Carpe Diem at Stir, Boston's South End

365 Days

Carpe Diem at Stir, Boston's South End

Posted 03/25/2008 at 08:20 AM by Cathy

Tonight at Stir, Barbara Lynch’s demonstration kitchen in the South End, a renaissance man named Check Draghi led ten very privileged guests through his version of a mini rare and unusual wine list. It was an exercise in carpe diem: enjoy these wines because you’ll probably never drink them again. All the wines were Italian in origin (like Draghi himself), all were completely unknown to me before tonight, and all had histories that are deeply obscure and convoluted.

The wines Draghi chose, and their makers, do not believe in the principle that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Take the 2005 Movia Ribolla Gialla. Movia itself, the producer, is in Slovenia but the grapes are grown across the border in Italy. It was the only winery in Slovenia that was granted permission to operate under Communist rule. They farm biodynamically, a practice that gives the wine a golden pear and golden apple sheen, along with a characteristic nuttiness. Irrigation, though, is anathema to biodynamic farming which means the vines need to work very hard just to reach water, just to survive. It’s a tough love approach: the harder you treat the vines, the idea goes, the better the wines will be.

I’m not sure it worked in this particular case. To me the wine tilted too far to the sweet end of the scale. Without much acidity it was structureless, a bit too loose, a bit too flabby. Unsatisfying.

The next wine though, a 2005 Volpe Pasini Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso, more than made up for it. It smelled of red cherries with some white pepper on top, an essence that complemented incredibly well the cinnamon spice of the gòlas (or goulash) of veal breast that Draghi and chef Caitlin Champagne had concocted. There should be a scratch-and-sniff option for this Refosco-gòlas combination next to every definition of extraordinary food-wine pairings.

Draghi moved on to a 2003 Bressan Schioppettino (Ribolla Nera) for the next course, and I moved on to what is, perhaps, my new favorite wine, period. Draghi introduced the wine by saying it could be moodier in the glass than the Refosco, but moodiness is something I can understand. The flavors of the wine vary according to what yeast has been used in the vintage; rather than use a commercially-available yeast, the producers actually go into the fields and choose leaves that still have yeast particles on them, and use those to ferment the wine. That, to me, is above-ground terroir to the extreme.

This Schioppettino, against a white background, exhibited a bricking effect where the outer rim of the glass is colored orange-ish (or brick tone), an indication of age and, according to Draghi, quality. On the nose I got molasses and a certain smokiness, with brown sugar that lingered on the finish. This was a wine with personality, style, and an underlying substance. The closest parallel I could imagine was to Marta Hallard, author Josephine Tey’s supporting character in her Alan Grant mystery series: Marta, like this wine, may not know The Answer but her tact and resourcefulness set you on exactly the right path.

Draghi unveiled the last wine of the evening with a flourish. Dina and Paolo Rapuzzi founded the Ronchi di Cialla estate in 1970. They single-handedly, Draghi said, brought the Schioppettino grape back from extinction. The wine Draghi poured tonight, a 1992 Ronchi di Cialla Verduzzo di Cialla, will literally never be made again. Sixty percent of the wine was lost to evaporation during its six-year preparation. It was aged in Slovenian oak, which imparts chestnut rather than vanilla flavors. Draghi said the wine would sell on the retail market for $800 or more, but he came by the last two available cases by accident and is not parting with them anytime soon.

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About the Author

Cathy Huyghe

Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.

Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.