I have been wanting to try this red wine since I broke a bottle of Vietti's "Tre Vigne" Dolcetto on the way to Christmas dinner. I bought this bottle (which has great label art--a nice picture of an ant, of all things) for about $13 and decided to pair it with the linguine with bolognese sauce I was going to prepare.

The wine is fundamentally unbalanced, and it made me sad. It has a dull red color with tints of pruple at the edges, and the aroma is indistinct. I would have called it "spicy," but I made an effort to look for specific spices and could not find them. My first impression, probably an unfair one, was of rubbing alcohol. On the taste front, the wine was, as predicted, light bodied, with very little tannin and a short finish. The thing that whacked me in the head was the sensationally high level of acidity. I purchased the wine thinking it would have a relatively high acid content (and thus might balance the acid in the tomato sauce), but this was like biting into a lemon.

I do not recommend this wine. This is not because Vietti is a bad winery--I have had other Dolcettos from them and have generally been pleased. But Dolcetto is a wine to be drunk young, and I suspect that this '98 is just following its natural evolutionary arc--toward vinegar.

UPDATE: I finished this wine last night, and noticed that it had substantially more sediment than I would have expected from a Dolcetto this young--whether or not it is unfiltered. I wonder if there was not some sort of slip-up in production or bottling.

Back to Rook's Wine Reviews

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.