handbook of Wine and Culture. We examine the cultural context of wine consumption and production from a range of disciplines in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Business with 45 great contributions from 57 of the leading authors in the field – and you can get to see how culture shapes wine in myriad ways and places: China, Champagne and Texas, label typefaces and backyard production, religion and fashion theory – then many others. It’s an academic book and not really designed as bedtime reading but I think it really does move on our understanding of wine – and the fact that it is not limited to a single discipline is very important to me. Too many people only engage with wine philosophically, or politically, or anthropologically, without learning about the other ways to explore the drink.

This is the project that has engrossed me professionally whilst I’ve been writing this blog.  When I was contacted by Routledge and asked to edit a book on wine and culture I immediately declined.  I’d just come out of editing two other books and – more significantly – I knew instantly that such a project would have so wide a disciplinary context that it would be beyond my experience and knowledge.  ‘Culture’ in this sense has to bring in expertise from history and geography, sociology and anthropology, cultural studies and text, economics and business – and I only have limited knowledge of most of these.

Twenty-four hours later I rang back and said that I had changed my mind, on condition that I could assemble a team of editors from different backgrounds and experience who would complement what I had to offer and enable us to create a truly interdisciplinary text.  This has allowed me to work with a number of colleagues with whom I had already researched and whom I was confident would strive to create a wide-ranging and genuinely useful book.  The process has been difficult at times (how do engaged researchers from seven different fields even agree on a definition of culture?) but it has been collegial and creative, as well as intellectually challenging and enriching. 

Why wine and culture?  Each of us editors is fascinated by this relationship, and each of us has a different story to tell about what piqued our interest in it.  Before I became an academic I spent a few years selling wines in liquor stores in Sydney.  The wine was interesting – but equally so were the people.  There was the lady who, every few days, would come in for the ‘cheapest red wine that you have’; when after some months of this I asked her why it was always the cheapest she answered that she didn’t like the taste – but had been told that it was good for her health to have a glass each evening.  The businessman, a self-confessed connoisseur, who insisted on ‘a man’s drink – full bodied red’ and refused the suggestion of pinot noir as you only have to look at it to see it is weak and a wine for women. The elderly couple I encountered outside a professional tasting of French wines who were interested in what was happening but then, when I explained it to them, retorted ‘why do that? We have perfectly good wines here in Australia and don’t need any of that French stuff’.  The wine store owners who insisted that they weren’t running a business but were ‘living a lifestyle’.  The office worker who didn’t drink wine often but when she did enjoyed it because it took her back to her youth in Croatia when she would be sent by her father to the corner shop with a plastic bottle to fill with wine from their barrel; ‘it would last us about two days’.  The winemaker who claimed that idea of terroir was just a French excuse for badly made wine.  All these stories and myriad others were as intriguing as the wines themselves, and an interest in what sparked such various views of the drink led me a decade later to write a book about its cultural and social context.

Finally, we note in the Conclusion to this volume that one of the negative aspects of wine is the vast amount of water consumed in its production.  We, the editors, enjoy wine immensely.  In part reparation for the environmental problems caused by our passion we have decided to donate the royalties from this book to the charity WaterAid – https://www.wateraid.org/uk/

DO Baragioeu – Another Unexpected Italian Wine

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(Thanks to Nicole Mascioli for help with this post).

Anyone who has followed my blog recently will be aware of my obsession with northern Italian wines made from no longer legal grape varieties (see my last two posts).  This prompted one of my Italian students in Dijon, Nicole, to talk to me about her experience with similar types of wine in the town she grew up in.  This is Cuggiono, about 30 kms from Milan and in the Ticino valley at the border of Lombardy and Piedmont.  It’s a place where there used to be many vineyards until phylloxera yet, as happened in much of Europe (even where I live in Burgundy) most of them reverted to waste land and forest or other agricultural use after the insect plague.  Cuggiono is the only town locally to maintain this viticultural heritage.  It is on the Ticino which carves out a national park in the area, and it is where Nicole’s parents and grandfather were raised as well.  She generously spent some time doing local research on this heritage for me.

The vines all disappeared from the 1920s onwards, but in 1982 the local historical museum in the town decided to recreate the old wines which were made there, and which formed part of the village’s cultural history.  There was a conscious effort to replicate the former styles of wine, but 60 years on many of the people who promoted the idea knew nothing of viticulture; however, a local professional agronomist was part of the team and advised them.  This, then, was a group of older people who were proud of their identity (and they still are) and wanted to remember it before it was completely forgotten.

By the 1980s the use of American grape varieties was banned in Italy for making wine except for personal use.  Many people, including Nicole’s grandmother, had been persuaded the banning of these grapes was due to the health danger they posed, so she pulled up her grapes, incorrectly thinking they were harmful (even though she was no longer making wine with them and it was only a small plot).  This was the same year, however, that some locals, based around the town’s historical museum, decided to recreate the wine so that the tradition did not die.  The found some local vines and used them to plant a vineyard in the public gardens of the town and, subsequently began to make wine.  Children do the foot pressing in a plastic vat; they used to do this in the past as their pressing was softer than adults (weight) and more could get in the tub at once.  Meanwhile, the adults harvest and manage the fermentation and bottling.  Nicole helped with the vintage at times when she was younger.

Initially the blend was Clinton and Fragolino with some other traditional local varieties.  However, the latter didn’t work soe well, and now it includes some freisa (an indigenous piemontese variety with rather bitter tannins but attractive soft red fruit aromas) plus cabernet France (as it resists mildew well) as well as the fragolino (which comes from the Veneto), and clinton.  The wine is not to be recommended for those searching for elegance and complexity; however, for its creators it is not about crafting a good wine – but shaping ‘their’ wine.  This is about maintaining a fading collective memory or the reinvention of a tradition ‘rooted in our way of being’.  Typically the wine is drunk with pan tramvai, a local dried fruit bread.  So not just the production, but the consumption also seeks to maintain the heritage.

By 2020 they were bottling 500 bottles.  The wine has an has an invented label – it is entitled ‘Baragioeu DO’ (not ‘DOC’ – the standard Italian PDO designation, which would be illegal).  Baragioeu is a dialect word for ‘wine.  The label also records that this bottle is from the is the ‘38th anniversary’.  My bottle is numbered 358/500.  Because it is an illegal wine it can’t be sold so the museum kindly gave me a bottle.