Within the borders of Italy, pinot noir from Südtirol/Alto Adige is largely alone in being able to compete qualitatively with the good end of Burgundy. Here you have the climate and soil to make this fragile grape produce top wine. It doesn’t necessarily taste like one or another Burgundy, but wines like Girlan Pinot Noir Riserva Trattmann are, on their own terms, unmistakably excellent pinot noir.
90% of the grapes come from Mazon/Mazzon in approx. 400 meters high with a soil of clay and decomposed limestone with a subsoil of limestone. The remaining 10% of the grapes come from a field near the winery, on the outskirts of Girlan, where a thin top layer of moraine deposits conceals a subsoil of volcanic porphyry. Here, French Pinot clones from the 7 series produce small, intensely flavored grapes with excellent structure.
At harvest, the grapes are picked in small cassettes to protect the grapes from pressure. 10% is fermented as whole bunches, while the rest are de-stemmed and macerated for a short month in steel tanks. After malolactic fermentation, it is barrel aged for 12 months in oak from the best French coopers, a mixture of 225 and 1200 liter barrels of varying age. The wine is then aged for a further eight months in 6-7000 liter foudres (Grenier/Pauscha), and after assemblage the wine is aged for eight months in bottle before release.
Expensive ‘prestige wines’ should be able to impress, but all too often they are simultaneously gloomy and serious with a pronounced lack of joie de vivre. Girlan Trattmann Riserva, on the other hand, is already a great pleasure. You simply can’t avoid getting in a good mood from drinking it (which then has at least one more reason…)
It would be unwise to break this down into individual aromatic components, but we can reveal that this is a full-bodied but top-trimmed light-welterweight, intensely perfumed wild berry fruit with well-tuned, top-quality oak. This is terrific pinot noir both now and at least for the next 10 years.
Served in a spacious burgundy glass at 14-17°.
3 glasses of Gambero Rosso for the 10th year in a row!
