Page 16 - Italian American Herald - July 2019

16 ITALIANAMERICANHERALD.COM | JULY 2019 ITALIAN-AMERICANHERALD
VINI D’ITALIA
Two men with a singular passion for the Sagrantino grape
By Frank Cipparone
This is a story of a grape and two winemakers I visited in Montefalco two years ago. Giampaolo Tabarrini and Francesco Botti are advocates for and committed to Sagrantino, the grape that binds them to their native soil.
Sagrantino is, without reservation, my favorite Italian wine. Traditionally made in the sweet passito style, only since the 1980s has it gained recognition as an outstanding dry wine. Not as widely planted or well known as Sangiovese nor as revered as Nebbiolo, to me it’s the most characteristic of its homeland. Sagrantino is tough and
resilient, an authentic representative of its paese and people. Like them, it is a wine of contrasts, one that takes time to get to know, an uncompromising grape that forces you to take it on its terms, or as Botti puts it, “ ... wonderful and welcoming but hard and reserved at the same time.”
Tabarrini pulls no punches in his assessment of Umbria’s signature grape: “Sagrantino is a great wine. I can easily put
it among the five or six best of Italy.” He
also notes that people in other regions are realizing their wines can’t age as well as Sagrantino, even though “ ... when it’s young it’s surely difficult, but there is a smoothness and depth which makes me think it will
evolve like a Barolo from a great producer.” Spending time with them got me to thinking that maybe it’s true that a wine
reflects the personality of the winemaker, an idea I’d long resisted. The two couldn’t be more dissimilar, but they are on the same page in discussing their relationship with wine. Tabarrini says, “My wines and
I have the same character, they come from my way of thinking and taste. They mean a lot to me, they are my creatures.” Echoing those thoughts, Botti feels his wines “... must be the expression of my character,
of my ideas ... ”, which is why he works without an enological consultant. “What the market wants cannot decide in place of me. I
interpret what every season offers me.” Tabarrini is a wiry bundle of kinetic
energy, enthusiasm bursting from him like runaway atoms in a reactor. When I met with him, he was eager to show me a work in progress that by now has become the largest cellar in the region, a space he needs for long- term projects fermenting in his restless mind. You get the sense that if he slowed down he wouldn’t know what to do. He admits that he must “... move forward and step up to the next rung of the ladder. This motivates me to push my work to the next level every time.”
A case in point would be taking a chance on Grero, another of the rediscovered grapes that keep popping up and one which