Italian wine critic

You might try Gambero Rosso or google the words "Italian Wine rating".

Not sure about that. Alcohol does not really taste of anything...

If a wine from Burgundy or Piemonte reaches 14.5% alcohol, then it has probably been concentrated in some artificial way, so it will taste bad but not because of the alcohol. The alcohol, like the bad taste, is a consequence of a particular way of making the wine.

OTOH a wine from Languedoc or Montalcino that does NOT reach 14.5% alcohol has probably been fiddled in some other way (in the best of cases, the yields are too high). In this case you would probably associate poor taste with low alcohol grade.

In each area of production a well made wine will yield the alcohol level that is natural for that area. For some areas of Germany that can be as low as 8%, for Bandol it is more likely to be 15 or more. In either case, a well made wine will not "taste of alcohol".

Thanks, I appreciate it. Dee Dee

For the sheer beauty of reading someone who is totally passionate about the Italian wines you should read Victor Hazan's "The Wines of Italy." It is a bit dated only in the vintage discussions, the descriptions of the wine areas is superb. Victor is Marcella's husband, btw. Then you might start on this website, it seems to have a lot of good advice:

pavane

I doubt it is sulfites, Montalcino wines contain on average the same amount as any other wine area.

You might like this: 2005 FALESCO SANGIOVESE UMBRIA. My Italian neighbors liked it. As for wine critics, I have always been let down. But check this out:

Pure ethyl alcohol has very little smell. One would not dare taste pure (absolute) alcohol because it would badly burn your mouth and throat membranes if you did. Pure alcohol is difficult to obtain, because no matter how many times you distill it, a certain low percentage of water will remain that can only be removed by chemical means. It is the impurities, including many compounds present in fermented liquids that pass over with the alcohol on distillation, that give commercial alcoholic drinks different tastes and smells. I have seen ultra-pure absolute alcohol used for chemical research, and it has nearly no smell - only a sharpness when sniffed close up. If diluted with about 1/2 water to whiskey strength, pure alcohol has nearly no taste other than the warmness it produces in the mouth. The closest thing you can buy to drink that will give nearly the smell and taste of pure alcohol is a vodka that has been distilled several times, charcoal filtered, etc. to leave it nearly tastless. However many vodkas are not so highly refined, and a slight smell and taste remains that differs for vodkas made from grain, grapes, or even apples or maple sap for a few of the high end vodkas.

Nice little review of this.

Thanks. Dee Dee

This must be a joke:

"The nose is showing lots - young vibrant energetic fruits of jammy cherry, cherry jello, ripe strawberry dipped in balsamic vinegar, cranberry with wild dry flower and violet/lilac. This well extracted full body wine offers tons of fruit and sutle spice, tobacco, dark chocolate, smoke, charred wood and almond nut"

Last September I was talking to a winemaker near Asti who told me his Barbera Superiore was pushing higher than 15% because of the extreme weather. He very much didn't want such a high concentration, he said, but that was the way the fermentation was going. It will be very interesting to see how it turns out.

Andrew.

innews: snipped-for-privacy@e39g2000hsf.googlegroups.com:

It goes like this. What Joseph refers to as "pushing" is he process of adding sugar to the fermenting must, or of passing it through a reverse osmosis process to remove water. Either way, you are making up for lack of natural maturity, you are pushing a wine that would have normally been thinner to a high alcohol level, yet you are leaving the flavour components unaltered, i.e. thin, lacking in something.

Now imagine that trendsetters determine that high alcohol is fore some reason bad, then winemakers, short of diluting the wine or resorting to other removal techniques, they can increase yields and produce grapes with lower sugar content. Again the flavour components will be off.

Anything that shifts the wine's alcohol content from its natural level is bound to make bad wine. In an area like Bandol (same is true for many CA areas) where it practically never rains from May to harvest time, one wonders how some wines come out at 12 degrees of alcohol. It's almost impossible to do unless you do something funny. And in fact even the good wines are marked with somewhat false information about the alcohol, it may say 14 on the bottle, but you can be sure it is in fact somewhere between 14.5 and 16.

The taxes are higher on higher alcohol wines. IIRC, 14.1 is the cut off for tax purposes.

Precisely