Montiano 2003, Falesco
20th August 2007
Back in the early 1990s I came across a newspaper review of a wine from Lazio, the Central Italian province surrounding Rome. The wine was a 100% Merlot. It was produced by a house called Falesco near the provincial town of Viterbo, fifty miles north of the capital. The reviewer praised it, though cautiously.
I had moved to Rome only recently, and was curious to know what a good local red tasted like. Then as now, the most prized wines were from Piedmont and Tuscany. Information about Lazio and the other regions was harder to come by. So, grateful for the tip, I hurried off to Rome’s largest wine merchant and spent 10,000 lire on what proved to be a minor disappointment.
Montiano, the wine in question, wasn’t awful. It was nothing like as bad as the scrofulous rubbish on sale in the average Italian supermarket. But nor could it honestly be called good. Its tannins were completely out of control. To compare it to paint stripper would be a gross exaggeration, but perhaps not so very gross. And this was a shame, for beneath the physical discomfort I could make out some interesting flavours. All the same, I concluded that if this was the best Lazio could do, it was obvious why Piedmont and Tuscany led the field.
Imagine my surprise a couple of years later when the same wine appeared in a list of Italy’s top wines. Not just any list, but the list – the Gambero Rosso Tre Bicchieri, Italy’s most prestigious awards. I went back to the wine merchant and found that the paint stripper had trebled in price. And when I uncorked a bottle that night I found, needless to say, that the tannin problem had magically disappeared.
In fact the wine was scarcely recognisable. It was now soft and plummy, densely flavoured in the modern style and mellowed by a year’s aging in small oak casks. Yet at the same time it had acquired earthy, mineral undertones from Viterbo’s volcanic soil. The combined effect was unique, quite unlike any Merlot from France or Chile.
In any event, here we are, fifteen years later, and Montiano is now an established feature of the Italian wine landscape. It wins the Gambero Rosso Tre Bicchieri award with mechanical regularity and appears in my glass as often as I can find it. The 2003 vintage costs £16 in the UK, $35 in the US. I urge you to try it, if only to discover what Italians are capable of achieving outside Piedmont and Tuscany.
