Buttafuoco dell’Oltrepò Pavese DOC

A structured red from a small stretch of the Oltrepò Pavese, named for the way it was said to burn in the glass. Like its neighbours it was a style within the Oltrepò Pavese DOC from 1970 and became, as the file records, an autonomous DOC in 2010 for its historical importance.

The Name and the Zone Buttafuoco means fire-thrower, and the usual explanation is the wine’s warmth and the deep, almost purple colour Croatina gives it. The historic heart is a small amphitheatre of hills between Broni, Stradella, Canneto Pavese, Castana, Cigognola, Montescano, Pietra de’ Giorgi and Portalbera — a stretch growers refer to as the Sperone, the spur, which a voluntary club of producers has treated as a cru since the 1990s.

The Terroir The file gives the shared Oltrepò description: hills with dry winters, summer ventilation and large temperature swings, traditional training and pruning, and yields that give the wine its complexity. What distinguishes the Buttafuoco zone within that is aspect — the historic parcels face south and south-west across a narrow band of calcareous clay, and the wines are correspondingly riper than the Oltrepò average.

Grape Varieties The Oltrepò blend: Croatina and Barbera as the base, with Uva Rara and Vespolina alongside. Buttafuoco is made both still and, traditionally, lightly frizzante — the still version is the more serious and the one that repays a few years.

The Critical Take Buttafuoco is the Oltrepò’s best argument that its red blend deserves attention, and it suffers from the same problem as everything else in the zone: the name means nothing outside Lombardy, and the fruit could always have been sold more easily in bulk. The wines are dark, warm, moderately tannic and genuinely distinctive, with blackberry and a faint bitter-almond close. They are also, for the quality, absurdly cheap.

The Club The Club del Buttafuoco Storico, founded in 1996, is a voluntary association of growers within the historic Sperone who commit to stricter rules than the DOC requires — specified vineyards, lower yields, longer ageing in wood and in bottle, and a numbered seal on every bottle. It is one of the few genuinely functioning cru associations in Italy outside Piedmont, and its bottlings are the ones to look for.

At the Table Pavese cooking: salame di Varzi, braised beef, roast goose, risotto with sausage, and aged Grana. The frizzante version handles salumi and fried food. Serve the still wine at 16–17°C, the frizzante cooler at 14–15°C.

Benchmark Producers Fiamberti, Bruno Verdi, Vercesi del Castellazzo, Giorgi.