Nero Buono

Nero Buono means, simply, good black grape, and for once the name is a fair description. It is one of Italy’s least-known natives, confined to the hills around Cori south-east of Rome, and it makes excellent mid-weight reds of real colour and freshness. Legend attributes its arrival to Cincinnatus, the Roman statesman who settled in the area in the fifth century BC.

Origins and history The Cincinnatus story has no hard evidence behind it, though the excellent local cooperative named after him would prefer otherwise. The variety was once called Nero Buono di Cori, but European rules no longer permit place names attached to grape varieties, so it is now simply Nero Buono, to considerable local irritation. Genetic analysis carried out at the Fondazione Edmund Mach suggests it is unrelated to any of the major known cultivars.

What the name describes The anthocyanin profile explains both the name and the wine. Nero Buono is dominated by malvin, carries very low proportions of the easily oxidised pigments peonin and cyanin, and shows high levels of acylated anthocyanins. The practical result is a wine of potentially deep and, more importantly, stable colour. Proanthocyanin levels are low but easily extracted, so total anthocyanins run higher than in many other red varieties.

In the vineyard The vines are a striking sight, growing erect with an obvious difference between the basal and apical leaves, the basal ones enormous, trilobed and almost fig-like. The variety is very vigorous but has low basal fertility, so only Guyot training works. Its great practical problem is continuous vegetation: growers may need to deleaf four or five times a year, and as Marco Carpineti puts it, twenty days after doing the work you would think nothing had been done at all.

Site and soil Nero Buono prefers altitude and volcanic soils, and at Cori, where vineyards reach five hundred metres, it finds both. It performs on calcareous and volcanic ground alike, the former giving more structure and body, the latter more elegance. Rootstock choice matters in a corner of Lazio with little summer rain, with Kober 5BB and SO4 currently preferred, since vigour cannot be curtailed too aggressively. Long hang times are unwise, as the thin skins tend to split.

No clones, only selection There are no clones available. Almost all recent plantings were selected from one grower’s site, with later material taken from the parcel of the Cori cooperative’s president. A walk through the vineyards reveals many morphologically different vines, so massal selection is the only route to identifying plants that grow well and give better wine. Curiously, different vines show markedly different bunch sizes while vigour stays much the same on equivalent soils and rootstocks.

Appearance and structure A good Nero Buono is grapey and vinous, light to medium-bodied, and drinks with an immediate juiciness that belies its colour. It is not a tannic monster and does not pretend to be. Producers wanting more structure tend to dehydrate the berries slightly, usually on the vine.

Aromatic profile Juicy black fruit leads, with pleasant fresh-herb notes alongside. With age the wine develops a distinctive register of quinine, ink and rhubarb, which is unusual and worth looking for. The herbal quality is consistent across sites, while the fruit weight follows the soil.

In the cellar The bureaucracy is perverse: the Cori DOC permits a maximum of only 40 per cent Nero Buono, while the neighbouring Castelli Romani Rosso DOC, where the grape has always mattered less, allows up to 100 per cent. IGT wines can of course be entirely Nero Buono. Three months of air-drying has been tried and makes the wine too sweet, so late harvesting, roughly twenty days, is preferred for concentration.

Key expressions

• Monovarietal IGT reds from Cori, the variety’s home.
• Selection bottlings made from the best parcels of fruit.
• Rosato versions, which suit the grape’s freshness well.
• Late-harvested riserva wines, picked around twenty days on.

The question of aging The stable anthocyanins keep the colour fresh far longer than most, and the wines hold six to eight years without difficulty, developing the quinine, ink and rhubarb notes that are their most distinctive feature. They are not built for decades, and the fruit is the main attraction early on. Late-harvested riserva bottlings last longest.

At the table Mid-weight and fresh, it suits the cooking of the Roman hills: lamb, porchetta, pecorino romano and pasta with rich meat sauces. The herbal edge works well with rosemary and garlic. Serve it a little below room temperature, around sixteen to eighteen degrees.

Why it matters Nero Buono is evidence that Lazio’s red future need not be Cesanese alone, and that a variety can be genuinely good while remaining almost entirely unknown. With no clones, no place name and an appellation that caps it at 40 per cent, almost everything about its situation works against it. The wines are good anyway, and remarkably inexpensive.