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by Thor Iverson |
February 20, 2009
Some people delight in the unfamiliar and are immune
to the comfort of the common. When that set of people intersects with
an interest in wine, there can be problems. Because, to be honest, most
restaurant wine lists just aren’t that interesting. The same names, the
same grapes, the same prices...yawn. It’s all just too tedious.
There are the exceptions: a well-aged bottle at a
good price, wedged into a lineup of the tried-and-true, or the sudden
appearance of a memory-laden bottle, tasted years ago in an Italian
seaside town, now pouring in a North End trattoria. But for the truly
adventurous, it’s the walk on the winy wild side: discovering an
obscurity that has, for some reason, become a passion — or is it a
fetish? — for whoever’s written the wine list.
At Erbaluce (69 Church Street, Boston),
Charles Draghi’s Italianate haven of eccentric traditionalism in Bay
Village, that passion — given the neighborhood, we probably shouldn’t
call it a fetish — expresses itself via Valtellina, an eccentrically
traditionalist wine from Lombardy that you’ll almost never see on a
restaurant’s list. At Erbaluce, there are eight of ’em. That’s right,
eight. Want to drink on the edge? Here’s your chance. ...
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