Wine of the week: an epic new wine from Italy
This stone-fruit-kissed wine sums up an Italian summer perfectly, says Matthew Jukes.
2019 Donna Elvira, Fink Fiano di Avellino, Campania, Italy
£18, campaniawines.co.uk
Wine samples arrive thick and fast every day and they usually come from importers, distributors, wineries and merchants I already know. Occasionally, bottles appear from new discoveries and, because of the short lead times at MoneyWeek, I can get them on the page in a trice. From Sarah Fink’s first email introduction, via samples, tasting, research, checking and filing copy to these wines appearing here today has taken less than a month. This means you are hot on my heels in making these epic discoveries.
My lead wine, a fiano, is terrific, accurate, exotic, bitingly fresh and genuinely rewarding. I adore this stone-fruit-kissed variety and it sums up an Italian summer perfectly. There are three more beauties to recommend: the 2019 Donna Elvira, Fringilla Falanghina (£15) shows accurate fruit and herb notes and bracing freshness, underpinned by a volcanic tang and steely acidity; the 2019 Donna Elvira, Aegidius Greco di Tufo (£18) is calmer than the other two whites and more lemony in its theme; and a true rarity, the 2018 Donna Elvira, Settemazze Aglianico (£18), a delicious red made from a particularly obtuse, indigenous grape variety that, in the wrong hands, makes some of the driest and most tannic wines around. At Donna Elvira, it is juicy, smooth, intriguing, cherry-and liquorice-soaked and the polite astringency only arrives at the very end of the finish. What a line-up!
Matthew Jukes is a winner of the International Wine & Spirit Competition’s Communicator of the Year (matthewjukes.com)