Two Volumes of Wine in Trastevere

Somewhere behind a small wine bar in Trastevere is a wine list that runs to two volumes, with the label of each of its 1,200 or so bottles stuck on its own page. I didn’t start there, though. I was called in from the street by a blackboard of wines by the glass, listed as clearly and colourfully as the notes on a child’s toy xylophone.

The place is Enoteca Ferrara, and if you have friends who say Italian wine is confusing, this is where I’d take them. The best wine bars have a certain lack of fuss about them, which makes Ferrara something of an achievement in a country where nearly everyone is a wine expert, or at least has firm opinions. With thousands of grape varieties and so many good regions to choose from, perhaps Italians need to be experts just to order. Either way, this tiny bar strikes a good balance between wines that are approachable and wines that are interesting.

We began with a glass of Pecorino from La Valentina, an organic producer in Abruzzo. It was like a light tap on a touchscreen: a clean flick of citrus and the palate was refreshed, with nothing complicated about it, which was exactly what I wanted.

Then the oven trays came out, carrying mini pizzas, mini arancini and assorted fritti straight from the restaurant kitchen to the bar. Free snacks with a glass of wine are always welcome, and these went very well with a 2008 Riesling from Ronco del Gelso in Friuli, which cut neatly through the fried octopus.

The bar is long, thin and short on standing room, with a view of the Trastevere alleyways where I spotted a few fashionable French students and made a mental note to buy a new hat for winter. It’s a bit of a squash, but I don’t mind being jostled when the atmosphere is good, and if anything it helps.

The serious wines live next door in the restaurant, with that two-volume list as thick as a Vatican Bible. At the time of my visit there was also a wine shop and a cellar holding bottles that reached back to the Second World War, all of them Italian, and the result of some fifteen years of collecting.

Rome is lucky to have wines from every corner of Italy on its tables, and Ferrara shows them off without any intimidation. The super-geeky can disappear into the two volumes while their friends stay at the bar with the blackboard and the fried octopus, and nobody is left out. It was all so relaxed that it put a dangerous holiday idea in my head: perhaps I could open a wine bar like this in London. Uh oh.

Details of the wine bar and its list are as they were at the time of my visit.