If we’re being honest, there’s plenty of corruption and crime in Italy, but has anyone taken a peek at our government lately? And nobody’s constantly talking about Senators eating beef while pocketing money from special interest… okay, bad example.
But it just goes to show: there’s more to Italy than what you see in the movies. Consider this Giornata Italian-Inspired Sampler your tour of the finer things the boot-shaped nation has to offer.
The 2010 il Campo Red, Central Coast offers flavors of black cherry, orange peel and cigar spice. The 2011 Vermentino, Paso Robles? Full of peach and starfruit and honeydew. And the 2010 Gemellaia, Central Coast brings it home with tastes of plum and cherry, toffee and espresso with a lingering vanilla towards the end. It’s a world of flavor exploding out of grapes cloned from the original Italian vines. And nobody got knifed in an alley or blew up a car or shouted out “Ay oh! Oh ay!”
It doesn’t matter if you’re after the village-like table style of the Il Campo, the aristocratic white of the Vermentino, or the balanced “super-Tuscan” joy of the Gemellaia, you’ll be unlocking a side of Italy they never seem to show on television.
For example, did you know that Julius Caesar wasn’t an orange guy from New Jersey? See? You’re learning things already!
From Italy to California by way of Provence, this vibrant and juicy Vermentino tells a great story of a unique grape variety traveling the world to fill your glass. Though known best for wines produced in Tuscany and the island of Sardinia, Vermentino has traveled quite a bit north and found itself rather well suited to the climate in the south of France.
The journey in creating Giornata started with a dream to create wines from Italian grapes grown in California employing the sensibility and philosophy of Italian winemaking. We work with the same grape vines (clonal material) as the best producers in Italy. The Central Coast of California possesses many of the attributes of the top wine growing regions of Italy. Our winemaking style leans more Italian than Californian in that we favor wines with balance and subtlety rather than intensity and extraction. We pick our grapes at lower sugar levels and handle our must gently in the cellar, thus resulting in wines that belong on the Italian dinner table possessing both ample acidity and tannin. Traveling to Italy on a regular basis, we continue to receive feedback on our efforts while researching Italian winemaking and viticultural methods.
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