VINI DA SCOPRIRE - GIUNTI EDITORE

Vini da scoprire – la riscossa dei vini leggeri

 By Armando Castagno – Gianpaolo Gravina – Fabio Rizzari

Drawings by Simona Oliva

Giunti Editore

In Italian movies, the name Lino is not linked to adolescent characters: Lino Ventura or Lino Banfi recall robust food eaters, such as whole grilled beef shank. Indeed, as far as wine is concerned, the suffix –lino evokes more slender structures: Grignolino, Cannellino, Bardolino.

Speaking about Bardolino: a wine originating from Veneto, which is now taking its revenge after the times when it was haughtily seen as a void and banal product.

It was the golden age of robust wines, regardless of their origin grapevine, made either with hyper concentrated grapes in vineyards (in best cases: yielding two grapes per hectare) or by means of exaggerated extraction techniques in cellars: must drain, rotary maceration at Mach3 speed, reverse osmosis. That world no longer exists. Those woolly mammoths are now almost extinct. A meteorite from the sky was not the reason. More easily, wine tasters understood the objective difficulty in matching a lamb loin roast with a 2011 too strong wine. Family Piona has made wine since the end of 19th century. It is not new to average informed wine enthusiasts. Nevertheless, it is not a small winery: it produces nearly half a million bottles and cultivates about eighty hectares in the countryside of Prabiano, near Villafranca di Verona. Still, we highly recommend the savory and lively Bardolino, as it envisages all the conditions herewith required: in indicative terms, 60-80% Corvina grapevine and Rondinella and Molinara grapevine for the rest, it comes from hillside vineyards, at 200 meters above sea level. Vinification is carried out according to consolidated protocols, including délestage process (the non-solid part of must is taken away from the fermentation basin, thus reducing the amount of vinasse at the bottom, and the liquid is subsequently re-immersed so as to get to a better extraction); thankfully, this does not bring to an excessive strengthening of the overall extractive structure. As a result, you get to an inviting wine, which is not aggressive at all, but highly scented (strawberry, raspberry, mandarin), fruity and saline at the same time, dynamic and almost hyper kinetic indeed.

MATCH: macaroni pasta with tuna fish buzzonagliia.