The wine production of the Antinori family boasts, among its ranks, real wine monuments, able to warm the hearts of their fans around the world. On the other hand, it is still one of the oldest Maison, now in its twenty-sixth generation, with Albiera, Alessia and Allegra Antinori, daughters of the Marquis Piero Antinori, after more than 600 years of history. According to official sources, the founder, a certain Accarisio di Antinoro di Combiate, seems to have been the owner of agricultural land in the area of Passignano, halfway between Florence and Siena, as early as 1179. The official date that sanctioned the entry of this family into the world of wine, however, is 1385 when Giovanni Piero Antinori was admitted into the guild that protected the interests of Florentine wine producers, l’Arte dei Vinattieri.
Antinori’s wine must have been really good, so much that Francesco Redi, in 1685, praised its quality in his famous comic-lyric poem Bacco in Toscana. To get to the winery as we know it today, however, we have to get to 1898 when Ludovico and Piero founded the Marchesi L&P Antinori, with the aim of putting order and organize, in a centralized way, the various estates scattered throughout Tuscany. Since then, this farm has passed from the hands of Piero’s son, Niccolò, under whose impulse it was expanded with the purchase of the Castello della Sala, in Umbria, and then to his nephew Piero, a great innovator who, in addition to having conducted a wide range of experiments in the vineyard and in the cellar, stimulated his team to produce the great wines that made this House so famous.
Among the most important estates there is the Tenuta Guado al Tasso: 320 hectares of vineyards belonging to the Della Gherardesca family from the second half of 1600. This estate, which already under Guido Alberto Della Gherardesca, in the first half of 1800, began to acquire considerable fame thanks to the quality of the wines produced, was the dowry that, in the 1930s, was brought by Carlotta Della Gerarchesca for her marriage to Niccolò Antinori.
When the Bolgheri DOC was created in 1994, the family was ready and began the production of the wine that took the name of the estate, the Guado al Tasso, which soon became one of the most significant bottles of that area. It was, and is still, a blend that has as its protagonist the Cabernet Sauvignon with a balance of Cabernet Franc, Merlot and a very small share of Petit Verdot, produced on clay soils, sand and silt of alluvial origin. The grapes are selected in the plant, during the harvest and, once destemmed, again selected and then left to ferment and macerate, for 15-20 days, in steel tanks, keeping separate the various parcels of origin. The various basic wines obtained carry out, always separately, malolactic fermentation and one year of aging in barrique, then they are united and spend another six months in wood before bottling.
The 2015 vintage shows a color between intense violet and ruby, with an evident concentration and an olfactory range that opens on notes of cooked plum, black cherry syrup, red currant and date, followed by pot pourri, tomato paste, bay leaf and nutmeg, with final echoes of pipe aromatic tobacco, Mount Athos incense, vanilla and carpentry. Despite the depth of the nose, the palate amazes, even in a warm year like this, for the excellent balance between amplitude and glyceric softness, on the one hand, and balsamic freshness and mineral sapidity, on the other; all enriched by elegant tannins, which help to make the sip more dynamic and smooth, and the retrolfactive return of the red fruit and spices that accompany the sip up to an exceptional length closure.
Rating: 93/100
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