Grape Groups and Families - Native Wine Grapes of Italy - page 110

producers are evaluating whether the variety is
best used in dry wine blends or air-dried and
added to sweet recioto blends.
I know of nobody seriously considering a
monovarietal wine at present, if for no other
reason than that no single estate owns enough
grapevines to make a monovarietal version in
suffi cient commercial volumes. In fact, Negrara
Veronese's diffusion is limited to a few sporadic
rows in Valpolicella near Verona and in the
provinces of Padova and Vicenza. It is listed as
one of the blending grapes in DOCs Bardolino,
Breganze Rosso, Valdadige, and Valpolicella.
Most often, it is used in the wines of Bardolino,
but the percentage is too low to draw any con-
clusions about the variety (if anything, Bar-
dolino is also where greater than usual percent-
ages of Molinara are used). I have yet to try a
monovarietal Negrara Veronese: producers
have told me the wine has good acid-tannic bal-
ance but is a little neutral.

skewed because some of the best Aglianico pro-
ducers were not represented, the Pallagrello
wines were the only two of two hundred wines
evaluated that scored fi ve stars, or 18.5/20.
Some experts believe the name Pallagrello
derives from paglia (hay), because the grapes
used to be air-dried on straw and eaten like rai-
sins; others insist that the Pallagrello s are direct
descendants of the Pallarelle varieties of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Others go
back even further, to the ancient Roman Pilleo-
lata, so called because of its very small, round
berries ( pilleola, or small ball). The Borboni
dynasty held Pallagrello wines in high esteem
and offered them to visiting notables as gifts or
at royal dinners. They referred to them as Piedi-
monte, the area where the wines were made
(Piedimonte Matese). In fact, Ferdinando IV
Borbone (1751-1825) included the two Pallagrello
grapevines in his famous vigna del ventaglio (or
vineyard of the fan) near the magnifi cent royal
building at Caserta. This vineyard contained the
ten grape varieties the sybaritic king claimed
were the best in his kingdom, planted in rows
that jutted out like the rays of a fan ( ventaglio ).
The varieties have come back to national
prominence thanks to the passion of Peppe
Mancini and Alberto Barletta, who created the
Vestini Campagnano estate and began produc-
tion of Pallagrello Bianco and Nero wines in
commercially signifi cant numbers (and in the
process also resurrected a third wine-worthy
native, Casavecchia). The two friends have since
parted ways, with Mancini setting up the Terre
del Principe estate, another high-quality Palla-
grello and Casavecchia wine producer. True Pal-
lagrello Bianco and Pallagrello Nero are those
grown in the province of Caserta, whereas
another variety grown in the province of Avel-
lino and also called Pallagrello in the past, is a
distinct variety according to Costantini, Monaco,
Vouillamoz, Forlani, and Grando (2005). In any
case, these and other homonyms probably date
back to the end of the nineteenth century, when
the name was used to indicate several distinct
vines now known to be Coda di Volpe Bianca,
Trebbiano Giallo, or Malvasia Bianca.

THE PALLAGRELLO GROUP

Perhaps more than any variety, the Pallagrello s
(of which there are currently two, a white-ber-
ried Pallagrello Bianco and a red-berried Palla-
grello Nero, though in the past there were many
supposedly different grapes referred to as Uve
Pallarelle, or Pallagrelle ) embody the plight of
native Italian grapes. Completely forgotten by
everyone until the early twenty-fi rst century,
these Pallagrello s are now on an absolute roll
and are considered two of Italy's most exciting
varieties. As recently as 2003, a state-of-the-art
topic on the wines of Campania, by Attilio Sci-
enza and Maurizio Boselli, made no mention of
either Pallagrello. Indeed, in 1995 there was not
a single producer of a pure Pallagrello wine.
Today there are more than a dozen good ones,
and some of the wines rank with Italy's best.
Not coincidentally, as reported by the British
wine magazine Decanter in May 2011, a panel
tasting of southern Italian wines bestowed its
top two awards on Pallagrello Nero wines, not
wines made with the more famous Aglianico or
Primitivo. Though these results were partly