Pieropan 2007 Recioto di Soave Classico “Le Colombare” (Veneto) — Sweet cloudberries, crystalline minerality, finely honed acidity. A beautiful, beautiful dessert wine. Like drinking the palest most tranparent gold. (9/16)
veneto
Kelly Ripassa
Zenato 1995 Valpolicella Superiore “Ripassa” (Veneto) — One of those “wait…I still have this?” finds from the move five years ago. Still, I didn’t get around to it until now.
It’s actually holding well — that much non-sugar dry extract has to count for something — and what’s left is like a dense dried fruit residue layered with dried fruit paste. That sounds worse than I mean it, but it’s not really a wine for drinking anymore (which it was in its youth), it’s a wine for contemplating, thinking “huh,” and moving on to something more quenching. (4/16)
Maule-ing
Maule “La Biancara” 2010 “I Masieri” (Veneto) – 100% garganega. A beautiful wine that sneaks up from behind, at first showing little other than a thinly floral note, but really broadening as it rests and warms. There’s terrific minerality here, vastly more complex flower-shop aromas than at its outset, and something honeysuckle-like in its insistent appeal to sweetness-without-sucrosity. (8/12)
Maule-dy lay
Maule 2010 “I Masieri” (Veneto) – Garganega (not 100%, I believe, but mostly…though I don’t have recent data at hand). Salted lemons, bold and weirdly compelling. More precisely, compelling and weird, and compelling in part because of that very weirdness. There’s a bit of a stale note that emerges later, whether from exposure to air (Maule tends to be very low-sulfur even amongst the low-sulfur crowd). Drink quickly, is what I’d say, though there’s every chance that other bottles will be different. (7/12)
Corazon
Gaetano d’Aquino 2011 Pinot Grigio delle Venezie (Veneto) – Sticky, confected lime candy with very spiky acidity that doesn’t seem entire ripe (or there are other possible interpretations, I suppose). Industrial. (7/12)
Againsta
Castello di Lispida 2002 “Amphora” (Veneto) – A very, very sludgy performance from this wine, which is always big but usually shows more life. Less like drinking molten metal than drinking the mold into which the metal was poured, this just pounds, pounds, pounds away until you finally get tired enough of the pounding to push it off. (5/12)
Ken
Venturini 2007 Recioto della Valpolicella (Veneto) – Concentrated berry residue, sticky and just a bit plastic, with in-control volatile acidity and the requisite tension between light residual sweetness and shriveled-prune tannin. You know, reading back over this note, I should say that I liked the wine more than the descriptors might indicate. It’s no great recioto, but it’s decent enough. (11/11)
Bull
Allegrini 1997 “Palazzo della Torre” (Veneto) – Dead. Dense, purple-black, and texturally rich, but dead. (11/11)
Campofiorin’s five miles long, doo-dah, doo-dah
Masi 1997 Rosso del Veronese “Campofiorin” Ripasso (Veneto) – Masi wants me to put a copyright symbol on “ripasso.” But…let me be polite about this…screw them. And screw their attempt to claim ownership of a widely-practiced technique and an extremely generic term. Anyway, it hardly matters here, because the wine is as corked as any wine I’ve ever experienced, filling the room with its trichloranisolic reek. (10/11)