Don Chisciotte e Sancho Panza and Cervantes is on table!
Don Chisciotte e Sancho Panza and Cervantes is on table
It’s about a month that I do not write; and a month is really a lot of time for a blog.
In this month I shattered into a thousand fragments, in a thousand pieces and this dispersion of ideas and thoughts led to having tasted a lot of different things; so without getting lost in preamble we go to see a little ‘bottles together and through those maybe I can pull the strings of a good story.
The story to tell was my meeting between il Tufiello e Tenuta Grillo.
Who owns these two wineries?
Always to the same person or to that beautiful abstract entity that responds to the name of Guido Zampaglione.
This gentleman owns two vineyards. The first one that is more famous to me (since I already knew it) is in Callitri, in Irpinia; This leads to a soap opera of the oenological world.
At the beginning Guido was the uncle’s enologist: that Luigi Zampaglione who produces a wine that alone told all of Irpinia: Don Chisciotte.
Only eight thousand bottles to tell the world a microcosm.
When Guido was the winemaker, the result was an infinite wine; but then the roads are divided and so the enological direction changes hands.
Don Chisciotte e Sancho Panza and Cervantes is on table!
Never mind, Don Chisciotte changes; neither for the better nor for the worse, but it finds its specific human dimension and yet up to Callitri to look at the wind turbines as windmills is another small vineyard owned by the parents of Luigi; a small estate 2.5 hectares of vines, 6200 hectare plants, the vine is exclusively Fiano cultivated in high hills 700-800 meters on practically mountain terrain.
This company is in a place of Italy lashed by the winds that sometimes blow so strong that the grains are torn from the earth (the real richness of the Tufiello).
Well with these premises once a year Guido returns to Callitri from his Monferrato and vinifies.
He is not a hero, he is a man who loves wine and his land and this land resounds as on the notes of Asturias of Albeniz.
Almost not to forget the plants its name its beautiful Fiano was called Sancho Panza.
So that in high Irpinia on the mountains whose landscape could be the place where King Arthur withdrew two members of the same family and with the same vine pay homage to the impossible challenges.
Don Chisciotte e Sancho Panza and Cervantes is on table!
I realize the length but doing this premise was essential otherwise you would not have perceived the beauty and complexity of stories that live behind a vine (the Fiano large berry aromatic seeds) and a family and you could not understand what kind of winemaking apply Guido.
For better or for worse Fiano is an extreme wine: obtained with very long macerations and continuous contact with the skins. What emerges is an orange without compromise but with a mountain drinkability and a very powerful freshness: needless to tell you buy it in barrels!
This year, however, Guido wanted to indulge and decided to make a test that is the wine that six hundred words ago I decided to tell you that a fiano so extreme to rival the Gaia of Cantina Giardino (which are friends of Guido) and then It was thus formed with a Sancho Montemattina or belly with a year of aging in more and it feels!
Bloody hell inf you feel it!
Resins and mountain herbs! Apples and a megalodontic olfactory scoop a wine of which I sincerely regret having taken a single bottle!
I tell you sincerely that I understand men who tell stories of burgundy or mosel and I can not do anything about it if I tell stories of Irpinia; but those perfumes and places are so far from the cool and cool routes that not only are told but must be lived intensely and entirely.
Don Chisciotte e Sancho Panza and Cervantes is on table!
To understand this producer I decided to also know his work in Monferrato. Fortunately, he wanted me to meet him at a wonderful event: “Van” Natural Artisan Winemakers; held inside the former slaughterhouse of Testaccio (at the fair of the other economy) and could recognize it, know it and exchange a few words turned out to be a man with a good face and a soul as windy as his mountains.
I must tell you that the man Zampaglione really liked me and so after tasting the wines he makes in Monferrato in his company called Tenuta Grillo (and that would really deserve even more than Montemattina) I decided to take away a bottle of Igea a barbera d’asti vinified in the “Zampaglionesca” way that comes out is a completely animal, powerful wine with tertiary aromas that rule over everything and that so much reminiscent of that all-animal seductiveness that sometimes assails us and when we see it in a woman, we’re screwed!
In that case, better escape! Do not hesitate for a moment or we will be incurably caught up in a spider’s web!
My boys that wines!
I sincerely hope to have been able to transmit the emotion of a viticultor so exciting to be disputed between Europe and Asia.
From my writing, however, I would like a concept to be clear; although this article is dedicated to Guido, which for me remains an exceptional oenologist and a person who, when he talks about his wines, does so with an infinite love, we must not forget that everything was born of two people.
Don Chisciotte e Sancho Panza and Cervantes is on table!
The two Zampaglione; I do not know the mechanics and methods of their confrontation, and I honestly do not care, what interests me is that you all keep in mind that Don Quixote is an incredible wine and not a B series.
Don Chisciotte is the wine that made me fall in love with orange wine and the fact that now it has changed a little in favor of a better drinkability does not mean that it is from the point of view become a supermarket wine!
And one of the big fiano of my life
Zampaglione
Giardino
Zampaglione
Here is my trinity of the Fiano; and in the case of the big Z I do not even put the name I would like you to get closer to this world free from schemes and rankings.
Have fun guys: or I will eat you!
