This wine from Calabria, Italy, is presented by SommSelect Editorial Director David Lynch, who sees not just a delicious red wine value but a piece of Italian-American heritage.
Like so many Americans of Italian-American descent (in my case from my mother’s side), I have a connection to the southern Italian region of Calabria—the “toe” of the Italian boot. Calabrians and other poor, southern Italian opportunity-seekers left home in droves back in my great-grandfather’s time, and for the most part, “Italian-American” culture—its food, its slang, etc.—is disproportionately southern Italian (Sicilian, Neapolitan, Calabrian, etc.). This wine, a smooth, spicy red from the Calabrian town of Cirò, is a sentimental favorite. Made from an indigenous grape called Gaglioppo (gah-lee-OH-po), which is found almost exclusively on Calabria’s Ionian coast, Cirò epitomizes the hyper-local nature of Italian wine.
The town of Cirò, which lends its name to the wine appellation (DOC) in and around it, sits in a little crook in the south Calabrian coastline. It was one of the original Greek settlements on the southern Italian peninsula and the site of the earliest Olympic games—where an ancient version of Cirò wine was given to the winners as a prize. Calabria’s modern history is less glamorous; it remains one of Italy’s poorest regions, with a still-pervasive mafia influence, and only recently have I seen a broader assortment of Cirò wines in the US market—the region’s best-known producer, Librandi, has been the torch-bearer for a long time, but I’ve enjoyed seeing other well-established properties, like Scala, get some traction here.
But unless you’re drinking at places with great Italian wine lists, like my friend Shelley Lindgren’s A16 in San Francisco, you may not have much of a frame of reference on Cirò and its Gaglioppo grape. Recent studies have shown Gaglioppo to be a cross of Sangiovese and a local variety, Mantonico. Author Ian D’Agata, whose massive book, Native Wine Grapes of Italy, has become a lodestar for me, notes that Gaglioppo may thus be related to the popular Frappato grape of Sicily as well. In my experience, Gaglioppo (and Cirò) is characterized by a few things: (a) it’s a grape with low color pigmentation (like Piedmont’s Nebbiolo), so the wines look brickish/orange even in their youth; (b) although it’s a ‘hot climate’ grape, it’s more Pinot Noir/Sangiovese in terms of the scale/weight of its wines; and (c) it has great natural acidity, keeping it from devolving into something sweet or 'raisined.' A good Cirò (as with reds from Sicily's Mount Etna), is clearly from a hot climate—it has a warm, pie-filling feel to its fruit profile—without being syrupy and “cooked” on the palate.
The Italian wine geeks out there will find more than a few familiar flavors in this 2012 Cirò from Scala, a family that has been producing wines in the area since the 1960s. This bottling is 100% Gaglioppo grown in sandy clay soils, fermented in stainless steel and aged in concrete vats for a year. In the glass it is a light crimson with orange reflections at the rim, and its aromas are a mix of tart red berries, orange peel, scrub-brush, tomato leaf, baking spices, and a deeper, cherry kirsch sweetness. It is plush and warm, but also rather light and bright on the palate. We tasted it blind in our offices, and it invited a number of fascinating comparisons: “non-tannic Nebbiolo and Poulsard from the Jura were but a few, but of course the best thing about it is that it really isn’t like anything else. The best way to enjoy this wine, which is styled to drink now, is to serve it with a slight chill with something red-saucy and spicy, as they would in Calabria (its barely perceptible tannins and well-moderated alcohol won’t clash with the heat from
peperoncini). Serve it at or a little below cellar temperature, say 50 degrees, with this killer recipe from my New York pal Andrew Carmellini. It incorporates the Calabrian specialty
‘nduja, a spicy, spreadable sausage that will change your life. If you’re not online searching for flights to southern Italy after this, I’m not doing my job.
— David Lynch
