Vini Rari is a small, select estate winery owned by Giulio Moriondi that produces little, with most of that consumed locally, and only a smattering going out to the U.S. market. It is tucked tightly into the Val d’Aosta, Italy’s smallest designated state---basically a single valley angling up from the Piedmont into the French Alps---offering a small area for propagation.
Aosta has been an important corridor, both for armies and tourists funneling in either direction, yet the wines never established the same presence as other, more prized regions. More important, the Aosta had its own particular set of grape varieties. And that is what Vini Rari focused on: the varieties that made Aosta unique.
This is Vini Rari Souches Meres: small plots of three unique grapes (most unknown to all but wine geeks) grown and made in an artisanal fashion. Not to astound and amaze; not to create blockbusters of overweening bombacity that command attention; and certainly not to make great wealth, for these wines are modestly priced, hard to find, and receive few reviews and little attention.
The Vini Rari wines are the embodiment of that particular Italian thing called “sprezzatura”. It is most often applied to fashion and food but can be used for wine and other things with easy facility.
Sprezzatura, as applied to food is that ability to take fairly humble but achingly fresh and simple foodstuffs and make them pleasant, rewarding, and satisfying beyond credibility, and doing it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. (If you’re reading this, you’re nodding your head because you know precisely what I mean.)
Vin Rari Souches Meres is sprezzatura itself.
Made from Petite Rouge (60%), Vien de Nus (30%) and Cornalin (10%), the wine is not a showstopper---why stop when something is this intimately pleasant?---but a friendly, accommodating and satisfying wine that is always harmonious with companion foods and companion people, a sociable wine. It doesn’t command attention---but it gets it, mostly in quiet appreciation. And it is a chef’s best friend (which I wish more chefs knew); when served with food the diners seem to enjoy and remark upon how very good the food is tonight.
Vini Rari Souches Meres is, and is supposed to be, a profoundly normal wine, what I used to call "sotto voce" wine because it spoke quietly but with authority, and it emerges with good food as an abnormally profound table wine. It is not built to be offered in auctions, avariciously acquired by collectors, or stored in hoarding caves, either of earth or steel, to be gloated over. It is wine to be drunk and enjoyed.
Souches Meres is one of those difficult-to-translate French expressions that gives you all the information you need about the wine once you experience it. The phrase means, more or less, the “Mother Vines”, the source, the origins. The name makes the declaration that this is heritage, this is the foundation, this is the, to coin a Medieval phrase that is apt, the “honor” of the Val d’Aosta, the element that makes it unique.
“Yes, but,” you plaintively cry, “What does it taste like????”
Saturated, pure, intense berry fruit that is in no way whatsoever gobby, jammy, over-ripe, or over-loaded with alcohol; structured with precise linear acidity that holds it together without creating any disruption, any distraction, from the aesthetic of sensation. It is a smooth and seamless wine. With no distracting tannins it is soft, but not at all flabby. There is little astringency to this lean wine, yet its acidic structure provides enough assertiveness to balance out any food and make it better.
And best of all? While one may not have exciting epiphanies of extravagance with the Souches Meres, it is infinitely pleasant in its constant drinkability: it is a wine to be enjoyed rather than prized. And that is the essence of sprezzatura, isn’t it?
