Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
wines to try:
Fattoria Zerbina*** (outstand-
ing
séléction de grains nobles
wines such as the
2006 AR Albana di Romagna Riserva Passito
and the dry wine Secco As), Podere Morini**
(excellent dry albana, and sweet Cuore Matto
Albana di Romagna Riserva Passito; the 2006
had 230 grams per liter of residual sugar and 8
grams per liter of total acidity, and only 8.5 per-
cent alcohol), Giovanna Madonia** (excellent
dry Neblina), Raffaella Bissoni** (Passito),
Villa Papiano** (Passito Riserva), and Tre
Monti* (both the dry Vigna Rocca and the
sweet Casa Lola, though I think this producer
does even better with Trebbiano Romagnolo).
To the best of my knowledge, there are no pure
Riminèse wines made on Corsica; a shame, as
it would be interesting to compare them to Ital-
ian versions.
early days, it was often made into a lightly spar-
kling wine. Unfortunately, Albana Nera is quite
rare today. Fontana and Filippetti (2006) have
tried to rediscover old vines in the areas around
Forlì and Riolo that Cavazza believed were the
variety's home.
It appears that Paolo Babini, owner of the
Fondo San Giuseppe estate near Brisighella,
where the variety was reportedly cultivated in
the past, owns twenty-fi ve-year-old Albana Nera
vines he selected from a local farmer's vineyard.
Given how forgotten this area of Romagna is,
and the altitude and steep hillside location of the
vineyards where he found the vines, a grapevine
discovery of this sort is plausible. I can person-
ally vouch for the altitude and the steepness of
the slopes: walking those hills with Babini on a
hot summer day last year, I was left panting
after only ten minutes into a much longer walk
(being out of shape doesn't help). For what it's
worth, the vines certainly looked to me like a
black-hued Albana. Further, there are some
fairly different-looking bunches among Babini's
vines, so it seems likely that, as with Albana,
there are different biotypes of Albana Nera.
However, some grapevines I saw that day were
clearly Centesimino, so I'm not sure all twenty-
fi ve hectares owned by Babini are Albana Nera.
Even more interesting is that amid the nor-
mal-looking Albana Nera bunches peppering
Babini's vines, perhaps a quarter of the total
were actually white-berried. Since entire
bunches were made up of nothing but white
grapes, it cannot be a case of asynchronous rip-
ening—as it was Babini who selected the grape-
vines to replant, it is highly unlikely that these
are different Albana vines planted promiscu-
ously or erroneously in the same vineyard. All
this leads me to postulate that Albana Nera may
be a colorful mutation of Albana. In any case,
Albana Nera and Albana wouldn't be the fi rst
examples of varieties that obligingly mutate at
the slightest provocation; the fact that Albana is
a very old variety makes color mutations par-
ticularly likely, as in Pinot Nero. Of course,
Albana Nera may just be a different variety
altogether, completely unrelated to the white-
Albana Nera
where it's found:
Emilia-Romagna.
national
registry code number:
not registered.
col-
or:
red.
Albana Nera is a virtually unknown cultivar
that I believe might have fi ne-wine potential—
but I am not sure it is an Albana. In the four-
teenth century, Pier de' Crescenzi wrote of the
Albatichi
group, grape varieties that all looked
like Albana, but (contrary to popular opinion)
he did not specifi cally write about an Albana
Nera (Cavazza 1904). According to de'
Crescenzi, the dark-berried Albana was also
called Albanina and was considered a good table
grape. For their part, Tanara (1644) and Acerbi
(1825) clearly describe, in vineyards around Ce-
sena, a dark-berried Albana named Albana
Rossa, and distinguish it from Albana Nera. It is
more likely however, as other experts have writ-
ten, that Albana Rossa was the name used to
describe Albana Nera in the area of Forlì and
Cesena, but that the two grapes were the same.
Farmers have always liked Albana Nera
because it tolerates higher altitudes and cooler
weather. It appears to have gradually moved
from hillsides to plains and from Emilia into
Romagna in the seventeenth century; in these
