Robert V. Camuto's Blog, page 5
March 17, 2023
Q: Do you know Suavia?
March 18, 2023
Q: Do you know Suavia?
You should!
I’ve been super negligent in keeping up with the Internet, while I have been living in the present in these last 10 days in Northern California.
Torrential rains, wind, flooded vineyards, and blah blah blah…followed by a couple of gorgeous cloudless days.
I have been loving some great niche wines — Vermentino (Steve Matthiasson), Nebbiolo and Barbera (Idlewild) and my personal greatest discovery these delicious old vineyard field blends from across the state by the likes of Turley and Bedrock Cellars. A big asterisk for the wacky home-feel wines of Jupiter winery. More tk.
Cabernet Sauvignon still keeps a lot of lights lit here, but there is so much more interesting going on.
I’m on my way back to Verona, where before I left I met and wrote about the Tessari sisters of Suavia. If you don’t know the wines, get drinking. These are some of the most precise wines from one of the best-researched and focused Italian wineries I’ve encountered in a while.
See my latest Robert Camuto Meets… at winespectator.com
The Tessari Sisters of Suavia from left Meri, Valentina and Alessandra
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March 6, 2023
Alt. Barolo anyone?
March 7, 2023
Alt. Barolo anyone?
A winemaking journey through time and bubbles
I’ve spent the last few days in a Florida beach community visiting family in a place where wine shopping is a bit different.
Trying to buy a bottle of Italian red at the local wine and liquor store to bring to my Sicilian nonagenarian uncle, was eye opening. When I asked the shopkeeper, where to find Italian wines, she pointed to some racks dominated by California and Australian reds.
She was friendly allright in a laid-back “Five O’clock Somewhere” way but I don’t think she knew the difference between Coppola (as in Francis Ford) and Chianti Classico. Or cared to. After that I headed to the local Publix supermarket where the choice was better.
Small brands and niche wines don’t make it to these sandy outposts.
Giuseppe Vaira, of Barolo's star G.D. Vajra tastes vintages of his alt_Nebbiolo inspired by the writings of Thomas Jefferson and other antique texts.
It all underlined once again what a rarified world we wine nerds live in.
Speaking of nerdy niche wines, my current Robert Camuto Meets… column discusses an intriguing Piedmont one-of-a-kind Nebbiolo from the Barolo-zone’s G.D. Vajra.
Called Claré J.C., it’s the brainchild of familial winemaker Giuseppe Vaira who’s worked to create a wine based on antique recipes and descriptions including one by Thomas Jefferson “about as sweet as the silky Madeira, as astringent on the palate as Bordeaux, and as brisk as Champagne.”
The wine is light in color and weight with a hint of wild rusticity and a bit of fizz. It’s also pretty easy drinking and tends to disappear fast – especially when served chilled in warm weather… like, say, at the beach.
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February 8, 2023
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
February 8, 2023
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Romeo, Juliet and Valpolicella
Month after month, year after year in Verona, I watch the tourist hoards come to visit the fictional but now iconic “Juliet’s House.”
Thanks to Shakespeare’s setting of “Romeo and Juliet,” Verona has become some 400 years later “The City of Love.” And, unsurprisingly, the area’s Valpolicella wine industry (which includes Amarone) has often been keen to sell their goods as a sort of love nectar.The ironies here abound.
First off, R&J was never a story about love, but about the hatred among local families that stamped on those feelings and drove teenagers to suicide. Italians are not known as a font of love-thy-neighbor, but in Verona the feuds among families (and wine families) persist. In my experience, Sicilians cooperate far more for their common objective of improving quality and selling wines than the hard-headed more affluent Veronese.
Members of a group of young Valpo producers (From left to right:) Giovanni Éderle, Davide Manara of Manara, Nicola Perusi of Mizzon, Piergiovanni Ferrarese of Villa Spinosa, Sofia Arduini of Luciano Arduini, Emma Campagnola of San Rustico, Noemi Pizzighella of Le Guaite di Noemi, and Paolo Creazzi of Cà dei Maghi.
So, this winter my heart was warmed to learn about a group of young producers named by the local wine consortium to work together towards their common future.
There’s a lot to do – Valpolicella wines have a lot to go to reach their potential and reflect the varied landscapes of this dramatic growing area.
For more on Romeo, Juliet, Valpolicella and the new generation, read the latest Robert Camuto Meets… (free) at www.winespectator.com
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January 19, 2023
Running the Light Red
January 19, 2023
Running the Light Red
Grignolino is a food-friendly Piedmont red coming back into appreciation
Not long ago, in a time when most red wines were closer to red than deep purple, Grignolino was the wine drunk at table in the Piedmont – finished off at the end of the meal by a glass of Barolo.
Now, as winelovers seek out lighter, easier-drinking reds Grignolino is in comeback mode. In early winter I visited one of my favorite Grignolino producers Olim Bauda to sip and discuss.
Read the latest Robert Camuto Meets….(free) at winespectator.com
Dino Bertolino (left) tastes Grignolino with brother Gianni at their Olim Bauda winery
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January 9, 2023
Listen up!
January 10, 2023
Listen up!
South of Somewhere comes to audible
I know. I know.
Who has time to read anymore? Especially with the hours in a day consumed by our devices. Just texting, posting on social media, listening to podcasts and watching videos can be a full-time distraction.
I get it — in fact I get it so much, that South of Somewhere has just been released as an audio book on Audible. So now you can free your leaven your commute or relax to the soothing sounds of a professional reading this critically acclaimed work on Southern Italian wines, food and soul.
The audible version is a collaboration with Alan Reinhardt, a pro with a smooth and precise voice, who happens to work a day job at San Francisco’s Biondivino wine shop specialized in small producer wines from Italy. Alan is passionate about many of the things I love : wine, Italy and books. He gets all of it and he reads it aloud better than I can.
Sample and listen to South of Somewhere today at audible.com
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January 5, 2023
The Viking’s last chapter in Sicily
January 5, 2023
The Viking’s last chapter in Sicily
Peter Vinding-Diers should be richer and more famous. I met this Danish wine icon on his remote Sicilian estate.
I’m happy to start off the new year with a telling of one of my more inspiring encounters of 2022.
It’s about the Danish winemaker Peter Vinding-Diers, who at 79 has led one of the wine world’s most fascinating and romantic lives. From South Africa to Bordeaux and South America to Eastern Europe, the self-taught Vinding-Diers has left a lasting legacy in the places he’s worked and the people he’s worked with.
Vinding-Diers and wife, Susie, in their barrel room
He was a pioneer for the use of native yeasts in Bordeaux in the early 1980s and helped lead a renaissance of sweet Tokaji in post-communist Hungary with then business partner, the British wine author Hugh Johnson. He has also inspired a new generation of like-minded Danes including his sons Anders and Hans, the latter of Argentina’s classic Bodega Noemia de Patagonia and his nephew Peter Sisseck founder of Spain’s Dominio de Pingus.
Vinding-Diers has spent his last decades with on a remote hilltop of southeastern Sicily where he lives and makes Syrah with his wife, Susie.
“I was dying to get my hands dirty again,” he says.
“I didn’t have a penny then and I still don’t have a penny,” he adds, bouncing through vineyards of his Montecorrubo estate in his dusty Land Rover Defender. “Everything goes into the farm.”
Vinding-Diers, author of his memoir “A Viking in the Vineyards,” should be richer and more famous than he is. He deserves to be known to anyone with an interest in wine.
To learn more, read the complete Robert Camuto Meets… (free) at winespectator.com
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December 21, 2022
Urban Holiday Wine Stress
December 21, 2022
Urban Holiday Wine Stress
Do you suffer from U.H.W.S.? Take heart.
When it comes to the end of the year, Italians do stress. But not in the way Americans do. Italians have this thing about finishing all the stuff they’ve been procrastinating on throughout the year by the self-imposed deadline followed by at least two weeks of vacation.
Electricians, business people, artisans, and maybe even writers, just have to clean the slate before they partake in the collective carb-coma of days of Mamma’s pasta and Panettone.
This year Italians are also stressing about paying their heating bills in this war-price era. But they don’t stress about the holiday itself: what gifts to get, what to cook, and certainly not what wine to serve or bring to a holiday dinner.
When it comes to the festivities, choices are simplified. Italians eat local traditional dishes and drink the local wines. (As with Italian grammar there are always exceptions). At Christmas they break out the good stuff – a bottle of an aged Riserva (or in the case of Verona Amarone, and its sweet forefather Recioto). Of course they drink bubbles – spumante, prosecco, Lambrusco, etc., and those who can afford it drink Italy’s most universally beloved wine: Champagne.
This week my wife and I are travelling to New York for family gatherings, and I can sense already that in the first post-Covid season, Holiday Stress (New York style) is back!
Thus the urgent calls from Mom and Sis about what wines to get for Christmas dinner.
Wine stress in a place like New York (big urban center far from vineyards) stems from two things: a glut of choice in this golden age of wine, and a wrongheaded 21st century taste tribalism that’s developed in places where being on trend or avoiding faux pas is primary
Don’t sweat it. Have a great holiday, and see and share my tale of Urban Wine Stress, in the latest Robert Camuto Meets…(free) at winespectator.com
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December 10, 2022
Meaningful Prosecco?
December 10, 2022
Meaningful Prosecco ?
A new generation from Northern Italy returns the popular fizz to its roots
There is Prosecco and there is Prosecco.
Most Prosecco – the most produced sparkling wine in the world from a vast swath of northern Italy – is anonymous stuff serving as a cheaper-than-Champagne substitute.
But there is some delicious mostly small-production Prosecco with lots of character coming from the Prosecco hills around Valdobbiadene.
Matteo Bisol (right) with fellow Col Fondo peers Christian Zago (center) and Martino Tormena (left)
A new generation from those prime terroirs is working to bring back an artisanal style of col fondo Prosecco – refermented in bottle (with a rustic layer of yeast at the bottom) – that were before the 21st century the local standard.
One of the champions of the deeper colored and flavored style is Matteo Bisol, scion of a Prosecco-pioneering family.
In my latest Robert Camuto Meets… column at winespectator.com, Bisol and a pair of his contemporaries explain how their goal to make Prosecco for winelovers, or “Prosecco for the five percent.”
While col fondo style is hip, it represents less than 1 percent of the global Prosecco market. And, because of Prosecco appellation rules over things like the use of crown caps, most of it can’t even be labelled Prosecco. So, it’s being poured in wine bars in Milan, Paris and New York under other names.
See and share the latest Robert Camuto Meets…(free) at winespectator.com
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November 30, 2022
Nobility, Crime and a Great Little Pizza Wine
November 28, 2022
Nobility, Crime and a Great Little Pizza Wine
On Campania’s endangered monster vines
I love Campania for lots of things including its often-hidden beauties.
In this, Caserta province runs a close second to its neighboring Naples. Behind all Caserta’s historical monuments and crime scandals are some of Italy’s best buffalo mozzarella, pizza and southern signature wines.
In the dense, damp lowlands straddling the Naples/Caserta border, for instance, is an historic but almost forgotten delicious, light sparkling wine, Asprinio – cultivated on monster vines that climb up to 40-feet tall attached to poplar trees.
Winemaker Luca Paparelli harvesting Asprinio
The French writer Alexandre Dumas (The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo) called it the perfect pizza wine two centuries ago. Now, burdened by the expenses of cultivation and the low prices it fetches on the market, Asprinio is endangered.
Which is really too bad for a wine of such elegance, cheer, and (low-alcohol) lift. Thankfully, Asprinio does still exist and can be found – though it’s more difficult outside Naples.
Please listen up! There is a big opportunity here I think for some enlightened importers.
Find out more in my latest Robert Camuto Meets….column (free) at winespectator.com
Italy’s “Great Little” Pizza Wine : Asprinio
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November 18, 2022
Going Deeper Into the South
November 18, 2022
Going Deeper Into the South
From Taormina Gourmet to Campania’s Fiano maestro Roberto di Meo
As late fall pushes into winter in northern Italy – the creeping fog, the interiors chilled by wartime fuel prices and warmed by plates of ravioli or pumpkin tortelloni – it is hard to imagine that about three weeks ago I was swimming in the Ionian Sea at 9 a.m. off Taormina.
I was in Sicily for Taormina Gourmet, Chronache di Gusto’s all-things-Italian-food-and-wine conference and fair where among other things I led a masterclass on the renaissance of Southern wines from my book South of Somewhere: Wine, Food and the Soul of Italy (aka in Italian: Altrove a Sud).
What a soul filling joy to climb up down and up those Taormina cliffs in the morning, to dine al fresco with friends from the Italian wine world in the evening, and to slurp almond granitas at the Bam Bar during afternoon breaks.
This late summer and fall I spent a good amount of time south of Rome going deeper into southern terroirs, and in Campania I had the pleasure to spend a morning with Roberto di Meo – a true southern gentleman and eccentric who pushes the aging of his expressive Fianos and other white wines to the limit.
Di Meo holds up a vat sample of a 1993 Fiano that has yet to be released after nearly 30 years
How much age are we talking about?
This year he released his 2013 Erminia Di Meo Fiano di Avellini, while its 1993 version remains in tank in cellar not yet ready for release according to Di Meo who adds: “It was a beautiful year!”
Whites are Italian wines’ secret weapon with a lot left to be discovered. Fiano for me is the quintessential southern white with depth and layers that only reveal themselves with time – like the south itself. Di Meo is taking it to the limit.
Read the full Robert Camuto Meets… column on Di Meo at winespectator.com.
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