Sommelier Yvonne: 5 terre wines for your Winter table

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Sommelier Yvonne: wines for your Winter 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 – Winter 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. Others like keeping the memory of their ancestors wines, using alternative ways of producing it. They create, this way, a more structured and long lasting wine that 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, the one that easily goes down and is a “thinner” wine, more refreshing. These qualities come from their acidity and we will match them to more simple dishes that 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 it will require longer cooking and will be more spicy so to enrich flavours and perfumes.

This is Ivonne’s selection for our Winter table

Azienda Walter De Batté – Riomaggiore

White wine with persuasive and Mediterranean aromas, Mediterranean scrub, yellow flowers, spicy, salty hints. Silky on the palate, with a thickness more similar to a red, persistence and great personality .. a meditation wine on winter evenings

Azienda La Torre – Campiglia

White wine with natural and enveloping scents, a symphony of fragrant notes that follow one another as it opens in the glass. We find saffron, honey, apricot, yellow peach in it. A wine that must be sipped and combined with an excellent lamb with potatoes to add colours to a grey November sky!

Azienda Campo Grande – Riomaggiore

Telemaco is the cleanest and most sincere expression of a white wine barricaded and aged in glass … longevity, slow and subtle aromas, persistence and freshness arrive, with a conductor who is well dosed buttery. Sublime on a special winter evening.

Azienda Vetua – Monterosso

White wine that gives us a walk among the summer paths, but with its power on the palate, persistent, savoury and almost tannic, it lends itself to be sipped in winter, with a long-cooked meat dish and seasoned with our aromatic herbs. A summer memory on a winter evening

Azienda Luciano Cappellini – Volastra

A white wine that gives us hints of scrub, brackish notes, flavour and freshness on the palate, persistence … a wine that spring is its moment, prelude to a good hot summer … better if it is more than two years old.

Knowing the Cinque Terre wines

The Cinque Terre: a land where fragility represents its weak aspect but, at the same time, 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. They exalt now the Vermentino bouquet, and now the strength and persistence of the Bosco grapes.

Any wine offers us different and unique sensations. 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.

Each wines shows and tells eloquently the personality and the history of its maker

Main focus for all the wine producers is quality and not quantity

Each farmer reaches a total of 600/8000 bottles per year