ITALY has slipped into the habit of holding a dizzying annual competition for its wines, in the little Umbrian town of Torgiano. Wine writers fly in from the four corners of the earth to sit in judgment, along side 40 or so of Italy's leading oenologists. It's a marvellous occasion, conducted with due Italian regard for pomp and stylish ritual much to the irritation of visiting Americans (Gee, in my tasting room back home, Steve, we could be through these wines in couple of hours and here it's taking three days. Why do they have to have all this ceremony?"). But the thing that struck me most, at, the 15th Banco d'Assagio dei Vini d'Italia, apart from the shock to my unschooled system of trying to assess dozens of wines in a pretty scholarly way, was the sheer diversity within the country ninety something grape varieties about 20 wine producing regions, stretching like a mottled stocking all the way up Italy's leg.
Years of Irish wine market conditioning have taught us, I think, to see Italian wine in much more simplistic terms. At the grim end are the two litre bottles of party plonk the thin poison that has given Valpolicella, Soave and Bardolino such a miserable name. At the luxury end are the Italian greats Barolo and Barbaresco, Amarone, Brunello di Montalcino and so called SuperTuscans like Tignanello and Sassicaia. In between comes the best known of all, Chianti, which, like restaurant pasta, can be anything from cheap and dismal to stunning and exorbitant. Stick with these familiar friends, and you'll miss out on a whole lot of excitement.
Eighty per cent of the Irish market for Italian wines is made up of the cheap rubbish and the well known quality stuff," says Richard Ecock, whose company probably imports the widest range of Italian wines into Ireland. "But super, competitively priced new wines from less well known regions make up the remaining 20 per cent and it's this part of the market that is expanding dramatically." His top recommendations? Regions like Puglia (especially the Salento peninsula the stiletto heel of Italy's boot) and Abruzzo further north. As for grapes, Verdicchio is just one of many he sees as having been brought on by leaps and bounds.
Say what you like about the circus of the International Wine Challenge, but it's noteworthy, all the same, that this year's Italian trophy winner is from Sardinia while wines from other dynamic regions like Calabria, Marche, Puglia and Abruzzo are up there Adige). All reds, you'll notice, since these deliver the rich, chunky flavours most of us prefer with our pizzas and pastas but there are also signs that Italy's somewhat wishy washy whites are beginning to develop in more interesting directions (see right). Through out the length and breadth of Italy, new life is being channelled into local wines by a young generation of wine makers, typified by the oenologists encountered in Torgiano all enthusiastic chat about native grapes when they weren't purring into their mobile phones. It is as if a team of keen young mechanics had set about revamping a rusty collection of Fiat 500s, with their whirring engines, and given them Ferrari features. Quality is the objective quality without sacrificing quintessentially Italian characteristics.
With the weakening lira, we might hope that this quality would come at a bargain price. It can't. Italian wine prices have shot up over the past couple of years, mainly because demand, now far outstrips supply the result of widespread uprooting of vineyards as part of a long term EU policy to halt once chronic wine surpluses, combined with a series of poor harvests. The 1995 vintage was Italy's smallest since 1961. Importers of Italian wine might also hope for more consistency (variations between vintages can sometimes be drastic) and less confusion as Italy comes to grips with its labyrinthine new classification system.
Still, we're inordinately lucky to have such a fecund source of different flavours right on our European doorstep, particularly the sort of robust flavours Irish people seem to like. Already Italy is high on Ireland's list of favourite wine sources, second to France, ahead of Australia, and selling us almost twice as much as Spain, according to figures just released.
Maybe, if we set about discovering more of these riches from the lesser known regions, we'll begin to move closer to Italy in the European league table of consumers, demonstrating a less shaky belief in wine as a component of la dolce vita here. It could take time, mind you. We're at the bottom, sipping just 5.3 litres a year they are near the top, knocking back 58.5. But we're working on it.