Sommelier Yvonne: 5 terre wines for your Summer table

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Sommelier Yvonne: wines for your Summer table

Is there a better wine for your winter table? Is association with food important? What shall we drink when we are spending our holidays in the Cinque Terre during winter time?

All great questions we will direct to Yvonne Riccobaldi, the well know sommelier and expert in Cinque Wines. She’s also the owner, along with her husband Tino Celano, of A Pié de Campu Wine Cellar and Focaccia Place in Manarola, an amazing place for food classes and wine tasting.

Yvonne Tips – Summer Edition

Our farmers choose independent way of making wines. Some of them prefer following the “rules” with an academic attitude offering a more flavoured wine, while others like keeping the memory of their ancestors wines. So the use alternative ways of producing it and creating, this way, a more structured and long lasting wine. This kind of wine goes along with more sophisticated dishes and are ideal for after dinner meditation.

This difference in style can be crucial to assign a seasonality to the wines we take on our table.

In Summer we will prefer drinking what Ivonne defines a more “beverino” wine. It means a more drinkable wine, the one that easily goes down. It’s a “thinner” wine, more refreshing. These qualities come from their acidity and we will match them to more simple dishes. They will adapt to season changes and the temperature around us.

In Winter we will prefer thicker wines, more persistent and with spicy notes. We need more complex wines that will fill our palates with unique sensations going deep till our souls. The matching food will be more structured and will require longer cooking. Our dishes will be more spicy so to enrich flavours and perfumes.

This is Ivonne’s selection for our Summer table

Azienda Crovara Alessandro – Manarola

White wine with citrus, wild flowers, fruit notes. Pleasant taste, easy to drink, good for aperitif time, at sunset or with light sea food appetisers

Azienda Cheo – Vernazza

Fresh wine, pleasant on the nose with herbaceous notes of Mediterranean aromatic herbs and fruity hints with white

flesh, stretched in the mouth with discreetly perceptible sapidity, suitable, in summer, and for lunch with a baked fish.

Azienda I Magnati

White wine with good olfactory expression, hints of summer fruit such as apricot, peach, spicy notes from a light passage in wood. On the palate it is extremely gratifying by virtue of sapid sensations, it lends itself to the whole meal or better still in a pleasant after dinner.

Azienda Forlini Capellini – Manarola

White wine of excellent workmanship, clean, slender and ready to drink, hints of white-flowered Mediterranean scrub, fruity like green apple and pear, savoury and fresh on the palate. Intriguing in a summer aperitif, or with a first course of fish with oil extra virgin olive oil at the end of cooking.

Azienda La Polenza – Corniglia

Fresh white wine with acidity and a pleasant fruity note, fresh and savoury on the palate, suitable and winning for the summer aperitif in mid-August.

Azienda Litan – Riomaggiore

White wine with strong, warm and sun-coloured scents … yellow flowers, broom, chamomile, notes of aromatic herbs, fruity hints of yellow peach, yellow apple, hints of saffron, white pepper … Palate entrance with balance and well supported by acidity and savoury, amazing in the summer throughout the meal with delicious seafood dishes, designed to highlight its sapid strength.

Knowing the Cinque Terre wines

The Cinque Terre: a land where fragility represents its weak aspect but also its strength and uniqueness.

The rocks that slide into the waters and the sun over them, enhancing their beauty, make the wines of this enchanting paradise powerful, severe and uncommon.

The Cinque Terre White Wines: the three vines that make-up this peculiar wine share harmoniously their task.

The Cinque Terre wine gets

structure and power from the Bosco vine, that grows only in this land
perfumes and flavours from the Vermentino vine, the Mediterranean queen of vines
the pleasant taste and its acidity from the Albarola vine

The Cinque Terre winemakers are so skilled in using and blending these three vines and exalting now the Vermentino bouquet, now the strength and persistence of the Bosco grapes.

Any wine offers us different and unique sensations, but the presence of the main vine, the Bosco one, always leads to our palate unique, iodised, salty, savoury notes.

This make us understand the synergy between the rocky soil and the hot sun shining on it and which slowly fades at sunset letting the terraced vineyards cool down at night brushed by the Mediterranean waves.

The largest production in the Cinque Terre is white wine

In the Cinque Terre we have a dominant production of white wines. It’s the kind of wine of our tradition, it brings the proud history of this land on our tables.

We have in the entire area of the Cinque Terre 25 small producers. They produce an average of 400.00 bottles per year: 130.000 bottles by the Cantina Sociale of the Cinque Terre National Park, 100.00 bottles by a producer in Monterosso that receives grapes from other farmers and the rest of the remaining 200.000 bottles come from the remaining 23 producers.