The beautifulSouth
THE South of Italy is often known as the Mezzogiornio (midday), a name which conjures an image of blazing sunshine, laid-back natives and a lot of very ordinary wine.
Certainly, really fine Italian wines are much harder to find in the South than in the North. They come in trickles from individual wine-makers who cultivate their vines in zones tempered by sea-breezes or in the cooler mountains of this sun-scorched part of the Mediterranean.
The "boot" of Italy is divided into four regions: Campania, Calabria, Basilicata and Puglia. Campania, centred on the beautiful Bay of Naples and the Amalfi coast, is known historically for falernum, the fabled wine of the hedonistic Romans. It appears in modern guise as falerno and is produced by the Moio and Villa Matilde estates near the northern Campanian town of Mondragone, also famous for its excellent buffalo mozzarella. The red version, made largely from the great Aglianico grape, is a strong but classy wine.
Further inland, near Avellino, the house of Mastroberardini has a virtual monopoly on wine production. Its minerally, waxy white Greco di Tufo is a nice change from Chardonnay, and its Grappa, distilled from the same Greco grapes, is superb.
Mastroberardini's best-known wine is the red Taurasi (100% Aglianico). Personally I find it a bit of a bruiser - brooding, oxidised, needing ages to mature - and therefore not suitable for restaurant listings.
The Aglianico really performs best in Basilicata, the instep of the Italian boot, on east-facing hillsides surrounding Monte Vulture, an extinct volcano. The big name here is Fratelli d'Angelo. Donato, the son of the house, has become a wine-maker of world class.
A glass of his 1988 Aglianico del Vulture sits beside me as I write this piece. What a wine! Deep, intense ruby with blood red highlights, this is truly, to quote the poet, a beaker full of the warm south but with a structure, class and lingering finish you might confuse, when tasting blind, with something much grander from Piedmont or the Rhône.
Prices vary between £6 and £8 a bottle for the 1988 and the 1990, which is quite a lot of money for a southern Italian red, but for this sort of quality you would have to pay up to £12 a bottle for something comparable from France. Why not suggest it as a change from claret with the new season's grouse?
Calabria is the toe of southern Italy and its poorest region. Vines are spread across the province, mingling with ancient Greek ruins, from Savuto and Lamezia on the Tyrennian Sea to Sant'Anna di Isola Capo Rizzuto on the Ionian coast. Here the Gaglioppo grape rules, providing rich, round, mainly red wines which used to travel north to illicitly bolster Barolo and Barbaresco in weak years.
Nowadays as the younger generation of Calabrians desert the land to find a better life in the factories of Turin and Milan, there is only one Calabria wine - Cirï - of any real commercial consequence. The red is an unpretentious, strongly alcoholic 13.5% tipple and there is also a characterful rosato which makes an ideal partner for fresh anchovies. Librandi is easily the most active producer of Cirï, though other good names include San Francesco, Ippolito and Caruso.
And so to Puglia, the heel of the Italian peninsula and the power house of the southern wine industry. Here vines grow in profusion, often on flatlands close to the Adriatic coast, and produce a staggering 1.2 billion litres of wine a year. Much of this was formerly sold in bulk for blending, but, funded by government grants, Puglian producers in recent years have sought to effect the tricky transformation from the production of wines in bulk to the production of wine in bottle.
As usually happens in the modern wine world, they listened to the siren voices of local bureaucrats who advised them to alter their vine training systems in order to make "lighter wines required by the market".
This, coupled with the abandoning of local grape varieties, resulted, according to David Gleave, managing director of Winecellars and an authority on Southern Italy, "as anyone who has tried many a southern wine will know, in neutrality on a mass scale".
Happily the more conservative farmers in Puglia's Salento peninsula have kept both to their old ways of vine training and their native grapes such as the splendid Negroamaro with its sensuous rich fruit. The best of the old has also been allied with the best of the new in high-tech wineries such as the large private concern of Candido or the co-operative at Copertino.
This has resulted, says Gleave, in red wines that offer by far the best value for money in Italy, and some of the best value in the world.
What Puglia lacked, until very recently, was a range of white wines with anything appraoching the distinctive character of the reds. But Gleave was swift to latch on to the winemaking talents of the south's great oenologist Dr Severino Garofano, consultant to the Candido estate.
The Candido Chardonnay "Casina Cucci" is a good incisive wine. And his latest creation, the Gravina Bianco, made from native grape varieties grown in cooler vineyards has an exciting and original flavour which at just £3.50 a bottle should transform the fortunes of southern Italian wines in the UK. n
