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La Dolce Vita: The blood of Jove

There are few wines that go as well with food as those made from the Sangiovese grape. The name is derived from the Latin sanguis Jova; the grape is made into Chianti, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, Brunello di Montalcino and super Tuscan wines like Tignanello. Most Sangiovese wines are light enough to go with salads and chicken dishes, but have sufficient acidity and tannins to stand up to tomato and meat dishes, too.

When we arrived home from work on a recent Friday night we got busy with our dinner plan. The idea of home-made thin crust pizza was beckoning and I already had a Netflix movie set in Italy picked out. The wine, of course, was an $18 bottle of Sangiovese that I had picked up at the Creston liquor store.

I understand the appeal of ordering pizza from a restaurant. We do just that on occasion. But our favourites are the ones we make ourselves. While Angela threw together the ingredients and began to knead the dough, I got busy slicing pepperoni, mushrooms and artichokes, and grating the mozzarella. The oven was set to 450 degrees.

The dough recipe we use regularly takes only 20 minutes (faster if you use a food processor, which we don’t bother with), so we barely had time to take a sip from our glasses. Strawberry flavours are typical in most wines made from Italy’s most popular grape, but the tannins and acidity are what make it a natural with food. Looking for a nice sipping wine? Unless you are planning a snack to go along with it, don’t open a Sangiovese. We did just that to enjoy while we admired the view from our bed and breakfast balcony near St. Peter’s in Rome a few years ago and the owner was mortified that we were drinking the wine without a meal. He acted like we had arrived from another planet.

With the dough divided and half and pressed into pans, we quickly got to work. I smeared one with tomato sauce, then added slices of pepperoni and mushrooms, topping it with shredded mozzarella and a sprinkling of Tuscan spices. Angela used Italian salad dressing on the other, then added mushrooms and slices of artichokes. She used the mozzarella and spices, too, then dropped pieces of creamy Boursin cheese on the top. The pies went into the hot oven and were ready in minutes. (We once sat near a wood-fired pizza oven in a restaurant in Florence and I timed the process—a minute to rollout the dough and place the toppings and 90 seconds in the very hot oven. Now that’s fast food!).

Our travels in Italy taught us a couple of things about pizza. Thin crust is best—you aren’t filling up on bread. And pizzas just don’t need 14 toppings, 12 kinds of cheese and rolls of mozzarella wrapped into the rim of the crust. Simplicity allows the flavours of each ingredient to come out, so we were able to enjoy the taste of each topping instead of an overwhelming mélange of flavours.

We picked up our wine glasses and loaded our plates with hot pizza slices, then relocated to the living room to enjoy the movie, Shadows of the Sun, starring Harvey Keitel. In it, the always interesting Keitel plays a reclusive novelist, a la J.D. Salinger, who has retreated to a Tuscan property to live in anonymity. A British book publisher, desperate to drum up business, sends one of his editors to convince the novelist to sign a contract and get back to his typewriter.

The location, around the village of Abbadia San Salvatore (I checked maps later and found we have been within a few kilometers of the beautiful spot), suited the story, which was interesting enough. The ending, for want of a better word, sucked. But we didn’t really mind, having begun our weekend with pizza and wine and, for a couple of hours, been transported back to Tuscany.

Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.