At
one point in my education I had five roommates, all from
Calabria, all ear-nose-throat docs in training.
Like most southerners that study away up
north, they always returned to our student
apartment with boxes and boxes of foods and wines from
home. They brought loaves of gray-crumbed and black-crusted
bread the size of car tires, which lasted for weeks. They
brought entire cases of reused Peroni bottles filled with
thin and watery tomato sauce. And they brought reused water
bottles of red wine, which they loved and would pour with
great ceremony on special occasions. And I was always eager
to drink their wine with them, even if it seemed more like
fermented prune juice… that had been left open for a week. It was Cirò,
and to me it tasted like wine made by teenagers, prisoners
or castaways, a beverage that was technically wine, but made
under the most impromptu and desperate of circumstances.
And
Cirò is where I am now, a city on the west coast
of Calabria, on the Ionian sea, about half way up the inside
of the ‘toe’. Taking the time and care to really
taste the wines here (versus just assuming that I already knew
the wines of Cirò), and now talking with the local wine
makers, first-hand, I’m learning that the wines of Cirò really
began to blossom when you could begin to taste what was
under the all that oxidised prune juice.
The
natural progression is always the same, says Valentino
Zito, owner of Vinicola Zito, here in Cirò Marina.
First the technology changes. Then wine makers decide
to put pressure on the board. Then the discipline changes.
Then the technology changes again and more changes
come, but always slowly, more slowly than any of us
would like.
I
had asked him about the changes in Cirò,
a wine so famous in Calabria as to be thought of
as the wine of the region, a part of Italy where
nearly everyone you meet still makes his own wine
and is eager for you to try it * (See below).
Valentino
was referring to the relationship wine-makers
have with the DOC, or board that oversees who can and can’t
label their wines as DOC, or as a ‘typical’ wine
from that region, a title that always implies more that
it states.
About
ten years ago they changed the laws (the DOC laws,
often referred to as ‘the discipline’, or the standards
a winery must follow in order to sell wine under that region’s
name, i.e. Chianti, i.e., which grapes may be use, the min-max
for sugar levels at harvest, how long the juice stays in contact
with the skins, the fermentation length, the time in oak, the
time in a bottle before release, etc). And since those changes,
Cirò has become a much lighter, less cooked wine. We
refrigerate now, he says, pointing to the thick belts that
ring his stainless-steel fermentation tanks. We harvest very
late, often going into October (nearly two months after the
vast majority of southern wine producers harvest), so the weather
is already cooler. We water-cool the fermentation tanks and
the wines really benefit from it. A lot, he adds, perhaps remembering
how his wines used to taste (He actually says, assai, the southern
slang for ‘a whole hell of a lot’, which makes
a strong impression, the little southern boy that grew
into a man that really cares about the wine he makes.)
In
tasting the wines of Cirò, it’s the lightness,
the savouriness that surprises me, as all the reds I know
from here in Southern Italy are all high-alcohol powerhouses,
jammy, fruity and most as thick as motor oil. That
a spicy and light and almost pinot noir model exists,
makes southern wine seem all the more varied.
How much do you sell abroad, I ask.
You can find Cirò all over the world, he says, but we’re
having problems really penetrating the North American market,
as our wines are so light in colour, and spicy versus fruity,
the way North Americans like their wine.
Does that bother you?
Not
at all. We’re in the process of changing the discipline,
to be able to add 20% of other grapes to classic Cirò rosso.
We’ll likely be adding 20% Nero d’Avola, to
add colour and fruitiness.
Mondo
vino, I ask, referring to the film, a cult favourite
of most wine makers I know, the film’s crux that American
taste is destroying diversity in the world’s wine.
No,
it’s not like that. Cirò makes perfect sense
here in Calabria, in that it’s a light and spicy wine
to go with our hearty fish and vegetable dishes, especially
in the warmer months, when you wouldn’t want a heavy
behemoth. But that’s locally. You drink local wine
differently than you do the kind you import.
What
do you really, really think of gaglioppo, the grape
used to make Cirò rosso?
I
think its time has come. It’s a very old grape, most
likely Italy’s oldest. I think that with today’s
new technology Cirò is one of most interesting wines
in Italy, even if the reputation hasn’t caught up
with the quality…
….Verus something like Pinot Grigio, where the quality
hasn’t kept up with the reputation. It’s become
trendy without meriting it.
Exactly.
I don’t feel that way about Cirò, and
I don’t even mean my Cirò, but the general state
of wine-making here. You can’t trust me, I love my own
wines. But let’s put it this way, I think most wine drinkers
outside of Italy would get even more pleasure from their Italian
wine, drinking even my competitors’ wine, rather than
a lot of the rest of the stuff exported from Italy… at
5 times the price.
We
chatted for an hour or so and I thanked him and as
we exchanged contact info, he loaded up my front bicycle
basket with his Cirò classico superiore. Within minutes of being back
on my bike, it started to rain and I ended up opening a bottle,
alongside a bottle of Librandi’s Magno Megonio, (their
winery is just up the street and I did a tasting there just
a few hours afterward), a 100% magliocco, a southern grape
I’d never even tried before. I drank the wines with some
chain-smoking Rumanian teenagers, who found the fact that I
both owned my own business AND still preferred to travel Italy
by bicycle, completely incongruent facts. I continued on up
Calabria’s Ionian coast, thinking that Southern wine
makers are among the most generous people I’ve ever
met, in every sense. I thought about Valentino as he lingered
to talk with me, clearly not eager to climb back
onto his tiny fork lift, to hoist more boxes of wine, to
do all of the constant 
hard
work involved in making wine. As I rode away, I watched
him switch the thing into gear, me thinking that wine for
a man like Valentino will always be something more than
the thing you order in bars when you’re tired of
gin and tonic.
*A
note on accepting any of the frequent invitations to
taste someone’s homemade wine in Calabria: Learn to
smile politely and make some pleasant, slightly vague comments
such as, ‘Sa
proprio di sole’, or ‘You can really taste the
sun’ is a good one. ‘Andrebbe bene con qualche
tipico piatto piccante’, or ‘this would go well
with a spicy, local dish’, meaning that you’d
hope to burn out your taste buds before tasting this kind
of wine again. The real lesson though, of slow travel in
Calabria is the profound contrast between such nice, generous
and eager people and how little they have, compared to
the rest of Italy.
Visons
of Calabria...
