Grape focus: Vermentino in Italy
One of Italy’s wealth of dry whites, Vermentino can really conjure up the Mediterranean, and on your table it’s the perfect foil for fish, seafood and light pasta dishes of all kinds. Richard Baudains tours its Italian homelands and recommends 10 top wine
Fresh, fruity, savoury, versatile and fantastic with fish, says Richard Baudains
Winemakers enjoy working with Vermentino. It is a very complete variety which delivers aroma, fruit flavour, body and structure. It is a wine of immediate appeal, but at the same time it has a slightly elusive complexity that keeps you coming back to it.
Vermentino is a fish wine par excellence. It is a dream partner to oysters and raw shellfish in general, and sails along next to squid and octopus dishes. It connects with the local food of its places of origin, so for instance it is a superb wine to drink with a basil-laden Genovese pasta al pesto, while the more robust wines can even handle the tomatobased fish soups of the coast.
So if you are looking for a highly versatile alternative to the international whites for your next fish supper, Vermentino could be the one. And a footnote: with a little searching, you can even find a sparkling version for the aperitif.
‘ Vermentino is a fish wine par excellence’
Versatile Vermentino
This is a naturally vigorous variety, and if heavily cropped it makes very simple wines, but even in these light and ephemeral styles it maintains an easy-drinking attraction. Depending on the zone of origin and the producers’ harvesting choices, its aromas may be herbaceous, or sweet and floral, or they may recall Mediterranean scrub. The fruit range goes from the more citrussy to ripe and peachy, and in warmer areas to full-on tropical. The common denominator, perceptible to a greater or lesser degree according to the region, is the minerally, saline note which marks out Vermentino from other white varieties.
Alcohol levels can be generous, but they are balanced by acidity which gives the palate a succulent, juicy quality. Drinking the current vintage is fine, but with an extra year in the bottle the best wines have greater focus, and older wines often develop a petrolly, Rieslinglike quality.
Winemakers tend to agree about the basic approach to vinification. Cold skin-contact is widely used to intensify aroma, and ageing on the fine lees is also standard practice. Where opinions differ is on the use of oak. Consultant Lorenzo Landi, who makes Vermentino in the Maremma and in Sardinia, feels that oak clashes with the varietal aromas rather than complementing them, and other leading winemakers such as Luca d’Attoma and Emiliano Falsini hold the same view. There are, however, high-profile Tuscan
Vermentinos that ferment and/or age in oak. The top-of-the-range wines from the ColleMassari group, where Maurizio Castelli consults, have more than a lick of oak about them, and Leonardo Salustri ages part of his exceptional Inès in barriques (he bottles it in magnum, and only in the best vintages).
In Sardinia, Capichera claims to have been the first to introduce barrique ageing to its Vermentino – a late-harvest selection – and other producers of late-harvest wines have also adopted the practice with, it has to be said, successful results.
In Italy today, Vermentino appears in 28 DOCs and innumerable IGTs up and down the country, but production is limited and rather random outside the long-established homes of the variety: Sardinia, Tuscany and Liguria.
Sardinia
In Sardinia, plantings of Vermentino have exploded, long since overtaking the production of red wine on the island and today representing an estimated 70% of the total surface area planted to the variety in Italy. At the top of the quality pyramid is Vermentino di Gallura, Italy’s only DOCG for the variety, which extends for 1,300ha in the far northeast corner of the island. The critical mass, on the other hand, is constituted by the region-wide DOC Vermentino di Sardegna, which, thanks also to generous permitted