Wine of the Week – Nebbiolo with a twist

Lessona – photo courtesy of Tenute Sella.

In recent months I have become seriously obsessed by the wines of Italy and I think with good reason. There is such variety, such diversity and such pleasure to be had. So much so in fact that I have been giving some tastings called Hidden Corners of Italy that shines a little light on the areas of Italy that people might not encounter all that much.

The wines really seem to have captured people’s imaginations and opened their eyes as to the huge variety that Italy offers. I have shown some stunning sparkling wines, wonderful whites and fine complex reds and will write about them all very soon. However one red in particular showed extremely well recently and I noticed that it is once again available in the UK, so thought that I would make it my Wine of the Week.

It comes from Piemonte, which would normally be regarded as a far from hidden corner of Italy, but it actually comes from the north of the region up towards the Alps from a little known PDO / DOC called Lessona. In fact Lessona is a commune in the Province of Biella some 70 kilometres north of Turin and although it was created a Denominazione di Origine Controllata / DOC as long ago as 1976, there are only 14 hectares of vineyards there.

Wine map of Piemonte – click for a larger view. Non watermarked, high resolution versions are available for a fee.

It wasn’t always like that though. The wine growing areas in the Alto Piemonte were once very important and like Lesona have long and noble histories that predate Barolo by several centuries. Phyloxerra devestated the vineyards and it is much harder to replant here on mountainous terrain than on the low rolling hills of Langhe. It is also much harder to scratch a living in more dramatic terrain, where transport costs are high, so many people left the land over many decades. Some emigtrated to the United States or Argentina, while others just went as far as Turin or Milan to seek work. After the depression and two world wars even those who had stayed were tempted to get steady jobs in the local post war textile industry that boomed for several decades. The consequence of all this is that the wine revolution passed the place by and so they found it hard to pull out of the downward spiral of decline that had gripped the place since the 1930s.

Tenute Sella – photo courtesy of Tenute Sella.

The richer Langhe region had more money to invest in vineyards and wineries, so as the post World War II modern wine revolution bit, those wines were perceived to be finer, richer, rounder and fruitier. More professional viticulture and hygeneic winemaking was completely normal in the south, but took far longer to reach the more impoverished north. As a result, by the time I joined the wine trade 30 odd years ago, the wines of this part of Piemonte were almost never mentioned.

Which is a great shame as the DOCs and DOCGs of this part of Italy produce some seriously impressive wines, especially the reds of Carema, Gattinara, Ghemme, Bramaterra and Lessona. There are many great producers here that deserve to be much more widely known – you can read a bit about them here.

While I was there many producers captured my imagination, but I developed a particular affection for the wines of Tenute Sella. Based in Lessona, although it has vineyards in Bramaterra too, this estate has been owned by the Sella family since 1671 when silk merchant Comino Sella founded it. Today the estate is run by the engaging and charming Marco Rizzetti, who is CEO of the winery and part of the Sella family on his mother’s side.

Tenute Sella vineyards in Lessona – photo courtesy of Tenute Sella.

Today Tenuta Sella farms 7 hectares in Lessona – 50% of the PDO – plus 10 hectares in Bramaterra. The Lessona vineyards are pretty fragmented and on Pliocene marine deposits, so comprise well drained sandy soils.

2011 Lessona

Tenute Sella

DOC Lessona

The principal wine from the estate and the wine they have produced ever since 1671. This is a blend of 85% Nebbiolo (traditionally called Spanna up here) with 15% Vespolina, a close relative of Nebbiolo. The vines are on average 55 years old and the vineyard is at 300 metres above sea level with a south facing slope. The grapes were destemmed and crushed before being fermented in stainless steel vats and the wine was matured for 24 months in large (2500 litre) Slavonian oak barrels, where it also went through the malolactic fermentation. Viticulture is all low impact, near organic with no pesticides.

2011 was a difficult year with periods of heavy rainfall and drought while hail in July severely depleted the crop making yields lower than normal. They are very pleased with what the vintage finally produced, as was I.

The colour was a little bricky like Burgundy, while the nose delivered lovely complex red fruits, spice, pepper, espresso and light smoke with an enticing mix of sweet fruit and savoury characters.

The palate was quite haunting with lovely refreshing acidity, tannins that certainly made themselves known but were not aggressive, making the texture quite supple. The flavours were deep red fruit, plums especially, with dried fruit, earthy, coffee bean, tomato stem, savoury spicy characters and a lovely gamey, leathery development. It really is a lovely wine, more perfumed, more supple than we normally think of Nebbiolo. I could not help feeling that this would be great with Christmas dinner – 93/100 points.

The cellar at Tenute Sella – photo courtesy of Tenute Sella.

A beguiling and complex food wine, if you like Barolo, Northern Rhône wines or Burgundy then you will love this. As well as turkey and goose, this would be wonderful with beef dishes and an array of cheeses.

Available in the UK for between £17 and  £23 per bottle from Vinissimus and Tannico.co.uk.

If you want even more of a bit of a treat for Christmas, then Vintage Wine & Port have a few bottles of the 2000 vintage Tenute Sella Lessona for £39.00 per bottle.

 

Wine of the Week – Mature Villa Maria Chardonnay from my Cellar

The beautiful Wairau River in Marlborough, New Zealand.

Recently I had a wonderful wine experience. I was working at the Decanter Fine Wine Experience and Sir George Fistonich was there. Now George, if you do not know is one of the great figures in the world of wine.

Sir George Fistonich, the founder, owner and driving force behind Villa Maria. I took this photograph at the Esk Valley winery in Hawke’s Bay, which is also part of the group.

He founded Villa Maria, the famous New Zealand wine producer, in 1961 and owns it to this day. His achievements are amazing and from humble beginnings Villa Maria is now the largest privately owned winery in New Zealand, indeed it is the largest New Zealand owned winery in the country.

I have been involved with Villa Maria either directly or indirectly since 1987 and the wines are never less than good and frequently very good indeed. As a whole the range is very impressive and it is easy to see why it one of Drinks International’s Most Admired Wine Brands in the world. In addition George also owns the Vidal, Esk Valley and Te Awa estates in Hawke’s Bay as well as the Thornbury range, whose Central Otago Pinot Noir is one of New Zealand’s best value wines.

What I especially admire about Villa Maria is that they make wines that people really love and that have huge recognition among consumers, but are still keen to innovate and try new styles of wine and new ways of working. George led the charge on the move to screw cap seals for instance. That seems a long time ago now, but it was only 2004 in fact. Among much else they have also experimented, very successfully, with Albariño, Orange Wine and a new wine called Ngakirikiri, a super premium release is a Cabernet Sauvignon dominated blend from the Gimblett Gravels growing area in Hawkes Bay and it is a magnificent wine.

I was chatting away to George and commented that I had found an old bottle of Villa Maria wine in my cellar and asked if he was around the next day to try it with me. Well he was and so I brought the bottle in on the tube.

It was my last bottle of 1994 Villa Maria Reserve Chardonnay from Marlborough. I hadn’t kept it deliberately, but it was left over from a tasting about 20 years ago and I simply never got around to doing anything with it. The level looked pretty good, but the colour slightly worried me. It looked quite dark, although it was hard to tell through the green bottle.

Opening an old bottle of wine is always nerve wracking. How old is too old? I was certainly nervous about this one. Would it be oxidised and just too far gone to drink. Frankly at 23 years old it could well have been.

George in his early days – photo courtesy of Hatch Mansfield Agencies.

I opened it very slowly and very carefully, but even so the bottom quarter of the cork broke off and I couldn’t retrieve it, so it was rather un-stylishly bobbing about in the wine. However the rest of the cork was nice and damp and smelled clean, which made me more optimistic that all would be well.

I poured some into George’s glass before mine and together we inspected the colour and then sniffed the wine before taking a sip. First I felt a sense of relief that it was still alive after all this time, then a sense of joy that it was actually still quite fresh and bright, then feeling of exuberance because it was actually rather fabulous.

 

 

Wairau Valley vines

Map of New Zealand’s wine regions – click for a larger view – non watermarked PDF versions are available by agreement.

1994 Villa Maria Reserve Chardonnay
Villa Maria Estate
Marlborough – the label rather elegantly states “Marlborough Region”
New Zealand

One great thing about this bottle is that the back label is wonderfully detailed, unlike the current labels. So, I actually know a great deal about how this wine was made. It is a blend of 70% Waldron Vineyard and 30% Fletcher Vineyard fruit. The two vineyards are very close to each other in the Rapaura district of the Wairau Plains, the ‘Golden Triangle’. Waldron is a warm, stony site that produces full flavoured, richly concentrated fruit that makes for vividly fruity wines. Fletcher, farmed by Colin, Chris and Michelle Fletcher, is on especially low vigour stony soils.

According to the fabulously informative back label just 17% of the wine went through malolactic fermentation, which made sense once I tasted it and noticed the high acidity. The wine was aged for just 5 months in oak barriques (225 litre barrels).

The colour was a beautiful bright yellow, light toffee, slightly orange and peach skin sort of colour. The nose was good, yes there was a slight touch of oxidation, but also real honeyed richness of peach and pineapple with something fresh, stony and mineral together with a light touch of caramel and butterscotch.

The real surprise though came with the palate. It was overwhelmingly fresh with lively acidity making it seem positively youthful and playful. Those flourishes of richness, pineapple and caramel mainly were in the background with something nutty and spicy from the oak, while the stony fresh acidity was to the fore making the wine seem pure and mineral.

23 years in bottle had not dimmed the wine in any way. I remember it as being a very good wine at the time, but now, all those years later, it has developed into something that brought all the different strands of Chardonnay together perfectly – ripe fruit richness, judicial use of oak, cleansing acidity and minerality. It had become a great wine and tasting it was a wonderful experience.

Wairau Valley vines.

So you see, Chardonnay is a great grape variety – indeed personally I think that New Zealand should enjoy a higher reputation for its Chardonnays than its Sauvignon Blancs – and Villa Maria makes wines that age brilliantly – even for a long time in the less than perfect conditions of my “cellar” – into something complex and extraordinary.

There are many things to enjoy about wine, the freshness, the fruit, the direct pleasure are all important, but sometimes the complexity of an aged wine is more beguiling and fascinating, while the shared pleasure of a rare wine can be a truly memorable experience.

 

Colli Berici – an exciting wine region in northern Italy

 

Colli Berici vines at the Pegoraro Estate.

I have recently returned from a trip to the Colli Berici and I was very impressed by what I experienced. It is a place that I had heard of, but had seldom tasted the wines that it produced, so I had almost no idea what to expect from the wines. This is especially so as the region seems to produce pretty much every style of wine there is.

Beautiful vineyards in the Colli Berici.

Located between Vicenza and Padua the Colli Berici are a series of limestone hills with red clay and volcanic, basalt soils. This variety together with the subtle differences in weather patterns – it tends to be pretty dry in the hills, but can vary – allows them to grow an impressive array of grape varieties in this tiny region. As you might expect, the best vineyard sites are on the south facing slopes of these hills and it it is the drier and warmer conditions there that make the Colli Berici such a good red wine region.

Wine map of northern Italy. The Colli Berici is in Veneto between Venice and Verona.

They grow a huge range of black grapes here, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Carmenère, Merlot, Pinot Nero and Tai Rosso, the new(ish) name for a grape long believed by the locals to be indigenous, but now known to be Grenache!

The region also makes a wide array of white wines from many different grapes too, Chardonnay, Garganega, Manzoni Bianco, Pinot Bianco, Pinot Grigio, Sauvignon and Tai, the new(ish) name for Tocai in Veneto.

Dal Maso

The first winery that I visited here was real revelation. Dal Maso was founded in 1919 and is now run by Nicola, Silvia and Anna Dal Maso, the 4th generation to run the winery and make wine there. The family originally started making wine in the the Montebello area in the tiny neighbouring DOC / PDO of Gambellara, which is solely for white wine made from Garganega grapes – of Soave fame. Dal Maso still make wine there and I came to like the wines very much. They were surprisingly mineral and came across as really quite Chablis-like.

Like most of the producers around here, they also make some very attractive sparkling wine from the Durella grape that grows just to the north in the Monti Lessini area. This is usually made by the tank – or Charmat – method and to my mind generally has more focus than the ever popular Prosecco.

The beautiful winery at Dal Maso, photo courtesy of the winery.

Nowadays they have a beautifully appointed modern winery and tasting room built into a hillside and surrounded by vineyards. It was a fabulous place to get to grips with this region which was almost entirely new to me.

All the wines that I tasted at Dal Masso were very good quality, but the standout wines for me were these:

2016 Montemitorio Tai Rosso
DOC Colli Berici
Azienda Vinicola Dal Maso

100% Tai Rosso, the local name for Grenache of all things, from their own estate vineyards, de-stemmed and macerated on the skins for 7 days, fermented in stainless steel with regular punchdowns of the skins to keep the juice and skins in contact to help extraction of flavour and colour. The finished wine is aged for 12 months in cement and stainless steel tanks before blending.

The colour is a rich and enticing bright ruby.

The nose offers lovely fresh minty, floral, wild raspberry, plums and – strangely as there is no oak – some mocha notes.

The palate has lovely sweet rich red fruit, soft spices and bright, refreshing acidity making it really really juicy and vibrant. A lovely wine that seems bright and direct, but has plenty of sophistication and elegance too should you chose to think about it. Or you could just enjoy it’s many charms – 88/100 points.

This is a very food friendly wine and would be great with all sorts of food, but lamb would work especially well.

2015 Colpizzarda Tai Rosso
DOC Colli Berici
Azienda Vinicola Dal Maso

A selection of the best Tai Rosso fruit from the Colpizzarda estate. De-stemmed and macerated on the skins for 10 days, fermented in stainless steel with regular punchdowns of the skins to keep the juice and skins in contact to help extraction of flavour and colour. The finished wine is aged for 14 months in oak barrels.

The colour here shows both the quality and the oak ageing as it is an intense earthy ruby.

Great nose, pure and earthy with some vanilla and cream notes as well rich red fruit, a dusting of spice and coffee and cocoa notes.

The palate is very supple and gives a beautiful balance of richness and freshness with lovely acidity. Rich red fruit, together with some darker notes, attractive, integrated oak characters and a beautiful silky texture. This is elegant and very fine with good balance of freshness and richness great finesse – 92/100 points.

 

Tenuta Cicogna, Cavazza Estate

The setting for dinner at Cavazza’s Tenuta Cicogna.

Cavazza’s Tenuta Cicogna.

This is another family run estate that started out in the Gambellara region in 1928. They continue to make their white wines from Garganega grapes grown in the volcanic soils there, but in the 1980s they spread their wings and bought the beautiful Cicogna (stork) Estate in the Colli Berici where they farm their Cabernet Sauvignon, Tai Rosso and Carmenère grapes for their red wines.

Cavazza’s Tenuta Cicogna, note the red soils.

The estate has a beautiful house and cellar on it and sitting out surrounded by the vines on the Cicogna estate enjoying a tasting and then superb dinner was a wonderful experience and a perfect way to immerse oneself in the landscape.

Once again I was very impressed by the wines, but will just focus on the standouts:

2016 Bocara
DOC Gambellara Classico
Azienda Agricola Cavazza

Gambellara is a tiny DOC sandwiched between the Colli Berici and Soave. It only produces white wines and they are made from the Garganega grape that is used for Soave. Part of Soave is on volcanic soil and so is Gambellara. I have to be honest I had never had a Gambellara before this trip, but was very impressed by the wines.

This is grown on the original Bocara vineyard that the family bought back in 1928. It is regarded as one of their finest white wines, so is a top selection of fruit from the 40 year old vines in the vineyard. Bocara faces southwest and is a gentle slope at about 150 metres above sea level. The soil is volcanic with some layers of tuff / tuff, which is volcanic ash.

The grapes are fermented in stainless steel at 16˚ C and the finished wine is aged on the lees for 3 months. 

The nose is very giving and generous, with mineral notes – stony, steely, ash as well – orange blossom, camomile, almonds and a lovely lees, gently creamy quality too. The palate has a lovely combination of softness – creamy and fruity (apricot, nectarine, green plum) – with taut acidity and a slightly salty mineral core. A really beautiful wine that screams class. This would be wonderful with all manner of lighter dishes, but is also perfect with a selection of softer cheeses – 92/100 points.

I had recently come to the conclusion that Verdicchio might be Italy’s finest white grape, but this is right up there, so perhaps Verdicchio and Garganega are the jointly best white grapes of Italy? But then of course there is Fiano?

2013 Cabernet Cicogna
DOC Colli Berici
Azienda Agricola Cavazza

Cabernet Sauvignon has been grown in the Veneto for around 200 years. It is thought to have been introduced at the time of French rule during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. This is a selection of the best Cabernet fruit from the Cicogna estate, handpicked and carefully sorted. The wine is aged for 12 months in French oak barrels.

This is very concentrated with an opaque purple colour. The nose is aromatic, lifted and fragrant with bright fruit, rich cassis aromas, leafy, mental, herbal notes, cedar and a touch of pencil shavings.

The palate is concentrated, supple and soft, smooth, with wonderful rich blackcurrant and bramble fruit and smooth tannins. There is a delicate mocha character and a lovely paprika spice quality to it.

This is a deliciously vibrant Cabernet – 92/100 points.

It seems a little counter intuitive to drink Cabernet Sauvignon from Italy, but this wine could well win us all round. If you like Claret you would enjoy this, but the brightness also makes it a good alternative to New World Cabernets too.

Cantine dei Colli Berici

Some of the cooperative’s beautiful vineyards.

Cantine dei Colli Berici, winemaking on a huge scale.

Destemming at Cantine dei Colli Berici.

This impressive cooperative is part of the Collis group that also runs cooperative wineries in the Soave, Valpolicella and Prosecco areas as well as the less well known Arcole and Merlara areas, so 5 wineries in total.  It is always rewarding to visit a large cooperative as it is always far too easy to think of a wine region as just the sum of the boutique producers. Actually very often in Europe the wines people will actually drink from a place on a day to day basis are the cooperative wines and so they often constitute the engine for the region. This was a case in point. They operate on a huge scale, producing over 130 million bottles of wine – although most of it is sold without being bottled – and yet it produced some pretty decent wines, even at very cheap price points, less than a Euro a litre.

Andrea Palladio

The region is justly proud of the architect Andrea Palladio who was born in Padua, part of the Venetian Republic, in 1508 and have spent his entire career in the Vicenza / Treviso region. He created amazingly modern buildings that became the blueprint for grand houses for more than 200 years. His name and style is celebrated in the word Palladian used to describe buildings, like the White House, that were built according to his ideas.

Today the City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto is a World Heritage site that protects the Palladian villas in the region.

Villa Almerico Capra, “La Rotonda” in the Colli Berici just south of Vicenza.

Inama

Marco Inama showing me his new as yet unplanted vineyard, see the red soils.

The Oratorio di San Lorenzo in San Germano dei Berici is right next to Inama’s Carmenère vineyards and a picture of this church adorns the label of their superb Oratorio di San Lorenzo Carmenère Reserve.

Inama’s Carmenère vineyard next to the Oratorio di San Lorenzo.

Inama is really the only well known winery from this region, as far as the UK is concerned anyway. That reputation though is historically for their white wines from Soave, indeed they are a very fine Soave producer indeed. Azienda Agricola Inama was founded by Giuseppe Inama in 1965 and after great success with their white wines they began producing red wines in the Colli Berici made from Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Carmenère in 1997.

My first ever experience of tasting a wine from this area was Inama’s 2006 Carmenère Più, although in those days the wine was simply labelled as an IGT Veneto Rosso as Carmenère was not a permitted grape in the Colli Berici DOC until 2009. In fact the history of the grape is fascinating. Until phylloxera struck in the middle of the nineteenth century, Carmeère was a major Bordeaux grape, but afterwards it was not replanted in a serious way as it is such a late ripening grape. Luckily for us cuttings were taken to Chile, where it was wrongly identified as Merlot, and northern Italy. Here it was widely grown in the Veneto and Friuli, but was originally locally known as “Old Cabernet” and then in 1961 was incorrectly officially identified as Cabernet Franc. It remained Cabernet Franc until it was outed in the 1990s and officially became a permitted grape, indeed one of the speciality grapes, in 2009. It seems that Carmenère is hard to identify.

As expected, I was impressed by all the wines at Inama. We started with their straight Soave and then moved on to taste their entire range of red wines, Carmenère Più, Campo del Lago Merlot, Bradisismo and two vintages of their Oratorio di San Lorenzo Carmenère, which were the stand out wines for me were:

2013 Oratorio di San Lorenzo Carmenère Riserva
DOC Colli Berici Riserva
Azienda Agricola Inama

This wine is made from a selection of the best fruit from the vineyard in the photo above. It faces due south and acts as a sun trap, which must go some way to explaining why Carmenère  can thrive here. The grape alsmot fell out of use in Bordeaux because it takes so long to ripen. Even in Chile, where it has found a new home, it is hard to get right as it is the last grape to ripen even in the Chilean sun.

The grapes were left to dry a little on the vine, to increase concentration, before being handpicked and fermented in stainless steel tanks and then aged in French oak barrels for 18 months, 50% new and 50% second use.

The colour is most attractive with a rich plum colour and a little earthy garnet look from the ageing.

The nose is very satisfying too, quite lifted blueberry, cedar, pepper and mocha notes while the palate is concentrated, smooth and silky with soft, rich fruit, slightly spicy and a savoury, earthy richness. There is also a lovely balancing freshness that makes the winery drinkable indeed and pulls all the parts together. A beautiful wine that carries its 15.5 very well indeed  – 92/100 points.

2007 Oratorio di San Lorenzo Carmenère Riserva
IGT Veneto Rosso – before 2009 Carmenère was not allowed in the DOC, so the wine could only labelled as an IGT
Azienda Agricola Inama

This older vintage was more bricky as you would expect and the nose had that meaty mature aroma together with more obvious pepper and vanilla.

The palate was wondrously silky with smooth tannins and that sweet dried fruit character just beginning to emerge. It was very stylish and still had lots of freshness and even some bright dark fruit – 91/100 points.

 

 

 

Pegoraro Estate

The Pegoraro Estate in Massano.

Arriving at the beautiful Pegoraro Estate.

The stunning terrace at the Pegoraro Estate, those lucky nuns.

This was a magical visit. They were all great, but this had something special. For a start we walked there along a wonderful trail in the commune of Massano, that crisscrosses a beautiful stream that powers 12 ancient water mills. Then when we arrived the winery was housed in a medieval nun’s rest home that dates from 1200 and it was the most astonishingly beautiful location and building. What’s more the wines were seriously good and the lunch was superb.

The Pegoraro family have been here since 1927 and they seem very proud of their land and the wines they create. Today Enrico runs the winery while his brother Alessandro is the winemaker. They are both very assured and passionate about what they do, although their father Pasquale is still around to give advice if needed. I really enjoyed the wines here. They were honest wines, immensely drinkable and not showy at all and I respect that. I greatly enjoyed their Tai (Tocai in the old days), their Cabernet (this blend of Cabernets Sauvignon and Franc was served lightly chilled), but the wines that impressed me most were these:

2013 Pegoraro Tai Rosso Spumante
DOC Colli Berici Spumante
Pegoraro Societa Agricola Semplice

A traditional method sparkling wine made from Tai Rosso / Grenache. I had just tasted their Charmat (tank method) rosé sparkler also made from Tai Rosso grapes and it was very nice, but this was rather finer and more sophisticated. They claim to be the only winery to make this style and I certainly did not come across any others.

It is a pale rosé with zero dosage and aged for 36/40 months on the lees before disgorging.

The blood orange colour was most enticing, as was the nose of dried orange, apple strudel and cinder toffee.

The palate was delicious with dried orange flavours giving freshness and acidity, butterscotch giving the richness together with some bright red fruit showing the grape variety and then a lovely yeasty quality like a fresh panatone. The finish was very long and it had a mousse that was persistent and firm, with awn almost brittle feel – a dear friend of mine once rather wonderfully described a mousse on a Champagne as “brittle” and I have finally worked out what she meant. This is a terrific wine that makes a very classy aperitif or would go with any lighter dishes and I really regret not buying a bottle – 92/100 points.

2016 Pegoraro Tai Rosso
DOC Colli Berici
Pegoraro Societa Agricola Semplice

100% Tai Rosso fermented and aged in stainless steel tanks to preserve the freshness.

The colour was an attractive pale red, almost a rich rosé, but they were adamant that it was not a rosé, but a traditional style of red to the region. The nose balanced bright cherry and strawberry with a touch of spice and savoury, earthy notes and rose hips.

The palate gave bright cherry, strawberry and raspberry fruit flavours together with some spice, gentle tannins, lively cherry acidity and a nice touch of spice. A lovely, honest wine that goes beautifully as with just about anything and can be served chilled too – 89/100 points.

Piovene Porto Godi Estate

 

The family house at Piovene Porto Godi.

The ancient and atmospheric cellars at Piovene Porto Godi.

Yet another extraordinary experience. This estate has been owned by the Piovene Porto Godi family since 1500 and is exactly how you imagine a wealthy farm to have been in the past. The house and winery is walled all the way round like a small fortress and apart from the 220 hectares of land it also consists of landscaped gardens, a mansion and an extensive collection of outhouses, cellars and stables where the winemaking goes on. As well as grapes the estate grows cereal crops and olives too. Although the estate has made wine for centuries, it is the current generation who have become really ambitious for the place and produce bottled, rather than bulk, wine to a very high standard. To achieve this they have in recent years replanted much of the vineyard and revamped the winery too.

We were treated to a comprehensive tasting and these were my my stand out wines:

2016 Garganega Vigneto Riveselle
DOC Colli Berici
Societa Agricola Piovene Porto Godi Alessandro

I think this was the only Garganega that I tasted from the Colli Berici and it was fabulous. It is a limited production wine from the best fruit of a single vineyard – Riveselle – that is south facing on chalky soils at 70 metres above sea level. It was fermented in stainless steel and although I have not been told that it was aged on the less, I am sure that it was.

The nose pleased me straight away. It was peppery like olive oil and rocket / arugula. There was also something almond-like with some smoky notes (lees ageing?), something herbal and lemon rind too. I found the nose rather additive actually.

The peppery and herbal qualities come back on the palate too together with the camomile flavour that I associate with the grape variety. It was also gently creamy and lightly smoky with some dashes of orange and nectarine. It was juicy with a long finish, cleansing acidity and that peppery note all the way through.

A super wine that I kept coming back to and would enjoy with a cold buffet or a selection of soft cheeses – 92/100 points.

2015 Campigie Sauvignon
IGT Veneto
Societa Agricola Piovene Porto Godi Alessandro

This is a style that I enjoy greatly, but sadly most Brits do not – oaky Sauvignon.

The fruit is from the Campigie vineyard which is south facing with a chalky clay soil. The grapes are late harvested to concentrate the sugars and flavour and they are fermented in a mixture of stainless steel and oak barrels. The wines is also aged for 8 months in barrel.

The nose is a mixture of fat and restraint. The oaky richness is obvious but not dominating with as light, attractive resiny character.

The palate is round and smoky, but again not too oaky. The grape’s natural freshness, stony quality and blackcurrant flavours really come out together with something tropical like pineapple and a touch of creaminess.

The finish is very long and satisfying. I would love this with a tuna or swordfish steak – 91 /100 points.

2013 Thovara Tai Rosso
DOC Colli Berici
Societa Agricola Piovene Porto Godi Alessandro

A single vineyard Tai Rosso that is one of the top wines of the estate. Again the vineyard is south facing on chalky soils. The grapes were fermented in stainless steel and the wine was aged for 15 months in French oak tonneaux – each one contains 900 litres, the equivalent of 4 barriques or barrels. This larger oak vessel means the oak flavour is less overt, but oxygen still gets into the wine through the wood to soften it.

The nose was smokier, deeper and full of darker fruits than I normally expect from Grenache. There were touches of leather and coffee too.

The palate was joyfully supple with rich raspberry, plum and liquorice characters all viewing for attention together with light touches of mocha and exotic tagine spices. A fascinating wine that has a delicacy and freshness competing with rich fruit and 14% alcohol. I liked this wine a lot and found it very food friendly and drinkable, yet there was good complexity and tension – 92/100 points.

 

Colli Berici

For me it is always a joy tasting wines from new regions and it pains me every time I see consumers in supermarkets buying from such a narrow range of wines. I have thought about this a lot and it is a terrible thing that so many British people who drink wine have absolutely no idea what variety and excitement is out there if they just opened their minds and stopped drinking the same old thing. There is so much more to life than Pinot Grigio, Sauvignon Blanc, Rioja and Shiraz.

In fact it seems that the wine world is just full of exciting places where talented and passionate people are working hard to make wines that might just be your new favourite – if you ever get to taste them. I was thrilled by the wines that I found in the Colli Berici – and in neighbouring Gamberella – and wish they were better represented on the shelves of wine shops and supermarkets in the UK.