“Burnt meat and baby food” is the way food writer Fred Plotkin once described Tuscan cooking to me. Moreover – I speak as one whose dinner is always important to him – its cuisine is far more interesting and varied than Tuscany’s, despite the totally inflated reputation of Tuscan cooking in this country. It’s less wild and rugged than Tuscany, more mellow and gentler, and it has its full share of castellated hills, artistic treasures (Assisi, for one), and classical and Etruscan antiquities (Perugia still boasts an Etruscan city gate). That’s a shame, because in many respects Umbria is the handsomer region. To tourists – wine tourists included – Umbria remains a territory far less known and travelled than Tuscany. His white Torre di Giano Vigna Il Pino and red Rubesco Riserva Vigna Monticchio are still the firm’s flagship wines, even though the line has expanded and the firm now also produces wine in the Sagrantino DOC and other parts of Umbria, as well in its home base of Torgiano.
He also blazed the trail for single-vineyard wines, at a time when, for Italy, that was a daring novelty. Back in the ‘60s, his Rubesco won the first DOC for Umbria (Torgiano Rosso), only the fifth in all of Italy. To make clear why that was so, Chiara, the young CEO of the historic Lungarotti firm, presented WMG members with an assortment of Umbrian wines that embraced not just Lungarotti’s bottlings but examples from most of Umbria’s now numerous DOC zones – a very impressive lineup, in both variety and quality.Ĭhiara’s father, the near-legendary Giorgio Lungarotti, was the great pioneer of Umbrian wine.
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