Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
very nice wine and supposedly mainly or all
Malvasia Bianca della Basilicata, it wasn't
labeled as such. I was left wondering what could
be done to revive the wine. The problem was
that most producers each owned only a few scat-
tered vines of it; it was impossible to ask a small
family-owned winery to make a pure Malvasia
Bianca della Basilicata, as they wouldn't have
enough grapevines to make wine in commer-
cially signifi cant numbers. So I turned to the
people at the Cantina di Venosa, a social coop-
erative that was enjoying remarkable success at
that time with their aromatic Dry Muscat wine,
a bottling of Moscato Bianco. It stood to reason
that if they were to scour all the vineyards
owned by their members, they might be able to
bottle a brand-new, monovarietal Malvasia della
Basilicata wine. I distinctly remember my visit
to the winery on the day I pointed out that they
could resurrect a local wine that had been aban-
doned and that would place the winery at the
forefront of regional innovation in winemaking.
To their credit, the team, headed by winemaker
Luigi Cantatore, was very gracious in its
response and in 2005 the very fi rst wine labeled
as a Malvasia Bianca della Basilicata, called
D'Avalos, saw the light of day. I was somewhat
surprised to fi nd that the fi nished wine was not
at all aromatic (Malvasia Bianca della Basilicata
is an aromatic variety), and was marked by oak
(people at the winery explained they didn't wish
to produce another aromatic fresh white wine,
as it would only duplicate their Dry Muscat).
Still, the die had been cast, and a wine that had
not been heard of for decades was reborn. Today,
on the heels of Cantina di Venosa's example,
Eleano also bottles a monovarietal Malvasia
Bianca della Basilicata wine; only ten years ago,
there was none.
In the summer of 2003, while walking mile-
high vineyards in the Valle d'Aosta with Gian-
luca Tellolli, then the winemaking director of
the Cave du Vin Blanc de Morgex et La Salle, I
came across a few scattered vines of Roussin de
Morgex, a red grape traditional to the high
alpine areas of the towns of Morgex and La
Salle. Provided one knows what to look for, it is
immediately recognizable due to the pale color
of its berries and its highly indented, almost
jagged leaves. It is found nowhere else in Italy,
and to the best of my knowledge, nobody had
made wine from it in commercially signifi cant
volumes for a century at least. Telloli had known
of Roussin de Morgex's existence and had stud-
ied it a bit, but wasn't convinced of its winemak-
ing potential and he soon left the winery to
pursue other projects, so my hopes of seeing
Roussin de Morgex wine resurrected were
dashed. But you can't keep a good idea down,
and in 2011, while talking wine with Nicola Del
Negro, the new director of the Cave du Vin
Blanc, I brought up the idea again. To his credit,
Del Negro was very interested in the project. We
fi rst surveyed vineyards in the summer of 2011,
and after identifying potential grape sources,
Del Negro made a small volume of Roussin de
Morgex wine (the equivalent of forty 750 mil-
liliter bottles or so) in the 2012 vintage that we
tasted together repeatedly following the har-
vest—Del Negro was kind enough to send small
bottled samples to my home in Rome when I
couldn't make it up to the Valle d'Aosta. Unfor-
tunately the 2012 harvest was a diffi cult one
and some of the grapes picked were not per-
fectly healthy, so that the wine showed a touch
of excess volatile acidit y. Still, the bright salmon-
pink color and the aromas and fl avors of red
currant, rosehip, and sour cherries bode well
for this wine's future. Furthermore, the
extremely high acidity of both the berries and
wine has led Del Negro to believe that Roussin
de Morgex might be best used to make a spar-
kling red wine (his Cave du Vin Blanc de
Morgex et La Salle is already adept at making
very fi ne sparkling wines from Prié, a native
white grape), which is the route he plans to go
in 2013. Obviously, further studies and more
work are needed, and the wine is predicted to go
on sale (given the paltry volumes, it will be sold
only at the winery) in 2015. In 2014 we also plan
to have the putative Roussin de Morgex grape-
vines we have identifi ed in scattered, small
vineyard plots high in the mountains, subjected
to university DNA profi ling (but there is very
