Terrazze Della Luna (Italy) Novello 2006
Sales of Beaujolais Noveau once caused great excitement each November, but those glory days have gone, and each new release of these fresh, young Gamay wines is met largely with consumer indifference. But still, releasing a ‘nouveau’ wine just a few months after vintage still happens not only in Beaujolais, but in a few other regions including here in the north of Italy. This wine, made from the indigenous Teroldego, is vinified by the same carbonic maceration technique as Nouveau, where the grapes are not crushed, but fermented whole under a blanket of carbon dioxide. That produces a wine with low tannin and extraction from the skins, and with maximum fruit. The colour is an intense crimson, and the nose has a touch of Beaujolais-like watercolour paintbox, but a mass of blueberry and Morello cherry with a really bright fruit quality. On the palate there is nothing complex or layered about this wine, it just offers a big, juicy mouthful of burstingly ripe cherry and liquorice-tinged blackberry fruit, with sufficient tannin and acidity to keep it fresh and very gluggable. Sometimes we need an antidote to ‘serious’ wines, and international wines made to a samey formula, and Novello delivers that medicine very nicely. 5.00-6.00, WoodsWinters, Partridges, Hoults, Bacchanalia
