A Rosato Between Friends

Dining with friends is an all-too-rare pleasure in Los Angeles.  Some will say, "What's he talking about? All we do is get together with friends!"  For Denise and I, we find that it's difficult to arrange time with our friends, because of our schedules and theirs.  One couple, dear friends, used to live less than a half-mile away and we saw them once a year.

One guy we rely on a lot for good company is our pal Guido, whom everyone except us calls S.J.  We often meet, though not often enough for me, at a restaurant up in the hills above Bel-Air.  It's way up there, just off Mulholland, so it's a nice ride up the canyon road and always a nice lunch.  As you might imagine, I had the rosé.

Actually, it was the Tenuta La Badiola Acquagiusta Tuscan Rosato.  It's made in the IGT of Maremma, on Italy's western coast, on the Tyrrhenian Sea.  The area includes parts of south-western Tuscany and northern Lazio.

The wine is made from 100% Alicante grapes from the Levante Vineyard on the La Badiola estate. Rosato is a great change of pace rosé, assuming you need a change of pace from Provence or California.  Italian pinks are often made from interesting indigenous grapes, and they usually offer a slightly different flavor profile.

A Forbes article by Susan H. Gordon gets lengthy while trying to figure out the Alicante grape's beginnings.  Summing it, there's a study that indicates the grape came to Italy from the people of Spain's Aragon region, and it's a biotype of Garnacha.  What little planting of the grape that remains in Italy is located mainly in Tuscany and Sicily.

This rosé's color is that dingy pink usually called onion skin.  I had it at the restaurant that serves my favorite salad in Los Angeles, the calamari and scungilli at Fabrocini's Beverly Glen.   Aromas were typified by earthy strawberry and cherry, which is where the palate lived, too.  There was a slightly dark angle which I'll call pomegranate since a better descriptor doesn't come to mind right now.  A nice acidity was useful, but I wouldn't recommend this wine for anything tougher to handle than cephalopods or mollusks.


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Still Blazing Hot In L.A.: Italian Rosato Helps Out

A warm September Saturday evening, al fresco at Fabrocini’s Beverly Glen, one last rosé before the memory of summer slips away.  Aaah.

Wait a minute, who am I kidding?  It’s early September in Los Angeles.  The really hot weather hasn’t even gotten here yet.  October’s Santa Ana winds and brushfire hell still awaits.  Screw it.  I’ll have the rosé anyway.

Acquagiusta Rosato 2012 is made completely from Alicante grapes, harvested in the Levante Vineyard on the La Badiola estate right in the center of the Acquagiusta Farm in Maremma.  Alicante is also known as Garnacha Tintorea in Spain.  The farm is a 19th-century land management project initiated by the Grand Duke of Tuscany.  With a title like that, one might be expected to do a lot, but could also probably get away with doing very little.  I like to think this particular Grand Duke was a beehive of grand activity.  He was at least smart enough to name the farm after the underground spring located beneath his property.

The grapes of Levante Vineyard are described on the website as vigorous, rigorous and salubrious - descriptive in the peculiar way only a digitally translated text can be.  Alicante grapes are red through and through - not just in the skins - and this rosé is the result of an attempt to make a white wine with them.  They are gently and quickly pressed to minimize color extraction.

The effort to minimize the color leaves the wine a pale salmon tint.  The color may be minimized, but the smells are not.  Big strawberry and melon fruit aromas come forward, along with some of the green stems on which they grew.  There is a beautiful and refreshing acidity which joins the great fruit flavor - light and a bit tart, with a touch of watermelon candy.  The wine feels quite full in the mouth, owing to the vigorous, rigorous, salubrious nature of the Alicante grape.

It goes well with my penne and mushroom marinara.  So well, I’ll keep it mind for that late summer L.A. weather yet to come.


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