"Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy" (Clarkson Potter, $35), by 
Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch

BABBO BOYS UNRAVELLING THE JOYFUL ANARCHY OF ITALIAN WINES 

By Rod Smith
Los Angeles Times
Food Section
April 24 2002

...I set off again, ...toward the endless viticultural charms of Italy.

...a Greek god, Dionysus, introduced the vine to Italy... the proto-Italian 
Etruscans embraced viticulture in antiquity, and Italy has never looked back. 
Modern Italy, with some two million wine-bearing acres in 21 regions, might 
be described as one big wine estate....The vast boot-shaped vineyard is made 
up of countless distinctly individual plantings, most of them relatively 
small plots attached to villages, castles and family farms. Each has its own 
story, ...--grapes are subject to the shifting fortunes of agriculture to 
some extent--and all those stories make up a cultural fabric that gives the 
greater Italian vineyard endless layers of complexity and inflection.

Italian wines are not classified very well, and the details are anything but 
easily memorized. Even hard-core wine nerds are hard pressed to recall, for 
example, the grape varieties typically blended in your everyday Valpolicella 
(and if you just rattled off "Corvina, Rondinella and Molimara," you may want 
to consider getting a life). And yet wandering the Italian winescape, glass 
in hand, is a marvelous odyssey that is only made more delightful by the 
occasional scary episode.

The essential guidebook to that exploration has just been published. "Vino 
Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy" (Clarkson Potter, $35), by Joseph 
Bastianich and David Lynch, is the Italian wine book Americans have been 
waiting for.

Chief among its many charms is that it makes sense of Italian wine via celebration, 
rather than pedantry... early on, the authors state their intent to expand 
the basic concept of terroir--the "total natural environment" of a 
vineyard--to include the human factors that influence the character of wine 
from a given place.

There is no attempt to impose order on what even the Italians happily admit 
is something akin to chaos. Instead, Bastianich and Lynch embrace the 
ambiente, or cultural environment of the vine. They show us around like a 
pair of Italian uncles, urging us to eat and drink while filling us in on 
stuff that makes the experience even more enjoyable.

This avuncular tone is set in the vignettes that open each chapter. They show 
us a slice of regional daily life, especially life at table, which leads to 
an illumination of the area's wines.

In one, they invade the Marche...In the next, they attend a soccer game in 
Lazio... (Italy's sixth most productive wine region)... 

...in Alto-Aldige, a wine district so rugged that viticulture there "seems 
more like an endurance sport than a way to make a living." ...a white wine 
from this region in the shadow of Mont Blanc is described as tasting like 
mountain spring water flowing through a meadow filled with wildflowers.

Historical revelations are woven into the stories... 

Italy has some 800 wine grape varieties. Many are found nowhere else in the 
world, and all of them, on some level, express Italian culture. There are 
hundreds of defined production zones on several levels of specificity. 
Piedmont alone has 50 Denominazione Origine Controllata, or DOC, zones. 
Tuscany has 40....

...An appendix provides a glossary of Italian wine terms, a roster of grape 
varieties and a precise directory of wine zones by region....All the good 
stuff (including recipes from Bastianich's restaurateuse mom, Lidia) is up 
front....

Explaining the arcane mysteries of Italian wine laws,.... Lynch confides that 
Italian wine producers "have lots and lots of laws, which they delight in 
creating, revising and, most especially, debating. But obeying them is 
another story."

He gets off some pretty good wine descriptions, too: "A glass of young 
Aglianico," he writes, "is dark and feral, like the wolves that still roam 
the hills in these parts, greeting you with a low, tannic growl."....

*
Rod Smith is writer-at-large for Wine & Spirits magazine.