Right, I was wanting not to like this one. It would have been fashionably to dismiss it, rather like a teenager back-handing Sir Paul McCartney for getting top of the charts and trumping Dizee, squashing N-Dubz and sliding past Lady Gaga. Before you start googling the radio one chart show, Sir Pauls not there, this is metaphorical. The point I want to make is that what’s cutting-edge one day, with hits like Yesterday and Hey Jude, can become predictable the next. Maybe that's what hit Super Tuscans like Sassicaia and Tignanello. Over the years more and more producers began selling so-called Super-Tuscans that owed less to a winemaker’s vision than a good marketing scheme. Packaging and a fantasy name (preferably one ending in "-aia") became much more important than the actual wine.
Sassicaia is a super Tuscan, with the Antinori Familia backing, established by Mario Incisa della Rochetta and creating wines in the image of fine Bordeaux. In the late 1990s Sassicaia was granted its own DOC (Bolgheri), the only wine from a single estate in Italy to enjoy this privilege. Before that, and in similarity to other wines made outside the traditional DOC/DOCG regulations, Sassicaia was classified as an Indicazione geografica tipica (IGT).
The wine came out the bottle with a little reductive funkiness, this blew off after a few minutes of swirling in the glass. On the palette this wine is full bodied with well built tannins that would give this wine a good long life. There was a lovely creamy note, that combined with blackcurrant and briar splashed around with red spice made this wine lovely to roll around the mouth. Expense and class came through with a great length of taste evolution on the palette. This is a no holds spared, expensive wine. The barrels are only the best, new oak, attentive viticulture with low concentrated yields and a wine maker who really knows what he's doing.
Feeling bad about drinking such a young wine early I decided to shove the cork back in, tear myself away from the bottle and try it two days later. Leaving a wine one glass down will give you a rough idea of how a wine will mature as it oxidises and ages. When opening it for the second time, the funkiness had gone, the lumpy awkward Cabernet character had disseminated, integrating well. The body and texture had developed into silk. The wine had grown up and matured, shedding that slightly gawky image and really transforming into something beautiful.
So how goods Sir Paul McCartney? Well check out the first paragraph on Wikipedia, nuff said!
Hi,
It was actually in 1994 it was granted its own DOC. I love this wine and also the more affordable Guidalberto. The 1995 I tasted from the barrel. It was amazing. I did not expect it to be so elegant at that point.
Posted by: Ruso | 05/12/2009 at 10:04 AM