Umberto Cesari Tauleto Sangiovese 2018
£44.75
The wine
A majestic wine, with expressive aromas of wild berried fruit and ripe black cherry layered with nuances of rose petal, pungent balsam and spice. Succulent red fruit is complemented by spice, pipe tobacco and graphite, with supple tannins and a lengthy, intense finish.
Tauleto is the flagship, from a single named vineyard and released with several years of age. It includes Uva Longanesi, a red variety found growing wild on a farmhouse wall in Romagna in the 1950s, propagated by the family who found it and now grown by only a handful of producers. A genuinely local wine in the fullest sense.
The producer
Umberto Cesari
View all Umberto Cesari winesUmberto Cesari and his wife Giuliana started the company in 1965 with twenty hectares in the hills of Emilia-Romagna, with a single ambition: to make Sangiovese that could stand comparison with anything from over the border in Tuscany.
That was an unfashionable aim. Romagna has always grown Sangiovese in quantity, but the region's reputation was for volume rather than quality, and the grape was assumed to reach its best only further south. The estate now covers 355 hectares divided into named vineyards, La Casetta, Parolino, Ca Grande, Laurento, Liano, Claterna, Miravalle and Tauleto, each vinified separately.
The family have also revived Uva Longanesi, a red variety found growing wild on a farmhouse wall in Romagna in the 1950s and now grown by a small number of local producers, and they use terracotta amphorae for part of the range. Emilia-Romagna is better known for Lambrusco and for its food than for serious still wine, which makes what Cesari have built quietly remarkable.
