You may have noticed Rainbow was on vacation last week. Em is visiting wineries and vacationing in Greece and Italy. I am traveling in a beautiful place but one where there isn’t natural wine unless you bring it, and I finally got tired of hauling it here. I’m thinking of what i will taste when I get home.
Some distance from friends, from my partner, from my pets and my city, Chicago, I am full of nostalgic wine thoughts today. Em wrote an eloquent and nuanced post about sentimentality and wine, one whose complexity I won’t attempt to match. Today I just want to talk about one wine we have in the shop right now. My mind wanders to this bottle, one I’m likely to open this weekend, one that I made memories with which, calling on them, makes me feel warm inside. This wine is kind of a pop star in the natural wine world, and like all pop stars, in my view, its popularity does not make it any less meaningful.
Em is in Lazio, the winemaking region nearest to the city of Rome, and hopes to visit Le Coste winery next week. The winemakers are Clem, who is French, and Gianmarco, who is Italian. Em’s and my shared feeling about what makes their wines so dynamic these days is the Franco-Italianese energy. They register on my palette like complimentary colors, French blues against orange rust earthtones, provencal lavendar against golden fennel buds. I have synastesia with them.
The Litrozzo wines are unique from the rest of the bottlings - they are meant to be a little more direct, bottled in liter (litrozzo) for sharing and drinking liberally. The rosato is from the Aleatico grape, considered like the red grape version of Muscat, for its aromatic, floral ways. For a while we didn’t receive the rosato here in Chicago, and I became a little obsessed with having some to drink and sell on the third coast (those were the days when I just wanted things if I couldn’t have them, I’m on the journey of moving as far, far away from that as possible). My partner visited the east coast and drank a bottle of it, and I was so jealous. I saw it on instagram, I could almost smell the Aleatico through the images and my craving grew.
When I finally had some to sell at Red & White, we sold it pretty quickly, and I didn’t really bond with it. I drank literally two sips of it. A few months later Em and I were having a rare shared night off, and decided to really go all out and each dinner out somewhere together. We went to Cafe Mairie Jeanne, a restaurant now closed that place I miss everyday. It was winter by this time, and drinking Litrozzo rosato seemed iffy. We weren’t particularly thirsty, and we were going to eat roast chicken. But it was the wine we most wanted to drink abstracted from place and time, and maybe the best price too, so we had it.
It was such a lovely companion at our table. French fries and juicy, roasted onion smoked chicken with the bold, saline wine, was a delight. Roast chicken dinner earns its revered reputation, and adding fries and a buoyant rose made it a feast.
The wine at that time was pretty vertical in energy, acidic and very savory, a little nutty and less of the ‘direct’ quality I mentioned - less fruity, basically. This new vintage, by contrast is very freshly fruity and floral. It smells and tastes like tuberose and strawberry and also kind of like the beach, a bit of wet sand, a bit of spf. When we drove it our case of it back from Giambotta, we were in a very scary spot on I-90 where we had to slam on the brakes to prevent a multi-car pile up, and sadly, one of the bottles collided so much inside the case with another bottle that the glass smashed. It was kind of a happy accident, tragic as it was to loose a bottle. My car smelled like candied violet, roses, lilacs, white peaches and red berries for weeks. Now I am bonded with the wine, and the fabric of my car trunk is too.
Litrozzo Rosato and bianco are both available in the store. We have lots of new wines from Australia - from Lucy Margaux (fresh, herbaceous Pinot Blanc, mineral, juicy Pinot Noir and Persepone Wines (vibrant Gamay and the gorgeous rose, Cuvee Simone, after Chateau Simone in southern France) that are also great for hot dog days of summer. DM @rainbow_wines or email us @rainbowwinechi@gmail.com anytime with wine questions - we love to hear from you.
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