Prima Terra, “Çericò” Rosso on Sale

Prima Terra, “Çericò” Rosso

If you’ve ever been to Cinque Terre, in Italy’s Liguria region, you probably drank a local wine that ranked among the best of your life. But when you re-visited that wine later, removed from its place of origin, was it everything you remembered? Yeah, maybe not. Let’s face it: It’s no small achievement for a wine to live up to a setting like Cinque Terre, so when something like Prima Terra’s “Cericò” comes along—a wine that doesn’t merely “live up” to its place but re-defines what’s possible there—it merits all the fanfare we can muster. Cericò is a succulent and brilliantly aromatic blend of Grenache and Syrah that does proper justice to the wonderland that is Liguria.

This region accounts for only the tiniest sliver of Italian wine production, which makes sense since it’s a tiny sliver of land, dominated by the Maritime Alps. Prima Terra’s Walter De Batté is one of the few wine celebrities in this out-of-the-way region, having made his name producing Cinque Terre Sciacchetrà, a honey-rich passito (dried-grape wine) to rival the great nectars of Sauternes. With Prima Terra, he again reveals the Cinque Terre to be much more than just a pretty face—it’s just up the coast from Provence, and this wine gives the greats of France a run for their money!

Because of the fragmented nature of vineyard ownership in Cinque Terre, and the small size of most individual holdings, wine production in the region has long been dominated by a regional cooperative, for which Walter DeBatté once worked. The wines he released under his own label, including those justly famous Sciacchetrà bottlings, were among the few examples of “estate-bottled” Cinque Terre wines seen in export markets. With Prima Terra, De Batté does not use the Cinque Terre DOC designation on labels, not wanting to be hemmed in by the “bureaucratic” constraints of an official denomination of origin. Çericò is bottled instead as a vino da tavola (table wine), offering him greater flexibility to showcase the terroir to its fullest. The Prima Terra winery is in Campiglia, in the province of La Spezia, with vineyards concentrated mostly in nearby Riomaggiore, along with a few sites across the border in the Colli di Luni region of Tuscany. 

The Cinque Terre is a national park, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but viticulture has been on the decline in recent years, despite the ancient history of its remarkable stone terraces. De Batté’s carefully assembled parcels, rooted in soils combining sandstone, clay/loam, and schist, are strongly reminiscent of some of the vineyards of the Northern Rhône, and while Grenache is more commonly found in these parts, Syrah has a significant foothold in the region as well—much as it does throughout the Mediterranean basin. There are a lot of similarities between De Batté’s Çericò (80% Grenache, 18% Syrah, 2% Vermentino Nero) and reds found throughout Southern France, be it Provence, the Southern Rhône, or Languedoc. The warm, plush red fruit of the Grenache is pointed up by the meaty savor and black pepper spice of the Syrah, the wine shot through with the same aromas of garrigue (scrub-brush) found in some many southern French reds. Liguria is an extension of France’s Mediterranean Riviera, with the same aromatic herbs and bushes (here called mácchia) growing alongside the vines.

Technically speaking, a wine bottled as a “table wine” is not allowed to carry a vintage date, so the only indication you’ll find that this wine is from 2017 is a lot number (L7/17) in small type along the edge of the label. Çericò comes from an old-vine parcel at 500 meters’ elevation, looking southward down at the sea. The wine was fermented slowly, with a long maceration on its skins, before 18 months’ aging in 550-liter Slavonian oak barrels. It spent another eight months refining in bottle before its initial release and is now in prime drinking condition—silky smooth, a little sappy, but loaded with palate-enlivening freshness. It’s a deep garnet-red in the glass, with aromas and flavors that initially put you in the mind of a classic French Grenache: cherry kirsch, raspberry, macerated strawberries, orange peel, red currant. But there are also some darker notes of licorice, violet, black pepper, and black plum, as well as the pronounced herbal/lavender note typical of Mediterranean reds. It is medium-plus-bodied with plush tannins and plenty of freshness to prevent it from feeling syrupy. It’s an exotic tour de force, great for cold-weather sipping and well-suited to some lamb shanks in a rich, tomato-y reduction or a classic eggplant “parm.” It’s not “classic” to Liguria, mind you, but it’ll work. Enjoy!