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Maturano

Posted by Keith Wallace

To love Italy is also to loathe Italy. And those of us familiar with loving and hating something at the same time know that some traits of our beloved can be equally memorable and destructive. For Italy, that trait is fragmentation. So much of Italy’s charm lies in her fragmentation – each hill town its medieval duchy, each curve in the nose of the town barista evidence of a different ancient tribal conquest. Fragmentation, especially as you travel further south, makes Italy remarkable and appallingly dysfunctional.

And it also makes for enjoyable and sometimes excellent wine. In this land of fragmentation, each abandoned farm or derelict hedgerow has the dazzling potential to guard a genetically unique, ancient vine, perfectly adapted to the local conditions and awaiting a savior to rescue it from oblivion. We already know the stories of some of these vines and their patrons, like Fiano and Antonio Mastroberardino in Campania and Arneis and Bruno Giacosa in Piemonte. Into this pantheon enter a man named Cesidio Di Ciacca and a white grape called Maturano, tucked away in the little-known Val di Comino region of Lazio, an alpine paradise between Rome and Naples where brown bear amble down from mountain redoubts to bathe in town fountains.

Though Maturano was recorded in the 1881 Italian Ministry of Agriculture’s Ampelographic Bulletin and is numbered 424 in Italy’s National Vine Registry, barely any of it existed, even less commercially, before Di Ciacca moved from Scotland to Picinisco to reclaim his family’s ancestral land, after cajoling and charming 140 distant relatives to sell him 220 discrete parcels of land, Di Ciacca had to choose which vines to grow. The local DOC, Cabernet di Atina, would provide an obvious answer. But Di Ciacca knew that his forebears weren’t growing French grapes, and locals assured him that Picinisco was perfectly adapted to, and the ancestral home of, a strange grape called Maturano.

After obtaining cuttings from local farmers so that, in Di Ciacca’s words, they couldn’t tell him later that he wasn’t growing Maturano, Di Ciacca hand-planted five hectares under the guidance of winemaker Alberto Antonini in 2013. Though Maturano used to be grown in the maritata fashion, with vines “married to trees” (Di Ciacca has a picture of his grandmother harvesting grapes, probably Maturano, grown this way), Di Ciacca trained his vines to trellises. Since the land had never seen chemicals or pesticides, he opted to eschew these inputs, growing his grapes “better than organic” in dry-farmed vineyards underlain by clay and limestone at 600 meters elevation and exposed to large diurnals.

Soon after, however, it was quickly apparent that the cuttings he obtained from his neighbors produced two distinct vines. Aside from differences in leaf morphology, the fruit could not have been more dissimilar between the two. One group produced bunches full of large, green,

and quite acerbic fruit; the other yielded small golden-yellow bunches, sparse on the stalk and much sweeter. Locals told a peeved Di Ciacca that these were indeed both Maturano, just maschile e femminile – masculine and feminine. Unconvinced, Di Ciacca sent samples to a laboratory for genetic testing. What he found out was that not only were both types indeed genetically identical, but that the Maturano genome was unrelated to any other known grape genome. Clearly, in this region that predated the Romans, Maturano itself is an ancient grape.

Fast forward to 2016. A banner year for the harvest, except that the ones that did the harvesting were the local wild boar. After digging fencing around the vineyard, Di Ciacca had his first actual harvest in 2017 – the largest Maturano harvest for decades, centuries, or perhaps millennia. Now he had to figure out how to treat this grape in the winery. Some decisions were easy, as he opted for only native yeasts and to age in concrete rather than terra cotta or wood since the area is known for its stonework, and terra cotta was historically uncommon. After that, he experimented. The first wine (and, to date, the most highly praised) is called Nostalgia, made from free-run juice without skin contact. Di Ciacca also makes one style with 3-4 days skin contact and an orange wine with ten months on the skins. Finally, he is experimenting with a passito since he notes that the local cuisine is replete with raisins.

Upon Di Ciacca’s first taste of Nostalgia, he realized that the wine he made was, in his words, “awful.” But he remembered reading a document from the Duchy of Alvito in 1595 that proclaimed that white wines from Picinisco were excellent but needed some time in the bottle. Di Ciacca surmises that this fact – the need for wines to mature – is where Maturano may have gotten its name. In any case, as the wines have aged, they have become excellent, and they continue to improve. It’s early, but signs point to Maturano being an ageworthy white wine, full of minerality and sapidity, capable of evolving gracefully. Anyone who knows the story of Fiorano and Prince Ludovisi knows that there can be true magic in ageworthy white wines from Lazio. Will Maturano reach such heights? Only time, in the bottle, will tell.

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