Wine Pages (still fermenting)

There were two threads of table conversation about wine in Umbria. How much we were drinking. And given that, why didn't we have hangovers? We drank a lot of a few wines mostly Vin de Tavola, made locally and in our case by the hotel Camiano Piccolo themselves. When Carol negotiated a fixed price for one of our meals on a tour day, we all said we'd ditch the desert and have wine included if there was a choice. Most times it's an automatic part of the meal. And it's good.
Selena filling the wine jugs from the flagons of Camiano Piccolo's Rosso and Bianco Fetching the rubber/ clip sealed  bottles of red at Monteluco, the truffle hunting day. 

In my old (1980!) Burton Anderson bible about Italian wines and winemakers, Vino, there's a scant paragraph about Montefalco wines in the section on the Perugia DOC. The Montefalco Sagrantino winemakers (names) he says would be 'scarcely recognizable beyond Perugia' and that 'there was an 'extraordinary wealth of wines to discover'. It seemed like that was still the case when there was general surprise at the Montefalco 1996 vintage, released after the regulation four years in 2000, winning acclaim as one of the top Italian red wines of the year (Arnaldo Caprai are quite entitled to skite about it here). 

Anderson: 
"In the old days, Sagrantino, also known as Sacrantino or Sacramentino, apparently in reference to the Sacrament or the Sacramentine religious order, was a smooth, sweet red wine made from semi-dried passito grapes. Although a few producers still make it that way, often a touch frizzante, the current practice is to carry out a complete alcoholic fermentation that results in a strong, dry, rich, deep purple wine with an attractively bitter finish, somewhat reminiscent of Recioto Amarone. Sagrantino vines, indigenous to the area, can be grown in the community of Montefalco and parts of Giano and Bevagna for the DOC wine.

Adanti makes an excellent passito (sweet) version. There is also Montefalco Rosso DOC, invariably dry and lighter then the Sagrantino. It is made primarily with Sangiovese with Trebbiano and Sagrantino."

Apparently "DNA tests have demonstrated that the variety is not related to any other vine of central Italy. No one really knows how long it has been here nor how it arrived, though most tend to accept that it was brought over by Franciscan monks, perhaps from the Holy Lands after some crusade, maybe from Spain…."

Oz Clark raves about the sweeter passisto, served from thinner smaller bottles, and the Arnaldo Caprai pure Sagrantino

While undoubtedly the reds had the floor, and get the attention, there were whites also that had a lot of appeal.

At the Castel Rinaldi classes we were always greeted with a glass or two of the the Arquata Grechetto 1999. Slightly 'frizzante', with oak (tannins?) to cut the sweetness. 







Links
Montefalco Commune
  http://www.montefalcodoc.it/ (If your Italian is like mine, use Altavista's Babelfish translator) 
and The Strada site   www.stradadelsagrantino.it 
Cantine Adanti

Wine 

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