Holiday Countdown 2024 (DAY 4) - 2021 Barbacàn Alpi Retiche Rosso

Holiday Countdown 2024 (DAY 4) - 2021 Barbacàn Alpi Retiche Rosso
These are the top wines that stood out among the thousands of wines I tasted this year. Some are always in stock, some are rare and hard to find, but all of them are sure to fill you with joy this Holiday Season.   
DAY 4:    
Of all the descriptions for wine, the one I love most is beautiful. Yes, it's subjective (as are most things in wine) and hard to describe, but to paraphrase Justice Stewart 'I know it when I taste it.'

For me, beautiful wines share a few common characteristics: crystalline fruits with clear, defined aromatics of perfumed flowers and spice. They are balanced and detailed, with flavors that seamlessly meld together yet are distinct from one another. These are elusive wines that possess intensity and concentration, yet are never overbearing or feel weighty.      

Today's wine, grown high in the Italian Alps of Valtellina, embodies beauty in every sense. A Nebbiolo of tradition and class, with soaring aromatics of mountain berries and rose petals, whose purity and finely etched flavors can only come from grapes grown on these terraced, centuries-old mountainside vineyards.

For me, this wine has set a new bar for what is, no doubt, Italy's greatest grape variety.
BUY NOW
Sourced from 70-year old Nebbiolo vines grown 700 meters above sea level. The incredibly steep pitch at which they sit make machinery an impossibility. Hand-harvested and fermented with ambient yeast in tank where maceration lasts 20 days. The wine is then pressed and racked into a combination of concrete and steel tanks to age a full year before bottling.

Like an Ansel Adams photograph, the wine opens with crystal clear, high-toned notes of tart cherry, wild strawberry, mountain herbs, chestnut and mulling spices. Unlike its heartier cousins from Barolo and Barbaresco, the palate here is silky smooth, with a streak of cool, piney freshness to complement the dense core of raspberry fruit, rose petal and spice. A wine of sheer beauty. 
High in the Italian Alps, nestled amongst the peaks, and clinging to the rock face, sits Barbacàn, a bastion of tradition and a vanguard of Lombardy wine. Winemaker Angelo Sega and his sons farm a scant 6 hectares of vineyards that are not easy to maneuver within. Each row of vines is hewn from the mountains, and there is rarely a flat plain in sight.

Chiavennasca, the local clone of Nebbiolo, is the star here, especially as Nebbiolo's fame has grown in the modern era. Barbacàn is not one to cave to trends however. In Angelo's own words: 'Every season we repeat ancient gestures, carrying on the identity of an Alpine people that has always been linked to the cultivation of Chiavennasca.'
2021 Barbacàn Alpi Retiche Rosso - $39.99

*SPECIAL NEWSLETTER PRICE - $37.99

To order, reply directly to this email or call me at 843.576.4845
Justin Coleman
Proprietor
Monarch Wine Merchants
Back to Newsletters