Italian Wine Adventure #13: Arneis! (A hidden white wine gem from Piedmont, for Chardonnay lovers?)

Show Notes

Episode 137: Italian Wine Adventure #13: Arneis!  00:00

Hello! And welcome to The Wine Pair Podcast. I’m Joe, your sommelier of reasonably priced wine, and this is my wife and my wine pairing partner in crime, Carmela. And we are The Wine Pair! 

If you are new to our podcast, here is a quick orientation! Each week, we explore a different wine varietal or blend—like Pinot Noir or Bordeaux or Arneis — and dive into what makes it unique, special,and worth learning about. Our goal is to help you expand your wine knowledge in a fun way that regular people can understand. We also taste and review 2-3 wines under $20 each, and share our scores and recommendations with you to help you find great wines without breaking the bank. So, thank you so much for joining us! And, we are proud to say that Decanter Magazine calls us fun, irreverent, chatty, and entertaining.

Carmela, after a week in France last week, at least virtually, we are now back in Italy, yes virtually as well, for another Italian Wine Adventure. Now, in case you need a reminder, or you have no idea what the hell we are talking about, in these episodes we explore a specific Italian wine so that we can learn more about different wine making areas of the country - that country being Italy - that makes the most wine in the world - believe it or not! And they make a lot of wine in Italy - in fact, they make about 5 billion liters of wine or, for us Americans who don’t understand the measurement system that the rest of the world uses, that is 1,320,860,262 gallons of wine. 

BTW, do you remember in grade school when there was a time the US tried to move to the metric system? It’s true! In 1975 President Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act which was an attempt to have the US give up the Imperial system - and it ultimately failed. It’s true. I know it is only tangentially about wine, because wine is a beverage that is sold in bottles based on the metric system at 750 milliliters. So, we may not want to use the metric system, but we can’t get away from it either if you are a wine drinker!

But today, we’re not talking about the metric system. We are talking about the little known and underappreciated white wine from the famous Piedmont area - which is where the great wines Barolo and Barbersco come from, as well as some of our favorites like Gavi di Gavi and Barbera - and that underappreciated white wine is called Arneis (ahr NASE), and I can tell you that this is an Italian white wine that neither of us has had that I can recall, and so I am really excited to learn more. The name of the wine, interestingly enough, translates to “little rascal” in the local Piemontese dialect. So that’s kind of fun!

While we are going on a tangent, and yes, I know this is a wine podcast, but last weekend we were on Vashon Island which is a great little Island right next to Seattle in the Puget Sound and we went to a really great wood fired pizza place called La Lunetta on the island and not only did they serve great pizza, but that had a killer Italian Margarita they made with Campari. It was amazing! New favorite cocktail!

And, by the way, on another tangent, we are on our 13th Italian Wine Adventure episode, Carmela, and you know this, but while the number 13 is often a number we think of as bad luck, in Italy, the number 13 is good luck! You were number 13 when you played soccer in high school, right?

Yeah, so 13 evidently is associated with the goddess Venus, I believe, as well as fertility and the lunar cycle, and the number is supposed to bring prosperity and long life. In fact, when Italians bet on soccer, or football in their language, they use the expression “fare tredici” which literally means “make thirteen” but what it actually means is to hit the jackpot! And I don’t know if this is a coincidence, but Arneis wines tend to come in at around 13% alcohol, which is relatively high for a white wine, and one of the wines we are drinking tonight is 13% alcohol. Coincidence?!? Maybe not!

So, hopefully this will be a lucky episode for us because we have had some really good luck finding great Italian white wines in these episodes, and we love ourselves some white wine, don’t we! Why do you tend to like or prefer white wine?

• Lighter tasting
• Good with foods like fish
• Cold

So, we are going to see if Arneis will enter into our list of preferred white wines, and we have two Arneis wines from Piedmont that we are going to taste and review and let you know if we think you should look for them . . . 

But first . . . we have to do our shameless plug.

Thank you for listening to us and for supporting our show, and if you haven’t  had the chance to do so yet, now would be the perfect time to follow or subscribe to our podcast  - and a huge thank you to all of you who have subscribed already! 

And, another great way to support is to leave a nice rating and review on our website or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or other podcast app so we can continue to grow our listeners.

You can also follow us and see pictures of the wines we are tasting and trying today and weird AI pictures I like to make on Instagram at thewinepairpodcast, and you can contact us on our website thewinepairpodcast.com, and you can sign up for our email newsletter there and get news and food and wine pairing ideas and more! And a special shout out to Maria who reached out to us last week after we sent out our newsletter and sent us a very sweet note about how she has listened to us for while and listens to us while she is on walks, which is when I often listen to podcasts, too, and she asked us if we would consider an episode on teinturier grapes which we think is an excellent idea, and may even fit into our Portuguese wine series. Love it. Thank you, Maria!

And we want to make content you care about and you like, so send us a note at joe@thewinepairpodcast.com and tell us what you like and don’t like, if there are wines you want us to try or wine making areas of the world you are curious about - and we’ll take care of it! 

And, as we do every week, we’ll tell you someone we think you should recommend The Wine Pair Podcast to so we can keep growing listeners. This week, we want you to recommend us to anyone who is very superstitious because we might be able to convince them that 13 is not an unlucky number. 

ARTICLES and LINKS

• https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/biggest-wine-producers-by-country/#:~:text=We%20take%20a%20quick%20look,beer%2C%20and%20other%20agricultural%20produce. 
• https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2015/07/us/metric-road-american-story/#:~:text=In%201975%2C%20Congress%20passed%20the,supported%20efforts%20to%20go%20metric.
• https://winefolly.com/tips/teinturier-grapes/ 
• https://winefolly.com/grapes/arneis/ 
• https://www.wantedinrome.com/news/top-10-italian-superstitions.html#:~:text=Thus%2C%20a%20hat's%20temporary%20resting,this%20might%20not%20floor%20you. 

Topic: WTF is Arneis? 10:28

Let’s learn a little bit about just what the F Arneis wine is. First, I told you that it translates to “little rascal,” but evidently it also has the nickname of White Barolo. It is also known as Bianchetta and Nebbiolo Bianco. So, this is a wine that may have a bit of a identity crisis on its hands.

Unlike a lot of Italian white wines - we tend to think about wines like Pinot Grigio and Soave and Vermentino and Pecorino - which can be on the lighter and crisper side, Arneis is supposed to be a more medium-bodied wine with a thicker or heavier mouthfeel than a typical white wine.

And, unlike Barolo and Barbaresco, which are wines made from the Nebbiolo grape but named for the region them come from in Piedmont, or like Gavi di Gavi which is also a white wine from the Piedmont region made from the Cortese grape but named for the region it is from, Arneis is the name of the wine and the grape varietal. Because of that, you may find Arneis from other parts of Italy, and other parts of the world like California in Sonoma, in Oregon, New Zealand and Australia. 

The one exception to that is the wine is sometimes known as Roero Bianco. Roero is a small DOCG wine area - DOCG supposed to be the top wine areas in Italy just above DOC as we have mentioned before - which is one of the main areas where Arneis in Italy is from, and 75% of the wine grapes grown in Roero are Arneis, and to maintain the DOCG designation, the wine has to be least 95% Arneis. There is also a DOC version in the Langhe area of Piedmont that is just called Arneis. 

The name ‘little rascal” or “little trouble maker” evidently comes from the fact that it is somewhat difficult grape to grow, and because it can be a difficult wine to make as well. The grapes are said to be delicate, have a tendency to have low yield - in other words, not a lot of berries per plant - and can have issues like low acidity, and usually you want white wines that are higher in acidity. Lower acid in a white wine can impact the intensity of flavors as well. 

There was a time when Arneis was blended with Nebbiolo grapes to make the red wines made from Nebbiolo not as tannic, but that does not happen very often anymore. This was also a reason why in the 1970s the wine almost went extinct - once the Nebbiolo winemakers stopped using it when making the red wine, they stopped planting Arneis grapes. However, in the 1980s there was a bit of a renaissance in appreciation for the wine which has been steadily growing ever since. 

Arneis is one of Piedmont’s most highly regarded wines, second only to Gavi di Gavi in terms of white wine, but probably, like a lot of Americans, you have not heard of either of those wines - Gavi or Arneis - very often if ever. We did do an episode on Gavi a couple of years ago, and it is an excellent wine, but these are not the easiest wines to find. Because of that, you may be able to find Arneis at a great price before it gets more popular.

Arneis is usually unoaked, but some producers do put the wine on oak to give it a richer mouthfeel, but these will tamp down on the acidity of the Arneis. One article I found online that you can get a link to in our show notes called Arneis a sommelier’s secret summer wine, so that’s kind of fun.

So, on that note, with just a few weeks left of summer, I think it’s time to learn a little more about the specific wines we are drinking today. Whaddya say?

ARTICLES and LINKS

• https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+pronounce+arneis&rlz=1C1VDKB_enUS981US981&oq=how+to+pronounce+Arneis&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgAEAAYgAQyBwgAEAAYgAQyBwgBEAAYgAQyCggCEAAYgAQYogQyCggDEAAYgAQYogQyCggEEAAYgAQYogTSAQg2NTY3ajBqN6gCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:cd04b599,vid:3Zr-iSmCRzQ,st:40 
• https://www.wine-searcher.com/regions-roero?srsltid=AfmBOopkrTt0T_RxOBXI-YuvMDKxGMRBhmtACodEDFzDjf7Rs-pqj2wy 
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arneis#:~:text=Arneis%20is%20a%20white%20Italian,produce%20DOC%20wines%20in%20Langhe.
• https://www.wineenthusiast.com/varietals/arneis/#:~:text=Most%20of%20these%20wines%20are,floral%20aromatics%20of%20unoaked%20examples. 
• https://pinestrawmag.com/arneis-the-alternative/ 

Arneis Wines We Chose for This Episode 14:55

As usual, both of the wines we have chosen for this episode are under $20, and I bought both of them on wine.com. Now, again, I know you can find Arneis, although you may have some challenges finding these specific bottles. If any of you out there in listening land know of some Arneis that you can source and that you have liked, send me a note and we can add them to our show notes. 

The first wine we are going to taste and review is called Cantine Elvio Tintero Langhe Arneis from the 2022 vintage, and I will tell you there is not a ton of information to be found about this wine. I will say it is a screw cap, which is awesome, and it is 13% alcohol, but it is really hard to find reviews for it, or any other information. I found a very sparse tech sheet on Kermit Lynch.com, which is the importer, and the sheet said very little although they did say the wine spends about two months on the lees - again, the lees are the stuff leftover from the fermentation process - and so this should give it a little creaminess.

On an online wine shop called Swig which I would love to order from but is in the UK, they give some information that I found in some other places as well. This wine is from Langhe rather than from Roero and the winery has vineyards in both Langhe and Moscato d’Asti. The Tintero winery focuses most of their attention on Moscato, but they also make Nebbiolo, Barbera, and Dolcetto as well as, obviously, Arneis. 

They claim to use sustainable farming practices and call their wines approachable and affordable - which we like, ok?!?

The second wine we are tasting and reviewing is the Luca Bosio Langhe Arneis from the 2023 vintage, so just brand spanking new. Again, not super easy to find out information about these wines, but this one, as we have mentioned, is also a Langhe wine, although they say the grapes are grown on the Bosio Estate in the Roero region. So, I am a little confused.

Luca Bosio, who makes this wine, is a 3rd generation winemaker and the marketing materials say that he has natural winemaking abilities which he inherited. Not sure that I believe winemaking is genetic, but we’ll go with it. He evidently studied enology at the University of Turin and learned some techniqueslike using native yeasts and reducing reliance on sulfur and chemicals. 

There are no reviews for this vintage that I could find, but Wine Enthusiast did give the 2021 vintage an 88, which is a very respectable rating.

The winery is super confusing online. There is a website called Luca Bosio wine, but it does not talk about this wine at all. Then, there is another website called Luca Bosio Vineyards, and there they have some information on the wine including a tech sheet.

I also found the same information on a website called Flaschenpost, but which also had weird translation that translated white wine into “ice cream” - but I did check and those are not similar words, but anyway, they said the wine is fermented for 15 days in stainless steel and then ages on its own yeast for 6 months, which is basically another way of saying it was aged on the lees. 

I think that is enough information - it’s time to drink! We’ll take a quick break and be right back. And, if you have an Arneis or, come on, any other wine, drink along with us!

ARTICLES and LINKS

• https://kermitlynch.com/wine/cantine-elvio-tintero/765/TI03 
• https://familywineriesdirect.com/products/2023-luca-bosio-langhe-arneis-d-o-c-g 
• https://www.flaschenpost.ch/en/arneis-langhe-doc_bosio-family-estates?srsltid=AfmBOopfb81ueZSYf3K8LLmC2c3Otxl6AqrOX6QjARcPxeI27IIE9Izp 
• https://www.bosiofamilyestates.it/cgibin/bosioLuca_schedePDF/Luca%20Bosio%20Langhe%20Arneis%20DOC.pdf 

2022 Cantine Elvio Tintero Langhe Arneis, 2023 Luca Bosio Langhe Arneis Wine Tasting, Pairing, and Review 21:32

Wine: Cantine Elvio Tintero Langhe Arneis (Click here to find this wine on wine.com. We may be compensated if you purchase)
Region: Italy, Piedmont
Year: 2022
Price: $12.99
Retailer: wine.com
Alcohol: 13%
Grapes: Arneis
Screw Cap!

What we tasted and smelled in this Cantine Elvio Tintero Langhe Arneis:

• On the nose: Granny Smith apple, pear, orchard fruit, creamy, citrus, vanilla, caramel, oaked?
• In the mouth: Crisp pear, pear pie filling, bitter, Aperol spritz, orange, grapefruit, orange zest, rich, creamy, good mouthfeel, full flavor

Food to pair with this Cantine Elvio Tintero Langhe Arneis: Focaccia, white pizza, seafood pasta, fried fish, tempura, spicy food, sushi rolls
 
As a reminder on our rating scale, we rate on a scale of 1-10, with no half points, where 7 and above means that we would buy it, and 4 and below means that we are likely to pour it down the sink, and a 5 or 6 means we are likely to drink it and finish it, but we are probably not going to buy it. 

Cantine Elvio Tintero Langhe Arneis Wine Rating: 

• Joe: 8/10
• Carmela: 7/10

Wine: Luca Bosio Langhe Arneis (Click here to find this wine on wine.com. We may be compensated if you purchase)
Region: Italy, Piedmont
Year: 2023
Price: $15.99
Retailer: wine.com
Alcohol: 13%
Grapes: Arneis
Screw cap!

What we tasted and smelled in this Luca Bosio Langhe Arneis:

• On the nose: Orange, Aperol, dried fruit, dried apricot, peach, dried pineapple, dried mango, some pear
• In the mouth: Aperol spritz, creamy, orange, round, soft, orchard fruit, peach, vanilla, orange sorbet

Food to pair with this Luca Bosio Langhe Arneis: fish, appetizer, baked brie, lumpia, egg roll, gyoza 

Luca Bosio Langhe Arneis Wine Rating: 

• Joe: 7/10
• Carmela: 8/10

Which one of these are you finishing tonight?

• Carmela: Luca Bosio Langhe Arneis
• Joe: Cantine Elvio Tintero Langhe Arneis

Taste profiles expected from Arneis  32:52

• General 
  • Wine Folly: Peach, Yellow Apple, Honey, Raw Almond, Nutmeg
• Cantine Elvio Tintero Langhe Arneis
  • Winery: Soft, mellow and faintly floral, with a subtle bitter almond note  that adds to the soft aromatics. Graceful and approachable, this is a wonderful and accessible example of Arneis.
  • Swig: Dainty and pretty: soft, mellow, floral, with a little bitter almond, pithy note – it’s not in-your-face, not shouty, but softly aromatic and with easy grace and approachability.
  • Kermit Lynch: Soft, juicy, ripe pears and limestone minerals draw you in from the first sniff. Great aromatics, a seductive mid-palate, and a lively finish that lingers on, and on.
• Luca Bosio Langhe Arneis
  • Winery: It starts with a clean, floral nose, with captivating hints of pineapple, apricot and peach that follow through to the palate and refreshing finish.
  • Flaschenpost: (the ice cream guys) also from the tech sheet Smooth with fruit and floral notes and good acidity.

Are we going to add this to our go-to white wine list? Heck Yeah!

Outro and how to find The Wine Pair Podcast 35:05

Ok, so, Carmela, it’s time for us to go, but before we do, we want to thank you very much for listening to us - and if you haven’t done so yet, now would be the perfect time to follow or subscribe to our podcast and also a fantastic time to leave us a nice rating and review on our website or Apple podcasts or other podcast app - and it is an awesome and free way to support us and help us grow listeners.

We would also love to hear from you about a wine you would like us to taste and review. You can leave a message for us on our website thewinepairpodcast.com and you can join our email newsletter there - and if you missed our latest newsletter, email me and I will send it to you. You can do that by reaching out at joe@thewinepairpodcast.com. And tell us some things you want to hear us do, or not hear us do!

Alright, with that, we are going to sign off, so thanks again, and we will see you next time. And, as we say, life is short, so stop drinking shitty wine.

Support The Wine Pair Podcast by clicking on this affiliate link to wine.com and find some great wines to enjoy! You can also support us by clicking on this affiliate link to join the Wall Street Journal wine club and get a special welcome offer!