Sunday, July 22, 2018

Winemaking at the Outer Limits

   

     What sort of person makes wine at the outer limits, where the chances of failure are enormous, but where there's a chance, remote to be sure, to make stunning wines, not just good ones?  What sort of person plants vineyards on slopes so steep that viticulture with machines is laughable, and where the topography dictates that the pockets of land suitable for vines are so tiny that a two-hectare (7 acre) vineyard is large, so that any pretense to commercial production means you'll have tiny plots scattered about from Vietri to Agerola, a distance of 30 kilometers?  And where vineyards climb slopes so precipitous that you have to harvest by stages, because the lower vineyards are a month more mature than the upper?  And, for the love of God, what sort of nut case decides to use autochthonous cultivars that nobody outside a 30 mile radius has ever heard of and then grow them using a training system that is two millennia old?

     You'd have to be some sort of masochist, right?  And if you somehow made a success of it, you'd need to be an obsessive-compulsive, driven to the point of madness, right?  Well, no, actually you'd have to be Marisa Cuomo and Andrea Ferraoili, two of the warmest, most gracious and hospitable people you could ever hope to meet.  Who just happen to make some of Italy's most spectacular wines at Cantina Marisa Cuomo in tiny Furore, perched some 500 meters (1600') up on the slopes of the stunning Amalfi Coast.

    Once again we owe the impetus for our visit to our daughter, Amy, sommelier at Ristorante Leuca in the William Vale hotel in Brooklyn.  Amy has been gushing for years about how luscious these wines are and how we needed to make a pilgrimage to the winery to convey her respects.  After all, we're only 40 kilometers away as the crow flies.  She even bribed us with a bottle of Marisa's most delicious white, Fiorduva, when we enjoyed a spectacular Italian-themed meal with her at the restaurant last autumn.  Tempting indeed.

     The problem is that these old crows can't fly those 40 km.  But even by road it's only 70, right?  Well, yes, but 25 of those are along the coast road of the Amalfi Coast.  I've driven it three times, and it is nothing short of spectacular, perched up on jagged cliffs anywhere from 100 to 200 meters above the sparkling Bay of Salerno, with those adorable little villages clinging to the slopes and smiling in the sun.  I would encourage every adventurous traveler to drive it....once.  The problem is that the road is so contorted that unless you drive like a maniac (which many of the locals do), you're lucky to do much more than 10 mph.  That is not an exaggeration.  So driving the road is a pure rush, for about the first 30 minutes.  Thereafter, it quickly starts to pall.  And Furore is 25 miles down the pike.  You do the math.

     So, I've been a hard-core recalcitrant until this summer, when Sandy discovered that a ferry runs regularly from Agropoli to Amalfi, only 10 km from the winery, and that taxis and buses are accessible from there.  And, for the umpteenth time, we owe our dear friends Massimo Alois and Talita de Rosa at Alois Wines, who heard of our interest, called their buddies at Marisa Cuomo and arranged the logistics of a vineyard/winery tour and a tasting.

    Everything about our visit was a delight.  On a sparkling Thursday morning, we parked the car at the Port in Agropoli, bought tickets for the equivalent of $10 apiece, boarded a clean, air-conditioned ferry, and chatted with our new friend, Le, an Aussie of Vietnamese extraction who was using our little town as a point d'appui for her travels in the South.  The trip over lasted an hour and a half, but it was totally relaxing, coasting down to cute little San Marco di Castellabate, then watching the dramatic Cilento Coast recede from view to the south and the equally dramatic Amalfi Coast emerge on the north.  Andrea had offered to pick us up in Amalfi but had been called away for urgent business in Rome, but a garrulous taxi driver kept us giggling the whole way up the side of the mountain with his accounts of encounters with shady practitioners of his own profession whom he'd encountered over the years, especially in New York City.

Beautiful Amalfi


     Marisa met us at the winery with a warm smile and options for winery tour before or after our tasting.  We opted for the latter, strolled down the road to Bacco, the restaurant/hotel owned by members of the family, where we had reservations for the night.  We checked into our room, a lovely one with a private terrace and a spectacular view, then made our way up to the restaurant where Roberto, a very friendly and polished waiter/sommelier introduced us to the wine and food pairings.  First up was a crisp, mineral Furore Bianco, paired with a medley of variations on tuna.  Then another stunning white, Ravello Bianco, paired with parsleyed tagliatelle and the tiny, sweet carpet clams that are so delicious in these waters.  Then the winery's stellar white, the Fiorduva we'd had before, a composite of Fenile, Ginestra, and Ripoli grapes, none of which I'd ever heard of prior to Amy's introduction., much less tasted  This was paired with a hearty dish of baccalà (salt cod) in a classic marinara.  Most whites would wilt before a dish like this, but the Fiorduva with its unctuous glycerines and intense fruit handled it with aplomb.

Two of Marisa Cuomo's gems

Roberto, knowledgeable and friendly

Tagliatelle con vongole

Baccalà alla marinara

The flagship white, Fiorduva


     Dessert was millefiori torte and good coffee. Then it was off to the cantina where our guide was lovely Bruna, a Brazilian expat with credentials as a chemical engineer and food technologist who worked in the chocolate industry in France for several years before her gig at the winery and is now proficient in four languages.  The cantina itself is typical of the new breed in Italy (and elsewhere), with a large pneumatic press and the refrigerated stainless-steel fermentation tanks which have elevated Campanian wines to cult status among savvy oenophiles, without the cult prices   The cantina also featured a modern, completely automated bottling line.
Millefiori

     The winery dates from 1980, when Andrea, the last descendant of a family of winemakers from Furore, bought the Gran Furore Divina Costiera brand, which dates to 1942, and gave the winery to Marisa as a wedding present!  Both Marisa and Andrea were born in tiny Furore (population roughly 800), but their ambitions were international from the start.  Over the years they bought some 10 ha (25 acres) of vineyards and signed long-term contracts with growers of as many hectares again.  They now produce some 50,000 bottles per year and are the largest producer in the Costa Amalfitana DOC.  Roughly 60% of their production is white wine, featuring standard grapes like Falanghina but also wonderful, quirky little local grapes like Biancolella and the previously mentioned Fenile, Ginestra. and Ripoli  A delicious rosato, a blanc de noirs from red grapes Piedirosso and Aglianico, cannot be classified as a rosé in France because of its intense pink color—in England in the old days it would have been called a claret— but is nevertheless extremely popular there as such.  The winery's reds , Furore Rosso and Furore Rosso Riserva, come mostly from those same two delicious grapes, grown on the eastern slopes down toward Vietri.  Beautiful, soft tannins and gorgeous fruit in the nose, combined with all those baritone notes in the mouth and a medium finish.

Sandy with lovely Bruna

Vines on pergolas, above the blue Tyrrhenian

One of dozens of small, inaccessible plots, with a monorail in the left foreground


    Bruna next took us up into one of the vineyards above the winery.  On the Amalfi Coast, vines are still grown on pergolas, just as they were by the Romans and perhaps by the Greeks before them.  Clusters hang down beneath the frames where they are sheltered from the intense sun (grapes are easily sunburned, believe it or not).  I was delighted to hear that chestnut is still the standard framing material, just as it was for the Romans; chestnut is easy to work and is extremely durable and resistant to bugs.  This training system and the topography ensure that viticultural practices as well as harvest are almost exclusively by hand, and this is enormously expensive but also ensures top quality.  The next morning we had planned to walk up the road above Furore to see more of those pocket vineyards, but Marisa insisted on dropping her winery and grandma duties to drive us up, stopping periodically to show us another spectacular view of a vineyard, and even one of the little one-seater monorails that provide a tiny bit of mechanization during harvest.  Yet another feature that this viticultural area shares with Cinque Terre, up on the Ligurian coast. Then it was back to the cantina to tour the wine cellar with its ranks of French oak barriques for aging the reds.  Earlier Andrea had explained that it had taken no less than four years just to procure the permits from the otiose Italian bureaucracy, then another four to carve out the cellar from the dolomitic limestone.  Unlike cousin calcite limestone, dolomite is extremely hard even in humid environments, and houses on the ridge above the cantina meant that the cellar could not be dynamited but had to be laboriously jackhammered from the matrix.
Part of the new cellar with its French barriques


    The highlight of the trip was lunch with Marisa and Andrea on the terrace of Ristorante Bacco.  Our amuse bouche was little crostini of bread baked on premises with anchovy fillets and good olive oil, paired with a Santi Prosecco Superiore Valdobbidene.  Look, I love a cheap Prosecco as much as the next guy, but do yourself a favor and try a Conegliano-Valdobbiadene DOCG superiore sometime; I can almost guarantee you'll be wowed by its intense minerality.  Truth-in-advertising disclaimer, however:  among her other duties, Amy is New York ambassador for this DOCG, so I'm a bit biased.  Next up was the rosato with a dish of paccheri (large tubular noodles typical of this region; like ziti that overachieved) and baccalà, but in this case simply dressed with great oil, a few cherry tomatoes and parsley.  Next we had linguine with an anchovy hash, dressed with the local version of garum, the famous Roman fish sauce.  This version is made in nearby Cetara, center for anchovy fishing on the Coast, and is actually closer to Roman liquamen.  If fish sauce sounds disgusting to you, better eschew that Thai restaurant you love so much; various forms of garum are what gives many oriental cuisines that indescribable umami flavor.  In this case Andrea also proffered an aerosol spray bottle of the good stuff if we wanted a bit more mojo.  Stellar food.  This and the next dish, a simple mixed salad from the hotel's garden and a frittura of anchovies and calamari, were paired with the Furore Rosso previously described.  Next up was a sorbetto of mixed citrus (lemon, orange and kumquat) followed by figs stuffed with a local sheeps'-milk cheese and a rich almond cookie.  With these we were offered a choice of coffee or digestivi, the liqueurs, most prominently liomoncello, which are popular after-dinner drinks here.  I opted for a Nanassino made on premises from prickly-pear fruits.

The irrepressible Andrea
Warm, gracious Marisa, who just happens to make world-class wines
Lunch on the terrazza

     The food and drink were exquisite, as you can tell from Sandy's photos, but the real treat was sharing a leisurely repast with this dynamic couple, Andrea the ebullient enthusiast, quick-witted and full of fun, a natural marketing genius, like our friends Massimo and Talita; and Marisa, quieter and intense, but equally kind and gracious.  I may be wrong, but I suspect it is that intensity and focus which manifest in the vineyard and the winery to create world-class wines.  Almost three hours later, we were introduced to the kitchen staff and bade Marisa good-bye before Andrea drove us back down to Amalfi, stopping several times to point out another precarious vineyard and once to show us a new winery recently given the official imprimatur and where new reds will be vinified going forward.
Marisa Cuomo's rosato

Paccheri con baccalà

Linguini con alici

Mixed salad and frittura di mare

Prickly pear liqueur


 Andrea was perhaps  proudest of a little plot of only 1.2 hectares down near the coast where he experiments with no fewer than 42 autochthonous grape varieties! Back in Amalfi, Andrea parked near the ticket booths for the many ferries that operate in the Bay, and, discovering that we had an unexpected 45 minutes before we sailed, was positively jubilant that he had time to show us a bit of his beloved second town.  As we strolled up through the town along the corso, we lost count of the people of every shape and description who greeted him, often with a hearty hug and a bit of banter.  In that brief span of time Andrea treated us to sodas at a local bar where the owner is a dear friend and the barrista, a beautiful young woman of Ukrainian extraction, is his adopted granddaughter, then insisted on a mini-cone of gelato from the shop of a childhood buddy who is now surgeon to the local celebs.  Michele and Andrea insisted they were pegged as high school students as 'the two least likely to succeed', but I'm not sure I'm buying that.  Then up to a local ceramics shop where the proprietor took us to the basement to show us a Roman nympheum, a dining room equipped with cascading fountains, which had been discovered in the course of recent construction there and meticulously excavated. Back at the port, Andrea insisted on escorting us to our embarkation, where he discovered yet another friend, this one the ship's bos'n, who, discovering we were friends of Andrea, insisted on carrying our bag on board. Needless to say, it was obvious how beloved Andrea is in Amalfi.

    So, these two highly successful people are exceptionally gracious, an anomaly, right?  Nope.  In our travels we have been lucky enough to come to know several dozen purveyors of fine food, from wine to bread to cheese to olive oil, truly exceptional people who have chosen the path of excellence in an area where mediocrity is so often rewarded.  And, to a one, they have been kind and generous with their time and talents, not from any expectation of recompense from two knucklehead Americans, but from the sheer joy of sharing their passion for excellence with us.  As often as not it has taken them years to be rewarded monetarily for that passion, but they have never lost the joy of the adventure.  And, to a one, they are genuinely happy people.  Trite as it may sound 40 years after Joseph Campbell encouraged us to 'follow our passion', I think the dictum is just as valid as ever.  Pursuing excellence, however you may define it, and sharing your passion for it with others, is the key to a truly happy and fulfilling life.