Livio Felluga Sossò 2000
Posted on 11 July 2012
Had three interesting wines yesterday at a birthday party. Two went with roast goose. I prefer to have goose with a potent white wine, but many people consider it a red-wine course, so I usually bring one bottle each of the two colours. With goose, the red wine should be light (nothing works better than Pinot Noir, really) while the white should be as powerful as they come; a big Pinot Gris or grand cru Riesling are my favs.
Orange wines are great food wines.
This time, atypically, I opted for an orange wine: the Giovanni Panizzi 2006 Vernaccia di San Gimignano Evoè. (See producer profile and previous tasting for this wine here). It is an extraordinary Vernaccia, macerated on the skins for several months, yet it’s less extreme than many orange wines such as the Roxanich Malvazija Antica I reviewed some time ago. Rather, it remains understated and elegant with only a bit of the spicy, grape-skinny, fleshy notes typical of orange wines. Initially this 2006 – showing anything but evolved – was pretty tight and inexpressive; it needs an hour of decanting and a 15C serving temperature to show its wonderful breadth and intensity of tangeriney fruit. A superb match with long over-cooked goose.
11 years is not a bad result but this won’t go farther.
The red wine turned out to be less exciting, if still rather interesting. Anita & Hans Nittnaus are reputed for making one of the best Pinot Noirs in Austria’s Burgenland. But the 2001 is now a fully mature, somewhat soft and evanescent wine, with some nice cherry pit flavour and good integration of oak but lacking liveliness and flesh to be really exciting. It actually drinks well for a 11-year-old Austrian Pinot Noir, but is slightly past prime.
Stunning Merlot from Italy. © Vivendoavida.net.
The opposite is true of the Livio Felluga 2000 Sossò, a Riserva of Merlot (with 40% Refosco) from the Friuli region in Italy. I uncorked this with no great hopes, but it is a very big wine with enormous concentration, a black colour completely unchanged by age, and a brooding nose of essence of cassis with minor lead pencil. The tannins are very present but extremely high quality, perfectly integrating the oak, and really grainy and polished. Impressive straight upon opening, this will repay decanting or cellaring. A truly world-class Merlot, this would be a fantastic ringer for a top Pomerol bling tasting.
Disclosure
Source of wines: Vernaccia, Merlot, own purchases; Pinot Noir, tasting sample received from the winery in 2005.