What we drank last night: 2006 Quattro Mani Montepulciano d’Abruzzo

A customer of ours requested a special order of the 2006 Quattro Mani Montepulciano d’Abruzzo.

We’d tasted the ‘05 before, as they pour it by the quartino at Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles. But we bought a case of the ‘06 for our client without pre-screening. Luckily, the client is our friend and we were invited to the shin-dig where the wine was served, and got to taste for ourselves.

The wine is a deep purple, almost inky and opaque. We were drinking out of plastic cups, hardly ideal for getting a great sense of aromas in a wine — so we can’t really speak to the nuances of the wine’s nose. However, this is quaffing wine through and through, and the lack of stemware wasn’t so much a deterrent to our enjoyment of it; only to our ability to describe it poetically.

On the palate this is a smooth wine with less rusticity than you might expect from an Italian wine. There are tannins, but they aren’t of the mouth-drying type. Very silky, especially for a value wine. Additionally, the wine is very juicy and concentrated, as well as ripe. The fruits are completely black and blue. Nothing red about this. It doesn’t have even a hint of the sour component we’ve found it so many other inexpensive (and even expensive) Italian wines.

Quattro Mani is a project from a US-based importer whose goal is to bring reasonably priced wines from well-regarded Italian vintners to the US market; the Montepulciano d’Abruzzo is the first effort from the Quattro Mani label (in its second vintage), and comes from winemaker Attilio Pagli. We’re not sure who the other three winemakers of the “Quattro” are, as Pagli was also responsible for the ‘05 release of the QM Montepuliciano. But we’re certainly curious to find out.

This was a great match to the panini sandwiches that were served, and at under $10 a bottle, this is a value that we can recommend that people seek out.

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