I cringe at many grape names:

Gros Manseng sounds like …eeewww.
Müller Thurgau… a wedding party?
Deckrot … WTF??
Ondenc … a failed dot com?
Scheurebe … won an Emmy for Monk?
Flaischweiner …can’t make that up.
…and pretty much all German hybrids
…and most Hungarian grapes
Steen …drink it or hunt it?
Jacobain …will it overthrow the Merlot?
Sargamuskotaly …the slut in high school?

But Bonarda makes me saddest of all. Boe-NAHRRRRRRR-duh. So inelegant and twangy for a grape that makes such pleasurable wines.

Wading through the muck that is the Italian wine label:

Winery: Fattoria Cabanon
Place: Oltrepo’ Pavese
Region: Lombardy, just East of Piedmont
Grape: Bonarda
Vintage: 2001
Cost: $17 to $20
Importer: Wineworth LLC out of Seattle, WA

Though I’m sure some wine Poindexter will chime in about an obscure 3 acre plot somewheres off I-90 or pontificate on the alias of Croatina or launch into a diatribe about Charbono, the only Bonarda you’ll see in the store will come from this area of Italy or Argentina. We’ll chuck the obscure crap & focus upon…

The textbook characteristics of the grape that this Cabanon wine exhibits, from this place in Italy where you will–YES–see Bonarda on the label:

Sweet-smelling, soft, herbal aromatics. Whenever I taste this wine blind with people, the guesses are all over the map: older Rhone, high-end Veneto, old Cali Cab, old Chianti Classico Riserva, and so on. Why would the smell make you guess that the wine was older or high-quality? That’s because the aromas here are mellow and refined, the wino equivalent of having caught a whiff of an expensive perfume. So subtle, layered and fine–it’s not from Walgreen’s.

Maturity of taste. Like the difference between a fresh vintage of new world Syrah, and a cellared French version. This wine isn’t flashy; it’s slinky. This wine isn’t wearing the short, crotch-bearing skirt of overripe fruit. This is a finely grown gown of dried raspberries, plummy/cherry fruit leather and all those red fruits that border on purple.

Mouthfeel. When I’m looking at clothes, I always have to paw them. This tells me everything about the quality of the garment. Wine is no different. Whether you can describe it or not, the tongue knows. It’s your brain and all of your preconceived notions that deceive. This wine has a rich flavor that lacks the density of new fruit, or the sandiness of young tannins. It’s what we mean by the word “silky.”

Acidity. Not much talk about acidity on red wines, but that’s the whole M.O. of Italy. Italians don’t often drink wine without eating. So the little hit of acidity a red wine gives you in the back of your mouth is a little squeeze to perk up the saliva glands for that next bit of food.

On a good day, most wine pros would narrow this down to Chianti, Gigondas, or an old Dolcetto, maybe. If I had to come up with a one sentence pitch: The Cabanon Bonarda tastes like the love child of a mellow, elegant, old world Grenache and a high-end Valpolicella.

Now if we could only find her a pretty name…