Vineyard Visit: Casale Cento Corvi

On a recent assignment to create an itinerary for the Etruscan territory north of Rome, I thought I’d put my fresh sommelier expertise to the test and add a winery to my tour.

I chose Casale Cento Corvi, as they’d just deposited few trial bottles at the wine shop downstairs and had made a very friendly impression. The wine was pretty tasty too—I’m not gonna lie.

Costantino, the son of the winery owner picked me up at the train station and took me on an hour-long drive through the vineyards before heading back to the showroom for a full-on tasting.

Now these guys have been in the business for years, over a hundred of them to be precise. They, like many families in this part of Italy, have been making their own wine for generations. It's good too, with a distinct mineral quality and sprightly acidity. The vineyard lies just inland of the Tyrrhenian sea with a chain of hills to the east, which makes for a very specific microclimate. They’ve got a geological history packed rife with volcanic eruptions and receding sea levels that has been packing the mineral punch into native grape species since Etruscan times.

The Collacciani family is proud of this to the core, but in 2000 they decided to add state-of-the-art technology to tradition and put their town (Cerveteri) on the wine map.

If you saw him, you’d peg him as the next Latin lover. He’s got a crinkly-eyed smile and seems to know every woman in town. He walks with a comfortable swagger and dresses like a collage kid in loose low-rise jeans and a tee shirt that shows off a toned torso. But when he gets to talking about running around the vineyard as a boy, and tasting the results of his hard work, and the legacy of winemaking in his family and in his history, he glimmers from the inside.

He’s most proud of Giacché, a grape that Etruscans were cultivating on the same land 3000 years earlier, and was given up for extinct before the Collaccianis got their hands on it..

The grapes resemble fat, ripe blueberries and grow in sparse bunches. They yield a distinctive and nearly opaque dark juice that stains everything in its path, smells and tastes of wild berries and stings with savage tannins. The Collaccianis have “tamed the beast” if you will, and have produced both a dry and dessert version (which pairs divinely with ricotta and cherry cake).

This is their crowning glory, but the whole line of wines, all blends, represent the distinctive flavor of the area, and have a lingering salty finish that is just evident enough to be interesting and remind one that the sea is splashing nearby.


See the movie!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWMcBU5G3rM