Italians tend to serve fresher, more restrained and lower-abv whites with their food, not least so as not to overpower it
I don’t know how many of you buy wine specifically to drink with food, but the Italians do and we could learn a few lessons from them. If you taste wines such as soave and pinot grigio on their own, you might think they’re a bit bland and boring, but sip a glass with a plate of antipasti or spaghetti carbonara, say, and they spring into life. Italians by and large don’t want wines with overt fruit flavours, too much oak or overly high levels of alcohol, because they overwhelm their fundamentally simple food, which tends to respect both the raw ingredient and the season in which you’re serving it.
Interestingly, I often find that people who are new to wine enjoy pinot grigio for that very reason – it doesn’t have too much flavour. It’s easy to be sniffy about that, and there are some cynically made commercial examples to be sure, but it can also be an enjoyably easy-drinking companion to a simple spring meal, especially if it’s from one of the supermarkets’ premium ranges, which tend to come from Trentino; gavi and gavi di gavi are also popular, I think, for a similar reason – Asda, for example, has a gavi in its Extra Special range for £9.25 that is often, though not currently, on promotion. The other virtue of Italian whites is that they are relatively inexpensive. The regular price of the Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi in today’s pick, for instance, is only £7.25 in store at the Co-op (and a little more online).
For more by Fiona Beckett, go to fionabeckett.substack.com
