If you have ever visited Italy, chances are that you have been to Rome. If you haven’t, then you are probably planning to go at some point. If you have ever eaten Italian food, chances are that you’ve tried carbonara, or at least some sort of interpretation of it. And yet, let me guess, you’ve never tried wines from Lazio, Rome’s own region. Am I right?
To be fair, Lazian wines aren’t very popular. The very few that are haven’t benefited from great praise by international critics. Appellations such as Frascati, Castelli Romani and Orvieto were once relatively trendy, but I doubt that any serious wine drinker would crave to taste any of those. The truth is that until very recently, for decades those wines were all made for immediate profit and no one was bothered too much about quality. As a consequence, Lazio’s image is still lower than that of other emerging Italian wine regions such as Puglia or Sicily. Fortunately, the landscape is rapidly changing; winemakers are making the most of a wide range of climates and an astonishing number of native and international grape varieties to play with.
From a viticultural, as well as cultural, climatic, gastronomic and historic perspective, Lazio is a sort of frontier region. The northern part is very much a continuation of southern Tuscany, while the north east and its inland mountainous areas have much to share with neighbouring Umbria and Abruzzo. The Orvieto DOC, for instance, is partly in Umbria and partly in Lazio. Southern Lazio, below Mount Circeo, has instead a lot in common with Campania. The central region surrounding the province town of Latina is perhaps less ‘borderline', but that’s simply because its marshy lands were only reclaimed and eventually populated as late as the 1930s.