Three Moments in The Life of One of The World's Greatest Grapes

April, 2008
The Awaiting Table Newsletter

1) It's fifteen years ago and it's summer here in Lecce and the twelve of us are lingering over dirty plates around an outdoor table, long after midnight. A breeze kicks up and my-then-girlfriend's grandfather stands up to sing in dialect. It looks like someone has punched him in the mouth, his lips, tongue and teeth stained purple and black from the wine which we're drinking out of Nutella jars-turned-tumblers. The family dog chases a clunky, low-flying beetle across the courtyard, rattling the gravel and shooting it at our bare feet. Grandpa takes another long belt of the wine and then launches into another verse in incomprehensible dialect, sounding like Italian as spoken by someone with a mouth full of marbles. The entire family joins in on the refrain, making it obvious that I'm the only one at the table that wishes he'd stop. The thick wine that we've been drinking is horrible. It's the colour of Dimetapp. You wince like whiskey when drinking it. It's raisins. It's prunes. It's worse than prunes; it's prunes you left in an old mayonnaise jar in the back of your car for the summer. My girlfriend stands and sings a verse by herself, half away through grabbing my dirty fork to stab her gathered black curls into a bundle. I can just make out that she's singing about the annual return of the starlings, her dialect full of course double consonants and thuddy double -'d's. The rotgut wine has caused her cheeks to flush, her tanned shoulders to sweat. Beyond her is an old stonewall dappled with a faint purple spray of lilacs, their scent mixing almost magically with pungent remnants of wood smoke and sizzling lamb fat.

2) It's our school's birthday last year and we're at the castle half an hour south of Lecce, 35 of us around the long table, the laughter and escalating humour almost deafening. It's the first chance I've had to talk with my business partner about anything but business the entire week. We've been good friends for so many years that we speak in an intimate short hand, a strange work jargon, spoken by only the two of us. 'Need a clip-board, wine's up the back stairs, talked to Giuseppe, fish's comin' earlier', he says, his blinks growing a fraction of a second longer as the night progresses. He's beat; the Southern Italian sun has turned his blond features pink, almost painfully. I'm tired too, and unlike him, I do do this for a living. Scottish Emma on the far end of the table starts a toast and then clicky clinks ride down the length of the table followed by a concussion of laughter. My business partner holds his oversized goblet almost horizontally and pushes his nose down into it: I know him enough to know that it's a question. I say, 'Antinori, prolly the most influential wine maker in Italian history, got a place down here now. Primitivo. A bit of an edge though, should soften with time in the bottle. Total desert island wine'. The corners of his mouth slowly creep up into his cheeks and silently I know that he's just decided that this will be the wine for his wedding when we'll be the same castle a year from now. What I don't need to tell him is that it's the same wine laying in cases in the bottom of my wooden armoire back in Lecce, the wine that I'm laying down for my 40th birthday in few years. He knows me enough to know that for the last year I've drifted off to sleep each night thinking about the black bottles, wondering what's happening inside, exactly, and what our lives will be like when we finally open them. When my birthday finally does happen, we'll likely be in the same castle again, around the same table, his new wife there, a welcomed insider with a language of her own for us to absorb.

There will come some point during the night when he'll put his nose down into his glass and maybe arch a brow that asks, Is this really the same wine, our favourite, the same one that we've been using to mark the important dates of our lives?

I'll say, 'Yes, and I'm going to lay down a few cases of it to mark the birth of your first child too, because I figure that you two will want to wait a few years before you have children so I'll buy the wine now and give it three years in the bottle so that some of the tannins fall away, just in time to celebrate a new little member entering our lives.' Of course I won't actually say any of this. If you happen to be sitting at the table next to us when we have this discussion, you're likely to hear something a bit closer to, 'Yeah', the wealth of our friendship residing not in the intimacy of what can be said between the two of us, but what never needs to be.

3) It's late last night and we're just finishing dessert, something I almost never make as we both know that she'll not only eat her portion and some of mine but actually be angry while doing it, her disgust at me absolutely naked as she slips in her spoon for seconds. I'm watching her eat, slowly and silently, knowing that I'm about four or five hours away from being woken with a few sharp elbows to ribs, indicating that her last trip to the bathroom involved a stop off at the fridge. I find her behaviour so delicious that sometimes I tip-toe out to catch her dancing barefoot on the cold tiles in front of the open refrigerator door. Oddly, she's rarely happy to be caught at such a moment and often uses the opportunity to mention my mother, along with some version of the phrase, Look at what you make me do! As she drags her knife across a supple pear I think that it's true, that she is fleshier now from eating my food, rounder and more womanly. Feeding her has taken on a sculptural quality that pleases me in ways that I can't put into words, and I always think 'I did that', when I appreciate her new curves. Of course she feels differently about it all though, and doesn't think it cute that I view myself as a real estate developer on someone else's body. Over time I've noticed that the one dish that seems to avoid our rehearsals for The Buttery-Guilt Ballet is, pears poached in our house primitivo, one of those rare dishes where the name of the dish also happens to be the recipe.

Hai messo la cannella, she is asking me. Did you put in cinnamon?

None, I say. No way.

Sine, she says. Yes way. O almeno i chiodi di garafono, cloves

None, I say.

Sine, she says. She slips a fleshy slice of purple pear between her lips and repeats , 'Sine', as though she is convinced and that is that: I must be lying. I smile and watch her silently eat her purple pears and think about the pears and primitivo and what the dish now represents to me, a way of making her happy. As I run a finger across the primitivo syrup I think about how reducing the wine concentrated and amplified the already present flavours. The black pepper. Cinnamon. Cloves. Mace. All-Spice. Ginger, until it's almost like dragging your tongue across The Spice Route.

As she finishes her second pear I wrap up those remaining, humming to myself on the way to fridge, knowing that I'll awake tomorrow morning with pleasurably sore ribs.

Primitivo. Even just saying the name makes my mouth water.

There is the tendency to think of Italy as an old place and that everything here now always has been. The truth is very different of course, and you don't need to go very far back to see that food and wine here were very different. Americans visitors to our school almost always mention primitivo and American Red Zinfandel as its child, the way that, say, they don't see cabernet as being imported from Bordeaux, if only because it happened long ago that few Americans think of California cabernet sauvignon as having anything at all to do with France. The truth is that primitivo in Italy predates Red Zinfandel in California not more than a few decades. Both came from Croatia, from a grape called Crljenak Kastelanski. Here in Italy it was named 'primitivo', not as in 'primitive', but rather as in 'early', or early-ripening, meaning that it's harvested much earlier than Negroamaro, Puglia's other world-class red grape (And, while present in Puglia but more closely associated with la Basilicata, Aglianico is harvested even later still, which depending on its location, can actually go into the early winter months).

In my mind, primitivo has three real zones of production, namely Gioia del Colle, slightly north of here, Manduria and the Salento, mostly running down the western coast, along the Ionian Sea. The grape is actually grown everywhere, but these are the zones where it becomes a serious wine, something more than a grape chosen for its incredible yield. A complete novice could quite easily notice the difference between the three zones, even by just sniffing a few glasses. Which is best? Like so much in Italy, the preference runs along property lines, and you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone here with a preference that strays beyond what happens to be the nearest zone of production. (I'd tell you that I routinely taste all three but I prefer that of the Salento, but I fear you'd just judge me as being an Old World provincial). Il Primitivo Del Salento actually has some red earth, irony flavours that I love, making the wine a little more complex than making it just about Big Fruit, a not-uncommon complaint about the other two. It's also helpful to remember that those doing any complaining are only the Europeans, the ones that often complain that a wine is a percentage point too strong. If you are a New Worlder, you're going to fall madly in love with primitivo, as it has all the New World wine fixations, in spades. Big fruit. Low residual sugar. High alcohol. Spice.

Long-time readers of this newsletter already know what's coming: What you can do, in this case, to help protect these zones. New Europe has been suffering the so-called Wine Lake problem and low-quality primitivo has been seen as a big contributor. If you're serious about preserving grape diversity, pick up a bottle of primitivo. Or better yet, make it your house wine if you don't happen to live in wine country and already have your 'favourite' grape chosen for you by your geography. And too, look for examples that really show off primitivo's characteristics, the freshly cracked black pepper, the winter spices, such as cloves, cinnamon, mace and all-spice, dried fruits such as cranberries, plums and anything else that makes you think of Muld Wien.

Only a tiny fraction of the high quality examples of primitivo are exported. If you're really interested in the grape and how you can learn to help protect it, consider paying us a visit here in Italy. I'd love to pour my favourite examples of primitivo for you, a grape that deserves much more attention.

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