Nebbiolo Vecchio

12/3/11 -

My ex and I used to leave our house in the center of the Loire Valley and drive about 3 kilometres to visit a winemaker in Les Montilles (also home to the Puzelats, but sadly we didn’t know them back then). He sold decent Sauvignon Blanc, and better Cab Franc to consumers in bulk - bring your own container - or in his own bottles (since a bottle cost about $1.75, it didn’t seem worth the savings to buy in bulk). We would taste the wine before we purchased, load the car, and drive the 3km home. At dinner that night, the wine never tasted as good as it had a few hours earlier. But we discovered that if we waited a couple of weeks, the wine would fall back into good form, and would be as tasty as it had been at the winery. For me, this experience was a formative lesson in the benefit of allowing wine time to rest after travel – and, how in some instances, even a short trip could disrupt the harmony of a simple bottle of non-industrial wine.

Here’s the point: we’ve just received a very interesting shipment from a Northern Italian collector of old non-Langhe Nebbiolo, including Bramaterra, Gattinara, Spanna, Sizzano, Valtelina, etc. In a perfect world we’d cellar the wines for a few weeks, but we lack the space and discipline for perfection, and they’re burning a hole in our pocket(s), so we’re putting them on sale now; after the trip of a few thousand miles we urge you to let them rest once you take delivery!

We already know the great Vallana wines from the old days; Nervi has also been consistently very good. From earlier sales we’ve had positive reports on Nera, Bianchi, Negri, and Tona. Travaglini is still famous for good Gattinara - often in that funny mis-shapen bottle; we had a very good bottle of 1989 in Italy once, but haven’t found older bottles until now. Berteletti no longer exists, and we can’t find much information – nothing in Wasserman. The bottles look terrific, and they seemed reasonably priced enough to take a flyer on them. We have a lot of their wines here but we’re trying to wait a little while before opening one!