Pecorino Colline Pescaresi, 2009, Contesa

Here’s a wine from made from pecorino.

No, not the cheese. You wag.

For it seems that Pecorino is also a white grape variety. A white grape variety that (on the evidence of this example by Contesa) makes dry, deliciously mineral-laced wine.

Yeah, mineral. As opposed, I guess, to animal or vegetable. Contesa’s Pecorino has a stony, chalky dryness. But not — let me reassure you, if that all sounds a bit gullet-rasping — in a harsh way. Because it’s also poised, rounded, cultivated. So more of a meticulously-kept gravel bed than a heap of shale. There’s some cream, some distant fruit in there as the flavours linger (and linger they do, most lissomely) in your mouth.

Verdict

I love mineral-dry whites. They achieve a mouthwatering, stomach-purring appetiser effect — yet need not be excessively acidic. This is a very nice wine to drink before dinner.

And during dinner. And after dinner.

I’m a suggestible old fart, what’s more, so I can’t help but taste — after all — a certain pecorino cheese thing. Yeah, deride me, sure. But there is something about that intensely flavoured, appetising dryness than reminds me of snaffling wafer slices of pecorino, cut from a freshly opened block, when you’re meant to be grating it.

Not that I ever do that.