Light glowing ruby with an abrupt edge. The kind of musky, peaty, soil-driven nose terroirists rave about and the rest of us just calmly like. Sharp and brittle, a definite wet gravel petrichor mixed with savory funk–enough barnyard and dirty cola to make your hair stand up, but in such a delicately concentrated package. Ridiculous blueberry and black cherry squirm about in the bright mud, fresh-cut Swiss-chard stem and bruised spinach filling the background.
A most gorgeous wine I picked at a line-up of Maritime Imports the other day and I *promised* myself I would keep my hands off them for a while but it wouldn’t work and besides, I wouldn’t be able to tell you about it until it possibly might be too late. Keep in mind this 2015 is a new bottling AND release at 3 years in barrel per Nobile Riserva rules, and this is July 2019, so do the math on that. This is an absolute BABY, and I never quote prices, but it is a STEAL–quite certain the least I have EVER paid for a Nobile di Montepulciano Riserva.
More chalky graininess translates onto the tongue, the infantile age glaring at you while you smack and relish all the joyful fruit and cheerful acid. A big, smoky theme of ripe delicious fruit clamors along in the background–impossible to shake, ruling out all barnyard mouthfeel–keeping a peppery grip on everything, not letting any one ism of the wine get unruly and require discipline. Blistering tannins eventually overtake the fruit, creating a long, wide landing strip for that wooden match.
Ya know how you see a 3 or 4 year old wine with a lot of Italian mumbo-jumbo on it and you create this mental picture of a reduced, slightly oxidized, maybe even ripasso’d, old-world funky beast riddled with cellar floor and old wood? Lose all those ideas with this wine. This is bright, fresh beautiful stuff. Sure, it has a BUNCH of shit going on in it that hearkens back to the old country and why we love Euro wines, but it is also New-World clean. An stellar meeting of the two. Buy a case (yes you can afford it) and drink one a year.
2015 CARPINETO Sangiovese (70%) Vino Nobile di Montepulciano DOCG Tuscany Italy 13.5
