OFFBEAT REDS
It’s a no-brainer that the combination of best value and highest quality in wine now comes from offbeat winemaking regions and their odd grapes. Here’s a too-short look at that combo in red wine, from the grape’s point of view.
Tannat
Tannat is the new malbec. You’re going to see more and more terrific tannat coming from South America—some from Argentina, most from Uruguay. This grape, the mainstay of the deeply colored, stout Madiran wine of southwestern France, emigrated to Uruguay in the late 1800s in the satchels of Basque winemakers.
Wine from tannat is as dark as a poodle’s nose and combines a malbec-like texture with an earthiness and rusticity in both aroma and taste. It may hint at dark chocolate and blackberry. In Madiran, tannat is known for its impenetrable tannin. Well-made tannat from Uruguay, however, substantially tones that down. The wine merely sweeps the palate clean.
Bonarda
Bonarda has more nicknames than the headliners in WWE, the result of its uncertain origins. (Croatians to Italians to Argentines and more claim it, under various monikers.) Suffice it to say that today, Argentina is turning out the tastiest renditions, under its chosen name of bonarda.
For the same reasons that malbec succeeds in Argentina—a long growing season, unfettered sunlight, cool nights—so does bonarda. In fact, bonarda is giving malbec a run for its money; the Argentines themselves prefer it to malbec. That means that someday we may well also because our noses tend to lead our purses sniffing out under-the-radar reds from South America.
Argentine bonarda reminds me of syrah from the Northern Rhone with a pipe in its mouth. Enormous color concentration sports aromas and tastes of long-cooked dark fruit jam laced with hints of bacon, smoke, licorice, spice and tobacco. It’s a mouthful of well-knit tannin, too, in its better versions (cheap bonarda is like redwood juice). Keep an eye out for Argentine bonarda; like tannat from Uruguay, there will be upcoming successive waves of it.
Touriga Nacional
One of the nicer happenings in recent years is to find “dry” versions of the grapes that make up Portuguese port (a sweet wine, to be sure). Chief of the blending grapes for port is touriga nacional, truly the wine grape of which the nation is proudest.
Because touriga nacional is so grippingly tannic, it’s often blended (as it almost always is in port) with its sister grapes touriga franca, tinta roriz and a possible several others. Nonetheless touriga nacional calls a lot of shots in a blend: the tannin, of course, but also its pronounced perfumes of new leather and chocolate-cherry bonbon.
One fine fillip in the many current offerings of the stout, dry reds from Portugal’s Douro is that they’re often made from vines with some age. Touriga nacional, you see, has been making sweet port for many decades. The same grapes go into the drier wines.
Nero d’Avola
If Sicily were a freestanding nation (which on occasion it seems to believe it is), it would rank seventh in worldwide wine production at around 300 million gallons a year.
Among Sicily’s reds, the indigenous grape nero d’Avola continues to impress. Its dark fruit flavors (especially dark cherries), tangy acidity and spicy, mildly tannic finish all conspire to make it delicious with many foods. Sicilians drink it with fuller-fleshed grilled fish such as tuna.
More, sir!
Some more worthy, off-the-radar red grapes to search for (with best place they’re made into wine): zweigelt and blaufrankisch (Austria); Montepulciano d’Abruzzo (Italy); carménère (Chile); mencia (Bierzo, Spain); monastrell (Jumilla, Spain).