| Piano Piano Barbera d'Asti DOC | £47.94 6 bottle half case (£7.99 per bottle) plus £5 post & packing |
Passionate about drinking good wine? The producers of this wine are. So much so that five years ago, Phil and Ingrid Blades decided they needed to make their own. After several years of extensive searching, finally in 2004 they found a suitable vineyard to buy. Piano Piano is the first red wine to be released from their estate. Being committed to an environmentally friendly philosophy, the couple combine the best of traditional and modern viniculture techniques. Phil Blades tells us “we are committed to ensuring the perfect matching of soil, climate and grape variety alongside rigorous selection of our grapes and meticulous care in the production process from vineyard to cellar. We believe that everything we do must respect natures own enormous contribution, following organic principles is not a matter for subjective choice, for us it’s simply essential for the success of our vineyard over time”. In naming the wine, “Piano Piano" [meaning softly, softly or slowly, slowly in Italian] Phil and Ingrid are affectionately acknowledging the advice they often got from their local Italian wine community. It is also a tongue in check dig at the strict Italian wine laws and bureaucracy that slows down everything in
Tasting Notes
Piano Piano D.O.C. 2005 is a young and easy Barbera with a marked personality from a low yield crop. The producer has helped concentrate the flavour of the wine by restricting the number of grape bunches allowed to mature on the vine. The Blades quality over quantity approach has resulted in a mouth-filling well structured wine with lemon-tart acidity and marked but accessible tannins. It’s still rather youthful palate shows a good density of bright berry fruit with a tannic, spicy finish. With a pleasing aroma of blackberry and citrus it’s taste is typically Barbera grape with a hint of liquorice. Dark reddish-purple in colour, it offers generous black fruit and ripe fruit flavours. A little zesty still, it comes into perspective with red meats and strong cheeses. The wine shows real promise for further improvement.
Although not a cheap ‘pound a bucket’ wine, its price is at the low end for decent Barbera and so represents a very good buy. Released in September 2006, it can be enjoyed now or left to smooth out more over the next few years.
.Serving Note: This wine benefits from being allowed to ‘breath’ for about an hour before drinking. Decant or uncork and pour off a sip to increase the exposed surface area, and let it sit at room temperature for an hour.
Variety of grapes: 100% Barbera double selection
Production area: Castelnuovo Belbo
Appellation: DOC
Alcohol by volume: 13.5%
Soil: calcareous, clayey
Harvesting: Late September
Fermentation: 8–10 days
Ageing: 6 months in steel tanks then a further 6 in the bottle
Bottling: March
Serving temperature: 16°–18° C
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