A great-value, coastal Tuscan showing a delicate hand in the winery. From €19.90, $23.89, £30.64.
In my tasting article on Monday, Grattamacco – a high point, I described a tasting of 11 beautiful wines from this isolated estate high in the hills above the Bolgheri coast. It followed Sassicaia as the second to be established in here, in 1977.
The Etruscans, thought to be indigenous, left their mark on this part of the world long before the Romans took over. The estate takes its name from macco, a mineral scraped (grattato) away by Etruscan ironworkers in these hills.
In the wines I tasted there was impressive complexity and longevity (the oldest was a 1991). There was no evidence of the sometimes exaggerated style of wines from the rash of Bolgheri estates that emerged at the end of the last century. The wines were delightfully ethereal. This is perhaps partly because of the relatively high elevation, as high as the original vineyards for Sassicaia I described here, but also because of the determination of the founder, Piermario Meletti Cavallari, to capture in the bottle the wilderness surrounding the estate. This strategy has been continued by the current owners, his friends the Swiss Bertarelli family who also own Castello ColleMassari in Montecucco and Poggio di Sotto and Tenuta San Giorgio in Montalcino. The torch is now carried by winemaker Luca Marrone (seen below), who oversees all four estates, and Grattamacco’s resident assistant winemaker since 2016, Davide Torchio. This most obviously means including, most unusually, Sangiovese in the reds.
(It is a complete coincidence, by the way, that Marrone is involved not just in this wine but in my last wine of the week, another Bolgheri, Poggio Lamentano 2001. I came across the latter through its progenitor Davy Żyw and when I recommended it had yet to meet Marrone.)
This wine is labelled prominently Bolgheri whereas the label of the estate’s flagship wine, a Bolgheri Superiore, is dominated by the word Grattamacco. The Bolgheri Rosso has been in the Grattamacco portfolio ever since the creation of the Bolgheri DOC in 1994. Indeed it was the very first Bolgheri Rosso wine to be bottled and was created in an effort to promote the denomination. Marrone describes it as ‘a second wine of Grattamacco’ and I can certainly see why. I thought this blend of 30% Cabernet Sauvignon, 30% Merlot, 25% Cabernet Franc, 10% Sangiovese and 5% Petit Verdot was already delicious and is a worthy reflection of the style of the top wine. Like any fine second wine, it’s simply more approachable than the grand vin, and, as usual, in this case it costs a small fraction of it. The current, 2020 vintage of Grattamacco itself costs more than £70 a bottle whereas this wine can be found for much less, as you can see at the top of this article.
This was my tasting note, as usual rather terse when I’m tasting with a producer:
Grattomacco 2022 Bolgheri Rosso
Luscious-looking purple. Heady. Very rich and opulent. Rather gorgeous for a young wine. Rich but not heavy. GV 17/20 Drink 2024–32 14% alcohol
The Bolgheri Rosso is supplied by younger vines, especially from the lowest of the vineyard locations owned by the estate, on the road from the town of Bolgheri down to the coast, as well as from some early-picked older vines. (The harvest team sometimes go through older vineyards twice or three times to ensure all grapes are picked at optimum ripeness.) After fermentation in tank, about half of the wine is aged for eight months in used barriques.
However delicious the wine, it would be a mistake to describe 2022 as an easy growing season. It was extremely hot and dry until the end of July, followed by an unusually wet August. This close to the coast, there are quite a lot of free-draining sandy soils on which the vines tended to suffer, with sugar and phenolic ripening out of synch, but this estate’s clay-loams were much better at retaining moisture and the wine grown on them was clearly really rather good.
This wine can provide Supertuscan luxury for a fraction of the price. Winebow import the wines into the US. In the UK the wine is currently available by the bottle from XtraWine UK and by the six-bottle case (which works out better value) from Decorum Vintners. The wine is also available in Italy (of course), Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Czechia, France, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Hong Kong, Japan and, widely, in the US.
One more note for bargain-hunters. The UK supermarket Waitrose has for long included another excellent, and well-distributed, wine from the Bertarelli stable, a blend dominated by Sangiovese, in their range. I made Castello ColleMassari Riserva 2015 Montecucco a wine of the week back in 2019. When I mentioned during my recent tasting with Marrone that Waitrose were offering the 2019 vintage of this wine for just £9.99 in June, a discount of £6 a bottle, the public relations person for the group, who had accompanied Marrone, got quite upset at the idea of being associated with such a low price. I actually think it is well worth its usual price of £15.99. I gave it 16.5 and reckon it will still be drinking well until 2029.
See also Grattamacco – a high point.