Lazio Spring

This was our first al fresco lunch of the year outside at Checchino Dal 1887, a restaurant set into the amphora-made hillside of Testaccio in Rome. It was the old slaughterhouse district and the main gate was opposite us as we tucked into various carnivorous dishes.

Normally you would go for red with meat but although this wine is from a Roscetto grape which has a tint of pink when grown, it is a golden, straw colour in the March sunshine. 

It is a fabulous wine made outside Rome in Lazio. It is crisp and mineral but without the body of a burgundy or the sharpness of a Chablis. But with a much better finish than a Frascati, for example. It is difficult to get outside Italy, although it's not expensive.

Taurasi: the taste of history

Taurasi is one of those little known Italian OCGs tucked away in the Campania region south of Rome. So it is a wine at the cross-roads of history. 

The Aglianico grape probably came from ancient Greece while the founding fathers of the main town were from imperial Rome. A Longobard castle shadows Taurasi which also saw the Allied forces sweep past in the Second World War.

The wine is a classy production that requires a minimum of three years maturation, one of which must be in wood.

This bottle from the Terredora producers has had a decade to reach what I think is near perfection for a moderate Taurasi. Imagine a Barolo heading towards a Montalcino Reserva.

The first taste can have a Burgundian edge but given time to open up it has wonderful flavours of dark red cherry.

Biferno

London, September, 2010

Very good value Tuscan red - soft, full-bodied, with a lovely curranty flavour but some depth and quite dry, too. Like a good Montepulciano.