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Sopranos Selections |
| For many of us Italian-Americans who grew up in Brooklyn during the 50s and early 60s, HBO’s hit series “The Sopranos” touches some sort of chord. If the well publicized outrage displayed by the organizers of New York’s Columbus Day festivities over the Mayor’s inviting a couple of cast members to join him in the parade represents one end of the emotional spectrum, the many passionate Tony, Christopher, or Furio fans, sporting their Cuban cigars, hefty gold chains, or thick pony tails, epitomize the other. Yet regardless of how one may feel about the show, who doesn’t get hungry when the camera focuses, even if briefly, on a dish of rich, home-style Italian-American food like Carmella’s baked ziti, Artie’s chicken cacciatore, or Paulie’s sausage with peppers? Dishes like these could always be found on the menus of most Italian restaurants during that period—that is, before Northern Italian cuisine replaced spaghetti and meat balls with risotto con funghi, red sauce with pesto, and straw-covered Chianti flasks with slender bottles of super Tuscans. While old-style Italian-American restaurants may be hard to find these days, there seems to be a resurgence of interest in this type of cooking, which today might be more fashionably referred to as Neapolitan or Southern. So, it should be no surprise that the recently released The Sopranos Family Cookbook, with an outstanding collection of excellent recipes by Michelle Scicolone, has become an almost overnight best seller. After reading the copy I received for Christmas, and making some of its recipes, I began to think about the wines that were, and to some degree still are, found on the Italian-American table: Among the bottles I remember being offered at the neighborhood restaurants of my youth in Brooklyn were Chianti, Valpolicella, Bardolino, and Amarone for reds, and Soave, Lachryma Christi, and Frascati for whites. Back then, the wine lists (typically simple cards and not the leather-bound tomes we see today) rarely indicated any vintage, only the name of the producer: Ruffino and Bolla were, more often than not, the only choices for Chianti and Soave respectively, while other producers like Bertani, Folonari, and Fontana Candida provided acceptable alternatives. So this month, I thought we’d revisit some of these wines and see just how well they stood the test of time. Shopping for them was a revelation; my favorite wine stores didn’t seem to carry any of the bottles for which I was looking. And when I eventually found them at a couple of wine “super stores” on the highway, they had been exiled from the Italian section and lumped in with the jug wines. I have to admit that it’s been quite some time since I tasted any of these labels, so finding them at relatively low prices (for example, $10.99 for 1.5 liter bottles of all the Bolla wines and $7.99 for the 750 ml. bottles of the Corvo and Ruffino) gave me some pause and made me rather apprehensive about this month’s tasting. Had all the wines of my youth turned to plunk? At least I had found a bottle of Ruffino’s Riserva Ducale at a surprisingly affordable price as well as a bottle of another old standby, Cesari, Amarone della Valpolicella. Perhaps the night would not be a total disappointment. I was also amazed that although one store had at least a half dozen different Pinot Grigios, it only had one brand of Valpolicella and Bardolino. Perhaps I should have gone shopping for this tasting in the old neighborhood and stopped in at one of my old haunts for a dish of veal and peppers and a stuffed artichoke. And then, maybe I should have walked down the block to the Italian bakery and ordered an espresso with some sesame-seed laden Regina cookies. Thank God, some things don’t change. To taste our selections, we prepared a recipe from The Sopranos Family Cookbook for Chicken Scarpariello, a tasteful sauté of chicken with sausage and pickled sweet peppers laced with white-wine vinegar and stock.It proved to be the perfect dish since it worked well with both red and white wines. I am also happy to report that none of our selections disappointed us. Although the Soave Bolla was not as “sophisticated” as we all had remembered it, it wasn't bad. In fact, all of the other wines proved themselves to be more than adequate accompaniments to our meal, and some even surpassed our expectations. As is our custom, we tasted the wines first on their own and then sampled them again with our meal.
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| TableWine is a personal website and does not sell any wine. However, many of the wines we review are purchased from our local wine merchants, Wine & Spirit World in Ho-Ho-Kus, NJ and The Wine Seller in Ridgewood, NJ. The Wine & Spirit World website may help you locate a good number of our selections. You might also use the database of quality wine merchants at Wine Searcher.com to help find wines that are difficult to locate. Finally, if your local wine store does not carry a wine that you've read about here, don't hesitate to ask them to order a bottle or two for you. For imported wines, you may need to supply them with the name of the importer or distributor. |
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