Monday,
October 01
The
ANNOTICO Report
Wine
has been produced in
In the later part of the 1900s, scores of
Italian winemakers abandoned native grapes and planted imported varieties such
as chardonnay and merlot. They were following the fads of the day, obeying the
whims of influential wine critics.
Lost were distinctive regional wines and a measure of rich Italian identity.
Eventually, Italian vintners found it difficult to compete with "New World"
producers such as
And so many Italian vintners began returning to their roots, practicing a craft
they say synthesizes the soil, the climate and the personality of the farmer.
All over
With more and more interest in the world in new tastes and regional dishes from
For example, the surge in the Nero d'Avola grape
from
This kind of winemaking is an heroic challenge, that
the vintners take great pride in.
In
A
growing movement eschews mass-market tastes in favor of local grapes. But
reviving tradition isn't easy.
By Tracy Wilkinson, Staff Writer
September 30, 2007
MONTEROSSO,
The small, delicate grape that Cavallo raises will go
to make a rare sweet wine that is available only in this northern corner of
Italy, one so precious, he said, that "you give a bottle to the doctor so
he'll take better care of you."
Cavallo is part of a growing movement across
But like the wine industry as a whole, these old-style producers face a gusher of
modern-day challenges, including European Union restrictions, high costs and
global warming's effect on the way grapes are harvested.
"We call it heroic viticulture," said Matteo
Bonanini, head of a cooperative of grape growers here
in the Cinque Terre region. "You have to be really dedicated."
Bonanini was overseeing the delivery of hundreds of
pounds of freshly picked pale-green grapes to the co-op's press. Gentlemen
farmers arrived with grape-packed crates tied to the roofs of their Fiats,
while miniature pickup trucks hauled in more of the harvest in a land so steep
and craggy that even mules cannot navigate some of the cliff-cling ing vineyards, or so the locals say.
Grapes were being poured into the press, enzymes added and the liquid stored
for fermentation. Gigantic wasps flitted about the bunches
of fruit, and a farmer occasionally plucked a grape and popped it into their
mouth, like people do in the olive-and-nut section of a supermarket.
Few in this panorama of green cliffs and blue bays, known as
His Cinque Terre co-op will produce only about 200,000 bottles of the region's
eponymous crisp, white wine, of which 2,400 bottles will be exported to
That these spirits are being bottled at all is perhaps a viticultural
miracl e, testimony to an important shift over the
last decade in
Wine has been produced in this region for millenniums. The Romans made wine
2,000 years ago, the Etruscans before them.
For most of those centuries, the Italians relied on the land and climate --
with little emphasis on technology -- to yield cheap-ish
Chiantis, Frascatis and other reds and whites. In the
latter part of the 20th century, they began adapting their techniques and
transformed
At the same time, however, scores of Italian winemakers abandoned native grapes
and planted imported varieties such as chardonnay and merlot. They were
following the fads of the day, obeying the whims of influential wine critics.
Lost were distinctive regional wines and a measure of rich Italian identity.
Eventually, Italian vintners found it diff icult to
compete with "New World" producers such as
And so many Italian vintners began returning to their roots, practicing a craft
they say synthesizes the soil, the climate and the personality of the farmer.
"All over
"There is more and more interest in the world in new tastes and regional
dishes from
As examples, he cited the surge in the Nero d'Avola
grape from
In Cinque Terre, vintners use an exact formula that combines indigenous Bosco, Vermentino and Albarola fruits.
This kind of winemaking is not easy, nor is it inexpensive,
Added to that are new challenges.
This summer, the European Union proposed a major overhaul to the continent's
$15-billion, heavily subsidized wine sector, with the goal of reducing a glut
of wine and making the business more competitive. In
Among the EU's proposals: paying growers to uproot
nearly half a million acres of vineyards; banning the addition of sugar to
fortify the alcoholic content of wine (a technique favored in Germany and other
northern countries); allowing the use of wood chips to add flavor (common among
New World makers).
The proposed regulations have gotten a chilly reception. Some producers don't
want to lose subsidies for their surplus, and others worry that loosening the
rules on processing would undermine centuries of tradition and undercut the
reputation of premium crus.
Global warming is also having an earth-shaking effect on
"On average, in all of Europe, the harvest was ahead of schedule,"
said Luca Zaia, an Italian wine expert and
agriculture official in the northern
The news is not all bad, however. The yield will be down by as much as 15%,
officials say, but the quality is expected to be superior.
Simone Orlandini, an agronomist at the
"The hotter it is, and the less it rains, the better the wine is, up to a
certain range," he said.
In Cinque Terre, the challenges sometimes seem overwhelming, and people wonder
whether, here at least, they are a part of a vanishing enterprise.
The average farm is just 3,000 square yards, less than an acre. Every time the
church bell tolls for a funeral, the residents have a saying: "There goes
another 3,000 yards."
Once upon a time, the vineyards sloped almost to the sea; farmers harvested by
boat, on this "land where people fished grapes," as Italian Nobel
Prize laureate Eugenio Montale wrote in the last century.
Today, only about 150 acres are dedicated to top-quality vines in Cinque Terre,
the co-op's Bonanini said, compared with more than
1,000 a generation ago. (Cinque Terre, wh
ose name means Five Lands, is actually a collection
of five villages connected by trails that jut spectacularly over the sea.)
The co-op tries to encourage vintners to stick it out by giving away 5,000
saplings every year, paying top prices for the grapes and building hillside
monorails to ease transportation of the crops. The co-op makes a small profit,
most of which it plows back into the business.
More than creating wine, Bonanini says, preservation
of the vineyards is crucial to the conservation of this fragile land of
stone-walled terraces, part of a national park and a UNESCO World Heritage
Site.
Bonanini followed his father into an agricultural
job, but he knows his own children will not do so.
"We try to get people to remain on the land, but my worry is the vineyards
will die," Bonanini said. "It's a
generational question, and we cannot kid ourselves.
"In the older generations, the fathers had an emotional tie to cultivating
vineyar ds; it takes people
back to a time when they were younger and worked the land for a living," Bonanini said. "The emotional tie becomes weaker, one
generation to the next."
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BACK
TO BASICS:
Old-style winemaker Vittorio Cavallo
is one of the few who concoct Sciacchetra, a rare
sweet wine available only in this northern corner of
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wilkinson@latimes.com
Livia Borghese in The Times' Rome Bureau contributed
to this report.
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