Feb

Wine Book Club #1: Vino Italiano

Sean Sellers in General Vino Italiano, Wine Book Club

For the inaugural session the Wine Book Club, David McDuff McDuff’s Food & Wine Trail selected Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy by Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch, first published by Clarkson N. Potter in the United States in 2002 and reprinted in paperback by Random House three years later.

Vino Italiano

At 518 pages (includes 130 pages of appendices) plus acknowledgements and index, no one could describe this book as anything other than comprehensive. Its authors are well-regarded experts on the subject of Italian wines and its contributors (Mario Batali and Lydia Bastianich) are renowned Italian food restaurateurs. In 19 well-researched chapters, the authors and their contributors exhaustively detail the grapes, wines, foods, and flavours of each of Italy’s 20 distinctive regions from the most famous (Tuscany, Veneto, Abruzzo) to the most obscure (Aosta Valley, Trentino-Alto Adige, Friuli Venezia-Giulia) — the operative word being exhaustively. And, therein, lays the book’s greatest strength and most glaring weakness. Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy is as exhaustively written as it is exhausting to read.

Each chapter begins with a short anecdote that typifies the writers’ experience of the region followed by a detailed description its climate and location. Next, the chapter divides into sections dedicated to the sparkling, white, red, and dessert wines made, before providing a quick summary of the region’s grapes, best wines and vintages, and an intriguing local recipe from one of the contributors. With so many characters, grapes, blends, wines, winemakers, and classifications (VdT, IGT, DOC, DOCG), it can get a little confusing — if read as a book, that is.

If thumbed as an Italian wine reference, the comprehensiveness of the book proves an amazing &dmash; perhaps invaluable — resource. It certainly helped InterWined.com to discover such hidden gems as the nutmeg-scented 2005 Maculan Dindarello served with InterWined’s Own Creamy Lancashire Omelette with Spinach & Proscuitto and the rhubarb-smelling 2006 Fattoria Nicodemi Trebbiano d’Abruzzo (a pedigree among ponies) from the UK’s Cadman Fine Wines.

Originally, InterWined intended to review this book as part of its popular ‘Blow the Bank’ feature and prepare one of its recipes. For the most part, unfortunately, that proved easier imagined than executed. While each recipe provides an excellent example of regional cuisine and an ideal pairing partner to a least one wine from the given chapter’s region, its reliance upon local ingredients proves difficult, if not impossible, to replicate without the assistance of a food importer and only supermarket shelves on which to rely. In fact, I’d argue that many of these recipes prove more about Mario Batali and Lydia Bastianich’s knowledge of Italian regional cuisine than they do workable recipes for their readers to follow. But then, Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy doesn’t really read as though it were intended to be used as cookbook. Like the anecdotes that begin each chapter, the recipes provide flavour, not sustenance.

As the journalist Frank J. Prial wrote in his April 2002 review of the book for the New York Times, “Nobody reads wine books. People read parts of wine books, and they look things up in wine books, and they display wine books prominently on their bookshelves. But cover-to-cover absorption? Slam it shut and exclaim, ”Wow, what a great read”? Forget it”. Very few wine books can ever escape such a fate — Eric Arnold’s 2008 Andre Simon Award nominated First Big Crush perhaps — but not Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy. It has 000 (reserved for reference material in the Dewey Decimal System) written all over it.

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