Wednesday's wine: Orvieto

Of Italy's white wines, Orvieto can be the dullest.  Calling it flabby can seem a kindness. Calling it lifeless, on the other hand,  can seem a bit hard. It is not always as bad as that. It is just wine, something perhaps  safer to avoid than to buy, but if you do decide to buy it - it has, after all,  an inviting  enough name, with all the allure of the part of Umbria from which it comes -  make sure that you do not spend too little on it. The supermarket average is around £6. It is not enough.

That is one way, usually my way, of looking at it. But  as with other Italian white wines, especially the omnipresent  Pinot Grigio, there is another side to Orvieto, which establishes that it can be quite a good, occasionally a very good,  wine, with enough oomph to cut through a spaghetti carbonara without damaging your tongue.

This sort of Orvieto  inevitably costs more than the other one, and you will be lucky to find it in a supermarket.  But at the moment my favourite supermarket, Waitrose, has the  2013 vintage of one of my favourites  in stock.

 Its name is Cardeto, and it comes from near the Umbrian hill town of Orvieto itself. Its taste is refreshingly clean, nice enough for an elegant   aperitif, but more than adequate to partner veal dishes, vegetable antipasti, and pasta.

 It costs £8.49 a bottle and is more interesting, I would say, than Waitrose’s current alternative, an Orvieto named La Piuma Italia, which is brisker and  more assertive, has a flashier label and costs £7.49, but has less lasting appeal.

An Orvieto that speaks for itself is also supplied by Valvona  & Crolla, Edinburgh’s famous Italian wine shop and delicatessen in Elm Row. This Rocca delle Macie classic Orvieto, from grapes harvested in selected estates, costs more than £10 but is special enough to make you realise that not all Orvieto is drearily ordinary.
24 September 2014