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| January 27, 2008 |
  
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One Pizza, One Wine
I've been making simpler pizzas for the past few weeks. Gone -- at least for the time being -- are the grilled radicchio and grilled red onions, the endive and leeks, the roasted red peppers and roasted garlic with which I regularly festooned my pizza dough before sliding it into the oven. No, I never made a pizza with shrimp and chunks of pineapple: Gack!Now the pizzas are more straightforward and classic: lots of basil, sliced tomatoes, a few quartered black olives, mozzarella and parmesan cheeses, sometimes a little bacon or sopressetta, but we even eschew meat on occasion and don't miss it.
Paired with the right wine, the pizza in this simple form is elevated into an experience of purity and intensity unencumbered by extraneous ingredients that, anyway, tend to muddy the flavors or run them together. After all, the most important aspect of a pizza is the crust; let's not pile on so many ingredients that the emphasis lies with them on not with the element of seminal importance.
And remember, when you're making pizza dough, keep the dough as wet as possible, at least to the point that you can still knead it without making a sticky mess. The drier the dough is, the less crisp the final crust will be.
Last night with our pizza -- while we watched Mrs. Soffel, a woefully under-rated movie from 1984 starring Diane Keaton before she became eccentric and Mel Gibson before he became Mel Gibson -- we drank a bottle of the
delicious Cesari "Mara" Valpolicella Superiore 2005, from Italy's Veneto region. Composed in the traditonal manner from corvina (70%), rondinella (20%) and molinara (10%) grapes, the wine is made is the ripasso method, which means that the young wine, I mean a few months old, is re-fermented, usually in January, on the dregs left from making powerful Amarone wine, lending the cadet version a bit more alcohol (though this version is only 13.5 percent), complexity and structure.The Cesari "Mara" 2005 is dark, rich, plummy and spicy. The bouquet offers notes of black and red currants, cloves, leather and roses. The wine is exuberantly spicy and savory, layering ripe and slightly roasted currant, blueberry and plum flavors with provocative earth and mineral elements, chewy and fairly gritty tannins, and touches of underbrush, briers and brambles. This description makes the wine sound rustic, but it's not, all of its features woven together and held in place by the essential acid structure and the subtlety of supple oak. (The wine is matured in Slavonian and French casks, not small barrels.)
A great wine? No, but lovely to drink, with admirable complexity and appealing personality. It would pair nicely with pork roasts, braised meat dishes and steaks, now through 2010 or '12. I rate it Very Good+. About $20
Opici Import Co., Glen Rock, N.J.
Visit cesari-spa.it
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