5/30/2023 0 Comments Masseto wine![]() Fresh herbs, fennel, garrigue, chocolate cherries very complex, coming around beautifully. Palate getting silky, and tannins smoothing out opulent, with a lively, almost bouncy texture. Concentrated, driven, powerful-like an SUV on a grouse moor. | 92īalsamic flavors, good acidity, with herbs and garrigue coming through. Food would absorb the tannins and release the aromas. Good freshness, powerful tannins definitely a Mediterranean wine. Silky cocoa and black cherries-spiced bottled cherries to be accurate-and black chocolate, dense. Flower aromas: roses around a solid door. | 90Ī rounder, more comfortable affair: leather notes, plums, all lush and opulent, with coffee and spice-cupboard notes tension, too, and a very concentrated center. There’s a slightly dry edge to the tannins. Finish is long, fresh, coffee-tinged, and grippy. Cinnamon, cardamom, plums, high acidity and tannins with a pronounced edge. Supple spice on the nose and a grippy edge to the palate. Very silky tannins and plenty of them, but they’re well tucked in. | 89įine-grained nose, and a taut, tight palate, fine and approachable. More marked by warmth there’s a certain chunkiness at the heart, under the elegance. It’s floral, with notes of roses, supple and silky, with herbs, a hint of strawberry to come good acidity backed by some chewy tannin. It’s a mini-me, sold at 35–37% of the price of Masseto, and containing 10–15% of Cabernet Franc. This is the estate’s second wine, of which the first vintage was 2017. Though I would hate to think that somebody could pinpoint when the new winery appeared.” “The new winery helps here, and I’m clear that if you can build a winery after you have experience of the wine, you have a clearer idea of what you want. That means less extraction, though not necessarily less maceration. “You have to be brave enough to get big rich fruit,” says Heinz, “but you have to stop in time to prevent it being overpowering and rustic.” Winemaking is about doing just enough to get optimum texture without rusticity. Now picking dates are more refined: “You normally have time to think about picking dates here, which is remarkable with Merlot, because it doesn’t normally give you much time.” The wine was a little chunkier before, a little less expressive. It was 2007 when he began to change the wine’s direction, point by point. Masseto is of course firmly in the luxury-goods bracket, and one of my favorite quotes of all time is from a Napa grower who told me many years ago that “you don’t mess with luxury goods.” Heinz has been messing with Masseto, but in the most delicate of ways he arrived in 2005 to make Masseto and Ornellaia, and his changes have been aimed at greater precision and less intervention. “Masseto is a good way of learning to handle wild ferments,” he says. He likes wild ferments, clearly he just doesn’t want chaos. These wines sell themselves.His position is that winemaking is not accidental, and his job is to guide the process. The estate is said to be “California style” which winemaker Axel Heinz (former winemaker at Château La Dominique” attributes to the original proprietor Marchese Lodovico Antinori’s frequent trips to the new wine world. Consulting winemaker and stranger to none, Michel Rolland, has his hand in as well on the oenology side. The film Mondovino illustrates all of this. The winery has changed hands, and those hands include Mondavi, Constellation and Frescobaldi. You can consider the Cab heavy Ornellaia as an alternative to Sassicaia or Solaia, and the Merlot based Masseto as a competitor to Château Petrus. ![]() ![]() The Super Tuscans produced include Ornellaia, with second wines Le Serre Nuove, Le Votle and Masseto (Merlot).Įstablished by the celebrated Antinori family, who also own Sassicaia and Solaia, there is a friendly competition going on between the members. The varietals planted are Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Sauvignon Blanc, Viogner and Petit Maseng. With 240 acres planted on the Tuscan Coast, Tenuta dell’Ornellaia is an iconic Italian label producing world class, Bordeaux style wines. He pointed at a bottle of Ornellaia and said to me, with great emphasis, “pay attention, this wine does NOT suck”. We were discussing wines that he loved because they moved so quickly, and wines that didn’t (he called those wines that “suck”). I remember walking the isles of a wine shop in Los Angeles with a friend who works for a major distributer. The pure Merlot from the wine estate of Tenuta dell’Ornellaia attracts the most attention from wine collectors all over the world, and it consistently fetches some of the highest prices in global wine auctions" " Masseto is the most collectible wine of Tuscany. ![]()
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