Amy Monroe shares her favorite unusual, overlooked, and underappreciated wines. Check out her previous installment here.
It seems like everywhere I look the last few weeks, there’s news of yet another new pizza place opening in this food-crazy town. Not that there’s anything wrong with that I just figured that between the excellent thin crust offerings from Little Star, and the inspired, artisan creations from Arizmendi and Cheeseboard, the Bay Area had its pizza bases pretty well deliciously covered. But, given that there will soon be a slew of new pies from which to choose, it’s only right that I write about pizza wine, and that means I must go somewhere I don’t want to go; to a place that produces a staggering amount of wine and yet has no word in its language for hangover. I must go to Italy.
I have a confession to make: I am intimidated by Italian wine. I should not admit this, being a wine professional and all, but it happens to be true. With well over 1,000 indigenous grape varieties spread among 20 different winegrowing regions, and a total production in 2008 of 45 million hectoliters of wine, Italy is a frightening equation of vinous permutations. In short, there are too many choices. So many choices that I tend to retreat into the comforts of the French, Spanish, Californian, or pretty much anything but Italian, — to wines I understand and love. There’s nothing wrong with this behavior, per se, except that it is antithetical to the very premise of this column in which I advocate stepping outside your wine comfort zone. What have I been doing when it comes to Italian wines? More or less the opposite of that. So in a quest to be less of a hypocrite, I finally took my own advice recently and went down the Italian wine rabbit hole. It just so happens that by doing so I not only had a lot of fun, but I found a couple of really cool, perfect-for-pizza wines along the way: