The Invasion of French Varietals into Italian Soil
(a seminar conducted February 18th, 2010)
The premise of this seminar and tasting is an investigation of wines made in Italy using varietals of French origin. Let’s start by noting that tracking of the movement of grape varietals across international borders is not unlike marking the evolution of any large cultural shift, i.e. language, art, music, et cetera. Timelines to record these changes are intrinsically fuzzy, and the material of concern, namely vitis vinifera in our case, is a constantly evolving population.
To take a snapshot of the current panoply of grapes grown in Italy, it is immediately recognizable that the vast majority of vines are identifiable as ‘indigenous’, or thought to have grown in their present geography for all known history. The same can be said of France, though it is widely accepted that the Greeks and Romans brought vines into Gaul sometime in the first centuries BC. The phenomenon of French varietals being brought into Italy is relatively recent, starting in the 19th century, but mostly occurring in the second half of the 20th century.
If Italy already has some 3,000 documented varietals of its own, why would a winemaker go out of his way to work with a foreign grape? Quite simply, the answer comes down to francs and lire. If a winemaker in Alto Adige earns half as much growing the local gewürtztraminer than he might get by planting chardonnay of Burgundian origin and fame, then why not?
It is precisely this thinking that spawned the genre we know as Super-Tuscans in the late 1960’s. Renegade Tuscan winemakers whose families had bled sangiovese for centuries began planting cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and syrah as a way to make wines more powerful, more international, and more profitable than those that were being made at the time. To their credit, without the Super-Tuscan craze of the past few decades, we would be far less fortunate in the quantity and quality of Italian wines currently available on today’s market.
In this decade, there has grown a backlash against the internationally-modeled wines, led by Johnathan Nossiter, among others, whose film “Mondovino” pointed the finger directly at consulting oenologists (Michel Rolland) and greedy wine producers for allowing market trends to supersede authenticity and terroir. This argument has led to an increased attention paid to winemakers using native varietals and natural, traditional techniques in the vineyard and in the winery.
Before the pendulum swings too far in one direction, today we will taste two Italian wines made of non-native varietals alongside two French wines made from the same varietal, but of original French soil. Hopefully, the elimination of varietal as a variable will serve to isolate the other components in the wines and shed some light on that most elusive of wine concepts, terroir. We will conclude the tasting by comparing two wines exemplary of terroir, one French and one Italian, made from varietals local to their respective regions. A couple of questions to keep in mind as we are tasting:
1. Can you taste authenticity?
2. Does one wine better illustrate terroir than then other?
3. What is terroir?
The wines:
2008 Albert Mann Pinot Blanc
The house white from an estate that has been at the fore of the biodyanamic movement.
2008 Tiefenbrunner Pinot Bianco
An example of a longer tradition of the use of a French varietal from the southern Tyrolean hillsides.
2007 Domaine des Hauts Chassis Crozes Hermitage “Les Galets”
Classic French syrah from the northern Rhone Valley produced by a third-generation winemaker.
2006 Bisceglia Basilicata Syrah “Armille”
A 100% syrah made from young vines in the land-locked, mountainous, southern Italian region of Basilicata.
2007 Doudet Naudin Bourgogne
Village wine made exclusively of pinot noir by a small, organic-minded estate in the village of Savigny-Les-Beaunes.
2007 De Forville Nebbiolo D’Alba “San Rocco”
Declassified Barbaresco from a small family estate benefiting from over a century and a half of winemaking.
