Sting Like a “B” (Bastianich’s Ass-Kicking Friuli Goodness)
Usually I prefer to know when wine samples are coming to my door. For the most part this has to do with the vagaries of logistics (will someone be around to sign for the package?), but just as importantly I prefer to know that the wine has some potential value for 1WineDude.com readers (you folks like that hard-to-find, more interesting juice).
Also, I need to find room in my basement, which is overrun with Styrofoam packing material that needs to be driven down to DE for recycling. Either that, or I’m gonna build a huge Styrofoam wall, and then bust out of it and scare the living shit out of my dog…
Anyway, it’s a really, really nice surprise when an unsolicited sample actually rocks the Kasbah and does have potential value for the 1WD crowd; when that random bottle that just shows up and causes my dog to absolutely freak out beyond all reason at the approach of the UPS truck (if you ever want to know what it’s like to dislocate your shoulder, just walk my dog around my neighborhood during UPS delivery time) is all worth it.
Which is why I recently did a double-head fake after tasting the 2006 Bastianich Tocai Plus – a rare moment when the odd random sample provided true blogging serendipity. I dare say it was even worth all of the mad barking, as this wine offers a nice helping of Friulian ass-kickery…
Some of you will recognize the name behind Bastianich – Joe Bastianich – as the purveyor of various NYC restaurants like BECCO, and as the co-author of the excellent Vino Italiano. Others might recognize his mother, food icon Lidia Bastianich. I’m guessing that the Bastianich wines from Italy’s Fruili region are not quite as well-known, but based on my tasting they ought to be.
I’ve been a fan of wines from Italy’s north-eastern corner for a long time; the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region offers a relatively large variety of wines considering it’s responsible for only about 2% of the country’s total wine production. What’s really been exciting for me, in a massively-wine-geeky way, is how producers from California and Long Island are starting to look towards Friuli for inspiration in their white wines, with some spectacular results. In the case of Napa’s Matthiasson, winemaker Steve Matthiasson is also starting to experiment with Friulian red varieties like Refosco (barrel samples I tasted with Steve earlier this year in Napa were promising).
Bastianich’s Tocai Plus is itself not your typically refreshing Friuli white. In fact, the wine is downright obnoxious, but you might love it anyway; it’s the white equivalent of Amarone (almost literally – some of the Friuliano fruit gets a similar appassimento drying treatment) and also includes some late harvest and botrytized fruit from 50 year-old vines, all vinified dry. After stainless steel fermentation, the wine gets 60% malo-lactic fermentation and 9 months of lees aging, followed by another year of bottle aging.
The result is just as bombastic and powerful as you’d expect, but it keeps a refined edge. There’s a good deal of aromatic complexity, with pears and melons, dissolving into an honeyed character but without the luscious sweetness. The palate is rich and the body of he wine is enormous without feeling flabby. My mini-review:
06 Bastianich Tocai Plus (Colli Orientali): Dense, structured, rich, a honeycomb w/out the sugar. Further proof of Fruili’s potential. $66 A
Pricey, but worth it if you’re looking for a unique wine expression that’s way, way far from the same-old, same-old. Only about 400 cases were made. You can shop for the Bastianich Tocai Plus at Italian Wine Merchants, and they have a (very infrequently updated) blog as well.
Cheers!
Other stuff you might dig:
- Weekly Twitter Wine Mini-Reviews Round-up for 2010-03-20
- Putting the OLD in Old Vine Zinfandel (Tasting Wellington Vineyards)
- What We Drank When I Got Fired
- WBW #41 – Talkin’ Tocai
Tags: 1winedude, 2006 Tocai Plus, Bastianich, Colli Orientali, Fruili
April 7th, 2010 at 5:24 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Bottle Juice, Wine Lover. Wine Lover said: Sting Like a “B” (Bastianich’s Ass-Kicking Friuli Goodness): Usually I prefer to know when wine s… http://bit.ly/9jzrLi (via @1WineDude) [...]
April 7th, 2010 at 9:31 am
My mouth watered when I read this, now I’m craving wine at 7:30am. Really??? Good stuff 1WD!
@fgj1013
April 7th, 2010 at 2:49 pm
Thanks, Felipe – hey, it's almost 7PM in Russia… ;-)
April 7th, 2010 at 3:54 pm
Regarding the Styrofoam problem. The stuff is not actually recyclable. It may be re-usable, but ultimately it breaks down and must be buried in a landfill, where it lasts basically forever. I started over a decade ago requesting that wine shipments come in recyclable cardboard, and after years of persistent effort, I'm only getting about 5% in Styrofoam – almost all of those from east coast PR firms who appear to be particularly insensitive and basically clueless about the environment. Anyway, I thought it worth mentioning that if you make a BIG STINK about it for a long time, they will respond. And out of thousands of wines received over many years, I can count on two hands the number that have been damaged in any way by being shipped in cardboard.
April 7th, 2010 at 4:43 pm
Thanks, Paul – consider it one of my new quests! I've been publicly thanking folks (via twitter) for shipping in environmentally-friendly packaging, but maybe what I need to do is produce a "wall of shame" for those who ship using Styrofoam…
Cheers!
April 10th, 2010 at 3:14 am
Excellent review! I will head over to IWM this weekend to check it out. We lived in Italy for a while and absolutely love the wines from Friuli, specifically from the Collio and Colli Orientali DOC zones.
April 10th, 2010 at 10:02 pm
Folks – I need to apologize, it turns out that I **was** contacted ahead of time about these samples, and simply lost track of the communication thread, and so I was WRONG when I mentioned that they were unsolicited. Although, technically I didn't solicit them so in a sense they were unsolicited… ah, forget it…
April 12th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
The Bastianich is a benchmark Tocai and we love it. Just a little correction: the Italian Wine Merchants' blog is Inside IWM (www.insideiwm.com) and we've been updating Monday-Friday, since November 2009. Check it! We love reading the blog, Joe!
April 12th, 2010 at 1:46 pm
Thanks, Melissa! Sorry about that, thanks for the correction!
April 13th, 2010 at 1:28 pm
We really appreciate your enthusiasm for Tocai Plus! It is a tiny part of our production, but such an important wine because it (like our Vespa Bianco and Calabrone wines) shows the enormous potential of Friuli Venezia Giulia.
I am the writer of that very infrequently updated blog, and I WISH with all my heart that I had more time to dedicate to writing it. Now that Vinitaly is over and the growing season has begun, I'll be able to do more for the blog.
In the meantime, Thanks for the great review!
April 13th, 2010 at 1:33 pm
Thanks, Wayne. I suppose that making tasty wine is a bit more important than updating the blog, after all. ;-)
August 27th, 2010 at 1:30 am
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