My, my, my...what a lovely little wine this is.
Foradori Teroldego Rotaliano 2006 is the kind of wine that, if you haven't had it, you should have. Quickly: go out and get some.
This northern Italian variety, related to Syrah, is a remarkable food wine. In the hands of Elisabetta Foradori, it's a spectacularly good wine.
Plump, but not fat; fruity, but never gobby; rich, but not over the top; perfectly, precisely balanced with nice long acids and lovely soft tannins and not overly evident wood, this is a succulent wine in every way.
Gorgeous aromatics and supple, velvety black fruit, with a little chubby blueberry showing at the bottom, this was a textbook example of a wine that could easily handle whatever food was matched with it.
We were in the new and uber-trendy Gruner restaurant in downtown Portland, noshing on some 'pan-Germanic' fare, and each of us had ordered differently. One had the classic Kavalierspitz of Austria, sort of a pot roast in a fragrant broth kind of thing; another had spaetzle with mushrooms (yum!); another had roasted quail with rabbit boudin; and I had mixed house-made wurst with choucroute-style sauerkraut, boiled potatoes, and sweet-spicy mustard.
The Foradori handled it all without a problem. It accommodated itself to the different foods and spices, and kept its style throughout, simply enhancing anything that came its way.
Even after the meal was over and we sat and dawdled and talked, the Foradori was a great after-dinner tipple too, just smoothing out the evening.
Lovely, lovely wine.
) aromas that I have come to expect from the variety based on a severely limited sample. But I hope this bitter or sour tang to the herbaceous fruit is the norm because it is incredibly attractive. But it would be much more attractive without that slight chocolatey oak aroma in the background. Quite dense and chewy, but with attractive, refreshing sourness so this is quite easy to drink even though I did notice a touch of oak influence on the palate, too. Perhaps worth setting a bottle aside for a year or two to see if the oak would do the magic trick and disappear. I say magic, because the more experience I have gotten with wines, the more I start to feel that obvious oak sadly doesn't ever really seem to disappear completely, it just changes over time - though, of course, this is will be lifelong experiment to gain a better understanding of this topic.
The nose was initially big sweet candied cherry juice, and it was absurdly grapey. Maybe it needed a long wait in a decanter prior to service to calm down and show something else, but on a table covered with such gems as '91 Montelena and '83 Chasse Spleen, it stood out like a tall, acne-covered boy scout in a gentleman's club.