Wines made from Grillo grapes of Vénétie
Discover the best wines made with Grillo as a single variety or as a blend of Vénétie.
A very ancient grape variety still grown today in western Sicily. Very often associated with catarratto and inzolia, it produces the famous Marsala liqueur wine. It is also increasingly being vinified as a single variety and produces excellent dry wines full of freshness and fruitiness. Grillo is believed to be the result of an intra-fertile cross between catarratto and Muscat of Alexandria or zibibbo, obtained in 1869 by Antonino Mendola. It is represented by two biotypes that can be easily recognized, but it seems that winegrowers attach little importance to them. Little known in other Italian regions - in Liguria it is known as "rossese bianco" - it can also be found in Australia and South Africa. It is not widely grown in France, although it is interesting because of its ability to withstand hot climates and drought, and to ripen quite late.
Veneto is an important and growing wine region in northeastern Italy. Veneto is administratively Part of the Triveneto area, aLong with its smaller neighbors, Trentino-Alto Adige and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. In terms of geography, culture and wine styles, it represents a transition from the Alpine and Germanic-Slavic end of Italy to the warmer, drier, more Roman lands to the South. Veneto is slightly smaller than the other major Italian wine regions - Piedmont, Tuscany, Lombardy, Puglia and Sicily - but it produces more wine than any of them.
I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...
I’m fortunate enough to taste a fair amount of fine wine each year and I have come to the conclusion that each of us is forced to build our own stylistic preferences, regardless of the appellation or classification of a wine. Instead of simply choosing a bottle of Bordeaux over Barolo, for example, most of us probably aim to drink each on the right occasion and, in doing so, carve out our individual preferences for these wines. My personal bias – which I must confess, to be fair and transp ...
I’m busy, lazy or just tired… it’s half past twelve. I open the fridge and the same familiar labels smile up at me. The same with the repurposed coal hole under the front steps where the red wines live. I won’t tell you exactly what they are – although regular readers can have a pretty good guess. The ones that get mentioned least frequently are the ones that make an appearance on every routine day. When the soup (winter) or the salad (summer) comes out for a ‘working’ lunch, the bottle be ...