Next Step | Fiano | 4 of 4

Part four of a four-part series.

Fiano di Avellino Winemaking: Respect Requires Restraint

There are often long periods of silence when driving between winery appointments. Jonathan drives and needs to keep his eyes on the narrow windy roads. Jim navigates using unfamiliar tools (I’m still a map guy, but paper maps only exist as historic documents). On a rare stretch of straight road Jonathan blurts out “respect requires restraint.” This captures Irpinia’s winemaking approach.
 
Wine is food. In Irpinia, food is fresh, traditional, and simply prepared. Pasta is eggs and flour. Salami is made from hogs raised on the farm. Home grown olives show up at every meal. Irpinian winemaking follows suit. The purity of the wines reflects this approach. The magic is the terroir. It is not the cellar.
 
I’ve had the opportunity to visit dozens of winemaking regions. Many were in transition from old-school traditional to modern. Often this transition was not pretty. Commercialization tempted more adventurous winemakers to focus on complex cellar techniques. The wines became muddled and soulless. The style became “international” and appealed to certain critics.

 “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
         -Leonardo da Vinci

So far, most Irpinian winemakers have resisted the alchemy of the cellar. While the cellars are mostly new and up to date, there is a confidence and desire to keep it simple. The winemaker’s ego does not trump terroir. This is probably why I became so attracted to the purity and restraint of Fiano di Avellino.
 
Simple does not mean primitive.

My tech notes

Almost all of the Fiano presses we saw were sophisticated (and expensive) tank presses. Tank presses are presses that are completely enveloped and sealed inside a tank so that air can be evacuated and replaced by nitrogen gas. This reduces oxygen pick up by the juice during pressing. These same tanks are also used by many Sauvignon Blanc producers. Their advantage is to retain juice aromatics, as many of the aroma precursors disappear (oxidize) when they come into contact with air. This is a stylistic choice. Some winemakers from other regions may go in a quite opposite direction and purposely oxygenate their juice (splashing and stirring).
 
Fermenting and aging (on fine lees) in stainless steel tanks is the norm. Malolactic fermentation and oak were rare.
 
This minimal handling and processing likely contribute to the age worthiness of Fiano di Avellino. Without exception, the older the wine the more complex and intriguing it became. In my mind these Fianos are in the same league as terroir-driven Rieslings, Chardonnays, and Chenin Blancs. I’ve been on a buying spree so that someday we’ll have a deep cellar of older bottles of Fianos to learn from.

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