How exciting it is for a wine like this to be in British Columbia. Cos is not only an icon of the ‘natural wine’ movement, but it is an exceptional producer that is making some of the most exciting wines in Sicily.
Natural Wine or Just a Great Producer?
Natural wine has consistently been a galvanizing force for debate about the nature and purpose of wine. Commercial viability, faults, ideology, and ethics all come out to play when a natural wine hits the glass.
Often those in this debate can lose sight of a simple reality for all wine: it is producer more than philosophy or technique that makes great wine. Great grapes and terroir are also necessary, but it is the endless minute decisions made in the vineyard and the cellar that ultimately make a wine what it is. This means that in natural wine, just as with all wine, there will be those producers that make wines far and above what most others are doing. For me, Cos is one of those producers.
COS – So Hot Right Now
Founded in 1980 by three partners – Giambattista Cilia, Cirino Strano and Giusto Occhipinti, whose daughter has started her own much adored eponymous winery – COS set out to challenge what had become ‘conventional’ winemaking in Sicily’s only DO “Cerasuolo Di Vittoria” first by farming completely biodynamically, and second by steadily increasing the use of clay amphora for fermentation of their wines. The amphora fermented wines bear the name “Pithos”.
COS is located on the southeastern tip of Sicily and as such the climate is both hot and dry. Despite this, the wines bear a lightness and elegance that belies their origins in one of the hottest climates in Italy.
Perfect Italian Wine
Alas while we do not yet have access to the amphora fermented wines in the province, this wine, fermented completely in neutral concrete, is still an excellent introduction to the COS style and philosophy. Made from 18 year old Frappato and Nero D’Avola vines grown on limestone-silicaceous and clay soils, this wine is both enticingly aromatic and very fresh and juicy on the palate. Pretty red fruits and flowers flow easily from the glass, and it is this effortlessness that is the wine’s most striking quality.
This is also a wine with a substantial medium body that will balance kindly with a wide variety of food from cured meats to lightly spicy pastas and grilled meats. It also goes great with air, as my friend Sean is fond of saying. This is also the kind of wine I would lovingly buy by the case – so don’t go running out and snapping up the small allocation this province has!
Excellent and Highly Recommended Value
$35 at BCLDB
In this last post of my Spotlight on Southern Italy series I will be looking at both a rare white grape and a very tiny region. The wine region, Molise, is nestled between Abruzzo and Puglia on the east coast of Italy, and it is far enough north to almost be out of what many would consider to be Southern Italy. Molise is a mountainous and heavily wooded region and there are many wines being made in the mountains, although none currently are being imported into the North American market. In fact, most wines made here aren’t sold commercially at all, but made for and drunk by locals. This region is quite poor and so in order for the wines to start improving and being bottled, there will need to be some sort of investment from elsewhere. This producer is an exception to that general rule, and is actually making some pretty good stuff.
Di Majo Norante has its own estate vineyards near the ocean and the town of Campomarino. Even though it is situated in Molise, it makes its wines in a more Campanian style, and so they have Southern Italy at their heart. Di Majo Norante has been bottling wines since 1968 and makes several reds and whites, including some interesting sounding blends.
I have one more post to go in the Southern Italy series, but I wanted to write up this little treat I have been sipping on for a few hours now. I feel compelled to do so because this is not only a great value wine, but it represents the difference between thought, care, and passion on one side, and mass market, simplification, and dumbing down on the other.
La Peira is a relatively new producer in the Languedoc region of France, which is situated south west of the Rhone on the Mediterranean coast. La Peira was started in 2004 by three individuals who believed that the undiscovered Terrasses du Larzac region in the hills of the Coteaux du Languedoc held great potential for grape growing, despite having no history of ‘greatness’ to support that theory. The first wines were bottled as recently as 2008 and were first tasted by U.S. “press” by none other than Gary Veynerchuck of all people – who by the way, loved them. Based on this bottle, I have to completely agree with him here.
This is the antithesis to the Montes wine I wrote up below. Gruner Veltliner is Austria’s most famous grape and definitely one of its greatest. It is also indigenous to Austria and you won’t find Gruners made anywhere else in the world. Gruner produces wines with great acidity, and stark personality. These wines can provide a huge range of experiences, from nutty and oaky to clean, lean, and sharp. Gobelsburg is located in Lower Austria in the region of Kamptal, and this wine is as dry as you would expect of a classic Austrian white. It is also made with purchased fruit, but that doesn’t seem to matter in the hands of wine maker Michi Moosbrugger.
British Columbia has recently begun to improve its selection of craft beers, which is nice to see. However, most of them are merely solid but not overly exciting examples of a particular style. Perhaps I was spoiled by spending 5 months embroiled in California’s thriving micro-brew culture, but my exposure to fine beers in the U.S. changed my perception of what is truly great.
This is the first of the 2007′s, a lauded vintage in the southern Rhone, that I’ve dipped my nose into. And a happy nose it was. This wine exceeds what is generally probable to discover in Vancouver at its price point, and proves why seeking out the small guy can pay big dividends.
