Italy has a ridiculous number of indigenous grape varietals. There are hundreds, if not thousands of them. It's no wonder that the land was known as Enotria (land of the vine) in ancient times. Earlier this year I developed an Italian Wine Appreciation course and during that process came across many of these autochthonous (indigenous) varietals. One that caught my attention was Tazzelenghe.
Tazzelenghe aka Tazzalenghe or Tazzalingua or even Tassalinghe is a varietal that originated in Friuli. Friuli is located in the North-East part of Italy and most commonly known as Friuli-Venezia-Giulia. The hills around Buttrio is ground zero for this varietal and to this day is it's epicentre. This varietal gets it's name from a combination of words in the local dialect meaning cut and tongue. Tazze from the Italian verb tagliare, to cut and Lenghe from the Italian lingua which means tongue. So, this wine cuts your tongue with it's high levels of tannins and acidity.
High tannin & acidity is not something most North American wine consumers go for. Not exactly a great selling feature. But in today's ever increasing generic wine market, why not try something new and interesting? These wines most definitely need to be aged to tame those characteristics but so do many wines. It would be interesting to see how this varietal would do in North America. It is a high vigor vine that prefers hillsides or sites at the foot of hills. I would love to see what some of our winemakers could do with the varietal.
Maybe a BC VQA Tazzelenghe could be in our future.
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