Serendipity, p.3
Serendipity, page 3
Around the mid-1950s, a few producers sensed a business opportunity: Amarone might have some appeal beyond the family table. Giovanni and Valentino Allegrini were among them, and time proved them right. Amarone has enjoyed great commercial success in recent years because it stands out among the great Italian reds for its unique and unmistakeable sensory characteristics.
Also, the drying technique has evolved and been optimised over time to produce two distinct wines: Recioto and Amarone. The naming regulations have changed too: the DOC guarantee of quality and origin set up in 1968 established that Recioto Classico della Valpolicella and Amarone Classico della Valpolicella were two distinct and equally valid wines.
Today, Amarone is consumed all round the world. Fourteen million bottles are produced annually – more or less the same as the well-known Barolo (see p. 25), though it has a much longer history.
‘That’s happened partly because our commitment to research was aimed at developing the tradition respectfully.’ Marilisa tells me modestly that the Allegrini family were the innovators: in 1998 a plan was drawn up for Terre di Fumane, a modern drying centre to optimise production spaces and pre-empt risks from excessive moisture. ‘Because the humidity that persecutes us right through autumn in some vintages can also cause moulds to form.’
Not exactly ideal.
Amarone is the expression of a unique terrain. It’s also one of the Italian wines with the greatest longevity. ‘In our cellar it’s normal – necessary in fact – to offer a rigorous interpretation and make it pleasurable at the same time. I love the intense Amarone: it’s full-bodied but at the same time beautifully balanced and it never lapses into excess during extraction. The high alcohol content is one of the natural consequences of the drying process, but the complex and powerful structure …’ (Marilisa pauses for a moment) ‘… must never mean the loss of elegance.’
This story with its happy ending would almost have you thinking good old Recioto has been forgotten. It hasn’t. Every instance of serendipity only adds to the range of possibilities; it certainly doesn’t destroy what was there before. The Allegrini family’s Recioto remains a jewel in their crown, and it’s dedicated to Marilisa’s father, Giovanni. It was his job at dinners with the extended family to uncork the wine between the main course and dessert. And yes, he always had his fingers crossed that there’d be a Recioto, his favourite wine. And no hailstones!
4
THE NEAPOLITAN BABA
From France, with love
WITH GENNARO ESPOSITO
I first met Gennaro Esposito fifteen years ago. Eataly was in its early days and I was travelling often to Campania – a region blessed with sun, sea and breezes – looking for the products it offers every season. Sure, I loved Naples and also the hinterland with its dairy delights but my heart longed for the coasts. Amalfi on one side and Sorrento on the other. Those narrow curves worming their way round the sheer rock above the Tyrrhenian Sea were my favourite part of the trip.
Along the Sorrento seaboard between Castellammare di Stabia and Massa Lubrense is where I found the best places for fabulous nosh-ups with my great friend Pasquale Buonocore. His very name is a guarantee of Neapolitanism.
Pasquale and I both like to compensate for our very long working days with memorable dinners. On the trip in question, we’d already tried many dining venues along the Sorrento coast and decided we had two favourites. As luck would have it they both had the same name: La Torre in Massa Lubrense and La Torre del Saracino in Vico Equense. Dancing around the tables in Massa Lubrense was Tonino, known by the English moniker ‘On Fire’ because he’s always on fire, while his wife, Maria, sweltered over the stove. In Vico, the great chef Gennaro Esposito led the team in the kitchen. One restaurant offered top-class but simple dishes; the other, research and innovation, using produce from Sorrento’s sea and mountains, without losing respect for tradition.
What did they have in common to make us fall in love with them? They might have seemed like chalk and cheese, but as soon as you stepped through either door you had the same feeling of wellbeing, welcome, complete harmony with the surrounding area, and authenticity. So whenever we were in the vicinity, we chose either Tonino or Gennaro.
One night, when we’d opted for Gennaro in Vico, we were joined by Bruno Fieno, one of my long-time partners in my businesses Unieuro and Eataly, and Corrado Colli, a great bloke who’d recently been appointed my successor at Unieuro. We sat down and I said to Gennaro, ‘You decide what we’ll have tonight. We trust you.’ He made us such a superb dinner that here I am still talking about it fifteen years later. The aroma, the colours, the flavours of the sea, the taste of citrus and so much more. It was like being drugged. On the way back to Castellammare, Pasquale was at the wheel and we drove those 15 kilometres at an average speed of 10 kilometres per hour in first or second gear, never touching third. I remember we were singing Neapolitan songs at the top of our lungs. I also remember that before we left La Torre del Saracino, Corrado was sinking his teeth into his sixth baba. That’s how crazy he was about it: one bite and he was a goner.
I thought this made a good starting point to write about the baba, in the context of coastal roads, catchy songs and that legendary evening. I ask Gennaro if he can help me tell the true story of the baba.
‘Well Oscar, the origin of the baba is controversial.’
‘Why?’
‘There’s no one story we can trust about who invented our famous beloved traditional dessert.’
‘Didn’t it come from Naples?’
‘Absolutely not!’ Gennaro laughs and explains: ‘There are two legends about the origin of the baba, but both started the same way. It’s the middle of the eighteenth century. Stanislaus, Duke of Lorraine and former King of Poland, was very fond of babka, the Austrian Kugelhopf, a cake made with saffron and candied fruit. He loved it so much that when it turned dry and hard he was sad, so he ordered his cooks to douse it in liqueur. Here the story takes two different directions.
According to the first version, there were possibly various trials and Stanislaus himself might have experimented by dunking the babka in whatever he was drinking, until he found it tasted good with Madeira. Later, when it reached the court of Versailles with the French Revolution, the Madeira was replaced with rum.’
‘Basically, the baba was created by a deposed king with plenty of time to devote to his culinary pleasures. So where’s the serendipity?’ I ask.
‘The serendipity is in the second story,’ Gennaro tells me, ‘and it’s my preferred take because it shows that steeping the baba in liqueur was purely accidental.’ That’s the one I favour too.
It seems that one day the babka got drenched when Stanislaus was fed up with the same old court dessert and hurled it down the lunch table. It happened to hit a bottle of Madeira, which fell over and drenched it.
‘An involuntary act, a mistake if you will. But sometimes errors lead to the sublime.’ And the sublime came to Naples after meandering around Europe. Gennaro gives me a summary of the baba’s long journey. ‘Stanislaus’s daughter, Maria, married King Louis XV of France and took her father’s Polish pastry cook, Nicolas Stohrer, with her to Versailles. He was the one who replaced the Madeira with Jamaican rum, much to the horror of the king’s father-in-law who had invented the dessert. Anyhow, the baba with rum was very popular throughout the reign of the next king as well, the unfortunate Louis XVI. But if you have your staff at Versailles making babas for you while Paris has no bread, sooner or later they’re going to hang you.
‘Long before the pitchforks arrived, the baba had a huge fan at the court of Versailles in Maria Carolina of Austria, sister of Queen Marie Antoinette. She married Ferdinand IV of Bourbon, King of Naples, and so at the end of the eighteenth century, the baba went to Naples with her and came into vogue big-time. You know what we Neapolitans are like when we fall in love, Oscar. By the mid-nineteenth century it was the ultimate Neapolitan dessert: wiped out by the French Revolution and adopted by the Neapolitan bourgeoisie.’
This is a treat that moved from one place to another and found a home a long way from where it was born. For pastry chefs it has become the classic litmus test: a cake everyone tries their hand at but also a mandatory test and a very hard one at that. There are multiple coefficients contributing to the difficulty, Gennaro explains: leavening, technique, elasticity of the dough …
‘Manual skill and sensitivity are indispensable to making a good baba, which is why it commands respect. The rules I learnt as a boy still hold: taking care to soak the baba at the right temperature, leaving it to drain and then delicately squeezing it are crucial. The danger of getting it wrong lurks around the corner. At La Torre del Saracino we have a little secret. We soak it when we’re about to serve it, so that the aroma of the batter and the density of the rum are just right. The bathing syrup is quite hot, and at the end we add custard and wild strawberries to enhance the taste even further.’
My mouth is watering. Gennaro gets the message without me uttering a word. He knows better than I do that talk never filled anyone’s belly.
‘Come on, sit down,’ he says with a grin, and asks with an accent that’s emphatically Neapolitan: ‘What’ll you have to drink with this?’
5
BAROLO
Call me a madman
WITH CARLO PETRINI
It’s dawn on Friday, 22 October 1841.
The Italian Royal Navy frigate Des Geneys is setting sail from Genoa under its captain, Giorgio Mameli.
Destination: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The cargo includes 141 barrels of red wine from the 1840 vintage, plus a few bottles of the ’38. It’s wine produced in the cellars of the royal estate in Pollenzo from Nebbiolo grapes sourced in Roddi, Verduno, Santa Vittoria d’Alba and Serralunga d’Alba. But this is not a sale: the bill of lading reads: Test transport to America. After crossing the Atlantic, tackling the waves and the arduous wintry weather, enduring the heat shock of the equator and then spending two years in Brazil (subjected to the obligatory tastings, of course), this wine would return to Genoa and from there to the estate of King Charles Albert of Sardinia, halfway between Bra and Alba, to the cellar where it was made. An experiment.
So, in the winter of 1843, the Des Geneys returns to the Ligurian port carrying the same barrels it had on board when it left.
The Pollenzo wines returned from America not only undamaged, but much improved … In brief, this is the full secret to achieving a safe way of sending our wines on very long journeys without the slightest detriment to them; moreover the discredit that has debased our wine for centuries compared to many others coming from abroad is now also removed. Piedmont is qualified to distribute it, and it can be transported from one end of the Earth to the other without undergoing any harmful change whatsoever.
So wrote General Paolo Francesco Staglieno, the mastermind behind the mission.
He’s the one who opened the barrels and rejoiced, as you can well imagine. He’s the one who made that Nebbiolo wine and apparently added a bit of Barbera. He’s the one who introduced two innovations he judged essential for it to keep – adding sulphates and clarifying. General Staglieno, backed by the military and political traditions of his noble Genoan family, had completed his military career and then commanded the Forte di Bard in Valle d’Aosta. But his natural inclination veered towards wine. Not only as a connoisseur – he also liked to make it and innovate. He was an oenologist before his time, before wine schools existed and even before the word had any meaning. After the result of the experiment on the Des Geneys, the king didn’t hesitate to trust him with the Pollenza Royal Estate, which he’d purchased and equipped for the specific purpose of conducting research to improve Piedmontese agricultural products. Especially wine.
Staglieno didn’t let him down. There’s a power and determination in his words that’s disarming:
Call me a madman, as many have, say that presuming to change the method of winemaking in Piedmont is like expecting to heal the lame. His Royal Highness has allowed me to practise my winemaking method in his unique estate and you should all have patience and leave me to it, even if I ruin all the wine.
According to the general, the Nebbiolo would be very different from the one normally produced in the areas around Barolo at that time. Up to the mid-nineteenth century, the wine from the Langhe was sweet, cloudy and sparkling. Staglieno wanted it ‘dry, clear, transparent; it should be full-bodied, alcoholic, pleasing to the palate, a delicious and healthy wine retaining a fragrant aroma. At this point we’ll be able to send it even to the most distant countries and it will hold its own with the Bordeaux and the Burgundies.’
He imagined that with the marvellous Nebbiolo grape at his disposal, he’d be able to create a wine with more or less the same characteristics that make Barolo one of the most esteemed wines in the world today. He studied, experimented and revolutionised wine to reach that goal.
General Paolo Francesco Staglieno is probably the person we’re most indebted to for the overwhelming success of Barolo, now known almost everywhere in the world. If not for his idiosyncratic venture in sending those 141 barrels to the other side of the planet and back, Barolo would probably be a different, and perhaps less appealing, wine. In my opinion, he’s not sufficiently remembered for the good he did for all of us in the Langhe and for Italians in general.
*
Juliette Colbert, great-granddaughter of the Colbert who was finance minister to the Sun King, came to Barolo as the bride of Count Falletti, whose lands included most of the vineyards as well as the magnificent Barolo castle with cellar attached. Juliette came from the Loire, a region of France where they knew how to make great wines. After tasting the Nebbiolo made in Barolo, she decided something better could be done with those grapes. She engaged her great friend Louis Odart, one of France’s leading oenologists and wine traders who was already working with Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour. Together they introduced a series of innovations on the land and in the cellar with the goal of improving the wine.
Countess Colbert Falletti’s most sensational move came in 1845: she had arranged for 325 carts (one for each day of the year excluding Lent, because she was deeply religious) pulled by 600 oxen to leave Barolo for Turin. Their destination was the Royal Palace. A barrel of red wine was lashed to each cart, and the aim was to convince the court that the wine produced at Barolo was the ‘wine of kings and the king of wines’.
A cunning marketing ploy? Sure, but an effective one: it’s impossible to count the number of descriptions of this epic journey published in documents and newspapers of the time, both domestic and international.
Brava, Giulia (as they called her in Barolo)! That’s what it takes to bring some things to the world’s attention! Those innovative ideas contributed to the success of a wine now found on the best wine menus around the world, more than 150 years later.
*
Carlo Petrini is not only the founder of the Slow Food movement and the brains behind the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo (yes, the town where Staglieno made his wine), he’s also one of the people who worked hardest and most effectively to restore the reputation of wine from the Langhe region after the 1986 Narzole scandal, when high amounts of methanol added to low-quality wines caused poisoning and the deaths of twenty-three people.
Perhaps now, decades later, there’s a need for change and innovation.
‘That need is clear to everyone,’ Carlo agrees. ‘Not just in food and wine circles but across the entire industry. Earth is asking us to recognise it.’
Carlin, as we call him, father of the Slow Food philosophy, explains that the Earth’s loss of biodiversity and fertility show how urgent the issue is. The current climate crisis forces us to ask ourselves questions and come up with answers. And there’s only one possible answer: ‘The productivist approach is only about maximising profit. We have to abandon that in favour of agriculture that puts the protection of ecosystems and people first.’
It’s easy enough to say, but doing it is a lot more complicated. However, Carlo seems to have carved a path through the forest of improbabilities and the obstacles of our time. A major industry like wine can start the engine of the revolution: specifically, Barolo wine and the people associated with it.
‘Because of the place it had, and still has, in the market and in people’s hearts, the Barolo industry has a huge responsibility. In order to respect the history it carries, and to honour the visionary personalities we’ve talked about, we must ensure Barolo continues to be not only “the wine of kings and the king of wines” but also, and most importantly, a promoter of change.’
‘So you think we’re facing a new “year zero” for the Langhe? You think the choices we make in the next few years can strongly influence the future?’
Carlo nods. This is the real challenge of our time. General Staglieno’s courage and perseverance and Countess Colbert’s creativity and vision should inspire today’s winegrowers and oenologists, who have (and should feel) a moral obligation to free Barolo from synthetic chemistry once and for all. Respect for the vine, respect for the grape and more generally respect for the territory of the Langhe. That’s what we need first and foremost if we’re going to pass it on to future generations intact.
The banning of herbicides and synthetic fertilisers is the utopia of organic farming, and it’s becoming an imperative. Already many winegrowers are trying it.
But as Carlo agrees, it would be great if the Consorzio di Tutela (the consortium responsible for protecting the origin and authenticity of the wines) was the one asking for Barolo to be made only where chemicals are banned. It’s true the world’s first organic designation might look like a marketing strategy, but as Giulia or Juliette (take your pick) teaches us, when, and if, there is substance, communication is essential to ensure it provides an example and driving force for the rest.
