Wine: ‘North-eastern Italy is open to experimentation’

A FREQUENT complaint, particularly about French and Italian wine producers, used to be their reluctance to learn from the New World. Equally, many have ascribed a similar conservatism to the top levels of the British wine trade.

Perhaps those contentions were what prompted David Gleave MW to create the innovative Liberty Wines in 1997, and then to make Italy his initial focus.

Though the business now employs 80 people and features wines from more than 200 producers, Liberty’s guiding principles remain the quest for exceptional wines and to be “stubbornly quality-focused”. As well as strongly supporting several of the – then unfashionable but very accomplished – Australian boutique wineries, Liberty was also behind the creation of Alpha Zeta wines in 1999. The project had two strands. One was to buy grapes – not the ready-made bulk wine traditionally used for entry-point products – but, more importantly, to improve quality by working with growers to reduce their yields and control harvesting. The other step was to bring in an experienced New World winemaker (in this case Matt Thomson from New Zealand) to create a range of the fruit-forward wines that had proved so successful in the southern hemisphere.

Alpha Zeta’s centre of operations, around Verona, was an interesting choice because north-eastern Italy is especially open-minded to experimentation yet has a tradition of careful winemaking. Verona is home to established names such as bardolino and soave but also forms part of the Veneto region, which is big on commercial wines and, thus, on the know-how to secure economies of scale.

This week we set out to see how well the Alpha Zeta range measures up to it own founding philosophies. First up was the 2011 Alpha Zeta Garganega (£8, Villeneuve) which uses a sometimes unruly local grape to deliver an uncomplicated white with apple and lemon-based acidity, with slowly developing pineapple and orange touches to add an intriguing perception of sweetness.

The garganega grape also figures prominently in the more elegant and restrained 2011 Alpha Zeta Soave (£7.99, Peckhams), a nicely structured white with a long, tangy finish but smooth grapefruit flavours that run right through it. Although most top soaves come from the hilly ‘classico’ area, some delightful straightforward versions like this are produced in the other 11 communes of the soave region.

When we moved to the reds, the focus switched to the corvina grape – the origin of dozens of light, peppery wines with savoury, almost bitter touches on the finish. Despite a relatively thick skin, though, its tannin levels are quite low. Corvina plays the major role in the wine made in the seven communes that form the Valpolicella region. The 2011 Alpha Zeta Valpolicella (£7.99, Valvona & Crolla) is particularly impressive, with layered complexity that includes powerful bramble and plum fruit, nicely balanced acidity and nutty spice influences on the finish.

There are, however, two levels above this in the Valpolicella hierarchy. The first uses the ripasso method, which traditionally re-passes newly fermented valpolicella over the grape skins that have been used to make amarone. In 2010 Alpha Zeta Valpolicella Ripasso (£12.49, Quel Vin, Glasgow), there is a degree of co-fermentation with those skins, and this has added a freshness to the wine’s intense, cherry-centred fruit that signs off with a firm, food-friendly, plum stone finish.

The higher level is, of course, the aristocratic amarone itself. Here, grapes from the excellent 2009 harvest went through a carefully controlled four-month drying process to turbo-charge their concentration and were also given 18 months of maturation in oak after fermentation. The result, 2009 Alpha Zeta Amarone (£26.99, Penicuik Wines), is beautifully balanced, with concentrated blaeberry and plum fruit overlaid with velvety-smooth chocolate and rounded off with clear hints of cinnamon and that trademark bitter cherry finish. This is excellent wine by any standard.

The whole series is an eloquent vindication of marrying Italian traditions with southern-hemisphere fruit-centred techniques to provide – literally – the best of both worlds. n