Mastroberardino, Radici Taurasi, DOCG, 2012

After a rough week of work, we decided to splurge a little by indulging in one of our favorites: Aglianico. Much like Malbec from Cahors, this black grape produces a deeply colored, leathery, bold, dry wine, exploding with tannins. Much like a spin around the block in a Ferrari, the wine rips your face off, yet in a totally desirable way (not that we take too many spins around the block in Ferraris, but you get the idea). Firm tannins grip the corners of this full-bodied wine. Yet, as expected from an Italian heavy-hitter, that tannins are balanced nicely with high acidity. Both can allow you to keep this one in your cellar and allow it to age.

The deep color of the wine if often described as garnet, but frequently it can hit much deeper tones, more often approaching an often equally earthy red from Cahors. For those of you who have traveled to Italy, as you head south on the Autostrade and reach Naples, a glance out of your window at Pompei will help you to understand the earthiness of Aglianco. The grape was first cultivated by the Ionian Greeks, and later brought to Southern Italy by Dr. Champ’s ancestors during their mass migration. Even Pliny the Elder enjoyed a good glass of Aglianico, as he describes in his book, Naturalis Historia, when discussing Falernian, the wine created from Aglianico grapes grown along the cliffs of Mount Falernus in Campania.

The ash in the soil would be partly responsible for the delicious earthiness of Aglianico but would also be responsible for Pliny’s ultimate demise; He died in 79 AD when Mount Vesuvius erupted, covering the ground with a fresh layer of nutrient-rich soil for future Aglianico cultivation. The wines from grapes grown on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius have their own denomination, Vesuvio DOC, also known as Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio, which translates to “The Tears of Christ on Vesuvius.”

Campania is the major area dominated by Aglianico, but you can also find it in nearby Calabria, Puglia, Molise, and Apulia, with small scatterings in other places. The DOCG Aglianico wine (at the time of this writing) include the most southern Aglianico del Vulture DOCG in Basilicata, and Taurasi DOCG and Aglianico del Talburno DOCG in Campania. The tears of Christ (and Pliny) successfully nurtured the growth of the Taurasi DOCG region at the Mastroberardino winery, where tonight’s bottle of 2013 Ridici was grown, fermented, bottled, and, according to Taurasi DOCG rules, aged for at least three years with at least one in oak. While this bottle had several decades of aging left in it, we felt it was the perfect night to enjoy it with some unpasteurized fontina cheese.

The Radici (meaning roots) is from 100% Aglianico grapes from vines with an average age of 30 years and at an altitude of 450 meters. The wine undergoes a long maceration time – hitting four weeks – for enhanced skin contact, then is aged for two years in French oak barrels and Slavonian casks, followed by at least two more years in the bottle before it even reaches the store shelf. The result is a wine chock-full of phenols like tannins and anthocyanins. In the search for the world’s healthiest wine, Mastroberardino’s Taurasi is certainly in the running.