I opened this bottle at a recent WINO Magazine panel tasting. It’s from the Adriatic region of the Marche in eastern Italy, made from a typical local grape called Verdicchio. Sartarelli is one of the very best producers there. Although Verdicchio has been increasingly catching the public’s attention of late, with its mineral expression of terroir and versatility with food, it remains a somewhat rustic white wine, and the appellation still has some way to go towards consistent quality and personality.
This Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi Classico 2008 weighs in at 12.5% and is delightful from the very first aroma that reaches the nose. It’s quite unfruity but has a wide mineralic panorama that’s really a delight to watch unfolding. A democratic mix of saline, peppery and crystalline notes, it vaguely reminds me of the granite-grown Muscadet wines of the Loire. I’ve long not encountered a more purely and directly mineral aroma in a wine – even in the recent bunch of Rieslings reviewed here.
On the palate, the impressions are equally positive. There is a light to medium body with fine balance and a hint of appley flavour, again offset by a distinctive, salty, mildly alkaline minerality. It’s a clean, consistent and engaging wine. It’s really very, very good but…
It’s obviously diluted. Thin. Watery. The flavour is rather light, and the finish is non-existing as the mild mineral flavour is washed away with dilution. This is initially quite puzzling. With a wine of such high quality of both grapes and vinification, it’s rare to see such a drastic lack of concentration. It tastes a little as if you added a part of water to four parts of wine in your glass.
The back label largely clarifies the mystery. The producer declares a yield of 120q (12 tonnes) per hectare, with a planting density of 2300 vines / ha. This translates into around 5kg of grapes per vine. That’s a lot! Fine wine is usually made with 1–1.5kg / vine, while a commercial white can climb to 2.5–3kg but I’ve never heard a vintner confessing 5kg. (Incidentally when I visited Sartarelli in 2001 the owner, amiable Mr Chiacchiarini declared they used a maximum of 80q/ha, as opposed to the outrageous appellation cap of 140q).
This wine had me reflecting on my (and our) attitude toward wine. Our perception is directly derived from our expectations. We have a range of pre-set criteria to assess the quality of a wine. For the unseasoned drinker, it might be soft tannins and intense sweet fruit (and so they pick a New World Merlot or Shiraz). Wine aficionados usually have a wide array of personal preferences that might go from strongly mineral Rieslings to lavishly perfumed Viogniers and iron-cast Tannats. However, we universally expect a wine to be concentrated. Dilution is almost always a vice (there are few exceptions: Portuguese vinho verde, French Muscadet, bottom-range German QbA Riesling might be forgiven for being ‘light’). We don’t so much like water in our wine. Even a Soave or a Beaujolais are expected to show, if not high concentration, at last ‘consistency’.
But there’s another side to the coin. Overconcentration is a serious problem in many wines around the world. Not least in the New World where climatic conditions contribute to increasingly thick wines. Palate density and lushness of texture work against what should be one of wine’s major assets (in my opinion): a sense of refreshment. I rarely, if ever, want to feed on a wine.
Thinking why Sartarelli would have decided to allow such a high yield for their Verdicchio, there’s one obvious explanation. Verdicchio might not be the most exacerbated example but it’s a grape that can reach quite some concentration of sugars. In some later harvested examples I tasted the alcohol exceeded 14.5 or even 15% (see Coroncino, for example, or the top bottling from Santa Barbara). We all complain about rising alcohol levels in wine. Among the proposed solutions are reverse osmosis or spinning cone column techniques to remove the alcohol from the solution (invasive and with an impact on flavour), harvesting earlier (for some, raising issues of ‘phenolically unripe’ flavours) or mixing a normal and earlier harvest (as above). It’s no secret many wineries in the New World and even some in Europe (where it’s strictly illegal) simply add water.
It’s easily forgotten that the least invasive and controversial way of bringing sugars (and consequently alcohol) down is to increase the yield. Less concentration in the grapes means you can easily bring the figure down by 1 or 1.5%. This Sartarelli Verdicchio has 12.5%. Sealed with a plastic cork, it’s meant to be drunk within a year or two (for something more ageworthy the same winery makes a single-vineyard Tralivio and an off-dry Balciana). And I really don’t so much mind a bit of water in my glass. At the price of a pizza (8€) this wine is a perfect solution, if you can forget your prejudice against dilution.
