Ned?Goodwin?|?France?vs?Italy

　　Credit: Siwen Zhong

　　While French wine tears its hair out over terroir, Italian vinos vibrantly plough through pretension, says Ned Goodwin.

　　What is it about Italian culture and with that, Italian wine, that proves so immutably attractive? While the French wine drinker fulminates about terroir, floating the word about with every opportunity on an endless stream of nebulousness, Italians simply drink the types of wine that evince an incorrigible joy and authority, especially when enjoyed with food. This approach, at least for me, resonates with the sort of giddiness that made me fall in love with wine many years ago, ironically, as a student in Paris.

　　Back then, I pondered the myriad of French wines, wondering why they failed to deliver the warmth of grapes grown in abundant sunshine that I was so accustomed to as a young Australian. Of course, bought in the sort of stores that remained open of a Sunday, the ilk of wine that I was drinking was as distant from top regional expressions as I was naive. Things changed as I clocked up hours working at a number of the city’s better wine bars and pored over books. I came to know more about French wines and became a Burgundy obsessive; I came to enjoy the crunchy pucker of Loire reds, while tantalised by the postcard-like labels of many wines from the south. Indeed, the fidelity to the cru in France, or that which is steeped in anthropological lore, is contagious. The notion that things are as they are due to a history founded on cultivating a persuasive consistency and with that, a voice stringently defined by place and man’s interaction therewith, is a bold and romantic tale. From the whiff of local honey; the personality of a village and its vineyards, and their ebb and flow within the tenets of time’s passing and man’s actions; to the way the light falls on the local café chairs to commemorate a day’s passing, the aura of the cru defines all.

　　Yet then, as now, it irked when local drinkers would fob off overly thin wines lacking nourishment and pleasure with a curled lip and excuses of terroir. In fact, the potency of terroir, or the synergy between site, grape and man’s interaction is such that it is too often reason for undrinkable wines, as it is justification for wines of superlative quality, founded on the lofty notion that a successful confluence between nature and man is inextricably and uniquely French. This sort of exclusiveness grew tiring.

While one is forbidden from walking on the manicured lawns of French parks and overwhelmed by the polished austerity of city monuments, in Italy gypsies roam amidst ruins that frequently serve as the foundation for newer buildings

　　Conversely, when I went to Italy, wine was served as a platform to toast life in all its incarnations. It is a vehicle to celebrate achievement, just as it is a drink to toast the trivial, a tipple to ease one through the requisite day-to-day prevarications and social manoeuvres, rather than a mantle of superiority or an opaque cloak to obfuscate middling quality and in some cases, a tired local culture whose better days are long gone. Italian wine is a conduit for the effusive warmth and inclusiveness of Italian culture and thus, is every bit about what the great wine writer Hugh Johnson calls the “existential” cru, as French wine remonstrates to be. Yet, in Italy, wine is seldom a platform whence to pontificate.

　　Similarly, while one is forbidden from walking on the manicured lawns of French parks and overwhelmed by the polished austerity of city monuments, in Italy gypsies roam amidst ruins that frequently serve as the foundation for newer buildings. Parks are stomped upon and empty bottles of wine are littered as testament to every crevice and stone that remains intrinsic to the daily murmurings of life. Belying their testament to antiquity and civilisation, Italian cities are still, even today, more about living than rumination. So it is with Italian food and with that, the country’s unparalleled number of indigenous grape varieties that formulate its wines.

　　These wines are, at large, defined by a dry, structural bite across colours. Be it the whet of a verdicchio di Matelica’s salinity and its song of bitter almond that flows effortlessly across seafood dishes such as wild mussels and fennel, or the ferruginous roar of aglianico del Vulture paired with long-simmered game, Italian wine soothes in its lack of pretence and posturing, while providing us with a patina of textural intrigue, shimmering energy and joy. Surely, this is what wine is all about, for if it is not, it is time for me to find another job.

　　What I’m Drinking

　　2010 Franceschi Il Poggione Rosso di Montalcino

　　A traditional producer minimising new oak handling, Poggione’s rosso di Montalcino is always a crunchy, sapid benchmark, while its brunellos are savoury, expansive and long-lived.

　　Ex-sommelier Ned Goodwin MW is an Australian wine writer, consultant and educator.

Related DRiNK Links

　　? Ned Goodwin | Sweet Temptation

　　? Ned Goodwin | How to Taste Wine

　　READ MORE

　　Please do not reprint or reproduce without permission. Please click the 'Read More' link below to visit our website.

《Ned?Goodwin?|?France?vs?Italy》由河南新闻网-豫都网提供，转载请注明出处：http://food.yuduxx.com/jkys/459496.html，谢谢合作！