Veneto IGT Cabernet Alzero 2018
Wine Description
Alzero is Quintarelli's answer to a question nobody else dared ask: what happens when Bordeaux varieties are given the full Amarone treatment.
Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon, roughly 40% each with about 20% Merlot, are dried on racks for months, fermented slowly and then aged for years in cask, so long that each release arrives with the calm of a finished thought.
The wine sets cassis and black cherry against tobacco, cedar, dark chocolate and a balsamic sweetness no conventional Cabernet possesses, its tannins dense but glossy.
The 2015 is a young Alzero with its best years still far ahead.
Serve at 18 °C after a generous decant. It stands up to a rib of beef, lamb with herbs or feathered game, and it is one of the few Italian reds that can close a dinner entirely on its own.
Winery
Giuseppe Quintarelli, the quiet master of Valpolicella, ran his family's hillside estate at Negrar from 1950 until his death in 2012 and set a standard the region still measures itself against. His daughter Fiorenza and her family keep the cellar exactly as he left it: about eleven hectares of vines, long natural drying of the grapes, slow fermentations and years of rest in large old botti, with every wine released only when the family judges it ready. Production stays near sixty thousand bottles a year, and the famous handwritten labels still leave the estate at their own unhurried pace.
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