Page 14 - Italian American Herald - October 2020

14 ITALIANAMERICANHERALD.COM | OCTOBER2020 ITALIAN-AMERICANHERALD VINI D’ITALIA
A sip of knowledge here, a sip of knowledge there
Dom Perignon was a Benedictine monk.
By Frank Cipparone
In the last portrait of Napoleon, he is posed holding a bottle that appears to be brandy but actually holds St. John Commendaria, a sweet wine that has been made on Cyprus for almost 8,000 years. It was the first wine to become a brand name when Richard the Lionhearted sold land to the Knights Templar as a reward for their service in the Crusades. The wine they exported became a favorite in Europe’s royal courts and is still produced under that name.
Ernest and Julio Gallo built an empire
Ernest and Julio Gallo were household names long before Napa and Sonoma became a big thing. At the end of Prohibition, they switched from growing grapes to opening a winery with $6,000 seed money and by 1933 had cornered 25 percent
of America’s wine market. Last year the company bought $1.7 billion
of branding rights and are now the world’s largest producer – making, marketing and distributing over 60 well-known labels such as Carlo Rossi, Barefoot, Bella Sera, Ecco Domani and Turning Leaf.
The first vineyard in the American colonies was started with cuttings
of Bordeaux grapes William Penn brought with him in 1682. A year later, vines were growing on Lemon Hill above the Schuylkill River.
The original plantings didn’t fare well, falling victim to local crop diseases and insects. They did, however, cross pollinate with
wild native grapevines to produce “wildings”, America’s first hybrids.
In 1985, Austria was rocked by a scandal when unscrupulous producers added chemicals to the fermenting must of sweet and semi-sweet Rieslings. It took about a decade
to recover and promote a favorable image. The upside is the emergence
of Gruner Veltliner as a popular alternative to Riesling.
There really was a Dom Perignon,
a Benedictine monk in charge of
his abbey’s cellars. The original Champagne was not what we think
of today. Made and bottled in the fall, cold winter temperatures would stop fermentation. Come spring’s warmer weather a second fermentation created a natural fizz. The savvy friar figured
a way to take the volatile kinks out
of the process, control the second round, and – voila! – the world’s most prestigious sparkling wine was born.
Zinfandel is the same grape as Primitivo, which was brought to Puglia by Croatian monks and so named because it was the first grape to ripen. Planted in northern California by Italian immigrants, it became the state’s primo vine before Cabernet and Merlot took over. The highly alcohol, full bodied wines sold well. By the
way, there’s no such thing as a white zinfandel grape to makes “blush” wines. They are the result of leeching out Zinfandel’s dark pigment to create sweet pink concoctions.
Wine has been around for thousands of years, but bottles
have only been in use since the
1630s. Prior to that it was stored
in loosely corked or sealed casks
or clay amphorae, then poured
into a drinking vessel. The first
bottles were onion shaped or a tall, flat-bottomed type known as a mallet. The streamlined standard of today was developed around 1820. So, the next bottle you uncork, lift a glass to its 200th birthday.
The cylindrical bottles of the 1700s required a better device to open them. Some early examples of corkscrews look like medieval torture devices. The compact, easy to store in a pocket variety called a “waiter’s friend” was invented in Germany in 1882 and is
still the favored tool of professionals.
It’s obvious that white grapes have clear juice when pressed, but so do all but about twenty red grapes that are known as teinturiers, the French word for a dying agent. They have been used for centuries to add color to anemic looking red wines and until
recently were not bottled on their own. Few are drinkable as a
solo act, though winemakers have had success with three Italian tintori – Colorino, Tintore di Tramonte and Tintilia. Whereas all other red wines get their color from the length of time fermenting juice is in contact with the crushed skins, tinting grapes have a red or purplish pulp that supplies the pigment.
It’s ironic that three Muslim countries in North Africa accounted for two-thirds of the international wine trade in the 1950s. Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco were under French domination but subject to Islamic law that forbids consumption of alcohol. Wine production is
now largely controlled by their governments, with predictable results.
There’s a Hungarian wine known
as Bikaver, or Bull’s Blood, that
dates to 1552 when attacking Turks panicked at the red wine stains on
the Hungarians’ uniforms, believing they drank a bull’s blood for courage. True or not, what was once a cheap red wine popular among Europeans is getting an infusion of new blood.
Thomas Jefferson’s advocacy of wine is well chronicled. As our country’s Minister to France he felt it his “duty” to spend three months touring and tasting in Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Piedmont. He partnered with Philip Mazzei to plant vines at Monticello which were never turned into wine until after his death. In his later years Jefferson, who loved Barolo, grew quite fond of Montepulciano.