Foxtail the first sweet wine of Claudio Quarta Vignaiolo

A double personality, a perfectly balanced game between sweetness and acidity for "Foxtail", the first raisin wine from the Claudio Quarta Vignaiolo cellars, which tells the story of the Campania region through a native grape with great charm: the Coda di Volpe. A celebratory wine for an important anniversary: the first fifteen years of activity of Claudio Quarta Vignaiolo.

Tomorrow Friday 19 June at 7 pm the official presentation in a "semi-virtual" appointment with the guest producer of the wine shop Garofalo Wine 1876 of Avellino for the tasting, broadcast live on the Facebook page Claudio Quarta Vignaiolo , also with those who are ordering the wine in these hours from the cellar to be able to taste it at the same time.

«Foxtail is a small treasure: the fox in the hills tends to flee, but here we" captured "it in a sweet and unpublished portrait", comments Claudio Quarta, who for years has been looking for the right grape for the debut in sweet production .

The "Vignaiolo del Sud", protagonist with his contemporary vision and language of productions of great value in historical areas of Salento and Campania, begins with the creation of a fruit cellar for the drying of the grapes, inside the Cantina Sanpaolo. We are in Torrioni, a village in the province of Avellino, which stands in a historic area, the capital of the Greco di Tufo DOCG in the heart of Irpinia. A unique territory where the vineyards are grown up to 700 meters high and the strong temperature range enhances the aromaticity. Here, where the soil is varied between the clay, the limestone, the sandy and rich in the ashes of Vesuvius, the white grapes of Claudio Quarta Vignaiolo and the Aglianico of his Taurasi are grown.

In the same cellar that gave birth to the first wine dedicated to Totò, Quarta begins testing for its passito, with grapes other than those usually used for the production of regional passito wines. «From the beginning - explains the vintner - my idea was that of a" different "passito, capable of expressing a non-cloying sweetness, a delicately aromatic pleasantness combined however with that freshness that is the emblem of the Irpinia territory». The choice fell on Coda di Volpe, which has the organoleptic characteristics that conquer the Quarta.

Coda di Volpe is an ancient Campania grape variety of probable Greek origin, already present in the Italian peninsula in Roman times, as evidenced by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia (1st century AD), which speaks of "caudas vulpium", to indicate the curved shape of the bunch, like the tail of a fox.

The harvest of the Foxtail grapes (coming from the Sannio area, Benevento) took place on 11 October 2018: the intact and perfectly ripe bunches were placed in small boxes, selecting the most sparse, in order to facilitate the recirculation of air during the drying phase, which took place in the air-conditioned room of the cellar at 24 ° C (Relative Humidity 55%). The dried grapes were de-stemmed and vinified on 3 November 2018 with a classic white vinification, in steel at controlled temperature, carrying out exclusively alcoholic fermentation. The result is a passito with a yellow color gold that impresses with its double personality: full sweetness and a touch of acidity, in perfect balance. Long and complex finish with hints of honey and dried fruit. To be combined with desserts and aged cheeses.

Accomplice of the choice and the charm suffered by the Coda di Volpe grape, a whispered story from ear to ear in the Irpinia winery, perched on a volcanic hill and surrounded by vineyards and woods. A story that the Quarta family, with the production of the first vintage of the Foxtail, wants to stop on paper and tie it to the birth of their first passito.

THE FOX AND THE IRPINE GRAPES

From the village of San Paolo near Tufo, in the hills of Campania, from time to time you could see a thick orange tail that rose and fell very fast among the rows of vines. It was the fox with the large tail, agile and very clever, who used to enter the vineyards to prey on the white, fresh and juicy grapes grown on the high ground, known to be the best in the principality. A young vintner had long been hunting her unsuccessfully, but one day he managed to approach her dangerously and was almost on the point of catching her. The fox, with a lightning bolt, threw himself down the hill and, to make his tracks lose, he slipped into a dark and narrow slit of the rock not accessible to man.

From there it entered a part of the large abandoned mines at the foot of the village, known as the Di Marzo mines. But the vintner, who knew those places and his paths well, first reached the exit and waited for the beast to capture it.

The fox, surprised just outside the hiding place, reacted in defense by waving the tail which, as if by magic, had become all gold and sparkling in the sunset light. Aware of its brilliance, it posed itself as a divinity, unattainable and unbeatable, waving its pintail with pride and swagger. The winemaker, paralyzed by that appearance and by such superb beauty, had no choice but to return to his cellar, appeased and perplexed.

From that day on, the fox no longer approached the vineyard, and that year the grapes were so sweet and precious that the vintner attributed their merit to the extraordinary event. The white and juicy grapes of that harvest were stored for a long time in the cellar to wither, in order to obtain a sweet, concentrated wine with a golden color. The winemaker liked the idea that the alleged prodigy that had occurred before his eyes explained the name of that extraordinary grape. In reality he was well aware that once again the fox had shown his well-known cunning: he had made believe that he was a divinity, skilled in metamorphosis, while he had simply taken on the color of sulfur by going through the mine.