San Marzano Talò Malvasia Nera 2025
£12.75
The wine
An intense and complex bouquet of ripe red fruit combined with hints of spice. Full bodied, with delicious flavours of morello cherry and vanilla notes running through to a smooth finish. Malvasia Nera on its own, which is a rare pleasure.
Malvasia Nera is dark-skinned, unusual for a family of grapes better known for whites, and in Puglia it is far more often used as a blending partner to soften Negroamaro than bottled on its own. Given its own label it shows a lifted, almost floral perfume and a gentler tannin than either of the region's better-known reds. A rare pleasure.
The producer
San Marzano
View all San Marzano winesIn 1962 nineteen growers in the village of San Marzano pooled their vineyards and founded a cooperative. More than sixty years later it draws on over 1,200 growers across Salento and the Manduria hills, and has become one of the most professional and forward-thinking houses in southern Italy.
The real asset is the old vines. Much of Puglia is still planted to alberello, the free-standing bush training the Greeks brought to the region, in which each vine stands alone without wires or posts. It cannot be machine harvested and it crops very little, but the fruit it gives is concentrated in a way trellised vines rarely match. Some of the plots behind Sessantanni and Anniversario 62 are well past sixty years old, and the names say exactly that.
The range is built on the three native reds of the heel of Italy: Primitivo, genetically identical to Zinfandel; Negroamaro, whose name means roughly black and bitter; and the near-forgotten Susumaniello. Passion and competence are the stated bywords, and the run of awards suggests they are more than a slogan.
