Sangiovese

With all of the excitement about Bordeaux wines each year, other prominent wine regions with expressive terroir get overshadowed.  I was reminded of this as I sipped a glass of Sangiovese wine last evening.  Italy, as a whole, is a wine region with appellations throughout that produce very distinctive fruit filled wines.  The Sangiovese I drank was generic but if I wanted to go deeper within the appellation I could have chosen a Chianti or Chianti Classico or a wine with more depth, a Chianti Classico Reserva.  All of these Sangiovese based wines are cherry laddend in flavor, but as you get more specific with terroir  the cherry becomes deep wild cherry or black cherry in flavor, surrounded with layers of tar, earth, and sometimes green pepper; each appellation offering a different expression of the Sangiovese grape.  Sangiovese to the 10th power would have to be Brunello di Montalcino.  I buy this as a splurge and take it into the closet with me.  Yes, this is an act of hording and non-sharing but I love to privately savor its layers of complexity.  Each sip brings a new awareness and insight into what the effects of land can do.  You know, the wine grape may just be the only food that takes on the characteristics of its land.  An orange is just an orange, a green apple is just a green apple…but a wine grape grown on different plots of land is as different as a fingerprint.  That’s what wine is all about.   One of my favorite Italian wine producers is Ruffino.  Ruffino anything will be good.  Also, here’s an Italian wine site I found so that you can learn more about the country, the food, and of, course the wine http://www.italianmade.com/wines/home.cfm

enjoy