A little while back, we had the Lawton family over for dinner, which of course required us to collectively open 6 bottles for the 4 adults. Susan cooked osso bucco, so we ended up drinking largely Italian wines. As always, it was a lot of fun, with several standout wines, to be sure.
With cheeses and other starters:
2010 Borgo del Tiglio (Nicola Manferrari) Collio Bianco. Given the youth of this wine and the fact that it’s sort of an entry-level offering for the producer, I was pleasantly surprised by the fine layering it shows on the nose--featuring outstanding scents of mineral and smoke atop aromas of peach, orange zest, lemon meringue, hazelnut and oak shavings. It’s fairly full and rounded on initial impression on the palate, turning crisper and more focused toward the back—with smoke and mineral accents pouring in to support the core flavors of peach, grapefruit and lemon-lime. In the end, it’s taut and refreshing, but finely-textured and pleasingly balanced.
2004 Vodopivec Vitovska Venezia Giulia IGT. This wine is a cloudy ice-tea color, with an amber-orange core to it. It yields very fun and funky aromas of peach cup, orange sherbet, lime juice, strawberry puree and wild tropical fruit notes on the nose. In the mouth, it opens with a fun burst of peach, nectarine and mango flavors before turning a bit more serious and dry in character toward the surprisingly classy finish. There’s a lot going on here, but the wine pulls it off with a fine balancing act.
With dinner:
2006 Arianna Occhipinti Cerasuolo di Vittoria Classico Grotte Alte. This wine is wonderfully peppercorn-driven on the nose, with all sorts of wild berry, sweet cherry, pomegranate, smoke, peat moss, desiccated red flower petal and sushi seaweed wrapper accents flowing in and out during the course of the evening. It’s a decidedly thought-provoking but highly-pleasurable wine to sit and contemplate. On the palate, it’s enormously juicy, lifted, giving and bright, with fun flavors of blueberries, plums and cherries that are bold yet controlled, and dark but sweet. It has a subtle power running beneath all that, too, and there’s some fine iron filing and peppercorn tastes that emerge over time to help create a sense of growing complexity throughout the evening. All the while, it shows outstanding cohesion, tremendous length, plush texture and loads of pumped-out flavor with no holes anywhere to be found. It has unique character and delivers a lot of intellectual and pure tasting pleasure—great stuff.
2003 Emidio Pepe Montepulciano d'Abruzzo. This is simply a wonderful wine in just about every way. After 2 hours in the decanter, it starts off with an immediate and giving bouquet of road tar, black leather, dirt pile, cigar wrapper, ink, dried sweat, pepper and plush dark red fruits on the nose. Then, in the mouth, it’s super-smooth, pliant and juicy, with subtle but energetic lift and a quietly insistent energy. The fruit is an elixir of black cherry and black raspberry, with no hard edges anywhere and only faint background tannins to worry about. It has an earthy, manly quality to it despite all of that warm, giving fruit, and it just all works in harmony so nicely. Moreover, it’s shockingly in the zone for drinking right now. I wish I had more.
2010 Foradori Teroldego Sgarzon Vigneti delle Dolomiti IGT. This wine is a super-dense, deep-purple color. Consistent with that, the nose feels rather primary and grapey to me--delivering dense, thick aromas of purple berries, rubber band, black olive, iron ore and concrete dust that just feel a bit impenetrable and formative right now. It’s big and mouth-filling on the palate, with full-blown plum, black currant and blueberry fruit flavors that feel dense, chewy and fudgy. It gets a bit friendlier in tone deep into the night, but at the same time the tannins start to really pour in, too. In the end, it just doesn’t seem to want to give anything up, so I’d have to say that it’s a wine that in no way should be opened any time soon.
With dessert:
1990 Joh. Jos. Christoffel Erben Riesling Ürziger Würzgarten Auslese Mosel Saar Ruwer. Oh my goodness, I could sit and sniff this wine all night long, with its phenomenally pure, energetic, airy and tangy aromas of lemon oil, pineapple, grapefruit, spice and musky Mosel funk that I absolutely adore. In the mouth, it has amazing purity, zest and energy to go along with loads of generous lemon, grapefruit, pineapple and white peach flavors that are delicious and just perfectly ripe and naturally sweet. It just keeps on pumping out the flavor with ease, with no sign of let-up into the next two evenings, either. I mean, what more could you want? This is just top-notch stuff all the way around.
-Michael