Montepulciano d’Abruzzo “Spelt” 2001 – Fattoria La Valentina – Alc. 14.5% - (Approx. €20)
The story begins with a heroic struggle with the cork. Using my favourite waiters’ pocket corkscrew with a two stage lever, I worked hard to insert the screw but then could not budge the cork; fearing breaking the corkscrew, I switched to a screw-pull which threatened to remove the centre of the cork while leaving the sides still adhering to the neck of the bottle (this has happened to me before); finally a wider bladed two handled corkscrew was not long enough and only extracted the top two-thirds of the cork; after trying to chip away the remainder with a sharp steak knife, I pushed it in and decanted through a silver filter which was not fine enough to catch all the cork dust. This cork was surely hermetic!!
C: Deep ruby red with purple foam.
N: Well developed and complex with dark fruit and a curious tang like cheesy tar. (I usually associate cheese aromas with a wine going wrong but they were hardly perceptible on the palate and when I sniffed the neck of the bottle containing heeltaps they had disappeared and brambly fruit aromas were dominant. Was this a sort of reduction which needed a much earlier decant?)
P: Full bodied, deep and darkly fruity with brambly blackberry aromas coming out together with spicy and tangy tar, touches of liqueur laced fruit cake, good lively acidity, good structural support towards the finish and good length. This is a powerful and tasty wine but “classy”, “refined” and “elegant” are not descriptors which spring to mind; 16.5/20 with potential for 17/20+ if the cheesy note can be eliminated by more age/airing.
Here is a link to La Valentina’s informative website - http://www.lavalentina.it/ENG/index.htm . “Spelt” is not the estate’s top cuvée; the much more expensive “Binomio” 2001 was more massive, woody and muscle bound than this and “Binomio” 2000 decidedly odd. “Spelt” 2000 was much more harmonious than either “Binomio” and indeed than this 2001 on its present showing but probably has less potential.
To revert to my rhetorical question in the title line, Montepulciano provides some of my favourite robustly food friendly QPR reds in the under €10 bracket and a wine like this one and Masciarelli’s Marina Cvetic provide some deeper and more complex drinking well worth their price around €20. However, I am not convinced that the more luxury cuvées like La Valentina’s Binomio (which creeps up towards €40) and Masciarelli’s Villa Gemma (towards €60) do more than provide rather more volume of the same sensations sometimes to the detriment of balance and harmony. They can be hugely enjoyable but class and elegance prove elusive and I am wondering whether I will ever find one which I would rate more than about 17/20 on my personal scale. I still have left a bottle and magnum of this “Spelt” and a bottle of “Binomio” 2001 together with some Marina Cvetic 2001, 2003 and 2004 and Rosso Conero "Sassi Neri" from Le Terrazze to allow me to go on testing the potential of this grape type after more ageing.
