Grievances, stress-eating beef, the smiles of small farmers: A profile of La Casaccia Freisa.

La Casaccia

March feels exceptionally long this year. I’m waiting on my second vaccination (one week to go) and waiting on the arrival of new wine from three of our favorite farms (two weeks to go) transported on a terminally slow 40’ container that’s clogged in global shipping lanes behind floating cities of cargo (mostly Pelotons.) Our forlorn pallets of small-farm wine are collecting dust at ghost ports emptied of truckers and dockworkers by Covid. It feels like there’s some point to be made here about the unsustainability of supply chains and stress-induced materialism, but since I’m also shipping goods across the Atlantic, I’d be a hypocrite to make it. 

And I wait on the arrival of proper spring weather. In mid-March beautiful days arrive in a cluster, and are washed away by winter’s last storms. Where are the tender, delicious vegetables? I’m not talking solely about asparagus, though I’ll take some bunches. I want variety enough to feature as the centerpiece of meals, to displace the brown food of February.

Tonight, wine will be my produce.

Margherita Rava is a vegetarian. She’d be mortified by what I’m going to do with her Freisa. All the wines at La Casaccia (a certified-organic hilltop winery in Cella Monte, Monferrato operated by Margherita and her parents Giovanni and Elena) are suited to plant-based meals. They have purity, clarity, lightness. Friesa in particular can thrive in the context of herby, fresher flavors, because it has a fruity, floral, aromatic side, like an irreverent cousin of Nebbiolo. 

Margherita Rava

It also has some tannin that gives structure and depth. I think it derives complexity from a notably long ripening period on the vine. Like fancy Nebbiolo, Freisa makes farmers wait. Harvest should be mid-October, while vessels of Barbera are busily fermenting in La Casaccia’s carved-from-stone 18th century cellar. Beneath Margherita’s house, the Grignolino might be done fermenting before the first Freisa berry is picked! Like all introverts, Freisa prefers to be late to the party. 

I’m going to serve Freisa tonight with beef kabobs. Marinated with an appealing mix of spices, from a Nigerian recipe. OK from a NY Times Cooking recipe, found thanks to a gift subscription from an overly generous friend, you know who you are Kelli Cotter (also a vegetarian.) A pure meat feast, bloody, fiery, made more primal by black garlic, more smoky by abundant pimenton, more fun-to-eat by being essentially meat-on-a-stick. The children will dance around the table, eyes lit up with glee, levity felt 10,000 years in our collective past by other small humans whose providers first gave charred protein with a handle to their offspring, in lieu of foraged brown mosses and dried berries. 

We won’t make friends with salad. At least, not tonight.

Maybe I’ll cook some basmati rice, as a side. A year ago I panic-bought a 50-lb bag from the Asian supermarket, along with cans of congee, dried pork snacks, bonito: anything I could hoard. Since we aren’t selling food by the pound or bartering for lamp oil (yet) I still have a solid two-fifths of my purchase, stowed away in burlap, behind a whole country ham. No, not the country ham in the fridge. That one’s fancy, and mostly gone. 

Maybe Margherita will forgive me because she loves Africa. Like her brother Marcello, Margherita is a citizen of the world, a free spirit with an open mind and a pure heart. She smiles more than any other farmer I know, and it’s infectious. Delightful. I feel better when we sell her wine, like I’m doing something good, supporting the just, honest, happy farmers tasked with beating back the rising tide of industrial agriculture. To protect us from a diet of processed corn and Franzia. Which is also made from processed corn: little known fact.

Margherita’s kitchen garden in summer is a wonder to behold. She has a green thumb. She is patient, even with clumsy American dilettantes who arrive barely announced at harvest to pick grapes for a day, and then demand to be fed and sheltered and marinated in wine (ahem.)

As an unrepentant salesperson, I will testify before congress that selling well-known wine is easiest. High-profile winery, ubiquitous grape variety with easy-to-pronounce (preferably French) name, from a place that an American with an undergraduate degree in calligraphy can find on a map: that’s the ticket to easy street. Of course, on the logical other side of the coin, as a certified wine importer with a decade of experience rooting around in cellars both dirty and spotless, I’ll stake my wobbly reputation on the maxim that finding tasty, affordable wine from less-well-known grapes and regions is far more likely, and easier by a mile (or 1.6 kilometers, or 2.4 hectares.)

Freisa sounds sweet. It isn’t. At least, not in this iteration. Freisa is a Piedmontese name for strawberry, and the unblemished red fruit character trapped by Margherita and family in bottles of their Monfiorenza* Freisa easily connects those dots. If you want to discover how a wine can be simultaneously fruity and structured, uncork a bottle of La Casaccia Monfiorenza Friesa. It will also demonstrate how a wine can be perfect for spring produce, the labor of love of vegetarians, and absolutely the right choice for spicy beef kabobs. 

Right, I’m off to the grill.

A presto, Jay 

*Monfiorenza is both a site name, lower down on the chalky slope that contains all of La Casaccia’s grapes, and is also a reference to the floral nature of this biodiverse organic vineyard, and the wines it yields.