Italy's Lambrusco Wines Deserve More Respect Than The Sweet Fizzy Stuff Of The Past
If the name Lambrusco means anything to most Americans it is probably because at some point they tried and even enjoyed Riunite, a pink, fizzy, sweet alternative to Kool-Aid for adults with the tag line, 'Reunite on ice, that's nice!' (I'm surprised they didn't Italianize it with 'atsa nice!) A jug of it still sells for $14. Back in the 1970s it was a wine crafted to compete with other sweet wines like Portugal's Mateus and Spanish sangria, loved precisely because they were sweet and could be splashed over ice.
MASSA FINALESE, MODENA, ITALY - 2017/09/05: A volunteer harvests Lambrusco grapes. This year Italy's ... More annual wine harvest started earlier due to to record-hitting hot summer. (Photo by Nicolò Campo/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Unfortunately Riunite's popularity was so great that wine lovers assumed all Lambruscos were of the same kind. Yet in Emilia-Romagna, where Lambrusco is made, that is far from the truth. In fact, the authoritative Native Wine Grapes of Italy by Ian d'Agata devotes eight double-column pages to the wine, writing, 'The Lambrusco family of grapes and wines could do with better public relations, as their image is tarnished in most fine wine drinking circles; fairly enough too, as these varieties are behind a collection of not very distinguished wines.' He also quotes Italian chef Lidia Bastianich as saying, 'Lambruscos have been misrepresented by industrial versions that have the soda pop flavors they think Americans might want.'
Traditional Italian Dish - Bollito Misto is a mix of boiled meat consisting of variuos tougher cuts ... More of beef and veal, gently simmered for 3 hours in a vegetable broth. Very popular in Piedmont, Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, served with mostarda, garlic and parsil based salsa verde and local chutney. Horizontal Composition.
I myself felt that way, too, until I traveled through Emila-Romagna and ate at its fine restaurants in Bologna, Parma, Modena and others where I found splendid examples of dry Lambrusco––with a slight fizz––that went with rich dishes like lasagne verde, tagliatelle ala bolognese and bollito misto.EMILIA ROMAGNA REGION, ITALY-MAY 2008: Founded in 1900 The Caseificio Sociale Castellazzo ... More Co-Operative in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy specializes in making the world famous Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. 19 partner farmers supply milk from Fresian and Antica Razza Reggiano cows who are fed a strict diet to ensure a high quality yield. It requires 16 litres of milk to make 1kg of seasoned Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, and milk supplied by the farmers allows the consortium cheese makers to produce 12,000 wheels of cheese each year. Picture shows master cheese maker, Cristian Pederzoli, in the temperature controlled warehouse of Caseificio Sociale Castellazzo Co-Operative, where 25,000 wheels of the cheese are stored. (Photo by)
There are at least eight varieties of Lambrusco grapes (not to be confused with Vitis labrusca of North America), of which the best known, oldest and most abundant is Lambrusco di Sorbara. Many of the best come from vineyards around Modena. The finer examples have a taste of strawberry and an aroma of violets. They tend to be fairly light wines and the acid cuts through the richness of foods. They are also very pleasant as an apéritif with Emilia-Romagna products like Prosciutto di Parma and Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Vecchia Modena by Cleto Chiari
Most Lambruscos are still produced by communal farmers, but there are some well-established and young artisanal newcomers who have continually improved the wines. Among the finer producers are Cavicchioli, Paltrinieri, Venturini Baldini, Terrevive and, possibly the best known and exported to the U.S., Cleto Chiarli, which was founded only in 2003 (though the parent winery goes back to 1860) by fourth generation family scions Mauro and Anselmo Chiarli. Located on 300 acres in Grasparossa (whose name is also one of the Lambrusco varieties), they produce 90,000 bottles in different styles crafted by winemaker Filippo Mattioli, using the Charmat method to give the wine its frizzantebubbles and clarity. The wines are very refreshing. All have a DOC appellation.
Its best known Lambrusco is Vecchia Modena Premium Brut ($18) dates back to 1882 and its introduction in 1900 to the World Expo in Paris in 1900, re-introduced in 2002, made from 100% Lambrusco di Sorbara grown in alluvial loam soil. Aged for two months, it is a lovely rose color, with a light 11% alcohol, and ideal with roast veal, grilled chicken and cheeses.
Fondatore is meant to resemble a 19th century trattoria wine.
Lambrusco del Fondatore ($21) evokes the quaffable style poured at the family's 19th century trattoria, made in the ancestral method by which the wine is bottled half-fermented and allowed to finish fermentation in the bottle, which traps the carbon dioxide that creates the fizz. It is now made from 100% Lambrusco di Sorbara grapes and, interestingly, not disgorged or filtered, so that the natural sediment remains in the bottle. It spends two months on the lees under cold fermentation. The wine gives you a true sense of that ancient style and goes well with simple, hearty pastas and stews. Its alcohol is 11.5%.Centenario is an organic wine made in association with the Cantina Sociale di Settecani from the ... More Castelvetro area,
'Organic' Lambrusco di Modena ($16). As of 2016 , with other growing partners within the Cantina Sociale di Settecani from the Castelvetro area, Cleto Chiarli worked with Grasparossa grapes with integrated pest control systems from soils composed of loam, alluvial sediment and gravel and vines nine years old. The grapes were macerated for four to five days using the must from gravity pressing, then treated to cold clarification and stabilization, with no second fermentation, spending one month in bottle to emerge at 11% alcohol.'Centenario' Lambrusco di Modena Amabile ($15). The term 'amabile' means lovable in Italian, and refers to a wine slightly sweeter abbocato. It is made from the thick-skinned Lambrusco di Grasparossa, whose high acid keeps the wine balanced and avoids its being cloyingly sweet from its 48 grams/liter residual sugar. Aged only one to two weeks, it's a simple Lambrusco but a good example of what a semi-dry (or semi-sweet) style should be like. Terrific match with pizza.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Newsweek
17 minutes ago
- Newsweek
Tiger Woods' Off-Course Power Move Reminded Justin Thomas Who's Still King
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Tiger Woods may not have teed up at a competitive golf event since TGL, but on Tuesday, he managed to steal the spotlight anyway at the Tour Championship without swinging a club. PACIFIC PALISADES, CALIFORNIA - FEBRUARY 16: Tiger Woods of the United States and Justin Thomas of the United States walk across the ninth hole during the first round of the The Genesis Invitational at Riviera... PACIFIC PALISADES, CALIFORNIA - FEBRUARY 16: Tiger Woods of the United States and Justin Thomas of the United States walk across the ninth hole during the first round of the The Genesis Invitational at Riviera Country Club on February 16, 2023 in Pacific Palisades, California. (Photo by) More Getty Images Justin Thomas was asked to share his favorite memory from past Tour Championships during the pre-tournament press conference at East Lake, and he recalled a classic Tiger story. "Probably my best memory, and I couldn't even tell you what year it was, it was probably -- I guess it would have been 2020," Thomas told reporters on Tuesday while stressing to remember the day. "I remember playing here (East Lake), playing a practice round and walking down 18 and FaceTiming Tiger because he wasn't here and didn't qualify, just showing him how the course was and how great it was. And then he acted like his phone cut out." But here's the twist, Woods wasn't done with the call yet. "Then he called me back two minutes later with the (Masters) green jacket on," Thomas continued during the same conversation. "I remember that very, very, very vividly." Though hilarious, it was a classic Woods move dripping with GOAT energy. And Thomas knew he'd been played. "Just a typical conversation of thinking I am having some kind of upper edge," Thomas added during Tuesday's conference, "and I get shut down and put in my place pretty quickly." Woods hasn't played competitively since playing at his TGL in February due to lingering ankle issues. He's been recovering from surgery and focusing on his TGL indoor golf league, which returns in December. But moments like this prove his presence in the sport is still magnetic, even when he's not on any leaderboard. More Golf: Tour Championship 2025: picks, bets, and predictions of the last playoff
Time Magazine
17 minutes ago
- Time Magazine
The Problem With 'The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox'
In a notorious video that circulated around the globe, 20-year-old exchange student Amanda Knox is kissing her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. Out of context, it looks like banal, sun-dappled vacation footage—American girl goes to picturesque Perugia, falls for scarf-wearing Italian boy. In fact, the couple had just learned, after an eerie morning at the apartment Knox shared with three other young women, that police had found her roommate Meredith Kercher brutally murdered in Kercher's bedroom. The kiss became a key piece of a prosecutorial propaganda campaign, giddily inflamed by the tabloid media, that framed Knox as a perverse, cold-blooded killer. You only have to keep watching for a few more seconds, as the lovers turn away from one another, to catch the look of pain and confusion on her face and realize she's not celebrating. The moment is recreated in The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a true crime drama that traces the since-exonerated Knox's Kafkaesque ordeal in an Italian justice system that tarred her as a psycho sex fiend who masterminded Kercher's rape and murder. What's strange, considering that Knox, her husband Chris Robinson, and public-shaming expert Monica Lewinsky are among the series' executive producers, is how much more ambiguous the kiss looks in this telling. When Grace Van Patten, who plays Knox, turns to face the camera, her expression is wide-eyed and inscrutable. Twisted is otherwise overwhelmingly sympathetic to its protagonist, and Van Patten (Nine Perfect Strangers, Tell Me Lies) does an admirable job with limited material. Yet the fumbling of this scene captures what is so frustrating about the show. For all its fidelity to the complicated facts of one of this century's most infamous murder cases, Twisted fails to deliver the one element of Knox's story that might be best expressed through scripted drama: insight into who its viciously caricatured, widely misunderstood subject really is. The eight-part series, helmed by showrunner K.J. Steinberg (This Is Us), often plays like an extended version of the broad reenactments you see in crime docs. In a way, this makes sense. There is much to reenact, to explain and unravel and contextualize, in a legal saga that began on Nov. 2, 2007, the morning Kercher's body was discovered, and had yet to be fully resolved as late as this year. Italy's justice system differs greatly from its American counterpart; prosecutors lead police investigations, criminal and civil trials can be consolidated into the same proceedings, juries in even the highest-profile cases are unsequestered. From paparazzi photos to footage recorded at the scene by the forensics team to TV news reports to interviews with Knox, plenty of imagery exists from throughout this story—much of which already appeared in the 2016 Netflix documentary Amanda Knox before being restaged, shot-for-shot, in Twisted. Following a flash-forward to Amanda's return to Italy in 2022, during which she spends a tense car ride hiding under a blanket from local media ravenous for a glimpse of its favorite villain, the tale unfolds in mostly chronological order. We watch an ingenuous Amanda skip around Perugia, in the fall of 2007, living out a study-abroad fairytale with her new boyfriend, Raffaele (Giuseppe De Domenico, heartbreaking), and three female roommates, including Meredith (Rhianne Barreto), a British student. About 10 minutes into the premiere, the dream sours. Amanda returns to her adorable apartment to shower after a night at Raffa's but slowly realizes something isn't right. There are blood stains in the bathroom, a revolting mess in the toilet. Meredith's door is locked, and no one answers when Amanda calls out to her. Soon after the body is found, the young couple become crucial witnesses in the police investigation, detained at the station for days' worth of questioning. Bilingual scripts effectively demonstrate how the language barrier exacerbated Knox's predicament, as she was far from fluent in Italian at the time and often lacked an adequate translator. It is (almost cartoonishly) clear from the outset that Amanda has rubbed the investigators the wrong way. They don't like the kiss, or her sexual candor, or the vibrator that was found among her toiletries; their prejudices are reinforced when Meredith's British friends express their own dislike for Amanda. A pair of nightmarish, physically and psychologically violent marathon interrogations ends with Raffaele manipulated into destroying her alibi and a disoriented Amanda implicating Patrick Lumumba (Souleymane Seye Ndiaye), the proprietor of the bar where she worked, in the murder. (Though she almost immediately recanted this accusation, Lumumba was arrested, then quickly cleared, and a slander charge was added to list of crimes for which she'd face trial.) The middle half of the series wades, somewhat laboriously, through years of legal wrangling and incarceration, as Amanda and Raffaele are found guilty and serve four years of their sentences before seeing their convictions overturned due to an astonishing absence of reliable physical evidence. The arrival in Italy of Amanda's fiercely loyal mother, Edda Mellas (the usually great Sharon Horgan, struggling with an American accent), should raise the emotional stakes, but, as is the case with so much of the show's dialogue, the women mostly speak in gloomy exposition. Richer and more thoughtfully depicted is the relationship that Amanda, an avowed atheist, develops with Don Saulo Scarabattoli (Alfredo Pea), the prison's open-minded, in-house priest. The advice he gives her when she's on the verge of yielding to despair over what could become a life sentence—"You can serve humanity even if it doesn't serve you'—will shape her future. Knox and Lewinsky have talked about how they insisted on ending Twisted not with Amanda and Raffaele's first acquittal, on appeal in 2011, but with a pair of episodes that trace the case's aftermath: the bumpy reacclimation to freedom, the permanent reputational damage, the search for purpose in a life derailed, the ongoing legal woes and media circus. The instinct to move beyond the true crime template, avoiding a false happily-ever-after ending, is a good one. But as executed, the penultimate episode just feels like more trudging from point to point on a timeline of well-documented events. Amanda endures an aggressive interview with Chris Cuomo (Josh Burdett): Check. Amanda finds community with other exonerees: Check. The finale—which is, unfortunately, the only episode co-written by Knox—goes deeper. We see Amanda, now an author, wife, and mother, compare battle scars with Raffaele and confront the prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli), who, despite the early emergence of airtight forensic evidence implicating the third person convicted of Kercher's murder, perpetrated the character assassination that led to her imprisonment. It's in this coda that the series finally feels like it's about something other than the obvious fact that Knox suffered a grave injustice. We discover that, just as Amanda is not the sex-crazed monster Mignini created, Mignini is not the bloodthirsty misogynist her allies imagined; he's a man tortured by personal demons. Everyone is more complicated than tabloid headlines make them out to be. (Knox took this argument to an extreme in a recent Atlantic essay that called the common description of University of Idaho killer Bryan Kohberger as, simply, evil 'an excuse to stop thinking, to ignore the evidence, to hate and punish someone law enforcement didn't, or wouldn't, understand.') This perspective tempers the hysteria of an earlier episode, which opens with a mini-biography narrated by Mignini that races from a childhood steeped in the Madonna-whore complex to his father's untimely death ('You're the man of the house now,' the boy is told, graveside, in an egregiously canned bit of dialogue) to the debacle that was his involvement in the Monster of Florence serial killer case. The Italian-stereotype quotient is high in this rendering, as it also is in another episode's more empathetic portrait of Raffaele. Perhaps out of respect for the privacy of the real people or their families, we barely spend any time with Meredith or Patrick—another innocent victim, whose experience as a Black, Congolese immigrant feels under-acknowledged in a story so concerned with Amanda's gendered shaming. But Raffa, a sweet, inexperienced romantic hoping for another shot at love with a woman he adores, comes through clearly. I left the series feeling as if I knew him much better than I knew Amanda, even though she gets far more screen time than any other character and Van Patten narrates most of the episodes. (These voiceovers can get pretty purple: 'Telling my tale is a sticky, tricky thing—especially when I was a stranger to my story's true beginning.') This is not for lack of discussion about her personality. She is described, variously, as quirky, impassive, naive, vulgar, blithely optimistic. 'Everyone says I'm like Amélie'—the eponymous gamine from the movie she and Raffaele watched the night of Meredith's murder—'because I'm a weirdo,' Amanda says at one point. Edda calls her 'sunny despite everything.' One of Meredith's friends testifies that the defendant struck her as 'cold,' 'unfeeling,' and 'quite open about her sex life.' It's fine that none of these contradictory characterizations bear much resemblance to the Amanda we observe. This is, after all, the story of a woman who was misread by a significant chunk of Earth's population. But The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox should have a compelling counternarrative to offer about Amanda Knox. To the extent that she's defined, it's in terms of what she self-evidently is not—not a killer, not a sex freak, not a callous American femme fatale. With ample evidence of Knox's innocence available for over a decade, Steinberg and her writers had the chance to do something more than mount yet another defense. They could've made us understand Amanda's thinking in the most awkward and insensitive-seeming moments of her trial by media. Instead, the show tends to replay these gaffes without adding much new perspective. Amanda's alleged weirdness is mentioned more than it's explored; how much could we have learned about her if Steinberg hadn't rushed through a scene set at her time-traveler-themed wedding? A flashback episode that gave us more time with Amanda before Meredith's death might also have helped. Some of the best crime docudramas, like Hulu's own The Dropout and The Girl From Plainville, thrive on nuanced portraiture of real women whose mass-media villain edits contain far more truth than 'Foxy Knoxy.' Without powerful insight into a person who is also Twisted's executive producer—and who has drawn more perceptive conclusions from her ordeal in two memoirs, multiple podcasts, and the Netflix doc—it's hard to justify the reopening of 18-year-old wounds.
Hypebeast
43 minutes ago
- Hypebeast
Ishaan Khatter, Aaron Pierre, and More Star in 'Be the Next BOSS' Campaign
Presented by BOSS Putting a fresh spin on its 'Be Your Own BOSS' platform, BOSS returns with a special campaign for Fall/Winter 2025 that brings a collective of rising stars from music, film, sport, and fashion into the spotlight. From breakthrough actors Ishaan Khatter and Aaron Pierre to fashion's hottest It-girl Amelia Gray, this season's focus turns to the talent's drive and determination to 'Be the Next BOSS.' With the respective visuals giving space to their journeys, they are placed at the forefront of an intimate series of shots in nothing but the latest modern essentials from the FW25 collection. 1 of 3 2 of 3 3 of 3 Complementing the pared-back campaign, their looks combine signature tailoring and luxury knits with a rich palette of olive green and grey tones. A staple outfit, worn by Khatter, exemplifies this classic aesthetic, pairing a sleek Italian wool coat with the 'New Trouser' – a relaxed, double-pleated silhouette which makes its debut this season. K-Pop star also subscribes to a timeless tailored look, posing in a two-button silver-grey suit made contemporary with a textural wool and slim-line cut. 1 of 3 2 of 3 3 of 3 Meanwhile, Pierre appears in a range of everyday looks, showcasing how a versatile base of mid-layers can be reworked to fit the weather by swapping out a blazer-style relaxed-fit jacket for a puffer jacket. Similarly, a duo of outfits featured on tennis player Taylor Fritz finds a coordinating green set restyled with a heavyweight herringbone coat in one look, and in another, layered under a clean-cut leather jacket. 1 of 2 2 of 2 As for the women's category, BOSS brings forth a mixture of day-to-night garments, lending to an array of events the season has to offer. Among the must-have outerwear pieces, a luxurious shearling jacket stands out with its warm brown Nappa leather designed with a cropped silhouette for casual styling. Featuring in a boxy, wide-legged suit, Gray captures the essence of the campaign, as the sophisticated wardrobe of sartorial pieces comes together to bring out her inner boss. Explore the Fall/Winter 2025 collection by browsing the campaign in the galleries above. To shop the latest drops from BOSS, head to its website and partner stockists now.
