What is VITIANO?

[stevebody]

I came into work at Esquin one day to find the owner with a big dopey grin on his face because he had a surprise for me. We went downstairs and approached a guy in a questionable brown suit who turned out to be Ricardo Cottarella. Unlike Roberto, I'm a big fan of his wines, so it was like meeting Mick Jagger. We went around the room and the talked about each of his wines, especially about his Fobiano, which I dearly love and about which I had written a rhapsodic POS sign about my 3 a.m. trip to the beach with Judye to watch the Perseid meteor shower and drink Fobiano. We finally got to the Vitiano, which is the only one of his wines that I just don't like at all. He asked what I thought of it and I siezed up like a two-buck pocket watch. (I've always told everybody that we didn't talk about Vitiano because I'm so ashamed of becoming so wishy-washy) I told him that, honstly, I didn't like the Vitiano ( didn't say that it's a horrible, unfocused, bomvastic mess, which would have been honest) and that it was one of two wines, the other being Bonny Doon's Big House Red, that seem too big and a bit out of balance. He listened politely, smiled and said, "Thank you for all your help and your astute judgements." And was gone.

I have no idea if he was talking about the Vitiano or not but that seemed like an odd place in the conversation to drop that in. Later, my buddy who's the sales manager for Cottarella's distributor told me that, over dinner, they had opened a bottle of Vitiano and Cottarella didn't touch a drop.

I'll never know, of course, but I don't really believe that winemakers have a solemn responsibility to make every single thing they bottle slavishly dedicated to "the earth, the earth, the earth...". Vitiano is one of the three largest-selling Italian wines in the US. A lot of people like it. I just didn't recommend it, which took care of my qualms. I did, however, on a suggestion of a friend, lay a bottle down for 14 months and it was a whole different wine when I opened it.