Argiano 2005 Brunello di Montalcino (Tuscany)

Seven years can be the charm for sangiovese, much as it can be for shiraz. Seven years from vintage, cork gods being kind, sangiovese based wines not explicitly built for early drinking will have often taken on some softening of tannins without hollowing out the fruit.

This bottle of the 2005 vintage Brunello from Argiano drank well at dinner last Friday. A thank-you night for the people who helped me pick the sagrantino I have planted at Quarry Hill, we had dinner at Dieci e Mezzo in Canberra. After a Campari and soda and some Prosecco, we got into the food and this bottle.

A deep colour, there are pleasant candied cherry and nutty things to smell. And oak. Oak does show in the wine, but the fruit is not totally swamped. Argiano keeps their Brunello in oak for two and half years, starting with a year in French oak small barrels, before moving the wine to Slavonian oak in larger format botti for another year and half or so. A kind of new-school-plus-old-school approach. A bet each way?

There is oak on the palate too, but also ripples of sangiovese tannin. The overall impression is of fruit ageing gracefully, with oak as a buttress more than a distinct ingredient. Worth a look if you see it on a list and have a hankering for Brunello spread across old and new styles. I suspect the 2007 vintage is the current retail.

Website. $120 (list price). Cork sealed.

Balsamico

This year the secret project has been to start up a balsamic vinegar line. The Italians call the series of progressively-smaller barrels the vinegar moves through a batteria or battery. This is a sequence of five or six, give or take, barrels, getting smaller as you move through the series & liquid evaporates. My first sequence starts with a 50 litre oak barrel. In a year, the balsamic will be moved to a 40 litre barrel, then 30, 20, 10 & 5 litres for the 6th year.

Where 'normal' wine vinegar starts with wine, which then acetifies courtesy of acetobacter converting alcohol to acetic acid, traditional balsamic is a different pathway. Instead of starting with grape juice fermented to wine, the start point with balsamic (most of the time, not counting the commercial, short-cuts processes) is unfermented grape juice that is cooked out over flame to make musto cotto. Reduced to about half of the starting volume by the slow boiling process, the cooled must is settled & transferred to barrel, along with a small amount of gluconobacter culture (a story in itself). Unless you already happen to have some balsamic & bacteria in the bottom of that barrel already.

Gluconobacter are a group of bacteria sometimes found in combination with types of acetobacter, but they operate quite differently. Where acetobacter eat alcohol to make vinegar, gluconobacter eat some kinds of sugars while they make acid. So no alcoholic fermentation needed in the traditional balsamic process.

From hand-picking sauvignon blanc grapes from Quarry Hill, to foot-crushing & basket-pressing the fruit, then settling & filtering the juice, cooking it out in my 92 litre stainless steel pot on a heavy-duty metal frame wok-burner over a couple of days to make the musto cotto... it has been a fascinating learning process. Not least about the hazards of do it yourself gas fitting.

Now the hard part. Staying hands-off that little barrel & let the gluconobacter do the work, racking & transferring down the line once a year. In six years time, perhaps something good. Though traditional balsamico from Modena takes 12 years...

The image above is a close shot of some of the 32 jets on the Mongolian wok burner, with the 92 litre stainless steel pot of must cooking out on top. Beautiful to watch at night, if a bit noisy from the air-mixing Venturi effect the system uses (sounds a little like a jet engine when it gets going).

Yarrh 2004 sangiovese (Canberra)

The Yarrh vineyard is an attractive, gum-treed site wrapped around by bush and not far from Ken Helm's Murrumbateman cellar door. Sangiovese is a strict mistress in regions marginal for it, such as Canberra. Everything has to line up: soil, water, vine health, bud counts, shoot vigour, shoot length, fruit load, season. Bryan Martin, of Ravensworth fame (and a big part of Clonakilla) has shown how sangiovese can perform in Canberra, but this wine fleshes out that story.

Maybe a sign of the Canberra roots I've put down, I've been having a bottle or two of this most years for the past seven years. Like old jackets shift smells and change their fit over years, seeing and feeling the aging path of this wine has been a satisfying thing. Tight and red-fruited, with a hint of something dried-herb & tobacco as a younger wine, this has aged well (though my bottle before this one had largely fallen over). In it's old age, this has become more local and less varietal, without losing overall appeal. The wine now shows aged red fruit, a touch of leather & mint, and something elusive, nutty & sweet, like a toffeed hazelnut. A good showing, from what I think is my last bottle. Congratulations to the winemaker, Fiona Wholohan, and the site.

A satisfying, if surprising pairing for this: bucatini in a sauce of onion, zucchini dice, black pepper and gorgonzola dolce, thinned with pasta water. The aged, nutty, toffee character of the wine made an excellent fit with the sweet yet blue cheese of the sauce and the comparative bitter of zucchini skin.

Hamilton's Bluff Sangiovese 2005 (Canowindra)

The Hamilton's Bluff vineyard at Canowindra can turn out the goods with sangiovese. Not too close to the richer, wetter and hotter parts of the district (near Cowra in NSW), there is vigour enough for the vines without washing out colour and flavour. But what I have enjoyed about the couple of vintages of this I have had, including this 2005, is that there is a distinctiveness to the wine. It has a softly-aged richness of texture, something gently-creamy about it, that is genuinely appealing. As well as being an excellent example of graceful aging under screwcap, at around $25 a bottle this is both good value and a good return to the people who grew the fruit, made the wine and brought it out to market in its prime. Roast lamb with borlotti beans cooked off in the tray at the end of the roast makes a good match, or just good bread & a bottle of spicy olive oil.

Their website is worth a look, both for the wine and Julia Andrews' writing about their vineyard, business and local area. Personal and personable.

Older nebbiolo

In anticipation of what should be a good dinner this Friday at Scopri in Melbourne. The theme is aged Barolo and Barbaresco. I'm anticipating some of my prejudice against nebbiolo and in favour of sangiovese may be challenged by this lineup:

MONFORTINO 1952 G.CONTERNO

BAROLO 1955 RISERVA G.BORGOGNO

BAROLO 1962 RISERVA G.BORGOGNO

BARBARESCO 64 RIS. FASCETTO MINUTO

BARBARESCO 67 RIS.RABAYA' PRODUT.

BARBARESCO 70 RIS. OVELLO PRODUT.

BARBARESCO 1976 BRUNO GIACOSA

BARBARESCO 1974 PRODUTTORI

BARBARESCO 1974 JEROBOAM PRODUT.

BAROLO 1976 RISERVA G.BORGOGNO

BAROLO 1986 BRUNATE CERETTO

MONFORTINO 1941 G.CONTERNO

The two encounters I have had so far with well-aged nebbiolo have been underwhelming, but I have an open mind.

Tenuta Sassoregale Sangiovese 2009 (Maremma, Tuscany)

Under screwcap and sub-$15 at retail in Australia is a pretty good start for an Italian sangiovese. From the Maremma, the 2009 Tenuta Sassoregale offers bright red fruits, a hit of tangy refreshment and a touch of varietal sangiovese tannin. The fruit does dip on the mid-palate and wash out somewhat on the finish, but this does not really matter if you have a plate of pork sausages on the table and a weeknight urge for sangiovese. Decent and another example of the value (and screwcap certainty) now coming in from Italy.

Peposo

A Tuscan idea that works well with Nero d'Avola, spicy shiraz or a richer style of sangiovese.

Take a kilo of beef shin and dice it into cubes of an inch or bigger. Crush six cloves of garlic. Grind a tablespoon of black pepper. Mix that all together, then add some tomato puree (130 grams is good) and 250ml of red wine. Touch it up with a bit of sea salt, then transfer to a heavy-based pan. Pour in enough water to cover the meat and cook at a gentle simmer, uncovered, for three and a half hours. Or until it is very tender. Stir occasionally to stop it catching and top up the water from time to time. There should be almost no liquid at the end.

Goes well with bread and a green salad. The pepper is the key to the distinctive flavour of the dish. It's one dish that shows really well with low or un-salted bread in the Tuscan style.

This was an idea I got from a good book on artisanal businesses in Tuscany (including the potter for whom this dish goes with the hottest time in the kiln-firing): Lori De Mori & Jason Lowe, 'The real flavour of Tuscany: Portraits & recipes from 25 of Tuscany's culinary artisans'. Worth a look, including for portraits of two Tuscan wine growers (Contini Bonacossi & Fonterenza).