Sommelier Courses: Wild And Crazy… About Quality (Talking Grignolino And Barbera Co-Ops MyNameIsBarbera.com)

Let’s bid adieu to November, in our hazy, Post-THanksgiving-Holiday trytophanic bliss, by catching up on the happenings over at My Name Is Barbera (for whom I’ve been doing both written and video work helping to promote Barbera – and other – wines from the Monferrato area).

First, there’s a lips-eye-view (yeah, I agree, that phrase was a bad idea) of Monferrato’s vinous equivalent of a Wild and Crazy Guy, Grignolino. I’ve written about this wily, overachieving red grape before, but here’s a chance to get up close and personal with it through a video tasting of Grignolino wine with Paolo Bava, whose passion for these wines will quickly be evident once you start watching.

Next, we get back to our normal programming, which means focusing on Barbera. In an interesting twist, in the next vid we move away from the relatively small production outfits that have been the focus of much of our previous journey through Monferrato’s Barbera producers, and talk with Lorenzo Giordano of Vinchio Vaglio (who just celebrated their 30th anniversary, with an event at which I was supposed to speak, but couldn’t attend because I got wicked sick… and yeah, I’m still a little raw about it, thankyouverymuch…). As you’ll see in the vid below, Girodano oversees a sizeable cooperative operation, and so has a unique, 20,000-foot view of Barbera throughout the region, and through all of its various quality levels.