The dark side of the wine.

The dark side of the wine.

The dark side of wine is a no-man’s land, populated by satyrs and ghosts who are not known by most but who fight wars and battles alone.

 

They try to defeat the obviousness and above all try to make their wines: those that they have in mind, those that take a lifetime to make them.

These people spend a life in the cellar, trying to be alchemists or playing cards with mother nature; often for years nobody takes them seriously.

They are guided by a sacred fire and continue inexorably year after year to create dark sides and black materials.

In my wanderings of zombies, I have met many, and when I sit down together to talk about wine, sometimes, in the air you can hear the breath of the night and time stops.

In those moments I realize that these men read the territory and commit themselves to devoting time to it even if they do not always get the fame they deserve.

They are like druids against the forest: they defend it, interpret it and spread its fruits, even if almost always we are too blind or not very sensitive to understand its true essence.

The dark side of the wine.

My friend’s Andrea Matrone, I have already spoken; he is the dark side of Vesuvius; but here in Lazio who has changed the cards on the table?

Perhaps speaking of lower Lazio is more difficult because for at least a century it is not synonymous with quality wine

However a hero is there:

His name is Matteo Ceracchi and his company Piana dei Castelli.

I will tell you immediately and to avoid misunderstandings that Matteo kick the ass , is a winemaker with his vision, his modus operandi and its precise direction that does not follow neither fashions nor wines guide.

I was lucky enough to taste his work very carefully, to drink his wines to study them in various formats; I was lucky enough to meet him, he who is elusive and always on the move is very difficult to stop him in one place.

Matteo is like certain ectoplasmic entities whose existence science doubts but nevertheless pursues it

It makes wine grades!

He is crazy!

The dark side of the wine.

It does not make too much sense to make a list of its wines as the series guides would do, since Piana dei Castelli does not have the obligation to exist in this dimension with a catalog of static wines: I’ll explain if I do not seem psychedelic.

Two of the elements that are used by this company as if they were coadjuvants are time and place; then the wines remain in their containers to age until the Ceracchi does not consider the wine ready and these containers tell a land that no one else studies with such great attention.

To immobilize three or four years a wine serves an important investment, both economic and human.

Almost no one is willing to do it, but on the contrary the result always creates three-dimensional wines and above all wines, photographs of vintages and territory perfectly in focus.

This is Matteo: he focuses on an image and only at the end will he be able to say whether this image corresponds to his ramified network of vines around the Lazio region; we could say that Piana dei Castelli makes wines without protection.

The dark side of the wine.

Each of these wines is a story in itself that mutates from year to year based on the dynamic research this man who is quietly able to keep a still wine for years only to see if his intuition was right or wrong.

I do not honestly choose one of his whites; I would say maybe 3 and madness are my favorite but to date I’m still in the phase that I want to drink other bottles to be able to pull off my idea.

And now we come to one of the most absurd wines that Matteo produces:

Out Rosè that is

 

The dark side of the wine.

Cesanese and montepulciano in equal parts: a wine that does not play on the pleasantness or on the perfumes but on the ability to tear away the fat component and exploit it to an incredible cleaning and neutralizing capacity.

A French wine (but of that France to the most unknown made of Jura or Rhone deeper) and sometimes one of those wines that makes you say that the natural smell; but here those smells and that mouth is functional to a very strong typicality.

An archaic wine and archetype of an infinite number of bottles no longer produced because they are not in line with the taste of the masses, but which tell the skin of the peasants; the face split by the November rain; the smell of wet earth and dogs that follow you.

If this Rosé was a record it would be Pink Floyd; it would be Richard Wright’s moog in welcome to the machine when it rings livid and tears your skin.

 

 

You float and at that point you do not know what you’re looking for in a wine or what you hate: at that point you shine like a crazy diamond.

Here everything speaks of power that subjugates and reformulates the elementary oenological knowledge; and mind you! I am aware that what I am writing makes sense only in my mind! Because to know the meaning of dark wine, of antimetinal wine, of monsters that intertwine on the universal multi-level one can not read! You have to uncork it and at that point you will really understand what a wine like is and this will change your life.

The dark side of the wine.

We arrive at the end of our journey to talk about the reds that are produced by the plain of the castles.

Even here Matteo could not fail to make me write for a whole day.

Having I believe at least eighteen harvests behind me (despite being as young as me), the experimentation that Matteo does on reds in some ways is even more extreme than that on whites.

Let’s start by immediately naming the wines that elsewhere would be considered with titles and blasonias would cost a salary:

Piana dei Castelli red.

Capitancelli (magnum)

Torre del mare.

These three wines are three worlds.

I would be wrong if I told you they looked like French wines; because in reality they look like wines de Matteo; open them calmly even three hours before.

Zero decanting, and reductions bring these wines to vibrate and they need an excellent oxygenation.

Torre del mare is a bordeaux made by us; it is put on the market only after the wine has made the shirt; Swabian that part of the precipitates binds to the bottle …… in 2018 the vintage on the market is 2009!

Basically it took ten years of rest to be put on the market with the maximum explosion of tertiary notes; A perfect photograph of a vineyard overlooking the beach.

Capitancelli instead is always a Bordeaux but much more juicy and fat; a wine from poultry or from cards, I honestly do not understand why nobody talks about it since it has a strength and a complexity that is not inferior to some American Tuscans.

To these two are added the red castelli plain which is a very dangerous merlot because it does not look like a merlot but it looks like a bottle to empty to open another and finally the Cesanese that Ceracchi is developing with the lady companion.

The dark side of the wine.

A trip to write this article: a real journey; an emotion that he could try in a year of rehearsals and phone calls.

Matteo is a father and a real man has his beliefs and his beliefs and his wines are far from perfect: fortunately they are human.

In many cases on the red there can be a slight carbonization (plain of the castles) but today I did not find great defects but only an endless desire to drink and drink again and that’s why I wrote so long.

I hope that at the end of the fair, his wines and his wonderful person will come to know why once a landowner is born on a territory, so then a strip of creation is reborn and the magic shines on this dirty and sad land.