a fine wine tasting archive
3 notes
Granbussia is the wine Aldo Conterno made only when the year deserved it: three vineyards the estate bottles separately, combined into one riserva. 1982 is counted among the greatest of them. Forty-four years on, this bottle still had grip at the finish.
The label on Roagna's 1982 Crichët Pajé says Vino da Tavola, the lowest rung of the Italian system. Inside was a forty-four-year-old Barbaresco from one of the slowest cellars in Piedmont — brick at the rim, balsamic and dried rose on the nose, and a core of fruit that had not gone anywhere.
In Bordeaux, 1982 is a legend — but that story belongs to the reds. In Sauternes the October rains washed the botrytis away, and almost nobody had picked in time. Forty-three years on, what you notice first is not the sweetness but the acid.