The ancient Italian red grape, aglianico.
The wine for a hotter future might come from an ancient grape grown in Italy’s south, writes MAX ALLEN.
It was almost 20 years ago now, but I can still clearly remember the first time I tasted wine made from the ancient Italian red grape, aglianico. It was produced by the Mastroberardino family from grapes grown in the hilly Taurasi region of Campania, near Naples. The wine had all the depth and complexity of the best – and far more famous – Chiantis and Barolos from further north. This was a revelation for me. Here was a grape that Australian winemakers should be growing: if it makes wine this good in Italy’s hot south, imagine what it could do in our sun-baked and dry vineyards Down Under.
I wasn’t the only one thinking along these lines. Around the same time, the forward-thinking Chalmers family of grape growers near Mildura imported lots of later-ripening, heat-tolerant, climate-appropriate southern Mediterranean grapes not previously grown here – aglianico among them – and started propagating the vines and selling them to other growers.
By the mid-to-late 2000s the first Australian wines from these vines began to appear. I remember being very excited by the savoury tannins in the Chalmers’ own first 2004 vintage aglianico, and overjoyed when the 2008 Calabria Private Bin aglianico from Griffith, in central NSW, picked up the trophy for best red at the 2010 Australian Alternative Varieties Wine Show: the late-ripening grape from Campania clearly loved being grown in one of the country’s hottest wine regions.
Since then a few other adventurous Australian winemakers have jumped on the bandwagon – people such as Craig Isbel, who makes wines in the Barossa Valley under the Izway label with mate Brian Conway.
Isbel says he became interested in aglianico as a response to climate change: “With warmer summers and marginal harvest conditions increasing, it’s essential that winemakers focus on the future,” he says. “In 2009, we were invited by one of our key growers to establish a new vineyard. The one caveat was that the variety should ripen at a different time to shiraz, as there was a lot of pressure on the grower at harvest (lots of different grapes all ripening at once is one of the results of hotter summers). After drinking some wonderful examples from Italy, we settled on planting aglianico.”
The variety has, he says, exceeded his expectations: it ripens later and gives wines with lower alcohol and higher natural acid. He currently produces two wines from the grape: a rich and tannic expression from 2017 called Angelo, destined for a long life in the cellar (much like the top Taurasi reds from Mastroberardino), as well as a juicy, fresh young red from 2018 called Mates.
“A small amount of SO2 at bottling is the only addition that’s been made to the Mates,” says Isbel. “It’s wild-fermented, unfined and unfiltered. And I think the minimal winemaking displays how well this variety works in our region.”
The Chalmers family also produce a couple of different wines from aglianico grown at their vineyard
If aglianico makes wine this good in Italy’s hot south, imagine what it could do in our sun-baked and dry vineyards.
in Heathcote, central Victoria, established in the late 2000s. As well as a savoury, cellarworthy reserve red, they also use the grape to make a very pale, dry, super-refreshing rosé – labelled rosato, of course, as a nod to the grape’s Italian origins.
When I speak to Kim Chalmers in early March she’s in the middle of harvest, and gives me a stark illustration of just how different aglianico is.
“Most of the other red varieties in Heathcote
– the shiraz, the cabernet – have already been picked,” she says. “We’re picking the aglianico for rosé today. Even in our (much warmer) Mildura vineyard, where we had two big heatwaves over summer, we have only just picked the aglianico grapes for red wine.”
Chalmers admits that aglianico is not always the easiest wine to sell, thanks to its bold, grippy tannins. Her rosato does very well because of the popularity of the pale, dry style, but her savoury reserve red is slower to move. And she’s heard of at least one grower who has pulled their aglianico vines out because of lack of commercial interest. But she is determined to persist.
“As this hot vintage has shown, aglianico is the number one red climate-change variety,” she says.
“It produces wines with freshness and ageability.”
The Chalmers also sell fruit to other makers who are excited about the grape and can see its potential. Ray Nadeson at Lethbridge in Geelong, for example, ferments and ages his aglianico in amphora for 11 months to produce a wine quite different in style to any mentioned above: more undergrowthy, driedherb characters and fine, long, powdery tannins.
They’re all fabulous expressions of aglianico that would make the Mastroberardino ancestors proud.