What’s in a Name?

October 24th, 2023

What’s in a Name?

Italian wines are notoriously cryptic, even to the initiated wine professional. Looking at a label it can be hard to know who the producer is, where the wine comes from, whether you’re looking at the name of the winery, the name of the wine, the name of the grape, or the name of the winemaker’s brother. There’s a wine that I’m rather fond of whose label says, in this order, from top to bottom:

Masseria Li Veli
Passamante
Salice Salentino
Denominazione di Origine Controllata

In this case, the first words on the label are actually the producer. Great, we’re off to a good start. Passamante? Just a name for the wine, but it’s derived from a wooded area adjacent to the vineyards. Obviously. Salice Salentino at least gives you a clue as to where the wine comes from. Enthusiasts of Italian wine will recognize it as a wine producing appellation from Apulia. The last bit, the DOC, indicates that the place of production is regulated and guaranteed. But unless you know that Salice Salentino is an appellation that calls for the use of the grape Negroamaro, you would have no clue what the wine was made out of.

German wine labels are complicated, but at least they follow an internal logic. Italian wine labels are a bewildering hotbed of madness (I sure do love the wines, though).

Complicating matters, wine labeling is not universal. If you see “Reserve” on an American wine bottle, legally speaking, it means bupkis. If you see it on a Spanish or Italian wine bottle, it is a legally mandated minimum time span of aging the wine at the winery. It might vary region to region, but it is at least regulated.

Another term that you may have seen in use on Italian wine bottles, most commonly in Chianti and Soave, is the word “Classico.” What’s all this then, you might wonder? It isn’t a New Coke / Coke Classic formula difference, here it refers to geography. Post-World War 2, Americans remaining in Europe developed a taste for some of the local flavor. Merchants knew that there was money to be made selling wines to a developing market, and where there’s money to be made, there are boundaries to be pushed.

What happened to both appellations was that a fondness by the Americans for the real deal juice was taken advantage of by less than scrupulous business people. If Guiseppe’s farm was just outside the boundary for Soave wine production, maybe he waits till his cousin’s on the certifying board and they make a pitch to expand the boundary, but just a little bit. And then a little bit further for Paolo’s farm. Why not a little of that Soave money for Alessandro just next door to that? What happened was an expansion of permitted growing acreage to make Soave and by 1990’s was a single co-op producing 80% of all Soave wine mostly from fruit grown far from the original boundaries that Soave made its name on.

Eventually the growers doing Bacchus’s work in the original, classico, zones of production pitched the idea of a way of labeling the wine as such. What made the Classico Soave region so special were its hillside vineyards and varied, volcanic soils that were contrasted by the fertile flatlands that co-opted the Soave name.

Now with this little Snapple Fact in your pocket, you can dazzle your friends at the restaurant when you’re able to pick a superior Soave. Of course true to Italian style, I’ve made it through all of this light history and label law, and I haven’t even said what color the wine is or what it’s made of!

Next time that you’re out shopping for a dry, medium to full bodied white wine, try a Soave made out of the elegantly named Garganega (with a bit of Trebbiano di Soave a.k.a. Verdicchio) from Italy’s Veneto to shake things up. After a few glasses of this Italian classic the labels might start making sense.

-Joe Buchter, Import Wine Buyer

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