The Wine and Food of Puglia

The red wine that I am drinking tastes like a bowlful of gorgeous fruit—raspberries, cherries, jewel-like pomegranate seeds.

It is Cacc’e Mmitte di Lucera DOC (Albert Longo) 2005 from the region of Puglia (Apulia in English) in Italy. But it tastes like a sunny summer day in California.

The reason I am tasting this wine is that a trade mission from the province of Foggia in the northern part of Puglia has come to Los Angeles to show off the region, its wine and food.

Puglia’s most important product is olive oil. Green gold, they call it. And this wine is red gold.

It is made from Uva de Troia grapes combined with other grapes such as Sangiovese, Malvasia and Trebbiano.

We drink it with appetizers—deep fried artichoke hearts, marinated mozzarella, tiny meatballs and sandwich-like canapés filled with eggplant and ricotta.

And we drink it with lunch, along with  a golden white wine, Le Fossette, made from the  Falanghina grape, which dates back a couple of thousand years.

A bottle of  Sciroppo extra virgin olive oil, produced in Foggia, is also on the table, and we pour green-gold pools of it onto plates for dipping bread.

Lunch, at Valentino in Santa Monica, is composed of Puglia specialties. A baby octopus and clam soup reflects the region’s involvement with the sea. Located in what is the heel of Italy’s boot, it has the longest coastline of any mainland region and faces two seas, the Ionian and Adriatic.

Durum wheat and tomatoes are important products in Puglia, and these are combined in the next course, orecchiette pasta with ricotta cheese and fresh tomato sauce.

Then come the main dishes-- red mullet topped with organic spinach that has so much body it seems more like chard and beef roulades filled with a creamy puree of broccoli rabe, a vegetable that is cultivated in Puglia.

Dessert is a Puglia style doughnut that looks like a small, round, puffy churro, flanked by pistachio and chocolate gelati, berries, cookies and a tiny golden circle of passion fruit sauce.

Puglia cuisine is a rich blend of historic influences—Greek, Roman, Macedonian, Turkish and more. The region is proud of its artisanal foods, prepared by small family operations in accordance with generations of gastronomic tradition, and we look at displays of olives, roasted tomatoes, vegetable preserves and pasta.

But olive oil is the star, because Puglia is the largest producer not only in Italy, where it outdoes Tuscany, but in the entire Mediterranean basin—possibly even the world, as its enthusiastic representatives let us know.

(Thanks to photographer Johanna Erin Jacobson for brightening my food photos, which were taken in a very dark setting at Valentino.)