(available by the six-pack only from thefinewinecompany.co.uk, or around £34.99 from glugwines.co.uk; oldbridgewine.co.uk; valvonacrolla.co.uk; stswithinswineshippers.com)
My column this week is a vehicle for mentioning one of the most unusual and fascinating wines of the year. My hope is that this wine becomes the vinous gift that you can give to your trickiest and most well-informed of wine-loving friends this Christmas. They will never have tasted it before, I am sure, because it is awfully rare, and it will be sure to light up their senses with its deep, throbbing palate and peacock’s tail of perfume.
Made from fruit harvested from a three-walled vineyard (Broli in the heart of Valpantena), only the very finest bunches of corvina/corvinone and rondinella are used for this wine. Using partially dried grapes, to augment the aromas and flavours and deepen the mid-palate enormously, the wine is bottled in a rather ostentatious flagon, as you can see from the accompanying image. Closer to Amarone in flavour than a standard Valpolicella, this is a wine with an enormous flavour trail which fires up your senses and leaves you feeling amazing.
It has been aged for one year in large barrels and a further two in tanks before bottling. We now have it on select merchants’ shelves at six years old (see list of suppliers above) and this is the sweet spot for this noble wine. Decant it and let the magic happen. I wish all my readers a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
• Matthew Jukes is a winner of the International Wine & Spirit Competition’s Communicator of the Year (matthewjukes.com).