Few
things prepare you for Basilicata. You expect poverty, most
of it historical. You expect decay. You expect Christ Stopped
At Eboli, you expect an onslaught of abandonment, of buildings,
homes, farms and everything in between. You couldn’t
be more wrong.
First
of all, virtually none of Basilicata has ever been inhabited,
so everything is pristine and green and just stunning. Hills
run. Mountains soae. And there is nothing but eye-popping spring
flowers, rolling green hills and lush valleys between the two.
As you approach the mountain of Vulture, you start to see more
and more vines- most trained in the guyot-style- row after row,
the vines growing off the metal lines stretched between posts,
torqued-tight with those tension levers that resemble Chinese
stars. And you’re elevated too, so suddenly you’re
no longer in ‘the south’, but some cool, mountain
region, where everything is green, lush, even the architecture
itself much more Heidi, much less Pinocchio.
I’ve come to talk with Donnato D’Angelo in charge
of marketing at Casa Vinicola D’Angelo and Fabio Mecca,
the wine maker at Paternoster, who were both eager to answer
my questions about the wine they make.
Chianti,
Chianti, Chianti, says Donnato, smiling, but clearly flummoxed.
I go to trade shows in London, New York, Berlin. I ask, ‘so which Italian wines do you know’.
Chianti, Chianti, Chianti, they say.
Really,
I say. I find just the opposite in my line of work. All the
Anglophones I know are eager to try the non-Tuscan varietals.
And Piedmont has largely out-priced itself. Frankly, it wouldn’t
be wrong to say I make a living offering an alternative to Tuscan
and no one has EVER asked for Chianti at my school.
No.
For foreigners, it’s Chianti, Chianti, Chianti, he
says again, and I just look at him for a moment and wonder which
one of us is wrong.
Do you ever use non-autochthonous grapes in your Aglianco Del
Vulture, I ask.
What? Why?
Because a lot of southerners are using foreign grapes for various
reasons, to enter the market or to round out what they feel is
missing from an indigenous grape.
No. Never, he says, and has a truly puzzled look on his face,
as if I asked how much maple syrup he adds to his wine, or pineapple
juice.
So
would it be fair to say that you see the Tosco-centric map
of Italy you’re biggest professional obstacle?
Without a doubt, he says, without missing a beat.
I
ride over to Paternoster a few hours later and pose the same
questions to Fabio Mecca, a third-generation wine maker and easily
the most dynamic speaker of any winemaker I’ve talked with
to date, his long hair flopping as he punctuates his points.
A
giraffe with an elephant’s body is no longer really
a giraffe, he says, when I ask him whether or not they use any
non-autochthonous grapes. It’s Frankenstein. He shows me
around the caverns and all the ways their wines are aged: the
classically-sized but fiercely expensive oak barrels (about 600
Euro each nowadays), the giant, FIAT-sized, flat-fronted botti
and the boxed and shrink-wrapped bottles waiting on pallets.
It’s perhaps irony then that the caves themselves seem
to be designed by Frankenstein, or at least his brother, the
architect. There is a strange incongruence between the musty
old, hand-chiselled caves, the smell of spilled red wine and
the high-tech machines riddled with Bond-esque stainless steel,
the pimped out whatchama-call-its with cryptic dials and gauges,
everything seemingly coated with flashing LEDs.
So
if you don’t monkey about with non-autochthonous grapes,
you must be doing something to distinguish your wines from one
another, I say.
It’s
really a matter of age for us, as we only use one grape, but
harvest it from variously-aged vines and then age those wines
in various ways. Fabio and I spend nearly half an hour discussing
the aging variations, from big old wooden, wall-mounted demijohns
to the new French barrels, to yo-yo like combination of the
two, each affecting price in counterintuitive ways.
So
we’re famous for these giant barrels here on Vulture,
he says.
And that wine costs more?
No, that costs less, he says, his hair flopping as he speaks.
So
it’s the new oak that costs the most.
It’s
actually new vines and new oak that costs the most, he says.
He
tells me that Vulture’s climate is cool and that they
don’t harvest until the second half of October, six weeks
after a lot of the rest of the south of Italy. (‘Cooked
wines’ are less of issue as well, due to elevation.)
And what about the foreign perception of your wines, I ask.
It’s all niche, he says. Those that drink a lot of Italian
wine really seek out our wines. Those that don’t, have
never heard of us, or even Aglianico Del Vulture, the only significant
wine in all of Basilicata. We’re a boutique product.
What
would you say to those that only see Italy as the land of Pinot
Grigio. Or Chianti, I add, remembering Donato’s
lament.
I’m
always shocked what people pay for mediocre wine, he says.
What could people be eating to justify so much Pinot Grigio
consumption in the world?
I’m
guessing poached ice burg lettuce, hot water aspic and those
packing peanuts that they use to ship breakable stuff.
I had assumed it was frozen shrimps on sticks, he says. That
is what you always see in the wine magazines.
I tell him about our new wine school, which fascinates him,
that there will now be a venue for non-Italians to taste his
wines. I buy his two flag ship wines- Rotondo and Don Anselmo-
and open them back in the hotel room, alongside two from D’Angelo
as well. I come up with a system of tasting and retasting them
blind, the four bottles of Aglianico Del Vulture. All are excellent,
solidly-made wines but Paternoster’s Rotondo is simply
one of the tastiest wines I’ve ever had, from anywhere,
ever, something approaching a choreographed fireworks display,
the flavours going off in my mouth in the exact same sequence
with each new, savoured sip. There are black-berries. Then
earth. Then cranberries. Then irony-soil, with warm tannins.
Black-berries. Earth. Cranberries. Irony soil. And again, in
perfect and impressive waves. It’s SO impressive, in
fact, that I leave the other three bottles there in the hotel
room the next morning with a note for the maid, only a glass
taken out of each. My legs stiff, I wobbled out of town, the
bottle of restoppered Rotondo poking out of my pack as I pointed
my bike towards the Italian region called Puglia. My bicycle
was heavy, but one weight seemed to be growing exponentially
by the day: it’s the jingling set of house keys that
hang from the salty and faded string around my neck.
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Basilicata images
