la bici

My favourite instument for getting to know the wines of Southern Italy, just after a cork screw, is my bicycle. I close my school for a month each year in fact and travel around the south, talking with producers, consumers, marketers and  all the folks in between. And I taste and I taste and taste. In the day time I spit but I tend to buy a bottle of the day’s favourite to drink that night, someplace haunting beautiful. In front of a 9th century church. Or while listening to the sing-song of the waves on the shore.  A pocket knife and an aged salami and a couple of peaches can be dinner, if the wine is right. And, of course, if you’ve chosen the proper church.

Travelling long distances by bicycle is its own reward: I don’t know anyone that ever only taken one bicycle-based trip. You tend to fall in love with the mode of travel two or three hours into the second or third day, based on how good of shape you were in when you left home. When it sinks it that you can stop and talk to anyone, at anytime, you’re hooked. That and the fact that they tend to put vineyards in the most beautiful of places.

Most I talk with suggest autumn as the best time to travel the south of Italy, charged with getting a good sense of our wine. Grapes are harvested after all, in the autumn (even if primitivo can be in August and aglianico can be in October or even November). But anyone that really knows wine knows that you’ll never really have the attention of any wine maker come September, not more than for a few seconds at a time. Arrive in April or May though, and you’ll have their attention for as long as you want it. Maybe lunch too. And contact numbers for the next town. May is when the real conversations happen, such as what sort of problems the annata (vintage) is presenting, why the marketing department (the wine maker’s brother, the one that doesn’t like being outdoors) had chosen a new label, without bothering to check the changes in the DOC laws. A very,very,very expensive machine will prove broken, one that didn’t exist even 15 years ago and going without will be weighed, New World wine versus Old World wine, the arguement in a nutshell. A massive multi-national will be by to suggest a merger, suggesting that tetra-paks are just what wine needs right now.

Or it will simply rain. And rain And while great wine is always an artisanal product, it starts off as an agrarian one, and where you have nature, you sooner or later have forces out of your control, the last thing a wine maker likes to feel. In late spring, all of this is out in the open.