Wojciech Bońkowski
Master of Wine

16 wines from Gambellara

Posted on 7 May 2009

A DOCG disaster

Went to a friend’s house recently to go through a shipment of samples he received from Gambellara, an appellation from the Italian region of Veneto that was recently awarded a DOCG status.

DOCG is supposed to be a notch above denominazione di origine controllata (DOC, Italy’s appellation of wine origin, equivalent to France’s AOC), although the exact difference is somewhat vague and the ‘G’ of garantita is hardly ever a guarantee of anything. There are currently 34 DOCGs in Italy including classic winemaking zones such as Barolo and Chianti Classico but also some rather puzzling nominations such as Albana di Romagna, an obscure and underperforming white wine zone east of Bologna.

Gambellara consists of 800 hectares of withered volcanic basalt located on extinct volcanoes between Verona and Vicenza in north-eastern Italy. Its whites wines – traditionally sweet passito from dried grapes, and now increasingly dry – are made of the Gargànega grape variety, and are in fact a lesser sibling of the better-known Soave, one of Italy’s classic whites made from exactly the same grape and on similar terroir.

I really, really like Soave and think it is one of the most underrated wines in Italy (today, thanks to the efforts of a dynamic group of vintners, it increasingly lives up to its potential). So I approached this tasting in a positive mood, but was vastly disappointed. We tasted 16 wines (10 dry, 6 sweet) that were all on a disastrously boring commercial level with no interest whatsoever.

Gargànega is not easy grape. It takes an expressive terroir and low yields to show good intensity, and the winemaking style needs to avoid extremes of technicity (bland ‘white-winey’ wines tasting like a million cool-vinified chardonnays or pinots) and oak (which can easily obscure the varietal character). On an everyday level, Gargànega can deliver a vaguely almondy, appley-crisp white with a hint of mineral salinity that is an unpretentious delight with lighter foods, but even that needs to be made properly.

These Gambellaras were simply mediocre. There wasn’t a single bottle I would remotely contemplate buying. They were thin, industrial, with a fair bit of SO2 reduction effectively masking whatever meagre fruit here might have been. There was no dream of terroir, and often not even of basic vinosity. There was so little body and such obvious underripeness in the dry wines it had me wondering what proportion of the 13% alcohol proudly displayed on labels was achieved with the forgiving participation of rectified grape must (Europe’s industrial wine chaptaliser / sweetener for those not in the know).

Even Gambellara’s best-known estate, Luigino Dal Maso, failed to deliver. One notable exception was the Gambellara Classico Prime Brume 2007 by the local co-op Cantina di Gambellara. Nothing great but what this wine should be: pleasantly almondy-bitterish fruit with a crisp, dry palate.

The sweet wines were, in a way, even more nonplussing. Apart from straight traditional passitos (named recioto here; it’s the wine that got the DOCG category from 2008) there were odd variations, including botrytis wines, and recioto spumante: sweet wines made from raisined grapes but given a secondary fermentation; so you have an odd crossing of Sauternes and Moscato d’Asti. The flavours don’t match (you don’t usually squeeze lemon on your peach jam?), the bubbles are as coarse as in Perrier mineral water, and the intellectual level is somewhere near kindergarten. I don’t even mention the other problems (volatility, dirty botrytis, reduction).

I don’t think Italy can find a writer more enthusiastic about its culture and wines than yours truly, but it really needs to work harder. Awarding the country’s highest level of wine certification to a bunch of mediocre stuff like this is surely going to alienate the public. Browsing Italian wine blogs it becomes obvious that the DOCG promotion for Gambellara was entirely a political move (the zone, together with neighbouring Soave, is home to some of Italy’s largest industrial wine producers) but from the consumer’s point of view, it’s an obvious scandal.