Cesanese Explosion!
8/9/16 -
Suddenly it’s boom-times for Cesanese, the most important red grape in Lazio (the region around Rome). Cesanese was the house wine in many Roman trattorias in the 1970s and 1980s; it could be pretty crude, but we have fond memories of lively wines that went perfectly with carbonara and saltimbocca. We’ve tasted many recent attempts to revive and "improve" Cesanese that were over-extracted, over-oaked, international-style wines that negated all that was interesting and distinctive about the grape. Then we met La Visciola, and our faith was restored: Cesanese actually can make wonderful, vivid and vivacious wine. Cesanese isn’t (or shouldn’t be) deeply colored, it isn’t a heavy wine, and the best examples have bright fruit and spicy / peppery aromatics which persist on the palate. It’s very responsive to site – the wines we are offering show clear variations according to the soils in the vineyards. For what might be a useful reference: in some ways Cesanese reminds us of Pineau d’Aunis, with similar weight and structure and good complexity and persistence at a relatively young age.
New wine from La Visciola is on the way, but in the meantime it turns out that there are some other fine practitioners. We were knocked-out when we tasted Riccardi-Reale Cesanese last spring (as an Italian friend said about their wines: “un colpo di fulmane!” – “a real thunderbolt!”), and the wines have just arrived in the US for the first time. Add to those Cioli (imported by Jan d’Amore Wines) and Berucci (Louis/Dressner), and we are too excited about our new Cesanese discoveries to wait!
Piero Riccardi and his partner Lorella Reale started producing wine in 2010 on land that Piero’s family had farmed for generations; there are vines and a range of small-farm products, all biodynamic. They make 3 Cesanese wines from 2 vineyards: the wine called “Neccio” comes from the plot that is rich in reddish volcanic soil, “Ca’Litro" from sandstone, and “Collepazzo” is a blend of the two.
It’s the wine that counts, but I do love the Riccardi-Reale logo of the woman holding wings and a tortoise, which they appropriated from the early renaissance book called Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Art historians say it's a representation of earth and air, of the alchemy of art; (the wings are the symbol of Hermes / Mercury, and the tortoise shell was transformed into his lyre.)
I also like to see it as an illustration of Festina Lente (classicists and students of symbols, please correct me): life requires a balance of diligence and urgency; time flies - and doesn’t; haste makes waste, etc. Jamie Wolff
