Finding wines that offer grape value

The search for new, exciting wines never does and never will end.

While this is usually confined to going down rabbit holes of finer and finer details for the wine geeks among us, we are always keeping an eye out for wines that are just great value glasses of wine that can bring some new and different flavours in a straight forward and accessible style.

An area of great interest now is the south of Italy, particularly Puglia.

It is a region with a plethora of old vine, native grape varieties that are suited to their area but have been out of favour for some time.

It’s an age-old story, think of Chianti, Chablis, Muscadet; areas that at their core have a unique and distinctive wine style which was exploited for the mass market and eventually saw a decline in general quality and consequently the quality image of the region.

Eventually as the poor-quality producers are flushed out of the system, we begin to see the established quality-focused producers shine through again and a new young generation given an opportunity to purchase good established sites or fruit at discounted prices.

The low-cost of land and established vines allows these growers to avoid the high costs we suffer here in Australia of buying land and taking years to experiment with finding the right grape varieties for a given site, not to mention the far higher wage costs.

Where it forces growers in Australia to price their wines well above the quality of the wine in the bottle, it frees small and large growers in these out of favour traditional regions to produce everyday table wines that possess good varietal character, maybe show a little of the place in which they are grown and even some complexity of flavour as well as shipping it halfway around the world for less than $20.

We are fortunate in Australia to have some fantastic importers who scour these regions for years to find quality and consistency from everyday drinking wines through to the benchmark producers.

Varieties that are gaining more interest for us include Negroamaro, which tends to produce wines of deep dark colour, medium weight yet quite full rich flavours. It’s relatively low tannin and acid means the resulting wines are full of earth, plums, chocolate and underlying savoury character, Lucarrelli ($18) have been producing a great value example for years. From the same producer, their Primitivo provides an equally good example of everyday drinking while maintaining the personality and character of the grape. While related to Zinfandel, Primitivo is not the same grape: it tends to ripen a little earlier and will show lots of cherry flavours, sweet spice, some dried fruit character and just a little more tannin. Finally, Nero di Troia which finds its home in the northern parts of Puglia provides a different view on the region. It tends to ripen later than the first two grapes and has a livelier feel. You will notice more floral characters, brighter fresh berries, subtle black pepper and herbs within a fresh yet rather silky frame given the more refined feel to its tannins. Torrevento produce a good example worth trying at $19.