And yeah, I do just kind of get lucky that way when I taste Nizza. Please don’t hate me…

Our next Barbera in the Glass episode reunites me with Gianni, a man who can be almost as serious as the wines that we taste in this video. Gianni is an expert on all thing related to Nizza, the Monferrato-area appellation that is home to what is probably the world’s most intense, structured, and long-lived Barbera wines.

In this episode, Gianni and I taste through two more recent vintages of Nizza: 2012, and 2011. While those might not appear to be too “recent” when you look at the calendar, remember that a Nizza has strict aging requirements: between eighteen and thirty months of combined barrel and bottle aging are required before a wine labeled as Nizza can be released on the market.

As Gianni describes in the video, those two vintages could not have been more different. 2012 was ripe, warm, and dry, while 2011 saw an almost polar opposite combination of wet and cooler weather. The results of those wildly different vintages will almost certainly surprise you, because they are far from being a story of ugly extremes (where one wine could have been over-the-top and the other too lean and off-putting). If anything, what Gianni and I taste are book-end like examples of the very best that Barbera has to offer, across the incredibly diverse spectrum of its various flavors, aromas, and textures. And yeah, I do just kind of get lucky that way when I taste Nizza. Please don’t hate me…

If you’re curious on exactly how those vintages turned out, click the play button on the video, and have a look at what Gianni and I find. If you’re not curious at this point, well, maybe you should seek some professional help (or at least reevaluate your status as a lover of Italian red wines)!

The post NIZZA TASTING (NUMBER ONE) appeared first on My Name is Barbera.