Agriculture Reference
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where their reduced susceptibility to the various
diseases that can affect grapevines is at the fore-
front. Extreme weather is not a problem in Italy,
making the need for hybrids close to null.
I think that at times crossings and hybrids
can get an unfair rap, and blanket statements
are made about how poor the wines are. This is
quite simply wine snobbism at its worst. Even
in the case of hybrids, while it's true that some
hybrid wines are best forgotten, Canadian Vidal
ice wines, Dutch johanniters and British seyval
blancs are lovely wines. Unfortunately, though
hybrids usually have increased resistance to dif-
fi cult weather and disease conditions, they may
present other problems: for example, Seyval
Blanc's thin skin is a problem in Ontario's cold
fall and winter weather, making Seyval Blanc
late-harvest wines or ice wines hard to produce,
at least in Canada. Of course some lovely dry
wines can still be made (the grapes are picked
sooner in the fall) but the range of possibilities
is fatefully limited, making the usefulness of
that hybrid in that specifi c habitat questionable.
Seyval Blanc is more popular in the United
Kingdom, where ice wine production is not a
concern, than it is in Canada, where estates
consider the ice wine option when they decide
which hybrid to plant.
Relative to fi ne-wine quality, some cross-
ings have been spectacularly unsuccessful as
well: I doubt readers will object to my consider-
ing German crossings such as Optima (Sylva-
ner × Müller-Thurgau) or Ortega (Müller-Thur-
gau × Siegerrebe) anything but poor. However,
many crossings have given much better results.
In my view, the same wine snobbery directed
toward hybrids is also at work against cross-
ings, since many wines made from crossings
are quite acceptable if not downright delicious.
In Italy, Müller-Thurgau and Kerner have been
very successful crossings; and whereas decades
ago many wine experts believed these cross-
ings to be unequivocally poor and best
uprooted, opinions regarding them have
changed considerably in recent times. Better
viticultural practices and winemaking tech-
niques have fi nally shown us that such cross-
ings can really deliver. Simply planting cross-
ings in more suitable sites and reducing their
yields has shown that their wines can be down-
right memorable; but not surprisingly, hardly
the same results are possible when the crossing
is planted in lousy fl atland vineyards made to
pump out grapes and wines in industrial fash-
ion. So it's a matter of fairness. Few true Italian
wine experts anywhere would dispute that the
Müller-Thurgau wine called Feldmarschall
(made by Tiefenbrunner) or that various kern-
ers (those by Kofererhof, Pacherhof, and Manni
Nossing spring immediately to mind) are
among Italy's best thirty or forty white wines.
So I rest my case. As Müller-Thurgau and
Kerner are essentially Germanic grapes (cre-
ated by researchers in countries such as Swit-
zerland or Germany), I won't discuss them in
this topic. That said, the wine lover in me
would do everyone a huge disservice if I didn't
at least mention the exceptionally high quality
of these wines made in Italy's Alto Adige
region.
There are numerous crossings that have
proven more or less successful in Italy. The
word for crossing in Italian is incrocio; all
crossings in Italy offi cially carry the element
incrocio in their name followed by another
descriptor, such as the name of their creator
and a code or color (e.g., Incrocio Dalmasso
13.26 or Incrocio Manzoni Bianco). In those
cases where the variety begins to have com-
mercial appeal, the name is inevitably (and I
would add, mercifully) changed to be better
sounding, easier to use, and easier to remem-
ber (hence, Albarossa or Manzoni Bianco). In
fairness, not a single wine made with these
Italian-born crossings can compete with the
extraordinary quality of some of the wines
made with their Germanic counterparts, but
it's also true that the Italian grapes have been
studied and planted less, so less is known
about them. Some have recently been reevalu-
ated however, and Manzoni Bianco especially
is beginning to attract considerable attention. I
list here those crossings that I believe are rele-
vant to wine drinkers.
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