Sunday, May 18, 2008
Food, "Behind the Bar"
Refresher course
Summer wines at Baraonda Caffé Italiano
Spark St. Jude
Lighten up this season at Baraonda with cool drinks like Rosa Regale.
By Hope S. Philbrick
Since opening in 2000, Baraonda Caffé Italiano has fed hungry Midtowners with its wood-fired brick pizzas, salads, pastas and risottos, and Italian preparations of veal, lamb and fish. Alongside all the food a variety of wines have been poured. The Sunday Paper recently chatted with Pietro Murganti, one of the restaurant’s managers, to learn more about the wine offerings.
Q What does baraonda mean?
A Organized chaos, which is what you get when you have a lot of people around a table making happy noise. It’s a positive adjective.
What’s the focus of your wine program?
Baraonda has a huge wine list, and the wines are high quality. We always taste a wine before putting it on the list. If we don’t like it, if the servers don’t like it, it won’t be sold.
We focus on Italian varietals. The goal for our restaurant is to have a pure, authentic Italian experience. Some people have a problem with that and ask for ketchup with their spaghetti—we don’t have ketchup. Some people ask us to fry the prosciutto de parma—I’m sorry, but the Italians would scream.
We have several Barolo and Barbaresco wines that are hard to find; some are even available by the glass. We love the customer, and that is why we bring all this in.
As customers’ wine drinking habits change for summer, how do you adapt?
Customers do tend to drink more pinot grigio, chardonnay and lighter- to medium-body reds in summer like chianti, merlot and primitivo. We normally change the wine list every season. During the fall, we try to have more full-bodied wines like Barolos and Barbarescos which people enjoy when it’s cold outside.
For summer we have insolia, a great Sicilian white that people love to drink on the patio. It’s hard to find the wine anywhere outside of Sicily, because that grape needs that specific terrior, but, like a chardonnay, it has a sweet character with a refreshing taste of toasted almond and cream. It’s partially dry but just refreshing as an aperitif or on its own.
In warmer months, we get lots of requests for sparkling wine. We have prosecco, which has a lively floral taste with just a hint of citrus. We also have a rosé sparkling wine called Rosa Regale, which means royal rose and is very popular with Europeans. As soon as you drink it, you taste wild strawberry; it’s very sweet.
How do you involve customers in your wine program?
When customers come in, we try to share our knowledge with them. We have a wine program every three to four months. Last fall was a Barolo and Barbaresco program where we gave a little flyers of information along with the wine, and during the winter, we did the same thing with Super Tuscans. At some point in the future, a new program will probably feature Chianti Classico.
On Monday evenings, we have 15 wines available for $15. We try to serve wines that are not on the regular wine list, and so we might have some Spanish, New Zealand or Australian wines. We normally try to keep a different variety in a wide range; often we have eight reds and seven whites, although it depends.
We had a meeting recently and decided we’ll launch a Brunello program, serving these wines by the bottle and by the glass. It’s hard to get these wines by the glass because they’re expensive and hard to age. Brunello di Montalcino is a very popular classic Italian wine. It’s full, young and vibrant with a variety of flavors including rose, coffee, cherry and cranberry. It will never let you down and goes well with fried calamari, marinara sauce, osso bucco and more, which is why it’s so popular in Italy. The best vintages of Brunello are 1997 and 2001. SP
Baraonda Caffé Italiano is located at 710 Peachtree St. 404-879-9962. www.baraondaatlanta.com.