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Percarlo and Siepi: A comparative Vertical

Does Sangiovese age?


If you ask 10 different people whether or not Sangiovese can age, you are likely to get 10 different responses, ranging from an incredulous “of course” to an equally incredulous “of course not.”


How can this be? Simply because Sangiovese is many things, many wines, and can be different things to different people. Consider for the moment that you can buy Chianti, Chianti Classico, Chianti Classico Riserva and Super Tuscans all from Tuscany, all based on Sangiovese, with each trying to fill a niche in the marketplace that is not served by the other. Heck, you can find producers who offer this line-up of wines and more, simply trying to satisfy market demands.


You think I’m going to be able to offer an easy answer to the question of Sangiovese’s agability? Not a chance, but a longer answer? That I can do.


We might as well begin with why Sangiovese might be a good candidate for agability in the first place. In two words, tannins and acid. These are the two elements wine geeks refer to when speaking of the structure of a wine, red wine in particular. While both can be added to a wine, having them in balance and in quantities that might suggest durability in a wine is the best indicator of a wine’s likely ability to age. I say likely because it is not always that simple.


In order to properly age, and for the wine’s structure to gently soften over time allowing for the formation of complex flavors with some reminiscent fruit, a wine has to have a certain type and concentration of fruit to begin with. That’s really where the categories of Chianti come into play.


For example, the vast majority of straight Chianti is simple wine, lightly fruity, with plenty of acid and modest tannins. There are obvious reasons for this. The first is price driven. Cheap wines must be made in bulk. In order to make money making cheap wine, you have to make generous amounts of it. The easiest way to do that is by cropping your vineyards quite heavily. I know, many people just sighed disdainfully, thinking that over-cropping is one of the great sins of wine making, but you have to consider all the facts before heaping your disdain on these producers.


The goal of much Chianti is to make a wine that is simple and fun. A wine that is likely going to be drunk on a Monday night, and a Tuesday night, and a Wednesday night, and… you get the picture. We’re not shooting for high art here folks, neither are the producer nor the consumer. We simply want a decent, simple wine at a great price, and that’s what most Chianti manages to do.


This heavy cropping is important because of what it delivers to the winemaker. Heavy crop loads tend not to ripen all that well, so the resultant wines tend to be fairly high in acid, have astringent tannins and light red fruit flavors. In fact, that is the start of many a fine Chianti!


The acid can be managed, acid reduction is not uncommon in wine making, and the tannins can be managed as well through shorter maceration and fining, but the fruit is what the fruit is. So simple, fresh Chianti can be made in either a soft or structured style, though most winemakers have really dialed in on a balance built on the intensity of the fruit. What we get is what we asked for: a light, simple, fresh wine that generally has very modest ageing potential. It is possible that the wine will improve over its first year or two, something I find most wines do, but once that fruit begins to fade, you’re going to be left with an increasingly acid-driven wine. There’s little joy in old Chianti, but that wasn’t the point.


If you want a Chianti that can improve with age, take a look at Chianti Classico. Here, the term “Classico” refers both to more stringent viticultural and wine making regulations and to a well defined region, the heart of traditional Chianti production roughly centered between Pisa, Florance and Siena. Here wines have all the attributes we tend to associate with Chianti, but with more.


There is more richness of fruit in Chianti Classico, more alcohol, more ripe tannins, more depth and more power. With all this more, it is not surprising to discover that Chianti Classico also has a longer life than Chianti. The extra depth of fruit and richness in particular allows Chianti Classico to develop complexity while retaining fruitiness as it ages. And the lower yields practiced here retain plenty of acid and tannin for ageing, though both tend to be riper, softer and with better innate balance than Chianti.


Chianti Classico ages much like Chianti early in its life, though at a slightly slower rate. It tends to peak fairly quickly but stays at its peak for a longer period of time, fading away in a much slower and more interesting way as complexities begin to emerge from the depth of the wine’s fruit. Excellent Chianti Classico can still be at its peak at age ten but rarely improves beyond that. Still, with so many of these wines affordably priced, they make for excellent wines to add to your cellar and very nice wines with which to display what aged wine is like to students of the vine.


Leaving out some other sub-regions, Chianti Riserva and the broad, vague “Superior” category, the next Sangiovese category we will explore is Chianti Classico Riserva, which I’m going to abbreviate as CCR.


CCR is from the same region as Chianti Classico but is subject to even more stringent regulations that include two years of barrel ageing and three months of bottle ageing before releases, though most producers opt for even long periods in the bottle. The reason for all this ageing is that this is often the producer’s best fruit. It’s concentrated and rich, ripe with tannins and in need of time to soften. The results of the ageing are often remarkable drinkability and incipient complexity on release, which explains CCR’s rather rapid arrival at its plateau of maturity.


While CCR may reach its plateau quickly, it generally does tend to stick around at its peak for sometime. The wine’s innate richness along with the oxidative effects of barrel ageing tend to create a wine that ages fairly slowly. While 10 years of age might be the turning point for Chianti Classico, CCR is often just hitting its stride by its tenth birthday, and typically will continue to drink well past 15 to 20 years, with exceptional wines surviving even longer. If you thought that Chianti Classico was a good value to cellar, you might be surprised by some of the prices of CCR. At $30 or $35 a bottle, you’re likely to find wines that will be spectacular at age 15 and will likely be nearly as good at age 25, if in a notably different period of development.


Great CCR, like most great age-worthy wine, tends to fade away as opposed to simply collapsing into its own structure. They continue to develop nuances and complexity as their fruit fades, so while not for every palate, they certainly should be considered among the world’s great wines.


The finale category of Sangiovese to take the stage today, and one whose age-worthiness I have been examining of late in both my 1997 vs. 1999 Showdown and the vertical tastings of Siepi and Percarlo, is the Super Tuscan.


Super Tuscan is such a broad category of wines that it is essentially a meaningless term. While there is no formal definition of what a Super Tuscan is, it is roughly everything a Tuscan wine can not be! The category originally evolved because of the Chianti regulation in force in the 1960s. Producers felt constrained and many believed that the requirement of Trebbiano in the Chianti blend resulted in inferior wine. The motivation behind keeping Trebbiano in the regulations was purely fiscal by the way. Small producers and farmers who grew Trebbiano would have had no place to sell their grapes if not for in Chianti, or so went the thought at the time.


Slowly, some producers took the very bold step of producing a wine that they intended to be their top wine, outside of the DOC system of the day. That meant that those wines gave up the noble name of Chianti to be labeled with a fantasy name and to be sold as lowly Vino da Tavola. To put it in perspective, when the first of these wines was released (1967 San Felice Vigorello) it was in the same official category as the bulk wines selling for pennies per liter.


This really doesn’t help me tell the story of ageing Sangiovese, but I just wanted to explain the history of Super Tuscan wines for a moment to point out the meaninglessness of the name and how it might pose problems here. To remedy that issue, allow me to narrow the discussion to Super Tuscan wines to those which are primarily from Sangiovese.


What we are talking about then are, in essence, Super Chiantis. Generally produced from low yields, these wines tend to be packed with fruit and tannins, quite a different story from their distant Chianti cousins. Another almost defining feature of Super Tuscan wines, with a few notable exceptions, is their relationship with French oak barrels, often new and generally 225 liter Barriques. The resulting wines are rich, powerful and dense, with layers of tannin that often resemble Bordeaux more than Chianti, and follow a similar ageing path.


You can expect many Super Tuscans to require many years in the cellar to reach their peak. Like with many wines, particularly those of the mid to late ‘90s, much of that time is required simply to help the oak impression soften. Like much of Italy, Tuscany was in the midst of a love affair with French oak and extraction through the second half of the 1990s. Things have generally moved to a more moderate style of wine making since then, but those are the wines I have in mind when building my ageing chart.


With powerful fruit and plenty of sweet oak, they were wines that impressed in their youth but, like Bordeaux, tended to shut down and become difficult during adolescence. In this respect, they fundamentally differ from most Sangiovese wines. The ageing chart helps to illustrate this dip in drinkability that many of these wines suffered from.


Time in the bottle generally proved beneficial to these wines, and they tended to return to top form right around age 12 or so, which turns out to be a great time to compare them to CCR of like vintages. In fact, when you look at the relative ageing charts of the Sangiovese wines I’m discussing, you’ll see that buying several wines from the same vintage leaves you with wines at or near their peaks for decades after the vintage. That is not an accident. As I mentioned earlier, producers are looking to fill various niches with each of these wines, and one of the niches they have in mind is time based!


So that’s a very brief run-down of the Sangiovese ageing curves. I’ve built this out with only the best vintages in mind, though my best will not necessarily correspond to other’s bests. Think 1999, 2001, 2004, and 2006 here.


If you want to see my opinions of the various vintages in Tuscany, check out my Tuscan vintage chart and stay tuned to The Vintages of Tuscany, coming this Thursday.



Siepi v Percarlo



I know that I am biased and that my biases are not always correct. I also know enough to not worry about things like this and just accept my new reality. If you’ve been following my writing, you might recall that I am a big fan of the 100% Sangiovese Super Tuscan known as Percarlo. In fact, I recently included it in an article I wrote about my Top 10 Sangiovese Producers.


What you might not know is that I was once also a big fan of Siepi, another Super Tuscan, but in this case a blend of equal parts Merlot and Sangiovese.


Through the second half of the 1990s and early noughts, I had rather equal opinions of these wines, or at least judging from what I stocked in my cellar. Sometime over the past five years, my opinions began to diverge. I found more recent vintages of Siepi less interesting and even had a few terrible encounters with wines from 1997 and 1998.


My hopes were not high when I delved into my cellar to pull out bottles for a grand #GTiSangiovese showdown, so I enthusiastically pulled the Percarlos, adding in the Siepi as a gauge to help judge the respective vintages of the tasting: 1995-1999. This is their story.


Slide 1


1995-1999 was a bit of a golden period for Tuscany weather wise. There really isn’t a bad vintage in the bunch. Bracketed by two finely balanced and elegantly austere vintages, the string also included the hallowed 1997 vintage which saw hot, beautiful weather preceded by a particularly wet winter, giving the vines all the water they could possibly need. 1998 was a near repeat of the summer of 1997 but without the water, causing some stress issues throughout Tuscany, leaving 1996 as a bit of the black sheep here, but one that would have been a star had it come three years earlier when Tuscany was suffering through several lousy vintages.


Knowing all this, I had a pretty good idea going into the tasting of which wines I would prefer. Just the previous week, I enjoyed a tasting of 1997 and 1999 Super Tuscans which confirmed by prejudices on that front. 1997, while fun and still delicious in some cases, simply lacks the elegance and finesse of 1999. I expected 1998 to finish on the bottom of this tasting, followed by 1996, then 1995 and 1997 fighting a stylistic battle, with 1999 finishing out on top. Let’s see what the wines said!


Slide 2


1995


1995 is not a vintage for everybody. It is austere and a bit tough, but is also fresh, bright and youthful in a rather strict way. The Percarlo was exactly as expected, very 1995 in its youthfulness and focus. Not a big wine, but one that was beautifully balanced, if still surprisingly immature.


Siepi on the other hand has a nose marked by green pepper and herbs. If that’s your thing, then this is a very complex wine. As it so happens, that can be my thing and this bottle of 1995 Siepi absolutely rocked! It was at full peak, fairly resolved, silky, soft and layered with exceptional complexity. I loved this wine! I can’t believe it but today 1995 Seipi is a better wine than 1995 Percarlo. The Siepi is likely just about to begin to fall apart a little bit, in fact by the end of the night it was less expressive while the Percarlo was unmoved, but holy hurricanes would I love to drink that again.


Advantage Siepi!


Slide 2


1995 Siepi


Lots of vegetal notes, lively and bright, a bit of oak spice. Nice balance and intensity, with an assertive overlay of green vegetal and herb notes of lovely faded cherry fruit. Elegant, open and smooth, nicely resolved and in a very nice place, the Merlot really helps out here, adding softness and roundness to an obviously lean and austere structure. Plum skin, bright fruit. Fun wine, not the most complex, but lovely, showing smoky oak balanced by lovely currant fruit and herbal notes on the moderately long finish. 92pts


Slide 3


1995 Percarlo


Opening with blood, fruit and flowers on the slightly reticent nose, this turns more strawberry scented with herb and a touch of toast before tightening up over the course of the night, showing more leather and black cherry. Tight on entry, plenty of acid here and still a relatively heavy dose of wood tannin, but there is fine, fruit as well. Rusty and mineral on the back end with apple skin austerity and some leather. Rich and austere with fine wood, supported by sweetness of dried strawberry fruit on the finish and a hint of alcohol. With air this seems to lose fruit faster than structure.  88pts


Slide 4


1996


Incredibly, both wines were flawed here. The Siepi was cooked and the Parcarlo lightly corked. Under their defects, they both exhibited some of the traits that are helping to rehabilitate 1996’s reputation, the chief issue of course being that the vintage simply preceded 1997.


Both wines showed solid richness, nice ripeness of structure and fine balance. I can’t talk to the quality of the wines, but on the face of it the vintage looks to be solid and continues to improve in my mind.


Slide 5


1997


Ah, the golden year. This was one of those years when critics competed with each other for the most over the top hyperbole. The best ever, breath taking, monumental, back up the truck, mortgage the house, sell your wife or husband! Yes, the wines were awfully appealing on release and some have aged well, but to make these extreme statements strikes me as odd at best and downright silly at worst in light of so many other fine vintages. How were the wines?


First off, they were oaky. This was the peak of Italy’s love affair with new barrique and given the opulence of the fruit, it’s not surprising to see that many producers got carried away here. With the Percarlo there wasn’t that much more to be discerned, it’s a wine still wrapped up in a tight veil of assertive oakiness, and that is not a good sign. It remains fresh, aromatic and painful on the palate. The Siepi on the other hand showed its oak, but revealed much more with herbal, spicy aromas and fruit that was just beginning to dry out, showing some pruney characteristics as well.


Closer than the 1995 but advantage still goes to Siepi!


Slide 6


1997 Siepi


A little jammy on the nose with blackberry, black currant fruit topped with a bit of bbq sauce, tomato, plum sauce, crystallized spice and burnt sugar. There is a touch of oxidation here along with some herbal nuances adding complexity. Light on entry and fairly elegant with a nice balance of wild berry and plum flavor which fades throughout the evening. There’s still a bit of wood tannin lending this a chewy texture and the oak does pop on the modest finish. A lot going on the nose but the palate is showing signs of falling apart. 88pts


Slide 7


1997 Percarlo


Very mineral water and toasty oak-driven nose with a hint of prune,  though with air this gains some freshness, showing curry and white floral complexity. Dense in the mouth and bright, but the red fruit flavors of are showing some oxidative edges. The tannins here are big and dry, chunky, clumsy and a bit hot even. There’s decent length with some sweetness but still so much caramel, toasty oak and a wall of wood tannins that may never really integrate.  87pts


Slide 8


1998


Here’s a vintage I’ve generally avoided in Tuscany. Not that great wines weren’t made, it’s just that on release the wines tasted a bit out of balance, high in alcohol and definitely quite ripe, without the freshness that even the 1997s exhibited on release.


That remains the story today. Again, this was a period of oak-ophilia in Italy, so it’s not surprising that both wines were marked by wood. As with the 1997, the Percarlo was just an extracted, oaky mess, gritty and drying on the palate. There is plenty of fruit there, heavily extracted fruit, but today it’s all being beaten down by smoldering two-by-fours.


The Siepi showed a bit of the heat of the vintage and oak but still managed to be complex and interesting, if marred by some poopy brett. It might have had a hint of TCA, but if so, under the brett so it was impossible to be sure. Even with all its problems, I still preferred it to the Percarlo.


Three to nothing?!


Slide 9


1998 Siepi


Pretty oaky on the nose, rubbery, leathery, though with lovely notes of coriander,  plum and herb. Turns bretty fairly quickly though with underlying notes of incense, spicy wood, leather and coffee. There’s also a slight musty note which might be a touch of TCA but the poopy bretty covers it well. Soft, rich fruit on entry lends this a slightly sweet impression. With nice tannins and good acid this is a bit compact but fresh and sort of muscular, full of blackberry fruit and a touch of fungi. With air this turns a bit hard with tannins that are a little woody and stiff on the back end, and while there’s a nice bit of sweetness still here, there seems to be more structure than fruit. 88pts


slide 10


1998 Percarlo


Pretty oaky on the nose with some mineral and floral elements, like a fresher ‘97 but still a bit muddy. Round and bright in the mouth with lots of red plum, blackberry fruit and some caramel oak notes adding a distinct nuttiness. There are a lot of tannins on the finish, raw, woody tannins, which make this a bit tough right now and dry and gritty. Lots of nutty/caramelly oak lends the fruit an even more earthy, leathery cast. 87pts


Slide 11


1999


So here we were, the youngest flight of the night. What could we learn from this beautifully pure and balanced vintage? I prayed that the Percarlo could salvage out a winner here so that I didn’t look quite as foolish as I might have otherwise. That my friends, would take some doing.


That doing was what Percarlo did. The excesses of the previous wines are in full retreat here. Yes it’s still oaky, but not oppressively so, and the extraction signals a return to a more elegant wine. There is fruit here and tension, with even some incipient finesse. This is a very young wine, there’s no doubt of that, but one that should greatly reward your patience. Could this be another 1990 (an epic Percarlo) in the making? I believe so.


In contrast, the Siepi showed an oak influence that was fairly consistent with the previous wines, though here too the extraction of the wine seems to have been dialed back a bit. This is a lovely wine, very likely a worthy successor to the 1995 Siepi that is already showing sweet herbal notes on the nose, but it’s nowhere near the vegetal quality that makes the 1995 divisive, if appealing to me. This Siepi is a fine wine, just a bit safe. Safe is sometimes boring.


Advantage Percarlo


Slide 12

1999 Percarlo


Lovely notes of cut plum, cherry and strawberry are accented by spicy, floral, herbal nuances. This is fresh, intense, complex and lively, with a fine tension between the  sweet red fruit and touch of vanilla. Intense and penetrating. Plenty of fruit here, black cherry and bright at that, with big, juicy acids all backed up by well judged oak notes. The liquory black fruit builds on the back end, before brightening on the big acid finish. This has lovely cut, good length and is tense like a drum skin, with nice dry extract of red fruit on the finale. 91pts


slide 13


1999 Siepi


This offers up lovely aromatic complexity with dried and fresh herbs, sweet oak, leather, spicy wood, jammy black currant and a bit of baked plum. It is fresh, bright and complex. A touch soft, perhaps a little dilute and just a little loose on the palate, but still nicely fresh with a little plummy, almost nectarine tinged fruit. The tannins seem a touch dry but remain covered by the fruit which wears coffee, vanilla and spice wood tones. The back end is more fruited and shows a flash of tomato leaf before the wood takes control. 89pts


Slide 14


Conclusions


With this tasting I set out to look at the quality of the respective vintages. While that was achieved, what was revealed in even starker detail was the state of Tuscan wine making through these years. The use of oak, the levels of extraction and even the ripeness of the fruit all changed rather widely and quite vividly as we progressed through the vintages.


This all makes it more difficult to discern the actual quality of each vintage, which is an exercise in stupidity based on two producers but one that I’m willing to do right after I stick this pencil in an electrical socket. What I do feel comfortable in saying is that this tasting proved to me the superior quality of the 1999 vintage over the 1997, and also reinforced my notion that both 1995 and 1996 are generally undervalued by the marketplace, while 1997 is over valued.


Slide 15


The Wines


I definitely  have a new found appreciation for Siepi and am thrilled I brought the wines when I did, I might even take another look at more recent vintages. As for Percarlo, relationships are full of ups and downs. The 1997 and 1998 are decidedly downs, and while the 1997 is the most highly regarded Percarlo of the 1990s and possibly of all time, I’ve never thought as much of the wines as the critics do. I guess we’re just looking for different things from our Percarlos. I still have faith in the 1995, 1996 and especially the 1999, but these are anomalous wines, requiring nearly two decades in the cellar before they blossom. If you’re looking for something to drink soon, grab a mature Siepi, you won’t regret it!








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