the most honest food and wine

Italian Honesty

Recently, while in Italy to check out the famous bareback horserace of Siena, I was able to indulge in some of the most honest food and wine I have had in a long time. Allow me to explain the 'honest' bit. In times today, food and wine can be very contrived, especially when criticism is merciless, the client thankless, and the competition so fierce. Costs — from rents to working hands — are high and the factors influencing dining behaviour and culture too numerous to be statistically crunchable: from economic crises to a shift in eating habits and preferences. In such a scenario, it is almost a surprise that chefs and sommeliers manage to make it through an entire shift without having a serious nervous breakdown. But in Italy, where good food has always been the bastion of the home front, I am always happy to be stuffed to my eyebrows with food, made slowly, with love and patience, and far from anything that reeks of commercial establishment. I was hosted for two dinners by the Fratelli family (Andrea and Alessio one evening, and Piero the next), a lovely Indian winery grafted into Italian family roots, and the meals were a saga in themselves. Equally interesting were the wines. Piero, the winemaker at Fratelli, after he had enthralled one and all with his home-grown olives, showed us around his modest winery (in Italy) where I tasted some pure Sangiovese; wines that had survived untainted by the commercial demands of blending with Cabernet and Merlot. As most wineries now have this option legally available to them, it almost seems as they have stopped focusing on making a Sangiovese that is elegant and soft and yet firm and robust enough to stand by itself. It is as if the crutches of certain international grape varieties has made them choose the convenient shortcut of blending their Sangiovese to get a comfortably drinkable wine with ageing potential, even if it means sacrificing the pureness of their own local homebred grape. As it is, the international consumer knows the taste of Cabernet better than Sangiovese so why not blend some in for sake of cognisance? This is what has helped Super Tuscans rise to such fame and the more I taste them, the more I find myself almost repelled by them. Sure, some of them are great but most of them have no sense of origin. Neither Old or New world, I call them No World wines. Later, Piero pulled out a sample bottle for all of us to drink that evening and pitched it discretely next to some 'Super Tuscans'. The wine stood out for its purity and simplistic elegance. It didn't try too hard to be anything for it was comfortable being itself. The Super-wines, although impressive, were never once as deep and pensive. As Fratelli gets set to launch their Sangiovese in times to come — I honestly don't know if it will happen this year or not, 'only the wine knows' — I wish them all the best. With an honest winemaking ideology, I'm more than curious to see what expression this grape finds on Indian Terroir.