Babbo Boys Unravel the Joyful Anarchy of Italian Wines

Like most wine fans, I got my feet wet in Bordeaux, mainly because it’s so seductively easy to understand. In fact, it was designed that way more than a century ago with an easily memorized classification that makes it the most approachable of all wine regions. Like Circe’s island intercepting Odysseus, Bordeaux is set up to gently interrupt a voyage of exploration, to make itself the center of a wine lover’s world, to tell impressionable and passionate neophytes what to think, and what to drink.

Soon enough, mounting curiosity broke the spell. Like Odysseus, I set off again, leaving a trail of purple footprints in the direction of Burgundy’s sensual landscape--and beyond, toward the endless viticultural charms of Italy.

Odysseus was Greek, of course, and legend has it that a Greek god, Dionysus, introduced the vine to Italy. Be that as it may, the proto-Italian Etruscans embraced viticulture in antiquity, and Italy has never looked back.

Modern Italy, with some two million wine-bearing acres in 21 regions, might be described as one big wine estate. But that would be missing the point. The vast boot-shaped vineyard is made up of countless distinctly individual plantings, most of them relatively small plots attached to villages, castles and family farms. Each has its own story, though not always a happy one--grapes are subject to the shifting fortunes of agriculture to some extent--and all those stories make up a cultural fabric that gives the greater Italian vineyard endless layers of complexity and inflection.

Italian wines are not classified very well, and the details are anything but easily memorized. Even hard-core wine nerds are hard pressed to recall, for example, the grape varieties typically blended in your everyday Valpolicella (and if you just rattled off “Corvina, Rondinella and Molimara,” you may want to consider getting a life). And yet wandering the Italian winescape, glass in hand, is a marvelous odyssey that is only made more delightful by the occasional scary episode.

The essential guidebook to that exploration has just been published. “Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy” (Clarkson Potter, $35), by Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch, is the Italian wine book Americans have been waiting for.

Chief among its many charms is that it makes sense of Italian wine via celebration, rather than pedantry. These days, wine is too often presented as an isolated phenomenon, something to be studied, quantified, rated and ranked apart from its place in a life well lived. But early on, the authors state their intent to expand the basic concept of terroir--the “total natural environment” of a vineyard--to include the human factors that influence the character of wine from a given place.

There is no attempt to impose order on what even the Italians happily admit is something akin to chaos. Instead, Bastianich and Lynch embrace the ambiente, or cultural environment of the vine. They show us around like a pair of Italian uncles, urging us to eat and drink while filling us in on stuff that makes the experience even more enjoyable.

This avuncular tone is set in the vignettes that open each chapter. They show us a slice of regional daily life, especially life at table, which leads to an illumination of the area’s wines.

In one, they invade the Marche in search of crudo (Italian raw fish) and find their way to a seaside osteria where the chef is “a wild-eyed, somewhat blissed-out character named Moreno” whose kitchen sends out “plates of delicate raw fish in architectural presentations, drizzled with olive oil.” In the next, they attend a soccer game in Lazio (Italy’s sixth most productive wine region) and celebrate the victory of Rome over the regional team with a carafe of fragrant, refreshing Frascati.

They break an arduous hike to eat mocetta (ibex/chamois prosciutto) and artisan Fontina cheese in Alto-Aldige, a wine district so rugged that viticulture there “seems more like an endurance sport than a way to make a living.” Not coincidentally, a white wine from this region in the shadow of Mont Blanc is described as tasting like mountain spring water flowing through a meadow filled with wildflowers.

Historical revelations are woven into the stories in a way that illuminates why the people--and their food and wine--are the way they are. In the chapter on Basilicata, for example, we learn that there are three strong theories about the origin of Aglianico grape, all of them involving the ancient Greeks.

In Veneto, Bastianich and Lynch speculate on the source of the locals’ fondness for horse meat. And sometimes the most telling bit of history is the lack of one, as when we learn that the name of Tuscany’s celebrated white grape, Vernaccia, means “indigenous.”

Italy has some 800 wine grape varieties. Many are found nowhere else in the world, and all of them, on some level, express Italian culture. There are hundreds of defined production zones on several levels of specificity. Piedmont alone has 50 Denominazione Origine Controllata, or DOC, zones. Tuscany has 40. How many can you name?

Don’t worry about it. An appendix provides a glossary of Italian wine terms, a roster of grape varieties and a precise directory of wine zones by region. You may turn to those pages often, but you won’t spend much time there. All the good stuff (including recipes from Bastianich’s restaurateuse mom, Lidia) is up front.

Bastianich co-owns an impressive roster of New York restaurants, including Babbo, Esca, Becco and Felidia. Lynch is wine director at Babbo. He is also a James Beard Award-winning writer on the subject of wine. That may explain his knack for imparting knowledge and insight painlessly.

Explaining the arcane mysteries of Italian wine laws, for example, Lynch confides that Italian wine producers “have lots and lots of laws, which they delight in creating, revising and, most especially, debating. But obeying them is another story.”

He gets off some pretty good wine descriptions, too: “A glass of young Aglianico,” he writes, “is dark and feral, like the wolves that still roam the hills in these parts, greeting you with a low, tannic growl.”

That, of course, says as much about the subject as it does about the author. Who would write something like that about a Pauillac?

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Rod Smith is writer-at-large for Wine & Spirits magazine.