Try These Italian Natural Wines
Cin cin!
Happy February, friends! It’s the month of sharing wine with someone you love. Here are my natural wine suggestions from a wine-producing country I love: Italy.
Spuma! Vino Frizzante is a delicately sparkling pet nat by winemaker Denny Bini as a part of the Fuso project, a project that is a collaboration between an importer and natural winemakers in Italy to bring low-intervention daily drinkers to us. Spuma! is fizzy, unfiltered, fermented in the bottle, and made in the ancestral way.
It is a beautiful example of natural wine. Spuma! tastes like strawberries, apples, flowers, mineral, and finishes with a hint of that classic natural wine barnyard funk. It remains balanced and clean, however; this is a bright, refreshing wine that’s perfect for a sunny day or apero hour.
Atilia Montepulciano d'Abruzzo is exactly what I wanted on a very cold January evening to go with the pasta sauce I had simmered all day. It’s warm, comforting, and simple with tasting notes of cherries, ripe dark berries, currants, and a dusky herbaceous note.
As comforting as this red wine is on a cold day, it’s not heavy. Atilia’s Montepulciano d’Abruzzo was hand-harvested and fermented with wild yeasts. Thanks to the lack of intervention in the fermentation process, this wine is light and fresh while still being a cozy red that’s perfect for a winter evening or to pair with a rich pasta dinner.
Fatto Coi Piedi from Filarole is a beautiful orange wine with lots of structure and impossible-to-miss tasting notes. It’s a blend of Malvasia di Candia Aromatica, Ortrugo, Trebbiano, and indigenious grapes fermented on the skins. The skin contact gives it a hint of tannins, a good amount of salinity, and those intense tasting notes.
Fatto Coi Piedi tastes like citrus, mineral, floral with a touch of barnyard funk. I loved the personality of this wine! It’s crafted by hand on a small batch winery and fermented using native yeasts without filtration. This skin contact wine is natural wine at it’s finest. Because of its structure, Fatto Coi Piedi pairs well with lots of flavorful foods, from pasta to fish to Asian food to tacos.
Sofia Brescia Frizzante from a sustainable vineyard in the Veneto is a lightly sparkling wine. Though this wine contains the grape that’s used to make Prosecco and has bubbles and comes from the region where Prosecco is made, it’s quite different. Frizzante is an Italian sparkling wine that is lower pressure than Spumante wines (i.e. Prosecco or a pet nat). It’s delicate yet refreshing and very versatile.
Sofia Brescia is a gently bubbly wine with crisp acidity and tasting notes of pear, apple, flowers, mineral, and a honeyed finish. It’s interesting, mouthwatering, and the bubbles create a nice contrast with whatever meal you pair it with. This is a year-round kind of wine, suitable for many occasions: it can go from Christmas dinner to a New Years Eve party to a Valentine’s date to hot summer evenings on the patio to crisp fall days to Thanksgiving dinner.
All of these wines showcase the beautiful terroir of Italy in different ways. They come from different regions, but they all share something in common: the winemakers are crafting the wines with care and little intervention. If you want to read more about what makes natural wine special, check out this post. Let me know if you try one of these wines and what you think!
My monthly natural wine suggestions are always free, but if you want to support this publication in a way other than subscribing you can buy me a coffee!