Nigeria Part 1: The Story of Amabile di Rosa
Never wear new shoes to a wine fair. Thank goodness it was Kachi Izukanne’s first Vinitaly. If the pinch of his new white sneakers hadn’t driven him to find a chair, we’d never have met, and I’d still be a person who’s never been to Nigeria. I would never have dug the flesh out of a bug-like catfish skull over a bowl of pungent pepper soup on the banks of Badagry Creek. I might never have walked the swinging bridges high above the trees at the Lekki Nature Reserve. If Kachi had worn old shoes that day, the sweet wine he’s importing into Africa would have a different story, and a different name.
Rose Thomas reveling over her first bowl of catfish pepper soup
Every spring, the world’s largest wine fair blooms in a permanent fairground on the outskirts of Verona. At Vinitaly, each of Italy’s twenty wine regions gets its own building. Enologists pour one-ounce tastes for journalists and businesspeople. Wineglass washers cleave the crowds, pushing carts stacked with plastic crates of clean and dirty stemware. On four April mornings in Verona, the wine industry emerges from price-gouged hotels, squeezes into shuttle buses, passes through turnstiles and pulls lanyards over well-dressed necks. The name tags hanging from the lanyards differentiate the winemakers, wine buyers, and the press.
No matter who you are, Vinitaly is a lot. This year’s fair was my third Vinitaly, which made me something of a pro. After all, I’m so obsessed with Italian wine stories, I started my own media company to do them justice. I was experienced and enthusiastic. I was wearing hiking boots—and still, just two hours in, I was looking for a place to sit down.
Vinitaly is a wonderful place to run into friends like Calabrian winemakers Mariangela Parilla of Tenuta del Conte (far right) and Sergio Arcuri (second from right, bottom row). RT and Emilia also pictured along with friends and family of Sergio.
If Vinitaly had benches, everyone who forgets to spit would camp out on the benches and sing drinking songs. For better or for worse, the only chairs outside of the packed cafeterias are in the tasting stands. Vinitaly is not an expo in an American convention center, so the “stands” are not plastic tables under branded vinyl tablecloths. They are beautifully designed miniature tasting rooms, or not so miniature, depending on the winery’s budget. You can walk up to a stand and ask to taste, but it’s such a crowded venue that it’s best to taste by appointment.
The first time I saw Kachi, he was sitting in a Sicilian tasting stand, long legs stretched out under the table, looking at his phone. He might have been waiting for someone.
I sat down. The sales director of the winery approached us.
“I’m sorry, these tables are for–”
“My friend and I would like to taste with you,” I said.
Kachi played along by showing no reaction, as if he had been waiting for me all along.
We swirled and sniffed and sipped our wine, then spat it into the spitoon, listening to the story of the Sicilian estate. Since I was pretending we already knew each other, I had to figure out what Kachi was doing at Vinitaly by what he revealed to the sales director. His import company, Trade Depot, had launched several spirits brands. Now they were adding wine to their portfolio.
“I’m looking for a sweet wine to import into Nigeria as a private label,” Kachi said.
Instead of being open to a potential new business deal, the sales director replied, “Sweet wines don’t sell.”
I had to disagree. I sold wine and worked in hospitality in New York City for a decade before switching to writing and education, and I had personally met dozens of consumers asking for more options for still, sweet wines. New York is an influential market. I could only imagine what was happening—or not happening—for sweet wine drinkers elsewhere in the world.
I had long felt these customers are being underserved, and that the wine industry is leaving an opportunity on the table by failing to create and market more quality sweet wines. This burning opinion of mine had yet to find a willing ear.
After the tasting, Kachi and I walked out of the Sicilian pavilion together. I looked around at the huge buildings full of great bottles at every price point, in every imaginable style, in a country whose wines hold my fascination because of their variety. I could think of a dozen regions to explore for Nigeria.
We paused in front of a map of the fairgrounds and turned towards each other to part ways.
Instead of saying goodbye, I took a chance.
“Do you want me to help you?” I said.
Kachi said yes, and a friendship was born.
Later that evening, over a Florentine steak, I told Kachi everything I knew about sweet Italian wines. I tore a page from the notebook I carry everywhere and wrote down a list of regions, grapes, and wines he should seek out at the fair.
The very next morning, Kachi found a producer who makes beautiful still wines in a zone better known for sparkling styles: Asti, in the northern Italian region of Piemonte. They already had the product available to create sweet red, white and rosato wines for Nigeria (and later Kenya and Ghana).
Kachi and Rose Thomas in Verona
Seven months later, I landed in Lagos to unbox Amabile di Rosa, a brand whose name means, more or less, “the sweet friendliness of Rose.” I didn’t ask for this homage, though I did suggest “amabile” as a brand name. It really just means sweet, a term written on the label of the off-dry bottles Italians enjoy. In my imagination, the name denotes a welcome that sweet wine lovers well deserve.
Rosa unboxing Amabile di Rosa
When legal regulations prevented the use of the technical term “amabile” for a brand name, Kachi named the wine after me. Then his team welcomed me and my creative partner Emilia Aghamirzai to Nigeria, and showed us the time of our sweet lives.
Emilia, videographer Mega, RT and multi-hyphenate talent Tobore, after traveling to Ago-Ajo and Badagry
The airline lost our luggage for a day, so we ate heritage rice and danced to Afrobeat at the Truth Shrine in Surulere wearing white t-shirts from the Shop Rite. We sipped fresh palm wine, the barely-fermented sap grassy and vibrant, from the traditional gourd pitcher called a calabash. Our Surulere adventure, and several others, were curated by Lola Pedro, a visionary producer of ògógóró. Ògógóró is a heritage palm wine spirit that was severely repressed by colonial authorities. It is distilled from fresh palm wine like the one we tasted from the calabash. Tasting ògógóró with Lola and her many friends was a spiritual experience that I’ll be writing quite a bit more about.
We also spent time with the team at Bature, Nigeria’s only craft brewery. Their talented brewers are producing superlative beers with the complex and vivacious quality I came to expect from everything I ate or drank in Lagos State. Nigerians love stout: Kachi is the one who first explained to me that the country has a totally different version of Guinness than the one that I knew. Bature’s stout was the best I’ve ever tasted, and I was inspired by their use of indigenous grains in all of the beers they make.
Emilia drinking Bature’s Founders Pale Ale
As we moved around Lagos with our friends Tobore, Abel, Michael, Mega, and the rest of Kachi’s team, this was my first impression of public life: initial interactions are transactional, everyone’s got side hustles, and visitors don’t always know the intense banter isn’t exactly conflict. Basically, not unlike New York.
Before our trip, I took several Yoruba lessons in Brooklyn with the Nigerian painter Doba Afolabi. Doba made a point to equip me with vocabulary for paying for things myself, in cash, in the local currency. I received humid stacks of naira for my dollars from the money traders in long tunics at the Eko Hotel, official exchange rate 1,641 to one. I personally paid a guy $15,000 naira to stop using a chainsaw on a palm tree so we could do some filming. In Brooklyn, that would have cost a lot more than ten bucks: I might have had to negotiate with a co-op board. I was pleased with my attempt to participate directly in the haggling of the Lagos streets, but Doba’s nephew Abel, who always has my back, shook his head that I’d been overcharged.
Abel Akinpelu with Emilia at Lekki Conservation Centre. Abel is our rock!
I enjoyed seeing the commerce happening in the street itself, varied commodities carried through traffic on people’s heads.. One day, I forgot my hat. New hats tend to find me, and Lagos was no exception. Michael, our driver, stuck his hand out the car window and bought me a new hat from a guy in the road. I wore it to ride a horse on the beach.
Rose Thomas riding a horse on the beach in Lagos
I did not realize that the “canopy walk” at the Lekki Conservation Centre meant climbing a network of swinging bridges separated by platforms that rose above high above the treetops. Antimalarial pills, which I was instructed to continue taking for a while after my trip, feature intense dreams as a side effect. For days on end, I dreamed of great feats at spectacular heights.
Emilia and RT on the canopy walk
The malarone recognized our bold maneuvers. Emilia filmed Nigeria while sticking out of a sunroof, hanging off the back of a motorbike, holding onto the gunwale of a tiny motorboat. A power surge fried our plug adapter in a spray of festive sparks. The humidity of the Lagos lagoon made our equipment swell: incandescent with sweat, Emilia was briefly trapped inside the E-Z rig, a contraption that dangles her camera from a plastic arm that sticks out over her head. I tried to speak local languages, made various faux pas, and faced my greatest fear: singing karaoke.
Emilia filming Lagos
Kachi took us to see a street vendor and ordered suya: two types of beef, fatty and lean, strung on wooden skewers, grilled over coals, fried in a pot of oil, then grilled again, dusted with crushed peanuts and secret spices, stripped from the skewers, chopped with chunky red onions and puffy sweet white bread, rolled in a newspaper, carried away then spread out and speared on toothpicks to pair with a crisp beer–I’m a big fan of Trophy–or, now that it’s arrived in Nigeria, a glass of lightly chilled Amabile di Rosa red.
Kachi, RT and Emilia enjoying suya
I’m comfortable declaring the meal inside that newspaper as the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my life. The complex floral notes of my Piemontese wines danced and sang with the suya, with an ecstatic stew of viscous okra with huge pink prawns, with utazi, an herb whose flavors I’ll try to describe as somewhere between lemongrass and tarragon.
Emilia and I practiced scooping bites of stew with little patties of fufu made from pounded yam, meaning that the flour used to cook it was pounded by hand with heavy stones rather than pulverized by machines. When pounded yam wasn’t immediately available, Kachi called a guy. I’m so glad we got to experience the difference in texture for ourselves so we could understand why this traditional fufu is so prized. Eating soup with our hands was new for us. Rather than ask for a million napkins, we tried to get used to the sensation of having our inexperienced fingers slick with sauce. Welcomed with such a vivid cuisine, to revel was the only possible response.
RT - “Rosa” - drinking Amabile di Rosa in Lagos
I knew nothing about Nigerian food when I met Kachi–though some friends I made at Buka, a Nigerian restaurant in Brooklyn, helped me immensely with my research before this trip. After my first experience dining in Africa, I am more certain than ever that off-dry riesling, as perfect as it is for many spicy foods, cannot remain the only suggestion to pair with every spiced cuisine on the globe. The variety of Italian indigenous wine grapes is ideally suited to this wine and food pairing puzzle. Bringing a world of flavors together only takes imagination, ingenuity and friendship.
Photos courtesy of Rose Thomas
