The very first sniff reveals a cool herbal elegance that bodes well for the evening’s continued development. If you think of super-Tuscans as fruit-steeped powerhouses, you quickly have second thoughts when Ornellaia 2019 lands on your tongue. BKWine Magazine’s Göran van den Brink has done a deep dive into a series of wines from Bolgheri.
Far down in the bowels of the Grand Hotel, deep in the mythical wine cellar, we meet Matteo Zanadello, export manager at Ornellaia. A fitting setting for these super luxurious top wines from Bolgheri on the Tuscan coast. He talks about the quite eventful development of the estate, which is very young in the world of wine. From the first vintage in 1985 under the direction of the Marquis Lodovico Antinori, via Robert Mondavi and now owned by the Frescobaldi family. Wine nobility with class!
We start the evening with the estate’s white wines, in particular sauvignon blanc. Poggio alle Gazze dell’Ornellaia 2020 IGT Toscana and Ornellaia bianco 2019 IGT Toscana. The first wine has clear sauvignon blanc notes with citrus and gooseberry, easy to like and you want to have another sip after the first. The top wine, Ornellaia bianco, is considerably more elegant and mineral. Herbs, citrus, green apples and a touch of elder but as far from the cousins from the land down under as you can get. Both wines matched very well with butter-fried trumpet mushrooms, 64-degree eggs and truffles. Probably the best sauvignon blanc I’ve drunk, but it remains to be seen if the Swedes are prepared to pay over SEK 2,000 (~200 euro) for a white wine from Italy.
Both the price and the elegance make Ornellaia bianco stand out among Italian white wines, but if it says Ornellaia on the bottle, there is still a risk that it will be sold out at once! To my question about how they resoned about the pricing, Matteo Zanadello answers; “We have benchmarked against Angelo Gaja’s Gaia & Rey chardonnay, a wine we also think is of extremely high quality and which is also produced in very small volumes!”
Ornellaia is not a small estate with only super premium wines as one might think. They have over 100 hectares of vineyards and buy more as soon as the opportunity arises. With the backing of Frescobaldi, there is no shortage of financial muscle, and the sister winery Masseto was recently launched as an independent entity and got its own state-of-the-art winery.
The fundament and cash cow of Ornellaia’s business is the wine Le Volte, which is indeed very popular in Sweden. As a celebration to the evening it was served from double magnum from 2020 (Ornellaia Le Volte 2020, Toscana IGT). And why not? Three-litre packagings seems to be a success in Sweden (3 l bib though.). But to get it one has to privately import it from Carovin (it’s not available in the monopoly shops) or bought from an online retailer if you want to impress at the family dinner. 2020 is a very good vintage of this stalwart, packed with cherries but not in that jammy way but with good structure and backbone. Easy to drink and easy to like!
The next step up in the quality pyramid is Le Serre Nuove. Some call it a second wine but if it previously was a way to use what did not belong in Ornellaia it has now grown into its own greatness with its own style that is not ashamed of itself and is definitely not a second class wine. Matteo tells us that over time they learned which vineyards are suitable for the style of Ornellaia and which are better suited to Le Serre Nuove. The vintage we’re tasting is 2020 (Le Serre Nuove dell’Ornellaia 2020, Bolgheri Doc Rosso) and it’s a couple of decent steps up from Le Volte in structure and concentration. A little more muscular without being a power wine. Perfect balance between the red fruit and finely tuned tannins. Although it is delicious already, it would not hurt for it to have a few years in the cellar to bring out the elegance even more.
So back to where we started, the highlight of the evening, the elegant flagship Ornellaia 2019. Classic Bordeaux blend of 62 percent cabernet sauvignon, 31 percent merlot and the rest petit verdot and cabernet franc. Very good already but give it ten years in the cellar and this will become a magnificent wine. More like a really good Bordeaux than a mammoth Yankee. More refined than bombastic. Ripe berries, both red and black, but more elegance and freshness than concentration and muscle. The red wines were served with classic chicken with tarragon sauce and, of course, even more truffles, food choices that normally go with red Burgundy, another sign of the elegance of the wines.
Every sixth bottle of Ornellaia 2019 has a label designed by the Swedish artists Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg. The “Il vigore” label. But to get one of these, you have to be lucky in Systembolaget’s lottery or spend a few additional hundred Swedish kroner per bottle and buy a whole wooden box from one of the online retailers that have Ornellaia’s wines. (Read more about the “Swedish” Ornellaia label here.)
The evening was rounded off with a rarity, Ornus dell’Ornellaia 2020, a sweet white wine from 100 percent late-harvest petit manseng. Lovely tones of dried apricots and honey but also a fresh acidity. Some of the more famous guests thought it was a perfect match for the Grand Hôtel’s crème brûlée but personally the your correspondent thought the wine lacked an ounce of sweetness on the decimal to be that heavenly combination.
