“The nose is springtime in the English countryside, with fruit and flowers wafting over the aroma of cobblestones after a heavy rain. That mix of floral freshness and damp saltiness lingers onto the palate, while the tannins look on, before acid blows through like a strong wind. ”

The remarkably layered nose, with the cherries and strawberries of summer flowing into September's new pencils and notebooks, then evolving into the grassy, herbal, slightly floral smell of soil on the last warm day of autumn. The palate is full of cherries before finishing with bitter orange peel and dark chocolate.
 

“A delightfully tart nose is full of Rainier cherries and dried cranberries, with undertones of minerality and herbaceousness. The palate runs with the cherries and adds oranges to the mix, with a latent heat and a thrilling amount of acidity elevating a minty freshness through the finish.”

“The organic Querciabella 2019 Chianti Classico Riserva Querciabella shows richly concentrated fruit with blackberry and cherry layered with light spice and mineral. This wine represents a selection of fruit from Greve, Radda and Gaiole in Chianti, and each parcel is vinified separately before the final blend is made. Production is 19,000 bottles.”

“The Batàr bottling from Querciabella is made from a fifty-fifty blend of pinot bianco and chardonnay, with the wine barrel-fermented and raised in twenty percent new oak. The 2020 Batàr is the new release from the estate and offers up a deep, ripe and complex bouquet of apple, white peach, raw almond, a lovely base of soil, citrus blossoms and a discreet framing of vanillin oak. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied and nascently complex, with a superb core of fruit, lovely mineral undertow, zesty acids and fine focus and cut on the long, impeccably balanced and classy finish. Readers may recall from my estate feature on Querciabella a few years back, their Batàr ages long and gracefully and is really not into its apogee until a decade out from the vintage, so it is still very early days for the 2020 vintage here. It is quite tasty today, but still quite primary and additional layers of complexity are sure to emerge with further cellaring. 2023-2050.”