At the stroke of midnight on November 6th, Italy will erupt with parties, and the pop of bottles being uncorked will sound like thunder rolling across the countryside. Italians will be celebrating the arrival of the vino novello, their first wine of the year. Novello wines, like their French cousin Beaujolais Nouveau, can offer a sneak peek of the wines to come.
“I look forward to this date every year,” says Gianfranco La Grassa, a retired economist from Conegliano, in the Veneto. “Twenty-five friends come over to eat chestnuts and drink wine.&rdquo
The majority of novello wines are made with the merlot grape, although any grape from the country's twenty regions can be used. Novello wines are always light, fruity, sweet reds, and—like any good partygoer—slightly bubbly, easily drunk and accommodating. Novello pairs well with almost any food, from chestnuts and dried fruits to cheese and cured meats.
Dr. Lucio Caputo, president of the Italian Wine and Food Institute in New York, doesn't think much of novello, however, and says that comparing it to regular wines is like "comparing a bicycle to a car." Novello is "not an important wine," agrees wine consultant Alex Berlingeri. "It doesn't keep and it's not for collectors."
But perhaps that's not really the point. "Novello isn't supposed to keep," says Roberto Zeni, who makes his renowned Novello di Teroldego high in the Dolomite Mountains of northern Italy. "They're fresh and young. I put passion and love into my novello, and you can taste the difference. If a novello is bad, it's not the fault of the wine, but of the winemaker!"
One group of passionate winemakers can be found at Velletri Prison, just south of Rome. Part of a rehabilitation program, the inmates produce a novello vintage fittingly called fuggiasco, or fugitive. The jail has its own three-hectare vineyard, and prisoners also take part in managing and selling the 50,000 bottles produced there each year.
All novello, wherever it is created, is made by sealing uncrushed grapes in large vats with carbon dioxide to facilitate fermentation within the grapes themselves. This process of carbonic maceration creates wine that is slightly frizzante and low in tannins, the bitter chemical compounds found in the grape skins and seeds, which help prevent oxidation. The result is a fresh but transient wine that doesn't improve with age. "Novello wines are meant to be enjoyed before December 31st of the harvest year," Zeni explains.
Italy produces about twenty million bottles of vino novello every year. You can find it on November 6th at Astor Wines (www.astorwines.com) and Pasanella and Son Vintners (www.pasanellaandson.com), in the $10 to $12 range. So get a bottle or two and invite some friends over. If you can't make it to work the next morning, just tell your boss, "Il vino novello e arrivato!"
