A gentleman straight out of the end of the 19th century, riding in his buggy wearing a top hat and gloves, elegant, refined, and sensitive behind the formality of good manners and an education. A lady in her beautiful dress with a rigidly structured bustle and rich decorations pulls the buggy curtains aside to look at life on the streets while the horse's hooves fill the air with the noise of their hitting the cobblestones. Elegance is the term that comes to mind as soon as the lips are touched by this smooth, silky, beautifully deep, dark wine. In the meantime, one breathes aromas of wild red berries, blueberries, red currants, blackberries, and graphite.

At the first sip, it is pure, smooth seduction of each single taste bud; a surprise, one feels enveloped by its richness and minerality. Its elegance and smoothness, accompanied by powerful tannins, make it an outstanding wine. I am writing about Zyme’s Oseleta by Celestino Gaspari, a wine that has received top scores from international critics but does not have the international recognition it deserves.

In Ian D'Agata’s opinion, based on his personal experience, varietal Oseleta wines “exude grapey and violet aromas, are massively tannic but offer delicate herbal and blackberry flavors, complicated by nuances of tar, leather, fresh herbs, and cinnamon,” and he believes Celestino Gaspari’s Oseleta has “very bright red and black fruit flavors and, though typically tannic, is never green or excessively astringent.” Zyme’s Oseleta is made in Valpolicella, in the Verona Lessini Mountains area (Illasi, Lavagno, Parona), with certified sustainable, practically biodynamic 100% Oseleta grapes. Destemmed and fermented for fifteen days with ambient native yeast, it ages at least six or seven years in barriques and one year in bottles.

The grape Oseleta is a rare autochthonous Italian variety whose name probably derives from the word “osei,” birds—the same word used for the famous dish “polenta e osei, a recipe with polenta and game birds like thrushes or larks—because birds love to eat its berries. Together with Corvina, Corvinone, Rondinella, and a, it is one of the typical grape varieties of Valpolicella. Looking at the names, out of five grapes, four refer to birds: Oseleta, Corvina, and Corvinone, with clear reference to corvi, crows, and Rondinella, a term of endearment for rondine, swallow. Oseleta is a low-yield grape (it yields 30% less juice than other local varietals), and this is probably the reason why it was not cultivated as much, if not completely abandoned, until some forty years ago when the Masi estate replanted it in the 1980s (unfortunately, Masi’s Osar, monovarietal Oseleta, is not yet imported in the USA).

Oseleta has a small, stocky, closed bunch with small, thick, dark-skinned berries, perfect for producing extraordinarily concentrated wines, and pips that, when perfectly ripe, release very pleasant tannins. Its polyphenolic characteristics are such that they make it probably the most coloring varietal of the Verona province, which is also the only area where Oseleta can be found. Set in the Italian National Grape Varieties Registry in the year 2000 and added to the allowed varietals for Valpolicella and Amarone wines in 2003, the Oseleta grape itself does not have a long history. The first scholar to mention Oseleta was Onofrio Panvirio, a sixteenth-century historian and humanist who describes it with contradictory terms: “alba et nigra (white and black), dulcis et recenti (sweet and fresh), acre et matura (sharp and ripe).”

In 1825, Giuseppe Acerbi, botany and agronomy professor in Milan, published a study on grape varietals where he mentions an “ozilina” grape that was cultivated in the province of Brescia, and in 1901, in his ampelography study, Zava mentions an Oselina, with synonyms Oseleta and Oselina, in the Treviso province. Zava also mentions an Oselina Biancara, an Oselina Montagnina, an Oselina Mora, an Oselina Nera, an Oselina Rossa, and an Oselina Salvega Biancara, cautioning, however, that they were all irrelevant and grew spontaneously and only for birds to enjoy. Sormani Moretti, another scholar of the time, identified an Oselina Rossa or Uccellina cultivated in Quinzano.

In the early 1970s, Oseleta was recovered in the Verona area, and following ampelographical and enological studies, it was deemed suitable for the production of the Valpolicella wines (Valpolicella, Ripasso, Amarone, and Recioto) because of its suitability for drying, the large pips, and its low yields, and consequently, in 2003, it was allowed in the disciplinare of the most well-known Valpolicella wines. Today, it is used in the production of famous Amarone wines like Dal Forno, where it is found in the quantity of 10%. Only approximately 20 hectares (50 acres) are cultivated with Oseleta grapes, thus making it a very rare variety still today. Even rarer is a 100% Oseleta wine.

In Italy, a few producers offer this wine, as we mentioned, Masi (named this year one of the fifty best Italian wineries by Food and Wine magazine and has received 5 stars from Falstaff Wein Guide), with its Osar being the best known. In California, after extensive research, I was able to find Zyme Oseleta, and it was the best surprise at the beginning of this 2025, and we are trying to expand its appreciation by wine lovers who are always looking for new palate stimulations. Zyme adopted the name Oseleta for their wine (it used to be Oz) only when they were fully satisfied with their product. They kept the large O at the beginning of the name as a depiction of a grape berry. To me, it brings back the memory of another O, but that is another story.