Childhood Heroines and Wine Extraordinaires

A couple Fridays ago was our one year anniversary of being engaged. We began the night with seeing Jerry Seinfeld, who was doing standup at that all too creatively named Chicago Theater downtown, and afterwards we decided to head to a local place downtown. I had met the chef - a transplant from Italy - at an event last year and we had previously a decent meal at his restaurant with a nice bottle of Brunello last October. However, in the year to follow the food took a bit of a dive  and the meal last Friday would have been a bust if it weren’t for the jaw-dropping bottle of wine that made the experience more than worth our while.

Sara Louise Bradshaw was on of my heroines

In order to accurately describe my wine experience with this bottle, I need to back up all the way to my childhood. I am the daughter of a fiercely independent and sharply intelligent woman and was raised to believe in my ability to be and achieve whatever I want, whether it was something expected of me as a woman or not. That resulted in my favorite hero(ines) in books and films being the strong women with teste dure who knew who they were, loved who they loved, and lived as they saw fit. This didn’t always mean the rebel; I looked up to an identified with the women and characters who were strong willed, intelligent, go-getters, and above all, believed in themselves.

It was in the Nov 2012 issue of La Cucina Italiana that I first read about Elisabetta Foradori. Hailing from the northeastern Italian region of Trentino-Alto-Adige - most widely known for its production of white grapes - Foradori is attributed with almost single-handedly putting the indigenous red grape of teroldego on the global wine world’s map. She committed herself to (wo)manning the helm of her family’s winery at the young age of 19, and one of her first tasks was ripping out the 50+ acres of the estate’s new vines bearing teroldego clones – useful for high quantity but not known for high quality – and replanting the land with clippings of the true and quality vines.

A simply magnificent wine

From this act, Foradori has not only rededicated her winery to quality wines with a worldwide following, but she’s done it her way, following her instincts and desires instead of that of others - including the DOC commission. In fact, there was a point during which the DOC regulators called her out on her deviating winemaking tactics and gave Foradori the choice to comply with their regulations or have her wines removed from the prestigious (debatably…) Italian certification. She refused to change to what she considered inferior production methods and promptly allowed her wines to drop to the lower classification of IGT. Foradori’s strong will and fierce dedication to her vines - she is a prime example of the belief that great wines begin in the vineyard not the cantina, following Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamic agricultural techniques linked to phases of the moon and returning to amphorae to ferment some of her wines – has paid off.

Foradori makes her wines bidoynamically

I read about her over a year ago (she was also recently in Wine Spectator) but did not have the pleasure of trying one of her wines until this last Friday night. While skimming through the unimpressive wine list for inspiration, I found it...a diamond in the rough:  Foradori's expression of Teroldego. Hastily calling the waiter over (like it would disappear if I didn't immediately take advantage of it), I ordered the bottle and with one taste was simultaneously ported to Trentino's cool hills, personally introduced the strength and character in the wine expressing all that I had read about the person who had so lovingly made it, and blown away by the balance, complexity, and utter elegance of the wine. 

If I have one point of this blog, it is to tell you to go, now, and get one of these wines. Don't make the mistake of admiring from afar and waiting the year I did --this was one of the best wines I have tasted in the past month and a perfect expression of all I had read about. This wine is the embodiment of what I love about Italian wine - the fact that they themselves embody their maker. And to Elisabetta - thank you for putting the strong role model that you are into the high-quality wine that you make. I will be more actively seeking my next bottle...perhaps one of the white made in 20-ft amphorae under the soft light of the Trentino moon?