Wine of the week: a Christmas gift for the family oenophile

By Matthew Jukes

published 20 December 2019

in Features

2013 Brolo dei Giusti, Valpolicella Superiore, Veneto, Italy

(available by the six-pack only from thefinewinecompany.co.uk, or around £34.99

from glugwines.co.uk; oldbridgewine.co.uk;

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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).

Matthew Jukes has worked in the UK wine business for well over three decades and during this time has written 14 wine books.

Matthew regularly lectures, judges, speaks at wine conferences and runs masterclass tastings for both corporate and private clients all over the world. Matthew is also the creator of his ground-breaking initiative, the One Day Wine School, an indulgent day of tasting and learning first performed in 2006.

He has been the MoneyWeek wine correspondent since 2006 and has written a weekly column for the Daily Mail’s Weekend Magazine since 1999. His four highly-acclaimed, annual wine reports – the Burgundy En Primeur Report, the Bordeaux En Primeur Report, the Piemonte Report and the 100 Best Australian Wines – are published on his website, www.matthewjukes.com.

Matthew is one of the world’s leading experts on Australian wine and, with Brisbane-based wine writer Tyson Stelzer, runs an annual competition in Australia to find ‘The Great Australian Red’. He was made Honorary Australian of the Year in the UK at the 2012 Australia Day Foundation Gala dinner.

Matthew is a winner of the International Wine and Spirit Competition's Communicator of the Year Trophy. His thoughts, recommendations and tastings notes are followed very closely by the wine world at large.