Tag Archives: Nicolas Belfrage

Nicolas Belfrage says NO to Merlot in Montalcino

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The following appeal to Montalcino producers by Master of Wine Nicolas Belfrage (above) was posted today, August 29, 2011, on Franco’s blog Vino al Vino. Franco has asked me to repost it here and I was happy to oblige (photo via the Adelaide Review).

I understand that, on Wednesday Sept 7, 2011, a vote will be held in the Assemblea of Montalcino wine producers on whether to allow a small but significant percentage of other grapes, which everyone understands to mean Merlot and/or Cabernet and/or Syrah, into the blend of Rosso di Montalcino DOC, which is of course at present a 100% Sangiovese wine.

I would urge you in the strongest terms not to support this change. Rosso di Montalcino, like Brunello di Montalcino, has created for itself a strong personality on international wine markets based largely on the fact that it is a pure varietal wine.

In these days when more and more countries are climbing on the wine production bandwagon it is more important than ever to have a distinctive identity, to make wine in a way which no one else on earth can emulate. It is my belief that the strongest factor in the identity of Rosso di Montalcino (and of course Brunello di Montalcino) is the fact that it is 100% Sangiovese.

I am not disputing the fact that Merlot, Cabernet and Syrah are excellent grape varieties, but it is their very excellence, their very strength of personality, which threatens to compromise the unique character of Rosso di Montalcino.

Who could ever imagine the producers of Bordeaux voting to allow 15% of Sangiovese into the Bordeaux blend? The idea is absurd — or would be treated as such by the Bordeaux producers. There are many who think that a reverse situation, in Tuscany’s finest vine-growing area, would be equally absurd.

Yes, in many cases it may improve the wine — especially in weak vintages or where Sangiovese does not succeed every year. But it will fatally undermine the personality of the wine.

I am aware that a lot of Merlot and Cabernet are planted in the Montalcino growing zone, and that there may be a need in the short term to find a commercial use for these grapes. But there are the options of St. Antimo or IGT Toscana.

Perhaps, instead of compromising the purity of one of Montalcino’s unique wines, there should be more effort in the irection of promoting these other wine-types.

You will be aware that many of us fear that a compromise in regard to Rosso di Montalcino would constitute an opening of the door to a compromise, farther down the line, of the purity of the great Brunello — one of the world’s great wines.

Whether or not that might be the case, I am convinced that it is against the long-term interests of Montalcino to allow any other grape variety, including any Italian or Tuscan variety, into the Rosso, just as it would be fatal to great Burgundy, for example, to allow Syrah to be blended with Pinot Noir, as was once widely practised — with, one might add, some notable successes, but with the inevitable distortion of the style.

You, the Montalcino producers, hold the fate not only of your own future market in your hands. You are the representatives of all of us who will not have a vote on September 7th. We urge you, please, to vote NO.

—Nicolas Belfrage

Emergency post: Tignanello, there’s nothing wrong with liking it

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Above: As if by some sort of cosmic connection, Tignanello was on my mind this weekend after I learned about a hand bag line called Tignanello while shopping with Tracie B at a local mall in Austin. (I guess the hand bag line has been around for a while but I just learned about it this weekend.)

It’s been a crazy Monday (after the holiday weekend) and I really don’t have time to post today but extreme situations call for drastic measures!

In his post yesterday, one of my all-time favorite wine bloggers and palates and all-around good guy, BrooklynGuy, asked his readers: “Does my Favorite Thanksgiving Wine make me a Bad Person?” The wine in question was a bottle of 1990 Tignanello, one of Italy’s (and Tuscany’s) most famous labels and vineyards and one of the original Super Tuscans — in fact, a Super Tuscan ante litteram. Evidently, his friend brought the bottle to BrooklynFamily’s Thanksgiving celebration and in the words of BrooklynGuy, “Yes, I drank a Super-Tuscan, and I loved it. And I love the fact that I loved it.”

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with liking that wine or wines like it (do you like my chiasmus?): especially when the new wood has integrated with the other components of the wine, as I imagine was the case in this nearly twenty-year-old bottling, these wines can be the source of immense pleasure. In another lifetime, when I lived in New York and worked at the top of the Italian wine circuit, I had the opportunity to taste a number of older vintages of the historic Super Tuscans, like Sassicaia (notably, 1985) and Tignanello (notably, 1990, 1995, and 1997). The wines can be very, very good.

I can’t say that I like the wines but I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with liking them. In fact, I showed 2005 Tignanello in my recent seminar on Tuscan wines (participants loved it, btw).

Why don’t I like them? And more importantly, why don’t I like the categorically? In the case of Tignanello, it’s not that I don’t like it but rather that there are so many other wines I’d rather drink — wines that, in my view, are more indicative of the place and the people who make wine there.

Having said that, I bet that the 1990 Tignanello — first produced in 1971 as Tignanello and the first Sangiovese to be aged in new French oak, according to the producer — showed gorgeously that night (and my deep respect for BrooklynGuy’s palate leads me to believe that it did, indeed, show well).

Above: To barrique or not to barrique? The answer is almost categorically “no” on my palate, especially when it comes to noble expressions of Sangiovese.

Frankly, I feel like I owe BrooklynGuy an apology and I feel terrible that he felt obligated to apologize — however jokingly — for liking a wine that is not a “hipster wine,” as he put it. After all, I have been known to patently dismiss barriqued Italian wines and Super Tuscans in general. The truth is I would have loved to try that wine myself!

It’s important to note that the designation Super Tuscan is generally not used by Italians. I’ve read that James Suckling claims he coined the term but I believe that Nicolas Belfrage actually created it in the 1980s. (Coincidentally, I’m reading Belfrage’s new book, The Finest Wines of Tuscany, and will review it soon. He doesn’t discuss his relation to the term although he does hyphenate it.) It’s also important to note that, whatever its origins, the designation is used purely in an marketing capacity and has no official weight or significance.

And while Tignanello is often called “one of the original Super Tuscans” (together with Sassicaia and Ornellaia), it’s important to note that its creators did not call it a Super Tuscan. In 1971, they declassified the wine from Chianti Classico with the vineyard designation to simply Tignanello, the vineyard designation. Why did they do this? Probably because they’re marketing sense led them to believe — rightly — that by shedding the then-tarnished Chianti label, they could command higher prices for the wine.

Lastly, it’s important to note that the declassification wasn’t the only element that Antinori and the “father of Tignanello,” Renzo Cotarella, introduced in its effort to conquer a greater piece of the foreign market: they introduced new-French-oak-small-cask aging, lower-than-required yields, and — I would imagine — Californian practices in the cellar (I don’t know but am guessing they began using cultured yeasts and other forms of manipulation through technology).

The most interesting tidbit of BrooklynGuy’s post, in my view, is the fact that he points out (and in many ways he’s right on): “Antinori’s Tignanello was a big part of the beginning of the Super-Tuscan craze that ultimately ended with the huge Brunello scandal.” Tignanello has always been made mostly from Sangiovese with smaller amounts of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc (to give color, weight, and tannin). The oaky, beefy (as it were) style of wine ultimately conquered the American market in what is surely to be remembered as one of the greatest coups in the history of wine marketing.

BrooklynGuy asks:

Is this wine partly to blame for the bastardization of Tuscan wine?

No, it’s not the wine. The blame lies with winemakers who have abandoned the flavors and aromas of their land for the sake of avarice.

Is Tignanello bad? And if it is bad, can it still taste good?

Tignanello isn’t bad. But there are so many other, greater expressions of Sangiovese that achieve much, much more at a much lower price point.

The 1990 tasted great, that much I can tell you.

I would have loved to taste it with you, BrooklynGuy! But then again, I know that it’s always a great experience to taste any wine with you!

Chapeau bas, for keeping it real in Brooklyn.

Bite your tongue, Dorothy

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tongueMy Google Reader overflows with feeds these days. It’s hard to keep up with them all and I regret that it took me a few days to catch up to Alice’s post on Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher’s article “A Waning Affair with Barolo”. In their piece, the wife-and-husband team priggishly express their disappointment with the 2004 vintage of Barolo. (I read The New York Times daily. It’s my tie to the Big Apple. And I dogmatically avoid The Wall Street Journal — required reading for the rich, a manifesto and manual for capitalist subjugation of the proletariat. As a result, I was unaware of the piece.)

They say they set out to find 50 bottles under $70 so it’s not clear how many they actually tasted. But their unwarranted, superfluous, and supercilious take on the 2004 vintage is decidedly negative. The wines, they write, “really just weren’t that impressive. You can’t imagine our shock and disappointment. Flight after flight left us cold. They weren’t bad. They were pleasant enough. But with wine after wine, we used a word that should never be used to describe Barolo: simple.” Pleasant enough? Simple?

In another one of her excellent posts wherein she continues her struggle (la lotta continua) to defend the world from Parkerization (and here I take her concept of Parkerization as it relates to the arrogant, chauvinist attitude that his followers — more so than he — exude), Alice rightly laments: “I have a hard time when writers smack down vintage. In this case, especially as they really don’t seem to be experienced when interpreting young vintages, it seems irresponsible.”

It is more than irresponsible. In fact, it’s reprehensible.

When you taste a great wine (like Barolo) in its youth from a great vintage (and it certainly will prove to be an excellent vintage, if not a great one), you don’t look for greatness in the wine. You look for the potential for greatness in the wine. Beyond its tannic structure (dominant in this phase of the wine’s evolution), you look for the presence of defects. In their absence, you can begin to assess the wine’s potential for development. You also ask growers and winemakers what they think of the vintage (they know better than any) and you do your homework by reading your colleagues’s assessment of a given wine.

I looked up Franco’s post on a tasting of 57 bottlings of 2004 Barolo in September 2007 with Roy Richards, Nicolas Belfrage, David Berry Green, and Stuart George. (Dorothy and John, if you don’t know who these guys are, please add them to your reading list. They seem to know something about Italian wine.) According to Franco, Barolo 2004 was “classic vintage.” He noted that “2004 seems to be a great vintage and there are many wines worth buying and cellaring — with all likelihood, wines that will get greater over the years… [In 2004], Nebbiolo triumphed with its elegance and its singularity… One thing is certain, 2004 Barolo is a great wine and it deserves our attention, our trust, and the consensus of all lovers of great wine. In English, you would call these wines fine wines: they are elegant, refined, complex, and nothing less.”

Arrogance, hubris, chauvinism, superciliousness, ignorance, disinformation: these are words come to mind as I ponder Dorothy and John’s irresponsible and reprehensible journalism. Once again, the haughty American attitude shows its ugly head. Once again, American wine writers haven’t considered the most important elements in any wine: the people who made it and the place where they live and work. Bite your tongues, Dorothy and John.