- Some of the Most Authentic Wines in Italy
- No Sheen, No Shine, No Target Marketing
- Crooked Labels and Ancient Techniques
- Brilliant and Beautiful Wines
2013 Guido Mazzucchelli Lessona "San Venz"
- At This Point, More Just Plain Delicious than the 2010
- Nose: Fresh Cherries, Nebbiolo Spice, Integrated Dried Roses
- Palate: An Absolute and Utter Blockbuster
- Fresh, Fresh Cherries with Elite Juiciness
- Hint of Chocolate, Some Salinity
- Fascinating but So Delicious It's Hard not to Drink It Quickly
- Limited Quantities/Some Of You Will be Disappointed, But I Hope Not!
- 92 Points Galloni (Vinous)
2017 Guido Mazzucchelli Vino Rossp "Uvaggio"
- Non DOC - It's Too Obscure
- You Really Want to Drink This
- Nose: Fresh, So Grapey, Intermitantly Floral
- Palate: Sweet Fruit, Licorice
- Some Blackberry, Mostly Mid Season Cherry
- Fruit Really Tastes Like It Was Just Hand Crushed
- So Fresh and Vivid
- "so much character here" Galloni
- 90 Points Galloni (Vinous)
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We live in a fast paced and optimized world. Where the best human minds alive are in a never ending race to improve products and productivity. To find out exactly what every segment of every market wants. To create products precisely targeted at those markets. To sell those product to those markets and delivery them with 99.99% accuracy.
And I, for one, am thrilled to live in this world. Where all of these brilliant minds are working day in and day out to satisfy my every need. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted from poverty. Diseases are being eradicated.
Yet, amidst all of this effort to find exactly what we all think that we need, I sometimes feel that things that we don't know that we need can fall by the wayside. Can disappear from history. And maybe I was put on this earth to help find the last versions of those things. And by selling them preserve them.
Because those things are ultimately authentic.
And winemakers like Guido Mazzucchelli are what authenticity are all about. He makes wines the way that they have always been made. He lives 5 miles from the middle of nowhere. There is no sign on his winery. His labels are crooked. Not because he thinks that this will appeal to hipsters but because he can't afford a machine to affix them.
These wines are the wine equivalents of a direct lineage of wines from ancient times.
Yes - they are well made (and have those sexy scores) ..but that is not why you should buy them.
- You should buy them because they are authentic.
- You should buy them because they are unlike anything else in your cellar.
- You should buy them because they remind us of times gone by when not everything was created for us. When things just were and we liked them or we didn't.
- You should buy them because in this optimized, mechanized and stunningly precise world in which we live we should pray that there is still room for a man to make a paltry 2,000 bottles of wine a year.
The reason I am in this business is to find these wineries that no one else can or will sell.
The Wines
The first wine is the 2013 Guido Mazzucchelli Lessona "San Venz" for $37.99 a bottle on a 4 pack.
The nose is more cherry fruit and spice with integrated dried rose. Haunting dried rose petals just
dominate after mega air. Glorious flowers, tar and sour cherries on a bed of intense minerality. Huge chestnut and old library aromas as well. Some pine, anise and a hint of mint. Just intoxicating.
dominate after mega air. Glorious flowers, tar and sour cherries on a bed of intense minerality. Huge chestnut and old library aromas as well. Some pine, anise and a hint of mint. Just intoxicating.
The palate is a total blockbuster. Elite levels of juiciness. Cascading fresh cherry fruit. Some chocolate. Terrific acidity. A bit saline. Nebbiolo spice. There is a hint of that sweet wood like you get with old Bordeaux. The overall palate impression is really just stunning deliciousness at this point. Palate is juicy, ripe and so elegant with delicate mid to late season cherry fruit that really saps out on the finish. Very pure and so refined.The freshness and juiciness are just really crazy off the charts. It's a complex wine but a wine that is so stunningly fresh you drink a ton of it.The wine has the tannic structure to age and certainly the acidity. My guess is that over time, the aromatics will become more prominent but the fruit is so good that it will be hard to let it age. This is the kind of wine that you can really sit with for an evening and even with some stale toast, it's a satisfying meal.
"The 2013 Lessona San Venz is beautifully lifted in the glass. Rose petal, mint, pine and anise give the 2013 attractive aromatic presence. The 2013 offers lovely aged Nebbiolo character and yet it has enough persistence and energy to drink well for at least another handful of years. The style is a bit rustic, but there is plenty to like. About 30% of this fruit underwent a brief appassimento, the drying process that is typical for Amarone and Sforzato." 92 Points Antonio Galloni (Vinous)
The second wine is the 2017 Guido Mazzucchelli Vino Rosso Uvaggio for $23.99 a bottle on a 4 pack purchase. This is almost the exact opposite of the Lessona. It's a weird one as it has no DOC and no year on the label. The labels, are, of course, affixed by hand so they are a bit crooked. This is far out in the country Italian wine but so perfect and beautiful I'm bouncing in my chair as I write this.
The nose is just stunningly fresh and grapey. You get some of that hand crushed fresh grapiness on the nose. Also a hint of apassiemento. Lovely cherry. Almost creamy cherries. Some flint. Some fresh wet leaves. Mint as well. Wet earth develops with air.
This wine is more about the palate. I'm going to try and describe it but this is just one of those wines that once you take a sip, you just want to drink the entire bottle. The palate just is just a freakshow. Perfectly sweet fruit. I mean perfect. Like the grapes are being crushed in your mouth fresh. Early and mid season cherries. A bit of blackberry. And there is intermittent florality that comes and goes if you care to focus on it. Almost like violets mixed with roses.
This is 50% nebbiolo and the rest is vespolina, croatina, freisa and barbera. Like I said, this is out in the country wine. It's stunningly delicious but the combination of the terroir, the old school winemaking and the grape selection makes this unlike anything else we sell. Plus, I'll be honest, uncorking and serving a bottle of wine that has a crooked hand affixed label is just incredibly cool.
"The 2017 Uvaggio is a big, powerful wine. A blast of black cherry, licorice, menthol, sage and cloves infuse the 2017 with quite a bit of depth and density. Although the 2017 is not exactly refined, it is a big, hearty wine that will work well at the dinner table, especially alongside rich fare. There is so much character here, so it is pretty easy to look past some of the more angular contours." 90 Points Antonio Galloni (Vinous)
The Winery
This is a winery that required some ninja level sleuthing to discover. Beyond that, it's almost impossible to find. You go down this road that hits a T and the number of the winery isn't there so you run right. After a quarter of a mile, you realize that you've missed it. After 3 runs, fortunately Guido was outside. The winery is around the corner from the main road with no sign
Guido is your classic Alto Piemonte farmer. He's been making wines for at least 20 years after inheriting the plots. He makes almost no wine (like 200 cases a year) and works very hard. Some of the slopes in the vineyards are on 40 degree slopes. Some of the bottlings are bottled by hand. This is really a trip back in time and the wines are really things of beauty. They are incredibly, incredibly underpriced for what they are.
2017 Guido Mazzucchelli Vino Rosso "Uvaggio" - $25.99 ($95.96 4-pack)
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