Browse Tag

emilia-romagna

Donati or nice?

Donati 2008 Malvasia dell’Emilia (Emilia-Romagna) – Difficult. This is no slickified industrial wine, so variable performance is perhaps to be expected. But this is…difficult. Papery, dusty, wrenched, and odd. I keep peering, waiting for an explanation, and then the bottle’s gone and I’m just as confused as before. (12/10)

Underbrush

Ca’ de Noci a Quattro Castella 2007 “Sottobosco” (Emilia-Romagna) – Blackcurrant vinegar and raw pepper dust, trapped under an avalanche of ash with someone who hasn’t cleansed their armpits in…well, years. Grossly imbalanced in terms of both acid and tannin. Awful. This can’t be what this is supposed to taste like, can it? (8/10)

Mooning

[vineyard]Ca’ de Noci 2006 “nottediluna” (Emilia-Romagna) – Lush pear and apricot. Almost buttery. Somewhat flamboyant, but its an appealing showmanship…flirtatious, yet classy. (7/09)

Cà de Noci 2007 “nottediluna” (Emilia-Romagna) – Stale paper with a bouquet of flowers in slow emergence. Acrid. This needs…I don’t know. But it needs something. And less of some other things. (7/09)

Cà de Noci on the left-hand side

Ca’ de Noci 2005 “riserva dei fratelli” (Emilia-Romagna) – Sparkling, though it’s more of a slushy froth than a proper pétillance. Apple and acid, with light bitterness and a fresh finish. However, the nose is odd, and mostly absent. Some are moved to a tentative declaration of cork taint (oddly, all such are female), but the importer (who is present) says not. Still, he agrees that the wine seems off in some fashion. (7/09)

Moonlit nights

[bottles]Ca’ de Noci 2006 “Notte di Luna” (Emilia-Romagna) – Not an orange wine, exactly (it’s far too pale and recognizable for that), but one in training, with the sandpaper scrape of tannin abrading a broth of whitish stone fruit, dried pith, and powdered stone, then finishing with the tactile buzz of newly-absent soda. While potentially gorgeous, it’s sorta elusive in my glass…not in the endless-descriptor fashion of the true orange-wine cohort, but in a more diffident fashion. This could just be a function of its context (other wines, food, distraction), and so I’d like another chance at this. Preferably several. (6/09)

I want Candia

Donati 2007 Malvasia di Candia Frizzante (Emilia-Romagna) – Straight from the bottle (which was, I believe, previously-opened), there’s a bit of traditional-lambic funk; alongside the spritz and the nippy acidity, this is like a far less painful Cantillon. These elements settle and cohere with air and rising temperature, bringing out some proto-peach and grapefruit precursors, a tactile but not gustatory salinity, and that ever-present spiky buzz of sparkle. If there’s a quibble, it’s that the wine is monotonic in pitch. But there’s a lot going on in that note, and so the quibble remains no more than a quibble. (6/09)

St. Joe

Aggazzotti Nocino “Notte di S. Giovanni Riserva” (Emilia-Romagna) – Nocino amped up, less with power than with density, like a slow-built stew with layers upon layers of flavor. There’s dark chocolate, Sicilian espresso, even the darkest of black cherries…though perhaps a slight devolvement of the walnut’s central role in such a liqueur. Nonetheless, this is fabulous, and if nocinos received points, this would probably be the beneficiary of a lot of them. (6/09)

Lini on me

Lini “Labrusca” Lambrusco Rosso (Emilia-Romagna) – There is, of course, plenty of deeply unserious Lambrusco. And then there are the serious, almost flagellant kind that seem to be a counter-reaction to the first. One is a travesty, the other is unnecessary. This bottling seems to live somewhere in the middle, with a fair amount of structure to its bursting, bubbly red fruit, and only the slightest touch of residual sugar. It’s very good, but not (for my palate) quite as groundbreaking as the Bianco. Still, one could hardly do all that much better. (4/09)

We three kings

[bottle]TreRè Nocino (Emilia-Romagna) – Very spicy-sweet, like one of those hundred-year barrel-aged stickies from Australia. The texture is of something balsamic. There’s not all that much actual walnut aroma, though the skin bitterness of the nut is certainly present. And it finishes in – or perhaps on – fire. I like the idea, but the alcohol’s just too dominant for my tastes. (4/09)