Wine Openers

Another memory from the recent trip to Emilia Romagna as guests of the Convito di Romagna and the Consorzio Vini di Romagna:
We spent almost two hours one sunny morning chatting with Cristina Geminiani, winemaker and grand-daughter of the founder of Fattoria Zerbina near Faenza in Romagna.

After Cristina walks a group of visiting writers and importers around the wine cellar and answers about 200 questions, she offers us a taste of the 2006 Albana di Romagna Passito.
It’s the color of a lion’s mane and sweet, of course, but not cloying, with ample acidity and a nutty undertone to balance the high sugar level.
The label is an illustration of a chessboard under the name “Scacco Matto.”
One of the non-Italian speakers asks Cristina what it means and she laughs.
“It means ‘checkmate’ because everyone told us we wouldn’t be able to make a great passito from albana,” she said.
“They were wrong, so we named it this.”
A great story, made even greater when we got home and discovered the wine received Tre Bicchieri from Gambero Rosso. Zerbina’s award was one of only 13 Tre Bicchieri given to the entire Emilia Romagna region.

FORLI, Italy – Giovanna Drei Dona pointed toward the southeast, where a range of low hills lay nearly hidden in mist.
“When it’s clear you can see the Adriatic Sea from here,” said Giovanna, gazing from the back steps of her family’s winery in southern Emilia-Romagna. “We are only 15 kilometers or less from the sea, so you understand it has a big effect on our wines.”
Giovanna and her husband Claudio are the owners of Drei Dona Aziende Agricole and the winery Tenuta La Palazza.
Azienda Agricole designates a place that grows grapes and makes wine as compared to an Azienda Viticolo, which only grows the grapes and sells them to a winery.
About a dozen writers and bloggers are gathered in Giovanna’s presence, all guests of the Convito di Romagna and the Consorzio Vini Di Romagna, both organizations representing winemakers in the Romagna region.
The Convito is a small consortium of eight wineries, including Drei Dona and Fattoria Zerbina, founded in 2001 with the goal of raising the level of Romagna sangiovese to that of the better-known Tuscany.
Giovanna, whose son Enrico was one of the initial founders of the Convito, related how it’s only natural the Romagna sangiovese should receive the same respect as the Tuscan version since the land we are standing on, now well inside the border of Romagna, once was part of Tuscany.

“Sangiovese was born here in the hills between here and Florence,” said Giovanna. “We were in Tuscany until 50 years ago when they changed the borders.”
Later, during a presentation by Convito president Giordano Zinzani, it was explained that it was Benito Mussolini who decided to turn a sliver of Romagna into Tuscany.
“Mussolini was born about here,” said Zinzani, pointing on a map just about where we were standing Tuesday with Giovanna. “He wanted the headwaters of the Tiber River to be in Tuscany, so he changed the border to include this narrow piece of Romagna where the river flows. Of course, later, when he left, the border was changed back.”
Also, the Medici family, that powerful 15th Century family that dominated Tuscany’s banking and politics, once owned this part of Romagna, Giovanna said.
She admitted the winery today doesn’t look very Tuscan except for the olive trees scattered around the 23 hectares (approximately 57 acres) of property.
“We like the tree and the olives but they are more a diversion than a way to make money,” she said.
This winery, part of which was a watchtower built in 1481, has been in the Drei Dona family nearly a century.
It was Giovanna’s husband Claudio who took the big step to raise the quality of the wines, which before his efforts simply weren’t very remarkable, said Giovanna.
“Sangiovese once was made tro be drunk early, not a long-lasting wine,” she said. “It wasn’t what we look for in a wine now.”
We heard a similar tale Monday when visiting the winery Fattoria Zerbina.
“Thirty years ago, my husband had the idea to bring the sangiovese of Romagna among the best in the world,” Giovanna said.
The Drei Dona land is planted mostly in sangiovese with some albana and small sections of chardonnay, riesling, malvasia and sauvignon blanc for the whites and cabernet sauvignon, uva longanesi and cabernet franc in red.
The climate this close to the Adriatic Sea is very humid and cooler than that of Tuscany, Giovanna said.
“It’s more like Sicily,” she said.”It never rains in the summer and sometimes, maybe one year in 10, we have to give irrigation to keep the acidity.”
Cooling breezes in the summer (cool enough in mid-summer to require a light cover) and moderating breezes in winter keep the wines fresh, she said.
“We never have bad storms, there are no problems for the vines,” she said.
Some of the vines are pre-phylloxera, that vine-killing louse imported from the U.S. that nearly wiped out Europe’s vineyards.
“That one down there, the one that curves off like a bridge, is pre-phylloxera,” Giovanna said, pointing to an ancient looking vine. “It gives us a white grape but it’s so old we don’t know what it is.”
The Tenuta La Palazza wines are lead by the riserva Pruno (all the wines are named after horses kept by the Dona Drei family), the 100 percent sangiovese flagship.
Other wines, such as the Notturno, Graf Noir and Magnificat, include international style grapes but they are made more because the customers want them.
The wine we tasted was a 2007 Pruno Sangiovese Riserva, very dark red, with the dried cherry nose typical of sangiovese. Unfiltered, with 18 months in wood and another year in the bottle, it still was young, with plenty of time ahead of it to settle down.
Maybe there was a hint of the sea, we thought.
Giovanna shrugged.
“Our idea is not to make an international wine but to work on our specialty, sangiovese,” Giovanna said. “We want you to remember these wines and the places they came from.”

FAENZA, Italy – The second thing Cristina Geminiani does, after shaking hands all around while needlessly apologizing for her excellent English, is issue the 10 or so of us visiting journalists a pair of plastic covers for our shoes.
“It’s nice today but it’s been rainy,” said Cristina, winemaker and grandaughter of Vincenzo Geminiani, the founder of Fattoria Zerbina, where we are visiting today (Feb. 19). “You’ll see you need these to keep your shoes clean when we walk in the vines.”
The soils of this hilly country only 25 miles or so from the Adriatic Sea are mostly clay, underlaid with a chalk or limestone shelf.
“It’s good for the vines because it holds the moisture,” said Geminiani, pointing out the 80 steep hectares of vines on which she raises (mostly) sangiovese, albana (the white grape of the Emilia-Romagna area) and small amounts of trebbiano, cabernet sauvignon, merlot and riesling. “The soil holds the moisture for the vines, even in the hottest times.”

Which is good, since the Consorzio Vini di Romagna (the local winemakers organization) must give winemakers special permission to irrigate.
“We do it maybe one year in 10, and then only up on the top, where the soils are bit different,” Cristina said. “And then it’s only the albana and it’s not to make the bunches larger but to retain the acidity.”
Local lore says sangiovese was first discovered by the Capuchin friars in Romagna, on Monte Giove (Mount Jupiter) near Rimini, a few kilometers to the east of where we were standing.
“The history of sangiovese goes back 500 years but it’s been cultured only since 200 years ago,” Cristina told us.
This area is trying hard to increase its exposure and its reputation for making high-quality sangiovese, which is why the Convito di Romagna and the Consorzio Vini di Romagna sponsored this trip for us.
Think of sangiovese and what comes to mind for most of us is Tuscany and Chianti Classico, often considered the gold standard for top-quality sangiovese.
What we’ve heard repeated during our brief time here is “We’re as good as Tuscany,” an argument also heard in the U.S. when wine-growing areas compare themselves to Napa or Sonoma.
That’s not say the winemakers in Romagna want to be another Tuscany, except in acceptance and sales.
Until very recently, we are told, Romagna sangiovese was made fast to drink fast.
“By February it was no good, but by then it had all been drunk,” one winemaker (not Cristina) told us.
But a generation of Romagna winemakers, including Cristina’s grandfather, decided sangiovese had more potential and worked hard to better the local wine, pushing it to unprecedented levels of quality, acceptance and yes, profits.
It took years and in the 1980s the wines started improving, Cristina said.
“The first ‘quality” sangiovese was in the 1980s and my first harvest was in 1985,” said Cristina.
At the time the winery was blending some cabernet, merlot and syrah with all their sangiovese but today the Pietramora Sangiovese di Romagna superiore riserva is 100 percent sangiovese while the IGT wines continue to be blends.
“We phased out the international grapes (for the riserva) and went back to the indigenous sangiovese,” she said.
Indigenous referring to stories of how sangiovese was first discovered in the Romagna region. That Tuscan version is a more-recent offshoot, so the stories go, taking advantage of the sangionvese-friendly conditions in the area about 90 kilometers to the east of Romagna, just over the Appenine Mountains.
Cristina said the 1997 vintage is generally considered a great vintage for the region but her favorite is the 1998.
And the hot year of 2003 holds a special place for her.
“It was very hot but the wines were very beautiful,” Cristina said. “It was a very difficult and challenging year for us but when it’s that difficult and the wines come out so well, you know the winemaker has done a good job.”
We are tasting all her wines Monday during the Vini Ad Arte tasting, along with wines from another 12 or so wineries. The bus taking us to dinner is waiting, so more news later.
(This post was amended to clarify which wines are 100 percent sangiovese.)