2005 Durigutti Bonarda

My experience with this wine is a lot like this…

You don’t have anything planned for Friday night. You’re at the library checking out your books when you notice the librarian is kinda cute. (If you’re a female reading this, just substitute the librarian for a computer geek) Very cliche, I know, but her fashion sense is off and she’s fairly shy, but she’s got a nice smile, so you decide to ask her out, if nothing else than to have something to do Friday night. She giggles and says sure, you exchange numbers and you’re on your way.

Money’s been pretty tight lately, but you take her to a little hole in the wall Italian joint that you know is quite good. During dinner it hits you that this girl is really quite interesting, and even pretty fun. Things go well and you’re back at your place, where things heat up. Soon you realize you’ve made the discovery of a lifetime as this girl’s wrapper was hiding some pretty sweet candy, and her demeanor has become quite sexy!

The next day at work you can’t stop thinking about her and how great your evening was with her. What a surprise she was! You can’t help thinking that if she had been raised a little differently that she’d be a bit more self aware and probably more materialistic… hell, she’d be out of your league. You can’t wait to see her again and again.

I love this wine like that. I wasn’t expecting much and it pretty much blew me away. I’ve had plenty of fruit bombs for under $10 that I’ve rated pretty well, but this one has everything. It is fairly fruity after some decanting, but it is balanced, and has a great mix of old and new world styles. I’m sure up to a point, but the longer you leave it open the better it gets. Of course, if you decant for about an hour before drinking, you probably won’t find out what it tastes like after 4 hours… you’ll be pouring non-stop until its gone.

It is very rare that we buy more than one bottle of any wine. There are just too many different wines out there to try and our appetite for variety typically out-weighs our desire to repeat a good wine. That said, we bought 3 bottles of this for a get-together. We drank one during the get-together and loved it so much we polished off the remaining two over the following week and have bought 8 more bottles to have on hand. I think that’s a record for us!

I look forward to seeing what this producer does in the next vintage. Note that if you don’t like any tannin in your wine, you may not like this wine as much as we do. When you first pop the cork it is fairly tannic and dusty. I had forgotten where it was made and was pretty convinced that it was from Italy. This wine is great with pizza and tomato based pasta dishes. I’m sure it will go great with BBQ and steak (both of which we’ll probably try it with in the near future). Anyway, in the K&L review they say it is full of blue and black fruit… I agree, but think it is more balanced with some red fruit as well. It also has my favorite… black pepper. There’s veggies, meat, you name it. For our tastes, this is hard to beat at a mere 9 bucks.

Rating: 91

Price: $9 (K&L Wines)

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