On June 6th, the annual Gambero Rosso Tre Bicchieri trade tasting rolled into town. Showcasing some of Italy’s best wines, with a focus, naturally, on those that achieved this country’s famous annual assessment’s highest award (three glasses = tre bicchieri), this is a great opportunity to survey current trends in Italian wines.
The picture is largely pretty, on balance. Some notable observations to share:
While Piedmont, Veneto and Tuscany still produce the lion’s share of award-winning wines every year, a number of other Italian regions are starting to catch up. There were several terrific wines from Friuli Venezia Giulia, Marche, Campania and Puglia. In fact, in terms of Quality Price Ratio (QPR), the best value wines currently coming out of Italy are from these and a few other mostly southern regions.
The more southerly regions’ white wines in particular really impressed, especially the tasted samples of Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi and Verdicchio di Matelica, Pecorino (yes, it goes very well with the homonymous cheese), Fiano di Avellino, and Falanghina del Sannio.
That these wines are not better known and more widely available in this market (British Columbia) maybe has something to do with their typically difficult to remember and pronounce (for us Anglo-Saxons) names. Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi is certainly a mouthful (and I don’t mean of wine!) compared to say Pinot Grigio, lots of which is sold here from Italy. This is a challenge for local consumers, but one well worth getting past.
I’ll go out on a limb here and state that Italy currently offers the best value – and in some cases simply the best – white wines of any European country, and can compete in quality with those from anywhere else in the wine world. It is exciting to come across so many intriguing, compelling, age-worthy white wines, most from native Italian grape varietals. And the best part? They are still relatively underpriced in the BC market, compared to their better known competition. Yes, that’s you, Burgundy and Bordeaux blanc.
The one exception to this turnout that disappointed me at the tasting was the almost total absence of wines (red or white) representing Sicily. Only one sole winery showed up. This is hardly reflective of Sicily’s overall results in the 2018 Gambero Rosso rankings: 22 of its wines garnered the top rating Tre Bicchieri, which was more than any other southern region including Puglia, Marche, Calabria, Basilicata and Sardinia, and just one fewer than Campania’s 23 wines.
Where were Sicily’s wineries? Why the no-show? Had they attended this event in greater numbers, and poured some of Sicily’s many award-winning white wines, I could have added these to the list of over-achieving wines noted above. And based on what I tasted on my recent visit to Sicily, especially the Carricante-based whites from Etna Bianco DOC, I would not hesitate to do so. On no account ignore the great white wines of Etna.
Elsewhere at this year’s Tre Bicchieri tasting, the usual suspects impressed, as they always do: Italy’s great red wines remain those sublime Barolos, Amarones, Brunellos and Chianti Classicos. Adding to which, allow me to give a special shout out to one of the most impressive (and, again, undervalued) Italian red wines – again from the south – available here in Vancouver: Torrevento’s Castel del Monte Vigna Pedale Riserva 2014 (made from the Nero di Troia grape, yet another Italian native varietal). At around $25 plus taxes here, it is quite simply a steal. Get it while you can.
Buon gusto!