Il Bastardo – Sangiovese

Date: 04DEC07

Name: Il Bastardo – Sangiovese

Vintage: 2006

Copy: This Sangiovese from Tuscany is produced at the Il Bastardo winery east of Firenze and is Rich, Fat and Luscious!

Price: $7

Appearance: The reddest of the three so far, even verging on vermillion, but again only at the edges. I did read a snippet in the Windows on the World book mentioned above about the proper way to assess a wine’s color, but I frantically kept it from becoming a memory lest the purity of my first few reviews be tainted.

Nose: Holy cow! Animal. Rot. Putrid. Those images hit you first, during the first milliseconds of the sniff, your nose deep down into your stemware. Then wafts the alcohol, then the berries. Your mind has no room for these more conventional aromas, though, because you instinctively need to cycle around and investigate the first molecules that punched you in the nose with a big, fat stinky fist. Then it hits you: it’s alluring. Why? Why does something that’s so evocative of earthly compost make you want to taste it?

At first I was hesitant to drink this wine. Though as we’ll see it turns out to be delicious my first thought was that my bottle was tainted. Spoiled. Rotten. Unfit. The smell could mean nothing else. It truly smelled (smelt?) of an earthly, decaying animal. I’m sure there is a word for this smell – I’m insouciantly unaware of it. It might be a trademark of the type of grape used in this wine. Weirdly, the smell works in tandem with the taste to deliver a quite satisfying refreshment…

Taste: Best wine I’ve had to date. At $7 a pop, no less. Thankfully it tastes nothing like it smells – but the smell does linger – and the mix is quixotically desirable. There was no overly powerful alcohol taste, which I believe means that this wine is therefore not “dry”; that is, the sugar content is higher than some other wines. I could be way off base here, but that’s my interpretation. Smoother than anything I’ve had before, this hearty, full wine seems to cry out its affinity for heavy, red meat. Give me broiled lamb! Give me thick, marbled steak! Cast away your chicken, your fish! Bring me venison! I can say with confidence that I will drink this wine again.

Tellings: Anyone paying attention will know immediately that once I saw a wine named “The Bastard” that it would find a way into my HEB shopping cart, on to the defiant portion of my counter that’s doing double duty as my wine cellar, and then straight to my belly – pronounced bell-aye. As an aside HEB comprises the initials of a one Howard E. Butt, owner of surely the most monopolistic grocery chain this galaxy has ever known. There are simply no other mainline grocery stores in San Antonio. You might find niche markets like Sun Harvest, but that’s it. Kroger: ran out of town. Albertson’s: didn’t stand a chance. With sickening pervasiveness and self-aggrandizement HEB trumpets its lies: low prices! best prices! we’re the best! I know better, since I’ve seen competition in action, in places like Dallas, Houston, Austin. You know, four corners and three grocery stores? You find low prices in that arrangement, and you don’t care so much that each store lives on margins so razor thin you’d rather buy them than cough up the $26 for the five-bladed monster Gillette is trying to slice and dice you with (best shave ever, btw).

Anyway, see The Bastard, buy The Bastard. There’s no way around it. The label shows a jolly, fat man, dark-brown close-cropped hair finishing up in a sharply-pointed crow’s peak, too-short, thin green tie against a yellow shirt, the collars buckling under the folds of neck fat. His mauve, or purple, jacket and pants don’t even seem close to fitting him comfortably. He’s sitting on a chair – overpowering a chair! – thick, rotund legs tucked under, feet splayed out to accommodate the girth of the legs. In his right hand he so delicately – jolly! – holds a glass of wine, verily pinches it with his fingers at the stem. Above the five-o-clock shadow on his ample, jocular chin rests a mouth entirely too small, too pensive, a margin-thin mustache, going up further a sharp, aquiline nose and eyes spaced quite oddly far apart, each apparently finding a different object to focus on at the moment. The Jolly Bastard sits on his padded, wood chair – he’s going to crush it! – in the middle of a gray, cobblestone street, behind which are brightly-colored Italian village houses set amid bucolic fields of grapes. There are no clouds in the sky.

So goes The Bastard.