Pittacum Aurea 2006 - Viņedos Y Bodegas Pittacum Winery - 40 CHF
Purchased online from
www.divo.ch
Right, after a bit of head scratching I figured out that the grape is called Mencia and the appellation that the wine comes from is Bierzo near Leon.
Mencia is (so I read in my Oz Clarke book) a traditional, light, fruity red wine grape which used to be used for early drinking wines but has recently grown in popularity and a lot of Spanish wine growers are using it to make older higher quality wines, particularly in the Bierzo region of Spain.
It’s quite dark, almost ink red and to be honest it smells like wine. Some wine smells like fruit but this smelt like wine, maybe with a touch of fruit but basically I would say it didn’t smell smokey or toasty and therefore proved either my nose or the Wine Spectator to be a filthy liar.
We drank the wine over a cold dinner of cheese, bread, pickles and cold meats and it seemed to go well with the sweeter food. The first taste is superb, very rich and velvety but there is an after taste of dryness which caught slightly in my throat and left a slightly bitter taste, which is why I think the sweeter pickles suited the wine better. I have since tried it on it’s own after a hard day in the office and it certainly suffered for the want of another flavour to take away from it’s dryness. It’s still quite a young wine and a friend of mine, who certainly knows more about wine than myself, commented that it needed more time in the bottle. The Wine Spectator states that it is good to drink now through until 2020.
However even I can tell that it’s a great wine, maybe not perfectly suited to my taste but I certainly would buy it again, and have, four bottles are currently in the post heading my way. Just as an idea of its quality, we shared the bottle with five of our friends and four loved it, only my misses gave it the damning verdict of, “too dry and furry”.