Current Wine Favorites

[Michael Chiarello Blog Feed]

Of our wines, I’m drinking this 2005 Giana Zin (http://chiarellofamilyvineyards.com/ourwines/index.html) . It’s the best we’ve ever made. It got a 90 in the Spectator last week, and Zinfandel never gets a 90! It’s like getting a 97 for a Cabernet. I remember working really hard on that vintage in ’05. It drinks well, and I think wines always taste better when you work hard at them and you win. Sometimes you don’t win - sometimes you lose. But they taste great when you get everything right.I’m drinking a lot of Lambrusco, because I’m on this kick as we’re working on the restaurant. This is a Frizzante, a sparkling red wine with a little bit of residual sugar. Very ‘every day’. This is wine from Parma, Bologna, where I was traveling recently, but you see it up into Venice too. These are all small mom and pop wineries that make this wine. Giacomo Bologna in Piedmont (Italy) makes one called Monello that I love. The problem is that they don’t travel so well, so if you want to bring them over for sale you have to find someone who wants to invest enough money to take a $6 bottle of wine and bring it over, refrigerating it the whole way.But I’ve been drinking a lot of Lambrusco trying to get a feel for it, it’s a perfect first course wine - a cool refreshing sparkling full-bodied red wine to have with prosciutto and Salami in the summer, and in early fall when my new restaurant opens.And I’ve been drinking a lot of Vare (http://www.varevineyards.com/vare/index.jsp) , from George Vare’s (http://www.varevineyards.com/vare/page/vineyards.jsp) vineyard. They are making wine with a grape called Ribolla Gialla. It’s a beautiful grape from the Friuli-Venezia Giulia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friuli-...lia_%28wine%29) section of Northern Italy. I don’t know where the heck George got the bud wood from. He does these 500ml bottles, and we’ve been drinking a lot of that, so I’d say its my favorite white wine at the moment.

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