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Wine Tasting - Anything With Sangiovese

In June of 2004, we held the ninth of an ongoing series of wine tasting events. We started with a small group of just six couples interested in wine but with varying levels of wine knowledge -- it was more important that we would have fun that really be able to identify the wines. The group was formed with the following guidelines:

We will have a blind tasting and casual dinner roughly every other month so that we rotate through the entire group once a year. The host couple may, at their discretion, invite more people to join the fun. The evening's host selects the theme for the evening such as: "Napa Cabernet under $50", "Single vineyard Pinot Noir from Oregon", "'Second wines' of Bordeaux", "Australian Shiraz over $30", or whatever. Each couple brings one bottle that fits the theme. The labels are hidden with paper bags so that this becomes a blind tasting. Everyone tastes each wine before dinner and selects their top three wines so we can have a consensus favorite. At dinner, we can finish the tasting wines or raid the host's cellar assuming, of course, that the host consents. And we should have fun doing this.

Before we get to the Sangiovese results, we have a small bit of catching up to do. Specifically, we missed adding the results of two tasting parties to the website. In large part, this was due to the nature of the tasting events themselves.

The first tasting party was a review of French champagnes. Although we came to an informal favorite (Cristal 1999, Cristal 1998, Nicholas Feuillatte NV), this was only the consensus of three of the fourteen guests. Organizationally, our group was challenged because the party was combined with a housewarming (a new house) and the bottles arrived over over a one hour period.

The second tasting party that we missed was a themed event. Our host chose to ask guests to bring wines that were discussed in the book Wine and War: The French, the Nazis and the Battle For France's Greatest Treasure by Don and Petie Kladstrup. This book details the conflict between the Germans and the French for control of wine during World War II. Sources include numerous anecdotes from many winemakers and their families which lends credibility to the narrative. As dozens of wineries were listed from every region of France, we tasted everything from a Huet Vouvray to a Mouton Rothschild 1982.

This takes us to the theme of Anything With Sangiovese. We had just returned from a family vacation to Italy and thought that we'd keep to the theme of the vacation. Sangiovese, of course, is the grape that most people think of when they think of red Italian wines. As the predominant grape varietal in Tuscany, it forms the backbone of the wines from Chianti, Montalcino and Montepulciano as well as some of the super-Tuscans.

The wines were opened roughly thirty minutes before tasting and were not decanted. The wines were tasted blind. We gave each member of the party a scorecard so that they could make notes on what they thought of each wine. This was a simplified scorecard from previous tastings.

After the tasting, we simply asked everyone to list their favorites which were then ranked using 3 pts for the #1 choice, 2 pts for the #2 choice, and 1 pt for the #3 choice. The winner was a super-Tuscan wine from Lucente -- this was a bit of surprise as it was probably the least expensive wine by a factor of two. After some thinking, we made sense out of this by assuming that the super-Tuscan blend (with merlot and cabernet) made the wine more approachable than some of the very young Brunellos and, consequently, it was the group favorite. The table below lists the wines in order of the consensus favorites. This was a fairly consistent set of results as four bottles received 90% of the points for favorites.

Following the tasting, we sat down to dinner with the remaining wine from the tasting. The dinner was coordinated to complement the red wines.

Dinner Menu

Next tasting - Several couples are arm wrestling to host the next tasting party. Stay tuned.

Click here to give us some ideas!

Other Wine Tastings