Drink - Victoria Moore discovers Verdicchio is no longer naff
Published 27 January 2003
Verdicchio, after a period of naffness, is enjoying a renaissance
The four members of the Dante group convene whenever diaries will allow. The rules are simple: never the same place twice and neither more nor less than one canto of the Inferno must be translated at each meeting. Wine usually plays a significant part, not least because it takes a few glasses to read aloud (in public) three lines of early Italian and limp through an English rendition. When inspiration dries up, one of us, at least, is adept at silently attracting the interest of an Italian waiter who will bow his head close to hers over the page to "assist".
Eighteen restaurants in, and we are at the Islington branch of Metrogusto for Saturday lunch. The wine list comes to me and for once I'm tempted - by the Verdicchio Classico dei Castelli di Jesi, Sartarelli 2001 - away from the house options.
Verdicchio has been grown in central Italy since before Dante (1265-1321) was alive. Its homeland is the cypress-studded hills of the Marches, to the east of Dante's beloved Florence and unlike many white Italian grapes it is easily capable of wines of quite distinctive personality.
I decided it could accompany us to the beginning of the Malebolge, a series of concentric ditches in the first of which trains of panders and seducers circle naked, their steps hastened by horned demons that lash them from behind.
Inferno should not be read by those with fevered imaginations who are in fear of death. It was responsible for some particularly nasty nightmares last summer at a time when real life was so lurid. Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi, on the other hand, is a resolutely earthly drink that seems to give sustenance and resolve to those who take the trouble to appreciate it. It's said that on his way to lay siege to Rome in the fifth century, Alaric, king of the Visigoths, ordered his men to load a mule with barrels of Marches Verdicchio because he believed it would stimulate his soldiers to fight well.
Like all wines rediscovered in modern times, Verdicchio has had to endure its passage through naffness before its eventual renaissance as a thing to be admired. It was wrenched from relative obscurity in the 1950s, when Fazi Battaglia began dressing it in curvaceous, amphora-shaped bottles only mildly less humiliating than the lampshade-base glass awarded to Mateus Rose. Inevitably, as sales increased greedy growers hiked up yields, until the wine emerging was virtually indistinguishable from any other mass-produced watery white. Now producers have turned to concentrating on the natural charms of the grape, Verdicchio is once again worth drinking.
It's a curious grape, more obvious on the palate than it is on the nose. I was recently given a Verdicchio to blind-taste and noted that the slight nutty aroma seemed to place it in Italy while the tenacious, fairly full palate shared characteristics of some white wines from northern Spain.
It has a good, clean citrus flavour and a touch of bitterness on the aftertaste. Lemony-ness and refinement aside, unlike some wines - say, Sauvignon Blanc or certain styles of Chardonnay - it does not taste particularly modern.
I was musing on this when Canto XVIII threw up a bizarrely modern piece of slang. Or so I thought. "Ma che ti mena a sI pungenti salse?" asks Dante of a pander he recognises in the eighth circle. I shall spare you my own hobbled translation and bring you that of John Sinclair. "But what brings thee into such a biting pickle?" It seemed an almost dissonant piece of translation work until, on checking the notes, I discovered that salse, the word for pickles, was the 14th-century name for a ravine close to Bologna into which it was customary to hurl the bodies of criminals. Some old things, like the notion of being in a pickle, we rehabilitate and think of as our own. Verdicchio has altered over the years. It used to be fermented on the skins, giving a harsher, more intense but less subtle flavour. Now it is vinified (via a single fermentation) in modern wineries - in the case of the Sartarelli in stainless steel tanks. But it still retains on the palate a tinge of the ancient; of armies marching towards Rome and of the men whose punishment for their various treacheries and sins Dante so chillingly describes in the Inferno.
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