Top 10 values
Price is a factor in what I drink at home. I'd love to drink Barolo every day, but I'd also love to keep a roof over my head! Besides, finding happiness in affordable wine has always been the territory of dedicated wine drinkers. I think it’s a purer form of happiness. Price and quality are untethered, to an extent. The anticipation and pressure of pulling the cork on a $100 bottle can marr the the wine if the bottle is anything less than sublime, transcendent. Also, most excellent wine is moderately priced. Not cheap. There is a rapidly accelerating diminishing return on bottles whose price tags dip below plausible levels. There’s a reasonable cost of production involved in the creation of good food products.
I don’t need simple wine in my life. It bores me. I need articulate wine at a price that doesn’t create physical pangs of anxiety. I want my heart to race from excitement, not fear of being underwhelmed.
All that said, these are the wines I have been drinking at home in 2021.
2018 Poggio di Bortolone Frappato - I think it's as good as any Frappato available in N.C., and is a fraction of the price of more famous peers. It’s transportative: few wines taste of a place as much as this red does. It brings Vittoria, Sicily to your dinner table. The range of foods for serving alongside Frappato is exceptionally large: fish, tender pork, lamb, couscous, caponata even. Make it a core item in your pantry wine rack.
2018 Pietralta Chianti - I love Chianti. No surprises there. This wine edges into Brunello territory, no small feat for a red at this price. It’s the archetypal “cheap organic Chianti for pizza” upon which our business was founded. Organic since 1983. Extra-delicious since Stefan joined his mom in the fields and cellar of this tiny 13th century farm.
2019 Pas de l’Escalette “Ze Rosé” - The most delicate rosé in our warehouse at present deserves a warm spring day and an excellent salad or light picnic lunch. Establishing a relationship with this biodynamic farm set a course for our French portfolio that I’m keen to follow in the years ahead. They are the best.
2019 Morella Mezzarosa Rosato - It has been my “go to” pink wine since the day it landed in North Carolina. Mezzarosa has an immediacy, an irrepressible clean-bright fruit edge. I don’t get tired of this wine, and I admire the craft demonstrated by Lisa Gilbree to fashion Primitivo and Negro Amaro into a rosato of undenaible excellence. Biodynamic farming and the precision of a winemaker who understands food science.
2018 Thurnhof Lagrein - my kids love crispy duck buns with hoisin, pickled onion and carrot, etc. All the banchan. It's the intersection of our interests. This is the appropriate wine for that meal. For me. They can drink chocolate milk with everything. Wine from a small family cellar, and the single, dauntingly-steep four hectare vineyard that looms behind it.
2019 Oltretorrente Rosso - Definitely the most precise, aromatic red we've imported from Oltretorrente. Dark violet/clean berry aromas, easy, mid-weight, should be a crowd-pleaser. Certified organic, made in a way that hews very close to my hopes/dreams for wines to present in this portfolio. Chiara and Michele are wonderful people. They are slowly buying little parcels of old vines surrounding their home village of Paderna. Oltretorrente is a decade-old start-up winery that is struggling hard every year to make progressively more and better wine. Oltretorrente is also a novel by Pino Cacucci, about the struggle against the emergence of fascism in Italy in the 1920’s. Drink it today, while considering new ways to resist fascism in the 21st century.
2018 Castello di Torre in Pietra “Terre di Breccia” - One of the flavors in this dark/smoky central Italian red reminds me of a wilder Nebbiolo. It's mostly Cesanese, a grape I'm really fond of currently, part of my growing belief that central Italian wines are unjustly below the radar. The Terre di Breccia is put together well, it's component flavors work as a whole, it has a distinct character. Certified organic, made on a dairy farm that also grows cereals just north of Rome.
nv Alla Costiera Bianco - Really ripe floral aromas, lots of texture on the palate, some yeastiness, then a very clean, dry finish. Certified organic for two decades. Filippo and Elisa’s white blend ridiculously over-delivers.
2019 Paolo Petrilli “Motta del Lupo” Cacc’e Mmitte di Lucera - Certified organic, catchy label, an affordable version of one of Puglia's best forgotten DOCs. I'm always happy with a glass of Motta del Lupo, and I'm rarely happy with a glass of other similarly priced reds. The thematic unity of a meal based solely upon Paolo Petrilli’s ancient grain pasta, heirloom organic tomatoes, and indigenous variety red wine is a thing of beauty and perfection. Simply add sea salt, olive oil, and maybe parmesan if you are feeling fancy.
2019 Torre dei Beati Rosa-ae Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo - I think Fausto is the top producer of Montepulciano in Italy, and that excellence extends to his dark pink rosato. It’s a multi-faceted wine that expands the boundaries of rosé season to include all 12 months. I want to wrap a whole fish in fig leaves and grill it to serve with the rosa-ae, but simpler meals work, too. Certified-organic, with a romantic poem from the winemaker on the label.