Massa Vecchia Bianco - a fan pays tribute…

Massa Vecchia Bianco, IGT Maremma

This wine is from the land where the wild things live and is a wild thing in itself, but a genial one, happy to party in your glass.

Fabrizio Niccolaini’s wine vision is, if not unique, then original and of another era. His vineyard, which he inherited from his father and grandfather, is a mere handful of hectares. And within that tiny plot are such white grapes as Vermentino, Ansonica, Sauvignon Blanc, Trebbiano, and Malvasia di Candia, and red varieties such as Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Aleatico, Sangiovese, Alicante, and Malvasia Nera. All are at least 35 years old, including the Cabernet and Merlot, which is unusual as these two varieties are generally only newly planted in Tuscany. He has also recently planted another vineyard with only Sangiovese.

Fabrizio subscribes to the deceptively simple sustainable agriculture theories of the Japanese farmer-philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka, detailed in his 1975 book, “The One-Straw Revolution.” “We use no chemicals, no herbicides, really not even much in the way of machines,” What little ploughing is done, usually to “rip” the soil between the vine rows to turn over the crop cover, is performed by one of two white, long-horned oxen kept by Fabrizio for this purpose.

The wines are as original and uncompromising as everything else about this exercise in purist winegrowing. For example, the dry white wine, now simply called Bianco is 60% Vermentino with a balance of roughly 10% each of Sauvignon, Malvasia di Candia, Ansonica, and Trebbiano. The wine is fermented with the skins, which is conventional for red wines but still highly unusual for whites. The grapes are pressed by foot twice a day for five days then the wine spends three weeks on the skins, with a daily punch down. Aged in small chestnut casks, the resulting dry white wine is nothing short of thrilling, with a bright golden-amber colour and a powerful scent of wild herbs and just the slightest astringency (from the skins) in the finish.

Like so many white wines that see a combination of extended maceration and wild yeast ferment there is an al dente crunch to the mouthfeel – it is as if the skins are still in the glass. I always get a whiff of ginger, roasted coriander seeds and maybe some cinnamon from this wine and it is not too fanciful also to detect some sweet chestnut. The wine seems to take the buttered citrus and briny elements from the Vermentino and the vivid ripe apricot-cut-wth-cloves and orange peel aromas from the Malvasia. The finish is sustained, warm, exotic and beautifully balanced. Delicious stuff and a late candidate for my white wine of the year.

Drunk at a meal downstairs at Terroirs with Philippe, David and our respective spouses - with a medley of charcuterie and shellfish.