Thursday, June 21, 2018

Giacomo Restaurant’s Teroldego, Foradori, Rotaliano, Trentino 2015 - A Closer Look - Essay

Teroldego, Foradori, Rotaliano, Trentino, 2015

Jose, the waiter at Giacomo, listened politely while I reminisced about “the old days.”


Giacomo Restaurant’s Teroldego, Foradori, Rotaliano, Trentino 2015 - A Closer Look

Jose, the waiter at Giacomo Restaurant, listened politely while I reminisced about “the old days.” It was about thirty years ago, I told Jose, when my Petroleum Engineer bosses used to take “us” (female office staff) to La Mora Restaurant for long boozy lunches.  Those extravagant lunches were expensive, but the bosses had company expense accounts.  They were high rollers.

You see, I told Jose, the high rollers appreciated La Mora’s superb wine selection.  I recalled one memorable lunch in which an inebriated high roller knocked his chair through La Mora’s window, so that day the bosses plopped down a stack of hundred dollar bills to cover the cost of the broken window on top of their company credit cards to cover the cost of the expensive food and booze.  Those were the days Jose.

Jose knew all about the old days.  His boss Lynette Hawkins, he told me, serves exceptional wines at Giacomo, just like she did when she owned La Mora.  I already knew that.  Hawkins’s reputation for good wine has been unwavering, and brought me to Giacomo’s patio, where Jose graciously tolerated an old broad's blabbering.

Which wine did I drink?  "Teroldego, Foradori, Rotaliano, Trentino, 2015.”  Sounds complicated, but the four words explicitly denote wine made from the red Teroldego grape which the Foradori family grows on a cliff-bordered parcel of land called the Rotaliano flood plain located where the Adige River meets the Noce River, in Trentino Italy.

Giacomo’s menu offered additional information.  The letter “W” near my wine designated the winery was owned by a woman, a distinction obviously important to Jose’s boss Lynette Hawkins.  Intrigued, I wanted to know more about the woman who grew grapes and made wine in the alpine Trentino, where viticulture has been practiced since the Etruscans.  I learned that Elisabetta Foradori took over her family’s vineyard in 1984 after the death of her father Vittorio, who had purchased his land in the 1930s.  Armed with a wine-making university education, she modernized and improved the grape vine farming and wine making processes, she eliminated pesticides, pruned selectively, hand-harvested, and significantly modified fermentation and storage.  It was not long before Elisabetta had gained a reputation for producing inordinately elegant wines.  Her two sons now work with her.

Giacomo’s Cibo e Vino
3215 Westheimer Road
Houston, Texas
713 522-1934
Giacomosciboevino.com


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