Drink - Victoria Moore finds the Bollinger of the Noughties
Published 10 March 2003
The super-flash Tignanello might just be the Bollinger of the Noughties
In restaurants, you will always find me craning to see what wine the people at the next table have ordered. It's not very nice, but I can no more help it than I could stop myself reading a gossipy e-mail over the shoulder of a colleague.
A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I had dinner at La Famiglia, an Italian restaurant in Chelsea. I'm afraid I paid him very little attention over the green olive pasta and grissini, because I was gripped by the flirtation unfolding on my right.
He was wearing a shirt beneath a crew-neck sweater. Not a promising start, but he had the sort of even-faced, smooth-skinned Gary Lineker looks that could just about get away with it. She was moderately pretty, nothing special, and I deduced right away that they worked together in the record industry. He was her superior and, boy, was he using his position to flirt.
Robbie (Williams, presumably) and Kylie were mentioned. I caught: "Yes, I put you in that situation deliberately because I wanted to see how you behaved when you were angry, if you'd stick to your principles." Had I been at all hung up on the guy, that would have made me fall for him right away. As it was, I could see he was just a manipulative, self-important idiot.
Then his wine came, in a fancy metal carrier. Our wine at La Famiglia never comes in a fancy carrier. That's because we never order show-off wine. I craned. Jackpot. Tignanello.
In other words, flash as hell. Tignanello is iconic. It's what's known as a "Supertuscan" - a wine made largely from the Chianti grape Sangiovese, but which contravenes Italy's arcane wine laws because it contains a proportion of Cabernet Sauvignon. Because of this pollution, Italians refuse to classify it as a "quality wine", and only accord it lowly table wine status. Sassicaia (100 per cent Cabernet Sauvignon, but made in central Italy) was the first Supertuscan and was considered heretical. Antinori's Tignanello followed hard on its heels in 1970. Before long, both had made names for themselves and were far more expensive than a good Chianti Classico.
The posh wine-carrier obscured the vintage, but my chap at La Famiglia would have paid £80 for the 1999; £145 for the 1997. Like I said, flash. I wonder if Tignanello might become the Bollinger of the Noughties. I've never tasted it and I was dying to. I thought about leaning over and asking for a teeny-tiny sip. After all, they were so into each other's saliva they wouldn't have missed it. Much to my regret, though, I chickened out.
Here's an alluring - and much less try-hard - Italian red I have tried, though. Campofiorin, Masi 1999 is gorgeously rich and has the slightly bitter undertones that mark it out as being Italian. You can find it in Oddbins for £8.29 - and drink ten bottles for every one of La Famiglia's Tignanello.
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