Wine of the Week – A rare and rich red from one of Italy’s most remote regions – It is wines like this one that make our jobs incredibly easy. It’s from a remote and rarely visited part of Italy, it’s delicious, and the only place to find it in Western North Carolina is here is at Table Wine! If you can imagine a hypothetical blend of Old Vine Zinfandel (rich and spicy) blended with a splash of Barolo (firm and complex), you can begin to understand what a great deal this wine is. In fact, it’s a super deal at less than $20 per bottle, but at less than $15 per bottle on your solid six pack, it’s one of the top red wine deals of the year.
Casa Contini is owned and operated by the Botter family, and they farm vineyards in the Southern Italian region of Molise. If you’ve never heard of it, don’t worry as only about 1 out of 100 Italians have ever visited this remote and sparsely populated region. Let’s be honest, there’s not a ton of great wine made in this area as the climate is very hot. Many of the wines are extremely alcoholic and smell and taste of sweet, cooked and dried fruit. Winemaker Alessandro Botter’s wines are quite the opposite. Because he farms and harvests by hand, he only selects the healthy clusters for his wines, and the resulting wines possess amazing balance, tremendous intensity, and overachieving complexity.
Alessandro Botter’s 2013 Casa Contini Brindisi Riserva is a blend of 80% Negroamaro, 10% Malvasia Nera, and 10% Sangiovese. In case you aren’t familiar with Negroamaro, it is one of the most important grapes of Puglia and Southern Italy, and it contributes rich fruit and perfumed spice and earth character. Malvasia Nera provides color and dark fruit notes and Sangiovese gives subtle red fruits, earth and acidity. All in all, the 3 grapes work incredibly well together, each one complimenting the other. After fermentation in stainless steel, Botter moves the wine to large oak casks for 24 moths of aging before he bottles it. This long oak aging allows the wine to settle, soften, come together and gain complexity.
This patience and attention to detail results in a wine that easily outclasses the mass majority of Southern Italian red wines. On the nose, it exhibits mature and sophisticated notes of warm raspberry, baked cherry, allspice, rosemary, vanilla, toasted coconut and violet. The palate is full bodied and firm, with a nice sense of ripe fruit framed by dusty tannins. Delicious now, you could easily drink this one over the next 5 to 7 years if not longer. With fall just around the corner, make sure to save a few bottles for your favorite autumn beef or lamb stew.