This episode of Wine, Food & Travel with Marc Millon was powered by Dialect Imports, tasting the language of Italian terroir. Marc takes us to the small, yet prestigious, wine zone of Montefalco. Marc’s guest is Giampaolo Tabarrini, owner of Azienda Agricola Tabarrini in Umbria. Marc and Giampaolo have met several times in the past, so their conversation opens warmly with Marc acknowledging the busy harvest season and thanking Giampaolo for making time to chat. The focus of the conversation is the native grape, Sagrantino, which Marc describes as extraordinary, mighty, and cantankerous. Marc asks Giampaolo to tell us about Montefalco and he replies, “Well, we are in a very lucky, lucky zone. First of all, it’s a territory that is very strange, it’s the only territory in Italy where you have two climatic conditions together. We are in the central to southern part of Italy, so our climate is Mediterranean. But in our zone, the Apennines drop down on the end of the peninsula, so we’re technically living in a circle in the middle of the Apennines, which gives us a continental climate. So here, you have a huge difference between the temperature of the day and the temperature of the night.” He goes on to explain that the huge temperature difference allows the grapes to develop unique characteristics, enhanced further by the lush verdant countryside around Montefalco. He points out that Umbria is the greenest region of the entire Italian peninsula, where it is possible to grow everything.
Marc mentions that Montefalco is located along the Salaria, one of the great Roman roads near the Clitunno Fountain, which was a Roman beauty and wellness destination during the Roman Empire. Giampaolo adds that the fountain is indicative of Umbria’s great natural water supply, providing plenty of water compared to many other regions in Italy suffering from drought. We know wine has been produced in Umbria for thousands of years, but Marc asks Giampaolo for a very brief family history of the Tabarrini winery specifically. Giampaolo tells him, “My great grandpa and my grandpa used to be growers, and they always, always made wine, oil, and they also had cows, which were our “tractor.” We remember the time of the methanol scandal in wine, in the north of Italy, in the 1970’s and 80’s, which made it very tough to sell the wine because people didn’t trust wine anymore.” In the 1990’s, Giampaolo convinced his father to lower the quantity of production and aim for quality, starting with bottling, rather than bulk wine. He recalls how, only 35 years ago, people in central Italy only drank bulk wine, arriving at the winery with their own demijohns to buy straight from the tank, consuming an average of 80-90 liters per person per year.
Marc remembers the moment when growers in Montefalco realized the potential of their wines to be truly great. It used to be the everyday beverage on the table but is now consumed in a different way. Talking about the Sagrantino wine Giampaolo produces, Marc asks what he would say to somebody who’s never tasted Sagrantino, how to describe what makes it special. Giampaolo explains that, in his travels, he always hears Sagrantino described by people as a huge, powerful, dark wine like a big Napa or a concentrated Super Tuscan. “These are not my thoughts about Sagrantino. It’s a grape that is very beautiful and very rich, lots of fruit, a lot of complexity. When you have this richness and complexity, you have to be more careful because more is not better.” He says that, today, people that drink 26 liters per year, not drinking more but drinking much better. “So we don’t want more. We want better. And better doesn’t mean more. We’re not magicians. We’re just chefs. We cook. And as any chef, we need to understand which is the better way to handle the raw material.”
To learn more about Montefalco, watch Stevie Kim interviewing Giampaolo:
Looking at specific Tabarrini wines, Marc mentions the Bisbetico Domato, which means grumpy and cantankerous. Giampaolo tells us the local traditional double meaning, and the fact that it’s deliberately unclear whether the wine is cantankerous or the winemaker is. He says “the character of the wine is the same character of the wine maker. So we’re twins.” Marc adds that he was “amazed and surprised at how approachable you’ve been able to make this, how beautiful this wine is.” This brings the conversation to the “Tabarrini method” for taming Sagrantino. Giampaolo shares that he was studying his wine 15 years ago, looking at fermenting ideas he had in mind, drawing and mapping everything in his cellar, and he realised they were wasting space. He began to think about eliminating most of the stainless steel, which was only used briefly in the winemaking process. He wanted a new way to handle the grapes during the fermentation, to be more careful, more delicate. In 2019 he built a new system and achieved “the best wine I have ever made in my life.” By 2022 the process was working well enough for the University of Perugia to validate it, receiving the patent in Italy, then in Europe, and then in many countries around the world.
The new process creates wines that still have the essential character of Sagrantino, but in a more approachable way. Giampaolo says, “the beauty of the story is I suffer a lot. Well, when I started to make the wine, to go from a wine that is 89 points, to 90 was easy, 91 and 92 a little bit harder, 93 even harder. To arrive at 97 points I had to do a thousand, thousand, thousand things. So because 100 doesn’t exist, because it’s the perfection, our 100 is far away. And we can grow.”
Giampaolo was a pioneer of producing cru Sagrantino wines, including his Campo Alla Cerqua. He explains that his three cru wines became important to him because he realised “I cannot change the wine, the fluid itself. If you are born round, you will not die squared.” Understanding the individual sites, soils, and characteristics of the crus made sense, as did vinifying them separately, to focus on the specifics of each one. Cerqua is the “salty” one, Colle Alle Macchie is on top of a clay hill, making the grapes sweeter in character and more fluid on the palate. “So you see, it is all the same grapes, but the wines are different, because they have their own soul and we handle their own soul. We don’t change it.”
Marc mentions the Sagrantino Passito, possibly the most traditional of Tabarrini’s wines. Giampaolo says it is the only wine he actually did change, allowing the residual sugar level to rise to 179 grams per litre, but maintaining a dry character that comes from the Sagrantino grape itself, known for its high tannins. “So it seems that it’s really a little bit sweet, but at the same time, it’s dry because it’s the Sagrantino grape. So the sweetness is just the first touch on the mouth and the mouth immediately after starts to be dry and a little bit bitter. So this is not a dessert wine. This was a wine where we changed our vision. It’s good with meat cooked on a fire, grill, or a wooden oven, or it is a perfect wine for lamb because lamb is a sweet meat, and all the elements that you have are salt, and pepper, and the kind of sweetness matches perfectly with the passito.”
Giampaolo is selling his wines all around the world now and Marc asks if there are particular foods anywhere in the world that pair particularly well with Sagrantino. Giampaolo responds enthusiastically, pointing to Asian food in particular. Both Chinese food and Indian cuisine work well with Sagrantino, as does food from Japan, which tends to be eaten at a low temperature. Giampaolo says these dishes create a sensation on the mouth from the spices and a huge sensation of softness from the wine. He says Bisbetico Domato can be served lightly chilled without the tannins exploding in your mouth, as a more gentle experience with Japanese cuisine.
Encouraging people to visit Tabarrini, to visit Montefalco to see the green heart of Italy, Giampaolo says, “the winery is open every day and we are so proud to host people and show them the winemaking process at our winery. Our winery is a bunch of dreams collected altogether, and it’s something we’ve been dreaming for 25 years. So how our heart is here.” He points out that Umbria is so rich in terms of food, it is considered the heart of the tradition of cold cuts in Italy. There are a lot of lovely B&Bs and a great selection of restaurants in and around Montefalco, whose ancient city walls protect the small population of 350-400 people.
Want to hear more from Gianpaolo Tabarrini? Check out earlier conversations:
Ep. 1914 Giampaolo Tabarrini | Wine, Food & Travel With Marc Millon
