Doffing my hattie to the Gatti red

Raboso, Gatti

Lorenzo Gatti is an artisan producer who makes a few hundred bottles of simple country wine. I have written about his outstanding Prosecco sur lie; this is an equally natural wine, a pure expression of a grape which I have hitherto only encountered blended into some insipid pink Proseccos.

This Raboso, however, was love at first sight and sniff, a slightly cloudy buzzsaw-scratchy, rasping framboise frizzer, a pricklepine of fruit sand paper with a crunchfest of rubbery-smoky, melted minerals to finish. All that jazz. It reminds me of Gamay d’Auvergne from Maupertuis, on an antsy day, another pukka puckerer; it has the same lean and hungry look. We drank it with grilled tuna with smoked tomatoes, black olives and artichokes and it was delicious; I can’t imagine what I wouldn’t drink it with.

Gatti’s Raboso comes close to that idealised condition of a devil-may-care wine that gives a Gallic pouf! (or the Italian equivalent) in the face of critical judgment. “Take me as I am”, it seems to say, “drink me, don’t think about me, and preferably with a sliver or several of bona fide salami”.

Check out the abv: 11%. Another in our pantheon of less is more.