Call the Zafferano Va La's spice of life

There’s a long list of foods associated with the region of Abruzzo in central Italy, situated between the Adriatic Sea to the east and to just beyond the farthest reach of Rome (about 50 miles) at its closest point to the west. One of those is Zafferano, better known as the spice saffron. It’s the name that winemaker and owner Anthony Vietri and his family adopted for one of the wines at Va La in Avon Grove, Pa.

That will be one of the wines to be bottled at the Chester County winery in the next couple weeks. No surprise it won’t last long; the winery’s Web site says about 600 bottles are filled. As Vietri said recently, “It goes really quickly because we have a loyal client base on that particular wine. Usually we have a signup list for it and people come in and get it.”

Zafferano, he said, is 100 percent pinot grigio wrung out of what he admitted are low-yielding vines in his vineyard.

“I’ve gotten very close in the past to ripping out the pinot grigio because it’s very difficult to farm,” he said, “but I’ve just had to throw up my hands as far as what fruit consistently comes off those vines. I’ve just had to accept the fact that, you know, it really does well there despite what I think. So it has saved its skin, so to speak, and we’ve just learned to live with each other. We make this little batch of it every year and it’s an interesting wine. I think it’s quite different than most pinot grigios than you taste out there, and I really don’t know the style that we [should] call it. We call it pinot grigio because it doesn’t go in oak. However, it’s somewhere between the gris style and the grigio style.”

The juice is essentially cold fermented, then bottled and served. A sip, according to Va La’s Web site, yields some hints of butterscotch and crème brulee notes. I’ve not tried it yet, although there are elements of two whites I’ve certainly tasted: pinot grigeo and vihno verde.

“Ours is a bit bigger than most vihno verdes,” Vietri explained, “which you know are on the lean side purposely. That’s a good example of a wine that has good acidity for fatty foods; that’s the point of that wine, that’s a great example, as a matter of fact. Ours is actually more round and fat; higher alcohol; it’s even got a bit of structure to it. It’s gold in color. They’re very ripe grapes that come off that site.”