Frappato, or notes from a fictional Mediterranean island.
These are not Frappato vines.
Has my New Yorker arrived? Tinned sardines, please.
It's better than quarantine in the states. It’s dire. It’s fine. Not the point of today’s conversation. Discuss the wine stocks?
I hadn’t noticed. After the Madeira. Such a talented actress. Didn’t roam too far.
It’s hard to sleep with everything closed up.
The sole, thank you. On the way to Corsica, apparently.
We’ll be fishing from the beach until Thanksgiving.
Too many, and too early.
Probably end up in prison.
A street cleaner. I thought they worked in the morning.
We’re safe from that on a fictional island.
The birds are louder than I expected.
Mangroves? Too far north.
It’s time for my daily dispatch. One can’t write about issues of consequence here. It’s one of the only rules. So our correspondence returns to wine. Our continuing literary barter is supplying the remaining fictional islanders with the essentials: magazines, conservas, peaches. Being off the map is a disadvantage in terms of trade.
Founded by Romans fleeing Nero, this imaginary seaside town is continually rebuilt by new arrivals.
As we are in the grip of the longest midsummer in history, an abundance of column inches have been devoted to white wine and its many uses in the preparation of the dizzying array of fictional fish to be found scant meters from our sandy palm-lined shore. I’m remiss, and I apologise. Even in paradise (and this is not paradise, I’ll tell you next issue about the rat and the half-eaten shoe, shabby rodents aren’t in any of paradise’s travel brochures) we have year-round red wine drinkers. It is imperative, a solemn obligation even, to serve suitable rosso for their grilled red snapper wrapped in aromatic fig leaves, a dish that requires kitchen shears to be presented table side by our omni-lingual, omnipresent wait staff.
The flip-flops take a moment of calibration, but Jonathan’s sublime understanding of the nuances of pairing wine to molluscs and cephalopods more than makes up for his bleached dreads and Bert’s Surf Shop attire. You’ll warm to him. He’s also the chef, the porter, and the captain of our underwater badminton side.
Today we pause to study Frappato. It thrives in warm fields inland from the gulf of Ragusa, and is inextricably bound by tradition to assertive and at times overbearing Nero d’Avola. As a soloist, Frappato has a more vertical, less terrestrial appeal. Red fruit and flowers leave lightness and lip-smacking acidity in their wake. Frappato must be chilled, hauled directly from the subterranean caves excavated deep into this fictional island millennia ago by addled homesick Norman Templars. Knights lost on the second leg of an imaginary crusade, noble men and women seeking refrigeration for wooden kegs of cidré containing the last tenuous memory of a Brittany forever departed. Anyway, and that reminds me, today’s Frappato started life in the fields of Pierluigi Cosenza, a very Norman-looking red-haired Sicilian, a man with the good sense to make Frappato into not only traditional Cerasuolo di Vittoria but also (and critically for today’s exposition) a very palatable monovarietal bottling. The 100% Frappato is a directly appealing and frankly affordable (in spite of our fictional currency’s recent fluctuations in fictional global currency markets) bottle of wine. A summer glass-pour, available in all of Taormina’s finest pizzerias and osterias.
Winding between the Norman fortifications of that seaside city on a hill, listening for fragments of Latin carried through time on the breeze from the Roman amphitheatre above its turquoise bay, wondering what wines the first actors to loiter on Sicily’s rocky eastern shore drank with sardines and olives between performances. We’ll assume this is how Pierluigi spends his evenings, fatigued from laboring in vineyards and olive groves, yet compelled to search for the origin of the great food tradition he carries forward. Wandering the coastline in search of fragments of culinary history.
I hear the ferry now. Time to greet new arrivals. It’s really filling up. Nevermind the flies. Argh: feral cat.
