Precious drops, poured (in a tasting at the Hotel Ballard) by Silvia Loriga, marketing associate for the Consorzio del Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. The Consorzio, and its tourism-promotion arm, the Strada del Vino Nobile, sent Montepulciano's mayor, along with several staff members and wine makers, on a whirlwind promotional tour; their stop in Seattle, touchdown to takeoff, was about 10 hours. But they got a lot done.
One of the biggest problems facing Italian wine makers is the fractured nature of their production zones. Start with Italy's 350 officially recognized grape varieties, add 20 specific, semi-autonomous regione (like American states), and overlay with almost 75 DOCG and 300-plus DOC zones. So it's not enough to like Tuscany (everybody likes Tuscany), you have to know about Chianti and Chianti Classico; you have to know that the same sangiovese grapes grown 20 kilometers further south, around the town of Montalcino, make a wine called Brunello, and 20 kilometers to the southeast, in the village of Montepulciano a wine known simply as Vino Nobile.
Look, this isn't easy even for the Italians, but a new blog called WineFolly.com has arrived to help you with some clearly drawn maps. Do the Italians deliberately make things complicated? No, but they're stubborn and take great pride in the details of what they accomplish, and they will hold on to those details with bulldog ferociousness.
Last summer, Cornichon was a guest of the Consorzio that promotes the "competing" wine of Chianti Classico in Tuscany, and it was encouraging to see the camaraderie between the two "rival" regions. (Sample post here.) About 100 wine growers in each, about 4,000 acres (about one-tenth of Washington's vineyard acreage). Vino Nobile produces about 7.5 million bottles a year, half of which gets exported to Germany. Ten thousand cases for the USA.
Below: vineyards in Tuscany, Montepulciano mayor Andrea Rossi, bottle of Vino Nobile.
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