1988 Roagna Crichët Pajé 13.5%
To celebrate Brazil's not-so-convincing-despite-the-score victory over Chile, I opened something maybe special. Chambers got a stash of this several weeks ago, and for some reason Roagna had originally been forced to choose between calling it generic Barbaresco DOCG or Crichët Pajé VdT. The label, bearing the classic Leonardo drawing of two superimposed naked men with outstretched arms, a famous illustration of the golden rule (which is, of course, the ratio between successive numbers in the Fibonacci series), led me to expect harmony. The naso was classic nebbiolo sour cherry, crushed rose petals (Marcia disagreed with violets) and a secondary (or whatever) festival of tar, rubber, iodine and leather. Alas, all under a potent voile of brett, like a chador concealing the beckonings of the flesh. Tasted very structured, dense, almost chewy (ChewBacchus), with still lively tannins and good acidity spine. Marcia declares it her favorite Roagna ever (quite something, since she became leery of Roagna, despite ideological empathy, after witnessing less-than-ideal sanitary conditions at the winery last November). The second pour, oddly, has a strange little fizz, like secondary fermentation. I'm puzzled, it's as if the wine had sedimented into geological strata that do not mingle when poured. At the end of the bottle, only Marcia was happy. I was under the impression that we were more or less equally brett tolerant, but last night the bitter little critters, veiling every positive sensation under a bilious shroud of Turin, got in the way, on final thought making the wine a reflection of the afternoon's game.
