Tombacco's sustainability IS recognised by equalitas

in the long term, will incentivise staff with annual awards for their good work and team-building activities.

Brothers Cristian and Andrea Tombacco are joint owners of Vinicola Tombacco. Cristian says: “Improvement is a path taken one step at a time, and each step must follow a precise direction made up of short-term objectives that lead to more ambitious and prestigious long-term successes.

“Every year we’ll prepare a Sustainability

Report setting out the improvement policies that we intend to put into practice, measuring the overall situation. An independent body performs an audit to certify progress: this guarantees greater transparency, but also encourages businesses to show constant commitment and efficiency.”

Tombacco is already looking to the future. Not only has it committed to continuously analysing its data to identify further room for improvement, it has embarked on an ambitious programme to identify how it can reduce the CO2 of its packaging.

“We know the path we have decided to take is a difficult one, but we do it with the awareness that this is the right one in order to stay faithful to our principles and guarantee future generations a thriving business like the one we are experiencing today,” says Cristian.

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From page 60

Abruzzo

Caparrone Abruzzo Passerina 2021

Well-made, well-priced, well-packaged, fruit-driven varietal wine is not necessarily what first comes to mind when we think of Italian wine: it sounds like a classic New World recipe. But that description certainly fits Rocco Pasetti’s 50ha estate in Collecorvino in Abruzzo, which does a neat line in brightly fruited expressions of such typical Abruzzo varieties as Montepulciano, Pecorino, and, in this case, zippy, breezy, citrussy, seafood-partnering Passerina.

Molise

Palladino Biferno Rosso DOC 2018 (Enotria&Coe)

It took a while for the mountainous south central Italian region of Molise to make a name for its wines. But for many of us who were regulars at Pizza Express in its 1990s and 2000s heyday, a wine from Camillo de Lellis in the region’s Biferno Rosso DOC earned cult status as a bargain mellow red to have with a Pepperoni or Margherita. Palladino Biferno Rosso achieves much the same thing, the blend of Montepulciano, Aglianico and Trebbiano, which retails at around a tenner, hitting several sweet midweek spots.

Campania

Terredora di Paola Falanghina Irpina 2021 (Winetraders)

The story behind Terredora Falanghina is part soap opera, part ancient history. The soap opera is all about the break-up of the Mastroberadino family’s wine assets in the early 1990s: one brother, Antonio, kept the family name and business; the other, Walter, got the old vines that would go on to form the basis of Terredora di Paolo. Falanghina was thought to be behind the esteemed ancient Roman wine, Felsina. All unimportant background if the wine, with its stone fruit, orange citrus and almonds, wasn’t so lipsmackingly enjoyable.

Puglia

San Marzano Talò, Primitivo di Manduria 2020 (Hallgarten & Novum Wines)

Puglian Primitivo is seen by many retailers as the perfect red entry point to Italy for wine buyers raised on the lush, sweet fruit of classic New World brands, an idea that no doubt owes a little of its purchase from the connection with Zinfandel. But it would be a great disservice to Puglia in general, and San Marzano in particular, to see its red wines solely through that narrow commercial lens. There’s too much going on in Talò – fresh and dried cherries and plums, dark chocolate and baking spice, a ripple of sour-cherry acidity – to say it was anything other than its own, regionally hyper-specific thing.

Basilicata

Vigneti del Vulture, Pipoli Aglianico del Vulture 2020 (Liberty Wines)

A regular winner at The Wine Merchant Top 100, Vigneti del Vulture is the work of Valentino Sciotti (of Vesevo and Gran Sasso among others) who took over a cooperative in Acerenza in 2008, and called on the talents of consultant winemaker Alberto Antonini to work with Danilo Gizzi to make a modern interpretation of local grape varieties. The Mezzogiorno’s answer to Nebbiolo, Aglianico, was first among equals, and here yields a powerful, crowdpleasing combination of ripe red and black fruit, floral notes and spicy mocha oak.

Calabria

Tenuta del Conte, Cirò Rosso Classico Superiore 2018 (Astrum)

In Calabria, a loose association of growers dedicated to making authentically local, low-intervention wines and restoring the reputation of the Cirò DOC used to be known as the Cirò Boys. According to importer Astrum, when talented winemaker Mariangela Parrilla took up the winemaking reins at Tenuta del Conte in 2011, the organisation changed its name to The Cirò Revolution. A wise move, since the group would most certainly not be the same without Parrilla’s input – or wines such as The Cirò Rosso, which shows off all the warm earth, garrigue herbs and black berries of the local Gaglioppo variety.

Sicily

From FOCUS ON ITALY THE WINE MERCHANT JUNE 2023 64

Cantine Nicosia Nerello Mascalese, Etna 2021 (Boutinot)

Such has been France’s historic grip on the notion of fine wine, the temptation to find French equivalents to help understand Italian grape varieties is hard even for Italian winemakers to resist. When it comes to Nerello Mascalese, Pinot Noir is the grape that is most frequently invoked – and, when you think of the combination of silk texture, perfume and terroir reflectiveness of Etna’s finest reds, it makes a lot of sense. Whether Pinot Noir

Palermo, Sicily grown anywhere has the versatility to produce the kind of affordable, juicy, racy, red-fruited easy-drinker that Nicosia does here is another matter altogether. But, either way, importer Boutinot’s suggestion that “this is to Etna what Langhe Nebbiolo is to Barolo” seems like the best way of summing things up.

Sardinia

Antonella Corda Cannonau di Sardegna 2020 (Liberty Wines)

You can see why people in Langhe, southern Piedmont, still revere the name Arnaldo Rivera, 40 years after his death. A schoolteacher and longstanding mayor of Castiglione Falletto, he was a charismatic and principled man with a passion for social justice.

In the decades leading up to the 1950s, Barolo producers faced real hardship. Grapes were sold for a pittance in the marketplace of Alba to ruthless brokers working on behalf of large industrial interests. Rivera was appalled by the undignified way the region’s farmers were forced to exist and imagined a fairer system in which energies, and profits, were pooled. So the Terre del Barolo co-operative came about, and from the beginning it had far grander ambitions than the co-ops of old. Though initially hesitant, vignerons across the region bought into the project and before long its membership had ballooned from 22 to 500 families. The wines it produced helped to reposition and redefine Barolo.

Today, some of those families have taken different paths but are still regarded as sons and daughters of Terre del Barolo, not rivals. For the 300 that remain enthusiastic stakeholders, there’s shared pride in the co-operative’s premium winemaking project that bears the name of their visionary founder.

The first Barolo wines under the ArnaldoRivera name launched in 2017, from the 2013 vintage. Made with fruit grown by just 30 families based in the best sites, spread across all 11 Barolo communes, the wines represent the highest echelons of the co-operative’s output and show how versatile Nebbiolo can be in its homeland.

The flagship wine, Undicicommuni [“Eleven Communes”], showcases the art of the blender, but there are single-vineyard wines too, expressing the terroir of plots that can be as small as half a hectare.

“Undicicommuni represents a little revolution in Barolo,” says the company’s Gabriele Oderda.

“The idea of Arnaldo Rivera from the beginning was to unify all Barolo villages, every grower, and to represent the story of each family through the generations. We are all of them together. So this is a mega blend. It’s our grande cuvée.”

ArnaldoRivera’s range encompasses nine Barolo crus, and the 2019s are now in trade. Representing Castello, Monvigliero, Ravera, Rocche dell’Annunziata, Vignarionda, Villero and Rocche di Castiglione, each is testament to the huge stylistic range that Nebbiolo can achieve in such varied terroir.

“These are all historic crus – even my grandfather would know the name of these vineyards,” says Oderda. “The wines are so different. Nebbiolo is very sensitive. We used to talk about Barolo as the grand wine of Italy. But now we can say there is a Barolo for every day of the week.”

Nebbiolo is not the only star of the show, however. Rare native grapes, such as Verduno Pelaverga and Nascetta del Comune di Novello, add an extra layer of interest to the range.

Oderda describes these varieties as “the B-side of Barolo”. Both probably owe their survival to their local popularity as table grapes, but today they are producing scintillating and authentic wines under the ArnaldoRivera banner.