“There are so many new wines coming from around the world, Americans’
choices have increased exponentially,” says wine expert Mike DeSimone,
co-author with Jeff Jenssen of “Wines of California: The Comprehensive
Guide,” scheduled for release in September.
Among the emerging varieties: “Definitely mavrud from Bulgaria and
malvasia Istriana from Croatia. Also, we’re seeing more nero d’avola and
grillo from Sicily,” says Jenssen. (Mavrud is a red wine, malvasia a
white.) “The funny thing is, none of these is new. They are just new to
the American wine market.”
Take Sicily, a region primarily known for cheap bulk wine until
relatively recently, when producers started focusing on quality.
“International varieties” such as merlot and cabernet sauvignon can and
do grow here.
But there also are interesting local grapes such as nero d’avola
(neh-row DA-vo-lah), a red, which is beginning to make a name for itself
in the U.S. market, and grillo (GREE-low), a white grape, that is
showing up in imports like Stemmari’s “Dalila,” an 80/20 mix of grillo
and viognier.
Some of the new choices in wine are due to political changes; the
break-up of the Soviet Union has led to the emergence of a number of
wines from Eastern and Central Europe.
Furmint, for instance, is a white grape from Hungary, which usually
goes into that country’s somewhat better-known tokaji (to-KAY) dessert
wine, but also is made as a dry white.
Bulgaria has benefited from entrance to the European Union and access
to financial support, says Christy Canterbury, a wine writer and
educator who is one of the few women to have attained Master of Wine
status. “Some of the wineries that I have seen in Bulgaria are as
sophisticated as the top ‘first growth,’ in Bordeaux,” she says,
referring to the French classification system which puts ‘first growth’
at the top.
And while Eastern European wines can be uneven in quality, Canterbury
says the wines she’s tasted from Moldova so far have been “off the
charts good.” Though it’s a small country in between Romania and
Ukraine, Moldova is a wine-producing powerhouse that used to provide a
fifth of the wine consumed by the former Soviet Union, Canterbury says.
To read more, click here
A red wine to look out for is rara neagra from the Purcari winery.
Rara neagra is a red wine grape grown in the Republic of Moldova and
Romania, which also has a region called Moldova that produces wine.
Of course, selling wines with unfamiliar names can be a challenge.