Andrew Cullen - Decoding Italian Wine: A Beginners Guide to Enjoying the Grapes, Regions, Practices and Culture of the Land of Wine

Decoding Italian Wine:

A Beginners Guide to Enjoying the Grapes, Regions, Practices and Culture of the Land of Wine

By Andrew Cullen and Ryan Anthony McNally

Cover and interior design by John Yardley

Copyright 2014 by Andrew Cullen and Ryan Anthony McNally

All rights reserved.

Contents

Chapter 1:

Lintroduzione

H ave you ever puzzled over the wine list at a nice Italian restaurant, wondered what vino to pair with a pasta dish youre making for a dinner party, or contemplated what wine would go best with some pizza and a viewing of The Godfather ?

So have we. But sorting through the Italian wine selection at a restaurant or store, complete with unfamiliar regions, grapes and classifications, can be as challenging as selecting the most picturesque area of Italy or choosing the best Fellini film.

Enter Decoding Italian Wine: A Beginners Guide to Enjoying the Grapes, Regions, Practices and Cultures of the Land of Wine . Our inspiration for a book on Italian wine has its origins in wildly varied geographic locations (Macau and Venice), movies ( The Silence of the Lambs and The Godfather ) and vintages (Super Tuscans and, uh, Italian table wine mixed with water). But it has one key element in common: a desire to make Italian wine more accessible to those who share our passion for good wine and Italian culture.

Andrews Story

I was at a restaurant called The Kitchen inside the Grand Lisboa casino in Macau, China, in November 2011 when I tasted one of the best wines of my life. It was my birthday, and I had just won a few hundred dollars playing roulette. The wine was the 2007 Antinori Solaia, and it was so unbelievable then I cant imagine what it will be like in 10 to 15 years as it approaches maturity. The wine had layers, depth, mouthfeel and finesse unlike anything I had ever tasted, and Ill never forget it.

This bottle instantly changed the way I looked at Italian wine, particularly Super Tuscans. I was a (self-proclaimed) French wine guru and was pulling for everyone to order a nice aged left-bank Bordeaux to pair with our Australian Wagyu steaks. But the expert sommelier at The Kitchen, which claims to house one of the largest private wine collections in the world, convinced us to go with the Solaia after we shared our food order and taste preferences with him. And Im so happy he did.

In my previous book, Decoding French Wine: A Beginners Guide to Enjoying the Fruits of the French Terroir , I mentioned a wine tasting I attended more than a decade ago with a highly astute host who was the Southeast representative for a major wine distributor. When I mentioned to him that I was gravitating toward French wines, he cheered that decision and advised I study and learn the wine regions one at a time. That way, I could submerse myself in a particular area without distraction.

Multiple trips to France and countless bottles of French wine later, I wrote Decoding French Wine , in which I attempted to demystify the complex world of French wines by writing in a concise, non-intimidating, fun manner so readers could absorb the content and gain a better understanding of the many amazing French wines. While I dont feel like my work is finished on that topic, I realized I wanted to do additional versions of similarly themed wine books.

That brings us to where we are now. Italy is a logical second choice for the subject matter (some would argue first choice). The only difference is that this time I wasnt bringing in decades of wine experience and multiple trips to Italy. True, I had sampled my fair share of Italian wines and reviewed many bottles for a wine website I founded called CostcoWineBlog.com . But I needed more expertise.

After sitting on the idea for almost a year, and slowly putting down those French Vacqueyras bottles I love so much in favor of Sicilian Nero dAvola, a random conversation over lunch one day changed everything. The answer was right in front of me the whole time. We just hadnt put the pieces together yet.

Ryans Story

When I was a little kid, I spent many Sundays at my maternal grandparents home in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. Sunday dinner, which usually began mid-afternoon, was a huge part of that experience.

Dinner always consisted of some sort of Italian fare, and it was always ridiculously delicious. My grandmother, whose parents immigrated from Messina, Sicily, would cook up a huge pot of tomato sauce (we called it meat gravy) from scratch, along with a mouth-watering assortment of meats: sweet and hot Italian sausages, homemade meatballs, veal and chicken rollatini and more. These would be paired with ravioli or macaroni and, of course, crusty Italian bread.

My grandfather was born in Chiesiola, a small Italian town about an hour from Parma. When he was 17 years old, he immigrated to the United States. After serving as a cook in the U.S. army in World War II, he returned to the States and worked for the next 40 years as a pastry chef. As you might imagine, our Sunday dinners always concluded with a vast assortment of Italian dessert items, including cannoli, seven-layer cookies, napoleons, sfogliatelle, pignoli cookies and more. During the summer, peaches soaked in red wine added some variety to the mix.

During these dinners, the adults would often enjoy a glass or two of wine. And as I grew a little older, I was allowed to have a small glass of red table wine mixed with water with my meal. In retrospect, my familys attitude toward this light consumption mirrored that of many parents in Italy, where its not unusual for minors to have a little wine during family meals.

A decade or so later, while I was in college at Wake Forest, I spent a semester abroad in Venice, Italy. Living on the Grand Canal was an unforgettable experience, and part of my cultural immersion involved sampling Italian wine. Of course, I was on a college budget, so many of my wine purchase decisions were driven by price rather than quality. At a dollar or two a pop, I even indulged in a few boxes of wine (oh, the horror).

Still, given the course of an entire semester, I was bound to learn something beyond how to order a liter of house wine in Italian Vorrei un litro di vino della casa, per favore though that was a nice ancillary benefit (see Appendix II for more helpful Italian phrases).

I started to learn a little about the regions and grapes of Italy, how they differed and how certain areas had their own quirky specialties. Venice, for example, had a wine called Fragolino that boasted unusual hints of strawberry. Cinque Terre, a group of five small coastal towns, was known for Sciacchetra, a tasty sweet white wine. And so on.

In the years that followed, I made two return trips to Italy and attempted to continue my Italian cultural education whenever I got the chance. I started to dig into Italian films, watching the movies of Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and many others, eventually launching a website, VivaItalianMovies.com , dedicated to Italian cinema. I continued to sample new Italian wines. And I fruitlessly endeavored to keep my Italian from getting rusty.

Some pursuits went better than others. I discovered that getting my electric oven hot enough to cook the perfect Neapolitan pizza was difficult to do without burning the house down.

One day I found myself at lunch with my friend Andrew, talking about my Italian movies website, my experience studying abroad and our mutual love for Italian wine.

I like to drink wine more than I used to.

Don Vito Corleone, The Godfather

This book had to be done and not just because we needed an excuse to drink copious amounts of fine Italian wine. No, we wanted to approach Italian wine in a way that hadnt been done before.

Simply put, learning about Italian wine can be more intimidating than a Clint Eastwood glare in one of Sergio Leones spaghetti westerns. Its a massive study with more than 2,000 grape varieties planted across more than a million active vineyards all over the country.