Giampiero "Cotidie" Rosso, Umbria, Italy 2021

FROM ROSENTHAL:

THE WINE: Over the past 35 years, Giampiero Bea—both through his own deeply personal wines and his far-reaching influence—has become a cornerstone of our family of growers. Building on the work of his father, a through-and-through farmer whose Umbrian dialect is so thick as to be nearly incomprehensible to outsiders, Giampiero realized what made Paolo’s wines so special and built a working philosophy around it. In a series of decades that saw Italian winegrowers embracing modern technology whole-hog, Giampiero—as co-founder of the ViniVeri (“Real Wine”) group—advocated for respectful vineyard work, biodiversity, a de-emphasis on technology in the cellar, non-engagement with professional critics, and an overall trust in old, tried-and-true agrarian wisdom. Thankfully, these principles have become far more commonplace today than they were thirty years ago, but Bea’s wines remain singular: boisterous, unabashedly wild expressions of their undulating, sun-drenched hills of origin, each new vintage of which is eagerly anticipated by a legion of loyal clients. Giampiero’s wines always proudly display their vintage, and he pointedly resists striving for a consistent “product” from year to year. There is no green harvesting and no excessive sorting, as he wants each wine to reflect the entire season’s crop and not just a choice section; fermentations begin and end without being forced in either direction, thus varying in duration notably from vintage to vintage; and the wines are bottled when they’re deemed ready to be rather than according to some schedule, with the reds in particular generally spending upwards of four years in cask. There is no regulation of temperature, no pumping, no fining, and no filtering. Giampiero relies on patience, and plenty of it, to clarify his wines, and what is in the bottle is always a full-on reflection of the fruit and the story of the season that birthed it.

THE PRODUCER: “Cotidie” Umbria Rosso: “Cotidie” (“quotidian” in Latin) was conceived as an “everyday” wine for its relatively easygoing and drinkable spirit. The methodology behind it feels outré today but would have been common practice for the ancients to whom its Latin name pays tribute: a co-fermentation of both red and white grapes—in this case, Sagrantino and Trebbiano—grown in close proximity to one another, and yielding a lip-smacking wine that’s hard to pigeonhole. In its vibrant ruby color, it sits in the interzone between a dark rosato and a light red, and it offers the heady spice we all love in Bea’s Sagrantino, albeit on a softer, lighter frame.