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| Passion Investments: Wine & Spirits |
Tuscan Sons
Tara Weingarten
11/01/2004
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Pliny the elder, the venerated author and scientist who lived from A.D. 23 to
79, was arguably the world’s first wine writer. In his greatest work, Naturalis
Historia, an encyclopedia containing much of the knowledge of his time, he
identified 80 superior Roman wines bottled especially for nobility. Two-thousand
years later, writers are still lauding the same number of exceptional Italian
wines, albeit a very different 80.
VALUE JUDGMENT
Italian viticultural traditions have attracted collectors to the country’s
finest vintages for decades. Now a new generation of winemakers, often the
offspring of traditionalist vintners, are exploring new regions and perfecting
more modern processes. The revolutionaries are adding novel flavors to the
country’s investment-quality bottlings. |
By the time Pliny documented the empire’s
finest wineries, the region had been under vine for more than a millennium. So
many vineyards dotted the landscape that the area was known as Enotria, or land
of wine. But even during the Roman Empire, connoisseurs agreed that the finest
examples came from what we now call Tuscany and Piedmont. Although grapes grow
in every village in Italy’s 20 regions (some 2,000 varieties of grapes in a
country of 116,000 square miles), Tuscany and Piedmont remain the most venerated
producers, and the most sanguine labels for collectors. They are likely to
remain so, but five years from now there will surely be more than 80 stars in
the Italian pantheon: The country is experiencing a winemaking revolution.
Far afield from the best-known areas, winemakers are literally putting other
regions on the map, experimenting with modern processes. For example, Piero
Antinori and Angelo Gaja are two of the high-end vintners who have planted new
vineyards in the Maremma region along the southern Tuscan coast, an area that
experts believe will overtake Montalcino as the next hotter-than-hot spot.
Smaller producers in other regions are learning to make superb wines in very
limited editions—as few as 7,000 bottles a year—that are already commanding
rising prices from collectors well-connected enough to get their hands on them.
(See “Appreciative Finds” at the end.)
Some of the more established vintners,
in a quest to obtain a greater degree of personal control over their operations,
are tossing aside the rules that once guided us to venerable collectibles. Since
the 1960s, enthusiasts have purchased wines with the DOC (Denominazione di
Origine Controllata) or stricter DOCG designations. This latter label,
Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita, which is worn by an
infinitesimally small number of wineries—about 24 in the entire
country—guarantees that the grapes are grown exactly where the winery claims
they are. For decades, the DOCG helped to steer us to the most desirable
regions. In just the past few years, however, winemakers like Gaja, whose
Piedmont wines command some of the highest prices in Italy, have flaunted the
strict government guidelines by declassifying his vineyards and referring to his
wines not as DOCG, but as single-vineyard bottlings. Gaja has done this with
several of his DOCG Barbaresco wines. The discriminating buyer who is not aware
of the discreet pleasures of Gaja’s Barbarescos stands to miss them entirely by
sticking to the traditional dictums.
 | | (Photograph by Kent Bancroft.) |
Complex Factors
This is not to say that the centuries-old Italian
winemaking traditions, aging the wine for up to 20 years in huge chestnut and
oak casks, for example, are disappearing. Well-aged wines are still very much
available. But a new generation of winemakers, often the children of the
traditionalists, has become eager to release the fruits of its labors quickly.
These young vintners are employing modern techniques, such as using small, new
French oak barrels that communicate a rich, vanilla taste, and picking their
fruit later in the season so that their wines are more lush, with intensely
saturated flavors.
Tuscan Adolfo Folinari, whose family has made wine since
the early 1800s and now owns the well-regarded Ruffino estate of Montalcino,
says it is his generation that began to care about factors such as clone
selection and the soil conditions. “We are trying to achieve the best
concentration and complexity through modern ways,” Folinari says. “We care about
getting the best root stock, clones and grape varieties for specific soils and
climates. We are now calling it a science as well as an art.”
Sergio
Esposito, co-owner of Italian Wine Merchant in Manhattan, which sells a
well-edited collection of both fine artisanal and modern-made wines, believes
that recent vintages are superior because they are the products of improved
winemaking techniques. “My advice to clients is to put a lot of their money into
the 2001 vintage,” he says. Indeed, 2001 is being hailed as a landmark vintage;
even modern-made wines show potential for long cellaring.
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