[wine] Red/White Burgundy at 510

Greetings, Lots of interesting wines, good food at Erte. Bruschetta, chx-wild_rice soup, steaks were very good. This week (9/16/04) we're doing White and/or Red Burgundy at the 510. Head count may be an issue.... Ten pours is a practical limit. If **ALL** of the couples share a pour, then we're at 11. The 510 Restaurant 510 Groveland Ave MINNEAPOLIS, MN 55403 Phone: 612-874-6440 Who's coming Fred/Kim Jim/Louise Russ/Sue Warren/Ruth Betsy Bob B-Dave Karin Lori Nicolai Roger Cheers, Jim December 10, 2004 MONTALCINO JOURNAL Museum Puts Life, Truth and, It Hopes, Sales in a Wine By IAN FISHER MONTALCINO, Italy - With a wine as famous as the Brunello di Montalcino made here - and with a million tourists who come each year because of it - you might expect the museum that opened in this ancient Tuscan hill town in November to be a shrine to luxury and prestige. But the exhibits are more ordinary: how local cobblers or dressmakers lived; a rustic pitchfork carved from a branch; records of Jews who settled in this part of Tuscany at least since the 13th century. "Maybe you like Brunello, maybe you don't," said Stefano Cinelli Colombini, one of the top producers of the wine, who is opening the museum at his winery here, Fattoria dei Barbi. "But Brunello is unique. What we want to show is the connection between the wine, the territory and this culture. Brunello was created here by these people, who wore these dresses, who used these tools. Brunello cannot exist without them." Sounds simple enough, but like the wine itself, it's a little more complicated: Mr. Colombini's quaint museum is also a craftier version of the sales pitch that Italian wine producers throughout the country's varied regions are making to revive the sagging demand for Italian wine: that, as some of them say, you are buying Italian culture in a bottle. In the last few years, Italian wine exports have fallen by about 10 percent, a problem caused by a mix of the ever weaker dollar against the euro, which makes European products more expensive abroad, and continuing competition from good, less expensive wine from countries like Chile, Australia and South Africa. High costs in Italy - and, some argue, greed on the part of winemakers - makes cutting prices difficult. So the Italian wine industry is deep in a campaign not to compete directly on price or quality, but to emphasize what is distinct, and distinctly Italian, about its wine: how certain Italian wines go with Italian food; the life and history in the places, like here in Montalcino, where wine is made; the almost uncountable strains of grapes particular to Italy. "Ottavianello!" declared Umberto Benezzoli, a wine expert, as he swirled a glass at a conference of more than 1,000 winemakers in Turin in October. "Personally, I'd never heard of it until yesterday. It was on its way to extinction!" Ottavianello, it turned out, is the name of an obscure grape that a wine producer from the southern region of Apulia, Academia dei Racemi, found neglected in its vineyard - and decided to turn into a varietal wine of its own, rather than blending it with others. The company's exports to the United States, an important market, have dropped in recent years from 30 percent of what it produces to less than 10 percent, and like other winemakers at the conference, it is looking for an edge by selling wine that could come only from Italy. "This kind of grape tastes of our territory," said Cosimo Spina, 43, the company's winemaker, whose hands were stained purple. "You can't say the same of cabernet. That's French. It can't represent us." The notion of marketing Italy as a land of unique history and culture is not exactly new. (James Joyce, living unhappily in Rome, once likened the nation's hawking of its past to a man "exhibiting to travelers his grandmother's corpse.") And, certainly, it is no guarantee of success. The almost fetishistic devotion to Tuscany among foreigners has not faded, but wine sales still have dropped. Some experts say that what Italy really needs is a more organized effort to cut prices and to simplify for foreign drinkers an already too complicated range of wines. "People are put off," said Michele Shah, a wine consultant and writer who helped organize the Turin conference. "They don't know what they are drinking." Here in Montalcino, sales do not seem to be an immediate concern for Mr. Colombini, even if this question of culture and wine certainly does. It was a change in that culture that first inspired the museum two years ago. Montalcino, a town nearly emptied after a distant highway built in the 1960's replaced one that had enriched it since Roman times, has been flooded in the last two decades with outsiders as Brunello developed into one of Italy's best and most expensive wines, fetching $50 a bottle and up. Half of the 300 producers of Brunello, he said, are foreigners, as are half the town's 5,000 residents. "We had more or less an invasion," Mr. Colombini said. "Now our problem is to save the tradition and character of our community and to share our culture with the newcomers." "We want them," he added. "But we need them to be a part of our culture." So with the help of residents who scoured their attics, he collected 10,000 photographs of old Montalcino; the contents of typical houses of middle-class families and workers; tools from blacksmiths, cobblers (especially important on a stop along the old Roman road) and, of course, winemakers. The new museum, which also will include a room for a bottle each from the 300 producers of Brunello, this month, provides a further attraction for a winery that already draws some 50,000 visitors a year. Those are numbers that few Italian wineries can boast, yet each claims a local grape and a unique tradition in pressing, aging and bottling it. Italian vintners are banking on that singularity to attract new drinkers, shape tastes and, they hope, eventually lift sales. "It is impossible to think of the wine without the culture that generated it," Mr. Colombini said. "That's the mistake of most technicians. They think that a wine is like a wheel, like a car you can build anywhere. They think wine is a technical thing. But it's not true." "You can produce a superb cabernet anywhere," he added. "It's not a problem. But you can't produce this wine somewhere else." -- ------------------------------ * * Dr. James Lee Ellingson, Adjunct Professor jellings(a)me.umn.edu * * University of Minnesota, tel: 651/645-0753 fax 651 XXX XXXX * * Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *