Lazio

Lazio has the largest gap between potential and delivery of any region in Italy, and the explanation is a single city. Rome sat close enough to absorb any quantity of wine at almost any quality, and for most of the twentieth century that removed every commercial reason to do better. The volcanic soils are excellent. Almost nobody used them properly.

The Landscape The region is 54 per cent hill, 20 per cent flat and the remainder mountain, running from the Tyrrhenian coast up to the Apennines on the Abruzzo border. January averages 9–10°C and July 24–25°C; rainfall is low along the northern coast and heavier in the south and the mountains. Almost all the wine comes off a belt of hills built from the debris of extinct volcanoes — the Monti Volsini around Lake Bolsena, the Vico volcano, the Monti Sabatini around Lake Bracciano, the Monti Cimini, and the Colli Albani south-east of Rome.

Four Belts The vineyard land divides cleanly. First the volcanic hills, which include the amphitheatre of volcanic rock around Lake Bolsena where Aleatico di Gradoli is made, and the large volcanic edifice at Montefiascone with its rich, fertile soils under Trebbiano and Malvasia. Second, the inland sedimentary hills north of Rome with their inter-mountain basins, bounded east by the Tiber valley and the Monti Sabini. Third, the Apennine reliefs, calcareous with patchy volcanic cover: this is where the Cesanese zone sits, on a carbonate platform running into the Monti Ernici and Monti Affilani, all red lateritic soil and limestone scree, with sandstone and volcanic tuff from the Colli Albani below 400 metres. Fourth, the coastal hills and the reclaimed marshland of the Lazio Maremma and the Pontine plain, which is mostly white grapes.

Etruscan Technique The earliest evidence of vine growing in Latium comes from north of the Tiber, in the old region of Tuscia, where the Etruscans had arrived with the vine as they did everywhere they went. Their method was to train living trees: usually four vines were run up and around a single tree, which supported them and shaded the fruit. It is the ancestor of every pergola and alberata system in central Italy, and versions of it survived into living memory.

The Grapes Malvasia and Trebbiano dominate the whites, and the distinction within Malvasia is the important one: Malvasia del Lazio, also called Puntinata, is the fine, aromatic, low-yielding one, while Malvasia di Candia crops heavily and tastes of much less. The twentieth century systematically replaced the first with the second. Bellone, Bombino and Grechetto also appear. The reds are led by Cesanese, which exists in two forms — the prized, small-berried d’Affile and the more productive Comune — along with Aleatico, the aromatic red of Gradoli, Nero Buono and a good deal of Montepulciano and Sangiovese.

The Critical Take Frascati is the case study. A wine with genuinely good volcanic ground beneath it became a byword for cheap carafe white because the incentive ran entirely towards yield, cooperatives consolidated, and the fine Malvasia del Lazio was displaced by high-cropping alternatives. That is now slowly being undone by a small number of growers, and Frascati Superiore can be very good. Cesanese del Piglio, the region’s only red DOCG, is its most convincing argument — peppery, sour-cherried, distinctly its own thing — though be sceptical of the near-universal claim to be working with d’Affile, which is much harder to grow than Comune and much rarer in the vineyards than on the labels. The region’s volcanic soils remain its unexploited asset.

At the Table The four Roman pastas — cacio e pepe, carbonara, amatriciana, gricia — plus coda alla vaccinara, abbacchio, artichokes done Jewish-style or Roman-style, and porchetta from Ariccia in the Colli Albani. A good Frascati Superiore handles the pasta; Cesanese handles the rest.

Where to Start Cesanese del Piglio, which most people have never tried and which makes the case for the region immediately. Then a Frascati Superiore from a single estate rather than a co-operative.