I may have written in the past of our project to taste through the wines of Italy. Believe it or not it has been going on since the start of 2018 – nearly two years ago – and now we are starting to get close to the end. This past weekend we took another step by tasting wines from Puglia, Italy.
You might know Puglia as the home of zinfandel, namely the primitivo grape native to the area. Thanks to the power of DNA matching we can trace zinfandel’s (ahem) roots to Puglia, and it is still going strong there, with Puglia ranked number 3 in Italy for pure wine volume. But volume doesn’t always mean quality, and I chose wines carefully with the help of a big wine book and a few local blogs translated from Italian.
Although there are a few native varieties grown in Puglia we chose to focus mainly on primitivo because of our love for Zinfandel from California, but we also included a negroamaro in both red and rosé form. In total we tasted six wines, and as always it was fun to compare.
The nice thing about Italian primitivo is that they are very affordable – most of our wines were under 20 dollars, and all of them under 30 dollars. They are big juicy wines that have the fruitiness and intensity of Zinfandel without becoming jammy or candy-like which we’ve found with some lower cost California zins.
My personal favorite was a 2017 Primitivo Di Manduria Ferrine, but they were all great wines that were easy to drink. Not a lot of complexity or aging potential, but great to open and serve with whatever you’re cooking.
And to go with the wine I followed a pasta recipe recommended for the Puglia region focused on cauliflower and panchetta with plenty of pecorino romano cheese and garlic. Since I had some extra cauliflower I cold smoked it, basted it with olive oil and then slow roasted the florets for a couple of hours together with a head of garlic and some cherry tomatoes to make a side dish. Kuniko brought home some excellent bread from one of her favorite bakeries inside Osaka Umeda station, and the food side of the tasting was covered.
So another checkpoint cleared in our Italian wine tour! Just three regions left – we’ll head to Sicily next, Sardegna after that, and we’ll wrap up the tour in Tuscany, saving the most famous (and most expensive) region for the grand finale.
