Basilicata's Pizza and Pasta Wine

There are wines meant to be mulled over, thought about, discussed, and dissected.

This is not one of those wines.

It's a wine for drinking when you don't want to mull, think, or discuss. It's a wine for having with pizza while you're watching TV or a movie on the DVD player, or for buying in multiple bottles and setting in the middle of a long, family-filled table adorned with a red check table cloth and big bowls of spaghetti.

The 2005 Alovini Terra degli Eventi is a good QPR choice if you are looking for a simple, flavorful wine to go with traditional Italian-American dishes. ($8.95, Chronicle Wine Cellar; available online from other merchants for $13.95) This is a wine that can handle tomato sauce--lots of tomato sauce--with its aromas of sour cherry and medicinal notes of clove and spice. Blended from Aglianico and Sangiovese, the wine's flavors echo the aromas and are predominantly sour cherry with high-toned blueberry accents and some hints of baking spices. While this wine will do the business for the price, it's not a highly unique or memorable wine.

Italy produces a lot of simple, quaffable reds. They're perfect for pizza and pasta. My rule is, if the wine costs more than the pizza you ordered for delivery you've done something wrong. If it costs less than the pizza, don't think about it too much. Just pop the cork, open the box or pile some strings of spaghetti on your plate, and enjoy.

An Aglianico from Molise

Behind this black and iridescent pink exterior is a wine that is quite extraordinary. It has quite a following, too, among merchants, bloggers, and readers. This may have to do with the wine's consistency--vintage to vintage people seem to find it rich and delicious. It certainly doesn't have to do with the Aglianico grapes that go into it, since Aglianico is pretty obscure here in the US. And the Molise region where the wines are grown is relatively untraveled, too, by American wine drinkers.

Maybe this wine is so popular because the unfamiliarity of the grapes and the region make it an unqualified steal when it comes to the price. I bought mine from Garagiste as a future some months back for $11.95. Now it's on the market for between $11 and $17. The 2004 Di Majo Norante Aglianico was a beautiful medium-dark garnet in color, although if you pour yourself a full glass expect it to look plummy purple. There were aromas of cherry and earth when the bottle was first opened, and the taste was a bit astringent and drying when I took the first sip and left an aftertaste like strong black tea. One of the readers here, Pat, suggested that I decant the wine first, and folks on CellarTracker seemed to agree, so I decanted it for a little over an hour and the wine had strikingly different aromas and flavors. Where before there had been cherry and earth, I now smelled blackberries, tea, and a whiff of roses. The flavors, too, had changed and now reminded me of blackberry tending towards blueberry--which is to say it tasted like huckleberries to me. There were also tea and sassafras notes, and a little minty lift in the aftertaste. This was a wine that was complex, easy to drink, and a great value--so I think it represented excellent QPR.

Aglianico is made for drinking with spicy Italian food, so think pepperoni pizza, sausage tossed with your favorite pasta, or something that uses a bit of chili pepper for heat. We had it with a slightly adapted version of Rachael Ray's gnocchi and chicken meatballs that uses lots of basil and fennel seeds, as well as some red pepper flakes, and the moderate spiciness of the food stood in interesting opposition to the clean huckleberry fruit and the herbal and tea notes in the wine. If you love spaghetti and meatballs but are trying to cut back on red meat, you will love these chicken meatballs every bit as much as the beefy originals.

Because this wine changed so much from opening to first sips, and because it was so affordable, I would be tempted to buy a case or half-case of this wine and drink it regularly over the next few years to watch it develop and change. It's lovely now, but I suspect it will continue to improve. I would buy this by the case and drink over the next 4 years. Thanks to Pat, the reader who recommended this wine to me, for suggesting I decant it. This wine is a great value--I highly recommend you try it, too.

Sparkling Wine from Campania

Alessandro de Conciliis likens making wine to playing jazz. The analogy is a good one. Both take specific elements, put them into new combinations, mix the old with the new, and improvise when necessary to make things sing.

Based in Campania, de Conciliis makes a number of great wines, but I wanted to taste his sparkling wine because of the shared Roman heritage that this Italian region has with the French region of Champagne. When I think Italian sparkling wine I think Prosecco, but I'm learning that there's a whole world of choices out there in Italy if you like bubbles.

The 2005 Viticoltori De Conciliis Selim sparkling wine is just one example. ($19.99, K & L Wines; available elsewhere for between $15 and $20) Named after the jazz musician Miles Davis, it's made from 70% Fiano (variety #97 in my Wine Century Club) and 30% Aglianico grape varieties--the first native to the region, the second brought to Campania in ancient times by the Greeks. This was a good QPR sparkler, with a pronounced yeasty aroma. Citrus and nuts played a duet in the flavors, and the wine was active in your mouth with its abundant small bubbles/bead. This wine was better with food, given its yeasty aromas, and it went especially well with appetizers--especially those that involve bread like thin grissini, or nuts (I loved this with a handful of cashews).

It was a treat to try this interesting Italian sparkling wine, and confirmed my suspicion that Italian whites are going to play a significant role in my top wine discoveries this year.