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Château Musar Rosé 1995

A short note tonight, but a long wine. I can still taste it, though the bottle was emptied half an hour ago. It’s the Château Musar Rosé 1995. A special wine for emotional reasons. But it also tastes great.

Château Musar is known to wine lovers all over the world for its fantastically idiosyncratic red wine that ages for decades and never seem to tire. Among hardcore Musar fanatics, however, it’s the estate’s white wine that often takes first stage: it’s even more ageworthy than the red version (the 1954 is still drinking superbly, I’m told; quel dommage I finished my last bottles in 1972…), and crazier. Musar also makes a rosé which is rarely given any attention. And yet it’s made of the same local varieties as the white: Merwah and Obaideh, with a splash of Cinsault for roséness. There’s no reason why it should age less well than the Blanc and Rouge. With any of the latter, I wouldn’t be worried about a 1995, but when I bought this bottle of the Rosé at London’s City Beverage Co. (a great source for older Musar vintages), I was told by the owner to drink up soon.

He was wrong. This wine is fresh as a daisy. In the bottle, the colour doesn’t even look so much aged: a Cinsault medium deep pink with perhaps some rustiness. Upon opening this is a little smelly and reductive, tertiary, with that toasty, searing quality of aged white Musar. However with airing and served at 16C this is getting better and better. Nose is that of a red wine, perhaps even older port with a pruney, confiturey opulence, but palate has the bracing oxidative energy of the Musar whites. While the acidity might be a bit punchy for most palates, the lovely textural finesse of Cinsault-generated wild strawberries is irresistible. This somehow is a little wild and pungent and at the same time shows an elegance that is out of this world.

A wine of real dimension with fantastic poise and personality. And not at all evolved: can go on for at least another 10 years. Challenging but really a transcendental bottle of rosé.

Musar owner Serge Hochar at a recent tasting in Warsaw.

Disclaimer

Source of wine: own purchase.

Van Volxem Riesling Rotschiefer 2004

Weingut Van Volxem is already one of the leading estates in Germany, but it seems to be making progress with every vintage. Here I look back at a 6-year-old Riesling and comment on how the winery’s style has subtly changed.

The wines of Mannucci Droandi

I received this nice box of samples from the Mannucci Droandi estate in Chianti, after a nice exchange of e-mails with owner Roberto Giulio Droandi. This 30-hectare property in Caposelvi hit the headlines recently with its wines from experimental grape varieties that were recovered from a pool of ancient clones in a programme with the Istituto Sperimentale per la Viticoltura in Arezzo, under the umbrella name of Chianti Classico 2000.

Chianti, we all know it, is made from the Sangiovese grape, and Sangiovese’s ups and downs as a variety define the critical history of Chianti and its Tuscan siblings: Brunello di Montalcino and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. And as we all know as well, there are some subsidiary grapes customarily blended into Sangiovese according to the Chianti ‘recipe’ worked out by Bettino Ricasoli in the 1860s: Canaiolo, and the white Malvasia del Chianti (as well as Trebbiano Toscano which is a later, and less happy, addition to the recipe). Hardcore Chianti fanatics might well remember some of the more obscure additive to Sangiovese, such as Colorino, Ciliegiolo, Malvasia Nera and Mammolo (some of these are seeing a minor renaissance and are occasionally made as varietals).

Well, as we learn from the Chianti Classico 2000 programme, it’s not the whole story. Historically – i.e. in pre-phylloxera and pre-scientific replanting times in the early 1800s and 1700s – there were far, far more varieties grown in Chianti, and Sangiovese was anything but dominant in the vineyards. The plantings were universally mixed and a single harvest was operated where all varieties were picked and then pressed and vinified together. This traditional system persists in some areas of Germany and Austria where it is known as gemischter Satz whereas in France or Italy, the complantation has been largely abandoned. Italians have a term for a blend of grapes made in the vineyard and vinified together: uvaggio.

Now here are some of the excitingly obscure name of historical Chianti varieties that were examined with the CC2000 study:

Albano, Cascarella, Lugliola, Malvasia Bianca Lunga, Orpicchio, Perugino, Salamanna, San Colombano, Trebbiano Dorato, Vermentino Bianco, Zuccaccio (these are all white) and Aleatico, Canaiolo, Colorino del Valdarno, Foglia Tonda, Formicone Bonamico, Grossolano, Lacrima del Valdarno, Mammolo Nero (in several subvarieties including Primaticcio, Piccolo, Sgrigliolante) Mammola Tonda, Morellino, Passerina, Primofiore, Pugnitello, Rossone.

Before you smile asking ‘who on earth needs all these obscure useless grapes’, it is worth remembering that many grapes that were on the verge of extinction just a decade or two ago are now firmly established as some of the world’s most exciting. (Viognier is one example).

Vineyards in Ceppeto. © Mannucci Droandi.

The best-known of these revived Chianti grape varieties is Pugnitello, the best-known version of which is bottled by the large estate of San Felice. It’s an impressive wine showing Pugnitello as grape with massive colour, great concentration, powerful structure coupled with very sensual fruit. My only criticism is that it is very unlike Chianti as we know, much the opposite of Sangiovese, and so its possible use in a Chianti blend is problematic.

Mannucci Droandi, meanwhile, are offering varietal bottlings of other obscure historical grapes. The Barsaglina 2007 is a wine of some body and extract, quite tannic on end (I wonder how much of this derived from wood, of which there’s obviously been a little), rich but restrained and structured – which perhaps sums up the Chianti terroir somehow. The colour is moderately deep and the bouquet is modest: a little reductive and animal at first, with some bright red berries underneath. The fruit register and highish acidity are in fact Sangiovese-reminiscent, though the fierce tannins are not. Made in a rustic, challenging, not very elegant style, but surely with interest, though it’s hard to see exactly what this would contribute to a Chianti blend. The Foglia Tonda 2007 is altogether a better wine, with a cleaner and deeper aroma and a more balanced palate where the tannins are more integrated; there is some wood support but better digested than the Barsaglina above. An attractive wine with broad, assertive fruit and very good concentration, smoother and easier than a comparably sized Sangiovese (indicating Foglia Tonda as a softening and perhaps enriching grape in the blend).

The Ceppeto property. © Mannucci Droandi.

Yet the most excitement comes with the regular, Sangiovese-based Mannucci Droandi bottlings. The Chianti Colli Aretini 2007 (coming from the historical core of the estate, the Campolucci vineyard located outside the Chianti Classico zone) is a typical Chianti with strong acids and mineral tannins, and plenty of seriousness too: most of Colli Aretini wines are for immediate drinking while this, aged in oak, can easily wait 4 or 5 years. Good impressions too for the Chianti Classico Ceppeto 2006 (Ceppeto is the name of a different, recently acquired property), riper and broader than the Colli Aretini, structured and tight and still somewhat dominated by the oak and extract, but with good fruit, length and potential. The Chianti Classico Ceppeto Riserva 2006 basically continues along the same lines, extractive and powerful with a tight mineral kernel wrapped in semi-intense crisp cherry. I’ve retasted these 2006s recently in Tuscany and they are evolving quite well (if slowly). Really distinctive and engaging stuff for a winery that only started bottling in 1998.

Tuscan winter.

Disclaimer

Source of wines: samples sent by the winery.

Positive energy

Wine PR queen Dorli Muhr has now also turned vintner. Her wines, from the hitherto very uninspiring region of Carnuntum east of Vienna, might well be Austria’s best reds.

Rising and falling stars

Gambero Rosso is Italy’s foremost wine guide, and in a country that puzzlingly lacks an opinion-making wine magazine, has constituted the most influential voice on wine for over a decade. Its stylistic bias has effectively changed the shape of Italian winemaking. As always when a medium becomes too influential, The Red Prawn has come under critical fire for its sins both actual and alleged, and as a strong counteraction against its pro-new oak agenda has gathered momentum Gambero’s star has started to wane somewhat. (Ironically this happened when the book’s quality, in my opinion, has clearly improved, with a more nuanced coverage and an obvious if limited acknowledgement of more traditional styles).

One of Gambero’s very engaging but equally controversial activities is the Italian Wines Roadshow, showcasing leading estates that have been among the guide’s protagonists over the last years (as well as its best business partners, one should add). And so 59 big Italian names descended onto Warsaw (as well as Moscow, London and a few other venues) and provided for an afternoon of thought-provoking drinking.

My feelings are a little ambivalent as there were several producers (cooperatives and not) which should never be included in what is supposed to be Italy’s 57 best wineries. And there was more than a fair proportion of estates that are doing some sound commercial work with their wines but which eventually do lack a bit of personality and expression of terroir. The latter, in fact, was more often than not missing from the equation, with red wines displaying impressive levels of extract, oak and overripe fruit but very little in terms of finesse or minerality. Whites wines were hardly better with the vast majority showing a fairly formulaic stainless steel cool fermentation profile, or decently concentrated but with utterly predictable new oak.

Daniele Cernilli of Gambero Rosso speaks at the seminar. © Piotr Niemyjski.

There were, highlights, too, including the various mineral facets of Cantina Gallura’s surprisingly good Vermentinos, and Nals Margreid’s transparent, impeccably balanced wines from Alto Adige (including an admirably restrained Merlot). On the red wine front there was the unquestionable greatness of Sassicaia 2006, seamless, elegant, juicy, with not a millimeter of excess, and the deliciously unpretentious Cirò Duca San Felice 2007 from Librandi, almost rosé in colour with real Mediterranean finesse. Some good fun was had with Nino Franco’s Proseccos.

And then four stunningly good wines from what is probably the Gambero Roadshow’s least-known winery, Provenza from the shores of Lake Garda. In the Lugana and Garda DOC appellations, some hopelessly unfashionable grape varieties are grown including white Trebbiano di Lugana, red Groppello and Marzemino. Their obscurity and provinciality are likely incentives to work really hard in vineyard and cellar, and these were truly very well-vinified wines including the Lugana Selezione Fabio Contato 2007, fermented in oak yet showing none in its flavour (and that’s quite an exploit with Trebbiano, an unaromatic grape that seems to absorb oak like a sponge), mineral, deep, balanced and elegant at the same time. The simpler Lugana Molin 2008 sees some skin contact on the Trebbiano giving it an unseen complexity and depth of mineral flavour, and the red Garda Classico Negrasco 2007 was equally good with earthy fruit and respectable depth while keeping a clean, crisp, very drinkable style that is really the essence of what Italy does so well. Whatever you say, it’s good of Gambero Rosso to endorse wines such as Provenza’s.

Disclosure: The Warsaw edition of the Gambero Rosso Roadshow was co-organised by the WINO Magazine where I am employed. I am occasionally invited to vineyard tours to Italy organised by Thompson International Wine Marketing who organise the Roadshow for Gambero Rosso.

Agony and ecstasy

2005 is by no means a bad vintage for Tuscany, but in Montalcino almost everything has been done to make it worse than it could have been.

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Vino Nobile: overdone, underwhelming

The Tuscan disease: overextraction is ruining Vino Nobile.

Vernaccia: white Tuscany

I traditionally spend the third week of February in Tuscany, invited alongside other writers and wine buyers by the consorzios for Chianti Classico, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano and Brunello di Montalcino who make the new vintages available for tasting.

Vernaccia tasting at the modern art gallery in San Gimignano.

It’s an intense time of hectic tasting, crisp acidity and crunchy tannins. Sangiovese is a fantasting grape but it’s easy to overdose. So it’s really delightful that this year I’ve started the Tuscan immersion by the preview tasting of Vernaccia di San Gimignano, Tuscany’s premier white wine.

Vernaccia has the laudable habit of spicing up its Anteprima with a comparative tasting with a famous French wine appellation. Past editions have featured Chablis, Sancerre and Hermitage, and this year it was Pouilly-Fuissé. Such comparisons have a limited direct relevance but they’re a good occasion to taste some proper French wines (something I must do more often) and look at Vernaccia in a broader context.

The Vernaccia consorzio president Letizia Cesani with Philippe Valette
and Fabio Montrasi (of Château des Rontets).

It was actually a brave move on Vernaccia’s side, as the comparison surely showcased some of the appellation’s inherent problems. The major one, for me, was a lack of stylistic homogeneity and a clear direction. It’s especially evident in the Riserva bottlings. New oak, used oak, large oak; oak fermentation, stainless steel fermentation, skin contact, lees contact; ageing in oak, in concrete, in bottle: I’ve tasted over 25 Riservas without quite understanding where they should be going. The best examples, such as Giovanni Panizzi’s 2002 and 2006 (see also my earlier article here), or La Lastra’s 2002 and 2001, or Mattia Barzaghi’s Cassandra 2007, are wine of compelling substance and potential, but many others are just coarse and excessive with no sense of harmony.

In the end it was a more consistent showing for the basic Vernaccias (and the odd single vineyard selection), many of which provide a happy reflection of San Gimignano’s sandy-clay terroir: unaromatic and sometimes low on fruit but with vivid salty, bitterish mineral notes on the palate, Vernaccia is one of Italy’s most distinctive white flavours. Highlights included Vincenzo Cesani, La Mormoraia, Mattia Barzaghi, and Cappella di Sant’Andrea, athough it should also be said there was a large amount of bland industrial-tasting wine that does nothing to enhance Vernaccia’s reputation.

The wine was better preserved than the label.

The Pouilly-Fuissé team was restricted to three estates, but they provided some very exciting drinking. I found Guffens-Heynen’s wines built around oak, but they’re real masterpieces of oak vinification and the Mâcon-Pierreclos 1er Jus de Chavigne 2006 is one heck of a vibrant, structured, mineral Chardonnay, and the Pouilly-Fuissé Deuxième Tri 1993 was impressively preserved for its age.

Yet in a way the more stimulating wines came from Domaine Valette, including a bold no-sulphur (there’s only 8mg added at bottling) Viré-Clessé 2006 and 2003 that was slow to open but revealed an intriguing herby-medicinal minerality and a wide panorama of salty notes; it’s really thoroughly recommended for 16€. And Château des Rontets offered three very solid bottling of Pouilly-Fuissé: the Les Birbettes, from 80-year-old vines, is extractive, deep, majestic and impressive. We were surely looking at the elite of Pouilly-Fuissé but they surely showed a level of consistency, concentration and depth that is beyond the reach of Vernaccia di San Gimignano, for the moment. Reasons? I’d identify a long consolidated tradition of wine production in Burgundy, but also a stronger emphasis on vineyard management, and importantly, yields: yields are always relative and should be taken with a grain of salt but a Vernaccia producer is happy to produce 50-60hl/ha with a planting density of 4–5000 vines/ha while the Burgundian standard at 10K vines/ha is closer to 30–40hl. That’s three times less than in Tuscany.

This trip to Tuscany
(flights, hotels, meals and transfers) was paid for by the consorzios of
Vernaccia di San Gimignano, Chianti Classico, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano and
Brunello di Montalcino.

In Apulia (4): Three wines that work well

In my recent series on Apulia I have been fairly critical of some aspects of the region’s winemaking. Back at home I sat to a relaxed tasting session with some potentially controversial wines, to see whether my feelings have softened.

Feudi di San Marzano is a large commercial winery making wines in a very fruity style (they’re high on the list of favourites of Luca Maroni, Italy’s most controversial critic), including the Primitivo Sessantanni that embraces the grape’s excesses I mentioned here. ‘Sud’ is San Marzano’s range of everyday varietal wines, and includes (interestingly) a white Verdeca alongside a Shiraz, Primitivo and Malvasia Nera. This latter grape is ubiquitous in Salento, the southern part of Apulia, but has always been used exclusively as a blending variety for its deep colour and lush fruitiness. (I’ve heard a theory that it belongs to the Grenache family). It allegedly lacks structure to be bottled on this own. Well, this Sud Malvasia Nera 2007 works very well indeed. It is a simple wine with not much bouquet to speak of, but making a statement about Apulia as a serious source of irresistibly tasty ripe fruit. The New World inspiration is very obvious here but the whole has a natural freshness and joyfulness that is rarely seen in an overseas wine. Unsophisticated but delicious, in a word. (It’s about 8€ retail).

With the Santa Lucia’s 2000 Le More, I wanted to double check my mixed impressions from a Nero di Troia tasting organised for us at Canosa by the Radici association. This grape is another former blending variety that has quickly risen to fame in recent years. But it’s still much a work-in-progress as producers are trying to figure out what winemaking styles suit it best. Rosés, light unoaked reds, classic long-aged large-oak examples, as well as turbocharged new oak modern fruit bombs are produced. The latter solution is the least interesting, the general feeling about Nero di Troia being that it tends towards overextraction, and doesn’t digest new oak well at all. The 2006 Riserva Le More from Santa Lucia was a case in point, and I much preferred their lighter Vigna del Melograno bottling. Well, I was proven wrong with the 2000 vintage of this wine. Time has been gracious to it, and it’s showing brilliantly. It has two major merits today: it has totally digested its oak, and shows Nero di Troia’s exuberant floral profile well. Colour is still dark, bouquet only mildly evolved, softly olivey, rather simple as befits this rustic grape variety, but with good overtones of violets and other flowers. On the palate this still is quite dynamic and bit of tannic-punchy, with Nero di Troia’s typically moderate acidity. Modern and dark-fruity but with really good structural balance, and more seriousness than most Troias.

Leone De Castris is one of Apulia’s veteran wineries, but with a recent change of style with the hiring of consultant Riccardo Cotarella I have been very underwhelmed by their wines. Especially by the Salice Salentino Riserva 2006, and all-time classic of traditional Apulian balsamic evolution, and following the Cotarella ‘revolution’ more of a blueberry muffin milkshake Mendoza Malbec-wannabe. (It is declared to be 100% Negroamaro grape aged in large oak; judging by what’s in the glass I have every reason to question both claims). So as a consolation I opened my last remaining bottle of the pre-Cotarellean Salice Salentino Riserva 2001. What a delightful wine! An unashamedly evolved, transparent ruby colour and an engaging bouquet of ripe cherry and red berries, with a hint of Salento stewed fruit preserve character, with minor herbiness for complexity; no oak, no tar. The real interest is on the palate with excellent volume of ripe and fleshy but vibrant fruit. And there’s quite some tannins on the finish. Still too young, should wait another 2–3 years at least. Where the latest vintage is flabby and boring this is poised and refreshing, structured and drinkable, sturdy and elegant at the same time. If you have bottles left, cherish them. This wine is no more.

Source of wines: Feudi di San Marzano – own purchase, Santa Lucia, Leone De Castris – samples provided by the producers (back in 2004).

Giacomo Conterno Barbera d’Alba 2000

Much to my chagrin I cannot afford the Barolos of Giacomo Conterno. This 45K-bottle estate in Piedmont’s Monforte d’Alba could well be the most famous and hyped of all Italy. And the entry ticket to the theatre of its epic, majestic, supremely ageworthy Barolo Cascina Francia is a hefty 95€ (the Monfortino Riserva, the last of the Barolo Mohicans, is three or four times that).

That’s a real shame, because I tremendously admire and enjoy these wines. I admire their absolute composure and uncompromised reverence of tradition. I delight in their raspberry & rose petal finesse (although that finesse is a polite grammatical way of making their stern structural statement). I admire Roberto Conterno’s soft-spoken way of refusing to depart even an inch from his father Giovanni’s and his grandfather Giacomo’s qualitative and stylistic standards. Non si cambia una virgola was his answer to what he’d change when I visited him in September 2005, a couple of years after Giovanni passed away.

Elephantine casks hosting Barolo in the Giacomo Conterno cellar.

Thankfully Conterno also makes one more affordable wine: a Barbera d’Alba that comes from the Cascina Francia plot in the commune of Serralunga and sees shorter oak than the Barolo here (although 14 months are quite a long élevage by Barbera standards), but otherwise comes close to a Barolo in structure and longevity. This 2000 version cost me 22€. (The current release, 2007, is 25€ at the winery).

It is a fairly aged example of Barbera, with little obvious fruitiness and a tertiary bouquet of game meat, dried herbs, with some balsamic oak overtones. The flavour is ample and long, bone-dry, with high acidity and still quite some unresolved tannins, although the fruit is a bit too low to speak about much further potential to age. Technically it’s not a perfect wine, with some rustic touches to the bouquet and a hint of volatile acidity.

Winemaking taken seriously: Roberto Conterno with geological analyses of Cascina Francia. (Photo taken September 2005).

Yet there’s something quite remarkable in how this wine completely ignores the modern ‘consumer taste’ and the flavour profile of contemporary wine. It’s not merely a traditional-style wine, like there are many in Piedmont. This Barbera is really more papal than the pope. It makes no concession whatsoever to the drinker: it’s stern, bone-dry, tart, bitter, tannic; there is sense of harmony and peace but it is the ascetic harmony of Gregorian chant. It’s the taste of wine from a now remote era, when great wine was something to aspire to, and not banally ‘consume’. A time when vintners weren’t told by journalists (or bloggers) what their wines should taste like. A wine to admire – and to enjoy, but humbly, not Vaynerchuk-style self-magnifyingly.