Passitivo 2010 Primitivo, Puglia (Italy)

Posted by Keith Wallace on Dec 4, 2012 in Wine Reviews | 0 comments

Judging wines isn’t a linear job.  It’s not really about grading all wines as a spectrum of quality. We don’t judge a Red Zinfandel from Russian River next to a bottle of Lafite Rothschild. They may get the same 90-point rating, but that doesn’t mean they are the same. We judge wines against  there peers.

I mention this because I am rating this $15 dollar bottle of wine from Southern Italy as high as I have rated some much more expensive wines.  This is a remarkable bottle of Primitivo, one of the best in the past few years. Perhaps only the Tormaresca Torcicoda has risen to this level of quality.

Full bodied, the wine offers up aromas of lavender and vanilla, along with with Amarone-like notes of black tar and raisin. On the palate, it starts of with fruit cake and fresh figs, leading into black cherry and a port-like note of smokey plum. The finish goes to anise and chocolate and then lifting into fresh fruit and an edge of rustic charm.  This is a fun and rich bottle of wine that offers a lot of pleasure.

One of the reasons for the high quality and balance of this wine stems from the unique way in which it is grown.  Primitivo ripens very early in Puglia,  often as early as August. The winemaker does what is called  “il giro del picciolo” which roughly translates to “strangle the leaf”.  Instead of harvesting, the stem leading to the grape bunches is twisted, which effectively starves the fruit of water and nutrients.  The grapes then start dry on the vine: this is a unique method that creates wine very similar to an old-school Amarone.  Ironically, the method also allows the wine to retain a fresh quality, despite being harvested as raisins.

Available at Bacchus Selections

ABOUT APULIA (PUGLIA) and PRIMITIVO

Apulia’s exceptionally fertile plains make it one of Italy’s largest wine-producing regions, but until the 1970s most of its wines were seen as fit only for blending or for making Vermouth. Because of this, most Apulian producers chose to try to rid themselves of this lowly reputation, bringing about a radical transformation of their industry. A great number of very ordinary wines are still produced, but various changes have greatly improved the situation. Irrigation programs, the introduction of lower-yielding, higher-quality grape varieties (including many classic French ones), and a move away from the single-bush cultivation, known as alberello, to modern wire-trained systems, have led to both new wines gaining favor and some traditional ones showing renewed promise. The most important grape variety is now the Primitivo, which has been identified as the Zinfandel of California and is the earliest ripening grape grown in Italy.

Peachy Canyon 2008 Westside Zinfandel, Paso Robles

Posted by Keith Wallace on Oct 12, 2012 in Wine Reviews | 0 comments

Paso Robles is a huge AVA, with over a half million acres of vines. Huge wineries like  J. Lohr, Treana, and Meridian dominate the region. However in the cooler hills on the westside of Paso, there are smaller treasures. Wineries like Tablas Creek Vineyard Terry Hoage Vineyard are at home there.

Peachy Canyon lives in both worths. A mid-sized winery that that offers quality Red Zins at a decent price.  It’s one of my de facto go-to wineries for BBQ-friendly red wine. Their gungho fruit-bomb style is a perfect accompaniment to hot smoked pork shoulder.

Their Westside bottling is a winner every year. Since it’s from their cooler vineyards, it’s a bit more layered. This vintage  is layered with sundried cherries and blackberries. A whiff of black pepper, and a huge mouthful of glycerin.

PASO ROBLES in San Luis Obispo county was originally planted with vines in the late 18th century; the Santa Ynez Valley, in Santa Barbara County, had a flourishing wine industry in pre-Prohibition times; Santa Barbara town itself was once dotted with vineyards. Yet both counties were virtually devoid of vines in the early 1960s; it was not until Estrella, in Paso Robles, and Firestone, in Santa Ynez Valley, established vineyards in 1972 that others followed.

Zinfandel Review: Alexander Valley Vineyards 2008 Redemption

Posted by M.L. Wolfsohn on Aug 12, 2012 in Wine Reviews | 0 comments

This Zinfandel review is brought to you by the Wine School of Philadelphia and Bacchus Selecitons.

If you drink Zin for it delightful complexity, you aren’t thinking straight. Zinfandel –despite its pink alter  ego– is a major badass. This bottle is in keeping with such a reputation. Full bodied and then some, this has dense black fruit that verges on the obscene. The black pepper notes turn smoky and  dense with oak flavors. This is just a pure bundle of fun, without a lick of seriousness. If your plan is to fall away into a haze of bacchanalian rapture, this is the bottle to reach for.

About Zinfandel

Via Wikipedia. This was once thought to be America’s only indigenous Vitis vinifera grape, but was later positively identified by Dr. Carole Meredith as the Primitivo grape of southern Italy by Isozyme “fingerprinting,” a method of recording the unique pattern created by the molecular structure of enzymes found within specific varieties.  However, this led to a conundrum because the earliest records of Primitivo in Italy date from the late 19th century, whereas the Zinfandel name appears in the nursery catalog of William Prince of Long Island, dated 1830.