Major Native and Traditional Grape Varieties - Native Wine Grapes of Italy - page 234

name and Genazzano, just south of Rome.
Other wines of note that are made with the
Cesanese s include DOC Velletri and IGT Colli
Cimini, Colli di Saleno, Narni, and Spello.
Cesanese Comune is also grown southeast
of Rome in the Cori area, which may come as a
surprise, yet the local Cori DOC has called for
20 percent Cesanese since it was created in 1971,
implying the variety had always lived there
(since Cesanese really wasn't famous enough in
the 1970s for local growers to have desired
pushing it in the blend). Differences in the
Cesanese wines of Cori with respect to those of
d'Affi le or Olevano Romano are mainly due to
diversities in the terroir. At Cori, since there is
not much limestone, the wine has less struc-
ture, but nice freshness and minerality. The
microclimates are very different too: Cori has
one of the highest sunlight hour totals in Italy,
rather like northern Puglia, and is much
warmer and sunnier than Olevano Romano,
even though the two towns are less than an
hour's drive apart. This is important because
the Cesanese s don't ripen well in general, but at
Cori, they do, and the lighter soils guarantee the
wine will be considerably perfumed. Also, there
are no problems obtaining darkly colored wines
in Cori, as there are in Olevano, Piglio, and
Affi le. But remember that a black-as-ink cesa-
nese is just as absurd as a sepia or ebony sangio-
vese or nebbiolo. Some creative producers might
insist otherwise, but you know better.
In fact, with a more quality-focused
approach to winemaking, and with greatly
reduced average yields, cesanese might have
returned to fame much earlier in the twentieth
century. Historically, Cesanese s were used to
make all types of wine, from sparkling to dry to
late harvest, but these wines were always
plagued by shoddy winemaking and unhy-
gienic cellars. Today things have changed for
the better, and Cesanese wines are defi nitely
something to get excited about. These days,
cesanese is almost entirely produced as dry
wine, though passito s, sweet air-dried wines,
have recently begun to appear again. Even bet-
ter, there are many new, exciting young produc-

ers who have stopped turning their grapes over
to lowly local co-ops; and though rustic and
nondescript wines still abound, there really are
many fi ne cesaneses made today. The better
wines are ripe red-cherry fruit bombs, with aro-
mas of delicate sweet spices (a hint of cinna-
mon and of white pepper) and red rose petals,
and come across as luscious and creamy. I can't
stress enough the wonderful, delicately aro-
matic nose that a well-made cesanese is
endowed with: one whiff and you'll be hooked
for life. The variety is not massively tannic, so
anything tasting astringent and behemoth-like
is probably the result of overgenerous use of
oak, which is a real shame, since balance is
what makes cesanese such a great red wine.
When good, these really are some of Italy's best
and most fairly priced reds. In fact, cesanese
has to be considered one of the big success sto-
ries of Italian winemaking in the last ten years.

wines to try: For Cesanese del Piglio, try:
Casale della Ioria*** (especially the top wine
Torre del Piano, but they're all good here),
Coletti Conti** (Hernicus, Romanicum, at
times oaky), La Visciola** (Ju Quarto, Vici-
nale), and Terenzi** (Velobra). For Cesanese di
Olevano Romano, try: Damiano Ciolli*** (the
entry-level Silene and the stellar Cirsium, made
from eighty-year-old vines), Buttarelli* (I Colli),
Migrante* (Consilium), and Proietti* (Corte
alla Luna, Vignalibus). For Cesanese d'Affi le,
try: Colline di Affi le*** (Le Cese) and Formi-
coni** (Capozzano). For Cori, try Cincinnato**
(Arcatura, a monovarietal cesanese). The Cesa-
nese del Piglio wines of Marcella Giuliani have
been praised in the past by others, but though
well made, they are very dark and creamy-
sweet: apparently, the wine's deep color is the
result of very strong bleeding in the cellar.

Chatus
where it's found: Piedmont. national reg-
istry code number: 379. color: red.
Usually also known as Bournin (in Pied-
montese dialect) or as Nebbiolo di Dronero,