Aging the Wines of Agricola Foradori
The Teroldego wines of Agricola Foradori deserve to be enjoyed when they are mature, but as Winemaker Theo Zierock of Agricola Foradori mentions, that isn’t always possible.
This is six of six long format videos featuring Theo at Foradori.
Some highlights include
If you don’t have the time to age wine, you need a new hobby
The experience of drinking a very old Teroldego that was made by Theo Zierock’s Grandfather
Don't miss this three minute video.
Special thanks:
Transcript:
Note: Transcript was created by a third party service and I’ve endeavored to clean up the spelling of ‘wine words.’ There are also some Italian words that I have difficulty knowing how to spell. Any persistent errors are mine alone and not Theo Zierock’s.
Or, watch the video. It is awesome.
Theo Zierock:
This idea of immediately getting a bottle aged right is a bit of an absurdity. I mean, at least that's not something that I think wine producers should be worried about. They should release the wine that it's drinkable and consumable, but it should never be at the right drinking point, because otherwise we would release the wines after 15 years, and if you are in Campania and you have Aglianico, you have to release it after 25 years, and they would all go bankrupt.
So please don't bankrupt us on this. Buy them early, keep them on the side, drink them, and if you don't have the time for it, then find another hobby. Or go to a restaurant and pay a lot of money for them doing it.
My grandfather was one of the first, if not the first, to bottle Teroldego, here. Also because in the '50s, a little bit of tourism was coming to Italy, and a lot of it was from Central Europe and they already knew from 50 years before that this was an area where the grandparents were buying some fancy wine. So on the way back, they would stop and say, "Hey, do you have... This is Teroldego place?" "Yeah, yeah." "Well, can we have some bottles?" So my grandfather would bottle and sell some.
I opened a '72 a couple of months ago. Nobody ever changed the corks, so obviously it's 50/50 chance that it's either gone. But if the cork held up, the fruit of the wine is perfect, because of the acidity, the antrocyanins. There is just a weird mix of durability in the Teroldego variety. It's a varietal thing. It's not we are particularly good. Maybe also the fact that we are on the shadier side, so more acidity historically, so that keeps a bit longer.
I was really moved, to be honest, to drink a wine from the '70s that's like that from here. And I never met my grandfather, so that's also one of these things. He died when he was 42. Everybody dies here.
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