Barolo and Barbaresco Reference Tools

Not to beat a cavallo morto but I'm guessing at least a few folks out there are as enamored with — and interested in learning as much as possible about — the wines of Piedmont, and in particular the Langhe, as am I. Following in the wake of my last two posts, which each touched on the wines and nomenclature of a particular vineyard in the township of Serralunga d'Alba, I thought I'd share with you a couple of the resources I find most valuable when researching the wines, wineries and vineyards of the Langhe.

Those who have been reading here for quite a while (and who are in possession of elephantine memories) may recall a short review that I published back in early 2009, when I was hosting "A Passion for Piedmont," a monthly installment of the now apparently defunct meme called Wine Blogging Wednesday. Here's what I penned at the time:

"When it comes to learning about Piedmont wines, Slow Food Editore’s A Wine Atlas of the Langhe: The Great Barolo and Barbaresco Vineyards is a fantastic resource. It’s not exhaustive, by any means, as it jumps straight to the top of the heap, focusing entirely on the Nebbiolo-based wines of Barolo and Barbaresco. More importantly, it focuses on the great vineyards of the two zones and includes in-depth information about the best and most storied producers in each locale, along with excellent photography and useful maps and statistical data."

With one minor exception (which I'll address later), I stand by those words. A Wine Atlas of the Langhe remains one of my go-to reference tools for the Barolo and Barbaresco zones. The book opens with chapters that cover the history of the Nebbiolo vine as well as of the viticultural practices traditional to and required in both Barolo and Barbaresco. From there, the atlas is divided into geographical sections, one for each of the townships or municipalities that make up the overall B&B zones.

Within each section, you'll find an overview of the history of the commune, viticultural statistics, a map of the primary vineyards and, most importantly, a reasonably detailed description, including recommended producers, of each of the named vineyards within the village. At the end of each chapter are short biographical entries regarding "The Greats of Barolo/Barbaresco," iconic producers such as Giulio Mascarello (Bartolo's father), Renato Ratti, Giacomo Conterno... the list goes on. High quality photographs, topical sidebars and points of interest for visitors to the region are peppered throughout.

Originally published in Italian in 2000 as Atlante delle vigne di Langa, then translated and issued English in 2002, there have of course been some minor changes to the statistical information such as acreage devoted to particular vines, but that's a minor quibble. The book remains relevant and a very well written guide. The only revision I'd make to my original assessment is relative to the maps, which, though still useful, are in retrospect somewhat crude and difficult to read. Which leads me to my other recommendation....

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For great maps, one need look no further than the incredible works of Alessandro Masnaghetti. Alessandro's I Cru di Enogea maps are relatively new to me. I first encountered them within a day or two of first meeting the man responsible for them, during my spring trip to Alba for Nebbiolo Prima. He's been working on them, though, since 2006 and they are clearly a labor of love. Not books but rather fold-out maps, each measures roughly 23" x 33" at full spread and folds to the size of a standard European sheet of paper.

On the A-side of each is a highly detailed, easy to read map, color-coded to identify each major vineyard and with a numeric key that indicates the location of the wineries within the covered commune. I've borrowed an image of one of the maps (below) to give you an idea of what to expect, but as with all good maps the true pleasure is in holding them in your hands, turning them to get your bearings.... All you map lovers out there will know what I'm talking about.

Image courtesy of Enogea.

On the B-side of each map is an equally intricate text-based description of the overall commune in question, followed by in-depth details of each vineyard site, including information such as altitude, exposure, primary varieties cultivated and key bottlings produced, as well as small, black and white maps that delineate the ownership of plots within each cru. There are even Google Earth coordinates included for each vineyard, should you wish to get a satellite's eye view of any particular site.

At present, Signor Masnaghetti has eight maps in production for the Langa: five for Barolo (Serralunga d'Alba, Monforte d'Alba, Castiglione Falletto, Barolo/Novello, and the newest, La Morra/Roddi/Cherasco) and three for Barbaresco (Barbaresco, Neive, and Treiso/Alba). He's also produced maps of the same ilk covering Chianti Classico, Bolgheri and the Alto Adige. Something tells me there will be more to come. Though originally published in Italian, all are available in English, translated by Daniel Thomases.

Masnaghetti's maps are not currently available through Amazon, so I can't provide you with a nifty little link for your insta-shopping pleasure; however, many of them are available here in the US via The Rare Wine Company or from K&L Wine Merchants (search: Masnaghetti). Given the quality of the work that went into them, they're a steal at about $9/per. For any fan or budding scholar of the wines of the Langa, consider them required reference material.

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Questioning Taste

Seemingly conceived as a rags-to-riches story, "Taste: A Life in Wine" is Anthony Terlato's autobiographical chronicle of his life's work, from his childhood days in Brooklyn to his current position as an American wine industry magnate. Though I expect the publisher has targeted Mr. Terlato's work for the wine and food shelves at your local bookseller, it would actually be more appropriately placed in the motivational business section, under the subheading of: "Here's how I made my millions; maybe you can do it too."

"Taste" follows Terlato from his early work within his family's retail and local distribution businesses through an ever-increasing entrepreneurial arc of growth as he builds hugely successful brands such as Corvo and, later, Santa Margherita. Yep, he's the man responsible for the Pinot Grigio-zation of America.

Occasionally, Mr. Terlato delves into wine itself as a primary context, as in the following passage:

"It was not until a producer with the stature and marketing clout of Antinori defied the DOC Chianti regulations with his 1971 Tignanello (not released until 1978) that the Super-Tuscan wines gained critical mass. By the early 1980s, scores of other notable Chianti producers began releasing élite reds. These wines were so impressive that the humble designation vino da tavola became a badge of honor for Italian wines."

More often, though, wine serves simply as subtext for stories of the author's successes and exploits: dinners with the Mondavi family; meetings with the reclusive Gallos, with Paul Bocuse and Alexis Lichine; using 1947 Cheval Blanc to make a pan sauce... the list goes on.

I was happily surprised to find the author sharing one of my own approaches to the subjective magic of pairing food and wine: "There is a natural harmony between wines from a particular region and dishes made with vegetables and meat that are cultivated nearby." It's his take on the old "what grows together goes together" adage. Sadly, it's undermined by the recipes that serve as chapter breaks in Terlato's work. Included, it would seem, to add a dash of hominess and true, personal nuance to the book, those intentions and Terlato's words are undermined by the wine pairing suggestions, all of which are items found in Terlato's own business portfolio.

All in all, "Taste" is an easy, relatively breezy read. For those with an interest in the formative stages of the modern American wine market, the book may prove to hold some interest. For those with a personal connection to Mr. Terlato himself, the book may prove a real pleasure. For those approaching the book with an expectation that it may actually be about wine, however, the book is more likely to prove a rather self-indulgent recounting of one man's rise to fame and success, with wine simply serving as the widget of choice.

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Disclosure: An advance readers copy of "Taste" was provided at no cost to me by Agate Publishing. Should you wish to purchase your own copy, here's my own little stab at entrepreneurialism to make it easy.

Terlato, Anthony, "Taste: A Life in Wine," Surrey Books, Agate Publishing, 2008.



In related news:
I chose the passage regarding Tignanello over a handful of others that might have been appropriate in homage to yesterday's probing post by Brooklynguy and the "emergency" response from Do Bianchi, both of which address Tignanello and the Super-Tuscan genre. Well timed, gentlemen.

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Corkscrewed Reviewed

“A good wine is a wine you find to be good. A great wine is a wine that you remember. As for all the rest… all the rest is literature.”

Though the words above were uttered by Côte-Rôtie producer Gilles Barge, their inclusion in Robert Camuto’s new book, Corkscrewed, serves a solid turn as metaphor for the spirit encapsulated in Camuto’s work.

Part memoir, part travelogue, Corkscrewed leads us not through tales of the good or great wines the author has drunk nor, for the most part, through trips to storied estates. Instead, Mr. Camuto takes us on a journey of the paths less traveled in French wine country. Along the way he spends time with struggling independent vignerons and contemplates the future of obscure vines, while the contemporary culture clash in the world of French wine takes center stage. What we read about are the moments and people, not just the wines, that struck a chord deep enough to take root in his memory. And the book’s style, literary as it is, puts a positive spin on the closing of Monsieur Barge’s quote.

Mr. Camuto paints a picture of French wine culture not dissimilar from that depicted in the film Mondovino, contrasting the spirit of the independent vigneron with the machinations of the “big” wine industry. His journey begins in the sleek, competitive wine scene of Bordeaux, but quickly follows the first of his many subjects, François des Ligneris, from his estate in Saint-Émilion to what’s clearly the winemaker’s greater passion, a property in the Corbières. From that point on, Camuto doesn’t look back. He spends the remainder of the book traversing the rural wine villages of the South and Southwest of France, with brief sojourns to Alsace, Burgundy and the Loire, focusing along the way on the challenges inherent to the rustic lifestyle associated with growing wine in the French countryside. Though Camuto’s overall conclusions are fairly similar to those drawn in Mondovino, his overall tone is thankfully far less cruel. His villains are less caricatured, less demonized, and his heroes are painted with warm strokes, yet broadly enough to let their character show through, warts and all.

Corkscrewed is not without its own warts. Camuto sometimes plays coy as to his own experiences and opinions, opting instead to let his characters do the damning where damning seems due. In one passage from the chapter “Drinking with Uncle Jacques,” Camuto utters a simple, hedonistic “mmmmm” in response to a vintage Maury poured at Mas Amiel in the Côtes du Roussillon. It’s Uncle Jacques, one of the author’s more colorful protagonists, who quickly lays down the dirt on the wines at Mas Amiel: “They are too much, too fruity, too caramel, too sugary…. It was like you took a prune, put a piece of caramel on it and ate it…. I tell you, it was something else, syrup maybe. But it was not wine!”

After spending the bulk of the book championing the unsung heroes of the French wine countryside, the chapter dedicated to Nicolas Joly – owner of the famous Coulée de Serrant in Savennières and great campaigner for the biodynamie movement – comes across as surprisingly requisite. On a more personal level, I’m irked by the demonization of a cyclist, dressed in lycra and pedaling furiously through the Ardèche countryside. I’d like to be cycling through the Ardèche myself, and I certainly wouldn’t be doing it on an old single speed bike with a baguette in the basket. But Camuto puts the image to apt use, contrasting the old school, slow and steady lifestyle of the struggling vigneron with the invasion of the modern, the incursion of the fast and an unwillingness to stop and experience the native pleasures of place.

Whatever quibbles I may have found with Corkscrewed, they are clearly outweighed by its merits. Mr. Camuto’s writing is precise, entertaining and compelling enough that it should appeal to audiences beyond the normally narrow scope reached by wine books. It reads very much like a collection of short stories that come together to form what is essentially a non-fiction novel. It travels a road that I’d very much like to follow. The individual stories alone are very much worth the price of admission. The fact that they come together to form a much greater whole makes Corkscrewed a rare gem in the field of wine literature and a highly recommended read.

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Wine Book Club #1: Vino Italiano – The Regional Wines of Italy

First published in hardback in 2002, followed by a revised and updated soft cover edition in 2005, Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy, by Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch, has quickly become fairly widely regarded as the new core text on Italian wine. For me, it takes over that crown, though with less technical detail and clarity, from Burton Anderson’s now out of print (and very expensive) The Wine Atlas of Italy. It also borrows on the personal, subjective charms of Victor Hazan’s classic (and inexplicably inexpensive) Italian Wine. It does both while also filling all of the expected roles of a survey book – for that’s essentially what it is – and establishing its own peculiar sense of objectivity.


One of the primary reasons I jumped at the chance to host this first edition of the Wine Book Club is that I wanted to push myself to break my own preconceptions. Frankly, I was predisposed to dislike the book. A copy had been sitting at the ready in the staff library where I work since just after its original publication. And while I’d picked it up for specific reference purposes on multiple occasions, I’d never had the urge to read it cover to cover. Or perhaps more accurately, I’d been disinclined to read it cover to cover. Why? Not for any rationally substantive reason; more based on a gut, intuitive reaction. Something about the tome’s authorship, really just the Bastianich half of it, turned me off. Why is a guy who owns a wine shop and has controlling interest in two wineries, whose mother is a world famous celebrity chef, and whose business partner is arguably an even more famous chef, bothering to write a wine book? Actually, the “Why bother?” made sense. It was the “Why should I read it?” part of the equation that didn’t click. I want my wine book authors to have subjective opinions; I just don’t want them to be clouded by their business relationships.

As it turns out, it’s that certain insider’s perspective that – though it has some shortcomings – makes the book not only good but worth a spot on any Italian wine lover’s bookshelf. At the book’s core is a region-by-region summary of the Italian wine scene, with every regional chapter broken into subsections on sparkling, white, red and dessert wines. Each leads off with a rudimentary map and gets the ball rolling with an anecdotal passage involving players in the local food or wine scene. That lattermost aspect lends a personal touch that helps make the book more engaging than a more typically textbook or atlas driven approach. A look, for instance, into the culture of artisanal vinegar production in Emilia-Romagna is treated with as much if not more technical depth than most of the wine-specific sections.

Occasionally though, the approach wanders a little too closely for comfort into the realm of namedropping; I sometimes found myself struggling to keep track of who’s who. A sub-headed section of the “who’s who” in each region would have gone a long way toward correcting that shortcoming, adding more value within the region-specific context of each chapter than it does in the purely alphabetic form chosen for the appendix of producers.

This brings me to one of the questions I posed in a Wine Book Club reminder about a month ago: If you were sitting behind the editor’s desk at Clarkson Potter, what, if anything, would you have changed about the book’s overall format, tone or style?

Given the scale and scope of Vino Italiano, its overall impact is actually quite impressive. I think it could have been significantly strengthened with the addition of more detailed and more regularly interspersed maps as well as by a stronger use of photography. Too often, attempts are made to convey richly visual and geographic information using words alone. While the power of the pen is great – yes, I’m going to use a cliché – sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. The pictures that are interspersed throughout the book seem geared more toward establishing a vaguely artsy/folksy sensibility than to actually supporting the content. Photos of some of the producers and vineyard areas being discussed would have gone a long way to anchoring them in the reader’s mind. Likewise, more detailed maps might have gone a long way to alleviating some of the confusion that’s common when trying to understand the orientation of a place one may never have visited. The $10-ish price increase these additions may have necessitated could easily have been borne as justified by all but the most frugal book buyers.

I’d also like to have a clearer sense of which author’s voice I’m reading at any given time. Given Mr. Lynch’s background as a writer for Wine & Spirits, as well as other food and wine periodicals, I’m inclined to think that he is the primary author. Yet there’s no clear indication that that is actually the case. I’d also like to have seen a clearer expression of opinion, a more subjective approach if you will, though that would clearly have made the book less broad and centrist in its appeal. In any event, as much as I want to dislike the authors’ embrasure of the increasing encroachment of international grape varieties, the growing importance of modernistic approaches in the winery and the prevalence of rich, heady wines in the bottle, I can’t help but respect the level handedness with which these controversial topics are addressed.

As to my other questions:

• Has your general understanding of Italian wine grown through the experience of reading this text?
  
• Is there a wine region, particularly one that was previously relatively unfamiliar to you, that the book has inspired you to learn more about?

I think that Vino Italiano is an indispensable resource in building understanding and knowledge of Italian wine. Though I’ve read it cover-to-cover, I’ll return to it regularly as a topical reference manual. Of the book’s 500-plus pages, well over 100 pages encompass detailed appendices that define terms, list vines and provide a quick reference tool for regional and producer-specific information. I can’t say that it has created an interest that wasn’t already there for me; however, it’s certainly intensified my interest in, and improved my understanding of, wines from many regions, Lombardia and Campania, for instance, among others.

And the bonus point challenges:

• For the critic: Did you find any editorial mistakes? If so, what were they?
  
• For the wine geek: Did the book inspire you to rush out and hunt down a wine or two? Then share some vinous love. Include your tasting note(s) in your review to earn kudos.
  
• For the gourmand: To earn double bonus points – and to inspire a little salivation among your readers – prepare a meal from one of the recipes in the book, pair the dish with a wine from the appropriate region, and report on the experience.

Suffice it to say, I’m constantly shocked to find that the level of editorial care applied in most literary publishing circles does not seem to extend to the genre of wine texts. I won’t be so unkind as to chronicle every typo and awkward sentence, but I will say that there are many (the mention of "Bryno" Giacosa on p. 135 is perhaps the most embarrassing). If anyone at Clarkson Potter is reading, I’m available to help edit the next edition! Happily, technical errors, at least ones that I was able to recognize, are few and relatively minor. In the Veneto chapter, for instance, Bardolino is cited as having been elevated to DOCG status; in fact, only the designation of Bardolino Superiore is now DOCG, while Bardolino in general remains a DOC (this is recognized in the appendix of DOC information). Similarly – perhaps it came too late for press time for the second edition – I was surprised not to see mention of Dogliani’s recent elevation to DOCG status within the already DOCG-rich Piemonte.

The book didn’t really inspire any shopping, at least not that couldn’t wait, but it does have me thinking about opening a couple of the new frontiers already waiting in my cellar, like the Ribolla Gialla from Friuli’s Stanko Radikon or the Fumin from Valle d’Aosta producer Grosjean Frères. As much as I’d like to regale you with tasting notes or a recipe trial, I’d saved those for the final week and never quite got there as I was waylaid with a nasty viral bug from which I’m just beginning to recover. But hey, that leaves me with some fun to look forward to.

Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy By Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch Copyright 2002, 2005 531 pages Clarkson Potter Publishers, New York, NY ISBN 1-4000-9774-6

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