The medieval Tuscan hill town of Montalcino is so picturesque you could turn a monkey loose with a camera and sell the results to Hallmark. Terra cotta farmhouses dot vine-planted hills while the valley below is hidden in a wad of cottony mist, punctured only by the occasional church steeple.
I’m here with some other journalists to stain my incisors on Brunello, the famous red wine from the perennially cranky Sangiovese grape. Old-style Brunellos had a tendency to be both watery and rough, like hot chocolate made with too much powder. At their best after ten years of aging, they developed a burnished oxblood color and the savory seasoning of bacon and soft car-seat leather. Nowadays, warmer climates, riper grapes, new clones and better farming result in a fruitier style with fine grained tannins, ready to drink much younger. What's more, the freshness of these newer wines is up to the job of washing down plates of exquisite pasta.
In Tuscany, food is far more important than, say, sex or death. Streets are lined with enotecas, restaurants and little cafés where tiny old men stop arguing for a moment to look you up and down with fierce eyes. There’s pretty much nothing to buy that’s not edible, and if there were, you’re up against the inscrutable European tradition of closing exactly when customers are able to shop, like lunchtime.
Our driver, Alessandro, sports the shaved head and overly-geeky glasses young Italians affect to tone down their beauty. He is seriously connected in Montalcino. Whatever the problem, he knows a guy. He whips his van through tiny streets and subscribes to the creative Italian parking attitude where no surface is off limits.
Alessandro’s family is Old Montalcino. It is his birthright to look down upon newcomers, some of whom have been here only thirty-odd years. Not to mention all the foreigners buying up vineyards. They arrive in a flurry of business improvements, bringing in new clones and advertising. Some offer profit-sharing to their workers, former peasants whose career path up until quite recently consisted of gathering kindling for the local lords. As this tide lifts all boats and sales figures rise, traditionalists curse.
After all, they don’t make their wines for the crass purpose of being drinkable. In fact, some insist, they don’t even pursue quality. Rather, theirs are wines of personality. If customers don’t like that, then they’ll change customers. As if they could pull out a drawer and pick out some neatly-folded new ones.
That’s not the only surreal thing I hear. One winemaker explains he never uses small oak barrels for his best wine, deploying them instead as a last-chance shock treatment for his worst behaved juice. Another insists his vines went dormant for two years and then spontaneously came back bearing smaller berries, lower yields and higher quality.
One winery accuses another of adding disallowed grapes. The accused winery claims its accusers were caught stealing. You could split your head open trying to work it out. But better not to try, because lying seems to be kind of a regional specialty, like pinci pasta or the tough little white cookies called dead man’s bones. Wherever you go, a layer of the not-quite-believable coats the truth, like the mist coating the valley below.
If lies come from fear, or--a word I hear a lot this week--jealousy, it seems to arise from of the European mindset that there is only so much pie and the bigger your slice, the less for me. As opposed to the New World credo: just bake more pie. The invasion of Montalcino by New World capitalists might just sweep the secrets from their spidery corners, changing the whole culture in a generation.
But, meanwhile this hardly matters, because no one’s listening anyway, just talking. And eating. Did I mention the food? It’s really good.
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