About Brunello 2004
Below are Sergio's thoughts on the 2004 Brunello Vintage, as excerpted from a recent e-Letter:
I understand why there’s a feverish
buzz about the ’04 Brunellos. 2004 is a
highly touted vintage for Italian wines in
general, those from Piemonte in specific,
and Brunellos to be exact. These wines have
already received a lot of acclaim from many
wine people. This type of industry chatter
inevitably leads to a wide offering of a
region’s noted wines; it’s a kind
of buckshot approach that hopes to hit the
real standouts in the field before the
vintage or the individual wines receive
their ratings from magazines, critics and
other experts. Simply put, when the
scores come out, the sales of five highest
rated wines will go up, and a broadly
inclusive offering can seem to offer a
higher chance of hitting the wines that will
get higher ratings.
My approach to really stellar vintages is a
bit different. I like to offer a tight
selection of the wine in question, which this
week is Brunellos. Though scoring can be
very beneficial to wine lovers in regions
like Bordeaux and Napa, I’m not
convinced that it works so well in Italy.
There’s just too much diversity in
producers, and there’s just too much
gleeful idiosyncrasy in the wines
themselves. That’s why I pick just a
few to highlight and to sell to my clients,
a group of people who understand the benefits
of careful selection.
In addition to offering a tight selection
of really good ’04 Brunellos, one of
the first in a series that we’ll be
rolling out in the next few weeks, I’d
like to offer an anecdote from my memoir,
Passion on the Vine, that illustrates why I
don’t have a whole lot of faith in wine
scoring, and why I like to judge by simply
tasting the wines. I trust you’ll enjoy
both the anecdote and the Brunellos, the
latter undoubtedly more than the former.
Several days
after my time in Barolo, I headed toward
Montalcino, in
Tuscany. It occurred to me that the last
time I had made this dreary drive to
Montalcino, I’d been in the company of
the fervent, possibly nuts, modernist Luca
Maroni. For me, Maroni has always conjured up
images of poultry. Tall and bony, he
resembles a fresh-plucked chicken, and his
bald head looks a lot like an egg with a
goatee. He wears fantastically elegant
clothes, heavy on the silk and cashmere, and
has an impressive command of the Italian
language—so lyrical is his spoken
prose, in fact, that I have, many times,
surrendered in an argument only because I
could not
match his poetry.
Maroni suffered from astinenza due to
alcohol from his adolescence until 1984. Of
course, all Italians have something
perpetually wrong with them—some suffer
from chronic headaches, others from car
sickness; many are allergic to chocolate,
some can’t be within twenty yards of a
glass of milk. Thousands can’t eat
flour and, at any given second in the day, at
least twenty thousand Italians worldwide are
saying, “I think I have a fever.”
And another two hundred thousand are saying,
“I think you have a fever.” For
their problems, they usually need rest, some
powdered medicine, an injection, or their
mothers. One day, I asked how it was
possible that every day, after working for
three hours, my apparently robust Italian
friend had either sear back pain, a stomach
problem, or something weird happening to a
place on his arm. “You don’t
understand your own people,” he said.
“I just want a little attention.”
The point is, astinenza is a widespread
condition in Italy, and its sufferers
don’t drink wine because they
don’t like wine. Or maybe, as another
friend said, they “feel very hot and
get pimples.”
Read more about Brunello.
Spotlight on Montalcino
|
|
|
|
