Azienda Reale - Amalfi Coast, Italy
100+ year-old tintore vine
REALE IN AMALFI: UNIQUE AND DELCIOUS
Vines grow almost anywhere. They are beings with a fanatic will to survive, an urge to spread their arms across anything that will hold them up. They exist in the three typical dimensions and importantly, stretch brilliantly through the dimension of time. They adapt to the landscape and merge with the people who grow them. In the mountains above the Amalfi coast, in the region called Tramonti, time is held up by a layer of ash. Into that ash vines grow.
Two brothers make wine in this village properly called Gete. They are mountain-bound collaborators with the old vineyards and the agriturismo with its almond-flowered courtyard. Luigi will welcome you at the front desk of the agriturismo, if Gaetano does not intercept you first out front in the vineyard. During our visit this May, we got out of the car and looked up (as one is perpetually doing in this skyward village) and there was Gaetano, decked in hat and puffy jacket against the whipping wind and intermittent rain. Was Gaetano outside after finishing up a vineyard task or just waiting for us? One only waits outside on a dreadful day with the most unflinching, rooted purpose, just as the Reale family only cultivates a life in this place with visionary, reverent intention.
We love the wine from this place at the edge of all things: this place where the low light means grapes can hang on the vine for a long time, ripening slowly and gaining complexity, the vineyards too steep to use a plow, the grape variety of Tintore and Per ‘e Palummo only seen within an hour’s driving radius. The existence of these wines is just a shred beyond impossibility. Up here, around 1700 feet of elevation on volcanic-sand soil, the devastating mite phylloxera never could reach the precious vineyards— both for the elevation and for the inability to live in this sandy soil. And so most vines are more than a hundred years old, carefully tended and beloved of the Reale family for generations.
Up! — we go into the vineyards. These are no ordinary vines, not in two dimensions up and down, but twisted, gnarled things spreading and unfurling across hundreds of feet of pergolas. The pergola system maximizes the sun on the canopy — this is very important for ripening grapes in the cooler mountain landscape. The terrain of Reale is shaped by the nearby pore of the earth, Vesuvius, and the vines look like tendrils of dried lava. They have an intensity and presence of solidified time like the Redwoods in California, but time you can taste.
Reale grows the red grape varieties piedirosso, tintore di Tramonti, and the white varieties biancazita, biancolella, and pepella. All of these grape varieties are indigenous to Campania. Tintore di Tramonti finds its home only in the small mountainous peninsula near Sorrento and Amalfi, scattered on pergola trellises in the hills. It’s a high-acid, darkly hued red grape. The name means to tint darker, and it is a treasure of this area. Piedirosso is here sometimes called Per ‘e’ palummo in the local vinous dialect. This means the leg of the pigeon, which are red! The stems of this variety are stained red like a pigeon’s. You may recognize this variety from other inland and other coastal varieties of Campania. It is well-loved and it loves to be grown by the sea. The same sea-faring sentiment is true for the three white grape varieties, biancazita, biancolella, and pepella. Biancazita is a local Neopolitan dialect for falanghina. The Reale brothers tell us that some of their white wine cuttings come originally from the nearby island of Ischia. Reale is a living grape archeology realm. To have these grapes at all is a treasure, but to have hundred-plus year old versions of these vines is a straight spicy delicious channel to the past.
This land has been smothered by volcanic deposits from nearby Mount Vesuvius over many centuries. The ash that covers the ground is thick and spongy and maintains moisture during the springtime and summertime, typically a time of no rain for months in the Amalfi Coast. Without this ashy deposit, the terrain would be inhospitable for grapes or for any of the family gardens or lemon trees also dotting the hills.
How is it that these tough-guy vines of Luigi and Gaetano’s rooted determination create such charming wines? Certainly environmental forces dare these roots to fold even deeper into the ash, into complexity and loveliness. Additionally, these two joyous brothers add their own vitality to the process. In the white-knuckled end-of-the-world-feeling driving scenario of the Amalfi coast and the mountains on high, you feel like you might never make it to a place of security and peace; then the doors at Reale swing open and you are fed heavenly wood-fired pizza, welcomed into an oasis of rowdy hospitality in the treacherous mountains. At the dinner service, Gaetano changes into a waiter’s vest and shirt out of his vineyard clothes. The two are at every moment dedicated to their work, dedicated to the art of hosting and the message of their terroir. If it weren’t for the sheer effort that goes into the creation of this wine, you might think that the wine was just something they made to fold into the experience of their hospitality. The focus of Reale is stewardship of their treasured, hundred-plus year old vines, a treasure on earth at the end of the earth. Their wines are at the heart of that goal.
Click on each wine for more detail.