In this entry to our 2024 wine writing competition, wine writer Kara Daly describes a revelatory moment in Lazio. See the guide to our competition for more.
Kara Daly writes Kara Daly is the author of the Wine Is Confusing Newsletter. She was a fellow for the 2023 Wine Writers’ Symposium and has been published in Wine Enthusiast, Vinepair, and Queen City Nerve. She’s currently based in Western North Carolina, where she’s delightfully watching the beginning of something really cool.
Lesson In Italian
I was 5,000 miles away when it hit me. We were 20 miles north of Rome, at the first winery of the day in Lazio. In the cellar, I watched as winemakers, Marco and Nicola, verbally elbowed each other in pursuit of the conversation. I didn’t know the language, so I watched their bodies, facial expressions, and listened to the sounds of their rowdy back and forth—are they brothers? I made a note to ask.
Our guide for the day, Sarah, was a local wine writer who had driven us the two hours there, chatting along as the unforgiving backroads scraped the bottom of her Toyota Yaris Hybrid. Now, she stood rooted in the face of these loud men, raising her own voice when she sensed that one of them might interrupt her. She was used to this, for they were talking about the thing they were most passionate about, a topic they lived, breathed, and drank: making punk wine at Agricola Il Vinco on the outskirts of Rome.
The wine was funky and smelled of new beginnings. I had read that Lazio was just now refining its style—with easy access to the Roman market throughout the heydey of the Empire, winemakers in the area had little reason to improve on quality, and their grapes were relegated to bulk wine. As a new wine writer, I felt an affinity for regions that were still finding their audience. So, even though it was my first visit to Europe, I skipped the iconic destinations of central Italy and headed to Lake Bolsena, a volcanic lake in the northern part of the region.
Sarah translated when she could, often getting lost in the impassioned conversation that one sinks so easily into when meeting another person for whom wine is their whole life. When she found moments to come up for air, she would translate. When she was down below, I held my glass and watched. The wine was textured, acidic, fruity, and earthy. Some of it was spicy, some was brett-y, some was tart and red, and some of it was salty. It reminded me, not of any Italian wine I’d had before, but of American wine. I wanted to say that but I didn’t know how—or if I should.
Here I had traveled 5,000 miles to Italy, walked up to the pedestal of my education, and the wine in my glass simply reminded me of home. In doing so, it pointed to the hypocrisy of my studies so far: I had been memorizing the history of Italy’s beginnings, failing to recognize the history taking shape outside my window.
Of course, I was doing what I was taught. My country is the biggest wine market globally, but while our homegrown wineries struggle to keep their doors open, we’re guzzling wine primarily from Spain, Italy, and France. And though I worked alongside sommeliers further along in their studies than me, no one had suggested we drive the hour or so to check out the vineyards in our state. The only local bottle I’d seen in anyone’s hands was a cloyingly sweet Muscadine, brought in as a joke.
The one thing I could truly grasp in Il Vinco’s cellar was how humbled I felt by my limitations. How was I supposed to write a story about a wine whose language I don’t speak, whose vineyards I’ve walked for a day, and whose politics I’ve only read about? When the only thing I can say after a sniff and a sip is, “It’s delicious, thank you. Are you brothers?”
Watching the winemakers all but wrestle each other to the ground in order to discuss making wine at the border of a complicated city, I wrote down what I would take away from the entire day ahead of me: I’m reflecting on my capacity to understand my home.
We had a few more wineries to visit that day. Driving around the lake, I felt a friendship forming with Sarah, and our disarmed conversations confirmed what my experiences in the lesser traveled towns of central Italy had suggested. This was a country with economic disparities, class issues, triumphs, and wine—just like mine. And the road to a true, lived understanding of the context in which the country’s wine grew was daunting.
That moment in the cellar, holding the home-smelling wine, watching the loud not-brothers whose perspectives on Rome I badly wanted to understand told me that while there was much to love about Italy, I needed to be careful not to romanticize faraway places. It was time to study American wine.
When I returned home, I drove 20 miles to Addison Farms Winery in Leicester, North Carolina. Nestled in the Southern Appalachian Mountains—one of the most biodiverse places in the world of its size—the winery makes Piquette from Sangiovese, dry whites from Petite Manseng and Chardonel, a Champenoise, a red blend, and a Cabernet Franc. Sitting among the vines with the winemakers, I asked the kinds of questions that a lifetime of cultural immersion permitted me to uniquely ask—they answered, and I understood.
Photo by Kennedy Lieberman: 'Walking towards Lake Bolsena at the last stop of the day, Andrea Occhipinti's vineyard'.