Tastes like Marsala

​If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.  So what do you do if life gives you spoiled wine?
Well, that is a problem that Alfredo Gallone, owner of Principe di Tricase, faced.  Before making wine he obtained some Cabernet Sauvignon to experiment with.  During the 2007 Witch Creek fire here in San Diego County some of the wine overheated, turning brown due to oxidation.  He kept the wine, not knowing what to do with it.
Fast forward five years.  In 2012 Afredo began researching sweet wines, including fortified wines such as Sherry, Port, and Marsala.  Fortifying involves added a distilled wine (i.e., brandy) to the wine increasing alcohol content and adding sweetness.  What he found is that Marsala is created by boiling the wine – deliberately overheating it in a controlled manner.  Turns out, wine that is unintentionally overheated has a Marsala-like taste, so much so that in Italy it is said to be Marsalato – tastes like Marsala – and can be made into a wine suitable for cooking.  And off went the light bulb!
He went back to his spoiled wine and tasted it.  Sure enough, it had a Marsala-like taste but was very dry.  Now if he could just make it sweeter by adding a bit of grape juice.  Nope, not sweet enough.  He needed a more concentrated grape juice. 
There is another way to make a sweet wine that does not involve adding anything to the wine.  In Italy, Alfredo’s homeland (he’s from Naples), the method is called “passito”.  The grapes are picked when ripe and then put into a screened in area and allowed to dry out in the sun, greatly concentrating the sugars in the grapes.  So, if he were to squeeze some of these grapes and add the very sweet juice to his dry Marsala-like wine….
Eureka!  He added the very sweet juice from the dryed grapes to the spoiled Cabernet Sauvignon wine and turned it into a Marsala-like sweet wine.  Below is a picture of the wine and you can see the brown color.  Also note that the bottle is not full – my wife used it to make a rather fantastic Veal Marsala -- which led me to writing this blog.  By the way, he can’t label the wine “Marsala”.  Marsala is a registered trade name.

​You might ask what became of Afredo’s attempt at making sweet wine? I can attest that it was a great success.  Now I am not an afficionado of sweet wine, but I really have to say that his are really, really good.  My favorite is his first, Romantico, made using Aleatico grapes.  All made the Italian passito way.
Try it.  You’ll like it.