The night I drink the Montefalco Rosso, Cesarini Sartori Fiorella, 2009—a blend of sangiovese, merlot, cabernet and sagrantino—might more aptly be dubbed Sunday afternoon.
I’ve been napping, dozing between the bells that ring out from a nearby Italian church. The bells clang one long, low DONG for the hour, and a brisker, lighter dong for each 15 minutes incrementally. So 1:30 goes like this: “DONG dong dong.”
That’s when I take a break from the hot day and sprawl out on my mattress.
The power went out for a minute yesterday. The digital clock next to my bed is flashing the wrong time. No matter. The bells keep me on track.
“DONG DONG DONG dong dong dong.”
I roll over and reset the clock to 15:46. Because I’m in Europe. There’s no confusing repetition of a 12-hour cycle here. A girl trucks through life one ’til 24. So it goes. Thankfully, the clock never rings 24 DONGs. Craziness.
I attempt to check Facebook. No luck. I’ve consumed my Internet bandwidth for the month. It will reset on Tuesday—in 48 hours.
I’m cut off from the world. I can’t post my witty, pointless observations about life for folks back home. Like “Q: How many Italian bartenders does it take to kick eight U.S. college students and a professor out of a bar when it’s closing? A: Only one, distractedly flipping the switch that turns off the Wi-Fi.”
I open the wine. The bottle is recommended by Pietra, a young man who owns Vino Symposium, a few labyrinthine blocks from my apartment. Pietra also sells vini sfuzi, “loose wines,” on tap in giant stainless-steel vats. Sfuzi—the original two-buck Chucks—sell for a couple euro per liter. Bring your own bottle; sfuzi go in any container. Last week, I bought a montepulciano/sangiovese blend. Pietra filled my 1.5-liter water bottle for three euro.
It’s OK.
The Cesarini Sartori Fiorella starts out a bit tight, but smoothes out nicely. I’m sipping my first glass as I assemble a pasta sauce. I’d been to the market for onions, a red bell pepper, fat garlic bulbs and several kinds of tomatoes, including half-ripe Sicilians and small Piccadilli that pack a big punch.
Food tastes great in Italy, because the ingredients are fabulous. Extra-virgin olive oil pressed from local family farms. Pastas handmade at a shop just around the cobblestoned corner. Meats, fresh and smoked, sliced thin or fat or diced or spiced, in a thousand varieties. Veggies soaking up the sun in fields of Sicily or Tuscany or right here in Lazio.
I blanch the skins off the tomatoes while I sauté an onion, minced garlic and some red bell pepper in tasty extra-virgin olive oil. When the veggies are getting done, I add a half cup or so of Pietra’s sfuzi.
I’m drinking the Cesarini Sartori Fiorella because this is my week to encounter wines from Italy’s Umbrian region, slightly north and east of the Lazio region in which I’m living for a couple months. Each Italian wine region specializes in some specific kinds of grapes. The rare sagrantino grows in and around the city of Montefalco. I could not find the exact wines listed in my Italian wine bible—Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy. The book’s my tour guide. Without Internet, I’ve been poring over its pages. Highlighting and underlining. Starring the wines I’ve samples and the recipes I’ve tried.
The sfuzi bubbles over the veggies, and I add about a tablespoon zucchero (sugar) so the mixture will caramelize. I mashed peeled tomatoes with my hands, thinking about how delicious it must feel to dance around in a vat of grapes.
I stir the whole thing together—and I could eat it just like this! But I don’t. It will be so much tastier when it cooks down, and the flavors meld. The individual elements will lose their distinct characters and become one with the tasty sauce. In the Middle Ages, art was like this, says an architect who’s teaching a class in urban landscape here. Art emerged from the community without any specific artistic ego imposing its brand.
And then along came the Renaissance, and with it, the beginnings of rugged individualism. Religious and humanist pretensions. I digress wildly.
The day I drink the Montefalco Rosso, I chat with hubby Dave via Google chat on my telephone. This doesn’t use too much of my Verizon international data plan, which costs $25 for 100 megabytes of data. (To put this in perspective, I ran through an entire 10 gigabytes of data using Skype on my laptop. If I had to pay Verizon’s rates, that would be $2,500.)
Skype sucks up giant vats of data, which I imagine flowing from a shiny sfuzi-like tank, as precious as wine. I always remember to turn off my Wind (that’s a brand of Italian mobile Internet service provider) when I’m not using it.
My sauce gets tastier. The wine opens up. The two flavors seem molto compatible.
DONG DONG DONG DONG DONG DONG. It’s only 18:00. Too early to cook the pasta, thin coils of capelli d’angelo. I read some stories from a book of women writers on their Italian travels. Here’s Mary Shelley: “The name of Italy has magic in its very syllables.” She digs gondola rides in Venice.
I start boiling salty pasta water around 19:00. Italians use salt in terrifying quantities. And I’m liking it. I pour a second glass of wine with dinner.
Finally, it’s time. But eating is like making love: Describing it, blow by blow, gets weird. To cut to the chase: It’s an exceptional sauce that brings out the best in this blend of Italian grape varietals.
I decide to watch Life Is Beautiful, an award-winning movie about an optimistic Jewish poet in Italy as World War II breaks out. The tale depicts a young family that ends up in a forced labor/death camp. Dad saves his preschool-aged son by transforming the horror of the camp into a game.
My Italian’s almost OK enough that I could watch this movie without subtitles and still get the full-on heartbreak.
Eleven quarter-hour DONGs later, I’m crying in my Montefalco Rosso.
So it goes.