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Exam shazaam & Vinitaly

I read somewhere that on this day in 1755, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was born in France. He wrote The Physiology of Taste, about the pleasures of food, published in 1825 when he was just 69. I should like to add that a couple of centuries later, on this day in 1955, my dear departed parents were married; it was their enduring joke on the world to elope on April Fool’s day. The last anniversary they celebrated was their 46th, shortly after my return to Canada in 2001.

We wrote our much anticipated food technology exam on Friday which got me thinking, as I perused my notes in the lead-up, about how learning really takes place, particularly in an aging and over-full human brain. The information actually retained probably had more to do with affection for the instructor than interest in the subject. For example I’m not sure, having supposedly completed the course, that I even know what is meant by the term sensory analysis; my understanding of the term is all tangled up in my enduring incomprehension about statistical methods which appear to have been the main topic under discussion (for many reasons it was hard to know really what in that class was being discussed). On the other hand, I feel sound in my understanding of olive oil technology which included harvesting and milling operations as well as chemical make-up and regulatory issues around extra-virgin olive oil. Reading my notes again brought the pleasures of the class back to mind in a way that doesn’t normally happen, I think.


Our much-loved instructor in that class, Sandro Bosticco, who had also led us gently, kindly and knowledgeably through a couple of wine tasting classes last week (one of which I wretchedly had to miss, felled by another short-lived stomach bug), reappeared to lead us through the terrifying expanse of the Vinitaly show yesterday, which also features an olive oil exhibition, Sol. He took us through an oil tasting at a producer who was promoting a high quality blend of extra-virgin olive oils, called Gemini, which successfully combined the punch of Tuscan with the flavours of Sicilian. He then led us back into the Tuscan wine pavilion where we sampled some Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. Which of course is not to be confused with wine from the Montepulciano grape, as earlier explained by our Montepulciano-growing friends in Le Marche).

The rest of the day was an exhausting but pleasurable tour of a few select producers under the wing of our campus director, Carlo Catani, no slouch in the wine area himself, particularly when paired with another distinguished varietal, the university’s director Vittorio Manganelli. We lunched in the Puglian pavilion and saw again our old friends orecchiette and agnello, but the best thing on my plate was the starter, a lovely little timbale of melanzane bathing in a pool of fresh tomato sauce and jauntily garnished with shreds of cheese and a chapeau of basil leaf.

Would you go to a wine tasting in this pavilion?

And now a word from M.F.K. Fisher

..who speaks of her time in Dijon, that started in 1929:

It was there that I learned it is blessed to receive, as well as that every human being, no matter how base, is worthy of my respect and even my envy because he knows something that I many never be old or wise or kind or tender enough to know.

from Long Ago in France.

She speaks tellingly about her fierce and frugal landlady, Madame Ollangnier, who scours the markets and badgers the food sellers into handing over the lamest and haltest of edible foodstuffs which she then transforms into excellent meals for M.F.K. and her other lodgers.

So having read that last night I was delighted by the coincidence of this morning’s speaker, Andrea Segre of the University of Bologna, who told us a fabulous tale about his students’ food economics project that has blossomed into a many-fingered enterprise: Last Minute Market began as a way to turn the horrific waste of supermarket surpluses – those imperfect, unwrapped or dented items the ordinary consumer won’t touch with a ten foot euro – into nutritious meals for the local needy.

More food economy in the afternoon with Riccardo Vecchio who walked us through the ins and outs of PDO (Protected Denomination of Origin) and PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) marks on foods, from a marketing and economic point of view. They’re not just in Italy, not just in Europe or the UK, but potentially all over the place now. And he gave us a briefing on farmers’ markets, which are new to Italy (being gradually brought back in after they died out here around 1900, that is). There are plenty of food markets in Italy, it’s true, but the stall-holders are typically not farmers or food producers selling their own wares.

And now, back to my books. Food technology exam tomorrow. More later.

Arrivederci Apulia

Sea urchin (“UNI!!” shrieked the sushi-eaters), part of Friday’s lunch.

One of our speakers said he’d prefer to refer to the place we’ve been calling Puglia by its alternate and more ancient name, Apulia. We were rich in speakers this week.

Thursday we kicked off with a talk by eminent enologist Severino Garofano, about viticulture in the Mediterranean, as well as an overview of the Puglian grapes which we’d been encountering in liquid and nascent form all week. Negroamaro, primitivo, aleatico and susumaniello had all figured in our glasses, and we had a few more drops to sample the range of Garofano’s Azienda Monaci, over a lunch at our excellent hotel. It began with a clever little bundle of shellfish and ended with a triumph of torta: a warm, perfectly-sized almond souffle-ish marvel, melting with cream and a flourish of chocolate.

We took a chilly stroll through the vinyards of Tenute Rubino which are interlaced with fields of artichokes; a combination that works for me. The owners wanted us to get a sense of the land our evening wine would come from, and we certainly experienced the salt winds that flavour the grapes.


We travelled to Cisternino, a Slow City, where we enjoyed a meal of meat with our wine, in Rosticceria Antico Borgo Di Menga Piero, a fornello, a butcher shop where you can buy meat by day as in a regular butcher’s, but by night, when you approach the display cases as a steady stream of locals were doing, you choose your cut of meat much as North Americans might do with lobster. The offerings included involtini di trippa soffocati (tripe rolls), capretto (young goat), and costata di asino (donkey in a red sauce).

On Friday, there was another talk on fishing in the region which included discussion of garum, a Roman seasoning which lives on in the Vietnamese fish sauce nuoc mam, yet another food whose sustainability and provenance is under question (covered during the week in the (thanks Ruth) Christian Science Monitor).

We heard a lot about the different nets and traps used to catch seafood, including the technique of octopus-fishing requiring nothing more complicated than a chicken leg and a fishing line. Of course once you have your octopus you have to kill it, and then you have to beat it with a stick in order to tenderise it enough to eat.

We were given the opportunity to taste it raw, an opportunity that I do not think I will need to seek out again. It made me think how nice is octopus simmered in red wine. Or cooked in anything, really. Ditto the cuttlefish.

After lunch we headed out to see where the meal had come from, to the docks at Brindisi. We were on the brink of turning back, as it was windy and it seemed the fishermen may not have gone out, when a boat returned and its cargo was swiftly unloaded for a speedy fish auction.

One last supper – at the stylish Menhir – where we dined on fish of many faces including some local clams with broad beans and orecchiette.

We had some beautiful wines from Candido, including a mind-blowing Aleatico dessert wine. Then, clutching our tums and our lovely Maglio easter eggs, we stumbled off to bed to ready ourselves for the flight back to Milan early the next morning. Enough eight course suppers to fell an ox, more wines than we could count on two hands, and more enlightenment about the variety of local food products in this area than we would have believed possible. Next stop Vinitaly, in Verona this weekend, where we’ll certainly be seeing several of the wine-makers we’ve already encountered on our travels in Le Marche and Puglia.

Puglia Wednesday: wine and white cities

Wednesday’s schedule included a trip to la Riserva di Torre Guaceto where olive trees and other growing things are being protected. The olive trees we saw were at least 500 years old, and were part of a scheme to involve farmers in organic production methods by creating a co-op to produce and market organic extra-virgin olive oil.

There is also a marine park which includes the beach below, which we were told accommodates as many as 5000 visitors a day in the summer.

Although Italian marine parks like this one are off-limits to commercial fishermen, it seems that, through its conservation efforts, the reserve has enabled a 400% increase in fish stocks, and now a small local fishing enterprise is permitted, under strict scrutiny by the University of Lecce which monitors the size and type of fish that are caught.


We travelled next to a restored olive mill, Frantoio Locopagliaro, in the midst of a large olive grove. Underground mills were once the norm in this area, because they were practical to build – aboveground constructions required specialised labour – and their rock ceilings could withstand the pressure exerted by manual presses. The underground setting also maintained the oil and processing at optimal temperatures.

The press itself: after the olives and their stones were ground to a paste beneath horse-powered millstones, the paste was put in round woven baskets that were stacked and placed beneath the wooden screw which was turned by human effort. The oil was then separated from the rest of the liquid, and the paste was transferred for further pressing.

This olive crusher was used for the second crushing, to reduce the olive paste residue further for processing into lamp oil or other industrial use.

After a tasting of Puglian extra-virgin olive oils, we sat in intermittent sunshine to enjoy a terrific lunch which included such local novelties as chicory (a kind of spinach-like green) with pureed fava beans and roasted green peppers, a bit of burrata, some cacciocavallo, and a nice piece of capocollo tucked into an addictive little biscuit called taralli. And some lovely oily bread. And a glass of wine.

After this, we were whisked off to Ostuni – la Città Bianca – where we ascended to the summit for a quick look over the forests of olive trees below.


Then a speedy and very chilly visit to the vineyards, just starting to leaf, of Lomazzi & Sarli, who’d provided our previous night’s wines – including Dimastrodonato, a particularly good dessert wine made from a characteristic Pugliese grape (Aleatico) – and back we went to the hotel to rest up for supper.

Le Marche – lotsa pasta, a bit more wine

So, this account is jumping around a bit, but then so did we.

Last Wednesday’s pasta tour of Spinosi was great fun. We found ourselves on another hilltop, in the village of Campofilone, in more glorious sunshine, where we donned our paper outfits and toured the small factory that distributes its dried pasta around the world, and its fresh products locally.

Afterwards, we had a lunch (Spinosini with lemon and prosciutto) prepared by our host Marco Spinosi himself and after that, we did our best to the shelves of the Spinosi shop, and all piled back on the bus to commence our previously reported afternoon of pork.

Some of Spinosi’s Spiritosini biscotti for afters; these ones were almond, very nice indeed.

On Thursday, we had another wine talk, from the excellent and extremely well-travelled Gianpiero Rotini, Export Director for Umani Ronchi. He showed us round their cellars, including the new one which is something of an architectural marvel, buried in the hillside, with state of the art brickwork and underground humidification controls.

He was hugely informative and interesting on the subject of wine marketing and shared a lot of great tidbits for our grateful cogitation. He cleared up one area of confusion for me as a wine consumer: the Montepulciano grape is native to Le Marche, but is often confused with a Tuscan Sangiovese product from the Tuscan village of Montepulciano.

He also told us that wine is subject to the most restrictive legislation after food, which always makes for interesting challenges when approaching new markets. He told us about the punitive taxation on alcohol that is hindering European exports to India; the difficulties in distributing to a diverse and segmented market in the US; and the inward regional focus of the Spanish market which make it a difficult one to penetrate.

Italy, he said, was the hardest country to sell wines in. A well-established culture of daily consumption is offset by difficulties in transport and distribution: there is not a good road transportation network (those mountains again!) which makes it hard both to work as a distributor and to ship your product around the country. And a lot of the consumption is local, largely by preference and tradition, so it can be hard for new wines to break in.

On the theme of profit-driven distribution, we heard that international marketing has been subject to the greed that the market economy invites: so the imported wines we often recognise as characteristic of Italy – Chianti, Lambrusco – had in the past swamped export markets simply because they are immensely profitable for export = cheap to buy and can be sold for huge mark-ups.


After tasting some wines (Verdicchio), and eating some lunch and tasting some more wines (Montepulciano), we had a whirlwind tour of the Moreno Cedroni factory, which was apparently in its afternoon clean-up mode, so we didn’t actually see anything being made. Probably most factories don’t need 24 shutter-happy foodies sticking their noses in production, but it was a bit disappointing to be whirled round in 20 minutes flat. Pretty jars and interesting ingredients, though. Not everyone can spin a buck from a tin of stewed monkfish tripe, or sea-snail (raguse) with tomato, garlic and wild fennel. And the fig and tangerine marmalade sounded promising, though I couldn’t see any back at the shop at Umani Ronchi. So I satisfied myself with a bottle of top-flight dessert wine (Maximo) and another of Montepulciano (Cumaro, named for the small red berry that grows on Monte Conero).

Our day ended, more or less, with a fabulous shop-a-thon at Azzurra, a purveyor of all things Marchese (“vini e tipicità delle Marche“) in another seaside town, Numani. Upon first arrival we pressed our noses hopefully against the windows, which were ominously dark: oh no, said someone, it’s Thursday afternoon. Which of course is the giorno di chiusura we all know and love (not) in Parma, which makes those from twentyfourhoursevendayaweek retail cultures stomp their feet and wave their credit cards in rage. But of course this tale has a happy ending: somehow we managed to get in the door and buy, buy, buy. I’m still not sure if it was by special arrangement, but we think our saintly driver Franco might have had a hand in it…

Le Marche – Tuesday: The Gastronomic Landscape, Shrine & Wine

We began our Tuesday last week in a room at Garofoli Winery, with a talk by Dott. Antonio Attorre (President of Slow Food Marche and teacher at the Università Politecnica delle Marche) about Le Marche as a food-producing region, which is largely a story about landscape. While – as we’d previously learned – Italy is 80% mountains, which affects everything about the country; this region has 13 rivers, which means 13 valleys and 13 different food traditions. It is further divided into mountain-dwellers and a coastal population, and still shows the pattern of the feudal system that marked it in previous centuries: houses are surrounded by a small piece of land, so it is not a system of intensive farming, but a more fragmented patchwork of vines and olive groves.

We’d heard at some length the afternoon before (during a talk on a Presidia product, the Portonovo “mosciolo” / wild mussel) that in coastal areas, the farmers who worked land in the hills also often doubled as fishermen, in order to supplement their diet and income with seafood. So, we were told, somewhat unique in Italian cuisine is Le Marche’s preference for dishes that combine vegetables with seafood. (To be honest, we didn’t notice many vegetables in the food we ate last week, but we had been noticing, in Parma, the segregation of vegetables and meats which are, where both occur in a meal, often served in different courses.) He also mentioned that the seafood recipes of the region have an obvious historical link with local meat-based cuisine, since the techniques for cooking fish often mirror those for meat – you simply substitute the protein source.

Le Marche, he said, was the first region in Italy to embrace organics, and ten years ago began organic trials. It also pioneered beef certification (for traceability, post-BSE), and seven years ago was able to win EU exemptions for small scale cheese producers who had been crippled by regulations designed for large scale operations. He mentioned A.S.S.A.M., l’Agenzia Servizi Settore Agroalimentare Marche, which provides research and advice for the region’s agricultural industries.


Next we had a talk about and lunched on three Le Marche Presidia products: the Mele Rosa dei Monti Sibillini (a sweet, long-lasting heritage apple, mountain-grown, brought back from the brink of extinction); Salame di Fabriano (a seasonal, hand-cut salami, with cubes of lard and whole peppercorns, made from prime prosciutto-grade pork); and Pecorino dei Monte Sibillini (pecorino fresco, a young, soft version of the sheep’s milk cheese we’ve been happily encountering at every turn).


Over the lingering lunch hour we took a side trip – thankfully at the wise and persistent urging of our art history grad Fabi – to see the Basilica del Santuario di Loreto, a stunning basilica built around the shrine of Santa Casa Maria (the Virgin Mary’s house, in which the Enunciation is said to have taken place). It had been, so they say, spirited away from Nazareth by the angels, and arrived here via Croatia in the fourteenth century. It was encapsulated in the basilica in 1507 and has been visited by pilgrims ever since.

We returned to Garofoli for a talk and tasting to embrace the region’s long wine-making tradition, dating back to those early vinificators, the Etruscans, who took a turn of influence here.

Started as a family enterprise in 1871, it is run today by the brothers Gianfranco and Carlo. Carlo is the enologist, and he gave us a short history of the region’s wines, and the transition of Italian wines from the 1950s through the present. We had been hearing a lot about Verdicchio, and he explained its status as the first DOC wine of the area.

Some sources, he said, claim it has been grown in Le Marche for 2000 years, but he would be willing to bet on the past 150 for sure. This varietal grows well in the area, usually within 20 km of the sea, favouring the mild climate and sandier soil, but is susceptible to diseases, especially moulds, and matures quite late. While exposure and altitude affect the alcohol content and acidity of wines, the interesting piece of trivia he shared about Verdicchio grapes is that the river Esino, which empties into the Adriatic north of Ancona, separates production areas into yields of higher and lower acidity.

Verdicchio began as a strong, high-alcohol wine, but has been refined into a fruitier, milder wine with a lower alcohol content. I think he was saying this was a result of American tastes for such wines, and is also the product of Italian wine-making efforts over the past thirty years to stabilise the quality of wines, while retaining their individual characteristics.

He talked about his growing methods, which we’d learned a bit about in our wine history classes. He said that previously they’d used four vines per plant but discovered that using only one would give more light to the plant, make it hardier and healthier, and therefore give a more reliable yield with less need for fertiliser. And then we tasted some wines (a couple of Verdicchios: Podium and Serra Fiorese, and a red from the other big Le Marche grape, Montepulciano: Grosso Agontano) after which we rampaged through the shop and then had a free supper. Which we enjoyed very much at Trattoria La Rocca, where – after running amok in the enoteca next door – we dined on fresh anchovies, fried sardines, crab pasta, battered wee fish and a lovely, lovely salad. And a sort of creamy lemon slurpee for dessert, followed by a very potent ‘fisherman’s coffee’ and a pleasant amble back to the hotel along the tree-lined sea front.

Ghosts of the orange tree, Porto San Giorgio.