“Sophia Loren!” exclaimed the Bangladeshi taxi driver, when informed that the two young men in his taxi hailed from Italy. “My father loved Sophia Loren!”
Following an afternoon of tasting and talking about wine with Emanuele Colombo, the young winemaker from La Giribaldina in Asti, and his friend Matteo, who sells the wines in the Asti region, our driver’s enthusiasm was a reminder that great wines were only one of Italy’s notable exports. But if Sophia Loren’s international acclaim stems from her sex appeal, wines from the Barbera grape, like those from La Giribaldina, attract attention in the U.S. for their verve, acidity, and bright fruit flavors.
Loren once noted famously that “everything you see, I owe to spaghetti.” Barbera doesn’t owe spaghetti anything, but works exceptionally well with it just the same. The zippy acidity and natural spiciness of Barbera are the perfect complement to pasta topped with a tomato-based sauce, as these characteristics prevent the wine from being overwhelmed by the acidity of the tomatoes.
Giribaldina’s Barberas, from the Asti zone of the Piedmont region in Italy’s northwest, rely on the white, sandy soil of the area to infuse the wines with great smoothness and elegance. While the clay soil in the neighboring zone of Alba gives Barberas from this area slightly fuller body and deeper color, wines from this area have less acidity. As a result, they may be ready to drink when they leave the cellar, but don’t show the same potential for aging as do the Barberas from Asti.
The nature of the soil varies within Asti as well. While the soil in the province of Alessandria, in the northern part of the Asti D.O.C., is versatile enough to grow a wider number of varietals, the sand in Asti Monferrato restricts Giribaldina’s growing options to Barbera, Moscato, and a small parcel of Sauvignon Blanc.
A family-owned estate, La Giribaldina is a relative newcomer in the world of winemaking. Francesco Colombo, Emanuele’s father, purchased the ancient Girbaldi farmhouse and the surrounding two hectares of land in 1995, leaving urban life and his career in automobile sales in the neighboring region of Lombardy for the countryside. Emanuele, 27 years of age, studied winemaking at the University of Alba and now manages the vineyards and the cellar. I was lucky to catch up with him and a friend on their whirlwind tour of the East Coast and even luckier to taste a few of his wines.
The 2007 Monte del Mare, from the estate’s newest vineyard, located on a south-facing slope in the midst of a forest preserve near the village of Vaglio Sera, is the freshest of Giribaldina’s wines. The combination of young vines– only 5-10 years in age– with fermentation and aging in steel alone yields a wine that is fresh, acidic, and redolent of red fruits. The 2005 Val Sarmassa, combining fruit from a recently planted vineyard with that from 50-year old vines, both located in the midst of the preserve, spends 18 months in French oak, enough to impart significantly more tannins to the wine. The key here is balance- for the Val Sarmassa still has plenty of acidity and juiciness, but also greater complexity, concentration, and structure. If the Monte del Mare is perfect for lighter fare, the Val Sarmassa worked both with my pasta with fresh tomatoes and bacon, as well as with the Italians’ steak frites.
Finally, the 2005 Calla delle Mandrie, from Giribaldina’s original holdings in the village of Calamandrana, uses fruit planted both before and directly after the Second World War, to produce the most concentrated of the estate’s three Barbera bottlings. This concentration allows the wine to handle 18 months in small 500 liter French oak barrels. With younger, less concentrated fruit, this aging would likely knock the wine off balance, but in this case, the finished wine shows notes of ripe plum and blackberry alongside enhanced spiciness and plenty of tannic structure.
It’s not likely that the next time I hop into a cab with a couple of Italians, the driver’s response will be “Barbera d’Asti!” But it would be appropriate, nonetheless. This region is making wine– reasonably priced wine, at that– as worthy of our attention as a starlet from the golden years of cinema.
