Grignano, Chianti Rufina, 2010, Tuscany, 2010, Red wine from Italy

3,5 points

Even though this wine is already four to five years old, surprisingly you don’t really taste the aging. There isn’t maturity or richness and dry fruitiness you usually experience when you open a “red” from Toscana. It is rather fresh, still very young, somehow a bit sour but pretty full of its own character. You may like it or you may not, but this wine doesn’t deliver any kind of Mediterranean flair like sun, heat, dry earth or straw. With my limits of tasting I guess – in the case I would have to taste the wine blindly – I would even tend toward some flavors I associate with nebbiolo. Nebbiolo is a grape of Piedmont. If you translate Nebbiolio into German something like “nebelig” would be a reasonable translation. “Nebelig” means foggy or misty.

The taste of cherries is pretty apparent. For me it tastes like a basket of red berries combined with bioscope apple: this is a kind of autumn taste if I can say it like this.  There are still sunny and warm moments during the days but foggy in the mornings, wet foliage and the first smells of moldiness are more and more coming dominate these days between late summer and early autumn.

I will leave the other two bottles I still have for another year or two in the cellar to see what happens. For now I would say it is more than just “ok” but it isn’t dazzling.

The wine is affordable – you can get a bottle below € 10 which is actually a great argument for buying it.

This wine has been introduced to me through the wine edition of my daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. There you can order it as well I guess.