Italy is for Oenophiles

While I've been greatly enjoying the vino that Italy has to offer, I've been struggling to come up with something interesting to write about them. I could give tasting notes, but that just seems pretentious, particularly given that I don't really know what I'm doing (and I don't have much of a palate). I could just write about whatever cool vintage/producer/style that I find, but that doesn't provide anything of use to people living back in the States (for reasons that I'll mention in a bit). I could skip the wine posts entirely, but plenty of my friends and family enjoy wine, and it seems to me that I can come up with SOMETHING worth talking about.

What's a wine-o to do?

After lots of thought, I decided that the best thing to do would be to talk about Italian wine in more general terms, AND feature some styles--if not producers--that should be accessible in the US. To do this, each week I'll be posting an update about one of Italy's wine producing regions with some information about the local styles, traditions, and so on, as well as a (slightly) in depth discussion of one of these styles that I've actually tried, and that should be available back home. I think that this will be a good system but if anyone reading this has ideas please let me know!

Before I get into these specific regions though (I'll be starting on that next week), there are some more general bits of information about Italian wine that are worth knowing (and that help to separate it from the rest of the wine-producing world). First is that, to a far greater extent than most New World wines (or even French wines), Italian wine is really meant to be enjoyed alongside food.

Do avoid anything that comes in with a straw covering, though

This mainly has to do with the attitudes that Italians have had towards wine over the years, and the corresponding decisions that the wine producers have made to appeal to their market. In more specific terms, Italian wine and food go together because of the very high acidity that wines from Italy tend to have. Such acidity can be overpowering on its own, and likewise Italian food has a tendency to be fairly fatty (consider the rabbit  fricassee I made last week, or pasta with a rich meat sauce, one of any multitude of local cheeses, the ubiquity of olive oil, the list goes on), though this is certainly not always the case.  The takeaway is that to best enjoy a given Italian wine, you should probably be nibbling on something alongside it, preferably a food from the same region. There are plenty of other guidelines for matching food and wine, but I'm not going to get into that right now.

You can do a lot worse than this to start, though.

Another important (or at least interesting) thing to know about Italian wine is that Italy and France trade places for the most wine production on a regular basis (from 2010 to 2014, Italy was the top producer 3 times). This of course does NOT mean that it produces the best wine; in fact, a lot of Italian winemaking is geared towards mass production and consumption rather than quality, especially in certain regions. Italy also has a mind-boggling variety of different grapes, numbering in the thousands. This, coupled with factory-style production can make finding something enjoyable difficult. Thankfully, Italy's government has a system to help consumers, as well as the producers.

While in Italy, as in France, the grapes used in the production of the wine are not required to be on the label, one of the above designations is, and these can tell you quite a bit (in conjunction with some Googling). They're definitely NOT a guarantee of quality, but they can give you enough information to know whether you might like a particular wine or not, based on what other wines you like. At the bottom is "table wine," which is essentially a label that means "made in Italy." The grapes must come from Italian vineyards, but that's about it. I don't think we get much if any of this classification in the US; import taxes are quite high, and there's no way these could compete with prices of locally made bottles. Moving up, IGT or "typical geographical indication" specifies that at least 85% of the grapes must come from a single region (which is also noted on the label), such as Tuscany, Piedmont, etc., pretty loose rules but still more strict than VdT. More stringent still is DOC, "registered designation of origin." A wine with this designation adheres to a specific set of rules (such as geographic area, allowable grapes, alcohol content, aging time and method, etc.) which vary based on what DOC the wine is. For example, a DOC Soave must be made in a particular region of the Veneto in north-eastern Italy, be made of at least 70% Garganega grapes, and there is also a limit on the amount of production from a given area of land. By contrast, a DOC Valpolicella must be made in a different particular region of the Veneto, be made of anywhere from 45%-95% Corvina grapes, and anywhere from 5%-30% Rondinella grapes (along with several other rules). If this all sounds confusing, it is. But the benefit is that by reading a DOC label, you can learn a lot about how that wine was made, which will (at least in theory) inform you of characteristics that you like or dislike. At the top of the pyramid is the DOCG or "registered and guaranteed designation of origin" classification, which is essentially more of the same as DOC, but with even more stringent rules governing the production of the wine, plus a government sticker verifying that the wine has been inspected and judged to meet the appropriate standards.

You've probably seen this before

If this all sounds confusing, it is. But, it's really the only way to differentiate between the incredible variety of wines being put out by the country. Given that we all carry computers around in our pockets, it's not too terribly difficult to look at a label, Google what you find (such as "Chianti Classico DOCG," as we see in the above picture), and find out what the wine producer had to do in order to achieve the designation. Whether or not you personally actually LIKE a given designation is something that you can only find out by trying them! This is also a good time to mention that these classifications absolutely don't guarantee quality; there are definitely still plenty of rotten Chiantis out there, and there are some really fabulous IGT wines (see the so called Super Tuscans that came on the scene in the '80s). Rather, these are basically a crib-sheet for what grapes were used, where it's from, how much alcohol, and so on and so forth.

The last thing that I wanted to mention is the difficulty of finding a great deal of Italian wine back in the US, thanks to particularly high import taxes (or perhaps export taxes, I'm not sure). This means that so many wines that are affordable here in Italy would be so expensive to sell in the US that there simply isn't any point in importing them. The more expensive the initial purchase price the less this matters, but nevertheless it greatly restricts what you'll see on the store shelves. As I mentioned above, I'm going to try to stick to reviewing/discussing wines that you should be able to find in the US, but it would be virtually impossible to stick to specific producers that sell in the US (since I've been here, I think I've seen a single label that I recognize from home).

I think that'll do it for this update. Sorry for how dry (ha!) it was, but I think it will make my future posts about wine more interesting and intelligible. Until next time!