May 2007
Pedaling Wine: Salice Salentino
If You Want More Interesting Wines, You’ll Have to Spend Less.

It’s because I don’t know of another white grape that better expresses our terroir here, says Paolo Cantele, here in the northern Salento.

Chardonnay best expresses your terroir?, I ask, thinking I misunderstood.

Yes, he says. But only because we don’t have any real whites, except la verdeca. In the absence of other whites, Chardonnay best allows us to describe our soil, the lay of the land, the weather, all the things that make this place special. But I think you’re hearing ‘chardonnay’ as ‘just another chardonnay’ when I’m saying that we are using chardonnay as a vehicle to express THIS place.

It wasn’t an angle I had expected to hear, that one of Italy’s best wine makers is using a foreign grape to best describe a place in Italy.

It’s late afternoon, 24 days into the trip and this is the first time that I’ve ever actually been intrigued by a foreign grape, that I’ve even been receptive. And I’ve been buying Paolo’s wines for years. Well, not all of them but I think you already see where I’m going with this.

Back in Lecce, I end up drinking Cantele’s wines more than just about anyone else’s. And like so many wines in Puglia, I tend to like their lower end wines, their straight-up-the-middle wines, their walk-in-the-front-door wines. It’s a strange state of affairs, if you think about, when it’s actually the low-end wines that represent your favourite, especially when you consider how implicit the cost of any wine is, relative to its quality. Few of us couldn’t produce more and better if cost were no object.

But standing here talking with Paolo, I’m starting to see that I drink Italian wine more like a foreigner than a local, in that I want my wine to reflect the area from which it comes. I WANT traditional grapes, I WANT to enjoy a glass of Negro Amaro in Salice Salentino and I WANT that feeling that I’m actually having the thing in its proper place and that that is good as wine ever gets.

‘OHHH, Now they have a Cabernet Franc’, my friends in Lecce will say, referring to their favourite producers. ‘We’re now cutting it with syrah’, a local producer will say, his face betraying that we’re actually talking about his new toy. My wealthier friends go on about the Super-Tuscans the way hippies do while in rain forests, and those are mostly Cabernets from Tuscany, something that doesn’t appeal to me on ANY level.

Paolo and I talked for well over an hour, his conversation well-informed and generous and free-flowing. We discussed him coming to the school to give lectures and tastings but as we shook hands I had already began to imagine the conversation that will need to happen. ‘Paolo’, I’ll say, pulling down his autochthonous-based wines from the school’s ample collection. ‘What do you say we really fixate on the local’.

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