Bricco dell' Uccellone Barbera D'Asti 2004

Hey all! Just last night I had a phenomenal wine that got me thinking about writing again- and well, here I am!

This wine was a 2004 Barbera D'Asti, made by Giacomo Bologna, an amazing wine producer, who according to my father, is credited with the marriage between the barbera grape and barrel aging. 

I actually mentioned this in my last barbera review (La Spinetta "Cà di Pian" Barbera D'Asti 2008) but I thought I'd reiterate some grape facts for some of you forgetful readers. Barbera, the grape, is actually the second most planted grape varietal in Italy- and is actually the most planted grape in Piedmont, home of the "Nebbiolo Brothers"- Barolo and Barbaresco.

At any rate, this was a real spank-daddy of a wine. I could tell it was something as soon as I started pouring it at the dinner table. Most of the time, when I praise the color and overall appearance of a wine, I've got to look at it in-glass for a while, move it around, and shine the kitchen lights on it. But not this one. As soon as I saw that gorgeous red liquid coming out of the bottle and crashing into the bottom of our glasses, I knew we were in for something special. The deep pour, the seemingly glowing colorful rims of the wine got me really excited. So excited in fact, like I said earlier, that I HAD to write about it. 

The nose also sold me. This wine is a classic example where it's more "bouquet" than "aroma." More "fragrance" than "smell." (I like that analogy... Let me know if it makes sense to anybody but me!) It was deeply jammy, the forefront of the nose was dark fruity, with JAMMY red and black currant berries, but it was held together by some classic barrique characteristics- a creamy oak delightfully lingers on the nose. EASILY one of the most fragrant wines I've ever had, I'd say the notes come through just as powerfully as they do in many gewürtztraminers. 

And finally, the wine did not disappoint in the taste category either. The nose components translated directly into the flavor profile, but that's not where the tasting ended. The oaky component of this wine integrated one of the most pleasant mouth feels I've ever had in an Italian wine. The warming 14.5% alcohol and its big dryness begged me to give it some cheese loving (and I did, I get to that in the next section.) It was a weightless medium body (once again, let me know if this sounds like nonsense,) and the flavors all came through in a balanced package: great flavors up-front, an active mid palate, and a warm, dry finish. 

Robiola is a white and milky cheese- REALLY tasty. 

Another thing I LOVED about this wine was its food-friendliness. This wine turned an already awesome Robiola cheese into the feature of my nearly two hour dinner. My dinner consisted of four courses: Appetizer (rustic style pizzas, fresh tomato salad, and robiola cheese) Pasta (trinette with a light tomato sauce and olive oil) Red Meat (ox tail and sausage from the tomato sauce) and finally Lamb (roasted with spices and herbs.) We opened the bottle at the end of our appetizer while the cheese was still on the table, and a quick taste of the two together was the great lasting impression of the entire meal. I'd definitely recommend the pairing!

WOW. Look at all those words. Sorry if I started rambling towards the end there- but when I love a wine, I've gotta let that love out and give respect where it's due. A "mad props" to the winemaker, you made my week with this jammy fruit-bomb of a wine!

Marisa Cuomo Furore Bianco 2010 & Wine Tour

The tour began with a walk through the cellar.

Hello everybody! This is the final wine tour I went on this Summer- the Marisa Cuomo winery. The winery is found along the gorgeous Amalfi Coast. You've got to take a long, curvy, and tight road along the water to get there. While the winery itself is located in Furore, the vines are found throughout a 10km radius of the central office. Since the Amalfi Coast itself is a mountainside, the vines are found at different altitudes ranging from 200 to 600 meters above sea level. Being on the Amalfi Coast is beautiful in itself, but being amongst vineyards on the Amalfi Coast is even more magical.

After the hour long tour, we were invited to the winery's own restaurant, the world renowned Bacco, where we enjoyed a four hour meal including a tasting of the winery's current vintage selection: the Furore Bianco, Ravello Bianco, Costa D'Amalfi Rosato, and the Furore Rosso. Each glass came with its own specialized dish for a perfect pairing, which led me to buy a bottle of each wine directly from the restaurant- I couldn't resist. I'm aware that my store sells these wines, but I just HAD to give these to some family in Italy because they're absolutely gorgeous wines that would make great gifts.

Afterwards, we walked along the street and enjoyed the scenery.

The wine I'll be talking in depth about will be the Furore Bianco 2010. Yeah, you heard me right. This is my very first white wine review. It was that interesting and refreshingly pleasant a wine that I just had to write about it. Let me just explain a little bit about Marisa Cuomo's wines first though. 

The wines are named after the towns that the grapes are predominantly collected from, be it Furore or Ravello. The white wines are blends of the Falanghina grape and the Biancolella grape (60% and 40%.) The Furore Rosso and the rosato are both a blend of the Piedirosso grape and the Aglianico grape (50% and 50%.) All of these grapes are found in Southern Italy, absolutely no foreign grapes are grown in the Marisa Cuomo winery. The Cuomo family, which runs the entire operation (Marisa's daughter was our tour guide,) believes strongly in staying true to themselves and the region in which they grow their wines, so only native varietals will be found and used here. The rest of Italy could try to do more of the same. 

We even got to walk through some of the aglianico vines. 

Okay, so now let me talk about the Furore Bianco. It was one of the most food friendly wines I've ever tasted. It was medium bodied yet insanely refreshing. Crisp, yet savory. The mouthfeel was out of this world, and when paired with the food served at Bacco, it tasted even better. I'm sorry to say it, but I didn't really pay attention to the individual flavors in the wine, the overall meal was just too much to take in. I enjoyed this wine a lot, and get this- I enjoyed the rosato even more. I don't even typically like rosato. That's how phenomenal these wines were. 

This post was a little all over the place, so let me just summarize everything for you here. If you ever get a chance to visit Amalfi, go online and make a reservation to VISIT THE MARISA CUOMO WINERY. You will NOT regret it. The weather is perfect, the air is pure, the scenery is magical, the cuisine is one of a kind, and the wines are truly superb. Check it out, fellas. 

Picture taken at San Pietro Wine & Spirits

I Sodi di San Niccolo` 2007 & Wine Tour

The Chianti Classico barrique.

Hi everyone! I appreciate all the feedback on the last post, it looks like you guys really enjoyed it! I'll try to keep it up with this one where I'll talk about the Castellare di Castellina winery in Chianti Classico and their top wine- I Sodi di San Niccolo`.

The Castellare di Castellina winery is a gorgeous winery found along the long rolling hills of Chianti, near Sienna. Throughout the tour my cousin and I were shown the cave-like cellars that were filled with barrique. They showed us two of the cellars, one where the Chianti Classico Riserva is kept, and one that we had to drive out to- a thirteenth century church where the Sodi di San Niccolo` is kept. The entire area was beautiful- the hills were filled with vines, freckled with lavender bushes that were surrounded by hundreds of butterflies.

Something I'd like to note about the Chianti barrique is how they keep the humidity within the cellar. Obviously being in a cave-like cellar, the temperature is kept relatively constant throughout the seasons, but the humidity has to be kept constant in a different way. What Castellare di Castellina does is dig out a ditch under the barrique and fill it with moistened gravel, which acts as a natural humidifier. Let me tell you, the temperature and humidity was perfect in there, not even my own bed room is that comfortable.

I Sodi di S. Niccolo` with some cold cuts.

Eventually, we were taken out to the office building (which looked more like a welcoming rustic household) to try a few wines. As we entered we were able to see the products that the winery produced, including the Chianti, the Chianti Classico, the Sodi di San Niccolo`, the vinsanto, the grappa, and even the world-famous Castellare vinegar. It was a nice reminder to us, who had just been out around a sunbaked paradise, that Castellare di Castellina is a prestigious and serious wine producer.

We tried three wines, the Castellare di Castellina Chianti Classico 2010, the Castellare di Castellina Chianti Classico Riserva 2009, and I Sodi di San Niccolo` 2007, the winery's "Cru," so to speak. We loved all of the wines, especially the Riserva, but I'll only review the Cru just because its something my father and I normally drink together at home.

The Castellare di Castellina entrance. 

The wine in glass is nice and medium colored. The legs formed beautifully, and you can tell by the swirl and aroma that the wine and barrique joined superbly to create a complex and pleasing wine. Elegant notes of violets and plums came through, all delicately coated in that rich oak I so very much enjoyed. The dish that accompanied the wine went perfectly together- I finished that entire dish of food since it tasted so good. It's definitely a wine I'd recommend to anybody who enjoys Italian food, and I have to say I'm glad that the Bruno Brothers carry this wine at their restaurants.

Anyways fellas, thanks for reading as usual. The next post will conclude my winery tour posts with the last one I visited- the Marisa Cuomo winery located in Furore, along the Amalfi Coast. I can't wait to write about it!

Castel Giocondo Brunello 2007 & Wine Tour

Hello everybody! Been a while hasn't it? Well I'm back to blogging now that I've finished my summer classes and Chrono Trigger (which is an amazing SNES game with a gorgeous soundtrack, you should definitely check it out if you're into that sort of stuff.)

440 meters above sea level, the highest vines
of the Castel Giocondo winery are found.

Now get this, for the past week I've been wine tasting with my cousin in Italy. We saw three wineries in total, two in Tuscany and one in Campania on the Amalfi Coast. I'll be reviewing the wineries one by one for the next couple of posts, and I have a ton of pictures to go along with them! I'm going to start with the first one I went to, the Castel Giocondo winery in Montalcino where I had the extreme pleasure to try the not yet released 2007 vintage of the Castel Giocondo Brunello and the groundbreaking first Super Tuscan produced in Montalcino, Luce 2008 (production began in 1993, but you know what I mean.)

Here's where the barrique are stored, and as
you can tell, this is the fancy part of the cellar.

So the winery is situated in Montalcino, which about three hours by car outside of Florence. Montalcino is essentially a tiny town in southern Tuscany that is found on top of a mountain that is covered in sangiovese grosso vines. As you can see, it's damn beautiful up there.

At the winery I got to see the original cellar and the newly added cellar that the winery opened for the purposes of tours (opened in 2005, if I remember correctly.) You can see the sharp contrast in the appearance of where the production started as a large square room with tons of equipment and where the winery becomes a bit of a souped-up, fancy cellar.

After seeing the cellar and the vines, we were taken to an actual castle at the highest part of the winery to taste a few wines and have some classy Italian finger foods to go along with them. We were given, as I stated before, the Castel Giocondo Brunello 2007 and the Luce 2008. Both pretty phenomenal and luxurious wines.

Excuse the photo quality here, I'm still getting
used to my new iPhone...

The Brunello is set to be released internationally in January, so it technically isn't entirely ready to be drunk yet. Typically a Brunello, being of the DOCG denomination of Italian winemaking rules, requires at least four years before being released commercially. However, being a Brunello (and a great one at that,) the wine was still very drinkable this young. Too many people reserve Brunello for the future, claiming that they need at least eight years after being vintaged to be drunk properly. While I respect the aging potential of the sangiovese grosso grape, I also respect the awesome fruit that a young Brunello packs.

The entrance to the winery after about a mile
drive through the winery's vineyards.

The Brunello was fruity and featured a deeply creamy vanilla aroma. It also represented itself beautifully in the glass, then again when you're tasting wine in a castle I think just about everything around you is beautiful. The flavor and nose were a bit closed, and I attribute that to the wine not being fully developed in the bottle yet. I would order a case of the stuff but I wouldn't open any of it until 2013 at the very earliest. I shouldn't knock it too much though, because this wine still exhibited some complex aromas (including what appeared to be chalk and wild berries) that I couldn't fully appreciate due to the entire experience of the wine tour. In my defense, it was my first wine tour and I made it a point to focus more on the wine I was tasting than my surroundings for the next ones.

I would include the Luce 2008 in this post as well, but I appeared to have rambled on for quite a bit and I don't want to make this any lengthier than it is already. Next time, I'll write about the Castellare di Castellina winery in Chianti Classico, found right outside Sienna. If you'd like for me to write about the Luce as well, please don't hesitate to email me at mfilippobruno at gmail.com. At any rate fellas, thanks for reading, and you'll hear from me soon!

My Apologies

Hello everybody! Long time no see! As you can tell, it's been quite a while since our last wine encounter. Don't get any funny ideas, fellas. The Wine Noob has had to take a bit of a hiatus due to some unforeseen happenings. Be that playing Chrono Trigger on the Super Nintendo or watching Madmen, I've been a little preoccupied.

 Don't fret! I'll be back and swinging very soon. I've tasted some awesome wines in the past few weeks and I've got plenty of tasting notes and anecdotes to go along with them.

Without further ado, I bid you adieu until the next post. See ya' soon, fellas!

H. Sorrel Le Gréal Hermitage 1989

Okay, so if you've been keeping up with the blog- you'd know that I just recently wrote about an aged cabernet from Napa. Yeah, it was pretty great. But get this- right after I had that 1999 cabernet... I had a 1989 Hermitage. This wine was freaking 23 years old. It was a gift to my father from a close friend of his years ago. I'd like to meet this man, because this man gave us a treasure we won't soon forget. So for a little information about the wine, I'd like to tell you a little about where it comes from. Hermitage is one of the top wines from Northern Rhône. The vines here are planted on steep slopes along the Rhône River, where they enjoy ideal growing conditions for the exclusive grape of the region- Syrah. Hermitage wines typically age beautifully, yet for some odd reason they do not fetch the same prices as top-growth Bordeaux or top-Cru Burgundies. If anybody reading this knows why, please let me know!

Let me begin relaying my experience of this wine with the uncorking of the bottle. As soon as I cut the wrap around the the tip of the bottle, my stomach turned. The cork was visibly molded. It looked like the thumb of a pale and bloody zombie. It also felt like the thumb of a pale and bloody zombie. The corkscrew actually cut through the cork like a knife through warm butter. It was a miracle that we were able to get the cork out without any residue falling into the bottle. Fortunately for us though, the wine held itself together despite the cork's health. The cork gave everything it had to keep this wine alive, and I'd like for all of us to take a minute to remember this brave cork, as it did an admirable job. Thank you.

In the glass, this wine was actually glowing. It was a dark almost red-velvet cupcake red color, be it still or mid-swirl. I didn't take a sip of the glass for a good half hour because I was so taken aback by how beautiful it was. This wine was embracing the glass, the air, the world! Think about how many years it has been since this wine has felt fresh air- roughly 23 years passed since its bottling, and you could tell that this wine was embracing the open world after being dormant for two decades.

In flavor and bouquet, this wine was a showstopper. It slowed down time, yet then again this might have been the effects of having had a bottle of cabernet beforehand and a couple glasses of Italian sauvignon for pre-dinner. The typical dark, pit-fruits that you hear about in Rhône syrah were present in this wine, but they were far from typical. They had this rustic quality about them, it was something I've truly never experienced in a wine before. The term perfume does not do this wine justice when it comes to the bouquet. The nose was thought-provoking. Through the elegant oak in this wine, thoughts of the steep hills of Rhône raced through my mind. Pure leathery notes also brought me there, to the foot of a medieval winery in France, looking out on the calm river, the trees, the vines, and the sun-baked stone towns. The mouthfeel was supple, the lush flavors complimented the wine's great acidity. With a roast lamb, the slightest spice would emerge on the finish. The list of qualities goes on, but can be summarized with the notions of anything you'd ever dream about in the ideal wine.

My literary structure in the previous paragraph was poor at best. Let me explain why I'm okay with that. This wine did more than leave a great impression on me. I'm going to look back on this wine for a long time. As a matter of fact, I've dated the back label of the bottle. My thought process when drinking this wine was intensely focused on the way I felt when I had that glass in my hand, underneath my nose, tipped into my lips. From the very first sip, to the end of the bottle, I understood exactly what the winemaker was trying to tell me about wine, Rhône, and life. So if what I've written in this post doesn't carry much rhetorical effect due to a lack of logical structure, I apologize. But understand that I wrote about this wine on a purely aesthetic level. Sentence structure, grammar, and clear connections didn't concern me this time, as you can clearly tell. However, I think that once in a while, this sort of experience is a good one. I hope you'll all agree. Thanks again for reading, guys!

Dalla Valle Cabernet Sauvignon 1999

Ladies and gentlemen... for this post I bring you my first aged Napa Valley cabernet! This wine is a whopping 13 years old. I've always heard about how Napa cabernets are world class when aged properly, and last night I finally got to experience what that meant first hand. Unfortunately, we forgot to decant the bottle before dinner (as we usually do,) so I don't think I was able to completely appreciate the wine. However, what I did experience was something totally new to me, considering I don't normally drink cabernet nor do I typically drink California wines all that often. So bare with me in this post, for this is generally uncharted territory for me.

In color, the wine was a deep and mature red. It had a black body and brick red rim. This is exactly what age does to the color of a well-kept wine. The body darkens and the redness develops more character. Upon a violent swirl, the wine displayed some gorgeous legs and the color figuration upon tipping the glass was almost completely uniform. This wine also threw some heavy sediment, which obviously comes with the aged-wine territory.

The flavor and nose of this wine also showed me some relatively new features to me. Cabernet is a fighter of a grape when it comes to aging, as described in the ever so romantic film, Sideways. I got some rich and unique black currant notes, drenched in a creamy french vanilla perfume. It had a powerful and relentless mouthfeel where I could literally feel the tannins (which I should note were soft despite being powerful and relentless,) beating down on my palate. The finish was oaky and dry, leaving me with a strong impression of what Napa Valley cabernets can accomplish when they're produced the right way.

Now you may be thinking to yourself, "Hey Mr. Wine Noob, this post sounds just like any other post you've written in the past- I thought that you said that this wine was something TOTALLY different for you than anything you've had before! You're slacking, BRO!" First of all, I'm not your "bro", pal. Secondly, the wine was something completely new for me despite the rather trivial description I wrote about it. Describing an aged wine in-depth is difficult, and considering I'm still pretty new to wine blogging, I think I've done a good job if you can pick up on the small characteristics that I reserve for phenomenal wines. Eventually I'll learn to do this a tad bit better, but for now I'm still The Wine Noob. This is what the wine was like, and it was pretty great. Thanks for reading, fellas!