Villadoria Bricco Magno Langhe Rosso 2007

Wine Noob disciples! I hope you all enjoyed that lovely 70 degree weather last week, if you're like me you probably tried a whole lot of white wines to cool down in the afternoon. I'll be honest, although I really like white wine, I really stink at drinking it. I'd say 90% of the wine I've ever drank in my life has been red, so I'm a lot more comfortable with it. Because of that, I've decided to keep with the reds for now, just until I get a better feel for what white wine has to offer us. This week's wine is the Villadoria Bricco Magno Langhe Rosso 2007. Long named wine... must be good.

Let me just start off by saying that I really like this wine. For $13.99 this wine gives you a boat load of Barolo and Barbaresco characteristics that would otherwise cost you at the very least $30, and often soar up into the $200 range. This is because the wine comes from an area within a few miles of Barolo and Barbaresco's vineyards, and is produced with the same exact grape: Nebbiolo.

Now, I could give you a history lesson dating back to the 1960s on the nebbiolo grape, but we'll save that for when we have a glass of the stuff together in the future.

Alrighty then. So once again, the Bricco Magno is a wine reminiscent of Barolos and Barbarescos. That said, it's similar to them, by no means is it the real deal. In the glass, the wine has a nice deep red, but I can see my fingers through the glass. It doesn't have the full body of the Barolo, nor the entirety of the elegance and finesse of Barbaresco. You may think that's a bad thing, but it doesn't have to be. Just from the color you can tell that the wine isn't going to weigh you down like Barolo, or overshadow the meal you're having like Barbaresco often can. At the same time you're going to get the solid acidity and structure that the nebbiolo grape surely delivers, and that my friends, is totally bananas.

The nose was by far my favorite part of the wine. It was so charming and so pleasant, I definitely didn't expect this going into it. Being that the wine is pretty young for a Piedmont red, the fruit was still there, and it was still swinging. Strawberries, red currant, and ripe plums are the fruits that come out and smack you in the face. Me, being a sucker for Piedmont, dug a little deeper and found some other things going on though. Brace yourselves fellas, this 2007 Bricco Magno showed signs of: mushrooms, tar, tobacco, and anise.

"Are you freaking kidding me Marco? What the hell are you smoking?!" Don't worry fellas, I'm in class right now so technically I'm not allowed to be smoking anything in here. But if I had it my way, I'd be puffing down a nice Marlboro red right now. Anyways, yeah, I'm dead serious about that. When I first noticed mushrooms and tar, I was ecstatic. I had always heard people talk about tar in wine before, but I had never really caught onto it before. Family, friends, high-tech pedophiles, believe you me that when you hone in on your palate and nose, you'll get those notes and you'll have a great time doing it, too.

Now that we've hit the five paragraph mark, I think it's a good time to start talking about how the wine tastes. So, I've mentioned already that the wine is young and that therefore the fruit comes out swinging. This wine is absolutely a fruit bomb (term "fruit bomb" coined by Gary Vaynerchuk, an awesome wine dude.) You get those red, ripe fruits literally wrecking down your mouth with catapults and trebuchets. But you guys know me, I'm a fool for texture and body- and this wine lacked a little bit in that department. Not enough tannic backbone and not enough going on in the mid palate. What I will say is that this wine has a lovely floral finish, and that it goes down so smooth with almost no bite whatsoever. I didn't try this wine with food, but I would imagine that the Piedmont region and the nebbiolo grape do a great job of producing wines with a good amount of acidity to pair with game meats, red pasta sauces, and who knows, maybe even forest salads (... are forest salads a real thing?)

Let's finish this post off with the wine's reception at the store. From what I've heard, people generally didn't like it. I got pretty depressed when I heard that, I really thought that I had found a quality value in a Piedmont region red that people would appreciate. So, where did I go wrong? Hell, I don't know. I'm slowly learning what people are looking for in wine, and I guess that maybe this wine isn't for everybody. A casual wine drinker should be able to enjoy this wine, but there's no guarantee of that. The Italy wine expert, on the other hand, would probably go crazy for this wine. What better Piedmont red at $13.99 can you drink while you wait for your 1997 Barolo to age to the height of its maturity? To be honest, there's probably a lot of better wines to be drinking right now than the Bricco Magno, but it doesn't hurt to diversify. Just ask those Lehman guys.