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A Tuscan Merlot in Tails: Le Macchiole – Messorio 2010 IGT Toscana

ByUmberto Gambino

3 November 2016
Messorio 2010

messorio-2010My dear friends and readers, welcome all to my new blog.

I like to much to tell you about an excellent wine that really deserves to be known. I am convinced that most you have already heard about it because this wine is very famous outside Italy but if it’s not so, this is the right time to tell you about it. I’ve been drinking this wine and I really loved it.

You should know that in Tuscany there’s a really suited area for the cultivation of high quality grapes: not only Montalcino and not only Chianti Classico area. I’m talking about Bolgheri land (Livorno province, Tuscany), that feels beneficial influence of the Tirrenian Sea which is very close.

So, I tasted an extraordinary red wine, a “Super Tuscan” born only from Merlot grapes: Messorio 2010. This wine is produced by a small, strong and determined woman, Cinzia Merli: she’s Le Macchiole’s owner at Bolgheri. Merli’s vineyards lining Bolgheri road, a real “wine road” that connects Bolgheri and Castagneto Carducci. These are lands where italian writer Giosuè Carducci was born.

Cinzia Merli

Messorio (which means in old terms harvest) wine is a really great Merlot to smell and taste! Flavors of iodine, Mediterranean flora and just the marine influence. It’s like a Botticelli’s painting with small touches of licorice, violet flowers and sweet tobacco. A modern Merlot, vintage 2010, drunk and sipped with satisfaction: intense taste, very balanced, very fresh, with silky tannins and a long balsamic final. Messorio is a graceful wine, complex, elegant, really drinkable with passion. But if you find to taste other vintages of Messorio not let escape them because will be high level too.

Other nice vintages of Messorio are: 2008, 2013, 2011, 1994, 2004

Therefore I want to acclaim Cinzia Merli because she’s a great determined and strong woman who has been able (with the help of her brother Massimo) to continue the work of her husband Eugenio Campolmi who died in 2002.

More technical information
The selected fruit destinated to Messorio is only 800 grams per plant and then a team works a triple selection of grapes. After 20 days of fermentation, partly in steel and partly in wooden tuns, wine aging for 14 months in 225 liters barrels (75% new oak barrels and other 25% second use oak barrells). Then wine ageing for 17 months in bottle. Produced 10,000 bottles. Organic Wine.

Designations: IGT means a wine made in a specified territorial geographic indication
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My Rating: 95/100
Retail price: $ 140 (€ 130)

www.lemacchiole.it

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ByUmberto Gambino

Professional journalist and sommelier, from an early age I breathed the scents of the vineyard and tasted the wine in my grandfather's cellar, in Sicily. The multiple life and work experiences brought me first to Liguria, then to the capital. Roman by adoption, but always Sicilian at heart, I am always fascinated by the beauties of our Italy, between territories to explore and typical food and wine.