Jason Drank

You might think that after Italy’s biggest wine fair — some 90,000 visitors, most of whom were Italian — I’d be back with loads of boring bottle shots for my roundup of interesting libations.

The truth is that after a day of walking the Vinitaly fair, tasting wines and writing endless notes (five days consumed one whole Leuchtturm notebook and a dozen ink cartridges) what you really want is a beer, or a cocktail, or at the very least a nap.

As some of you may know, the rule for this Jason Drank segment is that I drank it, not tasted it. Sometimes I drank it thoughtfully and ponderously over days or weeks, or even multiple bottles over years, and sometimes hastily and joyously in mere minutes. Either way, these are wines that actually went down during my time at Vinitaly, even though I tasted (and spat out) much grander stuff over the course of the fair. (Sassicaia 1996, I’m looking at you.)

The Tenuta Calimaia was an accidental drink in the middle of the fair. I was at the Frescobaldi stand talking to Lamberto Frescobaldi about Chianti Classico’s UGAs and tasting (and spitting) parts of the range when the decks were cleared, the first vintage (2021) of their Tenuta Calimaia Viacroce Vino Nobile di Montepulciano Pieve Cervognano was poured and a long speech in Italian, equal in length to the full name of the wine, was made from a balcony. There were no spittoons, but I liked the wine quite a lot so I sipped at it as the speech went on. Dark, brambly, chewy — very different to most Chianti Classico or Brunello di Montalcino sangiovese, it was earthier and more gutsy with some charcoaly notes. But it was clean and deep, with no funk and no oxidation, which is disappointingly uncommon with Vino Nobile di Montepulciano.

Moving on, I shared a bottle of Speri Valpolicella Classico Superiore 2022 with a colleague one evening but forgot to take a photo, and another night drunk the Speri Valpolicella Classico 2022 (non-Superiore) at the basic-but-good Trattoria alla Collonna where it was €15 a bottle. I loved it, and even if the Superiore is technically the better wine what I needed that night was something straighter, simpler and more instinctive. The Classico was as light as a feather, no tannins, uncomplicated cherry fruit, hazardously moreish. Not superiore, but certainly not inferiore either.

The Berlucchi was drunk at a very glamorous party in the Palazzo and Giardino Giusti. I liked but didn’t love the 61 Nature (zero dosage), but then wines with no dosage often taste a bit too lean for my taste. The 61 Extra Brut was delicious and so was the 61 Satèn. I have a soft spot for Satèn, a low-fizz style unique to Italy’s Franciacorta region. Satèn is not very fashionable, unlike the crowd, which seemed to mostly be gay men, or straight men dressed like gay men (I haven’t yet worked out how to tell the difference in Italy ) and extremely glamorous women with expensive handbags. The most entertaining thing was that it was a canapé-style dinner, with little morsels of deliciousness being brought out on trays. In England, everyone would furtively look over the shoulder of the person they were talking to and raise an eyebrow or gently angle into position to intercept the food. Not in Italy. The guests simply formed a military blockade at the doorway from the kitchen to the main room, an impenetrable phalanx of hungry Italians who, as soon as the waiter emerged from the kitchen, intercepted her and cleared the tray immediately. None of the staff got more than six feet into the room before returning to the kitchen empty handed, which amused me greatly. I soon realised that if I was going to get anything to eat, I would have to act like a native.

Now let’s talk about Steiger-Kalena Torre Kalena Rosato 2022. These wines were love at first sight for me, and I’ll write them up in a bit more detail another time, but the Rosato absolutely stopped me in my tracks at one of the satellite fairs to the main Vinitaly event. I love Lopez de Heredia’s Tondonia Rosado, which I have seen ascend to cult wine status in my lifetime, and have drunk far more than my fair share over the years. This thing in my glass was a sort of Tondonia-esque beauty with slightly less oak, slightly more bite and personality to burn. It was, quite simply, the greatest Italian rosato I had tasted up to that point. I say ‘was’, because I got to taste the 2021 and the 2023 a couple of nights later and I think the Torre-Kalena Rosato 2023 was even better than the 2022. At which point, I stopped tasting, and starting drinking. They’re not currently in the UK, but I hope they will be soon; I am absolutely desperate to drink them, er, more thoroughly.