Incrocio Bruni 54 - Marche, Italy

Today I'm going to do something I don't typically do.  I usually try to make sure that for any grape that I write about, I either try a wine that is at least 50% from that grape (though 75% is even better), or I move the post to Weird Blend Wednesday and write about wines made from several different unusual grapes, none of which make up majority of a given bottling.  I really try not to write about grapes that make up a minority portion of a bottling, and I have been mostly successful in avoiding that, but today I'm going to make an exception.  The only wine I could find that contained today's grape, Incrocio Bruni 54, only had about 25% of it in the blend, while the other 75% was made from Pecorino.  I certainly could have included this wine in my post on the Pecorino grape, but chances are pretty good that I won't be coming across any wines with a higher percentage of Incrocio Bruni 54 any time soon (though there is at least one producer who makes a varietal wine from it).  As of the 2004 Italian agricultural census, there were only 13 hectares (about 32 acres) of Incrocio Bruni 54 under vine in Italy, which essentially means there are only 13 hectares being grown in the world.  It is cultivated basically only in the Marche and is allowed in the DOC wines of Colli Maceratesi, but can make up no more than 30% of the blend there.

Incrocio is an Italian word that means "crossing," and there are a handful of Incrocio grapes that are planted to varying degrees in Italy.  These are grapes that were created either by private Italian breeders or by people working at various research institutes throughout Italy.  The most common and perhaps best known is Incrocio Manzone, also known as Manzone Bianco, which I'll be writing about in a separate post very soon.  Pretty much all of the Incrocio grapes follow the same naming convention: they all usually start with Incrocio (though occasionally this word is dropped) and then the word after Incrocio is usually the name of the breeder who created the grape, who in this case was Bruno Bruni, and the number refers to the specific selection of grape.  Sometimes these grapes are given "regular" names, but most of them seem to be stuck with these cumbersome long-form names.  Bruni created hundreds of crossings in his lifetime, but like most grape breeders, only a handful of them proved to have much value as wine grape cultivars.  The VIVC database has a fairly extensive listing of grapes created by Bruni, but it seems as though only number 54 has had any kind of staying power (though many of his creations are table grapes, so they may be more widely grown and known, but I'm not even sure how to check something like that).

Bruni was working in the early part of the 20th Century in the Marche region of Italy and many of his crossings were created between 1930 and 1950.  There either isn't any biographical information on the man online, or I'm just unable to find it underneath all of the results for an Italian sculptor also named Bruno Bruni.  In any case, our man Bruni published a paper (titled "Nuove varieta' di uve da vino 'Incrocio Bruni 54'") announcing his new grape in 1964.  The given parentage was Sauvignon Blanc x Verdicchio, and virtually every resource currently in print lists gives this as the accepted pedigree for the grape.  In a massive study done in 2010 (citation 1), though, the grape's parentage was revealed to be Aleatico x Lacrima.  I haven't been able to find this result corroborated in any other studies (which isn't surprising given the grape's limited plantings and importance), but the VIVC database is sufficiently convinced to list this as the grape's official parentage.

The wine that I was able to try with Incrocio Bruni 54 in it was the 2010 Fontezoppa Marche Bianco which, as mentioned above, is about 25% Incrocio Bruni 54 and 75% Pecorino.  I picked this bottle up locally for around $12.  In the glass the wine was a pale silvery lemon color with greenish tints.  The nose was fairly intense with white pear, lemon, lime, green apple and pineapple aromas.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity.  There were flavors of white pear, ripe red apples, lemony citrus, orange pith and green melon along with a kind of chalky minerality on the back end.  It was similar in style and in flavor to the Colle Vecchio Pecorino I wrote about in my post on that grape, but this wine was a little broader, fatter and blander than that one.  This wine is certainly not a fair representation of what Incrocio Bruni 54 might taste like, but it does give a sense of how the grape is used when it is used at all.  If I ever run across one of those rare varietal bottlings of this grape, I'll be certain to try it and post about it here, but until then, this is probably the best I can do.

Citations:

Cipriani, G, et al (seriously, there are 14 authors on this paper).  2010.  The SSR-based molecular profile of 1005 grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) accessions uncovers new synonymy and parentages, and reveals a large admixture amongst varieties of different geographic origin.  Theoretical and Applied Genetics.  121, pp. 1569-1585.

Maceratino - Colli Maceratesi, Marche, Italy

What the heck is Maceratino?  The more I researched this grape, the more I found myself asking that particular question.  There are a lot of suggestions out there for what Maceratino could be, but very few answers as to what it really is.  I did a little bit of digging and found some interesting stuff in the scientific literature that may help to shed a little light on the situation.

A lot of the confusion with Maceratino has to do with synonyms.  Maceratino has 21 synonyms listed in the VIVC, and, confusingly, eight of those synonyms include the word Greco while four include the word Verdicchio.  Many sources (including the OCW, Wikipedia and this Italian source) indicate that there may be some kind of relationship between Maceratino and Greco and/or Verdicchio, and some of them use the overlapping synonyms as an argument for that.  There are some ampelographic similarities between the vines that has led to the grapes sharing some synonyms, but it hasn't ever really been clear whether there's a serious genetic relationship between Maceratino, Greco and/or Verdicchio.  While I didn't find any studies that answered the question directly, I think I was able to find some answers by linking the findings from a few different studies together.

Before taking a look at Maceratino, I first wanted to take a look at the relationship between Greco and Verdicchio.  The OCW indicates that Maceratino could be related to either Greco or Verdicchio, but Wikipedia indicated that it was related to both, which naturally implies some sort of relationship between Greco and Verdicchio themselves.  The Wikipedia article on Verdicchio makes this a bit more explicit, as they say that with Verdicchio, there "appears to be a genetic relation to Trebbiano and the Grecogrape varieties."  We explored the relationship between Trebbiano and Verdicchio in the post on Turbiana, but this was the first that I had heard about an alleged relationship between Verdicchio and Greco.  The source for this claim is Bastianich and Lynch's Vino Italiano, which refers to Greco as a family of grapes with the Umbrian Grechetto as a subvariety and the Sicilian Grecanico as either a synonym for Greco proper or merely an offshoot of the family.  The authors further maintain that "greco may well have been the progenitor of most of the white varieties in Italy, including trebbiano, verdicchio, and the garganega of Soave in the Veneto," according to "some historians and scientists."

I took a look at a paper that I used for researching my Turbiana post, and pretty much all of the evidence that I needed was right there.  The authors of this paper didn't test Maceratino, but they did test Greco Bianco and Verdicchio and found that there was only 20% similarity between the two cultivars genetically, meaning that if they were related to one another, it would be very distantly.  Furthermore, Grechetto and Grecanico themselves had a similarity rating of 20% between them and both had a similarity rating of about 10% to Greco and Verdicchio, meaning that there isn't any really good reason to believe that these four grapes are closely related to one another at all.

So now that we know that Greco and Verdicchio aren't related to one another, we also know that if Maceratino is related to either of them, it can really only be related to one and not to both.  Maceratino isn't a very common grape and I wasn't sure if I could find a study with any genetic information on it, but, fortunately, I not only found one, but I found one that also tested Verdicchio as well (citation below).  This study was designed to test the discriminatory power of various microsatellite sites, which means basically that they were testing to see which areas of DNA differed the most across various grape varieties, so that those sites could be targeted in future studies.  The results indicated that Verdicchio and Maceratino matched exactly at three sites, matched for one allele at two other sites and didn't match at all on the sixth site.  This means that the two grapes are definitely distinct cultivars and are not a parent-offspring match, but there could be a more distant but still relatively close familial relationship between them.  The similarity of Maceratino to Verdicchio also means that it is very unlikely that Maceratino is related to Greco Bianco.

Geographically, this makes a lot of sense.  Verdicchio is thought to be native to the Marche region of Italy, where Maceratino is also found.  The name Maceratino doesn't have anything to with the word "maceration," but rather with the fact that the grape is thought to be from the town of Macerata in the Marche (though two of its other synonyms, Montecchiesse, meaning from Montecchio, and Matelicano, meaning from Matelica indicate that this bit of information isn't necessarily 100% controversy-free either).  Most Italian sources indicate that it has been grown in the Marche for hundreds of years, but plantings have been falling recently.   The reasons for its decline aren't 100% clear, as the vine yields generously and is relatively hardy in the vineyard while still producing quality wine.  This is usually the recipe for increased plantings, but some believe that Verdicchio's commercial success in international markets has led to many producers tearing up vines in order to plant more Verdicchio to meet consumer demand.  Most of the Maceratino that is still grown is found in the Colli Maceratesi DOC, where the white wines must be at least 85% Maceratino.

I was able to pick up a bottle of the 2009 Andrea Baccius La Murola Q Maceratino from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $10.  In the glass the wine was a pale silvery lemon color with greenish tints.  The nose was moderately intense with green apple, pear and lime citrus aromas.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity.  Right out of the bottle the wine was bright and zippy with pineapple, lime and green apple fruits.  As it opens up, the flavor palette gets a little broader with some white peach fruits and a bit of chalky minerality.  I much preferred it early in the evening when it was tart and refreshing, but I found that I liked it less and less as the night wore on.  It does represent a very nice value at only $10 and is versatile enough to complement a wide variety of foods.  I would definitely recommend giving it a shot if you run across it, as it seems to be getting harder and harder to find.

CITATION

Filippetti, I., Silvestroni, O., Thomas, M.R., and Intrieri, C.  2001.  Genetic characterisation of Italian wine grape cultivars by microsatellite analysis.  Acta Horta. 546.  pp. 395-399.

Passerina - Marche, Italy

I've mentioned in the past that doing Google image searches on grape names often yields unexpected results.  In doing this I've learned about a video game character named Verdelet and a painter named Grechetto.  I've also learned that Grillo is the Italian word for cricket and that Trousseau is the name of a company that makes bridal gowns (that post was a two-fer as I also learned about a baseball pitcher named Bastardo, which is one of the synonyms for Trousseau).  Today's Google image search on the Passerina grape was definitely the most colorful, though, as apparently Passerina is a bird genus within the Cardinal family.  The North American Buntings belong to the Passerina genus and are quite colorful and vibrant to look at so if you're having a dreary kind of day, take a quick break to look at this page of birds and hopefully they'll brighten your day a bit.

Feel better?  Good.  The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that around page 2 of the GIS, pictures of some plants start to show up that definitely aren't grapevines.  There is also apparently a genus of plants called Passerina which you can read all about here.  Believe it or not, there is a common link between the birds, the plants and the grape.  In all three cases, the name Passerina comes from the Latin word Passerinus, which means "sparrow-like."  This is pretty self-explanatory for the birds, as they do in fact resemble sparrows, though they are not related to them.  The plants that belong to the Passerina genus have seeds that are curved and somewhat beak-like so their name comes from the fact that they're said to resemble sparrows' beaks.  The grape Passerina is so named because it is apparently the snack of choice for the sparrows in the Marche region of Italy where it is grown.

Fascinating as all that may be, we're not interested in sparrows, buntings or weird plants here.  We're interested in grapes and wines and the one we're interested in today is called Passerina.  Passerina is grown exclusively in the Marche region on Italy's eastern coast.  It's not a very common grape, but it does find its way into a few DOC wines like those of Offida (where it can be made into a dry table wine, a passito style dessert wine, a vin santo style dessert wine or a metodo classico sparkling wine) or of Falerio dei Colli Ascolani.  It gets a cursory treatment in the Oxford Companion to Wine whose entry on it reads in full: "white variety from Italy's Adriatic coast."  Wikipedia offers a little more, telling us that the vine has "large berries, high yields and a long ripening period" and that the grape makes "appealing wines with clear, focused fruit."

Once we move away from these two sources, Passerina becomes a bit more complicated.  In his Brunello to Zibibbo, Nicolas Belfrage mentions that Passerina may be the same grape as Biancame and Bianchello, though he notes that his sources are not in unanimous agreement on the matter. The New York Times Wine Club website takes this position as well, but I can't find any other sources that agree.  I checked the VIVC database but the information that they have only muddies the water.  According to the VIVC, Passerina is a synonym for both Trebbiano di Toscana as well as Mostosa in Italy (with presumably the same etymological link to sparrows), though those grapes aren't grown in the Marche so they probably aren't what we're dealing with here.  The only entry listed with Passerina as the prime cultivar name is for a Greek grape, and though this (admittedly non-academic and sales oriented) source posits a Greek origin for Passerina, they're the only ones who make that assertion so I'm taking it with a grain of salt.  Since it doesn't look like anyone's done the DNA studies to prove or disprove the link between Passerina and Bianchello, the only option seems to be to note that the Italian government treats the two grapes as individual cultivars and follow suit.

I was able to find a bottle of the 2008 Capestrano Passerina from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $8.  In the glass this wine was a medium lemon gold color.  The nose was reserved with some lemon peel and fennel bulb aromas.  It was subtle, but the overall sensation from the nose was herbaceous.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity.  There were some ripe apple and lemony citrus flavors along with a stony minerality and a vegetal, herbaceous kind of fennel bulb edge.  The flavors were very subdued and washed out.  This wine was almost certainly past its prime and was mostly just kind of clean and minerally, which isn't always a bad thing, but it really lacked the acidic backbone that it needed to make it refreshing and interesting to drink.  It certainly resembled the Bianchello I tried before, but it's hard to draw any real conclusions from that since the bulk of their similarities have to do with their lack of flavor and interest, which can honestly be said about an awful lot of white wines throughout the world.  I'd be interested to try a DOC version sometime and if I run across any I'll be sure to post any notes here.

Pecorino - Offida, Marche, Italy

Confusion is usually the first thing that people experience when confronted with the Pecorino grape for the first time.  "Isn't Pecorino the name of a cheese?" many ask, and, of course, they're right.  Pecorino Romano is the name of a famous sheep's milk cheese made in the Latium and Sardinia regions of Italy, while the Pecorino we're concerned with here is a grape grown on the other side of the Italian peninsula in the Marche and Abruzzo regions.  One might be inclined to wonder if the grape and the cheese had something in common given their identical names and the answer is, kind of.  Both are derived from the same word, pecora, which means "sheep" in Italian.  Pecorino Romano (and Pecorino Toscana and Pecorino Sardo) is so named because it is a sheep's milk cheese.  The Pecorino grape is so named not because of any kind of direct link to sheep, but because it is said that sheep particularly enjoyed eating the grapes while they were being driven through vineyards from pasture to pasture.

Whether the story of the grape's name is true or not isn't really all that important, but it does give us some idea of how long the Pecorino grape has been around.  Sheep herding is something that is still done, but the kind of pastoral imagery that a story like that conjures up definitely makes me think of a much more distant past.  And while it is true that the grape itself is thought to be very old, wines made from the Pecorino grape date only to about the 1990's.  The story is shockingly similar to the story of the Pugnitello grape from Tuscany, with a slight twist.  While Pugnitello was found just growing in a field somewhere, Pecorino had a bibliographic history that dated back to at least 1871 and so it was known to researchers, but it was feared to be extinct.  Like so many grapes that have teetered on the precipice of extinction, Pecorino is a somewhat stingy yielder and over time many growers abandoned it in favor of more prolific vines like Trebbiano.  Growers make money on volume and Pecorino just wasn't able to sufficiently deliver.

In the early 1980's, a man named Guido Cocci Grifoni was doing research on native grape varieties on the eastern coast of Italy within the Marche region.  Like the researchers in Tuscany who discovered Pugnitello, part of his research was devoted to trying to save heirloom varieties from extinction, but he was also looking for more characterful grapes to make wine from than the local Trebbiano and Malvasia clones.  Rather than starting out by combing the fields, Grifoni and his team started going through the written records for the region and in the course of their research, they discovered the presence of a tiny vineyard on the right bank of the river Tronto which was located 1000 meters above sea level and was owned by an 80 year old man named Mr. Cafani.  Mr. Cafani's vineyard was purported to have a few struggling vines of the old Pecorino variety and when they visited the site in 1982, they took some of these cuttings home with them.

Grifoni grafted the vines onto modern rootstocks and began trying to grow the Pecorino grape in earnest.  The vines didn't give any substantial harvests until the early 1990's, and when they finally started producing usable grapes, Grifoni began experimenting with making wine from those grapes.  Encouraged by his early results, he planted more and more land to Pecorino.  Eventually he was making enough wine to sell, which he began doing in the early 1990's.  Since Pecorino was not an approved grape variety at that time, the first commercial wines featuring the Pecorino grape were sold as vino de tavola, which does not allow any vintage information, grape information or regional information on the front or back labels.  Grifoni campaigned for official recognition and received it in 2001 as Pecorino was finally allowed into the Offida DOC zone, where wines carrying the Offida Pecorino DOC designation must contain at least 85% Pecorino grapes.

Pecorino has roared back from the brink of extinction and is now grown not only in the Marche and Abruzzo, but also in Umbria and Lazio to the west.  It is a fairly thin-skinned grape that performs best at a slight altitude.  The grapes can be naturally quite high in sugar, which may help explain their attractiveness for the wandering sheep, and the wines produced from them are frequently in excess of 13% abv.  Luckily, the grapes are also blessed with naturally high acidity which helps to keep the alcohol in balance.  For those who are curious to learn more (and who can read Italian), somebody wrote a book about Pecorino called La Riscoperta del Pecorino: storia di un vitigno e di un Pecorino, which you can order here.

I was fortunate enough to find and try two different wines made from the Pecorino grape, both of them from the Offida DOC in the Marche.  The first wine I tried was the 2009 Saladini Pilastri Pecorino which I picked up from my friends at Bin Ends for about $13.  In the glass, the wine was a fairly light lemon gold color.  I tried this wine at the shop before I bought it and one of the salespeople there said to me "it tastes just like bananas!" which then promptly got into my head and wouldn't leave.  I gave myself a few months before I opened it at home, but that memory persisted and all I could smell or taste on this wine was bananas.  The nose smelled like bananas.  On the palate, the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acidity and tasted like bananas.  There was also some lemon, green apple and pineapple with a hard, steely kind of minerality to it, but the dominant flavor was still bananas.  Not even like fully ripe bananas either but like Laffy Taffy banana flavored candy, which I really don't enjoy.  I tried leaving my glass on the counter for a few hours but when I came back to it, it still smelled and tasted like bananas.  I read up on the grape to see if this was a common characteristic, and it certainly didn't seem to be, so I set about to track down another bottle for comparison's sake.

The second bottle that I was able to find was the 2009 Tenuta Cocci Grifoni "Colle Vecchio" Pecorino which I also picked up from my friends at Bin Ends for about $14.  This is the winery owned by Guido Cocci Grifoni who was responsible for discovering the Pecorino grape in the first place.  This wine is made from some of the original grafted vines and probably contains the oldest vine Pecorino juice available today.  If any winery could be said to make the benchmark Pecorino, surely this would be it.  The first bottle I bought was disappointingly corked, but Bin Ends replaced the bottle and the second was much better.  In the glass the wine was a pale silvery lemon color.  The nose was fairly reserved with some white pear and green apple.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of bright green apple, lemon peel and a lot of ripe, juicy pear.  The wine finished with a kind of chalky minerality.  It's not an assertively flavored wine, but it is well balanced and refreshing.  Fans of high acid whites should find a lot to like about Pecorino.

Bianchello del Matauro - Marche, Italy

For some reason, the Marche region of Italy keeps popping up around here. It's not a particularly prolific region, but I am continually finding oddities from there on the shelves at my favorite local shops. Today's wine is Bianchello del Matauro, a white wine made from the Bianchello grape in the valley surrounding the Matauro stream in the northern portion of the Marche. The wine history here goes back a long ways. There's a story about a battle by the Matauro stream where the Roman army defeated and turned back a Carthaginian force led by Hannibal's brother Hasdrubal. As the legend has it, the Roman army's triumph was inspired by their copious consumption of Bianchello wine prior to the battle (which is strikingly similar to the tale about Bull's Blood).

The grape goes by several different names. Biancame is the most common synonym, though Bianuccio and Greco Bianchello also are used (it is thought that Bianchello might be a clonal variant of the Greco grape). One source seems to think that Bianchello is the same grape as Ugni Blanc/Trebbiano Toscana, which is the grape most famous for being the base of Cognac. I do not find this information duplicated anywhere else, so I'm wary about the claim and will doubt it until I see corroboration from somewhere else. In any case, Bianchello is thought to be native to Italy and has a history dating back to at least 500 BC. The Bianchello del Matauro region was one of the regions inaugurated into the first DOC classification undertaken in Italy in 1969.

And, that's about it. There isn't a lot of information out there about this grape, it seems. I was able to pick up a bottle of the Fiorini "Tenuta Campioli" bottling from 2008 for about $14.50 from my friends at Bin Ends. The Fiorini website says that they produce about 70,000 bottles (less than 6,000 cases) of this per year and that the wines are sourced from 100-year old vines. It is typically advised that one should drink this within one year of the vintage, but it seems like Fiorini has tried to create a wine with the structure to age a bit. In the glass, the was a pale straw color and brilliantly clear. The nose was a bit reserved, with some crisp pear aromas. It was pretty full bodied with a thick, creamy texture in the mouth and medium acidity. There were some creamy pear flavors, but that was about it for the fruit. This wine was all about steely minerality, which was very surprising to me given how heavy it felt on the palate. Usually all that weight carries a bigger fruit load, but this was definitely more clean and fresh on the palate. My guess is that this wine was a little past its prime and had lost a good portion of its fruit content. It was certainly enjoyable as it was, but some fresh fruit flavors could have really put it over the top. It may be pretty difficult to find this in the US within a year of the vintage, but if you do, I'd recommend that you go for it and take a chance.

Sparkling Verdicchio - Marche, Italy

It can be difficult, at times, to decide what exactly constitutes a "fringe wine." There are definitely no-brainers on each side of the line: it's highly unlikely that Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay will ever find a home on this site, while grapes like Rkatsiteli and Grignolino are obvious candidates. Verdicchio falls into a grey zone for me. It is geographically limited to a small region, but that region is able to pump out a relatively high volume of wine. In that respect, it resembles Garganega (Soave), a grape I probably will not write about due to its high production volume and ubiquity. I was leaning towards excluding it until I came across a sparkling version.

Verdicchio is widely grown in the Marche region of Italy on the eastern coast (we've paid a brief visit to Marche here before). The most prolific zone for Verdicchio production is the DOC Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi which is responsible for one-half of all DOC production in the Marche region. For many years, Verdicchio from the Marche was a mass-market item, creating thin, oxidized wines due to over-cropping and poor winery management. Several decades ago, Verdicchio had much the same reputation as modern day Pinot Grigio or mass market Soave wines. There has been more of a concentration on quality from many producers, though, and as a result, the wines from this region have been steadily improving.

The grape itself is thought to be native to the Marche region. As you can see from the picture above, the grapes are very green, or verde in Italian, and this coloration provides the root for the name Verdicchio. It appears to be related to Greco and also several different subtypes of Trebbiano. It is late-ripening and a prolific yielder, requiring a diligent, heavy hand in the vineyards to prune excess grapes during the summer months. It is also naturally very high in acidity, a trait that lends itself very well to sparkling wine production.

Sparkling wine production in the Marche dates back to the 19th century where spumanti made from Verdicchio grapes were among the first sparkling wines produced in all of Italy. Sparkling Verdicchio is not uncommon within the Marche region, but it is unusual to find a bottle landing stateside, as very little of the production is exported to the US. I was able to find a bottle from Fontezoppa called Voile Blanche Brut for about $12 from my friends at Bin Ends (like many sparkling wines, this was a non-vintage bottling though their website indicates the most recent bottling is a 2009). In the glass the wine was a pale, silvery straw color with a steady bead. The nose was fairly neutral with some crisp apple and baked pear notes. This wine was vinified using the Charmat method, so there wasn't any of that toasty yeastiness like you might get in a Champagne. In the mouth, the wine was medium bodied high acid and a soft and creamy mousse. There were green apples, bitter almonds and a kind of herbaceousness lingering around. The finish is clean and a little minerally. This is more Cava than Champagne and makes for a nice refreshing drink either as an aperitif or as an accompaniment to lighter seafood dishes.

Lacrima di Morro d'Alba - Marche, Italy

Italy has proven to be very fertile ground for this blog. Sure, most Italian wines you find in your local shop or at your local supermarket probably feature Sangiovese or Nebbiolo or one of the "international" varietals, but if you do a little digging, you'll start to find that there is a staggering range of wines coming from areas of Italy outside of Tuscany and Piemonte. There are an estimated 800 distinct grape varieties found in Italy, half of which have been authorized for planting by Italy's Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. 400 grape varieties authorized for use in Italy, with another 400 possibly sneaking in in some blends. Most of those grapes are grown only in a very small region of Italy and nowhere else in the world (much like Sagrantino and the small Umbrian village of Montefalco). I could have focused this blog exclusively on Italian wines and probably had enough to material to last a few years.

Today's grape is Lacrima, or, more specifically, Lacrima di Morro. There is also a grape called Lacrima Nera, which is better known as Gaglioppo, and there is a white wine made in southern Italy called Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio which will be reviewed in a separate post. I have read differing accounts of how the grape got its name. Some sources say it is because the shape of the grape clusters resemble tears (Lacrima is the Latin word for "tears"), but I'm not sure I buy that. All of the pictures of Lacrima grapes I've seen look very similar to any other grape cluster. Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch, in their Vino Italiano, give a more plausible explanation. They say that the grape's skin has a tendency to rupture easily which causes juice to weep out of the grapes and onto the bunch.

In any case, Lacrima di Morro is grown in the Marche region of Italy. The Marche is on the eastern coast of Italy, immediately east of Umbria and between Emilia-Romagna and Abruzzo going from north to south. Morro d'Alba is the name of the village where Lacrima is grown, and it is just due west of the port city of Ancona. The region is perhaps best known for its white wines made from the Verdicchio grape, though there are also red wines made from the ubiquitous Sangiovese and Montepulciano. The DOC regulations stipulate that up to 20% of the blend for Lacrima di Morro d'Alba can be made up of Montepulciano or Verdicchio grapes, though most producers make 100% varietal wines. During the wine making process, dried grapes are added after the first racking in a fashion similar to the ripasso wines made in Valpolicella.

I recently picked up a bottle of the 2007 Conti di Buscareto Lacrima from Bin Ends for about $15. The wine has a dark, opaque center that is bright purple at the rim. It is inky and intensely saturated. On the nose, it smelled like roses...like a huge room full of roses...like a rose garden hermetically sealed in a room with rose potpourri. There was also some boysenberry jam fruit, but the overwhelming sensation was floral. The wine is full bodied with kind of a thick texture, nice acid and firm but soft tannins. Right out of the bottle, it tasted kind of hollow...all structure with no fruit. After I let it breathe for a bit, though, it filled out. A cautionary tale lurks here: don't rush to judgment about wine after your first few minutes with it; give it some time to fully express itself. There were lots of purple fruits and flowers and not much else. I have in my notes that it tastes like a rosebud dipped in boysenberry jam. Even a few weeks removed from having tasted this wine, all I can really remember about it was the overwhelming sensation of roses. If you're a fan of flowery smells and flavors in your wine, Lacrima may be your new favorite thing. While I found it interesting and enjoyable at times, it was a bit too one-dimensional for my taste and definitely started to wear out its welcome somewhere in the second glass. I have a very hard time trying to think about what kind of food this might go with. Maybe something that smells awful so you can at least use your glass as a kind of air freshener? It would be a good Valentine's Day wine for people that really love roses, I suppose, so maybe chocolate might be interesting here. If anyone has any favorite pairing with this wine, please let me know, as I'd be very curious to hear how this wine worked with different foods.

***UPDATE***

I was able to find a bottle of sparkling Lacrima, and have recently had a chance to try it.  I picked up a bottle of the NV Conti di Buscareto Rosé Brut from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $23.  The wine is 100% Lacrima Nera from the same producer and vineyards as the bottling above.  In the glass, the wine was a pale salmon pink color.  The nose was nicely aromatic with candied strawberry and red berry fruits with a bit of bread dough and toast and just a touch of something floral.  On the palate, the wine was light bodied with high acidty and creamy bubbles.  There were flavors of strawberries and red berry fruit with pastry crust and yeasty bread dough.  It was pretty typical for a traditional method sparkler, but had nice, accessible fruit flavors to go along with the bready, yeasty secondary flavor and aroma characteristics of most sparklers. It wasn't as aggressively floral as the red table wine was, which was really to its benefit here.  It also came in a really cool tear-drop shaped bottle which was visually very appealing.  For only $23, this was a very good value sparkling wine that would match up with any number of foods.  I had it with a seared duck breast and the acid and fruit were very good foils for the richness of the duck.  Those looking for a fun and unusual New Year's Eve sparkler will find a lot to like here as well.