At the Renaissance des AOCs tasting I was surprised and delighted to meet Elisabetta Foradori, a trailblazing biodynamic winemaker from Trentino, and one of the most prominent ambassadors of Italian wine in general. Some measure of how pleased I was might be found in my willingness to post the above photo, despite the poor lighting, which causes me to look like a drunken koala.
Foradori's reds, made from the rich, raspy, autochthonous Campo Rotaliano grape Teroldego,* are fixtures on just about every great Italian wine list in the states, including the few that I've worked on myself. Partly this is due to how few Teroldego producers there are - it is not grown in any real quantities outside the tiny Teroldego Rotaliano DOC, of which Foradori is by far the dominant figure. But Teroldego the grape, which has been genetically linked to Syrah, always presents a fine opportunity for sommeliers to surprise their guests with a weird unknown wine - Italy! what diversity! - that nevertheless hits many familiar pleasure centers: rich fruit, tannic grip, relatively tame acid, etc. There are built-in narrative selling points, too: how Elisabetta Foradori lost her father to cancer at a young age, and thereupon took charge of her struggling family estate, and through hard work and clever promotion turned a backwards, hard-to-pronounce local grape into one of Italy's most famous and written-about reds.
You could say its almost a fond tradition for Italian restaurants at a certain level to stock Foradori. I admittedly never gave it a lot of thought, because I found her basic Teroldego engaging, but not lifechanging, and her continually Tre-Bicchieri-netting "Granato" more impressive at the expense of typicity - whatever it is that makes Teroldego Teroldego.** The wines made people happy more than they made me happy. At the Renaissance des AOCs this year, however, Foradori was debuting two new cru magnum bottlings of Teroldego, "Sgarzon" and "Morei," both fermented and aged in clay amphorae. I tasted the latter, and to say it floored me would be an understatement. It actually retroactively justified all the hyperbole ever written about the grape, "Granato," the whole operation.
