This post is not exactly about strict “regular” and “reserve” wines but about three wines made from the same three grapes at decidedly different levels of achievement.

Depending on the wine and the region, Italy’s wine regulations sometimes favor 100 percent varietal wines for reds — sangiovese for Brunello di Montalcino, for example, and nebbiolo for Barolo — or permit blending, as in Chianti Classico, where a minimum of 75 percent sangiovese may be supplemented with the traditional red canaiolo grape, the nontraditional cabernet sauvignon, merlot and syrah, and two percent white grapes.

Another Italian red wine made from a combination of grapes is Amarone, a rare — it should be more rare — wine produced, in the Veneto region of northeastern Italy, from grapes that are dried in special boxes in temperature- and humidity-controlled chambers. (The grapes are no longer dried on straw or wicker pallets.) The drying process deepens the color, the flavor and the tannins of the wine; pressing the grapes and fermentation, which usually occurs in January after the harvest, takes longer than with typical grapes and wines. A great Amarone offers tremendous depth and body and intensity.

Traditionally, the grapes permitted in Amarone are (mainly) corvino, rondinella and (the least amount) molinara, though after 2005 the blend was required to be up to 80 percent corvino and corvinone with rondinella anywhere from 5 to 30 percent. Interestingly, the same grapes go into the usually simple and direct Valpolicella as go into Amarone, the difference being the site of the better vineyards in more amenable areas, meaning not on the plains.

So, today we’re looking at three wines from Sartori di Verona, a producer that frankly does not achieve the apotheosis of these wines — we’re not talking about Allegrini or Quintarelli — but that nonetheless makes wines that are thoroughly authentic and enjoyable; Sartori’s single-vineyard Corte Bra’ Amarone attains pretty high levels of quality. Prices for all three of these wines are very attractive.

To begin at the basic station, the Sartori Vigneti di Montegradella Valpolicella Classico Superiore 2004 — 50% corvina, 40% rondinella, 10% molinara — teems with notes of black currants and plums, potpourri and tar; it’s dense and chewy in the mouth, bursting with rollicking spice and vibrant acid, ripe and intense black fruit flavors permeated by black tea, orange zest and dried herbs. The wine ages 15 months in Slavonian oak casks, so the structure is firm without being sodden with woody elements. A terrific wine to drink with hearty red sauce pasta dishes, beef and game. I rate it Very good, and at about $13, it’s a Great Bargain. 1,064 cases imported.

The Sartori Amarone della Valpolicella 2003, which ages two-and-a-half-years in Slavonian oak casks, is deep, rich and spicy, dense and earthy and minerally, packed with spice and black currant and plum flavors with a touch of bitter chocolate and dried flowers. The flavors are ripe and roasted, a little raisiny; vivid acid cuts a swath across the palate for an invigorating effect. The wine is, it goes without saying, quite dry, almost formidably so, and the finish is long, spicy, substantial and austere. Drink now with robust fare or wait until 2009 or ‘10 to 2012 to ‘15. I rate this Very good+. About $34.

The single-vineyard Sartori Amarone della Valpolicella Classico Corte Bra’ 2001 — a great year in northern Italy — is almost port-like in its intensity, vibrancy and smoky, spicy character, though it’s not sweet, only super-ripe and dimensional. Black currant jam and plum marmalade flavors are infused with cinnamon and cloves, sandalwood and orange rind, lavender and licorice. The blend here is slightly different, with 60% corvina, 30% rondinella and the same 10% molinara. The wine ages a staggering four years in Slovenian oak casks and another year in small French barrels, yet the result is not a wine that’s over-oaked and woody but one that has absorbed that wood and remained firm and structured, powerful and dynamic. Start to drink this in 2010 and keep at it through 2015 or ‘18. Cases produced: 2,500. I rate this Excellent. About $41.

These wines are imported by Banfi Vintners, Old Brookville, N.Y. Visit banfi.com.

Many of the traditional grapes used to make white wine in Italy don’t take kindly to oak. Occasionally (or too frequently nowadays) one runs upon a wine that has been forced through a barrel regimen and come out like a torturous caricature of itself. You want to call Switzerland and see if somehow the Geneva Convention has been violated. The example of such a sad case is the pinot grigio mentioned below, but first take a look at a roster of completely charming, even intriguing white wines.

What’s intriguing in the bad way are the prices of several of these products. Apparently we’re seeing the reality of the dominant euro, stomping around in shiny black boots and kicking the bejesus out of the poor wimpy dollar, and the rise in the cost of oil for transportation, heating, electricity and so on. So, yeah, the first seven of these wines are terrific, but you pays yer money and you takes yer choice.

These wines are Marc de Grazia Selections, imported by Vin DiVino in Chicago. Visit marcdegrazia.com.

1. The Tavignano Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi Classico Superiore 2006 comes from one of Italy’s least-known regions. Marche or The Marches, occupies a long stretch of the coastal calf of Italy’s boot, between Emilia-Romagna to the north and Abruzzi to the south. Verdicchio grapes produce by far the region’s best white wines — Verdiccio dei Castelli de Jesi and Verdicchio Matelica — though that white variety is overshadowed by several reds, especially Rosso Conero, which must contain at least 85 percent montepulciano grapes. In any case, Tavignano’s Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi Classico Superiore 2006 is indeed a superior version. The wine is bright and clean and abounds with lemony accents that are spicy and a little roasted and buttery, though the wine balances this touch of lushness with brisk acid, bone-dryness, hints of slightly astringent dried herbs and, on the finish, a penetrating mineral quality. Delightful and versatile for spring and summer drinking. Very Good+. About $16.

2. If your memory of Frascati is of an innocuous and forgettable wine, this one may change your mind. The name is ancient and derives from the hill-town fewer than 20 miles southeast of Rome, the center of the province of Lazio (often called Latium in English). The grapes for Frascati are principally malvasia di candia, malvasia del Lazio and trebbiano bianco, with, for this wine, bombino, ottonese and cacchione; for those trying to join The Century Club of people who have experienced 100 grape varieties, Frascati offers you the chance to encounter some obscure examples.
Since 1981, Piero Costantini has worked to revive the reputation of Frascati. His Massarosso Frascati Superiore 2006 is dry and notably spicy; it’s a spare, crisp white wine, lithe and lively and supple. Scents and flavors of roasted lemon and lemon balm are infused with a strain of some astringent summer flower and touches of dried Mediterranean herbs. The finish offers more spice and layers of limestone. I’ll go Excellent on this one. About $16 and a Great Bargain.

3. The blend of grapes for the Palazzone Terre Vineate Orvieto Classico 2006 — Orvieto is a beautiful and fairly large hill-town in western Umbria — is 50% procanico, 25% grechetto, 15% verdello and 10% malvasia and drupeggio, the latter a local grape so obscure that it doesn’t show up in Oz Clarke’s Encyclopedia of Grapes. This is as pure and intense an Orvieto as I have ever tasted and also the most suave and elegant. It’s a lovely wine, delivering elements of lemon drop and orange rind, almond blossom and camellia, baking spice, hints of dried thyme and tarragon; it’s very crisp, dry and vibrant, yet smooth and slightly steely. It would be great with grilled trout or skate in a classic sauce of brown butter and capers. Excellent. About $18.

4. We go back to The Marches for the Bisci Verdicchio di Matelica 2005, a very dry, spare and sinewy wine that’s quite stony and earthy and briery, with a powerful limestone-damp granite component, scintillating acid and a finish that pulls in lemon peel and grapefruit astringency. A bit more demanding than thoroughly enjoyable, but should be terrific with fresh oysters and mussels. Very good+ About $19.

5. Perhaps the falanghina grape will make the break-through white wines of Campania, the region that extends north, east and south of Naples. Its less frequently seen name, falanghina Greco, may indicate origins in Greece. Cantina del Taburno is a significant association of 300 producers in the province of Benevento, which clusters around the city of that name inland and northeast of Naples. The Taburno Falanghina 2007 is a terrific example of the cantina’s craft. This is a lovely wine, seductive in its accents of jasmine and almond blossom, lemon and toasted almond and hints of dried thyme. In the mouth, the wine balances crispness and liveliness with a moderately lush texture, delicious flavors of roasted lemon, lemon balm and orange rind, all tied with a glint of limestone on the finish. A great bet for matching with grilled shrimp or mussels. Very good+ About $20.

6. The Serramarrocco Grillo del Barone 2006, from Sicily, 100% grillo grapes, is fermented and matured in old-fashioned concrete vats rather than stainless steel. It rated a “wow” as my first note. Shamelessly floral and spicy, the wine bursts from the glass in a welter of white flowers, dried baking spice, roasted lemon and a hint of grapefruit. “Haunting” is not a word I typically use in reviews, but this wine was strangely beguiling and intense, offering a flavor panoply of lemon in all its forms, with a touch of candied fruit, and a texture of pleasing heft and elevating powers, a combination of brisk acid and talc-like softness and a total permeation of chalk and limestone. A Great Effort. Excellent. About $26.

7. I’m sorry, but $29 is a boodle of money for any wine made from the vermentino grape, which normally produces wines that are charming and pleasant and drinkable. The Terenzuola Vermentino Fosso di Corsano 2006, from the Colli di Luna (”hills of the moon”) region of northwest Tuscany, is fermented in concrete vats and aged on the lees in stainless steel for six months, special treatment indeed, and the result is a wine of definite class and breeding. Made from grapes taken from vineyards 1,300 feet above sea-level, the wine is fresh and lively, lemony and spicy, with a sense of long-drawn-out acid and scintillating mineral elements, of balance and integration, that raise it above the usual product of the grape. O.K., it’s probably the best vermentino I’ve ever tasted, and I’d be happy to pay, oh, $18 for it. Excellent. About $29.

8. The Vie di Romans Dessimis Pinot Grigio 2005, Isonzo del Friuli, is a result of trying too hard in the winery to make a grape into what it is not. Even pinot grigio doesn’t deserve to be turned into a ringer for an over-oaked chardonnay, which is the effect this wine had on me. Barrel-fermented and matured seven months in French barrels, the Vie di Romans Dessimis Pinot Grigio 2005 is rich and ripe, glossy and roasted and slightly buttery, massively structured, stridently spicy, quite evidently oaky and overall grotesque. Poor innocent, unsuspecting grapes! I rarely do this, but I pin an “Avoid” rating on this mutant. Which shouldn’t be difficult for you to do, since the suggested retail price is about $44.

It snowed like mad yesterday in Memphis, an occurrence that’s no novelty for those of you living in northern latitudes, but a rare event in the Mid-South. Already the drifts are melting, so I went out this morning and took some pictures to share. Here’s an image of the front of our house. You can see that the snow has weighed down the branches of the maple tree that stands at the beginning of the driveway.

Anyway, it was a pleasure to be slightly snow-bound for a night and have dinner at home — and by the way, I’m no longer reviewing restaurants for my newspaper; see “Goodbye to All That Dining” at the “Whining & Dining” blog — and turn on the lights on the back of the house so we could watch the snow flurry down as we ate.

I whisked up a vinaigrette and made a salad of spinach, radicchio and endive, and LL made risotto, which I will describe. She very slowly cooked two pieces of pancetta to get a little fat, took the pancetta out of the pan and then browned a diced shallot. She added a little olive oil to the pan and cooked arborio rice to that translucent stage and then put in half a cup of white wine and when that was absorbed began adding the chicken broth and stirring the rice. In a few minutes she dropped in some diced green onions, more chicken broth — you know the routine with risotto — and at the end added a handful of grated Parmesan cheese and about a tablespoon of butter.

The whole process took about 25 minutes, and the risotto was fabulous.

To drink with the risotto, I took a bottle that had been in the refrigerator for six months or so. St. Pauls Exclusiv Weissburgunder Plotzner 2005, from Sudtirol Alto Adige, was sent to me with two other bottles of wine from Italy’s northeast region by a marketing firm in New York, but for the life of me I can’t remember what that company is, nor can I find any printed matter I may have received with the wines. No importer is listed on the label, whose text is in Italian and German. A Google search on the wine brought up only five hits, all in foreign languages. One of those, however, provided a link to St Pauls informative website. St. Pauls Kellerie/Cantina was founded in the town of Eppan, southwest of Bolzano, in 1907. It’s a cooperative that makes a full range of red, white and sparkling wines from grapes typical of the region.

The wine we tried was terrific and a great match with the risotto. Weissburgunder, while it might look like a synonym for chardonnay (”white Burgundian”), is a name used for pinot blanc (or pinot bianco) in Germany and Austria. Think that a pinot blanc from 2005 would be losing its freshness and luster? Not this one. Sporting a radiant straw-gold color, this wine was incredibly clean and fresh, spicy and minerally, snappy with crisp acid and slightly earthy. Notes of white pepper, peach and pear enlivened lemon and roasted lemon fruit, the whole package vibrant with the delightful tension between bone-dryness and juicy flavors. I rate it Excellent, and I wish I could tell you a price, but I haven’t a notion. The pinot blanc grapes for this wine come from vineyards at 600 meters above sea level, or 1,968 feet. If you visit St Pauls website, you’ll see how steep and picturesque and beautiful the area is.

Of course we ate the pancetta for dessert.

For months I had been eying a bottle of Fattoria le Fonti’s Vito Arturo 1997 (about $45) at Buster’s, my neighborhood wine and liquor store. Finally, when we were scheduled to have dinner last night with a friend at one of our favorite restaurants, I thought, “Now’s the time.” The fact that a 10-year-old bottle wine was still lying on the shelf seemed neither here nor there, though I had to wonder why nobody looking for a special wine had been encouraged to buy it; anyway, the wine has a great reputation — I had tried the fabulous 2001 in New York last year — and the store takes care of their products, so I wasn’t particularly worried. The wine is 100 percent sangiovese, made from a single vineyard from the estate in Tuscany. The wine ages 16 months in barriques, that is, small French oak barrels.

The restaurant is Bari, which specializes in the cuisine of southeast Italy, with emphasis on seafood, though the menu includes simple pasta dishes and a couple of red meat entrees, polpette (veal meatballs) and a beef filet, one of each of which LL and I ordered. After appetizers and a bottle of white wine — the engaging Inama Vin Soave 2006 — we asked the waiter to open the Arturo ‘97.

The first whiff brought a burst of mint, cedar and eucalyptus, almost as if we were smelling an old-style Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon. Then the bouquet revealed touches of toasted hazelnuts, dried lavender and violets and macerated black currants and cherries. While we ate our entrees, the wine continued to expand and develop, so by the time we were onto the cheese course, it really started showing firmness and character.

For cheeses, we chose a Gorgonzola, a Piave Vecchio and an aged Pecorino. All the cheeses were good, but the Pecorino was memorable, rich and dry, a little nutty, a little waxy, almost caramel-like but notably clean and earthy. By now the Vito Arturo ‘97 was in its element, broad and generous, taut with acid yet soft in texture, filled with notes of spiced plums and spiced currant jelly with hints of orange rind and black Pekoe tea. It was fabulous with the Pecorino, a truly balanced marriage of wine and cheese and all their elements.

The store where I got the Vito Arturo ‘97 has a magnum of the wine. I’d better go buy it Monday before someone else gets it.

Six of us gathered last Tuesday for dinner at Falai, a small, sleek, irresistible Italian restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It was my second visit, having eaten there back in March. The diners were LL and me, our friend Julie (with whom we stayed for part of last week), Terence Hughes of mondosapore fame and his longtime partner Ken, and Gabrio Tosti, the irrepressible owner of the fine little (mainly) Italian wine store De Vino, one block north of Falai on Clinton Street. We were joined later — hours later; it was a long riotous meal — by Gian Luigi Maravalle, proprietor of Tenuta Vitalonga in western Umbria, whose plane was late and whose luggage was lost.

Chef at the restaurant is Iacopo Falai, whose talent is for taking traditional ingredients of northern Italian cuisine, adding a sly inventive touch here and a sly inventive touch there and coming up with food that is delicious and memorable without being cute and tricky. After quite a bit of discussion and diplomacy, the table decided to order the prix fixe menu; here were the choices — Antipasto: Polenta Bianca (chicken liver, dried dates and wild mushrooms “Vellutata”) OR baby octopus with fresh celery, string beans, Granny Smith apples, American caviar. Pasta: Gnudi of ricotta cheese, baby spinach, brown butter, crema di latte, sage. Carne/Pesce: Manzo (petit filet, butternut squash and orange puree, blood orange fennel salad) OR Branzino (potato-wrapped sea-bass, leek, white asparagus, huckleberry sauce). Dolce: passion fruit souffle. Four courses for $55. Some members of our party tried to negotiate a menu without the gnudi, and the efficient, amenable and incredibly, infinitely patient manager Jiordona — pictured here with Terry Hughes (in his usual serious mood) — even offered such a deal at $50, but in the end, everyone got all the courses.

We began by quickly downing a bottle of the crisp, floral and delightful Ronco delle Betulle Tocai Friulano 2005 from the restaurant’s wine list ($44). After that, we consumed five bottles, two that I brought and three brought in by Gabrio. The first of Gabrio’s wines — and we pretty much scarfed this down too — was a new rosé, the fresh, delicate and tasty Whispering Angel 2006 — everybody who thinks that’s a terrible name raise your hand! — from Chateau d’Esclans in the Côtes de Provence; Sacha Lichine bought the property in 2006. This dry rosé offers whispers of crushed raspberries and strawberries and feathery hints of stones and dried flowers for pleasing effect. The high-concept label is attractive, the wine retails for about $22, and it’s the only rosé that Gabrio sells.

We drank these gentle opening salvos during talk and bread — Iacopo Falai is a former pasty chef, and the breads are excellent — and appetizers, of which the octopus got best marks. You can see from the image how great the plate looked. The baby octopus was exceedingly tender — it’s boiled first and then grilled — and the curl of celery and the slender batons of apple provided crisp contrasts in texture and fresh flavors. Not that the Polenta Bianca was any slouch. Indeed the combination of the creamy chicken livers and slightly crusty polenta with the sweet fruitiness of the dates and wild earthiness of the mushrooms was heady and flavorful, but the dish was definitely rustic compared to the finesse of the octopus.

Next came the gnudi, a carefully shaped oval-like nest of ricotto cheese and shredded, cooked spinach bathed in a nutty brown butter sauce with a touch of cream; leaning against this delicate construct was one sage leaf. Rich and creamy, these gnudi disappeared into our mouths in about three minutes, leaving us wishing that they had not vanished so quickly.

I picked up a bottle of Domaine Leccia Petra Bianca Patrimonio 1998 ($25) at Crossroads Wines & Liquors on 14th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues at the suggestion of Nicolas Palazzi, who is French through and through yet bears the name of his father and honorable ancestors from Corsica. The Palazzi family owns Bordeaux properties in Cotes de Bourg, Entre-Deux-Mers and Graves, and Nicolas lives in New York nine months a year trying to market the wines. Anyway, he and I are email correspondents, and he, mindful of his Corsican heritage, had delved through the stock at the totally eccentric and treasure-filled wine store, found this wine and sent out a bulletin. “Petra Bianca” refers not to the wine’s color — it’s red, made from 100 percent niellucciu grapes — but to the chalky clay soil that nurtures the vineyards of Corsica’s Patrimonio region. The wine was imported by Kermit Lynch in Berkeley, Ca.

I’ll confess that I didn’t love the wine, though it was very interesting. It opened with whiffs of cedar and eucalyptus, scents of walnuts and walnut shell, dried spice and brown sugar, the sign of a mature red. In the mouth, the wine was dense and chewy, formidably tannic and sporting a startling hit of acid. It smoothed out and became more palatable in 15 or 20 minutes, but the whole time it was in my glass I kept thinking, “What happened to the fruit?” Of course, it’s nine years old; it would be instructive to try more recent vintages.

By this time, of course, our entrees had arrived. When I dined at Falai in March, I had ordered the manzo, asking for it to be cooked to medium rare, but what came to the table was medium or more. This time I ordered the beef rare, so it came to me at a perfect medium rare temperature and rosy-red color. The preparation at the end of the winter included parsnip puree, red wine-cooked shallots and wild mushrooms and a Marsala-truffle sauce; more in keeping with the season — and it was hot in New York last week — the petit filet came with a butternut squash and orange puree and a blood orange-fennel salad. It was a sumptuous yet completely balanced and appropriate presentation. I did not, alas — or I don’t remember, alas — tasting the branzino.

Next we opened the Rosso Ca’ de Merlo 1998 from Guiseppe Quintarelli, who is often called the “Master of the Veneto” or the “King of the Veneto.” This is the kind of wine that at first sniff and sip you say, “Well, here’s a once in a lifetime opportunity,” meaning that in completely the best way. This wine also came from Crossroads and cost about $76; it was imported by Robert Chadderton in New York. Despite the name, the wine has nothing to do with the merlot grape. It is, essentially, a sort of super-Valpolicella, made from corvino grapes (taken from a single hillside vineyard) in the traditional ripasso method in which the wine undergoes a second fermentation on the skins of the dried grapes used to make Amarone wines, thus providing additional strength and tannin. Nothing tannic here, however; the Rosso Ca’ de Merlo ‘98 was lovely, smooth and mellow, subtle and supple, composed of black cherry, currant and plum flavors deeply infused with dried spice, potpourri and black tea with touches of moss and clean earth. What a treat!

Not to be outdone, Gabrio rushed back to his store and returned with a bottle of the Merlanico d’Orta de Conciliis 2000, a Vino da Tavola (two-thirds merlot, one-third aglianico) produced by Lombardy’s Barone Giulio Pizzini Piomarta; the importer is Vignaioli Selections in New York. The price at Gabrio’s store is $150. This is, frankly, a stunning wine, deep and rich and flavorful, and it gets deeper and richer and more flavorful as moments pass. It opens beautifully, warmly in the glass, offering notes of cedar and tobacco, leather, toasted hazelnuts and wheatmeal, black currants and plums with hints of wild berry, earth and minerals. Retaining considerable tannins, the wine is dense and chewy, packed with spicy wood, yet generously supplied with black and red fruit flavors, that wane as the large and fairly austere finish takes over. And what a match for the medium rare beef filet!

By this time Maravalle had arrived, sans luggage and sans vino for us to try, so again Gabrio rushed over to his store to get something from Tenuta Vitalonga. He returned with a bottle of Terra di Confine 2004, a blend of 80 percent montepulciano grapes and 20 percent merlot. As Maravalle pointed out, this is a young wine from young grapes, planted only four years ago, so we were not surprised that the wine was bold and brash, wild and robust, bursting with currants, plums and dark-chocolate-covered raspberries nestled in dense, leathery tannins. Another wine destined for pairing with hearty red meat dishes, it sells for $25. I would try it from 2008 or ‘09 through 2012 or ‘14.

Were we finished?

With wine, yes, but not with dinner, because dessert came, a sumptuous, luxurious, yet light-hearted passion fruit souffle.

And then we gathered our gear, our notes, our bags and shuffled out of Falai, by far the last to leave, hoping against hope that we wouldn’t have hangovers the next day.

Falai is at 68 Clinton Street, near Rivington. Call (212) 253-1960.
De Vino is at 30 Clinton Street. Call (212) 228-0073 or visit de-vino.com.

The top image of the restaurant, shot from behind the small bar area looking toward the back, is by Jeremy Liebman for New York magazine. The rest of the images in Falai were shot by LL or FK.

I just posted a “Featured Article” by that title over on KoeppelOnWine.com. Geographically, the wines hale from Tuscany, Piedmont, Umbria, Sardinia, Sicily, Friuli and the Veneto. Vintages include 2004 and 2003 and several from the superb 2001 and ‘99. The wines cover the gamut of styles, from traditional Barolo aged two and a half years in huge oak casks to sleek Bordeaux-style cabernet sauvignon and merlot-based wines aged in small French barrels. You pays yer money and you takes yer choice, and speaking of money, the majority of these wines, I regret to say, are not bargains; only a couple get down to the $25 or $30 range, but I hope that it’s as fascinating for the curious or the avid to read about the wines as it was for me to try them and write about them.

“I don’t like the French barrique,” said Enrico Dellapiana, making a round motion with his hands to indicate the shape of the famous 59-gallon oak barrels that play such an important part in the world’s winemaking. “They have no place with the nebbiolo grape or in Barbaresco.”

While producers all around him in Piedmont are turning to barriques to pump up the spice, vanilla and toastiness of their Barolos, Barbarescos and Barberas, at Dellapiana’s Cantina Rizzi estate in Treiso (cantinarizzi) you will find only large casks of Slavonian oak, once the traditional vehicle across much of northern Italian for aging red wine but now disappearing. By “large,” we mean 25 or 50 hectoliters or 660 or 1,320 gallons. The effect is to give the wine shape and maturity — Barbaresco is required to age two years in wood and two in bottle — without blatantly influencing flavor.

Dellapiana is in the eastern U.S. to promote the family’s Barbaresco wines. Cantina Rizzi, a young estate, founded in 1973, makes Barbera d’Alba and Dolcetto d’Alba, a chardonnay, two dessert wines and a grappa, but “Barbaresco is what we are about,” Dellapiana said. We’re having lunch at Cafe Society in Memphis, and I’ve ordered veal to go with the red wines. He’s showing three examples of his craft: The Barbaresco Riserva, a blend of several vineyards, and two single-vineyard wines, the Barbaresco Fondetta and the Barbaresco Boito, all from the terrific 2001 vintage. The wines are imported by Opici, in Glen Rock, N.J.

The immediately noticeable factor is that these Barbarescos are not dark purple but are a lovely, radiant deep garnet color. “This is the true color of the nebbiolo grape,” said Dellapiana, “which you don’t see much anymore. Barbaresco should not be heavily extracted or concentrated.”

The Rizzi Barbaresco Riserva 2001 offers aromas of cloves, dried raspberries and black cherries and macerated and roasted black fruit. Layers of subtlety and nuance provide a mouthful of dried spices, dried flowers and dried fruit that after a few moments in the glass expand into blueberry, rhubarb and Orange Pekoe tea. It’s a meditative wine, quiet, elegant yet powerful and vibrant, and it will drink beautifully from now through 2010 to ‘12. About $32. Excellent.

The Rizzi Barbaresco Fondetta 2001 quickly escalates and intensifies every element. The color is slightly darker, more ruby/garnet, and tannins are dense, chewy, a little grainy, but the wine is still heady and seductive, utterly smooth and harmonious, revealing depths of complex spiciness and black fruit flavors and a substantial presence that forgoes some of the previous wine’s elegance for the sake of power and seriousness. Now through 2012 or ‘13. 400 cases. About $42. Excellent.

Third of the trio, the Rizzi Barbaresco Boito 2001 is riper, meatier and fleshier than the Fondetta, with lots of tobacco and lead pencil, a touch of black olive and fathoms of dark, spicy black currant and black cherry flavors. The wine is vibrant and resonant and hefty yet displays, paradoxically, beautiful balance and a sense of delicacy. Now through 2010 to ‘14. 400 cases. About $42. Excellent.

These Barbarescos are perfect for roasted veal or lamb, game birds and hearty stews.

Perhaps you remember the television commercials of the 1980s for Riunite and Cella Lambruscos, fizzy, grapey soda-pop wines from the western Emilia part of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region. “Chill a Cella” and “Riunite on Ice — Very Nice” were the unforgettable slogans of those ads, which depicted the wines as mindless, fun babe-magnets. Americans drank millions of cases a year.

The Fontana dei Boschi Lambrusco 2004, produced by Vittorio Graziano in Modena, is not one of those wines, though it could be a magnet for babes who really like interesting wines. I got a bottle of this intriguing, serious effort from Gabrio Tosti’s De Vino store (de-vino) on Clinton Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “Drink it with pork or lamb,” he said. I was skeptical, though the dignified, straightforward label certainly did not imply that it was anything like Cella or Riunite.

Last night, LL made a pasta of farfalle with cipollini onions, sun-dried tomatoes, broccoli rabe and leftover grilled chicken. (It was great.) The bottle’s back label informed us that the wine is aged six to nine months in stainless steel tanks, put into bottles for a second fermentation (as in the classic Champagne manner) and then disgorged to clean bottles. Few Lambruscos — that’s also the name of the grape — today are made in this traditional manner, more typically being produced in the bulk method. When I opened the wine, it emitted a “POP” and a spew of lavender foam, and in the glass the effervescence persisted for several minutes before it subsided. The bottle is not closed with a Champagne-style cork and wire enclosure but with a regular cork that’s fatter at the bottom.

The Fontana dei Boschi Lambrusco 2004 is a rich, deep purple color with a dark ruby rim (see the picture above). It bursts with pure black raspberry and black cherry scents and flavors with a spicy black plum undertone and a touch of wild berry. The wine displays surprising tannin and structure; this is not a sweet, simple-minded little quaffer in any sense but a forthright and individual wine intended for hearty fare. It was delicious with the grilled chicken pasta and also at lunch today with tacos made of leftover grilled pork chops (we’re big into recycling, and I’ve been grilling outdoors a lot) with white bean puree and tomatilla salsa.

Fontana dei Boschi Lambrusco 2004 is brought into the U.S. by Lambrusco Imports, Spring Valley N.Y. At about $22, it’s definitely Worth a Search.

That’s what LL said — “Unlike anything I’ve tasted before” — after a sip of the Gravner Anfora Breg 2001.

The wine, which carries a designation of Venezia Giulia, is made by the legendary Friulian winemaker Josko Gravner, who revolutionized the production of wine in Italy’s farthest northeast, where family names reveal their roots in what used to be called the Balkans, just across the border.

Gravner, a pioneer in stainless steel fermentation and aging, was a mentor to many of the region’s young winemakers, though few, perhaps, would place a foot on the path he has forged since the late 1990s. That was when he began putting his white wines through a seven-month fermentation in large clay amphorae. That’s right; not stainless steel tanks or concrete vats or oak casks but clay vessels that he buries up to the neck in the ground, just as winemakers did 2,000 and 3,000 years ago. And after the wines are pulled up (by buckets) from the amphorae, they spend three years in neutral oak barrels

I purchased a bottle of Gravner’s Anfora Breg 2001, a blend of sauvignon blanc, pinot grigio, chardonnay and riesling, at De Vino, a sleek little wine store with an impeccable selection of mainly Italian wines on Clinton Street in New York. I was on my way to dinner at Falai, a contemporary Italian restaurant in the next block south, and I stopped at the store and asked if they had any of Gravner’s wines. The Breg 2001 was in stock. When I returned to Memphis, I emailed store owner Gabrio Tosti di Valminuta and asked him what I should expect from this unusual wine. “Don’t expect,” he replied. “Just sit back and relax. Treat it like a red wine. Let it breathe a little.”

So we sipped Gravner’s Anfora Breg 2001 slowly and carefully.

Look at the color. LL, who dotes on semi-precious stones — well, OK, precious stones — described the wine’s pale sunset hue as tourmaline infused with topaz. I’ll go with that. The color, by the way, derives from the pinot grigio grapes, whose skins have a pinkish tone.

The wine combines spareness with unctuousness to an uncanny degree, like a Spartan wearing a satin cloak. The bouquet offers orange rind and orange blossom, roasted almonds, cinnamon and clove, spiced peaches and apricots, yet the aromas are delicate, almost ephemeral, and they take on hints of sandalwood and strawberry tea. We discovered that Breg 2001 cannot be consumed at too cold a temperature. Even I, a fanatic for keeping white wines chilled, understood that this wine needed the slightest of chills and that as it warmed in the glass a bit it really bloomed. Do not, however, as I read somewhere, drink this at room temperature; the acid turns flabby and interferes with the wine’s essential taut structure, which would, of course, happen to any white wine.

In the mouth, Breg 2001 balances crispness with lushness and macerated stone fruit with acid and minerals; there’s a rising tide of limestone; the wine is bone-dry, yielding some austerity on the finish. All of these elements represent tissues of delicacy; there’s nothing obvious or overblown about this wine.

We puzzled a bit over what to serve it with. Breg 2001 does not seem to be a dinner wine, though a respondent to cellartracker.com wrote: “wonderful stuff and deliciously paired with well-spiced honey and ginger risotto with grilled sweetbreads.” Well, de gustibus and all that, but gack! at least as far as the honey and ginger risotto is concerned. We thought of it more as an aperitif wine, a uniquely complex yet elegant accompaniment to some earthy and unadorned preserved meat like speck or braseola.

The rub — and there is one — is that you wouldn’t want to pay $115 for an aperitif wine. Apparently, uniqueness and eccentricity, no matter how compelling or entrancing, come at a cost. I mean, think of all the capital that was tied up while Breg 2001 aged for more than three years.

Maybe not final final because I’m still going to be writing about many of the wines I tasted in New York on March 19, but general thoughts about the event and its implications.

First, the organizers of the event, which offered 167 wines from, I guess, every wine-making region of Italy, need to be better organized. The wines are presented in no order. From table to table, you might have a wine from Tuscany, next to a wine from Abruzzi, next to a wine from Sicily, followed by a wine from Umbria, next to a wine from Piedmont. Since that’s the case, you will find grapes of far different qualities and potential succeeding each other.

And the so-called “Tasting Notebook” doesn’t help, because it lists the wines to be tasted in order of presentation, by table number, and doesn’t mention the region. There’s no way you can scan the list and make sense of regions, grapes or types of wine. And when you have about three hours to try as many wines as possible, you need all the help you can get to be systematic. If you wanted to limit yourself, for example, to wines from Piedmont — Barolo, Barbaresco, Barbera d’Asti and d’Alba, Dolcetto and so on — there’s no way you could sample all the wines except by running back and forth from room to room and table to table like a madman.

More important, though, is what this tasting of award-winning wines says about the Italian wine industry, its history and its expectations.

For instance, I tried the Galatrona 2004, a 100 percent merlot wine from Fattoria di Petrolo in Tuscany. It was solid, a little stolid, well-made but certainly emphasizing structure, even pretty damned tannic and oak-ridden; indeed, it ages 18 months in new French oak barrels. Since merlot grapes are not indigenous or traditional to Tuscany, the wine receives a designation of Toscana I.G.T. — indicazione geografica tipica — stating exactly that fact. I asked the representative at the table what the suggested retail price of the wine was, and he blithely answered, “$85 or $90.”

I mean, really, but the principle question here is, “Why?” And then, “Who cares?” James Suckling, European correspondent for The Wine Spectator called Galatrona the “Le Pin of Tuscany,” referring to the tiny estate in Pomerol, on the Bordeaux Right Bank, that produces a highly finite amount of sumptuous and very expensive wine from merlot grapes. If some errant numbskull began producing sangiovese in Pomerol, would Suckling call it the “Il Poggione of Bordeaux”? What I mean is, great merlot (and by extension cabernet sauvignon) can be found in many of the world’s wine regions; why must Tuscan producers feel that they must compete with (especially) Bordeaux and by implication California by using Bordeaux grapes and aging techniques, that is, in small French oak barrels?

Basically, I found too much cabernet sauvignon and merlot and too much French oak at the Gambero Rosso event. Wine after wine was stiff, tannic and wooden, or velvety, voluptuous and toasty, I mean, California or the new style in Bordeaux. Read Italy’s Noble Red Wines by Sheldon and Pauline Wasserman (Macmillan, 1991, second edition) for the story about how Italian producers have gradually, since the 1970s, switched from using traditional large casks of Slavonian oak (even chestnut) to using 59-gallon French barriques. Yes, many red wines in Tuscany and Piedmont used to be aged too long, so that tannin masked the fruit in youth and wood masked the fruit in maturity, but if you think the transition to small, new French oak barrels hasn’t changed the character of many of these wines, you might believe that Anna Nicole died of whooping cough.

It’s disturbing that Slow Food, originating in Italy but now an international voice for locality, integrity and authenticity in food products and wine, is a sponsor or collaborator in Gambero Rosso’s awards and in this event. There’s not much that’s truly authentic and local about a Tuscan wine made from French grapes and aged in French oak.