The Italian White That Puts Italy on a Level with the Great Wines of France - These Are Sweeping Through Michelin Star Restaurants

Mario Mazzitelli, The Genius Winemaker Who Will Change Everything
 - One Salesman Has Them in 15 Michelin Starred Restaurants in Italy
 - ...Including Seta (**) Perhaps the Top Restaurant in Milan
 - Trained at 2 of the Top Wineries in Italy
 - I'm Way Ahead of the Curve Here But Lunarossa Is Becoming the Darling of the Top Sommeliers in Italy
 - The Pricing on These Wines Is The Lowest I've Seen for World Class Wines

2015 Lunarossa Quartara
 - Monstrous Density and Concentration
 - The Palate Impact of Hermitage or Corton Charlemagne
 - Terrific Minerality, Fassy Juiciness
 - So Much Going on, It's Almost Alive on the Palate
 - At a Minimum, This Is Remarkable Wine, It May Be Better  than That with Age
 - The Chance for the Rest of Us to Try World Class Wine for $32.99

2012 Lunarossa Borgomastro
 - The Complexity and Deliciousness of Great Taurasi
 - But Remarkably FRESH
 - A Uniquely Toned Down, Balanced, Sensual Aglianico
 - Sweet, Gorgeous Licorice Nose
 - Raspberry Liquor, Raspberry, Spice on the Palate
 - Crazy Long, Juicy 
 - Incredible Value for a Wine This Good and Old
 - The White Is the Headliner But Please Do Not Sleep on This
 -  $34.99 6 Year Old Aglianico This Good Is Insane  

I've written that I find most Italian white wines pleasant but basically insipid.  I didn't understand why that was the case until recently when I learned that this is the way that most Italians want them to be.  It makes sense; Italy has enough great terroir to make world class red wines.  It should be able to make world class white wines if it wanted to.  Now I've tried all of the famous names in Italy.  Miani, Borgo del Tiglio, I Clivi, Emidio Pepe, to name a few.  And some of them can be very good.  But I'd never had an Italian white that had the sheer immensity of palate impact as the top French wines until I tasted today's white. 

I like to talk about the Wall of Flavor.  The Wall of Flavor is when a wine has everything coming at you all at once.  It has huge fruit density.  It has massive minerality.  It has acidity.  It has secondary flavors.  When you drink it all you can see is the wine.  It is so massive it takes over your palate and your existence.  Today's wine has that.

The White That Will Change Everything
I'm thrilled to offer the 2015 Lunarossa Quartara for $32.99 each on a 4 pack purchase. This is 100% Fiano. First, please do not draw any conc

lusions from the price.  This is a very young winery with limited marketing dollars and they are

making wines in an unheralded area of Campania so the market has not yet had a chance to work its price mechanism on them.  They should cost at least in the $60+ range of Miani and the top Borgo del Tiglio bottlings.  The nose is one of those that grabs your attention.  Just massive concentration.  Mineral.  Dried fruits.  Salinity.  Wow.  Definitely a wine that could live on its nose if it had to.  But the palate is really where the freakshow happens.  This is one of those wines that you get it in your mouth and no matter what you are doing, time dilates, almost like a scene in a movie where the main character is fine and everyone else is frozen.   The first thing you get is a sense of overwhelming richness.  I'm not talking California Chardonnay faux wood richness, but real richness from the density of fruit and bundled secondary flavors. Massive levels of dried apricot, packed secondary flavors like honey, saline, a hint of spice.  The wine is really young and there is so much going on, you'd need at least a day to unpack most of it (I didn't have a day).  All seamlessly bonded with perfect epic levels of sucking on a cold, river-smoothed rock minerality.  Oh, and this wine is not a sledgehammer - it's perfectly balanced with super clean acids - it's so juicy.  Really complex and big internal aromatics swirl around like a tornado: anise, apple, mere hints of acacia honey and chestnut, orange flowers and chamomile.  Great texture on the palate; the wine has truly great palate presence.  The finish at this point in its evolution is mineral with lovely clingy green appleskin.

Now this is perhaps the best white I've had in Italy but the crazy thing is, it's not one of those whites that is a museum piece type wine where it's purely an intellectual construct and fascinating to taste.  It's absolutely one of the most delicious wines I'll offer all year.  The fruit is really clean and delicious.  It's unlike the top wines from France in that regard which are usually too woody (and sometimes obnoxious) to drink young.  I could make the ethical argument that even though the wine is incredibly good now (and so inexpensive) that it would be wrong to suck down a case in 12 months.  Alas, I'm not a professor of moral philosophy. 

I noted in the headlines that this wine is at least remarkable.  It is.  It's absolutely one of the most well made, powerful and delicious wines you will drink this year.  But the truth is it may be better than that, I just have no idea what will happen as it ages.  The only other vintage that I tried was the 2013 which was certainly more elegant but still young.  My gut is that with 5-10 years the secondary and tertiary flavors bound up in the 2015 could free themselves as the fruit calms down and this wine could be profound.  Please, at least save a bottle for a few years to see what happens.  The wine has the acidic balance and structure to age for at least 5-7 years and likely longer.

This is 100% Fiano.  Only 180 cases were made of a special selection of his best vines.  Fermentation is in amphorae.   The tops of the amphorae are closed so the wine is not an orange wine (even though the winemaker worked with Gravner).   The wine is subsequently aged in oak barrels. Somehow the winemaking gets the most out of the grapes but does not make the wine taste oxidative at all.  When I said that the winemaker will change everything, I meant it.  Whatever he is doing is remarkable.  This needs 20-30 minutes to open up - it's not a pop and pour quaffer and it needs to settle down so please give it some time.

Please Do Not Sleep on the Red - It's Fantastic
The second wine is so good, it would have top billing in most E-Mails.  It's the 2012 Lunarossa Borgomastro for $34.99 each on a 4 pack purchase.  This is one of those very rare Muhammad Ali wines: "Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee."  It's made from 100% Aglianico which is generally definitely in the heavyweight class in terms of weight.  But for some reason, this wine has the fruit density of great Aglianico and it has really terrific finesse and balance.  In its own way, it's just as amazing and unique as the white.  The nose here is mostly sweet licorice.  I'm not talking Twizzlers, I'm talking very light, sweet, almost floral licorice.  Just beautiful.  Some black cherry, juniper, black pepper and floral elements as well.  The fruit on the palate is amazing.  Raspberry, delicious sweet raspberry liquor, licorice, spice, a hint of tar, all woven together.  Really voluminous on the palate.  Amazing balancing acidity and so juicy.  Really amazing levels of juiciness for a wine with this amount of fruit density.  It'e really incredibly fresh as compared to Taurasi.  Perfectly integrated tanins with the structure to age for a decade or more.  The finish is long and juicy.  The wine is almost sensual in the best way.  It has all of the components of Aglianico but they are just presented in a slightly toned down, more gentle way than most Aglianico-based wines. 

This is their top of the line red.  It's made from a selection of their best grapes from a vineyard near the Picentini mountains.  The wine is aged in large oak barrels for 24-30 months.

The Winemaker and the Mountains
The winemaker is named Mario Mazzitelli.  He has worked with Quintodecimo and winemaking legend Jasko Gravner (although his style is distinct from both of them).  I spent a little time with him and he is an extremely humble, studious guy.  You can tell that he's picked up tricks from every place that he's worked and altered and combined them to create his own unique style.  He founded Lunarossa in 2006.


The grapes are grown around the Picenti mountains, which is very important for two reasons.  First, the altitude allows you to have cooler climate tasting wines even though the region is rather far south.  Second, the grapes are grown on the sea side of the mountains which allows for ocean breezes to cool the vineyards.  I've always emphasized the importance of microclimates being able to produce classic wines even within regions where you would not necessarily expect it (e.g. Chateau Simone, Laible, etc.).  These wines are somewhere between the Rhone and Burgundy in terms of weight which is pretty remarkable given that they are from Campania.

2015 Lunarossa Quartara - $34.99 ($131.96 4-pack) 

2012 Lunarossa Borgomaestro - $36.99 ($139.96 4-pack)