After wine-alcohol, wine-sugar, and wine-fruit, here we come to the fourth “category”: wine-earth, the one that puts its connection to the territory of origin before everything else.
If you reread the rating sheets published in the old vintages of the many wine guides still prevailing, you would notice how certain descriptors were almost absent in the former and present with increasing frequency year after year.
Let’s talk about the noun-adjective “mineral,” of graphite, the flint, and all those elements that come from the bowels of the earth rather than the plant world.
This change in our language is not a physique of tasters seeking originality but the telltale sign of a change taking place, of a new trend meandering among producers devoted to high quality and who do not pursue it by trying to resemble established holy monsters.
A wine that transcends the grape variety
This new challenge we can call wine-ground, viz. a wine that transcends the grape variety and uses it as a tool to absorb and make its own the moods of the soil in which it sinks its roots.
And then transcends the wood and bends it into a useful tool for cementing those moods, smoothing their edges, balancing them and returning them to us in perfect harmony with each other.Mind you, nothing new under the sun. The wine-ground has its own distinct homeland of choice, established for a few centuries and appreciated especially by those who understand wine beyond fashions and marketing sleight of hand: Burgundy. What is extraordinary is that, almost spontaneously, in the most diverse parts of Italy, new producers are increasingly deciding to try their hand at producing wines-earth, tackling a venture that is in many ways reckless, both from a viticultural and commercial point of view.
Because these are wines that require great effort and sacrifice, terroir of rare mineral complexity, extreme vineyards in terms of age, conformation and method of farming, rarely codified agronomic and oenological practices, intuition rather than reasoning, courage seasoned with a pinch of madness. And once launched to market, they must fight against the stereotypes of established success, made up of power, wealth, aggressiveness, all of which have easy play in bamboozling even the well-acculturated consumer.As daunting as the task is, the results are comforting, and it is surely from this niche that will emerge the great Italian wines of the future.
Hanno solo bisogno di tempo, di incoraggiamenti e di un consumatore più maturo, disincantato e profondamente sensuale.
Article from “RuvidaMente.com,” courtesy of author Stefano Milioni: The 6 Faces of Planet Wine – RuvidaMente by Milioni
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