2016 Sauvignon Blanc Riserva Bolzano Winery Review And Tasting Notes
The 2016 Bolzano Winery Sauvignon Blanc Riserva is an ambitious and well-made wine that wants to be a great wine. It is dense, rich, and full, making wood aging difficult. Between barrique and tonneau, it spends more than a year in cask.
Don’t expect a hard, uncompromising Sauvignon, Loire-style, all salt, rock, and electrifying verticality. This is dynamic yet sumptuous, certainly savory, but tending to complacent fatness, underlined by the touch of wood and vanilla.
You will find it a little built if you are fond of New Zealand-style Sauvignon, accustomed to whipping lime.
The vineyards are on steep slopes in the municipality of Renon, just above Bolzano. This is a great place for South Tyrolean Sauvignon Blanc and has become a pleasant place for it.
Harvesting by hand, soft pressing, fermentation, and aging in small wood and tonneau barrels. After a good rest in the bottle, it is ready.
Organoleptic characteristics
A mix of tropical fruit, vanilla, grapes, helichrysum, sage, and a thousand aromatic herbs, with rock, iodine, and flowers in the background, explodes on the tongue.
It is good as an elegance, expressive, and spicy, but it never reaches the outburst of many Sauvignon Blancs that have unpleasant green hints.
So there are no pyrazines?
From this vantage point, the ripening is ideal; there is a cascade of intense aromas, but they are perfectly integrated, are hints, and do not overpower.
No cat urine, thanks.
On the palate, it is salty and well-shaped by citrus acidity. It moves straight, even if the taste expands in richness thanks to the aging in wood, which has enhanced the creaminess of the wine. It’s not butter spread on roasted papaya, but we are close.
Overall, it’s a beautiful, stylized wine with hints of vanilla and age. It’s a wine that shows the desire to make a wide range of wines, but it needs to sit in the bottle for years to get rid of all the wood. After 6 years, the wood is still dominant.
It is fighting the melons and the vervain with the knife between its teeth. Indeed, in Burgundy style, it will begin to evolve and find a more complete and balanced development in the tenth year.
For now, it is in a transitory phase: good, but the charisma is still far away. As mentioned, we are not discussing the quality, which is undoubted.
Price
26-28 euros. Indeed, it isn’t cheap, but it is a limited production, coming from a single cru at high altitude, and all in all, the quality justifies the price.
Food Pairings
All wines find their realization in combination with food, and this wine is the proof. We have to admit that this whimsical and eclectic Sauvignon finds a perfect match with Indian, Chinese, and Thai fish cuisine, thanks to an incredible combination of spices and lemongrass. Fish and chips, fish tacos, octopus salad, baked fish, parmigiana ravioli, spaghetti with clams, chicken tikka masala, Chicken Cacciatore, Vitello Tonnato, truffle risotto, pasta alla carbonara.