Weekly Saturday Tasting

Lesser Known Italian Grapes

Saturday, March 2nd
1:00 - 3:00

One of my favorite things about working with wine is that you are constantly learning new things. No matter how long one has been in the wine business, there always seems to be some new region or grape that you had not experienced before. Nowhere may encapsulate this better than Italy and Italian Wine. With such a wonderful variety of micro-climates and culture, the only thing really tying Italian wines together as a whole is the fact that they come from Italy. You get an amazingly diverse spread of wines traveling from the Piedmont in the foothills of the Alps, to the Teutonic influenced Northeast around the Veneto, to the romantic hills of Tuscany and Chianti, down to the heel of the boot and the robust wines of Puglia, and even over to the island of Sicily and the stunning wines from the slopes of Mt Etna. It is a cultural microscope as well, as the variety in Italian wines truly shows how the country was an amalgam of various City-States that history bound together. You can see this in the way that the same grape will have five different names across five bordering regions; and you can see it in the way some Italian wines are named for their region and some for the grape; and you can see it in the small production of indigenous grapes that pop up in different areas that people hold onto as part of their history, and which you don't find hardly anywhere else. It is some of these that we will look to this Saturday as we taste through a line-up of some lesser known Italian wines. Most of these are grapes you may well never have heard of before, and which you will only find grown in these wonderful historic appellations. After twenty-eight years of working with wine, I still find myself feeling like an amateur when it comes to Italian wines, and I hope you can come be a novice alongside us this Saturday.

Borgo Moncalvo 'Ellipsis' Moscato Secco
Piemonte DOC, Italy, 2022
 
Petrilli 'Motta del Lupo' Nero di Troia Rosato
Puglia IGP, Italy, 2022
 
La Casaccia 'Poggeto' Grignolino
Grignolino del Monferrato Casalese DOC, Italy, 2022
 
Thurnhof 'St. Magdalener' Vernatsch & Lagrein
St Magdalener DOC, Südtirol, Italy, 2021