Colle Vecchio, Offida Pecorino, 2007, white wine from Italy

5,5 points

I never believed that this experiment would end well! Two or three years ago I discovered that I still had one bottle left of a rather typical – certainly not top – white wine from Cocci Grifone, vintage 2007. If someone had asked me – even five years ago, I would have said that this wine had very likely gone bad. I would have been wrong. And I was wrong. From the first nose it was clearly not off. But would it be a good wine? To my great surprise, the wine was still very good and, due to its age, had probably become something special.

Lemon, some sweetness like well matured pineapple, late summer flavors of grass, chrysanthemum and gooseberry; almost a creamy but salty outflow. Perfectly balanced among cheeky freshness and lusciousness of mature ripeness.

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A nice tasting experience that we probably can’t repeat – since I don’t think anyone would have stored this wine on purpose for so long. The autochthonic grape is called Pecorino, a type native to central Italy, and found in particular in Abruzzo and Marches. It is rare – according to Wikipedia there are only 213 hectares. Probably it is an intractable sort of wine, so to say. Offida is the only DOCG wine – all others are table wines. Offida is the most prominent vineyard for Pecorino, at the edge of the small city of Ripatransone – where Cocci Grifone’s winery is located.

Cocci Grifone is a small and underestimated winery which produces some of the best red wines in Italy. When I started this blog, one of my first reviews was about a wine called Il Grifone: https://avdwineandfood.net/2015/02/25/il-grifone-2000-rosso-piceno-superiore/.

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From time to time, it is worth storing even a “normal” wine for some years. If, with some aging, the wine becomes as good as this one, we know that the winemakers truly understand their business. As is so often true, the grounds for this are found in the traditions of one wine-producing family – along with the modern inspiration of the recent generation. The three generations of the Grifone family are female (Diana Cocci Grifoni, Marilena Cocci Grifoni, Paola Cocci Grifoni) as you can see on their updated and nice webpage: http://www.tenutacoccigrifoni.it/.