Italian wines have always made a great impression because of their minerality. But after all, this Country immersed in the seas by impetuous volcanic activity, has many microenvironments: the soil, climate and the men characterising hundreds of grape-types creating just as many wines, giving distinctive mineral qualities to each. But the ‘saltiness’ of Frascati Wines is unique. When it is combined with that wonderful freshness and hints of fruit and flowers, aftertastes of dried figs and nuts, well… this salt can be really irresistible. The roots of the vines delve deep into the lapilli and basalt to capture it then the Tuscan microclimate welds it there. It’s not like a sea salt, but rather light. A sensation that heeds the exclamation ‘this is a Frascati’! Perfumes and tastes that come from deep down to make us feel at home.
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Our first tomatoes are ready, Summer is just around the corner! Make sure you’ve got yesterday’s loaf though. Slightly crumbled, tomatoes rubbed hard onto the bread to make it as wet as possible, then chopped tomatoes and whatever else you want to pile on! Onion, black olives, I love capers myself, a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, salt, pepper, there you have it: La Panzanella, fit for a King! Even better after it’s been standing a bit, when it has soaked in all the flavours. Mind though, it’s not to be eaten in small doses, your hands and your chin need to get a bit oily, and shine, like lovers’ eyes, as you dig in. A nice glass of cold Frascati, or two even better, to clean your palate. Now who’s better off than us! I could just about reach the height of the dark wooden table with my eyes. I waited for my mum to make a crater in the mound of white flour. It was really high and I had to hold my breath to avoid creating a Central-America type tornado. Then she broke the eggs inside the mountain, a pinch of salt, a drop of water if needed, and a duck egg to make it more yellow and wholesome. I watched her hands create an eruption, and a rapid succession of dam-bursts and repairs, to make sure the amalgam was perfect, chasing after lava flows that tried insistently to reach my nose. In this case woman overcame nature, the final ball was proof of her victory, the volcano defeated, the fusion a success. My mum had some wrists on her! She continued to knead like a blacksmith would beat on his anvil. Then on the board, her rolling-pin would calibrate the thickness of the dough, she’d create a yellow sun, she’d dust it with flour, then leave it to dry a little. Not an easy task, a labour of precision and strength. In the meanwhile the kitchen was invaded with the perfume of pasta sauce. She’d roll the dough like you’d fold a bed-sheet, then as her fingers dictated the distance, she’d neatly cut the pasta ribbons. I’d look at her proudly as she gently unfolded each little roll and without even bothering about the sharp knife, I’d reach out and steal one of the ribbons to taste, just as it was, raw. A prelude to a dish that I absolutely loved. I’d take a glass of wine to dad in the vineyards, that was his aperitif. Then after moment, that strong voice would echo as usual , “ Is it ready?!!”. That’s when my Sunday commenced. The volcano is still alive. But I miss that voice. Nowadays our life has become longer, sometimes even beyond the capacity of our bones to sustain it, but Methuselahs existed and still do. Beings capable of challenging the centuries, of remembering the two great Wars, one fought with cold weapons and the other with the Atomic bomb. The 20th Century gave us an awful temporal acceleration, launching us into this phenomenon. Lately I’m hanging out with an octogenarian, still in quite good shape and an exceptional mental dexterity. Like all of these particular scientific cases he boasts of his mischief, flaunts an almost pathetic virility and the heterosexuality expected of his generation. But I adore him, he seems such a modern fossil! Together we make fun of the new fads and lifestyles, from vegans to the most fierce of teetotallers. It’s him, already past it, that comments “what point in life have these 80 or 90 year olds got!?”. He smokes Toscani cigars, drinks Italian wines, and rum with pestiferous toasted cocoa beans, I like to flatter him, listening to him a bit, pitying him and humouring him a bit. But you should listen to how he talks about women! It seems as if he really knew his stuff, like Magellano would have told of Oceans. When I tell him this, he turns round and answers back insolently “my women, I had to undress them myself”. He says it as if he really had relished in that discovery, reliving it on each different occasion. Maybe woman had loved him… Mankind, sad survivor of Worldwide economical and social wars, where every single difference and divergence of a thousand years before were still intact - of course now with new Countries in the forefront - had reached 3015. With highly advanced technologies, albeit reserved to a minority Elite, almost identifiable as Castes, heirs of the old Lobbies. Business dinners, for the ostentation of power, were frequent and fully participated and for which invitations were highly sort after. Tele transportation meant that it was easy to receive food, mainly synthetic or of molecular cuisine, with ingredients that had become exclusive in many cases. A compote of Porchetta of Ariccia DOP was all the rage in Beijing, but the bystanders really couldn’t get their heads round some hosts beaming down bottles of wine onto the tables. Wretched winemakers, the most conservative still fermenting in wood or outdated steel! What absolute astonishment if a Frascati Superiore appeared on the table! It seems that they still trampled on grapes with rare, almost extinct, women’s feet!! We’ve started. The first copper and sulphur treatments are wetting our vines. Plant by plant, leaf after leaf, as if enveloped in a London fog. We have been spore-stalkers for thousands of years. Not that we want to totally wipe them out, but reduce them as much as possible, to save leaves and bunches from the deadly fungus. Against which no serendipity or magic right on Earth can have effect. Today we have modern machinery, pressurised cabins, to use the utmost precaution not to pollute our fruit, soil or our climate: they are our wealth and collateral. But neither do we want, as farmers, to suffer damage of any sort. I can clearly recall my grandparents, that died at almost a century old - but only by chance- come out from the vines with a pump of Bordeaux mixture on their shoulders, copper and lime, as blue as the loveliest sea, blue like the clearest of skies, blue like the bluest cloak of Prince Charming. Then just rinse off with water from the well, drink a glass of wine, praying that it wouldn’t rain too soon. Only from the most healthy of grapes can you make excellent wines that, each of them, in a year or in a hundred years, will be newborn, adolescent, adults and great veterans, but unavoidably will die, just like the most fortunate of us all. No wine maker will produce wines with the intention of trying to make them last a hundred years, it’ll be the territory, the vintage, the method of vinification, the conservation of the bottles….to decide. I have met great old guys and run-of-the-mill youngsters and viceversa, but inevitably the mothers, that know our weaknesses, that encourage us, that scold us, love and when they are especially happy, cry, like a vine shoot cut in February. I used to hide in my mum’s, my aunts’ and their friends’ skirts. I’d hide there from my cousins whilst playing hide-and-seek. I don’t care about Oedipus, I’ve already sorted that out and I adore my mother, but I will always associate the vineyard holidays with those moments, innocent or not. “Leave your Grandfather alone”, baked pasta, roast lamb and puntarelle…he doesn’t even care for these things nowadays: Fava! fava! fava beans!, dipped in salt or eaten with pecorino cheese, dripping like the women he boasts to have abandoned. Nowadays he’ll only eat those. I’m not exaggerating either! They are real words, carved into our memories, words that me and my brothers identify each other with. Grandma, annoyed and proud of the old, alluring, geezer. A great group of relatives, ready to throw into each other’s faces their so called qualities, yet a real, true and solid affection. In this, the fava bean holds an important role. Sweet and insatiable, an example of how people have a common, simple identity, yet still it is an irreplaceable one. Our wines, that flowed and went down throats to compensate for joys and pains. The salt of a Frascati Superiore and a fine sea-salt covering that water-green delight (which I challenge any painter to match on his palette!) that was the Roman Fava bean. Then the sweet breeze, May-day with its Red Flag, and us, on our way home. Me hidden under mum’s skirt, that little man who was his father’s great expectation. "Go on! Forza! where are you all! Get a move on!" Now we have another year to wait, but Ferragosto will soon arrive, with the water melon cooling in the well, our summer treat. In Italy it’s called bugiardino (meaning literally, the little liar), that apparently minuscule piece of paper, that once unfolded warns us of the contents, dosage, therapeutic usage and side effects of medicines. For the moment, only for the moment, with wines we get by with labels that have to respect the law and common sense, to guide us to use it sensibly. But, really, he who has been to a wine-tasting course or those that find themselves having to taste wine in a professional manner, should know that there are times of the day that are better than others for our senses to enable us to understand this magic liquid to the full. The palate, the nose the senses have to also be absolutely free of interference. For example that coffee had just a moment before, that cigarette not to mention practically all foods of any nature or substance. Literally hard iron rules and contraindications so as not to jeopardise this act of tasting, this bud tickling, of what remains an exercise of judgment almost like in a polling station when one goes to vote in the elections. But, seeing that Bacco, Tabacco e Venere, apart from leaving us in cinders, are absolutely our own personal choices in life that encounter one and another in every moment with resounding results, in my opinion, here I am at the end of each tasting, since as long as I can remember: I eat, I drink yet more wine and if I can, I’ll light up, and it goes down even more a treat, if I can revel in the company of one or more lovely lady. After all, prohibition is the worst possibile incentive of good behaviour. But I’ll read it, and you too dear friends, the ‘bugiardino’ with great attention as well as the labels on wine..except for the ones I make, those I trust. Jack-of-all-trades and forager that I am, I was roaming the hills looking for wild asparagus to gather, exquisite with pasta, with just a few anchovies and tomato, wandering the odd copse, ditch and cultivated field. With my trained eye, from years of contadinitudine, I could pick out from hundreds of yards away in the March sun, all sorts of different crops: tic beans, wheat, barley, the vineyards and the olive groves, wild fields or those being prepared for corn or sunflowers. Coming out from behind a mound, clutching my bunch of wild asparagus victoriously, I saw this particular score of acres, already ploughed and cleared of boulders, but eroded by the torrential rain and the slope. A vineyard, I realised, only a vineyard would be right on here. The ditches carved in the ground by the near monsoon-like rains where almost like the tears in a Burri canvas. Whilst all around nature was sprouting and budding. I couldn’t help thinking about the pain that farmer must have felt: this year he wouldn’t be able to plant his vineyard. I bet he never lost hope right to the last minute. A whole year in the vineyards is one really long year. Making my way down to the valley, towards the sea, I thought, maybe he’s stubborn. Maybe he’ll manage to prepare that perfumed bed in time. In that instant I could see beyond the clear sky, there was a certain restlessness brewing and, from the north I could hear a clear rumble of thunder. Right now, in these days of the Easter festivities, I was reminded of the odour of eggs that during this period you could once smell around the lanes of Frascati and Marino, where the doors of many cellars were flung open. Between March and April thousands of eggs were cracked open, often coming from hens kept in the campagna in and around the vineyards. This was nothing to do with the rebirth rite connected to Easter. And nor were they chocolate eggs with surprises inside. The whites were separated (I can remember so well sticking my fingers in the soft yellow spheres!) so that the ‘chiarate’ could be prepared: a Botte barrel of a thousand litres would need 30 beaten whites, that descending through the wine would clarify from any impurities suspended. Dragging them to sediment on the bottom, leaving just the limpid and perfumed wine behind. The yolks became our biscuits, ciambelloni cakes, tozzetti (or the hard chewy mostaccioli if honey was added), but never, ever, cantucci! An ancient oenological technique that of the chiarata, centuries-old, descending through the wonderful world of farmers that always had a watchful eye on health and knew how to live well with little. Disastrous to lose such people. |
Easyfrascatia group of people, that have lived and experienced the wonderful atmosphere of Frascati for many years, and now wish to share it with you. Archives
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