Fino, Fiano and Dolcetto - news of new booze

I’ve just polished off my third snifter of fino sherry in double quick and feeling as inebriated as a vulgar little monkey after a banana bender. So forgive the Jack Kerheroicisms. The sherry in question and in copita belongs to Emilio Hidalgo (no relation) and cometh in a serious bottle with a cork – none of your half bottles to barely see you through a mimsy plate of whitebait. In contrast to the muy fresco styles this fino is a powerful bone dry wine, simultaneously elegant yet also rich. This richness is balanced by a crisp, (white) peppery flor character to give a lingering aftertaste. One would serve this with an array of tapas such as shrimp, white fish, cured ham, smoked ham, cheese…

I’ve noticed that journos are seemingly contractually obliged to recommend cheap wines over the festive period – after all tis the season to be alcoholic - and quantity must therefore quality on occasions. I may be getting sere and tedious with old age but I can’t see the point of championing mediocrity. I don’t mean that every wine I drink has to aspire to some strange notion of greatness, but, dammit, it should taste as real and elemental as if it had been dragged through hedges and across the broken stones of Nature itself.

Tonight’s wines are avowedly non-conformist, utterly true to themselves. The first is a white, or rather, an amber wine, that, held to light, reveals a blizzard of lees seemingly in dynamic suspension. Il Tufiello is a two hectare vineyard located 800 metres above sea level in the commune of Calitri, in Alta Irpinia, Campania, Italy, the world, the universe etc. The vineyard has been run organically for the last seventeen years, but it is in the winery that the non-interventionist philosophy is truly revealed with long, slow wild yeast fermentations and maceration on the skins for 40-60 days.  Malolactic occurs only if it starts naturally. The wine is not filtered or fined and made without added sulphur. You know it is going to be a beezer wine.

I prepare to be funked out of my senses, but a quick nuzzle reveals only the barest hint of cider house mayhem. Initially, you have to tease out the aromas – a whiff of baked bread, roast sweetcorn, a suggestion of dried fruit and herbs and whispering floral notes of hawthorn and honeysuckle. In the mouth you taste warm grape-skins dusted with gingery tannins and feel the lemon intensity and mineral-flecked acidity which brings the wine to such a fresh close.

The wine is called Don Chisciotte. It is not known whether any windmills were injured in the making of this delicious enterprise. Like the eponymous knight errant there is a touch of glorious madness, but in the end you see the world naturally through this wine’s hazy orange spectacles.

The Pratoasciutto (the wine means dry meadow referring to the aridity of the soil) is 100% Dolcetto. I have always wanted to like Dolcetto - maybe it’s the name – but, unhappily, found most examples to be clumpy, fruitless and tannic. The nose here, however, is instantly appealing, oozing violets, black fruits, liquorice, and parma ham. The fruit is great, the tannins velvety and there is a bitter black cherry rasp to the finish that taps your taste buds on the shoulder and reminds them that lack of food is not a credible option.

Both the Fiano and Dolcetto take me on a journey in the way that many of the more meretricious, souped-up, “bling-laden” wines would never be able to. Whereas those latter wines would urge and cudgel you at every step to feel their quality and admire their width, these natural wines have no pretence and no reference other than themselves. I appreciate their integrity, there is no hollowness, no fat; they are dynamic, linear, lean and pure. I particularly notice and applaud the proportionate alcohol (12% for the Fiano), the lack of extraction and the fine seam of minerality that gives them focus.  At the risk of alienating the terroir-deniers these wines taste of where they come from, wherever that might be. They have the personality of their environment as opposed to hiding behind luxuriant trappings, the best that expensive winemaking can buy.