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Monday, November 12, 2007
Despite gender bias, Italy sparkles
The Tiber River, Rome (photo courtesy Niki Foor)
While my notes from Houston ferment to the proper fruit-tannin-alcohol balance, I’ll turn the entire blog over to Uncorked reader Niki Foor of Beavercreek, who traveled to Italy recently with her husband and who has graciously offered to allow us to live vicariously through her. Here’s a slice of Italian life — food, wine, and gender bias in glorious display — entitled First stop, Roma! (Please click on “Continue reading”)
By Niki Foor
Fresh off the plane, hungry and thirsty, we checked into our Trastevere B&B; stowed our stuff and took off on foot to explore. Trastevere, right across the Tiber River from the historic center of Roma, is a neighborhood where many Romans actually live, and it was Sunday afternoon, a time when many locals go out to eat with family and friends. The large pile of fresh porcini mushrooms at Il Galeone, a local trattoria, along with the convivial groups of Italians sitting and chatting in the sunshine convinced us this would be a good place for our first meal in Italy. We ordered a bottle of mineral water and a bottle of 2006 Gotto D’Oro Superior Frascati, a local wine from the Roman wine region of Lazio. It was a nice golden straw color and slightly effervescent, crisp, dry, and cold; perfect with the fritto misto (mixed fry) we shared. The fried anchovies, fried stuffed squash blossoms, and fried ricotta were all wonderful, as were the sauteed porcinis which were our second course. Too full for anything more than espresso to finish, we walked back to the B&B to rest a bit before hitting the streets again.
Roma is not only the capitol and largest city in Italy; it’s also the best place to taste the widest variety of Italian wines. That fact can make the prospect a bit daunting since Italy is the largest wine-producing country in the world. It’s possible to find more obscure Italian wines from all Italian regions in Roma than in any other city; many times one can find wines in Roma that are no longer available in the region where they are produced. With that in mind, we visited two wine bars (enotecas) in Roma recommended by Maureen B. Fant, author of Trattorias of Rome, Florence, and Venice.
The first enoteca, Cul de Sac, is near the Piazza Novena. We sat outside and pursued a wine list the size of the Beavercreek telephone book. There was one page for California wine, one page for Australian wine, several pages of French wine, one page for Germany and another for the rest of the world, and the rest were all Italian. Each Italian region was listed on at least several pages, and the sections for Tuscany, Friuli, and Piemonte were even larger.
Since I’m the wine geek in the family and my very patient husband was hungry, I asked him to choose the food we’d eat so I could pick a wine to match, figuring that strategy would at least help me narrow the choices. He chose smoked buffalo shoulder, which came in very thin slices, topped with extra virgin olive oil and black pepper. That called for a red wine, and I selected the 2004 Marco Felluga Refosco, a variety not often seen here in Ohio. Refosco is a grape native to northern Italy, especially Friuli and Trentino, and makes a powerful, tannic wine with flavors of currants and plums. This one was a deep purple-burgundy color and had a nose of tobacco, leather, and dark fruits. On the palate, it showed mulberries, tart cherries, and a hint of bitterness. It matched beautifully with the buffalo shoulder.
The second enoteca we visited in Roma was Cavour 313. This is near the Coliseum, which we visited at night in order to enjoy viewing that historical sight all lit up. This was a pre-dinner visit (Italians eat dinner late), and we were on vacation, so a bottle of bubbly appeared to be warranted. I’d long wanted to try Franciacorta, a sparkling wine from the Lombardy region of Italy, reputed to rival Champagne in complexity and elegance. I ordered the NV Cavalleri Franciacorta Brut Blanc de Blanc, made from all Chardonnay grapes. The wine smelled of toast and green apples, it was a beautiful pale gold color, and was filled with tiny pin-prick bubbles, and had a long, lingering finish with a touch of lemon zest on the palate. At 25 Euros, (about $37 given the abysmal exchange rate), this wine was a much better value than a comparable Champagne, in Roma at least.
Cavour 313, by the way, was the first place in Italy where the server presented the wine to me to approve. Although I was obviously the one pursuing the wine list and ordering the wine, in every other establishment, the server presented the wine to my husband for approval. In the spirit of “When in Rome….” I asked my husband not to make an issue of it, but rather to just taste the wine, and if he suspected anything might be wrong with it, to then offer me his glass. Setting his equality principles to the side, he did as I asked, but we were both happy when servers in upscale enotecas appeared to understand that the wine world is no longer a boys-only club!
Note: on the last night of our Italian vacation, again in Roma prior to flying home, we celebrated the end of our travels with another bottle of Franciacorta. This time we had the 2002 Bellavista Gran Cuvee, a mixture of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. This wine had a yeasty, toasty nose similar to brioche, luxurious pin-prick bubbles, and flavors of tart apple and pear which danced on our tongues. At 30 Euros, it was another real winner!
Roof of the B&B (photo courtesy of Niki Foor)
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