Wine of the week: an epic new wine from Italy

(Image credit: 2019 Donna Elvira wine)

published 2 July 2021

2019 Donna Elvira, Fink Fiano di Avellino, Campania, Italy

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.

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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)

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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.