Peter Creasey
Peter Creasey
Levi, yours is one of the better online postings in recent times.
Thanks!
. . . . Pete
CWD: 2001 Sella Lessona San Sebastiano Allo Zoppo
- Thread starter MLipton
- Start date
Levi, yours is one of the better online postings in recent times.
Thanks!
. . . . Pete
Levi Dalton
Levi Dalton
Thanks, Pete.
I put together a tasting with a group of folks not too long ago and we went through the following accompanied by a wonderful Piedmontese beef stew that Steph made.
In general, the wines showed really well with no one wine being close to a majority favorite. The upshot of all of this is that I would be happy to drink almost any of these and ecstatic to drink some.
Boniperti Colline Novaresi Vespolina Favolalunga 2015
Boniperti Colline Novaresi Nebbiolo Carlin 2015
Boniperti Fara Barton 2013
Very good wines offering excellent value. The Vespolina was very quaffable in a Beaujolais type way and the Fara was tangy nebbiolo.
Ioppa Colline Novaresi Vespolina 2015
Ioppa Colline Novaresi Nebbiolo 2015
I found these disappointing, but others liked them more.
Massimo Clerico Costa de la Seisa Spanna 2012
Matteo Correggia Roero La Val dei Preti 2013
The Correggia I hadn't had in years. I gather they still may see some wood, but I found a lot to like in this wine. The M. Clerico was fully mature and good drinking.
Davide Carlone Colline Novaresi Croatina 2016
Davide Carlone Boca 2013
I liked these a lot and bought both for the house. Croatina has a Mondeuse like blockiness and rustic charm.
Cantina Castaldi Francesca Fara 2012
Tenute Sella Lessona 2011
These two were the most resolved seeming of the night, particularly the Sella. It was resolved and generous. The Fara was a new producer to me and I liked the wine quite a bit. Pretty good value.
Monsecco “Barbatasso” Vespolina Colline Novaresi 2015
Monsecco Sizzano 2013
Monsecco Gattinara 2011
All all excellent and impressive.
Platinetti Guido Ghemme Vigna Ronco Maso 2013
For me, this wine really stood out. Maybe because I had never heard of the producer and the wine was, IMO, excellent.
Le Pianelle Bramaterra 2013
Corked as was a subsequent bottle while a third bottle left me wanting. Bummer as I had high expectations for this wine. I'll check this producer on a different vintage.
Ferrando Carema Etichetta Bianca 2013
Ferrando Carema Etichetta Nera 2013
Very good, but a bit disappointing given the pedigree and nowhere near the best wines of the evening despite being the most expensive by a good margin.
In general, the wines showed really well with no one wine being close to a majority favorite. The upshot of all of this is that I would be happy to drink almost any of these and ecstatic to drink some.
Boniperti Colline Novaresi Vespolina Favolalunga 2015
Boniperti Colline Novaresi Nebbiolo Carlin 2015
Boniperti Fara Barton 2013
Very good wines offering excellent value. The Vespolina was very quaffable in a Beaujolais type way and the Fara was tangy nebbiolo.
Ioppa Colline Novaresi Vespolina 2015
Ioppa Colline Novaresi Nebbiolo 2015
I found these disappointing, but others liked them more.
Massimo Clerico Costa de la Seisa Spanna 2012
Matteo Correggia Roero La Val dei Preti 2013
The Correggia I hadn't had in years. I gather they still may see some wood, but I found a lot to like in this wine. The M. Clerico was fully mature and good drinking.
Davide Carlone Colline Novaresi Croatina 2016
Davide Carlone Boca 2013
I liked these a lot and bought both for the house. Croatina has a Mondeuse like blockiness and rustic charm.
Cantina Castaldi Francesca Fara 2012
Tenute Sella Lessona 2011
These two were the most resolved seeming of the night, particularly the Sella. It was resolved and generous. The Fara was a new producer to me and I liked the wine quite a bit. Pretty good value.
Monsecco “Barbatasso” Vespolina Colline Novaresi 2015
Monsecco Sizzano 2013
Monsecco Gattinara 2011
All all excellent and impressive.
Platinetti Guido Ghemme Vigna Ronco Maso 2013
For me, this wine really stood out. Maybe because I had never heard of the producer and the wine was, IMO, excellent.
Le Pianelle Bramaterra 2013
Corked as was a subsequent bottle while a third bottle left me wanting. Bummer as I had high expectations for this wine. I'll check this producer on a different vintage.
Ferrando Carema Etichetta Bianca 2013
Ferrando Carema Etichetta Nera 2013
Very good, but a bit disappointing given the pedigree and nowhere near the best wines of the evening despite being the most expensive by a good margin.
Glad to hear that.
I opened the 2011 Gattinara this weekend and it was so pale and fruitless on opening I thought it was corked.
A few hours later it had filled in a bit, so I could actually perceive the fruit. Of course that fruit was rocky and stony, never too giving. I found it interesting, but not sure it ever reached excellent or impressive for me.
Maybe it remained slightly corked (although I don't usually experience such evolution with corked wines).
Either way, plan to give the next bottle a (longer) decant.
Ian Fitzsimmons
Ian Fitzsimmons
I think clay, like sand, is defined by grain size, not rock type or composition. Because of its small grain size, clay may hold its water very tightly (the large aggregate surface area, combined with small inter-grain spaces, causes relatively high capillary pressure), whereas sand, because of its relatively large grain size and inter-grain spaces, holds water loosely, i.e., drains quickly - depending on the composition and slope of the soil or rock beneath it, as well as the depth of the water table.
I suppose clay releases its water to plant roots gradually, as leaves transpire in the absence of rain and root osmotic pressure increases; up until the two pressures equalize. This should give vines planted in clay some buffer against down-regulation of photosynthetic rate in dry conditions, so sugar and tissue synthesis would, in general, be interrupted less frequently than otherwise.
On the other hand, I've read here and there that fast-draining soil is a favorable condition for grape vines: is this a proposition that doesn't hold water?
Mark, be gentle.
I suppose clay releases its water to plant roots gradually, as leaves transpire in the absence of rain and root osmotic pressure increases; up until the two pressures equalize. This should give vines planted in clay some buffer against down-regulation of photosynthetic rate in dry conditions, so sugar and tissue synthesis would, in general, be interrupted less frequently than otherwise.
On the other hand, I've read here and there that fast-draining soil is a favorable condition for grape vines: is this a proposition that doesn't hold water?
Mark, be gentle.
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
I have read that, too: the last thing you want is fat, happy vines. What you want is for the vine to think it's days are numbered and so it's going to make the best possible offspring.
Christian Miller (CMM)
Christian Miller
But a sense of impending doom would imply producing lots of seeds (i.e. grapes) and less foliage. On poor soils you tend to have less of both.
Lotta lotta variables here, that make one or two-liners difficult. Poor soils have been associated with high quality. because they naturally hold down yields. It has been a widespread mantra that lower yields = higher quality; but the few controlled yield/quality experiments I have read about point in various directions. In some years lower yields equaled preference in blind tastings or "improved" measures (of brix, phenols or whatever), but in other years there was no correlation. Sometimes (usually?) it's not a linear relationship, so for example reducing yields from 7 to 5 tons an acre results in significantly improved quality, but not from 5 to 3 tons. Ditto for old vines, another way of keeping yields down; yet they will vary by year too, even if the yields remain steady.
Some vintners believe that it's about the right balance of canopy to grapes, and that poor soil or old vines can achieve this naturally, but it can be simulated through trellising or canopy management.
Getting back to clay, if it retains water in a manner that allows slow steady irrigation of the roots, maybe that improves quality or fosters a particular flavor. So can that be simulated in other soils by carefully controlled irrigation? On the other hand, no one seems to want a clay hard pan under their vineyard soil, they usually rip them in new vineyards, so there's clay and there's clay.
Just for underlying soil, we have variables of drainage, water retention, heat retention, indirect impact of any minerals or nutrients on growth and flavor, and I'm probably forgetting some. Add in clones or vine selection, rootstock selection, weather patterns, trellising, pruning and canopy management, crop thinning, picking and sorting decisions. And on top of that, how the wine is made.
So you can see how difficult it is to draw conclusions regarding just the soil. We have to settle for very general statements, or make narrow, precise statements where the other variables are controlled or less important.
I find it interesting that wine academics and connoisseurs have spent so much time pondering the impact of underlying, geological soils and so little on the microflora of the topsoil.
Ian Fitzsimmons
Ian Fitzsimmons
Well, I'm trying to reconcile this idea with Levi's statement:
"What I am saying is that clay and the great wines of the world are synonymous. Clay is dominant or a key dance partner is most of what we think of as the great wines that are sought after [...]"
Granted that Levi, as a professional and specialist, knows quite a lot more about wines than I do, in general, and Italian wines, especially, I have no interest in challenging his expertise. But calling clay and the great wines of the world synonymous is a sweeping statement. I wonder if the causal factors of great wines are multiple and combine in different ways from place to place, so that different combinations of soil, exposure, levage technique, variety, weather, and vigneron skill (add others ...) may give a variety of great wines - some from vines grown in clay, some from vines grown in other soils.
I don't feel I have enough hard info at my fingertips to venture a firm opinion, but discussion on the topic might be instructive.
Christian Miller (CMM)
Christian Miller
It's more the ratio of time than the amount, which as you say is important. Even mildly geeky wine consumers are used to hearing about limestone or volcanic soils, but how often does someone mention topsoil or microflora on a tech sheet, let alone a back label?
Venturing far outside of my own expertise, I think that we need to be clear about whether we're talking about topsoils or substrate. AFAIK, there are only four types of soil: sand, silt, clay and loam. Underneath them you'll typically have some sort of bedrock (unless, like me, you grew up in house built on bay fill). In alluvial plains and valley floors, you'll find no shortage of soil, but those steeply sloped vineyards in the Rhone and Mosel valleys are going to be largely devoid of topsoil as a result of erosion. The one soil type that I expect can remain in those vineyards is clay, which is more resistant to erosion. While I have walked a fair number of vineyards, I am sure that people like Levi, mark e and Christian have far more experience than I do and can comment with far greater authority than I.
Mark Lipton
Keith Levenberg
Keith Levenberg
Perhaps of interest. Excerpts from an interview with Claude Bourguignon.
"[C]lays have a capacity for cation exchange since they have layers with a negative charge. They retain potassium, magnesium and calcium. In other words, when the plant rots it releases what it had previously absorbed from the rock (calcium and magnesium) and these constituents will be stored in the clay for winter when the plant does not absorb nutrients followed by a release of elements by the clays when the plant starts growing in spring....
"In the Bordeaux region, for example, the clay is underneath the gravel. When Bordeaux owners tell me: 'I have a very good terroir; I have good gravel.', it makes me smile because a gravely soil holds no nourishment.... The only function of the gravel is to drain water as fast as possible so that the root reaches deeper into the subsoil, there where the good clays are found. And we have measured the internal surface area of these deep clays.... In the laboratory, we measure the surface between the layers when a colouring agent whose molecules cover the layers with a monomolecular film. Since we know the volume of colouring agent required to over all the layers of a certain quantity of clay, we can work out the internal surface of the clay which varies from 10m^2 per gram to 800m^2 per gram depending on the type of clay. With the help of this method, my associate Linda and myself, have made two interesting discoveries. No two crus in Burgundy have the same internal clay surface. In other words, if you took two crus in Burgundy that appear to have the same clay content, for example, Richebourg and Romanee Conti, a simple granulometric analysis will point out a similar soil. But the clays are in fact completely different.... So there cannot be the same kind of exchange with the plant!
"[W]e have studied these clays and we realized something altogether surprising: if one considers the great traditional terroirs, those that are recognized and confirmed by the entire world as producing great wines, all the great white wines have been planted on soils containing small internal clay surfaces and all the great red wines have been planted on soils containing large internal clay surfaces. For example, in Burgundy, the slopes of Montrachet and Meursault have soils with small internal clay surfaces and in the same region, south of Beaune, our ancestors planted red on soils with large internal clay surfaces (at Pommard). They made no mistake! If you follow the Cote de Nuits towards Dijon, with the summit at Morey-Saint-Denis, these soils have the largest internal clay surfaces in Burgundy (almost 700m^2), almost the equivalent of Petrus in the Bordeaux region.... The smallest internal surface measured in France is that of Coulee de Serrant at 52m^2/g. We have found 71 m^2/g on the Epinotte climate at Chablis. The largest surface currently measured is that of Petrus at Pomerol, followed by Bonnes Mares at Chambolle-Musigny: 671 m^2/g."
"Taking the case of Bordeaux as example; the original crus were on calcareous soil: Saint-Emilion, Fronsac or Sauternes. The Saint-Emilion plateau is composed of 'asteries' limestone. Saint-Emilion is, in fact, the wine area in Bordeaux that most resembles Burgundy. This 'asteries' limestone is very fissured and easily penetrated by roots, with brown-red soils, very comparable to the soils of Burgundy. But, underneath the 'ateries' limestone, one finds Fronsadais clays that are the geological equivalent of the clays found in the subsoils of the Medoc. The Fronsadais wines are thus very elegant. In my opinion, these wines represent the best quality/price relation in Bordeaux. The powerful red wines owe their refined, fine and subtle taste to the excellent calcareous clays, quality marls with very large internal surfaces."
"[C]lays have a capacity for cation exchange since they have layers with a negative charge. They retain potassium, magnesium and calcium. In other words, when the plant rots it releases what it had previously absorbed from the rock (calcium and magnesium) and these constituents will be stored in the clay for winter when the plant does not absorb nutrients followed by a release of elements by the clays when the plant starts growing in spring....
"In the Bordeaux region, for example, the clay is underneath the gravel. When Bordeaux owners tell me: 'I have a very good terroir; I have good gravel.', it makes me smile because a gravely soil holds no nourishment.... The only function of the gravel is to drain water as fast as possible so that the root reaches deeper into the subsoil, there where the good clays are found. And we have measured the internal surface area of these deep clays.... In the laboratory, we measure the surface between the layers when a colouring agent whose molecules cover the layers with a monomolecular film. Since we know the volume of colouring agent required to over all the layers of a certain quantity of clay, we can work out the internal surface of the clay which varies from 10m^2 per gram to 800m^2 per gram depending on the type of clay. With the help of this method, my associate Linda and myself, have made two interesting discoveries. No two crus in Burgundy have the same internal clay surface. In other words, if you took two crus in Burgundy that appear to have the same clay content, for example, Richebourg and Romanee Conti, a simple granulometric analysis will point out a similar soil. But the clays are in fact completely different.... So there cannot be the same kind of exchange with the plant!
"[W]e have studied these clays and we realized something altogether surprising: if one considers the great traditional terroirs, those that are recognized and confirmed by the entire world as producing great wines, all the great white wines have been planted on soils containing small internal clay surfaces and all the great red wines have been planted on soils containing large internal clay surfaces. For example, in Burgundy, the slopes of Montrachet and Meursault have soils with small internal clay surfaces and in the same region, south of Beaune, our ancestors planted red on soils with large internal clay surfaces (at Pommard). They made no mistake! If you follow the Cote de Nuits towards Dijon, with the summit at Morey-Saint-Denis, these soils have the largest internal clay surfaces in Burgundy (almost 700m^2), almost the equivalent of Petrus in the Bordeaux region.... The smallest internal surface measured in France is that of Coulee de Serrant at 52m^2/g. We have found 71 m^2/g on the Epinotte climate at Chablis. The largest surface currently measured is that of Petrus at Pomerol, followed by Bonnes Mares at Chambolle-Musigny: 671 m^2/g."
"Taking the case of Bordeaux as example; the original crus were on calcareous soil: Saint-Emilion, Fronsac or Sauternes. The Saint-Emilion plateau is composed of 'asteries' limestone. Saint-Emilion is, in fact, the wine area in Bordeaux that most resembles Burgundy. This 'asteries' limestone is very fissured and easily penetrated by roots, with brown-red soils, very comparable to the soils of Burgundy. But, underneath the 'ateries' limestone, one finds Fronsadais clays that are the geological equivalent of the clays found in the subsoils of the Medoc. The Fronsadais wines are thus very elegant. In my opinion, these wines represent the best quality/price relation in Bordeaux. The powerful red wines owe their refined, fine and subtle taste to the excellent calcareous clays, quality marls with very large internal surfaces."
Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
Fascinating.
Had another bottle of the 2011 Gattinara yesterday and made sure to give it more air. I coaxed more joy out of the bottle than the first one and it played a pleasant role with food. But definitely not a wine for the masses (at least not the masses I know), and probably not something I need to drink a lot of. But there was some appeal.
I think the key to enjoying many of the Alto Piemonte wines (as it is/was with old-style Langhe Nebbiolo, etc.) is food. They just aren't quite the same without the triple combo of fat, salt and meat (at the same time). The only thing that even comes close is Parmigiano Reggiano, but I suspect you may not eat that because it is made with animal rennet. Since I still do eat some birds I can guess at that, but it still doesn't have quite the same effect on AP tannins as, say, a grilled rib eye.