Italy gives bad wine the boot

This month we look at emerging wine regions. Next week: Portugal.

I was fortunate enough to spend three years in the late 1970s in southern Italy, eagerly exploring its boundless wonders. I heavily researched Italy's history, landmarks, food and wines, the latter virtually for naught: Bottles with beautiful, soulful names -- Lacryma Christi ("Tears of Christ"), Est! Est! Est! -- contained bland, soulless wines.

But I also had my "a-ha" wine moment there, at a trattoria on the absurdly beautiful isle of Capri. The homemade red at La Cisterna was rich and rustic and lusty, and a major reason I returned to the island a dozen times or so. I also stumbled across a wonderful red in a dank, medieval-looking place in Palermo, Sicily, poured from a tap in one of the 8-foot barrels that served as the back wall.

So I came home in September 1979 knowing that people could make great wine in southern Italy, but unsure if the folks who were actually bottling it ever would.

Turns out they weren't really even trying. Throughout southern Italy, grapes were grown and wine was made in old-fashioned ways with old-fashioned (and often none too clean) equipment. If it was good enough for their grandfathers, it was good enough for them.

Italy's wine renaissance "took longer to come to the south," said Marc Mackondy, buyer for the nonpareil retailer Buon Giorno, "as many things did, like highways, on-time trains and law. But that is not to say that this area didn't produce top-notch wines. The Greeks called this area of Italy Enotria, the land of wine, as almost every hillside was planted to the vine."

In Apulia, the region forming the heel of Italy's boot, more grapes are grown than in Australia and New Zealand combined. But until recently it was used to make bulk plonk and to add some color to Chianti. Now there are wonderful reds, especially negroamaro and primitivo (zinfandel's twin sibling) and white blends coming out of Apulia.

The volcanic soils near an even more famous mountain, Vesuvius, are spawning some wonderful wines in Campania, just south of Naples. Falanghina and greco di tufo are crisp, clean wines for seafood, and the dusty aglianico is a rising red star.

If that weren't enough, I recently had a decent Lacryma Christi (from De Angelis), as soft as its 1970s forebears were harsh. Clearly, more progress has been made in the past three decades than in the previous 19-plus centuries, since that wine's namesake performed the ever-enviable miracle of turning water into wine.