Yesterday, it was a liter of first-class Austrian Grüner Veltliner. Today, it’s a legendary Southern Italian red wine that really has no business being $20. To paraphrase a great woman: When we go low, we aim high. I cannot think of another red wine, Italian or otherwise, that delivers this much at this price point.
This isn’t sentimentality talking, these are just the facts on the ground—it’s a 2011, for crying out loud! It’s right in its sweet-spot drinking window, with a voluptuousness that distinguishes the best wines of the Puglia region. The grape variety is the native Negroamaro, and it’s crafted by none other than Cosimo Taurino, one of southern Italy’s seminal producers. The parallel I’d draw here is to the historic bodegas of Rioja, who are able to release long-aged Reserva and Gran Reserva at incredibly reasonable prices, but regardless: $20 is simply unbelievable for a wine of this age and quality. Grown in the iron-rich red clays of Puglia’s Salento peninsula, “Notarpanaro” (so named for the
contrada, or farm, it hails from) is a rite-of-passage wine. It’s an Italian wine list staple and the perfect wine to showcase the terroir of the “heel” of the Italian boot. Maybe it’s seven generations of Taurino family history in the same spot that enables such a benchmark bottling to remain so inexpensive. Whatever the reason, this is an old-vine stunner with real character: You cannot afford to miss it.
I first tasted this wine more than 20 years ago at the Taurino winery in Guagnano, which is about 20 kilometers northwest of Lecce on the Salento peninsula. Nearby is the town of Salice Salentino, which lends its name to one of the best-known wine appellations (DOCs) in the region: It’s an area chock-full of large-scale vineyards planted to massive, bush-trained vines, and like Puglia in general, it was known historically as one of Italy’s most prolific sources of bulk wines—wines made in large regional cooperatives and shipped anonymously in tanker trucks to points further north in Italy (and beyond). In coastal towns like Brindisi, the whitewashed buildings and blazing sunlight give Puglia the look of a Greek island, and like the rest of southern Italy, Puglia’s ancient winemaking culture was heavily informed by that of the Greeks who colonized much of the area.
Bush-trained vines were a traditional necessity throughout the Salento peninsula, which is buffeted by a crossfire of strong breezes from both the Ionian and Adriatic seas. The alberello (“little bush”) method was employed to protect grape bunches not just from wind but from intense heat and sunlight as well—this is one of the most fertile, flat stretches of land in all of Italy, known not just for wine grapes at scale but grains for bread and olives for oil as well. Soils are iron-rich clays with some limestone, which take on a distinctive rust-colored hue during the growing season.
Grape-growers going back seven generations, the Taurinos were among the early “estate-bottlers” in this traditionally poor, co-op-dominated region. The late Cosimo Taurino, still immortalized on the wine’s label, debuted “Notarpanaro” in 1970, choosing to bottle the wine as a varietal Negroamaro rather than blend it with Malvasia Nera, as was traditional in the Salice Salentino DOC. At the time of my visit to Taurino (2000), Puglia was having a “moment” of international recognition thanks to the discovery of a genetic link between Primitivo—another native grape of Salento—and American Zinfandel. But I found (and still find) Negroamaro much more interesting, more structured, and more serious than Primitivo. Meaning “black and bitter” in Italian, Negroamaro is indeed “black” in terms of its fruit character: lots of rich, dark fruit is framed by firm tannins and complemented by a deep baking spice component and lots of dark, dusty earth.
We offered the 2010 edition of this wine previously (to enthusiastic response), so when the new-release ’11 came our way—think about that: 2011 is the current release—we were eager to re-visit it. The wine is 100% Negroamaro aged six months in used French oak
barriques, followed by extended periods in glass-lined concrete tanks and bottle before release. As with the ’10, the ’11 has landed right in this perfect spot where the dense, lusciously dark fruit has ceded ground to all sorts of spice, earth, and other “secondary” aromas/flavors. In the glass, it’s a deep, nearly opaque ruby-black moving to garnet and burnt orange at the rim, with concentrated aromas of mulberry, black raspberry, Morello cherries, cacao nibs, licorice, coffee grounds, hazelnuts, exotic spices, and turned earth. It is medium-plus in body, leaning towards full, with tannins now the texture of silk and a pleasingly viscous, chocolatey feel on the palate. Although it is not throwing much sediment, decant it just before serving at 60-65 degrees in Bordeaux stems; it hints at everything from Left Bank Bordeaux to Carignane from Priorat to old school Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel and should be paired with a hearty dish that’ll play to its richness. Check out the attached recipe for beef
braciole, which I included in the previous offer. No reason to fix something that isn’t broken! Enjoy!
