Underneath our feet, the soil is mostly clay and sand with a dash of lime. “It is difficult to sell more bottles, it is an unknown grape,” he tells me, as we tour the vineyard.
#Children of morta wine machine plus
Then there are the indigenous white Albana di Romagna and the indigenous red Centisimino plus small quantities of the international varieties Syrah and Malvasia.Īt the farm, which incorporates a 17 th century farmhouse offering B&B and an 11-year-old winery with shop, Mauro makes 5,000 bottles of sparkling Famoso (Divo) and 4,600 bottles of still VIP. His other grape varieties include the region’s main white, Trebbiano, and its key red, Sangiovese. Mauro’s 28ha in Oriolo dei Fichi, south of Faenza, grows a variety of fruit – apricots, peaches and olives – alongside 15ha of grapes. Like most of the wineries in the region, La Sabbiona is also a farm. The first winemaker I met on this tour of Romagna, Mauro Altini, uses the Charmat method and stainless steel or glass-lined cement tanks to preserve the grape’s aroma and its fruit flavours. The aim being to add some complexity to this soft, elegant, moderately acidic, medium-bodied wine. This starts in the vineyard by reducing yield with green harvesting and continues in the winery with lengthy periods of bâtonnage. As it offers so much on the nose, the winemakers are also experimenting to make sure the wine delivers in the mouth, too. The main reason for the experimentation seems to be to either enhance or tame the grape’s distinctive sweet floral and exotic fruit aromas – linden flowers, hawthorn and orange blossoms mingled with banana, peach, green apple and apricot.
These variations are expected in large regions with well-known varieties, but there are less than 10 serious Famoso producers, most of whom live within 20kms of each other, none of whom has more than 2ha to play with, and all are using the same clone. I saw bunches hanging from single and double Guyot training systems and from the region’s traditional pergola. I tasted Famoso that had been matured in stainless steel and glass-lined cement tanks, and also in oak barrels. I tasted it as a Champagne-style and Prosecco-style sparkler, as a dry, off-dry and sweet still wine. What surprised me most during this trip, though, was the level of experimentation. On a recent trip to the region I counted 11.25ha planted and heard of more in the pipeline. It became an official Italian grape variety in 2009 and is being considered for the next edition of Wine Grapes as the 2010 census of Italian wine grapes shows there are 6ha planted and a growing number of commercial producers making wines from this big-berried, loose-bunched, early-to-mid ripener. They liked the grape’s toughness, the wine’s distinctive floral aroma and light acidity, saw its potential for producing a top quality white wine and started the legal process to get the variety registered. The discovery, however, inspired a band of local wine producers, with a passion for indigenous grape varieties, to experiment with the vines, the wine and to join together to save the variety. All that was left were two rows of vines yielding table grapes at the Montalto farm in Mercato Saraceno, near Forlì. Although it was mentioned in tax documents as long ago as 1437, after phylloxera ravished Europe’s vineyards in the late 19 th century it fell into decline and had almost disappeared by 2000. It was ignored because, in 2000, there were no commercial wines being made from this ancient grape variety and no hectares planted with Famoso vines. It’s an odd name for a grape variety that isn’t even a footnote in the Vitis vinifera bible, Wine Grapes (by Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding and José Vouillamoz).
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