CAL-ITALIAN

As the holidays are a time when so many of us head back home, it seems right to conclude this Red Rogues year by keeping it local. Kind of. While Italian varietals are hardly strangers to Californian soil, the quality, variety and visibility of the wine produced from them has fluctuated pretty dramatically over the years. We are currently experiencing something like a renaissance though - as winemakers statewide plumb the Apennine Peninsula for inspiration with increasingly successful results - but it is likely also just the beginning: Italy’s literally countless shades of grape, conducted through the Golden State’s vast spectrum of terroir, is an onephiliac energy source of enormous untapped potential. Whatever the future holds, right now is as good a time as any to mark this moment of ascent with three of the brightest lights on the scene - and toast to the promise they represent. Happy New Year! 

The history of Italian winemaking in the United States arguably begins with Florentine merchant and friend of Thomas Jefferson Phillip Mazzei in seventeenth century Virginia, but he eventually moved back to Italy and appears to have left no successors. It wasn’t until the California gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century that significant numbers of Italians began coming to the US and journeying west. Mostly from Northern Italy, they farmed land,  planted grapes, and made wine. Among the most important was Andrea Sbapboro, who arrived from Genoa, aged twelve, in 1850. In 1881, he formed the Italian-Swiss Colony, consisting of 1,500 acres in northern Sonoma County near Cloverdale, around the village of Asti (named for the Piedmontese wine-making  commune.) Spapboro initially intended the venture to be a combination business-social philanthropy concern that would employ (and eventually provide ownership stakes to) the large local Italian immigrant labor pool.  While the latter part of the project never quite took off,  the business end proved quite successful, planting grapes as diverse as Zinfandel, Carignane, Mataro, Barbera, Cabernet, Pinot Noir, Riesling, Pinot and Sauvignon Blanc, modernizing production and distribution enough to weather phylloxera and market fluctuations, and arriving around the turn of the century as the biggest producer in a California wine industry that was selling its product all over the world. 

The passage on the 18th Amendment in 1919 prohibiting the sale of alcohol destroyed all that of course. And a loophole in the law allowed each home to make “200 gallons of non-intoxicating cider and fruit juice per year” so thousands of Americans began to make their own wine at home. The price of grapes skyrocketed and to meet the demand, growers tore out their fine wine varietals and replaced them with lower quality grape varieties better suited to shipping. Following repeal, it would take more than half a century for California to return to its pre-Prohibition production level, and in that time the local industry increasingly shifted its focus to French derived varietals more suited to California’s large diurnal temperature shifts. The famous Judgment of Paris in 1976 - when a panel of French wine critics crowned California Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon best in show during a blind tasting -  greatly accelerated this trend. 

In the 80-90s there was an attempt to inaugurate a Cal-Ital trend that failed due to massive and indiscriminate plantings of Italy’s most famous red grape, Sangiovese, on uncongenial dirt, that likely discouraged further attempts for a while. But the old vines planted in the mid to late 19th Century remained, and as local winemakers have found it easier to train and study in Italy, find relatively unheralded vineyards and benefit from the experience of others as well as their own experiments, we have arrived at an inflection point for unique expressions of the gamut of Italian grapes. From the northern and central reds excerpted here - Nebbiolo, as terroir sensitive as Pinot Noir, and well suited to the cooler weather of the Central Coast; Barbera which grows best in the Sierra Nevada foothills and distinguishes itself from its European relation with lush dark fruit and herb; and Sangiovese, spotlighted in perhaps its oldest Napa incarnation - to white varietals like Vermentino and southern grapes such as Algianico and Carricante, there is so much to discover, explore and savor.

Cheers! 

The PlumpJack Wine Team