Soave is consistently one of my favourite white wines from Italy. It's also quite a difficult wine to generalise about, because it ranges from dilute plonk, through elegant, mineral seriousness to tropical, nutty richness. A lot depends on site and yield, with many producers bottling single vineyard wines costing upwards of £15 per bottle in the UK. This looked like a good buy at £13 - especially when I noticed on the back the words 'parziale appassimento'. This means that the grapes were given an extended hang on the vines to dry out and concentrate.
The style of the wine bears this out, with quite extroverted dried mango, apricot danish, toasted almonds, candied citrus peel and meadow flowers on the nose. That tropical plushness is there on palate, but it's far from blowsy, balanced out by pithy ripe lemon classic savoury nut flavours on the finish. It's the impact and depth of flavour that really impresses me here - I have a big soft spot for this style so long as it's all in balance.
No comments:
Post a Comment