On our final night in Rome our friend / host B made it back to town, having been pulled away by conflicting business and family obligations. He brought us to a spot he frequents in the old city called Maccheroni.
It is one of those restaurants where food quality - fine enough, perfectly satisfying - is very much secondary to the lovely terrace atmosphere and the jocular hospitality of the service. But even here - at a restaurant very plainly not aiming for wine-geek clientele - there is a section of the wine list devoted entirely to wines from Lazio, featuring a few reliably excellent producers, notably Casale della Ioria and Sergio Mottura. I was pleased to see that even in Lazio - a justifiably underrated wine region - the stars got their credit at Rome's restaurants.
Only, none of the wines were available. Not just the two producers I mention above - almost none of the entire Lazio page of the wine list, fully half the entire list. It got ridiculous. There I was, the tourist, reaching supreme exasperation because I was unable to get ahold of one of the most dislikeable acidic bitchface red grapes in Italy, demanding of the genial staff in English, "Are you telling me you have no Cesanese in the entire restaurant? What about all this Cesanese listed here? Don't tell me there was some kind of mad run on Cesanese recently."
