Librandi: A Calabrian icon plus eight wines tasted

If asked to name a wine producer from Calabria, I doubt that many of us could come up with more than one: Librandi.

The company was founded in the early 1950s and has remained in family ownership. The holdings are spread across six different estates, totalling around 230ha. The focus has long been on indigenous varieties, which is a brave stance given that Calabrian grape varieties are hardly household names, especially outside Italy.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for eight Librandi wines

The region’s best known wine has always been Cirò, which has the added advantage of being easy to pronounce. It is made from the Gaglioppo grape (less easy to pronounce) which is the variety that accounts for 40% of plantings in Calabria.

It’s not an easy grape to vinify. Like Nerello Mascalese from Etna or Nebbiolo from Piedmont, it is low in pigmentation and does not produce deeply coloured wines. That in itself is no drawback, but it also has a tendency to acquire an orange hue as it ages, which is less appealing.

Many wineries tend to ferment Gaglioppo at too high a temperature, which both diminishes the aroma and extracts a good deal of excess tannins. That, combined with the variety’s naturally high acidity, can lead to wines with considerable astringency.

Having recently tasted a range of Cirò wines, it’s clear that many of them do have a rustic character. This is less true of the Librandi wines, but even so, robust tannins are often an integral part of the wine’s structure.

But these are not aperitif wines, they are intended to be consumed with Calabria’s hearty cuisine. (This is, after all, the birthplace of nduja, the fashionable soft pork sausage with chillies.)

Librandi’s top Cirò, a Classico Superiore Riserva called Duca Sanfelice, is sourced from bush vines planted on clay and limestone soils. After fermentation in stainless steel tanks, the wine is aged for two years in steel and concrete tanks.

Librandi’s other outstanding wine, Megonio, comes from the even more obscure Magliocco grape, which is grown on similar soils and cropped at low yields.

It’s a vigorous variety with tight bunches that give deeply coloured juice. Like Gaglioppo, it needs to be picked late to ensure the tannins are ripe.

Megonio is made in a more international style, being aged for 12 months in barriques.

The aromas, enhanced by the oak ageing, can display leather and tobacco aromas as well as black fruits. In a way, Megonio is the polar opposite of the red-fruited Duca Sanfelice. Even more than Duca Sanfelice, it’s a fine match for rich, meaty dishes and sauces.

Gaglioppo is generally not a wine for long ageing, but Librandi has demonstrated that both these varieties deliver wines that can be confidently cellared for around 10 years, and can age for considerably longer, though it’s certainly not necessary or even advisable to do so.

These moderately priced wines perhaps suffer from the less than inspiring image of Calabrian wines as a whole, but they deserve to be better known.

Stephen Brook rates multiple vintages of two outstanding Librandi wines

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