You’re standing in a wine shop facing a wall of obscure (to you) Italian red wines. One sounds familiar. And the price is fair. But you’ve never heard of the wine before: Salice Salentino (sal-ee-chay sal-en-teen-oh).
A clerk is either not available or can’t tell you anything about it. Have no fear, however; help is on the way. If, that is, you have a cellphone.
This essay is all about wine education “on the fly,” which is about as painless as you can imagine since you don’t have to learn anything about Garibaldi, Italian government regs, or laws about how wine must be made.
Just Google the wine’s name. You'll learn that Salice Salentino is a dark, slightly rustic red wine made from a grape called “negroamaro.” Roughly translated, it means black/bitter.
It has now taken you less than a minute to learn that this wine, which likely sells for less than $20 a bottle, sounds like a decent value, and although you’re concerned about the word “bitter,” you look a little further.
Another 60 seconds of reading on your cellphone determines that the negroamaro grape was named hundreds of years ago and that wine technologists since then gave us the ability to make delicious red wines from it—a variety that might once have been bitter.
If the name negroamaro seems familiar, here a week ago in this column I recommended a rose produced from that variety. It didn’t bear the name Salice Salentino. Instead, it said Salento, its home.
Cellphone wine education is a topic I’ve preached for two decades. The cellphone/internet is one of the most forgotten research tools budding wine lovers can make use of in attempting to find decent wine values in corners of the world, areas that get no respect or attention from most wine writers.
This includes places like Paarl, Tupungato, Bio Bio, and Canelones, all of whose wines now are being imported to this country. Each represents exciting new opportunities for the adventuresome.
An example of how this would work: A few seconds ago, I typed “Canelones wine region” into the Google search engine. What popped up were several sites that told me Canelones is home to 60 percent of all the wine being produced in northeastern Uruguay!
This country is emerging as a mesmerizing wine region, where some astonishingly fine wines are being crafted from sauvignon blanc, cabernet franc, tannat, and cabernet sauvignon, among others.
Back to negroamaro. Most of the world’s negroamaro is grown in Puglia in the Italian boot, a warm region where alcohol levels have been known to rise significantly. The best producers, however, work to keep the alcohol down.
This week’s Wine of the Week is a classic example of modern-day negroamaro. It has only 13 percent alcohol.
Salice Salentino first was certified as an official wine-growing district by the Italian government 48 years ago. In the late 1970s I tried the first red wines with that name that were imported to the United States. They weren’t very good. The main problem was a persistent funkiness.
Wine of the Week
2018 Cantele Salice Salentino Riserva DOC ($16): With spot-on aromas of cranberry, violet, and black cherry, the wine’s true personality only comes out after an hour open. The faint rustic character is its only complexity. But the wine’s perfect compatibility with food is evident in a single taste. Best with red-sauced pastas or lighter grilled meats. Occasionally seen discounted to $14. Imported by Winebow, New York. Bottle Barn in Santa Rosa has some at $12.49.
