Vin Santo

The producer is Barone di Ricasoli, not one of the lesser ones... :-) Anders

It's one of the most important Chianti Classico producer. See

This is a good one:

Wow -- talk about dumb luck, then! It is an amazing wine - from what I have been finding out on the Web, is that there is tremendous variation year to year and producer to producer!

Just looked them up - talk about dumb luck on my part - thanks!!

The best I've ever tasted is from Avignonesi. It's fabulous!

But the number of Vin Santo producers is enormous - many wineyards have a (often small) production of this sometimes wonderfull wine - somtimes boaring indifferent fluidium. But in general You'll find that good producers og 'usual' wines also produces good VS.

regards

Jan

The best Vin Santo I've ever had was a glass the waitress treated Susan and I to in a teeny restaurant in the Cinque Terre. She said it was a local wine, which is interesting - do they even make Vin Santo in Liguria? Whatever, it was astonishing, and of course, being a wine newbie and a puddinghead besides, I never looked at the bottle!

They are beautiful wines though, aren't they?

Katherine

No. It was Sciacchetra', a wine made from air-dried grapes.

Rarely beautiful, most are bottled for tourists, but if you can get hold of the one made by Walter De Batte', I would say it is the only serious one (despite the others being sold at the same outrageous prices). This wine is very hard to find, even in the Cinque Terre. Unlike the others, it exhibits all the complexity that you expect out of a "passito".

Mike

Ciò che ha detto Mike Tommasi ( snipped-for-privacy@tommasi.org) è così interessante, che devo dire la mia:

Right, but I'd add also Buranco to the list.

See you in S. Bartolomeo, I hope.

Luk

Thanks for clearing that up for me. My memory was that the waitress said it was a Vin Santo, but between her tourist English and my kitchen Italian she could have said it was *like* a Vin Santo, and I misunderstood.

We must have lucked out, then, because the wine we had was a revelation. I have always had a sweet tooth for dessert wines, but this wine was different from the uni-dimensional sweetness of what I had tasted before. As the wine sat in my mouth, it kept changing, deepening. Then, swallowing, it changed again. Breathe out - oh, that's wonderful! After a minute I realized that I had been sitting, one hand gripping the table, white-knuckled, eyes closed, while the waitress was asking me, a bit worriedly, "Okay? Okay?" I opened my eyes, looked up at her, smiled, and said, "Si, fantastico!" - and we both laughed.

Seems like I said "fantastico" a lot in Italy...

Katherine

DOC Cinqueterre Sciacchetrà, beloved by Ernest Hemingway, is an extremely rare (production area: 140 hectares, juting out over the sea, with very little, hand made, and somewhere dangerous vintage) and also in Italy difficult to find wine. It is made from air-dried grapes. It is rare, but not really expensive, because it is an underestimated and 'not known' wine. A 50 cl. bottle cost about E20, here in Italy.

Ciao Cesare

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