In this entry to our 2024 wine writing competition, sommelier and wine expert Cynthia Chaplin writes about her encounter with a wine corker. See the guide to our competition for more great wine writing.
Cynthia Chaplin writes Cynthia Chaplin is a Vinitaly International Academy certified Italian Wine Ambassador, a professional Sommelier with Fondazione Italiana Sommelier and the Worldwide Sommelier Association and a Professor of Italian Wine and Culture. She is a Consultant for Vinitaly International and The Old Vine Conference, and the host of VOICES covering DEI in the wine industry for Italian Wine Podcast. She is a contributing author and editor for the recently published Wine Democracy (2022) and Italian Wine Unplugged 2.0 (2023), winner of the OIV Award 2023. Through her business, Cynthia Chaplin Wine, she designs and presents Masterclasses at conferences as well as courses based on Italian wines for embassies, corporate team building, staff training, private clients, students and charity events. Cynthia is a WSET Certified Educator and Maestro Educator for Vinitaly International Academy as well as a wine writer featured in Italy Magazine, Bellissimo, Maze Row Voices for Gallo, winery websites and other publications, both in print and online. She is a judge at international competitions including Concours Mondial de Bruxelles, LA International Wine Competition, 5StarWines & Wine Without Walls, Sud Top Wine in Sicily and Feminalise in Paris. She is a Wine Expert for Martin Randall Travel gastronomic tours in Italy and she consults with restaurants and enotecas developing comprehensive wine lists and excellent food pairings, as well as advising private clients who wish to curate personal Italian wine collections. Born in the USA, Cynthia moved to Europe in 1990 where she has lived in Spain, Belgium, England and Italy. In 2012, she chose to center her career in Italy and immerse herself in the Italian wine sector. She is based in Negrar di Valpolicella, just outside Verona.
It Was A Corker
I grew up in Ohio in the 1970’s and it was certainly not wine central. A pretty town and the quintessential white picket fence were the backdrop to summers watching my dad wash the car, drinking beer from the bottle, the transistor radio blaring out the baseball game. Winters were bookmarked by Wednesday nights when my mother took my brother and me to the bowling alley for her ladies’ league. Mom’s tipple was vodka, Kahlua and soda, a drink so syrupy yet so bitter that we never even considered stealing sips from her glass.
Looking back, I am grateful for the relatively peaceful and innocent childhood I had but, at the time, all I wanted was an escape from a place where everyone knew everyone’s business, nothing interesting ever happened and I felt like a bookish misfit. The college I attended proved to be an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire experience, another kind of mis-fitting, but it opened the door to new sophistications, some more benevolent than others. I discovered wine at a fraternity dining club, light years away from the diversity and equality I have championed for decades. Old boys club aside, the wines served at our monthly formal dinner intrigued me and I went on to take wine classes, tasting and experimenting when budget allowed, until I eventually moved to London and was introduced to Chablis by my English father-in-law. The rest is history. But that is not the wine moment I will never forget.
Fast forward to 1993 and I was living in a rural town outside Milan with my first child and a very absent husband. My interest in wine had expanded exponentially as we moved from England to Belgium to Spain and then to Italy. Sufficient wine knowledge under my belt gave me confidence to investigate. It’s amazing what a bit of spoken Italian will do for a young woman with a blonde baby and endless wine curiosity. I discovered that all the local wine producers were happy to have me wander into their cantinas with a glass demijohn or two, taste wine from the tank or the barrel, chat about the vineyard and head home with some local vino made from native grapes. Central Lombardy in the early 90’s was not a hotbed of red wine excellence, but I was captivated by the raw authenticity of the Croatina, Barbera, Marzemino and Vespolina wines I found on these tiny farms.
The moment I will never forget happened by accident, as the best moments do. I was in the cantina of an older farmer who was supplying me with unstable, acidic, fruity reds that I drank like water. I spied a contraption in a dark corner. Simple and sturdy, crafted from cast iron and painted long ago a now flaking green, this simple structure resembled a slightly stooped stick figure, clutching a plate to its chest. I asked about it and my host scoffed, “we don’t use that anymore, we take our wine to the bottlers.” A few minutes later, this astonishingly heavy device was in the trunk of my car and my baby was holding a bag of enormous corks. My secret love affair had begun.
My co-conspirator gave me directions to the local agricultural coop where I could buy bottles. I still feel a shiver remembering the delight of finding a new world, this airless, sheet metal warehouse filled with racks of bottles, pale green, dark green, along with ugly plastic bottle carriers, rustic racks made from shipping pallets, and dusty shelves with boxes of crown caps, plastic tubing and more bags of corks. The power of a cute baby and decent Italian skills were employed again and Giacomo was dispatched to my aid. A man of indeterminate age, black hair falling in his eyes, heavy work boots and slightly ripe in the aroma department, his face lit up like the fireworks on Ferragosto when he learned I wanted to know how to bottle my vino sfuso. “Signora, you are making a wise choice. Respect your wine. Even if it is simple, it will feel your love.” He whisked me to a store room holding more cast iron stick figures in varying stages of decay. “Tappatrice,” Giacomo named them for me. “You put the bottle here, on the plate, and you hold the cork here at the bottle’s neck, and then you squeeze the handle down, like closing the door carefully when you say goodbye to your Nonna.”
If I could sculpt or paint an image of that moment, I would colour it green and grey, black and translucent red, with hints of palest gold. The old iron tappatrice in Giacomo’s strong hands, his dark hair falling over the ruby stream of the fruity Croatina that sustained me through many lonely moments, my tiny daughter’s hair catching the sunlight through the open warehouse door while she played on the concrete floor coalesced into a shimmering moment when I knew Italian wine would always be in my life. It was personal.
I bottled over 600 bottles of wine in the next 3 years, then moved what was left of them to England. Suffice it to say, their instability was a common thread, but I loved what they meant to me. I have certainly tasted many more noble wines in the 30 years since, but it was that tappatrice, that corker, that made me feel Italian wine in my soul, its simplicity, its ancient story of usefulness, its ability to give generations a chance to save their homemade wine over just one winter touched something inside me. The corker still lives in my shed and its timeless strength has been a cast iron backbone for my life in wine for 3 decades. One day, I hope to bottle my own wine, just a few hundred bottles, hopefully grown on a someday plot on Mt Etna soon. The meeting of the moment I never forgot with the moment I hope to achieve.
The photo of the corker is courtesy Azienda Agricola Fratelli Vogadori.